“Higgins, do you copy?” he radioed.
Win glanced around, panicked. It took time for the Higgins to take shape in the star’s dim orange light, the outline diminishing in size as the distance grew. Where the ashram had been there was now a gaping hole venting atmosphere, and sparks from electrical systems sent white dots in every direction. Win hit his forearm controls. Gas jetted from his backpack unit and the deceleration was more violent than he’d anticipated, almost forcing him to collide head-on with a massive hull section that had been trailing him. He dodged around it. The gauge on his heads-up showed the diminishing fuel supply but still Win hadn’t reversed course by the time he had exhausted three-quarters of his maneuvering fuel in navigating the debris. He used almost all the rest to start closing distance with the Higgins until only a small fraction remained.
“Higgins,” he repeated, “do you copy?”
Before he could ask again, Win’s faceplate sensors sparked, almost all of them failing simultaneously and sending him into darkness. He couldn’t see his forearm controls. Win’s heart threatened to pound from his chest and he heard the sound of his own heavy breathing while trying to figure out what had happened to his systems and what to do next. Win reached up. He fumbled at a tiny protrusion near the top of his helmet, snapping something open so that a projection appeared on his screen, his last chance to see and navigate through these surroundings. Suit helmets were equipped with backup optical periscopes, manually activated, but the red giant’s light was so dim the thing projected bare and ghostly images, almost unrecognizable. Finally he spotted the Higgins again; her new weapon, arrayed in a series of mammoth cylinders on its port side, now glowed at the tip as if it had just been cast in the furnace of hell.
They fired, Win thought. That’s what overloaded my sensors. My god, what a weapon.
“Zhelnikov,” he said, hoping the suit’s backup radio system still functioned. “Do you read me?”
“Win? Where are you and what’s your status?”
“I’m outside the ship, trying to maneuver my way back. I’m uninjured but my suit is almost out of gas. All my sensors failed when the Higgins fired so I’m working off periscope with no way to get range. Thank god the suit radio still works, along with life-support systems. If you maneuver away, I’m gone.”
At first Zhelnikov didn’t respond; when he returned his voice sounded reassuring. “We’re launching a shuttle. Keep radioing so the pilot can get a fix.”
Win waited. Every so often he would say something, until a small shuttle flew into view while the Higgins peeled off, entering another series of evasive maneuvers. By the time he’d made it into the shuttle airlock he’d seen enough to realize they were making for the wormhole, in retreat.
Win strapped himself into a couch, still blind except for the periscope. “Is the Higgins running?” he asked the pilot. “She’s about to get destroyed.”
“Yes,” the pilot said. “It lost an engine so we should be able to keep pace.”
“Did the weapon work? What’s the status of the Bangkok?”
Someone took Win’s arm and he heard a snapping sound when the person jacked a cable into the suit’s forearm control unit. A second later he had access to the shuttle’s sensors and coms.
“We missed. Minimal damage to only one Proelian vessel but I don’t know which one. Both are now within missile range.”
Win flipped through the sensors, settling on a combination of the Higgins’s tactical feed and its wide-angle optics. He zoomed into a Proelian ship. The vessel spewed gas and debris along one side, from multiple gaping holes in its sheathing material but its engines burned as brightly as its sister’s. Swarms of rockets lit from its front section, then from the other ship’s. Win shook his head at the sight. He counted more than thirty missiles as they streaked toward the Higgins, and already the tactical readout had identified them as a combination of kinetic and nuclear warheads.
“The theurgists are done at playing school,” he said. “Now we see their true faces. I was wrong about them.”
“My god,” said the pilot.
“That is not your god. That is your death—and ours with the destruction of our destination: the Higgins.”
The copilot pointed at Win, his voice filled with anger. “We should have left him out there. The Higgins has some neutron and gamma shielding; enough so that some will survive. This shuttle is a coffin. We died to save Zhelnikov’s monster?”
“Those missiles aren’t targeting us,” the pilot said. His hands sped over the shuttle’s control panel, a navigation holo popping into existence as he plotted a new course. “We’ll burn for a few more seconds, then use maneuvering gas to send the ship in a wide arc, around where the tactical predicts the nuclear tips will detonate. We might make it.”
“Might?” the copilot asked.
“We can’t arc too far or we miss the transit. We’ll definitely take some radiation.”
Win absorbed their fear like a light rain that fell on his face, misting his thoughts with its vibrations and tremors. He mapped it. Every tick of the copilot’s thoughts induced a new current of terror that provided insight and Win soon saw his opportunity.
“There will be enough radiation to disrupt your DNA,” he said. “You’ll escape immediate death, but from the distances shown on your course projection you’ll still absorb a lethal dose. Not enough to cook you immediately, but enough so that within hours you’ll become sick. Your tissues will behave as though they’ve been broiled from the inside out. And over the next few weeks you’ll begin the exquisite road to organ failure and a painful death. If you can become comfortable with the thought of vomiting up blood, it might not be so bad.”
Now the copilot’s thought patterns came in intermittent bursts, the random firings of a person both panicked and never stable to begin with, and he saw the copilot’s anger build. He blames me. Win watched the man clench and unclench his fists, his breathing shallow and ragged as the pilot locked in a new shuttle course. Its engines cut off. A sudden absence of acceleration sent their compartment again into weightlessness, punctuated by moments of inertia as the maneuvering jets spurted off and on to keep them on course. Win began to unbuckle his couch straps. The copilot spun in his chair to face forward, chuckling.
“You forgot one thing: You’re in here too. With us.”
“Yes,” said Win, releasing the final catch that kept him in place. “But my servo harness has adequate shielding because Zhelnikov designed it for maximum survivability. I’ll get a bad sunburn. Nothing more. You, on the other hand? When they bury you in space, it will be as though they loaded the coffin with a raw oyster.”
The copilot hit a button on his armrest, releasing him from the acceleration chair. A maneuvering jet fired. Win had anticipated it, shooting the last of his servo harness fuel to compensate for the shuttle’s acceleration while the copilot, hanging in midair and unable to change direction with the craft, flew headlong into a bulkhead. His suit helmet cracked open; a fraction of a second later, a sharp metal corner slammed into his skull, splitting it and filling the compartment with a spray of blood. Win disconnected from the coms cable, barely able to see through the helmet periscope while he scrambled for the man’s seat where he finished strapping in before the shuttle jets fired again.
“Your copilot looks dead, but have no fear; he won’t fly around. Your course will keep pushing him into the bulkhead.”
“Jesus!”
“I need to adjust navigation.”
“Any wider and we run out of maneuvering fuel. Closer, and I fry for sure.”
“Please, forgive me. I can’t afford to take the route you plotted; it keeps us in Sommen space for too long, and gives them a chance to fire at us.”
Win slammed a spiked servo harness leg through the pilot’s helmet, cutting him off. Killing filled Win with a burst of energy. He’d kept the urge under control for so long that Win imagined the sensation was the same as it would be if he rid himself of the servo harness, a
llowing cool air to flow over his wasting frame, drying the drool from his chin instead of sucking it off the skin. I am meant to destroy—anything and everything. It is as I choose, the deity of meaningless expirations.
He pulled the spike out, then concentrated on trying to find a spot on the control panel to jack into.
“I do not recognize you,” the shuttle computer said.
“It’s okay. I’m on the Higgins’s roster; check your records for Win. Shuttle pilot and copilot are now deceased and I need control.”
“Authorized. How unfortunate. Do you need medical attention?”
“Time to missile detonation?”
“Two minutes.”
“Change course. Fastest burn to the transit.”
“Such a route will put you within range of several nuclear-tipped warhead detonations, immediately post detonation.”
“I know,” Win said.
“You cannot survive.”
“Do it.”
“Your records indicate a lack of engineering for combat g-forces. I will keep them within standard range.”
Win shut his eyes. If kinetic warheads destroyed the Higgins he would die, but if some of the ship’s systems survived, even with a dead crew he had a chance to enter a navigation route and hibernate. How long would it take to reach Earth—from here, at the edge of Sommen space—if he chose not to use wormholes? What if the missiles took out navigation and all he could do was point the ship at Earth? Thousands of years asleep. The concept almost tempted him; Win could start over, arrive after the Sommen war to see who won and who lost, and, perhaps, reestablish himself as the leader of conflict and annihilation. Then again he’d have a constant need of fuel and would have to pray there were no reactor problems; the power systems required maintenance and overhaul every fifty years. Win chuckled out loud, prompting the shuttle semi-aware to ask, “Is there something funny? Detonation in five seconds.”
“Yes. If I am the only one left on the Higgins, and its navigation system is destroyed, I can’t make it home. I’ll die in hibernation, but live longer than you.”
A blinding flash backlit Win’s eyelids, the shuttle’s sensors activating filters in the light of several new suns. A few seconds later, he opened them. Jets of molten metal streaked toward the Higgins. A glowing halo of energy surrounded the ship, expanding so fast that it enveloped the shuttle in x-rays, gamma radiation, and charged particles, forcing Win’s control panel to spark and catch fire, the systems switching over to backups at the same time emergency vents opened the compartment to vacuum. Ten kinetic missiles had found their target. In the aftermath of the radiation bath the Proelian ships had just given her, the Higgins bucked at this new insult when glowing, orange streaks pierced its hull in multiple spots and then ejected out the far side in clouds of debris. The Higgins’s engines cut off. Win had to blink when he realized gamma radiation had made it through his beryllium-doped polymer sheathing, leaving streaks of light across his vision as if fireworks had gone off inside his helmet. He squinted, willing the phenomenon to stop so he could see. By the time he regained his vision, the Higgins had begun a slow tumble, disappearing backward into the wormhole. Then came the shuttle’s turn. A sudden feeling of exhaustion overtook Win, a portion of his mind warning that this was radiation exposure, and he shut his eyes again after struggling to keep them open while the mirrored wormhole surface expanded across his view screen.
“Wake up. Wake up. Wake . . .”
“What?” Win asked.
“You’ve been unconscious for thirty minutes,” the semi-aware said. “I was able to access your suit’s medical unit and administer one dose of radiation mitigator, but your oxygen generator is almost empty. There are spares in the storage compartment between the pilot’s and copilot’s stations.”
“Where are we?” Win asked. He fished a cartridge from out of the compartment and replaced his old one, dousing the suit’s low-oxygen warning light.
“I have successfully docked with the Higgins. We now drift outside Sommen space, three thousand kilometers from the transit point.”
Win ripped the seat harness loose and pushed off, slamming his hand on the airlock controls. It took a moment to cycle through. Once in the Higgins’s airlock he saw the blinking lights on the other side of the door, through a small porthole: the ship’s interior was in vacuum. Had there been an atmosphere Win would have heard the alarm klaxons while the ship’s semi-aware listed damaged and destroyed systems over ship’s speakers. The inner door cycled open and three corpses tumbled into the tight space, dead crew members who had bloated—as if someone had both burned and inflated them.
Win jetted through the maze of corridors, crashing through the dead, most of whom had ruptured suits from where large chunks of debris had punched through the fabric and then their bodies. He tried to remember. The Higgins’s combat bridge had been radiation hardened so the command crew would have the maximum chance for survival but it took almost an hour to find it amid the labyrinth of wreckage. He worked the door controls the best he could, cursing at a loss of backup power and the illumination of his small helmet lamp; the beam flickered, its boundaries defined by suspended dust and blood.
Suddenly, the hatch cracked open. It crept open further to allow a burst of atmosphere to escape from the cramped space, the crack widening enough that Win saw Zhelnikov’s face through the glass of his helmet’s faceplate.
“Win; you’re alive.”
“What happened?”
“We missed. The shot was close enough that it melted portions of a Proelian ship but not enough to disable it. When the missiles hit us, the ship automatically shut off reactors and our one good engine. She’s dead unless we conduct some repairs.”
“And the weapon?” Win asked.
“Salvageable.” When there was enough space, Zhelnikov and several other crew pushed out of the combat bridge. “Come. There’s no time. We have to get basic systems online before we travel too far, and before the Proelians come to finish the job.”
“The Proelian scum,” said Win. “My sister. They think I’m dead and will not come for us; they are in Sommen space and will continue on mission. But when she finds out I’m alive, she will try for me again. She will never stop.”
“Well, then it’s good that I laid a trap for her—back there, after we fired the weapon. Now: move, boy; there’s work to do.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We have lost both captains, San sent, her message part of a mammoth game of tin-can telephone where quantum particles in the tomb linked with ones thousands of light-years away, deep beneath the surface of Ganymede. One died on the Jerusalem, when the Higgins fired its new plasma weapon. The other died on his shuttle, in transit. He was on the Jerusalem when the Higgins entered our space, and the captain tried to make his way back to my ship, midbattle. The plasma beam scored a direct hit, vaporizing both him and his craft.
The response: I have relayed this to the abbess. She says that the surviving executive officers are now the captains of the Bangkok and Jerusalem; both ships are to continue on mission, which you will direct, advise. What happened to your primary targets: Win and Zhelnikov?
Presumed dead. One of our missiles scored a direct hit on his ashram while it was occupied.
The abbess congratulates you and the Bangkok’s crew. The same message is being relayed to the Jerusalem right now. Continue on mission.
A sense of panicked fear threatened to choke San as it rose in her chest, settling in her throat; before long they’d all be in deep inside the territory of an overpowering adversary.
What about the Higgins? She escaped through the wormhole and we must pursue, in case of survivors.
The abbess says that it is critical to learn about the Sommen abandoned zone; to gather any data you can on the machinists. After your last report, she and Fleet have conferred and models are in agreement that Zhelnikov and Win could not have survived your attacks; do not pursue.
Her brother was dead. San let the concept
seep into her thoughts and work its way downward to her chest where it blossomed into a picture of reality: She had killed, and not Chinese hybrids this time. This had been an entire Fleet vessel crewed by people like her, young men and women who’d joined so they could see space and operate in the service of humanity, to protect Earth the same way she’d always dreamed of doing. Her connection with Ganymede wavered with San’s effort to fight back tears, a battle weakened by a growing sense of disconnection from reality that wedged itself between her thoughts and gray matter. Why should she mourn her brother? The Higgins had been manned by traitors and deserved the end they received, so why should she care at all about their lives or loss? San searched for something, anything, to distract herself from the questions, which she suspected had no answers.
Our landing craft, she sent, reestablishing connection, are preparing for water collection operations. The battle and maneuvering in a gas giant’s gravity well depleted our reserves. After refueling, we will continue.
The abbess says to move out immediately after refueling, to put as much distance between you and the engagement area in case Sommen detected the battle. And, San?
What?
The coordinates given by the Sommen priest were valid. Fleet and the Proelians have wiped out the new Chinese home world, and are hunting for stragglers posted in wormhole ambush sites. She said to tell you “well done” and “thanks to your and Wilson’s bravery, the erasure of Chinese errors will soon be complete.” End communications.
San felt tears in the corners of her eyes. The tomb slabs opened and she wiped them on the bare skin of her forearm, sliding back into her undersuit before breaking into open sobs. The weight of death and killing settled upon her with the mass of a boulder and although she couldn’t read their minds, the fear and uncertainty of the entire crew buzzed through her mind; it hummed, a thin wire tensioned to the breaking point. Once San announced Fleet’s decision to the crew, it wouldn’t take long for word to make its way throughout the entire ship that they were headed deep into Sommen space after all; many had thought because of the battle they’d be recalled. Disappointment would be a cancer.
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