by Tara Basi
Three of the marines were in the exercise room, where parts were laid out on a number of temporary work benches. The fourth marine was down the hatch shouting at someone.
“Report,” Grain directed at the nearest marine.
“The civilian’s locked himself in the armoury.”
“What? Who? Oh Christ, Greg,” Grain asked and answered himself, the marine just nodded.
“Greg, can you hear me? What’s going on?” Grain said, speaking into his lapel radio.
“He’s not answering, Sir. His radio might not work in there but there’s a door intercom, Mack’s down there trying to talk to him.”
“Mack, any luck,” Grain shouted down the shaft.
“He doesn’t answer,” Mack shouted back.
“Get back up here, leave him alone,” Grain called out, and then turned to Cole and said, “We need to think this through, nothing we can do here.”
Grain nodded in the direction of the galley, pointed at his radio and put his fingers to his lips. Before they left, Grain signed for his men to stay and keep eyes on the door. Back at the table he found a slate and wrote out a question for Sara, ‘Can we cut off Greg’s radio? Want to be sure he can’t hear us.’ Sara nodded and floated off to the comms console. After a couple of moments she called over her shoulder.
“His personal radio is disabled. I’ve routed the armoury intercom to the briefing table speaker.”
“How bad is it?” Cole asked after checking the comms unit on the table was switched off.
“Couldn’t be any worse. It’s impossible to breach that door without destroying the Small Business and he has all the bombs in there with him,” Grain answered, thinking he should be happy the mission would be called off, but he wasn’t, he was angry.
“I’ll try talking to him,” Cole said, and reached for the comms button but Sara grabbed his hand.
“Let me,” Sara said, and Cole looked a little surprised but shrugged and nodded. Sara switched on the microphone, “Hi Greg, its Sara, are you OK?” sounding genuinely concerned.
Clever, clever wifey, Grain thought. Greg was much more likely to open up to Sara than Cole or Grain. Silence was the only response for long moments.
“Sara? You understand, right?” Greg nervously answered.
“Yes Greg. I think I do understand,” Sara answered, her voice calm and sympathetic.
“It’s not just me, right? Jugger, he knows, it’s probably just a primitive gut thing, but he knows. We can’t mess with the Blocks,” Greg answered, his voice gaining in confidence as he spoke.
“You could be right, I think I got a bit carried away, after everything I saw,” Sara continued, her voice still calm but her face tense and angry.
“We’re being judged. Block Seven might be hell, others might be a paradise and the gateway could lead to heaven, we can’t know, we mustn’t interfere.”
Sara paused, and looked at Grain. He could see she was torn and angry. He took her hand and squeezed it gently. Cole nodded in encouragement and mouthed, “Good job.”
“I think I see Greg, what do you want?” Sara asked, staying calm.
“I don’t want to die Sara.”
“You’re safe Greg, no one’s threatening you, we just want to work things out,” Sara said, starting to look concerned.
“I can’t work the big bombs but there’s lot of other explosives in here. I want Cole to turn back. If he doesn’t, I’ll blow us up.”
“Greg, please,” Sara said, and looked up at Grain and Cole. Grain mouthed, “Buy us some time.”
“Greg, I’ll need time, to persuade the others, can you give me some time Greg, please?” Sara said, letting the fear show in her voice.
“Sara, listen carefully. I’m not that strong. I’m not like you. Maybe you could persuade me not to do this, so I’m turning off this intercom and setting a one hour timer on a bunch of explosives. If you don’t change direction it’ll go off. When we’ve docked back with Maxinquaye we’ll talk again, not before,” Greg said and the channel went dead.
Sara slammed her hands down on the table and hissed, “Honeymoon wrecking fucker, let’s do the bastard.”
Grain was taken aback by his wife’s venomous outburst and even more so when she explained her plan for dealing with the honeymoon wrecker.
As Grain stepped out of the airlock loaded down with equipment he was still struggling to comprehend how he’d got this particular task, but then he was likely to survive slightly longer than anyone else if it all went wrong. Sara surprised him at every turn. How she’d worked out the plan while talking to Greg he’d never understand. That’s my wife, he thought, feeling quite proud of her, an odd thought he’d never imagined having about Sara. While he prepared to step outside his marines were working as quietly as possible to add extra bracing to the armoury door. Then they would build a second, rough and ready airlock in the shaft leading to the door. Sara was gently increasing the air pressure in the armoury room, hoping Greg wouldn’t notice. Cole had wanted to drain the air completely but Greg could have rigged a dead man’s trigger for his explosive. And, even if they managed to suffocate Greg they’d still be locked out and the moon-busters were in the armoury.
Grain floated around the outside of the ship till he was positioned directly opposite the armoury hull wall. Like the rest of the Small Business there were no windows. Greg would have no idea he was just on the other side of the bulkhead, unless Grain made a noise.
Fixing himself by a line to an external hook on the hull Grain checked his watch; it was time, in under a minute Sara would be maximising the air pressure in the small space Greg was locked in. Grain struggled to unhook the largest hull repair patch they had from his back and swing it around in front of him while keeping his position relative to the hull. After a moment of breathless struggling it swung free and he was holding the metre wide anchor ring and cap. Trying not to bang against the ship he took hold of the base and held it in front of him with outstretched hands, just a few centimetres away from the hull, and braced himself. Right on time Cole gently started to turn the Small Business back towards the Maxinquaye. In theory Greg would drop his guard, thinking he’d won and the engine noise would mask what Grain was doing. As the engine vibration increased Grain floated forward and let the ring clamp onto the hull.
Grain hesitated, braced for an explosion. But he was still here. Greg hadn’t reacted. He carefully applied ultra-fast cutting gel in a crude circle just inside the circumference of the ring directly on to the hull and inserted an ignition primer. Making sure he had a tight hold of the repair cap and was securely tied to the ship with the detonator trigger cocked he signalled Cole to accelerate hard. As Grain felt the sharp tug on his line he triggered the gel pasted to the hull and held his breath.
The shaped cutting charge burst into life, turning bright blue and glowing fiercely as it instantly cut through the hull, leaving a neat circular hole and unleashing a massive decompression in the armoury. Grain watched as the brutal force folded Greg in half at the waist and sucked him out through the opening like a champagne cork. Greg shot past Grain and kept going, he was clutching a bulky package to his chest with one hand and the other was holding detonator with trailing wires. Grain and the Small Business accelerated away in the opposite direction. The explosion still shook the ship and sent Grain spinning around his anchor point.
Greg disappeared in a cloud of pink particles.
“Gotcha,” Grain shouted, and for a moment he felt sorry for Greg. He was just a bit crazy, doing what he thought was right, and who wasn’t crazy these days?
“Grain, you OK?” Sara called out over the radio, sounding subdued.
“Fine, just finish up here, see you in a minute,” Grain answered, guessing Sara was starting to understand that her plan had killed Greg.
Grain brought his spinning under control and waited for the debris and air to finish streaming out of the hole before climbing inside and pulling the repair cap after him and over the hole, sealing it. If Gre
g had locked himself in any other compartment but the armoury a hole that big would have triggered a ship-wide hull collapse. Damage was minimal and, most importantly, all the essential weaponry was safely locked down and fully intact. While Grain waited for the armoury to be re-pressurised it occurred to him that he’d saved the ship only to go and die.
The Small Business stopped a few kilometres from the gateway, only a short distance from the oblongs’ flight path. It appeared only one alien ship could pass through the gateway at a time. Directly ahead of the Small Business was the point where an oblong leaving Earth would pause, waiting for the arriving ship to magically pop into existence at the centre of the gateway. As one arrived and headed off for Earth, the paused oblong started up again, continued on, and vanished. Their whole plan was based on that clockwork pause, something Cole has spent hours observing when he’d come to scout the gateway. The dance of the oblongs never appeared to vary.
Grain stood in the Small Business airlock with Sara and the four other marines. It they weren’t about to die Grain would have thought they all looked rather funny. Like everyone else he had a moon-buster blue egg strapped to his back and fixed to his front a simple, half-metre square box. The front of the box was heavily coated with a strong adhesive that could survive the vacuum and still stick on contact, like welded steel. So there would be no final hugging.
“Think the blood bomb worked?” Sara asked Grain as they waited for the air to be pumped out.
“If it did, that blood’s already gone through. Another brilliant idea by the beautiful Mrs. Grain,” Grain said, and turned his head to smile at Sara through the thick glass of his helmet visor.
“Mrs. Grain. Still gives me goose bumps just hearing it,” Sara answered, and giggled nervously as she returned his gaze.
“Goodbye Mrs Grain, see you on the other side,” and for a moment he paused, then whispered, “I love you.”
“I’ve loved you since I first saw you,” Sara answered.
“Radio silence,” Grain called out, trying to keep his voice steady. As the airlock door started to open he switched off his comms.
Grain would be going first, then Sara, followed by one marine after another. They would all be on their way to the gateway in less than fifteen minutes, five would be going through. The six bombers moved slowly away from the Small Business and came to rest just a few metres above the oblongs’ route at the currently empty pause point. Looking back towards Earth, a long line of oblongs could be made out slowly approaching, another line moving away. A strange alien necklace with the Earth as its pendant.
An oblong floated underneath Grain and instantly came to a dead stop as though mass and momentum did not exist. The Block technology defied their understanding at every turn.
Grain positioned himself at the rear of the oblong and slowly approached the back end. His sticky chest box gently connected just below the top edge and stuck fast. It was a good position, he could see over the top, along the roof of the oblong. The ship didn’t react in any way to its stowaway. Exactly on time, the arriving oblong appeared out of the gateway and his ship moved off. He twisted his head to look back at Sara and the others and gave a double-thumbs-up as he pulled away. The marines gave awkward zero-gravity salutes and Sara waved frantically. Their rides would be along soon enough.
Grain took a deep breath and sighed. There was no way back. He could trigger the bomb any time or it would detonate automatically when he ran out of air and his heart stopped. Either way he was a dead man. He relaxed, and decided to enjoy the ride.
The rapidly approaching gateway consisted of a flat, thin ring of very black material a few kilometres in diameter. Looking more like a colossal, empty, picture frame than a piece of technology, it was really only visible when it obscured the stars or a planet passed behind. The view through the ring was slightly distorted as though it was a giant’s monocle, but only the local stars beyond the ring were visible. It gave no clues to where they might be heading when they passed through. As each oblong touched the surface of the lens it just disappeared, nothing emerged on the other side. There was no burst of energy or flashes of light, which just made its operation even more incomprehensible. It struck Grain, the gateway was massive but not big enough for a Block to pass through, they must have arrived some other way.
As Grain’s oblong approached the shimmering centre he looked back and could just make out Sara’s oblong waiting patiently, framed against a good looking Earth, all blue and splattered with double cream. He gave a final wave and hoped she could see him. Turning his attention to the fast approaching shimmer, he wondered what was going to happen.
With that thought he passed through the distorted looking glass and without any seeming interruption, emerged in a place that was obviously very far from Earth. Looking back the gateway was right behind him just as it appeared on the other side. Ahead loomed a large green and ochre planet, and beyond there were other brightly coloured worlds and he thought he could make out orbiting moons. A large yellow-red star, looking older and bigger than the sun, hung behind the gateway, its image distorted by the lens. Grain could see a long line of oblongs, silhouetted against the giant planet below him, heading up in his direction, towards the Gateway and heading down towards the planet directly ahead. It was hard to tell but there could have been other gateways hanging in space far in the distance. Before he had the time to study the stars more carefully and figure out where he was his ship had swung down and entered a high orbit around the planet directly below.
Under his feet the swirling green and red turned out to be billowing clouds that covered the entire surface of the alien world, reminding Grain of a Van Gogh painting. As his ship flew on he knew he might be crushed or incinerated if the oblong flew into the cloud, so he flipped open the safety catch on the trigger. It was an amazing sight. Sara had seen another star system on her Small Business journey. He’d slept through the whole thing and got terminal cancer for his trouble. Thinking of Sara he looked back, and at that moment her oblong appeared. He could just make out a stick figure at the back of the ship, was she waving? Grain waved back.
He was orbiting a planet in a system no human had ever seen and he had come all this way just to die. Giving himself a mental slap he tried to get to grips with his terror. It was an extraordinarily beautiful sight, a feast of colour and changing forms. I name this planet ‘Grain’, no ‘Sara’, he thought.
Was Sara following him? Damn, her oblong had peeled away and was headed in a different direction. Good for the plan, but he felt a tinge of sadness; she’d be out of sight in moments. He waved wildly, hoping she could see him even if he could no longer make her out.
Her oblong headed towards a large blue world tinged with wisps of orange cloud, while his ship paused. It seemed to be waiting in a long queue of oblongs that arced away and out of sight around the curve of the planet below. Grain turned back to watch Sara’s path towards the blue world till her ship was just a dark dot, one of many spiralling down towards the planet’s surface. Looking back towards the gateway three more oblongs had emerged, each should be carrying a marine but he couldn’t see them. Their oblongs peeled off and headed away in different directions.
His ship was moving again, the whole line was steadily moving forwards and picking up speed. The first sight of the gargantuan object startled him. He’d been staring at the blue planet after Sara. If he’d seen it creeping into view around the curve of the planet it might have been less of a shock. The structure was hanging in space above the swirling atmosphere. A super-sized Block that dwarfed anything they had seen on Earth. It looked a thousand times bigger. The oblong carrying him was following a line of identical ships approaching from below, above the clouds but towards the underbelly of the monster Block, its smooth, featureless greyness contrasting sharply with the chaotic, billowing froth underneath. The Block ahead could have been a cube of grey sugar, momentarily suspended over an exceptionally colourful cappuccino. As he drew closer the line of oblongs suddenly started
climbing up towards the roof. As he rushed past the smooth grey wall he found it hard to take in the scale. This super Block was to the Blocks on Earth what his oblong was. It was big enough for Earth sized Blocks to easily fit inside, in their hundreds.
A blinding light shocked him out of staring at the hypnotically grey cliff flashing by. Grain turned and saw a rapidly growing purple bruise spread across the face of the blue world. Sara, was gone. His breathing turned ragged and his vision blurred. Was there something wrong with his suit? It was a moment before he realised he was crying. He couldn’t wipe away the tears. They kept pooling in his eyes, then slowly turned into little jewels that were sucked away by his suits air circulation system.
Another starburst, behind him. The gateway had been replaced by an angry mass of red and yellow gasses. So now it was just himself and two marines left on this side.
He had his target, this massive Block. As he cleared the edge, the roof was spread before him. The centre of the roof had a colossal opening; tens of Blocks the size he was used to were emerging and arriving surrounded by clouds of oblongs. It made Grain think of an ant’s nest. Had it been disturbed by the flashes, the destruction of the gateway, or was this normal? There was another blinding flash, then another, but he couldn’t determine from exactly where.
Grain was alone.
Flocks of oblongs arrived from all directions, heading towards the vast roof canyon. Grain’s ship slowed as it approached, slipped over the lip and floated steadily downwards, moving deep inside the structure. Grain could see the walls all around him were pitted with the tight fitting docking areas that he had seen off the Block shaft on Earth. Oblongs were landing and departing everywhere he looked. Further away there were impossibly large bays, some occupied by Earth-sized Blocks. This had to be Block central, the nerve centre at least; he would make a big mess, for sure. As his vessel swooped straight down towards an empty slot on the floor of the giant rift, Grain could not help smiling as images from the old movie Doctor Strangelove flashed into his mind. Grain had learned to love his bomb. His last thought, as he depressed his trigger, was of Sara.