by Rick Partlow
A hulking figure in a suit of Svalinn armor stepped through the hatchway and sprayed the bridge with KE rifle fire. I couldn’t see through the visor, but the 75th Ranger Regiment scroll on the shoulder was plainly visible and I knew it had to be Randy Quinn. He’d swapped out his drum from tungsten penetrators to anti-personnel incendiaries, and the burst of energy at the end of the barrel heated the bundle of sintered metal into a plasma as it left the weapon, the red and white splashes of burning metal looking very much like some sort of sci-fi movie energy weapon.
Tevynian crew shouted and dove away from their stations, seeking cover, and the burning metal tore into control panels and display screens, sending showers of sparks flying and acrid smoke drifting through the bridge. I sprinted past Quinn and nearly ran into the armored chest of Pops.
“This way!” he said, his voice blaring over the external speakers of his helmet.
He grabbed me by the arm and hauled me along beside him down a short corridor from the bridge into an enclosed alcove I recognized from our own cruisers and the Helta’s as well. It was the entrance for the bridge escape pod bank.
He yanked open an oval hatch and pushed me ahead of him into the pod. It was impossibly cramped, theoretically meant to hold six people but I didn’t know how Pops and Quinn were going to manage to squeeze into it…and that was before I noticed Colonel Tygart already strapped into one of the seats. I tumbled forward and nearly slammed my head into the control console in the center of the lifeboat, unable to use my hands to stop my fall. I managed to get a foot beneath me and shoved myself sideways into one of the acceleration couches beside Tygart.
The XO was still unconscious inside his spacesuit, but I didn’t know if that was from his initial concussion or the treatment they’d given him in the sickbay.
“Where the hell did you guys come from?” I asked, watching with horrified fascination as Pops contorted through the narrow hatchway.
“When the ship got hit the first time,” Pops told me, grunting with effort as he pulled himself inside, then turned and offered a hand to Quinn, “me and the kid took Tygart and beat feet for the hangar bay. We figured we’d see if there was a shuttle in there that we could all use to evac the ship if things got too bad. We didn’t find a shuttle, but we did find some zero-g maneuvering packs. And when the enemy ship came close enough to send a boarding pod out, we snuck in the other way.”
Quinn caught part of his backpack on the corner of the hatch and yelled in frustration, grabbing a handhold inside the pod and yanking himself through, landing on his back. Pops lunged past him, ripping his SIG from its chest holster and firing off a full magazine at something out in the corridor before he pulled the door shut and latched it.
“Brace yourself,” he warned me, smacking a button in the center of the control panel. “This is gonna get rough.”
He wasn’t lying. The bridge was deep in the center of the ship, which meant that the escape pod had to get itself through the tunnel, past the hull and away from the presumably exploding ship, and do it fast. That was accomplished by quick-burnout solid-fuel boosters and I’d heard the acceleration from an ejection rated at around nine gees.
Mercifully, I blacked out.
***
“I think I turned on this thing’s emergency beacon,” Pop mused, staring at the control panel, shaking his head, “but I ain’t sure.”
He pushed himself away and floated back to one of the acceleration couches, catching a restraint strap and using it to anchor himself. He and Quinn had both taken off their armor, strapping the suits down in their own couches, where they sat waiting patiently as if they were about to join in the conversation. Thankfully, Quinn had managed to get the restraints off my wrists first.
Not that there was anything I could do with my hands other than twiddle my thumbs.
“Do you think the ship jumped to hyperspace?” Quinn wondered, face pressed against the pod’s single viewport. You couldn’t even see the stars through it because of the interior lights, but he hadn’t moved from the port since he’d gotten out of his armor nearly two hours before. “Or did the Alliance get them?”
“I think,” I told him, “that if the ship had been taken out, we were close enough that we’d have gotten fried right along with her.”
Which meant Cartimandua was still alive somewhere out there, and would have an even bigger hard-on for me. Not that I cared. About anything.
“We’ll be okay,” Pops insisted, mostly for Quinn’s benefit, I thought. “Someone will see us floating out here eventually, whether I got the signal activated or not. We’ll be back home in no time.”
“Home,” I mumbled. “Where the hell is that?”
“Your home’s with us, Andy,” Pops told me. “With the team.”
I rubbed my eyes, pretending to be tired but mostly trying to hide the tears from him because they wouldn’t be held back any longer.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I told him. “I’m going back to Vegas, to my house, going back to being a hack science fiction writer with a shitty TV show. I did my fucking part. Someone else can carry the weight now.”
“She wouldn’t have wanted you to give up.”
My head snapped up and I glared at Pops, something of the same red haze descending that had hit me on the Tevynian ship.
“I guess we’ll never know what she would have wanted, will we?” My grip on the edge of the acceleration couch tightened, my knuckles going white. I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself to relax, pushed the rage back beneath the overpowering weight of despair.
“I’m seeing something out here,” Quinn said, pressing his face even closer to the port. “There’s something moving…I’m seeing something glowing. Might be maneuvering thrusters.”
Pops pushed across the pod and nudged the kid out of the way, trying to get a look, angling this way and that, grunting in obvious frustration.
“You fucking with me, kid?” he demanded. “I don’t see a damned thing.”
The life pod shuddered. My grip tightened against the side of my acceleration couch to keep from floating off it and I looked upward at the docking ring set in the nose of the little boat. Something banged against it, then metal screeched, grinding against metal. Pops pulled his SIG from the holster on the chest plate of his armor and I looked at him askance.
“It’s not the Tevynians,” I told him.
“No,” he agreed, “but it could still be the Chinese or the Russians.”
“And if you’re pointing a gun at whoever comes through that hatch,” I pointed out, “their first response will be to shoot us and cut us loose. Put it away.”
He scowled at me but did as he was told. I settled back and waited, finding it was too much effort even to stare at the airlock. More grinding and rattling shook us and finally, a gentle hiss of air as pressures equalized and my ears popped. The airlock hatch swung outward and a blue Space Force pressure suit appeared in the gap, a SIG 9mm shoved ahead of it, the muzzle swinging back and forth to cover all four of us.
“Don’t move.” The voice was young and male and nervous. Then the command repeated again in Tevynian.
Pops glared at him, gesturing at his teak-brown skin.
“Do I look like a fucking Tevynian to you?” he demanded.
The space-suited figure pushed up the visor of his helmet. He was even younger than he sounded, maybe nineteen, his eyes wide and his mouth in an “O.” Then his expression firmed up and the muzzle of the SIG ceased to waver.
“I don’t know if all Tevynians are white,” he reasoned. “They might just not have had any African…umm, African-Tevynians on their crews so far. All I know is this escape pod has Tevynian markings and the automated beacon we followed here in the shuttle was on a Tevynian frequency. Now you guys are going to need to turn around and put your hands behind your heads….”
A bare hand grabbed the kid by the shoulder and he looked back into the airlock of the shuttle.
“It’s okay, Technician, they’r
e Americans.” Julie Nieves’ grin appeared over the technician’s shoulder. “I’ll vouch for them.”
I didn’t speak, didn’t move, didn’t breathe. I knew it had to be a hallucination, maybe brought upon by the concussion or the static shock that had knocked me unconscious back on the Bravo, and I was waiting for her visage to disappear, to morph into a stranger’s face.
It didn’t. She pushed the young enlisted man out of the way and pulled herself through the lock and then she was in my arms and she couldn’t be real but she was and I was kissing her and tasting the salt of tears, unsure whether they were hers or mine. And when I could finally speak, I only said one word.
“How?”
“How what?” she asked, teasing, smiling through her own gentle sobbing. “How did manage to find someone as awesome as me? How have I not kicked you to the curb yet?”
“That, too,” I admitted, laughing perhaps a little hysterically. “How did you survive? I saw your ship explode….”
“What? Did you think your ship was the only one with escape pods?” The words were sarcastic, but her expression sobered immediately and I think she would have sagged against me if there had been gravity. “The implosion took out engineering. Barnwell and Hayden were in there. They never had a chance. The bridge was cracked right down the middle and three of the four escape pods were damaged. The reason I’m not still wearing my space suit is that it was half-melted and the rescue crew had to cut if off me.” I hadn’t noticed until then the bandages wrapped around her forearms, another on her lower leg, her fatigue pants torn away from it. She shivered in my arms. “It was a damn close thing, Andy. Closer than I ever want to see again.”
I took her face between my hands and rested my forehead against hers, the two of us floating together in nothingness for just a moment.
“I hate to interrupt,” Pops said, clearing his throat, “but I’d really like to get Colonel Tygart into the shuttle while they can still do some good for him.”
“Come on,” Julie urged me, pushing me ahead of her into the waiting grasp of the Space Force technician. “General Olivera is waiting for us on the Jambo. And I understand he has some company.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Blood brother,” Anu Neeme Klas said, his hand stuck out awkwardly for a shake. “I greet you in the human manner.”
“That is the greeting of a friend,” I told him, pulling the big wolf-man into a hug. “This is the manner in which we greet our brothers.”
The whole bridge crew and assembled aliens were all staring at us and I didn’t care. God bless the big, hairy asshole, he’d saved us all. Anu patted my shoulder stiffly and awkwardly and I let go after a moment, not wanting to cause an interstellar incident. I was just glad I’d picked up a comm unit and earbud before coming up to the bridge. Julie had let me know I might need one.
“Thank you for convincing the others to come,” I told Anu Neeme Klas. “We wouldn’t have lived through this without your help.” I turned to the other Alliance representatives gathered on the bridge of the Jambo, Vironian and Chamblisi and Helta, and nodded my gratitude. “Without all of your help.”
“I am saddened to learn of the death of Captain Joon-Pah,” the Helta officer said. I couldn’t remember his name and didn’t know if the octopus and the lizard-man were the same ambassadors who we’d met on the Skrith homeworld or totally different people.
“Joon-Pah gave up his life to save our world,” Michael Olivera declared, back to his normal, self-consciously-dramatic senior officer self now that the battle was over. “He will not be forgotten. Our nation, our coalition and our entire world will honor him among our own heroes and legends.”
Olivera didn’t look any the worse for wear, but that was more a function of how deeply the bridge was buried than how much of a beating the Jambo had taken. I’d seen her on the way in with the search and rescue shuttle and the old girl had gone ten rounds with the heavyweight champion. Her impulse gun mount was gone, ripped away, and huge, black gouges had been burned into her sides where the drive fields had been overloaded locally by enemy particle cannons. Just a few more minutes, and she would have shared the fate of the Delia Strawbridge and been lost with all hands.
Roberto Garcia had reappeared from the self-imposed exile of his compartment once the bullets stopped flying and he moved in to glad hand the Alliance representatives, which wasn’t easy with the Chamblisi, who didn’t have hands. I left him to it, drawing Anu Neeme Klas away from the others into a huddle with me, Julie and Olivera.
“Tell me honestly, brother,” I said, “how did you do it? How did you change their minds?”
“It was not I alone,” he said, hand going to his chest. “I went to my government and pled your case and they agreed to send what forces we had independent of the Alliance. The Helta had already committed to your cause, and once both of us decided to support you, the Chamblisi were forced to agree, because the Alliance would have disintegrated otherwise.” He whoofed, which the translator informed me was the equivalent of a laugh. “The ugly bastards aren’t happy about it, but there’s little they can do, particularly now that the Tevynians have been defeated.” Anu bared his teeth in savage joy. “This is two clear defeats for the enemy in just months, two more victories than we have had in ten years. Even the Chamblisi cannot gainsay this.” His gaze flickered to the other representatives, who were following Garcia off the bridge. “Your pardon, my brother, but I must stay with the others, lest they be tempted to renege on agreements made in the spirit of desperate haste now that the battle is over.”
I watched him go, shaking my head in disbelief.
“And all because I killed a fucking elk with a spear,” I mused. “Shit, now that he’s here, I should take him to Alaska and try to get a moose.”
“I should have you busted back to lieutenant,” Olivera growled, no amusement on his face. “Hell, I should bust you both down to Space Force Technician First class. You were both supposed to take those ships and leave, get them out of the system and keep them viable for us in case we needed them in the future. If the damned Alliance hadn’t shown up, we’d have wound up with no starships at all.”
“Mike,” I said to him, earning a raised eyebrow, “if the Alliance hadn’t shown up, there wouldn’t have been any future to save them for.” I chuckled. “Besides, once Tygart got wounded and the rest of the crew was dead, I don’t even think I could have found another star system to run to. I was stuck with that damned Virtual Assistant system you hate so much.”
“Sir,” Julie asked, “how did things go downstairs? It seemed pretty bad last we heard.”
Downstairs was Earth. It was interesting how quickly we’d developed our own lingo after just a couple years in space. I wasn’t sure I was at home enough in space to refer to Earth quite that casually yet.
“It was pretty bad, Colonel,” he confirmed, the ramrod stiffness going out of his back, his shoulders sagging. “Casualties ran into the tens of thousands, and a shitload of those were civilians. But once you took the ships out of drydock, things died down. The entire attack downstairs was a distraction to keep our eyes off the ships.”
“And let me guess,” I said, lip curling in a cynical snarl, “the Russian and Chinese governments are claiming it was rogue elements and hardliners and they condemn the violence and pledge to apprehend and prosecute everyone involved.”
“It sounds like you wrote the press release for them.” The muscles in Olivera’s jaw clenched tight. “I’ll lay you even odds the bastards get away with it, too. Popov and Chairman Xiang are smart enough to know when the fight’s over and it’s time to just take what they can get. And President Crenshaw is pragmatic enough to act like he believes them in exchange for whatever he can squeeze out of them in private.”
“You don’t approve?” Julie said. Her arm was hooked through mine and she hadn’t taken more than a few steps from me since she’d joined me in the shuttle. And I was okay with that.
“It galls me,” Olivera a
dmitted. “I don’t know if I could keep my mouth shut in public, which is probably why I’ll never be president.”
“Never say never,” I cautioned him. “You’re a war hero, and you might live a long time.” I shrugged, thinking of Dani Brooks. “Maybe. If you get out of this fucking business.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?” Olivera asked, eyes sharpening as if he could see into my thoughts. “Get out of this business?”
“What I’m going to do,” I said, slipping an arm around Julie and leaning on her for support, “is make a lot of next-of-kin visits, attend a lot of funerals and a lot of posthumous medal ceremonies.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and squeezed my eyes shut for a second before I could go on, forcing cheerfulness into my voice. “Then I’m going to take leave and get married.” I looked a question at Julie. “You wanna have a ceremony or just let Elvis marry us in one of those Vegas wedding chapels?”
“As tempting as that sounds,” she said, tilting an eyebrow at me, “I’d like to invite my folks. And my daughter.”
“Then you’re certainly invited as well, General Olivera. And after the honeymoon, which will be just as long as I can strongarm the President, who owes me one, into allowing, and as luxurious as my royalty checks can cover, then, and only then, will I even try to decide what the hell I’m going to do next.”
“We,” Julie reminded me, squeezing my bicep.
“What the hell we are going to do next,” I corrected myself.
“Congratulations,” he said, but his eyes narrowed as if he wasn’t buying it. “But Julie, you can’t tell me you’re ready to give up serving on a starship for the domestic life.”
“Mike,” she told him, laughing, “I have lost count of how many times in the last two years I’ve almost died. What I’m ready for is a Goddamned rest.”
***