The Compromise

by Chelsea Gaither

  Starlight without atmosphere was cold. It stole more life than it lended. Beams from New Houston’s sun lanced through the USS Marel Sanders’s front ports and tinted the interior graveyard gray. The fire bled out of Adrienne Parker’s auburn hair. Her trembling hands now resembled a corpse’s.

  “Brace!” a voice screamed from the cockpit. Adrienne grabbed the arms of her crash couch. The Marel was a claustrophobic shoebox for supplies and personnel, and all fifty meters of it shook as enemy weapons fire grazed their rear. Electric bolts blasted through cockpit and tiny hold, playing over stacks of yellow medical boxes. The lights flickered. Adry’s heart sank. Only Overseer weapons burned out electrical systems while they made holes in things. It took all her willpower not to leap up and check her cargo, those precious yellow boxes stacked six deep around her.

  Beneath the lids sat four thousand glass vials in black foam nests. The enzyme inside degraded too quickly in plastic, and like most medicines it wasn’t DMS friendly. She’d packed the vials herself, twenty vials to each foam flat and ten flats to a box. Totes of standard antibiotics and vaccinations were netted to the bulkhead on the opposite wall, along with two rad-field generators for emergency bandage sterilizations. Sixty boxes of foodstuffs. Two hundred personal water filtration systems. Everything Digital Matter Storage couldn’t handle. All fine targets for smugglers aching for a buck, but not something that would attract an Overseer.

  No. It was after the vials. This ship carried the first widespread distribution of the Landry Enzyme. The game changer, world saver they’d all hoped it would be. If it worked as advertized, it could end the Overseers as a species. The aliens had to stop its spread.

  Bad luck for her and the USMC. Their job, after all, was to stop them.

  The invention of Jump Drive had allowed humanity to settle distant worlds. Over the last two hundred years the so-called Rim Worlds had grown from tiny colonies on distant stars to bustling centers of commerce. Most of them had broken free of their parent nations over a hundred years ago, though a few were still nominal members of their parent nations. The United States had fathered no less than four worlds. These were the reason the Space Force and Adry were here to begin with.

  The Overseers arrived just over fifty years ago; they hit the corporate colonies first and spread like some kind of disease. Planets with national backing survived a little longer. They had more resources, support from a stronger military. But it wasn’t enough. Of the US settled planets, Foster and New Greenland were cinders populated only by slaves. New Houston and Planet Gaga were hit every few weeks. Millions on millions were dead.

  And unless they were incredibly lucky, Marel Sanders, Adrienne, Captain Bob Harris and PFC Morgan were all about to join them.

   Teeth gritted, she rode out the next impact. Let them shoot. In the long run, it wouldn’t matter for the Overseers. They were doomed. The Enzyme was Bryan’s idea, his life’s work and epitaph. Finishing it was her revenge for their destroying him. If she died here, now, the SF would only spread the enzyme through the galaxy in her memory.

  But she still didn’t want to die in the next ten seconds.

  “How long has the Overseer been following us?” She faced the control chair. Captain  Bob was tall and blond. Distant starlight glared through his buzz cut. Pale ghost sweat poured down his brow.

   “No way to know.” Fingers moved cat quick over transport controls. The console design was bulk in olive drab. Nothing like the chrome-and-cream civility Adry was used to. But shoebox or not, Marel Sanders was designed for war. Bob couldn’t have gotten his answers half as fast in a Honda Sailor or Vacuro Sandman.

  He flicked through the radar screen controls until their follower was dead center. Bigger than the Marel, the alien vessel was streamlined for atmo combat, an arrowhead shape with a rounded aft. “It must have been coasting on atmospherics until we got here. Fang class, no shielding, no backup…Give me a shot, Morgan.”

  “No can do, sir. It’s in the hole.” 

  Harris cursed. The defense/offence, or def/op, hole was created by bad weapons placement. Oh, the United States Marine Corp equipped their transports with the best. The best was just designed for ground ops. Terrestrial design bias didn’t work in space war. And out on the Rim of explored space, most worlds couldn’t afford support craft designed for a three-D battleground.

  “We should have had cover when we left base,” Morgan said. “We’re flying with our drawers down.”

  “With Overseers gathering near New Houston, we’re lucky we got transport at all,” Harris said. “I just wish the bastards hadn’t figured out about the hole. Incoming!” He braced against the console. Morgan grabbed his seat straps. Adry wasn’t as lucky. When the enemy fire hit, she bounced off the bulkhead wall.  Bob swore. “Subspace drive is down; Jump drive is going on and off like it’s having a goddamn stroke. I need to route power out of the inertial compensators before—”

  Shunk.

  For one instant g-force wrapped around Adry’s insides, a giant hand squeezing her guts like a tube of standard-issue toothpaste. The old-fashioned kind with obnoxious mint. Then the compensators came back up and she could inhale again.

  “Goddamn it, we’re losing her. Morgan!” Bob flipped a panel off the rear control bay. “Start breaking procedures now, and do whatever you can to get that sucker off our ass before it gets another shot.”

  “Did we lose compensators?” She asked, breathlessly.

  “No.” Bobby pulled several burned components out of the hole. “Fast as we’re moving, if they had gone we’d be smears on the backdrop. Please sit down, Dr. Parker.”

  Morgan turned. “It’s got a lock, sir. I can’t shake it.”

  “Hell. Switch with me.” Bob grabbed the side of the chair, and Morgan half ran, half fell to the open circuit board.

  Adry dropped back into her crash seat. The boxes of Landry Enzyme stood around her like a yellow castle wall with netting motor. A shield. That had been Bryan’s goal. But it took losing Bryan and Holton Station for the Space Force to turn it from a chemical experiment to an actual thing. Now, if their mission worked, millions of lives would be saved.

  So please, God, let it work. Let it survive her.

  The ship rocked with another well placed blast. Sparks flew as the inertial compensators gave another hiccup, pressing bone against the crash chair’s cushioning factor. If you were moving when compensators were on the fritz, arms and legs could be ripped from sockets, fingers turned to powder, necks snapped, bones ground to dust. And even if you were sitting during a total loss, you might as well stand between your ship and an asteroid. G-force would turn you into tenderized mush.

  It was a race between the breaks, the compensators, and the alien fighter on their tail. So when Morgan began screaming, Adry had her safety straps half off before her brain started working.  “What’s wrong?” she shouted.

  “Thumb!” Morgan said.  “Nothing!” Clipped tones belied that last “nothing”. Figured. You could set a load of CF-29 in a soldier’s gut, and if they survived the explosion they’d just ask for a stapler and their gun back. She reached for the first aid kit.

  “Parker, get your ass in that chair and don’t leave it. That’s a direct order. Oh, goddamn it, sucker took out the Jump Drive.” Harris ran frantically through the Marel’s switches. Without compensators, they couldn’t use the subspace drive. G-force would be fatal. If they couldn’t Jump, they were dead in deep space.

  “Can you fix it?” She said.

  Morgan met her eyes, his own dark as caramelized honey and hopeless as a black hole. “I can try.” He looked a thousand years old.

  You might as well have said no. Hell. I didn’t sign up for this, Adry thought. But that was a lie.

  She had.