Solar Kill

by Charles Ingrid

  Jack bolted for the doorframe. He looked outside, to the barely lightening sky, and heard the rumble. He cursed, even as his heart took an awkward leap in his chest. The sky over the mines took on a violent, orange glow.

  “Holy Knights,” Storm muttered and froze, unable to look away.

  He was watching a planet burn.

  He heard the reentry rumble and knew that the warships were headed his way.

  Fumbling, he lunged back at the terminal and transmitted a message along the computer lines. Then he stopped. There was no way of knowing if anyone was there to receive his warning.

  Dull thunder spoke overhead. He had no time left. The very air crackled with the heat, the heat of the weaponry being unleashed on unsuspecting, undeserving Claron. He had one chance left. He stripped off his shirt.

  Jack pulled open the storage locker and jerked open the seams of the battle armor. He didn’t have time to think. The suit hummed faintly as he climbed into it and began the laborious process of sealing up.

  He attached only the contacts he had to for operation. He wouldn’t have time to fight back—no, all Jack wanted to do was to live. He had one chance to make it. His helmet snapped into place.

  The ceiling blew off the compound. Orange light flared in, wrapping around him like a maelstrom. The suit was baffled, but stayed upright. Jack paid no attention as he connected the last of the wires, and the holograph came on, whispering smoothly.

  He’d kept it well oiled and powered all these months, in spite of his fear of it. He still feared it, but he feared dying worse.

  The firestorm caught up the last of the compound, whipping it up from around him, and Jack stood in the clear. In the orange glow of the burn-off, the golden eye of the Star Gate had turned to an eerie blue. Jack ran toward it, loping easily, the power vault of the suit giving him the ability to move over the terrain even as it charred and buckled under him.

  He looked up, once, his sensors dulling the fire, and he caught sight of the tremendous warship cruising overhead, its reentry shields still glowing. He couldn’t identify it.

  The cannon mouth swung around. Jack ducked his head and put all his resources into a last leap. He flung his arms forward and jumped, diving headfirst into the blue curtain of the Star Gate.

  It wrapped around him, still dormant, hugged him, brought him to a stop. Jack rolled over and looked back out the Gate. Red and orange fire, in sheets, rippled across the verdant tracts of the Ataract forest—over all of Claron. He had only a second to ask himself why, when the energy backlash hit—and the Star Gate activated, blowing him through and beyond.

  Chapter 3

  There is always a kid in Basic who ignores the drill sarge when he says, “Don’t ask.” Always. It’s a universal law, like gravity. Even when you don’t really want to know the answer, there’s always some jerk to ask the question.

  “What if the drop tubes misfire and instead of going planetside, we get put out beyond the orbit?”

  Someone in the back row had snickered, saying quietly, “What if you put your ass in your helmet instead of your head?”

  But the D.I. had ignored all of them, his baggy brown eyes sweeping over them with contempt. “Don’t ask,” he answered. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah, but—what if,” the kid persisted. “I mean, your suit’s got air—it’s insulated and it can pressurize. You got communications, water—you could make it, couldn’t you? Until you got picked up? It’s battle armor, right, but it could double for a deepspace suit temporarily, right?”

  “You don’t wanna know,” the sarge repeated, wearily.

  But this kid that asks these questions, it’s also a universal law that he just doesn’t shut up until he gets his answer—or fifty laps.

  In Storm’s case, the kid in Basic got fifty laps. But as he looked out his face plate, doing a slow tumble, he thought … now I know, Sarge. And the answer is yes … your suit’ll hold. Not forever. Probably not until you get picked up and especially not if someone is hanging around to shoot holes in it, but yeah—the suit will hold.

  Probably longer than your mind will.

  And he did another slow roll through black velvet space, praying the tinting on the face plate would block out the starlight, saving his sight for another day. Beyond him, the golden eye of the Star Gate stared back, an unwinking deity which, after having punted him this far, was dormant once again.

  He didn’t even feel like calculating the time he might have left. The thought was too morbid and, Jack added to himself, he’d probably been on borrowed time since he waded into that pit of Thraks nearly twenty years ago. So much for the borrowed time theory. So what he did do was cautiously, supremely cautiously, for every wave of the suit’s limbs sent him veering in another direction, take the time to finish hooking himself up, weapons and all.

  His cameras scanned and he saw that he was drifting in open space, but that he might not necessarily drift for eternity—there was a planet within view and, in a few months, he might even drift close enough for its gravity to snag him and pull him down. It went without saying that Jack wouldn’t be alive to find out if he was right or not.

  He considered his com equipment, wondering if he should put out an SOS. It took little energy, was solar-powered, and up to optimum, so he kicked the chin lever that put out the transmission. Eerily, he couldn’t hear it, so he could only assume the suit broadcast what he was telling it to.

  Jack spent the rest of his time sweating, hearing things, and being angry. It was the anger that kept him sane … and so he fed it, because he didn’t like the aching fear of the suit, and he was worried that he was actually hearing what he thought he was. It was a low, scratchy mumbling, just beyond the range of his senses, and he didn’t know if he really heard anything or not, like a ghosted-transmission. Just a spidery, whispery kind of noise. It made no difference to him that the suit embraced him like a long-lost lover, that wearing it brought back a kind of easy familiarity, that it nestled him close and kept him alive.

  “Sarge, what happens if the Milots got to my suit, too, and put those—those parasites into it and even now I’m hatching them and they’ll consume me and I’ll be like Bilosky, dead, and then a lizard berserker, like you, Sarge?”

  “Ya don’t wanna know.”

  “But, Sarge—what if it’s true? What if it happens? What if it’s going to happen to me?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “But Sarge … I can feel something tickling the back of my neck!”

  “Fifty laps, kid, and then, if you still want to ask a question, ask why some jerk of a commander sent you dirtside to Milos, and then left you there to die? Ask that one.”

  “Ya don’t wanna know why, sergeant,” Jack said wearily. He licked his lips for the hundredth time and felt his stomach do an elegant zero-grav flip-flop as the suit rolled over again.

  “You don’t want to know the answer to that one.

  “No, but you do. Jack. And you’d better stay alive to ask it, this time. They shut you up with seventeen years of cold sleep and two years of hospitalization and rehab, but they ain’t shutting up this time. There’s nobody else left to ask the question this time. Jack my boy—and you’ve already done your fifty laps. And—hell! While you’re at it, ask them what happened to Claron!”

  His dazed voice echoed inside his plate, and he realized he was still suited up. How long now? How long had he been talking to himself. He shook. Carefully, he withdrew his right hand from his glove, the missing metacarpal bothered him with a ghost of sensation, and he wiped the trickling sweat on his face. Heat dissipation still a problem inside a suit. He grinned without humor. While he had his hand out, he checked the SOS beam. Still on. Had anybody heard him? Somebody had better hear him, because he wanted to live!

  The scratchy whispering had stopped. Had he only imagined it? How long had he imagined himself back in Basic? How long had he been tumbling out here?

  He spread out. Below him was a canopy of stars. To his
two o’clock, the glowing blue ball of a planet which just might snag him in—if he could afford to wait for months. He couldn’t. The suit wasn’t made for it, and neither was he. And even if he got close enough, who said the planetholders down below were equipped to pick up a reading on him, and dash out to save him?

  He slipped his hand back inside the glove and flexed the fingers. Jack decided to go back to talking to himself. After all, staying angry was as good as staying sane, until he came to the end.

  “Holy shit,” Tubs exclaimed, his fat fingers playing over the sensor keyboard of the Montreal. He’d been looking for trouble dirtside—they were strikebreakers after all, going in to bust up a planet, but he hadn’t expected to sense anything this far out. A mine, perhaps. He waved frantically for Short-Jump to attend him at the screen.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m tracking the god-damndest piece of space junk I’ve ever seen.”

  “A mine?”

  “I thought so at first, but don’t know now.”

  Short-Jump frowned and leaned in over Tubs’ shoulder. He was uglier than sin, so ugly it was hard to find a woman who’d look at him twice unless he got a short jump head start, hence his nickname. He wrinkled his spatulate nose. “Hell, that’s a suit. Probably deader’n last week’s soya rations.”

  “A scab maybe? Jettisoned out here as a warning?”

  “Could be. Strikers can be a tough lot.” Short-Jump grinned. He relished a good fight. Opinion aboard the Montreal used to be that he hoped for a battle injury to give him a free ride into cosmetic surgery. Tubs had given up on that theory long ago. Strikebusters like Short-Jump made enough money to pay for any kind of surgery. He had decided his shipmate just liked to bust heads. “I’ll go tell the captain.”

  Tubs looked back to his screen, his pop eyes still round with amazement. “Shit,” he muttered to himself excitedly, as he caught a better view. “That’s no deep suit—that’s battle armor!” He began to plot a fix for the tractor beams.

  The captain of the Montreal watched noncommittally as the tractor beam hung the armor in midair and the hangar doors sealed shut. The Flexalinks glistened like mother-of-pearl in the dingy recesses of the privateer’s hold. The suit hung quietly, with no sign of life in it. Captain Marciane scratched his thin thatch of brown and gray hair. He’d never seen battle armor quite like this before—one of the old, elite suits, was his best guess. At his side, Tubs finally babbled to a halt and scuffed his boots on the decking. Marciane realized his men waited for him to do something. He signaled for the transparent bulkhead to open. Still eying that suit cautiously, he stepped into the now pressurized hangar.

  “Now that’s one oyster I’d hate to shuck,” he murmured to himself.

  “Shall I go cut it down, captain?” Tubs blurted.

  “No. It might be armed.” He waved the tractor beam off. It unlocked, dumping the armor five feet to the deck abruptly. It landed with a BOOM that reverberated off the metal walls.

  Tubs yelped. “Holy god, captain! If it was armed—”

  Marciane silenced him. “Not armed that way. It may be armed against tampering.” He walked a little closer, tilting his head back. Whoever had worn the suit had been a tall man. “The men who used to wear these things …” his voice trailed off.

  “What’ll we do with it?” Short-Jump pushed back past the bulkhead into the hangar with them.

  “We leave it alone. After we get dirtside, we see what kind of salvage we get from it.” Having seen enough of a legend, Marciane turned his back on the armor.

  Tubs, a skittish man, but good in his field, gave an odd hop, and grabbed the captain’s forearm. “Captain! It moved. I swear it did.”

  Marciane turned around slowly on one heel. He could see no evidence that the suit had so much as twitched. He grabbed Tubs’ torch from his equipment belt and shone the beam into the darkened face plate, and saw nothing. The beam etched dark shadows into the half-empty hold. He lowered the torch. “You guys are all on edge—a fighting edge, and I like that, because that’s what I need to break a strike. We’ll be doing reentry shortly. Get back to your posts and get ready, because we’re going down burning. I want us to be too hot for th’ line to handle. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.” Tubs’ round, usually florid face paled, but he saluted.

  Short-Jump just gave him a flat smile from his ugly face. Marciane nodded briskly.

  He turned for one last look back at the bulkhead. “Besides,” he said to himself. “If there had been someone inside there—he’s either dead, or insane by now, anyhow.”

  A dry, rasping voice followed them hollowly. “Would you settle for thirsty?”

  The three men froze. Tubs was the first to turn around, but his legs had buckled and dumped him on the deck, where he quivered, his mouth working uselessly. Only his hand twitched into activity, pointing at the suit.

  Short-Jump kneed his companion. “Cut it out, for crissakes. It’s not a ghost, there’s someone in there. Captain, permission to aid the visitor?”

  “Granted.” Marciane wet his lips as the squat, ugly man waded forward, unafraid, to the death suit.

  Marciane watched the thirsty man gulp down a second glass of water, then motioned for the two of them to be left alone in the tiny galley.

  The Montreal was a refitted freighter, not a passenger ship, and carried few of the amenities. The captain captured a chair and wrapped himself around it, eying the sandy-haired young man with the world-weary eyes. He wore nondescript gray pants, with the many pockets empty sacks, and his torso was bare, except for the tiny crimp marks where contact sensors had been clipped. Those pinches of flesh smoothed out even as they talked.

  “What were you doing out there?”

  “Dying and praying, mostly.” The visitor dried his lips on the back of his hand, and Marciane saw the missing little finger, sliced off neatly at the edge.

  “Were you jettisoned? Marooned? Do you know anything about Washington Two?”

  The man’s head swiveled and he squinted slightly, to look at the tiny view-screen in the galley’s wall, as it previewed the upcoming planet. “So that’s the name of it. No, can’t say as I do.”

  The two men eyed each other. Marciane rubbed his chin abruptly. He had a feeling there was a lot more to the youth than showed—like the battle armor, for instance. He knew it couldn’t be Storm’s, but it was.

  “How long were you out there? Where did you come from?”

  “Let me have a look at your bulletin board, and I can give you a pretty good idea of how long I was drifting. As to where I came from … captain, I don’t want to hedge with you, right now. I’ve had a look at your setup. You don’t want to be telling me too much of your business, either.”

  Marciane reached out. His fingers drummed the tabletop. “I can’t have you sending messages through to Washington Two.”

  “That’s not my business—that’s yours.”

  “All right then. Come with me.” The Montreal captain was never so aware that, as his visitor shadowed him, the image of the battle armor shadowed him as well.

  Tubs’ round eyes opened wider as he saw the two men shouldering into the narrow bay of his work station. He craned his neck at them. “Yes, captain—what is it?”

  “Storm wants to have a look at our bulletin board. Pull it up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He brought up the subspace messages. There were a few holos of wanted men, some odd news items here and there, a few personals, and then the brief, startling news flash that the colony planet of Claron had been firestormed forty-eight hours ago, and all survivors evacuated.

  Storm’s face tightened. “That’s your answer, Captain. I’ve been out here forty-eight hours.”

  “You’re from Claron? Impossible. And who would do a thing like that? Claron’s only been open a few years. It’s worth next to nothing.”

  “I don’t know. I was rangering there when we got hit. I got to my suit, put it on, and made it to the Gate that op
ened Claron up. The energy backlash knocked me through.”

  Marciane made an irritated whistling noise through the gap in his front teeth. “Nobody destroys a planet for nothing.”

  “No,” said Storm softly. “And I intend to find out the real reason. Just set me down dirtside, and I’ll be on my way.”

  Tubs cleared his throat, said nothing to his captain’s warning glare, and turned back to his board, shutting down the bulletin board.

  Marciane looked to his visitor. “It’s going to be a little more complicated than that, son. We’re going to be doing a little destroying ourselves.”

  “Doing what?”

  “We’re strikebreakers.”

  Marciane invited Storm back to the galley, where he poured out something a little stronger than water. Faded blue eyes considered the whiskey label on the bottle.

  “This is good stuff.”

  “Tantalos prides itself on its breweries. I saved this for a rare occasion.” Marciane poured himself a drink and let it sit while his guest sipped at the mellow amber.

  Storm savored the drink, swallowed and then said, carefully, “Where I come from, people drink this kind of stuff over deals.”

  Marciane, for all his deepspace-toughened hide, flushed a little, then said, “Close.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “What do you think I want? Your suit, and your expertise in operating it. If it’s yours.”

  “It’s mine, all right. But I’m retired.”

  “So am I … into private enterprise. Now, down there, we have Washington Two, in the clutches of strikers who’ve shut down the spaceport and damn near everything else. I have people paying me who don’t want to be shut down. They don’t want to be union. They don’t want to starve while the unions and the Dominion negotiate over this parcel of space.”

  “So you’re going to kick ass.”

  “Damn right. I’ve been invited to the party.”

  “If the port’s closed down, how do you expect to get in? They’re going to know you’re coming and blow you right out of the sky.”