by M. R. Forbes
"We already did," the assassin replied. He shifted his weight and turned the handle of the bike, forcing it into a leaning skid that brought them out onto the edge of an overpass. Stretching below them were the hyperlanes, fully autonomous highways that carried ground vehicles from city to city at ultra-high speeds.
Mitchell felt his heart stop. He couldn't possibly...
The bike zipped forward, straight towards the divider that separated the above-ground city lanes from the hyperlanes below. A third disc came to his hand, and he threw it forward at the wall.
Mitchell closed his eyes. The AI would sense the debris and stop the traffic, but would it be fast enough to keep innocent people from being killed in a horrific crash? He didn't think so, and he didn't want to see his fear confirmed.
He heard the explosion, felt the heat of it. The whine of the bike's repulsers changed as it shot out into open air, twenty feet above solid mass. Then they were angling downward, dropping to the ground below at the same time he heard the din of the destruction at their backs. The repulsers scraped along the ground and the bike wobbled and almost fell out from beneath them before the rider straightened it up, and the automated systems caught the new vehicle. His rescuer hit a button, and a weak energy shield wrapped around them. It wouldn't be enough to stop a bullet or a laser, but it protected them from the elements as the lane system pulled them to speed.
Mitchell couldn't believe they had made it.
18
They exited the hyperlanes twenty minutes later, nearly eight hundred kilometers from York. The spot wasn't a designated exit, but a stretch of open air surrounded by fields. The assassin had done something to override the autonomous control of the bike and impressively steered them off the grid.
They had ridden through the fields, over an embankment that separated the hyperlanes from the land and into a massive growth of wheat. The farms on Liberty were corporate owned, thousands of acres across, tended by huge machines that towered over the crops and were surrounded by smaller drones that did more delicate work. Mitchell could see a couple of them off in the distance, but their own path was clear.
"They won't expect that we ditched ahead of an exit," his rescuer said. His voice sounded strained. "We should be safe."
"Where are we going?"
"There's an old hanger fifty klicks east of here. It's going to be torn down in the next couple of weeks, but it's there now. So is our ship."
"Our ship?"
"Yes. It isn't pretty, but it will get you off Liberty."
"Who are you?" Mitchell asked again.
"Not yet. When we reach the hanger."
They sped through the field in silence, the energy shield throwing up sparks of brighter light as the wheat bounced off. They reached a narrow road and raced along it, headed east. Mitchell sat behind the assassin, focusing on his breathing, trying to clear his head. What the hell was he doing on this bike? The man he had escaped with had killed an untold number of people getting them out of York, not to mention Corporal Kwon and four civilians two days earlier. And he had tried to kill him.
Or had he?
He had been shot in the side of the head. Grazed, right at the place where his neural implant was located. It had been damaged, shorted, and ever since then...
He put his hand to the side of his helmet and wondered at the implications. Had the whole assassination attempt been a ruse? Had the engineers who fixed the implant done something to it in the process? The implant was a direct link to his brain, and it had routines built in that could both monitor and assist in controlling nearly every basic function.
Could he trust his own mind?
The idea almost frightened him more than the thought of his impending public implosion when Tamara went live with her report of his fraud, when the Prime Minister called him out as a rapist, and when General Cornelius sang in tune to all of it and denied the military's involvement in the lie.
It all felt so surreal, and at the same time so oddly familiar. As if he had known this was going to happen.
Or, as if it had happened before.
What about Christine? He hoped she had managed to get through it with her own integrity intact. He still didn't get why she had helped him escape, or what was with that kiss. He also didn't get why his mind kept going back to that, of all things. The Major was physically attractive, sure, but there was so much about her he found grating. Why did he care that her lips tasted like honey? That her mouth was soft and warm and perfect.
He stopped himself. It was those kind of thoughts that got him into this mess to begin with. If he survived, if he managed to get off Liberty and make it through another day...
He was done with women.
The bike pulled off the road a few minutes later, making a beeline down a small path between overgrown brush until finally reaching the abandoned hanger. It was made of poly-alloy and ultralight molded concrete, a grayish-rose color that looked like a pimple in the middle of the green field that surrounded it. There was rust showing around the edges, and part of the back corner had either collapsed or been knocked down by vandals. The doors were closed, a magnetic lock bolted to it and keeping them that way.
His rescuer stopped the bike, and they both dismounted. Mitchell noticed the man was the same height as him, with a build that was probably very similar beneath his rider's padding. He reached up to take his helmet off.
"Don't," the other man said. "Inside." He walked up to the lock and put his palm against it. It deactivated, and he pulled the doors halfway open. Then he turned and headed back for the bike.
That was when Mitchell saw the blood.
"You were hit," he said.
It was thick on the man's chest, flowing steadily enough that it had stained the entire front of the padded suit he was wearing.
"Yes. Three times." He grabbed the handlebars and led the bike into the hanger. Mitchell followed behind him.
A single light went on when they entered. It was resting on a simple metal table in the corner, a bright diode that bathed the entire building in a daylight glow, including the ship the assassin had mentioned.
It was a starfighter. Not a Moray. Older. A dual-purpose configuration, intended for use in space and atmospheric missions. He stared at it, trying to remember the model. A pair of vectoring thrusters on the top and bottom and fixed gun mounts facing front, a long beak with seating for two in the cockpit, a wedge-shaped set of wings with small missile launchers extruding along them, and a flat tail that sported a pair of thrusters at the rear. Compared to the Moray, the thing was a brick.
"An S-17," the man said. "It's more agile than it looks."
He stood at the table, picking up a tool from it that Mitchell didn't recognize.
The S-17. That was it. The ship had to be sixty years old, at least.
"We need to disable your implant," his rescuer said.
"What?"
"The helmet you're wearing is jamming the signal, but as soon as you take it off the Alliance will know exactly where you are. You don't want to get caught, do you?"
Mitchell stared at the device.
"Trust me, you don't want to get caught." The man walked over to him. "Take off the helmet."
"Why don't you take off yours?"
"I don't have a fixed implant. The helmet is a surrogate. I need it to help me zoom in on your skull. Now lean down and let me do this. We don't have a lot of time."
Mitchell leaned down, and the man positioned himself next to his head.
"Now, take off the helmet. Quickly."
Mitchell grabbed the sides of the helmet and pulled it off. The moment he did he was greeted with a shrill tone that forced him to clench his jaw. Then he felt a sting and the warmth of his blood on his cheek. The tone vanished.
"Remote disable," the man said. "Nasty. It won't bother you again."
"I didn't know they could do that," Mitchell said.
"If they used it, it means they have no intent on bringing you back alive to tell anyone el
se about it."
He returned to the table, bending down and reaching under it. He came up holding a jumpsuit similar to his and a pair of boots.
"Lose the uniform, put this on."
Mitchell didn't question. He stripped out of the jacket, shirt, and pants, and then slipped on the jumpsuit and boots. They were both a perfect fit.
"You obviously know who I am, where to find me, what size clothes I wear," Mitchell said. "Isn't it time you told me what all of this is about?"
The man paused. Then he reached for his helmet.
"Yes. I think it is."
He lifted the helmet from his head.
Mitchell found himself looking back at... himself?
19
EARTH. October 21, 2055
"Smile team, you're about to make history."
Kathy smiled, careful not to squint her eyes when she did. It was hard enough to keep them open with the glare from the New Mexico sun. Rising up a kilometer behind her was a massive block of alloy and carbonate. It was spread almost two thousand meters long and two hundred meters tall across the plains, bolstered another twenty meters by the repulser sled that had been built beneath it.
A starship. An honest to god, made in the U.S.A starship.
And she was one of the pilots.
It was a dream she had known since she was able to recall dreaming about anything. A path she had been so sure of since the day that XENO-1 had plummeted from the sky. A future that had been so clear, so straight, that in the back of her mind she had somehow always known that this day would come. Somehow.
There were thousands of people lining the viewing area out on the plains, the dignitaries from nearly every nation in the world getting the front row seat to the event. The ship had been built here on the New Mexico flats, but the workers had arrived from dozens of countries to add their own skill and expertise to the design and construction. It truly was the work of an allied world, one that had overcome so many of the past squabbles over the last few years in exchange for a piece of this history.
And she was going up in it.
"One more."
The cameras didn't flash. Not in this light. There were so many of them.
A roar of engines, and a squadron of F-70s split the sky, trailing colored smoke as they cut overhead and away. Kathy looked up at them, watching them until they vanished into the skyline.
"Major Asher," Bonnie said. "Smile."
Kathy put her eyes straight again and smiled. Bonnie was the ship's navigator, an Irish woman with a round face and a great singing voice. The ship's computer would be handling the course for this test run, but she still needed to be there - just in case.
One hour to liftoff. She'd survived the two years of training, the black tie gala two nights ago, and a dozen speeches from a dozen heads of state today. Now she just wanted to get on board the Dove, to get up there and out among the stars. She wanted to get on with her mission, a mission that was more important than any of them may have realized.
"Time to go," Rear Admiral Yousefi said. He was the CO of this mission, and of the Dove - a position that had been more highly sought after than any that had ever come before. That he was a former member of the Federation, a former enemy, had been forgotten over the last few years. They were all in this together, now, regardless of country or branch of the military.
"Yes, sir," Kathy said, along with the others. They broke their photo formation and lined up behind him, facing the Dove, more affectionately known to them, and the media, as Goliath. The whole thing had been orchestrated ahead of time, every detail given the suitable pomp. A live band started playing over nearby loudspeakers, and the crowd began to cheer.
They weren't going to walk the kilometer to the ship. Instead, they walked a few hundred meters to a waiting transport, itself a sample of their newfound technology. It floated a few inches from the ground, the repulsers keeping it steady, the engine nearly silent. A platform telescoped out from the rear, allowing them to climb up onto it, remaining in the open air so that the bystanders could see them.
"I feel like a sheep in the summer," Bonnie said.
The transport accelerated steadily, lifting further into the air, six feet or more to show that it could. The repulser technology was almost as impressive as the FTL engines that had been reverse-engineered from what the scientists had discovered on XENO-1. She didn't understand much of the math, but she knew it had something to do with harnessing dark matter to fight the pull of gravity.
The crowd cheered louder. The transport moved steadily towards the Goliath, which rose higher and higher above them until it blocked the sun behind it. Kathy had been in it over a hundred times already, and even now she gasped at the sheer immensity of the ship, her mind boggled by the impressiveness of humanity's undertaking. That they had been able to work together to build such a thing was unbelievable.
Soon enough, there was nothing to see but the cold alloy sides of the ship. A hatch opened in front of them, leading into what was intended as a hanger. Assuming the FTL engine tests were successful, they would stock the ship with smaller ships that could spread out and search for E-type planets, other signs of life, or other valuable resources before returning to the Goliath. Their primitive application of the alien technology wasn't the only reason the ship was so large.
For now, the hanger was empty, except for the transport. It landed smoothly and they disembarked, heading out a side hatch and moving down an open corridor.
"Welcome home," Yousefi said.
Even after the FTL test, they were to be the first crew of the Dove, and would spend two years aboard her. Thankfully, however the engines worked they didn't affect relativity the way Einstein had predicted. Time in what they had decided to call hyperspace, in honor of the science fiction that had coined it, passed the same as time on Earth. They called the travel faster-than-light, but it wasn't technically accurate. Kathy didn't understand exactly how it worked, and she didn't really need to. FTL was good enough to describe that they were traveling maximal space in minimal time.
"Dove, we are at T-minus forty-five minutes," the voice said through the ship's comm system.
"Roger, Command," Yousefi said.
They continued to walk, reaching the central hub of the ship. It was a small, round space, with a lift in the center and four hatches that branched out around it, a setup that was repeated across all of the Goliath's decks. The crew paused for a moment while the lift hatch opened, and they all climbed in.
"I'm so excited, I think I'm going to pee in my flight suit," Bonnie said.
"I already did," Kathy joked.
"Let's save the urine for the recycling system," Yousefi said.
The lift carried them up to the center of the ship, a hatch on the opposite side sliding open and leading them to the control room. They walked towards it in anxious silence. It slid open as they neared, revealing a design that looked like it could have come from a sci-fi movie and had certainly been at least partially inspired by one. A central command station with a large captain's chair was positioned near the center while other stations circled it, each surrounded by its own set of semi-transparent screens.
It all seemed to float in the middle of the open New Mexico air. The entire room was a massive projection system, capturing data from hundreds of cameras mounted around the Goliath's hull and merging them together into a nearly seamless three hundred sixty-degree view of the ship's surroundings. It was impressive to see, and to experience, and every time Kathy entered the room she felt like she was taking a giant leap of faith that the floor was really there, and she wouldn't go tumbling down into the dirt below them.
The designers had originally wanted to install a bridge at the top of the Goliath, with a clear carbonate bubble through which they could observe space directly. They hadn't perfected the process yet, and efforts to produce something of that size had all ended in failure during stress testing. There were smaller viewports in different areas of the ship, but most were head-sized at best
. It was a little disappointing that they had to rely on mechanical eyes, but at least they were ultra-sharp mechanical eyes.
They took their seats, strapping themselves in. The ship was equipped with "repulser repulsers," an engineering joke term for artificial gravity, which was essentially the reverse polarity of the repulser technology. The straps were there just in case that tech failed.
"Nothing to do now but wait," Captain Pathi said. He was one of the five engineers on the crew, who were in charge of trying to fix anything that went wrong in-flight, including the artificial gravity.
Kathy stared out through the view feed. She was leaving her planet behind. She wished her parents were alive to see it.
The minutes seemed to pass so slowly. They all sat on the bridge together in tense silence. Maybe some were praying, maybe some were running through their own duties over and over in their mind. Kathy sat in silent contentment. This was what she was born to do.
"T-minus one minute," Command said.
That brought her back to attention. The computer was supposed handle the liftoff, but she had a stick in front of her, just in case something went wrong. If it did, it was her job to keep them going up and out, to get them into orbit. She put her hand on it. The feel of the familiar shape was comforting.
"Twenty seconds," Command said.
"All systems are operational," Pathi said. "Generators are purring like happy cats."
"Ten seconds."
"Nine."
"Eight."
Kathy took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, feeling the tingling in her nerves, the butterflies in her stomach.
"Four."
"Three."
"Two."
"One."
"Flipping the switch," Yousefi said. In truth, he pressed the enter key and initiated the launch sequence.
The ship began to rise.
"Not as impressive as the old way," Bonnie said with a nervous laugh.