by Alex Deva
"I'm good," answered the blond man, in a strangled voice.
The sudden change of odds worried the soldier. Just as he was trying to decide what to do, the newcomer addressed him:
"Hey, soldier. Look at your feet."
He didn't, of course. But the blond man did, and smiled, relaxing visibly. The SEALS instantly tried to kick him, but found that he couldn't move his legs. The discovery threw him out of balance, and he nearly fell on his butt, holding onto his opponent's arm, for the first time, as support.
Then, he did look down.
His feet were glued to the floor with some alien, grey gel.
Rethinking his strategy, he let go of the blond man's arm, and in the same movement tried to punch him in the face. Aram moved his head out of the way in time, so that the punch met with nothing but air. His left arm now free, in a quick, swift move, he yanked the knife out of the American's wound and made it do a complicated dance on the tip of his fingers.
The pain attacked again, as severed nerves sent panic impulses and opened blood vessels emptied themselves freely into the soldier's wound. The suit's automatic local wound compression helped with the blood loss, but added to the pain. He gritted his teeth and tried to bear it, but tears appeared at the corners of his eyes.
Aram was watching him, cooly.
"Hurts, right?"
He said nothing.
"Well, now you know how I feel, you modern fuck."
Modern? What's that supposed to mean? thought the SEALS soldier.
The newcomer put his hand gently on the blond man's shoulder.
"How's the pain?"
The blond man grimaced.
"I could do without it," he answered, then faced Mark for the first time. Noticing his bloody nose, he recoiled a little and said:
"I see you've had your fair share."
Mark tried to smile, and looked around the room. Two bodies on their backs, tied to the bulkhead, and a strange gel pillar with glass flechettes stuck in it, made for an odd situation assessment.
"I only had two," he remarked. "The third one is still outside my room, but he'll no longer be a threat."
"Yeah, like hell he won't," spoke the soldier through his helmet speaker.
The two civilians looked at him. The soldier pointed at his helmet.
"We've radioed for backup," he said. "You're fucked now. You're dead, you just don't know it yet. Give up now, and we might just let you live."
The two men didn't say a word.
"You may even make it home at the next prisoner exchange," added the SEALS man.
Mark sighed and said, quietly:
"Name and rank, if you please."
"Travis, Thomas, Chief Petty Officer, United States Navy, Space Special Warfare division, Sea, Air, Land and Space," recited the other, placing careful stress on each individual word.
Aram showed mock disbelief.
"Fuck me," he said. "That's one long name. Your mum must've been really confused."
"Who's in charge of your assault team?" asked Mark.
Travis turned and pointed to the soldier with the smashed helmet and the broken arm.
"He was."
"OK, Travis. Here's the deal, as you say in America. Your radios aren't working, so you didn't radio for help. Porter and the rest of your squad aren't coming, or I wouldn't be here. You tried to take over our ship, and failed. In my book, that makes you the losers."
Travis didn't say anything.
"You attacked us without any reason or provocation. You didn't even wait to talk to us. Can you explain?"
"You destroyed two Wings."
Wings? Is that what they're called? thought Mark. Then, loudly:
"You were pounding us to hell, son."
"You didn't answer our hails."
"So you thought to shoot first?"
"What the fuck do you want? We're at war."
Aram looked at Mark, raising his eyebrows. Mark didn't acknowledge.
"You wanna take that thing off? I don't know how much air you have left, but it can't be much. Your fight's over. Behave, and it stays over."
Travis looked uncertain.
"Am I to consider myself a prisoner of war?" he asked.
Mark pursed his lips, thoughtfully.
"To be honest with you, Travis, I sincerely doubt it's us you're at war with. Consider yourself our prisoner for now, if that counts. As for war -- we'll have to have a bit of a chat about that."
The SEALS man pondered. As a prisoner, he'd be entitled to medical care, and his arm hurt like hell. Probably just as much as this guy's, though, he thought for a moment, looking at Aram's weird, bloody shirt. His lifepack's reserves were indeed running low. In the end, he decided for it; touching the appropriate switches, he unpressurised the suit and released his helmet catches, then took it off altogether.
The two men carefully kept their distance, and glued to the floor as he was, there was nothing he could do anyway.
He looked from one to the other.
"What now?" he asked.
XXIII.
"You had a knife? All this time, you had a knife?" Mark asked Aram.
They were heading towards One, hurting and tired.
"Yeah, why?" asked Aram, holding his right arm with his left.
"You didn't think it might've been worth mentioning?"
"Was there any point since we've met when my knife needed talking about?"
"That's not the issue."
"Then what is the issue? It's just a knife. Everybody has a knife. Everybody I used to know, at least."
They arrived in One still talking about it. The room was dark, and Doina was gently floating in front of a wall, surrounded by graphs and symbols of various forms and shapes, that only made sense to her. As they entered, she increased the room gravity to normal and landed softly, then stepped forward to meet them.
"Oh, God," she said, seeing Aram's arm and Mark's face. "Oh my God. Does that... do those hurt badly?" she asked both at once.
"I'm fine," said Mark.
"We're fine," said Aram. "Thank you for saving my life, Doi. I won't forget it."
"He's not fine," said Mark. "He's been shot, twice. Doi, we should've talked about this sooner, but how are we for medicines?"
"Anything left in the wound?" she asked the Dacian.
"No, I think it's clean," he answered.
The girl shrugged. "Back home I would've tied it tight, but not too tight, with some mashed marigold leaves inside," she said. "I don't have any marigold," she added, seriously, as if she might have been expected to.
"Nine hundred years later and you're still using marigold?" winced Aram.
"What are we going to tie it with?" asked Mark.
"Wait," said Doina and disappeared through the ceiling iris. She returned a few moments later with a strip of flax fibre, torn off her old dress.
"Erm," said Mark, looking at it. "I think they did discover something later on."
They looked at him.
"Germs," he said. "We need that thing disinfected before we use it on an open wound."
Doina looked at the strip of cloth in her hands as if she was seeing it for the first time.
"Boiling water will do, I think," he said.
They boiled the strip of flax fibre with help from the ADM, who obligingly produced a bowl of water heated at a temperature suitable for phase transition into vapour. Then, Mark remembered about inflammation and asked for another bowl of water that was near freezing temperature, and they cooled the bandage as well as they could.
Aram took his shirt off and they cleaned and wrapped his wound in the cold compress. The entry wound didn't look too bad, but the exit on the front side was ugly, with flaps of skin hanging off. It was like recreating a puzzle and it took them a while.
Doina brought another strip of cloth and tied it around Aram's neck, to support his arm across his chest. They were almost done when she exclaimed, again:
"Oh, God."
"What?" asked Mark.
"What about the soldiers? I don't have enough cloth for them all."
Mark and Aram looked at each other.
"Fuck the sol..." started the Dacian.
"Right," interrupted Mark, "the soldiers. Let's try to find out what's this soup we just fell into, and when it is. Doi, let's talk to the one who broke my face, please."
The girl shrugged, as if to say I know they hurt you, but they're people, too and went back to her command post. The Englishman had a sudden idea.
"Any chance of visuals?" he asked. The girl turned to face him, not understanding.
"I mean, can we also see him?"
She thought for a few seconds, then started going through her library of symbols.
"I think... OK, yes," she said, finally picking one.
A small three-dimensional replica of the room where Mark had been fighting the two SEALS appeared floating in front of them.
The unconscious soldier, just a few centimetres tall, and the two guns lay stuck to the floor. Glued, Porter had resorted to sitting on the floor, although he had to lie almost on his back because of his immobile soles.
"Porter," said Mark.
The soldier was visibly startled, but he tried his best to conceal his reaction.
"What?" he said, trying to get back to his feet.
"Your radios aren't working, and we have the rest of your team. Your CO's knocked out, and I just spoke to Travis. Sorry about those two Wings, but you left us no choice."
A look of surprise washed over the soldier's face. Doina gestured and the holographic image zoomed in, until Porter's body was almost a metre tall.
"How many people in the Kennedy?" asked Mark, fully aware that he would be given no answer.
The soldier gave him none.
"How many Wings have you got left?"
Still nothing.
"How much ammo are you carrying on the Kennedy?"
"My name is Daniel Porter, my rank is Chief Petty Officer, my serial number is eight eight zero one one five zero zero," said the other, finally.
"Is that all you're gonna tell me?"
Silence.
"OK, let's start with something easy," said Mark as he gave Doina and Aram a here comes nothing look. "What's today's date?"
But the soldier resolutely said nothing. Mark signalled with his finger in front of his lips and Doina cut off their side of the audio.
"Well, it was worth a try," said Aram. "Want me to go and ask nicely?"
The girl threw him horrified look.
Mark didn't answer. He was intently studying the American's face. He went around the holographic image, frowning.
"Something's not right," he said.
"Why?" asked Aram.
"He's not scared at all. I mean, I know he's got Special Forces training, but look at him. We just kicked the hell out of their ships and their assault team, and the man's smug."
Aram came closer and looked, too. He raised his eyebrows and scratched his chin.
"You're closer to them than we are," he said. "If you think he's hiding something, I believe you."
"But what could it be?" asked Doina.
Mark looked in Porter's eyes for a few long seconds.
"I wanna ask him something," he said. Then, as the audio link was re-established, he addressed the soldier:
"What's the thing you left in our airlock? It's not a radio, is it?"
Porter smiled, and said, precisely enunciating each word:
"No. It's a bomb."
XXIV.
It was his first time in a space suit.
Well, it was his first time in space, actually.
Outside of a spaceship, that was.
Obviously the spaceship had been a first, too.
Actually, it was pretty hard to think of something that was in any way familiar. Maybe the pain in the right shoulder. Yeah, he remembered pain. That, he remembered only too well.
Aram floated in what the Americans had called a "numb suit” — a space suit with nothing but life support turned on — towed on a strap secured to his chest. The Moon hung huge in front of him, much bigger than he'd ever thought it might be when, as a kid, he was staring at it from the green hills of now ancient Apulum.
The image of the greyish moon was still very much alive in his memory, only a couple of weeks old, and now here he was, floating right in front of it, this bleak, pockmarked, great, round... thing, surrounded by... spaceships, one of which was what he kinda took to calling... home. And there'd been people called Americans shooting at him, and himself hurling great objects back at them. And fighting for Doi, both the ship and the girl, and being shot with a strange weapon that threw sharp pieces of glass. Damn it, he hadn't even seen glass before, only heard about it being made in Treverorum, on the banks of the Mosella river in Germania.
Certainly, Aram was a man who took everything in stride, coolly finding his balance in any situation, even if it suddenly brought him a couple of thousand of years into the future, hanging just above the Moon in a suit that felt like he was a mouse being eaten by a snake.
As soon as it had sealed, back in Doi's spoke, he'd felt it tighten all around himself and, soon after, there was a prick into his skin, and his shoulder pain was replaced by a weird feeling of elation. The soldiers had told him that the suit would take care of him, as he and Mark would be transported to their cruiser.
They had argued about it, in One. They had asked the ADM about the possibility to survive an explosion in the airlock. Well, Mark had, mostly. Aram didn't really know what a bomb was. He still couldn't quite understand how something so small could make such great damage, but compared to the other things he had witnessed in the past few weeks, it seemed oddly acceptable. Mark had certainly been livid about it. There was something odd about the modern Englishman, who kept coming up with interesting strategies as if that hadn't been his first trip into space.
Of course, Aram had no way of checking if anything Mark said was true, but he had somehow developed a guarded sense of trust in the man. Despite his suspicion that the Brit was hiding something, he never seemed to be telling an outright lie, and he was certainly genuine in his concern for Doina.
He carefully swivelled his head inside the bulky helmet and tried to look back. There was a soldier following him, and then Mark floating after the soldier, and another soldier ending the line.
Yes, they had argued about it. They had certainly won the fight with the American soldiers right there in the ship, but a contained on-board explosion (Mark had called it so, having expertly named it without hesitation, Aram noticed) would have crippled the starship and killed them all. Yes, it would have killed the soldiers, too. No, Mark didn't think that might intimidate them. Yes, the bomb could be set off from a distance, but no, it didn't need to -- it had what Mark had called (again, very expertly) a dead man's switch, meaning it would go off by itself unless it was told not too, after some fixed time.
The soldier named Travis had told them that the bomb would definitely go off if they didn't agree to come with them to the Kennedy. There was no easy way to confirm that; no easy way to disprove it, either. Aram had suggested that it might have been a bluff, and Mark had agreed, but the risk was just too great.
Ostensibly, they had been "invited" for negotiations, but the Englishman had been openly sceptical about it. Still, they didn't see any way out of it. They could probably have run away, but, also probably, that would have set the bomb off right away. Doina suggested that maybe they could throw it out of the airlock, but Mark said the bomb would've likely been rigged to prevent that.
So, in the end, there just wasn't any choice. They allowed Travis and Porter to carry their wounded to the airlock, helped by the third soldier, whom Doina had released; a few minutes later, the Americans returned with extra space suits.
This won't end well, Aram thought.
They entered the crescent-shaped ship through its own sliding airlock doors, and waited for pressure to recover. Aram now understood about air pressur
e, though it had never occurred to him before that the atmosphere even existed. Air was just something he took for granted. Unless someone was trying to choke him.
He had come to understand a whole lot of things in the past few weeks.
And so, as the inner lock opened, he stepped into the second spaceship of his life.
In terms of size, the inside of the vessel mostly matched its outside. There was one single room, with a large semicircular transparent wall, behind which were seated two people. One of them was watching some displays intently, and the other was turned, curiously watching the newcomers.
Along the walls were benches, each with its own pair of thick supports and handles. The wounded soldiers were already strapped in place. The two people behind the window had a different harness, but were wearing the same type of space suit. Their lips were moving, though Aram couldn't hear a thing. The communication systems in his and Mark's suit had been disabled.
He fell a pat on the shoulder, turned and saw Travis pointing and pushing him towards the bench on the left side. Mark had been similarly instructed to take a seat on the opposite side. The ship was barely tall enough to allow a man to stand, but it was quite wide.
He peered at the unfamiliar dashboard in front of the two men. They had to be the ones driving the ship (flying, he corrected himself). It was nothing like Doi, where command symbols appeared on walls, or simply floated in the air when Doina wanted. This vessel had a number of curved displays, each showing complicated graphs and numbers.
Aram couldn't read very well. Mark had given him a basic course of the English writing system, which he found somewhat complicated. Unfortunately, the words he could see made no sense to him.
The ship was constantly moving in small, lurking movements, trying to keep still above Doi. But then, the other man at the controls touched the displays in a few places, and the movements stopped.
The pilot had a small replica of the ship itself in front of him. He gently grabbed it with both hands and pulled it up ever so little.
The vessel itself jumped upwards, accelerating gently. Then the pilot let go of the small replica, which went back down again, and the acceleration stopped. Then, he pushed the control replica forward, and instantly, the actual ship accelerated forward. Carefully monitoring navigational aids on his screens, he kept nudging his model ship this way and that, each motion of the small ship generating a similar motion to the big one. As long as he nudged the model to any given side, the ship accelerated in that direction; when he let it go, they simply carried on by virtue of inertia.