by Craig Allen
The ropes in the wall threw the object from within itself.
“Those tentacles spat that ball out?” Gaston whistled. “Hope this place isn’t breaking down. What’s that thing do anyway?”
“Looks like it just glows,” Cody said. “Stripe, do you mind if I hold it?”
“Oh Christ.” Sonja stepped forward. “Cody, do you really think that’s a good idea?”
“It hasn’t hurt Stripe, so I don’t see why it would hurt me.” Cody reached for it. “May I?”
Stripe gave a head bob and handed the sphere to Cody. The sphere felt cold even though it had been in Stripe’s warm hand. The light dimmed and soon faded completely.
“It has almost no weight,” Cody said. “And the wall tentacles just spat it out?”
Stripe nodded.
Cody held it up higher and looked at it. “I wonder why it stopped glowing.”
Stripe shook his head.
Cody handed it back. “Not sure what it does, but it seems harmless.”
Stripe took the sphere and examined it himself, like a child with a new toy. The ball started to glow once more.
“Interesting,” Gaston said. “But right now, the main objective is to leave this place. Options.”
“The hopper is fully operational, sir,” Sonja said. “Just a few dings from coil-gun fire from our fight with the toads. But as soon as we get outside, the reactors will shut down, assuming that antireactor field or whatever is still on.”
“Let’s assume it is,” Gaston said. “Think you can get enough thrust with that thing to get us outside that barrier before the engines shut down?”
“Unlikely, sir.” Sonja gestured at the docking entrance, several feet off the ground. “The problem is that we can’t really thrust inside the tube itself while it’s wrapped around us. The only forward momentum we’ll have is whatever comes from the tube ejecting us into space.”
“Do we have any kind of antigrav devices on board?” Cody asked. “Something powered by batteries instead of the reactors?”
“We have two grav-belts,” Johnson said. “They can lift a person, but it’d be like a rat pushing a bowling ball if we attached both of them to the hopper.”
Cody thought of something. “How many torpedoes do we have?”
Gaston snickered. “You thinking of blasting a hole in the Hive, Doc?”
“No, but they have their own propulsion system, right?” Cody took several steps toward the hopper. “They have gravity drives but are fueled by battery power, not a fusion plant.”
Johnson grinned. “Doc, that’s a great idea. We can disarm the warheads and strap the torpedoes to the outside of the hopper, and they can push us.”
“They only got enough power for about thirty seconds of flight,” Sonja said.
“That’s all we need.” Johnson held up his hands. “All four can help us build up some serious momentum, and then we just coast past the barrier. There, the fusion reactor should come online, and we can head wherever we want.”
“It’s a risk, but I can’t think of another way off this tub. Let’s get this set up. We need to report to the fleet what we’ve seen here.” Gaston pointed at the pink ball Stripe was playing with. “Including that.”
~~~
Cody helped the best he could, but he wasn’t an engineer. He did, however, understand programming. He finished up his wiring in the cockpit just as Gaston walked up.
“How’s it going, Doc?”
“I’m ready here.” Cody pointed at a small box attached to edge of the holocontrols. “I pulled the control mechanism from a gravity belt and reprogrammed it to activate the torpedoes. It will send the signal once I have its codes.”
“Well, you’re never getting those,” Gaston said. “Step aside, and let me enter them myself.”
Cody stepped down from the cockpit.
Gaston then climbed up to enter numbers into the box. “What do you think about that toad and what it said?”
Cody wasn’t sure what he could add. “It wouldn’t surprise me if someone was clandestinely working with them. Humans have always done those sorts of things. Hopefully, it’s our government and not pirates.”
Gaston finished and stepped down. “Why would it make you feel better if it were our government?”
“Pirates are more dangerous.”
“Read your history. At least pirates don’t hide their intentions.” Gaston leaned back and eyed Cody. “If it is someone in the UET, I could make a few calls to know for sure. But then I’d be tipping my hand. If I had a higher clearance, I might be able to get it more clandestinely.”
Cody let a smile slip. “You know, don’t you?”
Gaston shrugged. “I suspected. I read the report of how you, Sonja, and your friend Bodin detonated those torpedoes underground and destroyed the Reed Entity’s factory. I’m sorry for your loss, by the way.”
“Thank you,” Cody said. “Bodin was a good friend and a good marine.”
“I’m sure he was.” Gaston stroked his chin. “But that data you gathered before the torpedoes detonated… You couldn’t have gotten that without high-level clearance.”
Cody sighed. “Yeah, well, I guess there’s no point in hiding it.”
“Oh, by all means, spill.”
Cody looked into Gaston’s eyes, trying to determine how much trouble Cody would get into once he told his story. But given what they could use the access codes for, maybe he could trust Gaston after all.
“It goes back a year ago,” Cody began. “On the Spinoza, before we crashed. Sergeant Bodin was playing cards with a bunch of people, including a man who called himself Corporal Deveau.”
“Called himself?”
“The name was correct, as far as we know, but the rank wasn’t. He was really a colonel.”
Gaston chuckled. “And exactly how did Sergeant Bodin acquire command-access codes from a colonel?”
“Deveau was losing,” Cody said. “Apparently, he thought he could draw an inside straight. He was so convinced of it he claimed he had access codes he’d acquired from a colonel. It wasn’t until much later we learned he was an actual colonel, of course.”
“Of course.” Gaston shook his head. “So he bet his access codes and lost.”
“Basically, yes.” Cody held up his hands. “Well, it turned out to be useful in the end.”
Gaston nodded as he continued to stroke his chin. “I’m not a fan of secrets. Some knowledge should be shared by all. But I will never betray this uniform or anyone in the service. You keep those codes safe. And at some point, I’m going to have to confiscate them. Understand?”
Cody met Gaston’s gaze and nodded. “I understand.”
“Good.” Gaston leaned outside. “Johnson, how are we doing?”
“We got the torpedoes strapped to this thing.” Johnson slid out from under the hopper and stood, dusting himself off. “They’re ready to receive the command codes.”
Cody wondered how much Johnson had heard.
“Good work,” Gaston said. “Have we drawn straws yet?”
Johnson didn’t get a chance to answer. A crack sounded in the distance, which Cody recognized.
“That’s coil-gun fire.” Cody leaned out the pilot’s hatch.
In the distance, toads bounded from one berm to another, gripping coil rifles in their central claws.
Gaston pulled Cody back inside and tapped his earpiece. “Everyone on board. That’s an order.”
“Everyone?” Cody asked.
Fliers took to the air suddenly and circled away. One was cut down. Both it and its severed wing fell to the ground.
“We can’t take the fliers,” Gaston said.
“We can’t leave them,” Cody said. “The toads will kill them.”
Sonja ran up behind Cody and pushed him out of the pilot’s seat. “But we can do something with the hopper.”
Cody hadn’t thought of that. The hopper’s coil guns and grasers would cut through the toads as if they were soft butter. His mai
n concern was what firing induced-gamma emissions would do to the nearby fliers.
Cody sat in a booster seat behind Sonja and Gaston. The rest of the crew gathered inside the hopper, and the main hatch closed. Sonja brought the drives online, and the hopper rose.
“How heavy are we?” Gaston asked.
“A whole crew heavy,” Sonja said. “But I think we can do it. Life support is at maximum. Reserve batteries are charged.”
“Very good.” Gaston pointed across the Hive. “Let’s go help our flying friends.”
The hopper pushed its way forward across the pseudo terrain. Coil-gun fire cut down another flier, but the rest of the fliers were at a safe distance… all but one.
“The hell does he think he’s doing?” Gaston asked.
Cody pulled up the hopper’s sensors on his internal viewer, and the readout reflected on the inside of his corneas. He zoomed in on the sole flier hovering over the toads. A stripe bisected his forehead.
“Oh no,” Cody said.
“I think our friend is going to die,” Sonja said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
On the ground, toads had spread out from an opening in the wall, one that Cody had not seen before. The coil guns rattled, and clouds of pseudo dirt bounced into the air. Half a dozen toads were split in two by the initial blast.
Gaston had fire control at his fingertips. “We’re leaving, but we’re not leaving our friends hanging.”
Another burst of coil-gun fire obliterated three more toads. The rest scattered. On the starboard side, Stripe still hovered in place. How he tolerated the gravity drive was beyond Cody. It would’ve sounded like a volcanic explosion to Stripe’s magnetic senses.
Another burst of coil-gun fire scattered toads, but a few managed to return fire. Rounds bounced off the canopy and the hull but didn’t penetrate. To the side of the hopper, Stripe held his central claw up to his face, and coil-gun rounds hovered in the air before him, then fell.
Cody started to say something, but the sphere glowed like a flashlight in Stripe’s face. Cody put his hand to his eyes, but the flash had vanished already. Stripe lowered the sphere then lost altitude. He spread his wings and dove straight for the toads in a strafing maneuver.
“Crazy buzzard,” Gaston said. “He’s going to get himself—”
Another flash erupted from the sphere, but it was much smaller and more directed. On the ground, a toad stood staring at Stripe. The toad then split down the middle and fell apart, cut in two with surgical precision.
Gaston ceased firing and instead stared at the spectacle through the canopy. With another flash, two more toads were cut in half. Each half flailed uselessly for a moment then lay still.
The toads ran, for all the good it did them. Half dropped their G-1s as they scrambled for cover. The sphere flashed several more times. One toad had its legs cut away, leaving it to flop in the dirt. Another had its massive head cut clean off. Others simply fell over with gigantic holes in them, large enough to crawl through.
Stripe rose into the air and adjusted course until he was staring into the hopper. A message appeared on the hopper’s HUD. It was the clearest sentence Stripe had ever communicated.
Leave this place and report what you have found. I will finish this.
“How’d he get access to our HUD?” Sonja asked.
“Never mind that.” Gaston pointed over his shoulder. “Looks like he can handle himself. Let’s get our asses out of here.”
Cody continued to stare at the visual broadcasting from his inner eye. “How did he learn how to use that sphere?”
Gaston started to speak, but text flowed across the HUD again.
I understand now, Dr. Brenner. I understand everything. Now go.
Sonja accelerated away. Fliers in the distance had gathered, hovering in midair. Cody still watched the external view of the toads as Stripe sliced them into pieces.
“There’s the docking port.” Sonja dropped altitude. “Approaching.”
“Let’s hope…” Gaston trailed off at the sight before him. “Well, shit.”
The docking port opened at once, reaching out for the hopper like a mother for her baby. Sonja released the controls as the port engulfed them and brought them inside. A few seconds of darkness followed, then they were in space. Cody’s weight vanished, and he would’ve floated out of the seat if he hadn’t been strapped down.
Outside the canopy was the blackness of space. In the distance, Cody saw a small, red planet.
“That’s Kali,” he said.
“Reactor’s dead,” Sonja said. “Activating torpedoes.”
“Everyone hang on to something,” Gaston said. “It’s going to get rocky.”
In the hopper bay, people pushed their way toward the rear hatch or held on to the floor where they could. Blankets had been tied near the back of the hopper, and people did their best to hang on to those blankets in zero g, as it wouldn’t stay zero g for long.
Sonja touched the control mechanism for the torpedoes, and Cody quickly got heavy, falling back into his seat. Grunts and groans erupted from the hopper bay. Whatever forces they were experiencing must have been higher than three g’s.
Cody tried to breathe, but the air wouldn’t come. His lungs were too heavy. His vision clouded and grew black.
Just before he almost passed out, the heaviness lifted. He was in free fall again. Cody gulped in air and shook his head, trying to regain full consciousness. Behind him, some of the crew laughed and high-fived each other. Others just looked plain relieved, as Cody felt.
“That’s it.” Sonja brought up a reading. “Our velocity’s pretty good. Let’s hope it can get us clear before we run out of air.”
“Any idea when we’ll be far enough away our engines will come back online?” Gaston asked.
Sonja shook her head. “Unknown, sir. I don’t know if we can find the edge of this zero-fusion field, or whatever it is. To be honest, sir, I don’t want to turn on the sensors to try. We’ll need every scrap of power in those batteries to maintain life support, which is being taxed as it is with all the people we have back there.”
Off the port side of the canopy, a huge shape appeared. The Hive came into view, moving away from the hopper and the sun.
“Looks like she’s headed for Kali Prime,” Gaston said.
Sonja shrugged. “She’s taking her time. At that rate, it’ll take her days to get there.”
Gaston shook his head. “I wonder why she’s taking her time.”
“A better question is what the Hive is going to do when it gets to Kali Prime,” Cody said.
“No, a better question is what the hell that light show was about.” Gaston frowned. “Ancient technology is dangerous as it is, but now those buzzards got a hold of it.”
“And they killed toads very effectively with it,” Cody said. “I wish we had time to ask them how.”
“We’ll discuss later.” Gaston folded his arms and leaned back. “Everyone, get cozy. It could be a while. And we’ll need to keep the chatter to a minimum.”
“Why?” Cody asked.
“To preserve oxygen.” Sonja pointed at the life-support readout.
Cody checked the battery power. They had a few hours at most.
He leaned back and tried to not think about breathing.
~~~
“Contact!”
Jericho looked up as Tokugawa’s sensor operator put the lidar and gravimetric readout on the main hologlobe.
“What am I looking at?” Jericho asked.
“It just showed up on lidar,” the officer said. “It was on gravimetrics for a few seconds. The grav signature looked almost like torpedoes, but they were the slowest torpedoes I’d ever seen.”
Jericho strode up to the hologlobe. “Zoom in on… whatever it is. I want a clear look.”
The image enhanced, and Jericho grinned. It was a hopper, and strapped to her sides were torpedoes.
“Clever.” He turned to his staff. “Contact the Odin. Have her approach t
he hopper but maintain five thousand clicks from the Hive.”
As his message was relayed to the Odin, he smiled. He’d heard stories about Gaston, but frankly, from the oddness of the design, he suspected Dr. Brenner had come up with the idea.
Goddamn clever.
~~~
Cody could see his breath clouding in front of him. His nose was cold, but the rest of him was relatively warm. The enviro-suit helped maintain his body temperature, but that wouldn’t matter if they ran out of air.
He didn’t dare look at life support. Last he’d seen, CO2 levels were climbing near dangerous levels.
In the hopper bay, respirators were being passed around. Only ten were on board, two of which were reserved for the wounded. The other eight would have to help everyone, but they wouldn’t last long. All in all, time was running out quickly.
Cody glanced outside the canopy. The Hive was visible to starboard, moving farther away from them and closer to Kali Prime. Other than that, the depths of space loomed, interspersed with stars. One star moved in relation to the others.
Could it be…?
“There.” Cody pointed out the canopy. “What is that?”
Gaston squinted. “Looks like one of ours.”
“How far away are they?” Cody asked.
“Too hard to tell in space,” Sonja said. “Human eyes are made for the soup of an atmosphere. Distances in the vacuum of space look way off.”
Cody thought it might be several thousand kilometers away, but it might as well have been several thousand light years. “Can they reach us?”
“Not without getting shut down.” Sonja looked back at Cody and mouthed the word sorry.
He winked at her. “We’re not gone yet.”
Part of him couldn’t believe they were going to die, but that was the Earther in him. Life on Earth was so easy that most people never thought about dying, particularly when the average person lived to the ripe old age of two hundred while still looking young, thanks to rejuv. Sitting in the hopper, he realized all that might change.
The idea of Sonja dying… He didn’t want to think about that at all.