by Bobby Adair
In five separate liter-sized containers, blasting bottles Tarlow called them, we have TX set to detonate. The bottles are sized to fit down holes drilled deep into asteroids. Each will produce a powerful charge. Brice and I have jammed bottles into the crevices between the pipes and hoses on a drilling rig formerly used for creating holes for the bottles. The rig is standing on the Potato’s surface, sixty meters on the other side of the rocky wart keeping Brice and I hidden.
Brice has the detonators on the blasting bottles connected to his d-pad, and he’s looking at me now, silently asking if I’m ready.
I notice the elapsed time. “You think the others have had time to get their TX charges down to the sublevels?”
Trying to address my hesitation, he says, “With all the shit in the air fouling the radio links, we knew we’d lose comms when we made it this far out.” Still, he waits for an answer. “Does it matter?”
In truth? No.
We have no way of knowing whether the explosion we’re about to detonate will trigger a reaction from the Trogs. We don’t know the state of the rest of our forces. We’ve chosen a self-assigned mission that needs to be carried to success if any of us wants to leave this rock alive and free. The only thing I know for a fact.
My eyes settle on Brice, yet my thoughts are focused inward as I reach my decision. “Fuck it.”
Brice’s smile belies a pyromaniac tendency as he taps the button on his d-pad. A timer starts to tick down through ten seconds. He pats his bundle of buckets. “All we have to hope now is the concussion from the explosion doesn’t set this shit off.”
Both our bundles are off the ground by a meter or so, not touching anything. They’re shielded from blast shrapnel by the rock we’re hiding behind. Still, my earthbound intuition of explosions makes me fret.
“Five seconds.”
I grav myself into position beneath my bundle and flip around to put my feet on the ground, knees bent, ready to push.
Brice slips beneath his load, just as the timer expires.
The rock beneath us shakes sharply.
Jagged hunks of metal and fragments of stone rip through the dust on both sides of us.
Time to fly.
I push off and assist the strength in my legs with a forceful nudge from my suit’s grav plates.
Brice grunts under the strain of pushing the stationary momentum of his load into motion.
We’re both off the surface.
In seconds we’re above the thickest of the gray slurry, hunks of pollen nestled in the core of the expanding bloom of twisted metal from the explosion we just detonated, hoping the Trogs believe we’re part of the debris.
I adjust my grav to aim at the asteroid I think will put us in the best position for our plan, and push my load on the same trajectory. I kill my grav, and relax with legs askew and my arms out to the sides, going ballistic, one more hunk of crap in the solar sphere at the mercy of the gravitational pull of the masses around me.
“You all right?” Brice asks.
“Thanks,” I chuckle.
“What?” He has no clue why I’m amused.
“You complimented me,” I tell him. “I’m trying to look dead.”
“Maybe you should have pursued acting instead of volunteering for this shit.”
“They don’t have actors anymore.”
“In the propaganda films they do,” he argues.
“Yeah,” I laugh, “if I wanted to spend my life pretending to be a dumbass in the films where North Koreans are always doing the smart thing. Not for me.”
I realize I’m slowly rotating as the explosion’s debris cloud thins. However, I’m past the point where I can risk a grav adjustment or movement. Out here with nothing to shield me from the penetrating eyes of little Gray fucks on that Trog cruiser, I need to maintain the charade. If I don’t sell my dead routine, they’ll no doubt send a volley of railgun rounds to ensure my demise.
Of course, they might do that anyway.
I lose sight of Brice as I spin, instead satisfying myself with a view of the sparkly diamond of our sun blazing far away at the center of the solar system. It makes me feel so, so far removed from everything. Even the word, ‘everything’, takes on a different proportion out here with a billion miles of hostile vacuum stretched between me and my home.
Inexplicably, I think of Claire, that smile the first time I saw her, the softness of her skin, the taste of her mouth on mine. The loss of her false love still clenches a brawny fist around my heart and glasses tears over my eyes. No matter how much our marriage was an expedient lie for her, to me, it was the most real thing I ever lived. The death of it still aches. The loneliness from three years of watching her give her entire being to that reeking stick-thing living in my bedroom puts a sharp point on my isolation.
The debris around me starts to thin. My gravitational sensitivities, no longer muffled by the cloud of debris cloying the Potato, feel clear. I no longer need my eyes to picture the three dimensions of space surrounding me.
Brice is there behind me, stiff and playing his own corpse role. Out here with so little mass to skew my senses, I feel his heart beating and see his chest expand with each breath. I can even detect his muscle movements, and see the flow of blood through his veins.
It makes me wonder—how much more clearly than me a Gray can perceive the world? The potential frightens me with its implications.
Pointed in the other direction, the Trog cruiser dominates the sky behind me. Far past, I feel massive Jupiter, slowly spinning inside the halo of its moons.
“That ship is massive,” utters Brice.
“Standard size, though, right?” Of course it is.
“That’s not what I’m saying,” he counters.
“You think we might not have enough to blow it open?” I ask, as I come to accept Brice’s worry.
“You know that’s what I’m thinking.”
“Tarlow said—”
“That’s what worries me.” Brice makes an exasperated sound. “I know he said we’ve got plenty to blow the hull open, but you know as well as I do, he’s guessing. All his knowledge about the structure and materials in these ships would fit into a Gray’s asshole.”
Everybody knows Grays don’t have sphincters, so I guess that makes Brice’s point.
I don’t agree, so I wonder whether my acceptance of Tarlow’s certainty was a case of me hearing what I wanted to hear.
“I don’t like trusting him,” says Brice. “He’s not dependable.”
“He’s just different.” I slip into Dr. Psychologist mode. “You’re projecting other unpalatable traits on him because of one or two characteristics you don’t like.”
Brice chuckles through a series of joyless noises. “So long as you don’t mind me fragging him when this goes to shit. I don’t care what you think the reasons are.”
That’s funny, although not in the way Brice thinks. “If this fails, the Trogs will blow every one of these asteroids to rubble, and we won’t have to worry about who’s alive when it’s over.”
We float for a bit in silence, Brice watching the Trog ship, me lazily spinning with a fantastic view of the whole universe.
Brice makes a few attempts to contact Blair by radio, with no response. Neither of us is surprised. That statically charged dust is doing its work.
“‘Bout halfway,” he informs me.
Our destination asteroid is coming into my view. We’re on course to impact it near where we’d planned—on the far side, out of the cruiser’s view, and hopefully with enough of the asteroid’s mass between us and the ship that the Grays up there won’t detect the grav Brice and I use to maneuver our explosives to a soft landing.
“Major?” It’s a woman’s voice, not Blair.
Startled, I ask, “Who’s this?”
“Silva, sir.”
“Silva?” I grin through a sense of relief I hadn’t expected to feel.
“Where?” ask
s Brice.
“You’re headed toward us,” she answers.
“Us?” I ask.
“Lenox and Mostyn are here with me.”
“You made it?” It’s a stupid thing to say, but sometimes stupid is the best I can come up with when I’m surprised.
“We went for cover when the shooting started.”
“Injuries?” I ask.
“None,” she tells me. “We’re holed up in a mining shack over here near a piece of drilling equipment.”
“I see it,” says Brice.
The asteroid is slipping out of my line of sight as I spin, but through my grav sense, I can make it out.
“How are you set for A and H?” Brice asks.
“Ammo’s fine,” answers Silva. “We’re topped off on hydro. There’s a stock of H packs and C packs in the shed.”
“We’ll come to you,” Brice tells them.
Chapter 32
I baby my load down to the surface. With the bulk of the Trog cruiser, an array of defensive grav fields surrounding it, and a few million tons of asteroid rock between us, I doubt the Grays in the bow will detect the grav I’m using to maneuver my suit.
My main concern is after using the mass of an asteroid as cover to sneak up on the Trogs twice, will the Grays be focusing their super sharp grav sense at every nearby asteroid to see what’s hiding behind it?
Brice nurses his bundle of TX buckets down to the surface beside me.
Lenox, Mostyn, and Silva are out of the mining shack and coming toward us.
“It’s good to see you guys,” says Lenox.
I smile, but I find myself staring at Silva, trying to see the shape of a woman inside her bulky orange gear.
She catches me looking at her, and I turn away, busying my hands at uselessly checking the tension on the straps around the buckets.
“We made it this far.” Brice punches me in the arm. “Right?”
I look up, and he’s smiling. Apparently, he didn’t expect this much success. “Yeah,” I answer, confidently.
“Hey, boss.” Silva punches me in the other arm, and I turn to see she’s smiling too, eyes trying to catch mine in a lingering gaze.
Just a moment past the end of my melancholy drift across the void, and I find it’s easy to look at her and entertain a thought about what a future might look like with another woman in it. “It’s good to see you.”
She wraps me in a hug. Lenox and Mostyn embrace us both as much as that can be done in the gear we’re all cocooned in.
“I thought we were alone,” Lenox admits as she pulls away from me.
“That’s okay,” offers Brice, as he leans over. “We thought the three of you were blasted off into space.”
“We were,” Lenox tells him, “but not so far we couldn’t recover.”
“What about the Rusty Turd?” asks Silva. She’s talking about our assault ship. “I can’t raise them on the comm.”
I shrug and shake my head.
“Destroyed?” asks Lenox.
“Don’t know,” Brice tells her, glancing at me because he believes there’s no open question on the matter.
Lenox follows Brice’s look in my direction and guesses wrong on its intent. “Are we stuck here, sir?”
“No.” I shake my head to emphasize my certainty on that point. “There are a lot of damaged ships over there on the surface of the Potato, and there are repair shops and parts. And people. We found the station’s crew, a few hundred of them in holding pens down on sublevel nine. Once we take care of our Trog infestation, we can probably repair as many of those ships as we want.”
Mostyn sighs. She wasn’t expecting anything so rosy. Likely, the three of them had concluded they’d be stuck on the small asteroid until they found a way to sneak back to the Potato and hijack something capable of making light speed.
Silva glances at the two erstwhile castaways with her, and then her eyes settle on me. She’s investing her hopes. She wants to believe in a happy outcome to all this shit. “What do we need to do?”
Brice points at his feet, down through the asteroid’s core, and out the other side, right up through the Trog cruiser’s curved aft drive array. “We need to knock that scag out of the sky and neutralize all the Trogs on the surface.” He catches himself as he’s finishing up. “And the ones underground.”
“Do we know how many yet?” asks Lenox, not an ounce of apprehension in her. She’s ready, and no doubt understands the risks.
“No. Not a clue.” I pat a TX bucket in my bundle. “We have our part of the mission. We’ll do it, and then we’ll worry about the Trogs on the surface. Once step at a time.”
“One step at a time,” confirms Brice.
“What’s this, then?” asks Silva, squatting down to examine the label on one of the buckets. “Doesn’t look promising.”
“Industrial explosives,” I answer. “They drop it into the bore holes they drill in these asteroids to split them in half.” I throw in the last part to emphasize the power of the syrupy-thick liquid in the buckets.
“Powerful,” figures Lenox, glancing past us, taking measure of the rock we’re standing on.
“They’ll do the job.” I share a look of what I hope is certainty with Mostyn, and then Silva. I pause when I see doubt in Silva’s eyes, probably because she sees the truth of the doubt in mine. “I don’t know how strong this stuff is.” I acknowledge Brice with a quick look, letting him know I’ve come around to his way of thinking. “The tech who set all this up for us is in the business of breaking rocks, not star cruisers.” I finish with a shrug. Not a great leadership moment, but I’m going to ask these three women to come along on a mission that’ll only reduce their already dismal odds of long-term survival.
“Doesn’t matter.” Brice is certain. “We’re going up there, down there, whatever. We’ll split that cruiser open and kill all the Trogs in it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try the next thing, and the next, and the next.”
That’s the kind of certainty I can get behind—the certainty of persistence. “We have seven hundred pounds of this stuff.” I pat one of the buckets again. “We put it in the right place on that ship, and we’ll take it out of action.”
Lenox steps up close, and starts to read the label on one of the buckets. “It’s a ternary explosive.”
I nod.
“Did you mix it?” she asks.
“Do you know about explosives?” asks Brice.
“Only what I’ve read.” She looks at each of us as she straightens back up. “And I know a little bit about bubble jump arrays.”
I’m curious. “Go on.”
Lenox smiles devilishly. “Knock some of those plates out of alignment and either the ship won’t create a well-formed wave and won’t be able to bubble jump, or maybe it’ll end up on a skewed course and stuck in the interstellar void.”
“What are you thinking?” I ask. “Plant these in the drive array?”
“No,” she answers. “One, maybe two. Just enough to damage the array in case your plan to destroy the ship doesn’t work out. If we can’t kill ‘em, then fuck them up the ass with a pinecone for coming to our neighborhood and acting like assholes.”
I smile my enthusiasm. Nothing wrong with a good backup plan.
Chapter 33
Since keeping our feet on the surface of the asteroid is achieved primarily through suit grav to enhance the effect of the local g, I realize walking around to the other side of our small asteroid isn’t any stealthier than amping up the g and blazing through the sky. Either way, an attentive Gray worried about the cruiser’s rear flank will spot us.
So, we’re off the ground again, curving over the horizon as we separate from our big rock. We’re all in a line, heading straight toward the Trog cruiser’s stern drive array.
I’m in the lead, eyes wide open, grav senses stretched to their limit, trying to see any change as soon as it occurs, believing fluctuations in the cruiser’s defe
nsive fields are my proxy warning system for impending danger. Right behind me, Silva is flying with nothing but a weapon in her hands. Mostyn is a few meters back, guiding my bundle of TX buckets. Brice follows her with his bundle. Lenox has the rear with one bucket in hand.
“Stay close,” I tell them. “There’s a surge in the field coming up. Follow my path exactly, or it’ll bounce you out.” Deflect them actually, just like a railgun round bending its path away from a Trog’s chest plate.
I see a series of donut-shaped fields stacked off the stern of the ship, and I can’t help but wonder at the grav talent of some of these Grays for the complexity of the field shapes they’re able to coax out of their defensive hull arrays.
I bear left to slip through a gap where two of the donut-shaped fields are neutralized because the polarities flip directions.
Silva grunts like she’s been slugged, and I know she’s drifted off my course.
“Exact,” I remind them. It comes out more angry than urgent. A mistake I don’t have time to apologize for. “There’s not a lot of room.” I slip into a neutral zone in the hole of a donut, come to a stop, and spin around to watch the others follow my path.
Silva floats to a stop beside me with a nod and a smile. Harsh words forgiven. Effortlessly so. Draftees resent officers as part of the natural order of the universe. I decide my easy absolution is due to another reason, one skewed strongly by what I want it to be. I decide she likes me as much as I think I like her.
Christ, do men ever mature past the sweet temptation of pubescent puppy love?
What would be the fun in that?
I need to focus on the mayhem ahead.
Mostyn is slowing and delicately maneuvering her load.
“Another meter forward,” I direct her. “Then cut hard toward us.”
She listens and moves as told.
Her buckets are buffeted on one side. She squeezes through the gap between the grav fields, and her bundle starts to spin.
Silva accelerates over to help Mostyn bring the load back under control.