by Bobby Adair
“Maybe back in the days before the siege, I’d agree with you. People are mentally tougher now. As much as I hate to minimize it, people are used to the idea of death. Before they even reach kindergarten, everybody knows someone who has died. We all know a dozen before we get out of school, and I’ll bet you can’t name a person who hasn’t seen the MSS beat the shit out of somebody in the street by the time they were in third grade. War is a brutal thing, but if the MSS did nothing for humanity, they raised us in a brutal world, and made us tough.”
“In theory,” says Phil. “The crew is still having a hard time. I think the losses when we got back from 61 Cygni were the final straw for us.”
“You mean for Silva and Lenox?”
"For me and you, too," says Phil. He glances over at Brice. "Even him."
I reach up to massage my temples and bang my fists on the sides of my helmet instead. “Sometimes I hate wearing this thing so much, I want to peel it off and dive into space.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.”
“I’m just yammering,” I tell him.
“Maybe it’s a Freudian thing.”
“Phil, stop it. Give me your opinion, is the crew going to hold together through tomorrow’s fight?”
“What do you think? What does Silva tell you?”
I groan. “Silva barely talks to me, now. She’s not avoiding me.” I look around the bridge. “That’d be kind of hard in what little interior space we have left.”
“Does she cut your comm when you try talking to her? Is she mad? Did you do something?”
“No,” I say. “Nothing like that. Everything’s fine as far as I know. It’s just… I don’t know. We don’t talk about anything anymore except the mission. The next bombing run. The ship-to-ship comm. When she tells me she loves me, she doesn’t sound like she means it. She sounds like Claire used to.”
Phil nods. “Sydney said it the same way. It sounded like a recording.”
“Then, you know what I mean.”
“Have you asked her about it?”
I shake my head.
“It’s probably nothing. It’s the situation.”
I shrug.
“You should talk to her. My bet is you’re making something out of nothing.”
“Neither of us has time for that. I need to figure out how to destroy that base.”
Chapter 23
Sometimes, inspiration eludes you. The imagination won’t produce anything brilliant, and all you have left to do the job that still needs doing is audacity. And courage. Phil doesn’t agree. He says the two virtues left when you’ve got nothing else to give are stupidity and stubbornness, my two most prominent traits.
However you label it, we have a full load of six nukes mounted on the pylons outside, ready to drop. We have another six crammed into the space in the forward compartment. We won't need to rendezvous with Leroux until after everything's done, though we have one more drop scheduled.
“Thirty seconds,” says Phil.
Over the crew comm, I tell everyone, “Be ready for anything.”
“Like a dozen cruisers all emptying their railguns at us?” guesses Brice.
“We’ll be fine,” says Peterson.
“We’ve taken on worse odds,” adds Silva.
I glance back at Brice to emphasize that he’s alone with his cynicism, but mostly I’m reassuring myself. I know the crew’s words are masks for their trepidation. “Keep an eye on those monitors with Peterson,” I tell him. “We need to know where they’re going to be.”
“Ten seconds,” announces Phil.
I count ticks slowly in my head as I watch the digits silently slide off the corner of Lenox’s screen. Our success depends on how fast we’ll be able to do what we need to do.
“Five. Four,” says Phil, for everyone to hear. “Three. Two.”
The scintillating blue seems to get sucked into the vacuum, and the tense seconds begin.
We’re oriented so that the rough sphere of the asteroid is below us. A full squadron of cruisers is spread in the space above and around us, always a startling sight, no matter how much you expect them to be there. Five of the cruisers are in no order that I can identify. They’re scattered across space, each standing away from the base by five to twenty kilometers, all looking massive as hell.
“That one’s right in our path,” says Phil, winding up the tension as the sky starts to sparkle with red dots. Dots, not streaks, because the railgun rounds are coming right at us. You know, one of those things you learn from being shot at so often.
Lenox amps power through the drive array, and we accelerate.
The grav lens pulses brightly in front of us.
“The cruisers are off our port side,” shouts Peterson.
Shit!
“They just popped out of bubble,” she says.
“Incoming fire,” adds Brice, pointing at hundreds of pinprick lights running across Peterson’s screens. “They didn’t waste any time.”
“This is the shit,” I tell them, smiling through my adrenaline.
“Powering up defensive grav,” says Phil. “We don’t need all the power for acceleration, anyway.”
He's right. Even during the seven seconds in which we plan to accelerate toward our target, we can get moving too fast for our nukes to survive the impact. We have to govern our speed.
“Where do you want me to go?” asks Lenox, “That cruiser over the base is right in our path.”
“There’s no way around it,” says Phil. “We’ll have to break off. Come back another time.”
There's no time to debate this further, and there'll be no coming back for this one. I make the call. “Ram it.”
“What?” shouts Phil. “What about the nukes?”
“Same run as before,” I tell him. “Drop them on the way in.”
“All of them?” he asks.
“Use ‘em or lose ‘em,” says Brice, knowing that if we ram, we’ll lose every nuke attached to our hull and some, if not all, of the mounting pylons.
“Drop them all,” I reiterate.
The sky is bursting red with dots still targeting us accurately, and streaks heading for where we were, or where we’re headed.
The ship rings with the sounds of two hits. No major systems seem to be damaged, as we continue on course.
Everything is happening fast.
The cruiser in front of us is pulsing its grav field, positive and negative, twisting and creating waves, all in hopes of deflecting us and our bombs.
The base is coming up below us as volleys of half-ton slugs fired from railguns, built for pounding cruisers, are hurling past us, not hitting us, but blasting through our defensive grav field and jostling us off course.
“Nukes away!” shouts Phil.
“Max grav,” I tell Lenox, and she hesitates because the cruiser is looming in front of us.
Phil doesn’t flinch, though; he knows what’s coming and shunts all of our power into the grav lens.
Blue flashes bright.
Internal g strobes and bends as the sound of tearing metal screeches through the ship.
We come to a stop. Wind is howling outside the hull.
We’re alive.
Still a surprise, though we’ve rammed our share of ships.
We’re lodged in the dorsal spine of a cruiser, right above the reactors, if I’m guessing right. The atmosphere from inside the hangar bay is venting through the hole we’ve made in the hull.
“Time until detonation?” I ask.
“Not enough time to get away,” says Phil, guessing what I’m hoping, too. “Everybody hold on!”
The grav picture outside suddenly turns chaotic, and a shock rips through the ship, overpowering our compensating g field, killing internal power, and sending everyone sprawling.
Chapter 24
Chaos greets me as I try to pull my scrambled brain back into line to form coherent thoughts. Grav is
a mess. Nothing around me is stable. No direction is down. Light flashes and disappears. The sound; even that isn’t right. The tornado howl of a dying cruiser, a sound I’ve come to love, is weak and fading fast.
“Status?” I call into the darkness as I turn on my suit’s outer illumination.
Voices over the comm seem lost, not just Phil, everyone.
“Brice,” I call, as I turn to see him tying to get his feet beneath him, only he’s not on the floor, he’s on the ceiling. The field is reversed, and I guess through a series of groggy deductions that we’re under the influence of the cruiser’s g.
“I’m good,” says Brice, though he doesn’t seem much better than me.
“Go forward,” I tell him. “Check on Clark and his crew.”
He hops across the ceiling, and disappears into the hall.
Things are clearing up fast.
“Phil, Lenox, Silva, Peterson?” I ask.
“Fine,” Silva tells me, first to speak.
Phil is already trying to figure out what happened to our power. Lenox is working her controls, trying to get a response out of the ship.
Peterson seems dazed, and I reach out to shake her shoulder. “You okay?”
She nods, but she’s not sure.
“Get those guys ready at the assault doors,” I tell Brice. “We’re going to have to start shooting Trogs as soon as the escaping atmosphere is done blowing out.”
“Not there yet,” he replies.
“Phil?” I ask. “What’s wrong with our ship?”
“We were too close to a nuclear blast,” he tells me, perturbed that he has to explain it.
“What specifically is wrong?” I ask.
“I’m trying to figure that out,” he snaps. “Jesus Christ Almighty, dammit!”
I notice Nicky then, strapped into the seat beside Phil, looking every bit dead. I can still sense the presence of its mind generating weird Gray thought patterns, but I don’t sense much strength. “Is Nicky all right?”
Phil shakes his head. “Let me work. Find someone else to boss around.”
“Silva—”
“I can’t do anything here,” she says, unstrapping from her seat and deftly flipping to put her feet on the ceiling. “I’m going forward to help Brice.”
“Is Nicky okay?” I ask again.
“Goddammit!” Phil shouts, as tears spill from his eyes. “I don’t know! I don’t know!” He continues to struggle with the ship, doing maybe the most selfless thing I’ve ever seen. Nicky, the love of his life, in her and Phil’s weird inter-species way, might be dying, and he’s doing all he can to save the lives of the crew.
He’s a better man than I ever gave him credit for.
Better than me.
I unstrap from my seat and spring across the bridge. Without a thought as to our internal atmospheric situation, I unclip the retaining ring on my glove, slip my hand out and lay it on Nicky’s rubbery skin.
My suit’s internal air rushes past my wrist. My ship is leaking its atmosphere, too.
“Is it dead?” asks Peterson.
I shake my head, because I don’t know. “Try and get your machines rebooted.”
“It’s the grav switches,” Phil tells me, frantic-fast, as the internal lights come back on. “The grav. Something about the flux.”
I reach out with my mind and try to probe Nicky’s brain, looking for anything familiar, anything that’ll tell me she’s not dying. “You think when the nukes shifted so much mass so suddenly—?” I stop myself. I don’t know what the fuck I’m even talking about. Was it finally too much?
“The reactor’s coming back online,” says Lenox.
“The modifications,” says Phil, slipping into a dispossessed rhythm of words. “The mechanical and electrical switches… Underlying everything, there are still grav switches.”
Nicky jerks.
I resist the urge to pull my hand away. I push telepathic questions into its head, Are you okay? Are you alive? Can you move?
Nicky’s eyes shift.
Phil’s head swivels for a look. “Nicky?”
Nicky reaches out for him.
Phil reaches over and touches her hand. “I think she’s okay.”
“You sure?” I ask.
He nods through a flood of tears and blubbers his way through telling me the nuke blasts did something of a reboot on every grav switch on board.
“That means all the Grays on board the cruiser,” I speculate. “The ones on the bridge. They were stunned, too.”
Phil nods.
“And on the other ships?”
He shrugs and works feverishly on his panel.
“My system’s up,” says Peterson. “I can’t pick up anything in here, though.”
I slip my glove back on and lock it into place before I lose all my suit air. I jump back to my seat.
“Grav systems coming back online,” Phil announces over the comm.
“How soon will we have power to pull out of here?” I ask.
“Looks like ten minutes,” answers Lenox, eyes glued to her power output gauges. “The reactor needs to go through its entire startup procedure.”
“Is it damaged?” I ask.
“Can’t tell.”
I turn to Phil.
“I can’t, either. We’re going to have to hope our luck holds when we power up.”
“Brice,” I call over the comm. “How are things up there? Do you have the assault doors open yet?”
“A smidge,” he tells me. “Open just wide enough to shoot from. The cruiser is full of holes. Most of the atmosphere is gone. The Trogs are busy trying to save themselves.”
“Let me know if they organize for an attack.”
“ETA on our exit?” he asks.
“Ten minutes, is the guess. Reactor problems.”
“Great. I’m sure we have all day.”
“You know sarcasm doesn’t always carry over the comm, right?”
“Apparently, it does.”
Chapter 25
“I’ve done all I can do,” says Phil, as he turns to examine Nicky.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“All systems are online. Everything’s acting a little squirrely. Once the reactor is producing enough power for us to dislodge and bubble out, we can go.”
“So we’re just waiting on the reactor.”
“I just said that.”
“I’m just confirming.”
Phil’s eyes never leave Nicky’s. “I don't know what's with you lately, but you need to lighten up."
Lenox turns and puts a hand on my arm, as a way of telling me to shut up and let them have their minute.
And she’s right.
“Brice,” I call “if the Trogs aren’t attacking you yet, have the techs set a timer on one of those nukes for eleven minutes and slip it out the door. You know, a going-away present.”
Brice grumbles. “I thought you said we’d be ready to leave in ten.”
“Not now,” I look at my d-pad. “Maybe five.”
“Five? Are you positive?”
I turn to Lenox.
She nods. “Five. Maybe six or seven, but probably five.”
“Did you hear that?” I ask.
“So if anything goes wrong?” Brice isn’t pleased. “Then what? We nuke ourselves?”
I sigh. “You’re right. Set the timer for five minutes, but don’t start it until you roll it out the door just before we take off.”
“Five minutes is all we’ll need to get out of range?” asks Brice.
“Phil says all systems are a go,” I answer. “Mostly.”
“He said they were all squirrely, right?”
“They’ll work well enough to get us away from here,” I tell him. “Besides, if we can’t hit max grav and bubble, wouldn’t you rather this ship blows up behind us to cover our low-speed escape?"
“I’m going to set it for seven minutes.”
/>
"Do you want to be floating around out there in space, trying to get up to speed for seven minutes, getting pounded into metal shavings while we’re waiting for the nuke to detonate?”
“Five, then. Brice out.”
“Thank you, Brice.”
“You see?” he asks. “Right there, the sarcasm came through just fine.”
Chapter 26
Silva comes back on the bridge, just as our reactor timer is ticking down through the last minute.
“Strap in,” says Lenox. “I’m going to hit it hard as soon as I get a green light on the reactor.”
“Just a moment,” says Phil, his attention off of Nicky and back on his console.
“You ready to go over there, Peterson?” I ask.
“Ready,” she tells me.
“Silva,” I ask. “How were things up there?”
“The Trogs never came for us. They could have, but they didn’t. Like they couldn’t decide what to do.”
“I think the Grays on the bridge are still recovering,” says Phil.
“You sure about that?” I ask.
“I sense them,” says Phil. “It’s hard for Nicky right now. There’s no way to describe it well, except that maybe it’s like a really bad hangover. That’s what I’m sensing from the bridge.”
“Is Nicky going to recover?” I ask.
Phil nods, but he’s not certain.
I press him for more. “Can you sense anything from the other cruisers?”
“Maybe if we pass close by on the way out, I can— ”
“We’ll have to leave that little bit of science for another day,” I tell him. “Lenox, keep us as far away from those cruisers as you can.”
Phil looks back down at his panel. “We’re ready.”
“Brice,” I call, “ditch the nuke. We’re bailing out of here.”
“On it, boss.”
Before I can respond, Brice calls out, “Go! We’re a go!”
“Assault doors closed?” I ask
“Don’t wait for us,” he says. “Closing now.”
“Phil,” I say, “punch the grav lens and break us free. Lenox, goose it.”
Blue grav fields sizzle bright all around us as the Turd II lurches. Lenox jiggles the controls and pulses the drive array, and suddenly, we break free.