by Alan, Craig
Gabriel’s guns twisted in their mounts and fired, and streams of nine millimeter slugs the size of marbles spat from their barrels. Two missiles took a bad angle and missed completely, and crossed paths behind her. Their wakes burned an enormous red X on the holo. They had absolutely no chance of reacquiring, and self-destructed harmlessly. A second pair of missiles straight ahead went to hard burn and sprinted for her. The guns tore them apart more than one hundred kilometers out, and by the time Gabriel sailed through the shrapnel it had scattered like a summer rain. A few fragments scraped the hull, and then she was clear.
“Ballista?”
“Thirty seconds,” Vijay said.
The final pair swung in abaft to pursue, and Gabriel fired behind her back. The missiles swayed their rocket nozzles from side to side to evade, but the closing speed was nearly one hundred kilometers per second, and bullets no bigger than pistol rounds sliced them to pieces. Elena watched twin holographic explosions flare at the center of the bridge. The projectors had been overwhelmed with weapons fire from every direction, and twisted and zoomed crazily to catch it all.
Elena felt a tremor in the air, like the beat of a bass drum.
“Hit!” Hassoun said. “Multiple impacts, hull intact, no breach.”
The outsider shells beating on the fuselage had struck as hard as their mass in dynamite, and had cut no deeper than the sheath of titanium muscle beneath Gabriel’s carbon skin. Most of the drones were now behind her, and the breakneck speed which had been so lethal a few moments before worked in Gabriel’s favor once again as the cannon shots glanced off the hull. Elena watched the guns track the targets that Vijay selected. Another missile died, then a second. The fire trailed off as the drones fell further and further behind.
“We’ve crossed the border,” Demyan said.
Alone of the bridge crew, he had yet to raise his voice. He activated the avram, and the ship seemed to shudder again, just once. Elena knew that she had imagined it. Gabriel slid invisibly to starboard, and shifted into a new orbit, pushing back against the embrace of Jupiter’s gravity as hard as she could. There was no telltale rocket burn, no wake to follow. Soon her trail would be entirely cold.
The final drone fired and missed, just a few hundred kilometers ahead. Its sensors told it that Gabriel was still on course, not burning her rockets or thrusters, yet her position changed every time it took a shot.
“Ballista ready.”
Vijay didn’t wait for the order. He fired, and the shell obliterated the drone and smeared a trail of hot vapor across space. Gabriel overtook the remains a few moments later and burst through them like a cloud.
“We’re clear,” Demyan said.
“Situation?”
“Eleven contacts remain, Captain,” Vijay said. “Closest distance, five hundred kilometers and climbing.”
“Damage report.”
“No breaches, hull is intact,” Hassoun said. “No casualties, all systems operational.”
Gabriel was already nearly a thousand kilometers inside the border, and even at full burn it would be almost physically impossible for the drones at the border catch her. She expected a second line of defense, and a third, but there was too much space in between the planet and its libration point to guard it all. It would take a dark miracle for the outsiders to find her now. Elena Gonzales Estrella was the first human being to win a victory over the outsiders since Captain Muller had triumphed at the Battle of the Kirkwood Gap, and she had done it on their doorstep.
“We’re here,” Elena said. “Finally.”
There came one of those moments where everyone waited for someone else to applaud first, and so no one did at all. Gabriel had surpassed the Solstice, and avenged the Archangel. She had given her planet a victory that it could rally around, and now she was hugging the shores of uncharted territory. They would become the first human beings to orbit Jupiter. In a better world this would have been a moment made for explorers, scientists, or even diplomats. But the outsiders had killed the last explorers that the Earth had sent.
They were out there now, waiting in the darkness, and they knew she was coming. But Elena wasn’t afraid anymore. She had come to make the monsters fear her.
Judgment Horn
Six months earlier
Elena awoke and hung in the air. It was her habit to swing her legs out of bed almost before her eyes had opened, but today she lingered to savor the morning. The ship had been pressurized only the day before, and while the rest of her crew had preferred to remain in port for the evening, Elena had spent the night alone with Gabriel. She experienced none of the gauzy surprise that came with waking in a strange bed. To Elena, the stateroom already felt like home.
It hardly deserved such a grand title. Her combination cabin and office was a cylinder of nearly forty cubic meters, nearly twice as wide as it was deep, every inch illuminated by glowtubes that lined the rounded walls. Elena reached up to unzip the hammock that she had strung between them, and spilled from her cocoon. She unfolded the head from the rear wall, next to the open mouth of the sleeping tube that she never intended to use.
When she had finished, Elena filled two absorbent towels with water from a blue nozzle. She squeezed one in both hands, and let a tide of water climb out and spill over them up to her wrists. She took a moment to savor the cold touch of the water on her skin like, liquid gloves, before she sponged it back up.
Elena stuffed the used towel into the dryer and sealed it. Then she pressed the second to her face, eyes closed and mouth shut to let the water cling to her like a mask. She parted her lips to sip some, and blindly reached for her tube of toothwash and drew a mouthful to gargle. She carefully wiped her face and neck dry with the towel, then opened her mouth wide and exhaled. A ghostly white orb bubbled from her mouth, streaked with hints of toothwash, and tumbled slowly through the air. Elena watched it ripple for a moment, the sucked it down with the vacuum hose.
Routine finished, she drifted up to one of the storage lockers that circled the round walls high above her head. Her stateroom was a designated emergency shelter, and was generously supplied with food, water, and other supplies. She opened her personal locker, and dressed in a clean blue jumpsuit, standard duty wear in port. Her civilian clothes were tucked away in a cargo crate somewhere on the station.
Elena sank back down to the rear wall and her desk, and landed cleanly in her chair, next to the sleeping tube. Elena pressed one thumb to the ID plate to activate the computer, wrapped her bracelet around her arm, and began her day. Her executive officer would arrive at precisely 0800 hours, when the ship’s bell rang in the first shift.
Her door chimed.
“Permission to enter, Chief Officer.”
“Get in here,” Elena said.
Second Officer Vijay Nishtha entered. Elena had met him only two years before, when they had been the first to arrive at Glenn Station. In the months since she had spoken more to him than to any other three people in her life combined, and together they had borne Gabriel in this womb high above the Earth. She could barely remember what the days had been like before him.
“Subhaprabhata, Chief.”
“Buenos dias, Vijay. Old business?”
“The protocol is ready,” Vijay said. “Civil Affairs approved it overnight, you need only sign.”
“Protocol?” she asked, and Vijay laughed.
“You just won me Marco’s next paycheck,” he said. “I knew that you would forget.”
He unwrapped his bracelet from his wrist, and snapped it into shape as a hard, flat pad the size of a book, which he handed to her. She glanced at it quickly and saw the crew roster, each name followed by that of their home country, and a number.
“The election.”
She scrolled quickly through the procedures and safeguards that Vijay had set up to allow the men and women of Gabriel to cast and transmit their votes. There we
re over six billion human beings in the solar system, and over four billion were citizens of the Global Union. If the estimates were correct, about three billion of those would go to the polls next week to choose the new Global Assembly, including those on active duty with the Space Agency. Vijay had set up dozens of ballots, across the entire world—no two members of the crew were from the same country, let alone the same district. And as usual with his work, Elena saw nothing that needed to be fixed.
“I assume that you rigged this?”
“Yes, Chief,” Vijay said. “The crew of Gabriel will cast forty five ballots for one Vijay Nishtha.”
“You know I don’t vote.”
“Beg pardon,” Vijay said. “Forty four.”
Elena pressed her thumb to the pad, then signed the screen and handed it back.
“Making it unanimous would raise suspicion, anyway. Que otra cosa?”
Vijay moved onto the next item of the list. It was all routine, and fairly mundane. Gabriel was practically finished and required only the finishing touches, and today’s shift consisted of nothing more than a few diagnostic checks and dry runs.
“Is that all the business for today?” she asked after approving her dozenth work order of the morning.
“I believe so,” Vijay said. He wrapped the pad around his forearm once more. “Dresden is on schedule to dock at 1200. We should have all Gabriel’s cargo offloaded within the hour.”
“Including our new tactical officer?”
“I imagine we shall do that first,” Vijay said
“Bueno. We’ll finally have a full complement.”
“It was an interesting choice, I thought.”
“Thank you,” Elena said.
“What with the security risk, and all.”
Elena sighed.
“He has the same clearance you do, Vijay.”
“Only because we share a rank.”
“A rank he earned with fifteen years of loyal service.”
“It is the patient viper that you must fear the most.”
“‘The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken,’” Elena said.
“Beg pardon, Chief?”
“Es no importa. But combat experience is, and right now the only member of the crew who’s been in battle is our damn doctor. I thought we should have a tactical officer who knows how to fight.”
“All due respect, there are many officers who can fight.”
“I know, I’ve got one who won’t stop.”
“And if it’s combat veterans you want,” Vijay said, “I can name half a dozen good men and women who have it, and glowing fitness reports in the bargain.”
“But none of them served aboard an Archangel.”
Vijay waited for a moment before speaking.
“No, I do not believe they have.”
“Forty four men and women have ever seen the inside of one of these ships,” Elena said. “Now they all work for me. And if you’re going to accuse one of my crew of disloyalty, you’d better have a damn good reason.”
Vijay bowed his head briefly.
“I do not accuse, and I apologize for that impression. But this is indeed an Archangel. I thought it behooves us to have higher standards.”
Elena was quiet for a moment.
“You can’t choose your birthplace any more than you can your family. When Dresden arrives at Glenn, please send him directly to me, and supervise the rest of the offloading. I’ll take it from there.”
Vijay nodded and turned to leave. He opened the interlock door, and spoke once more.
“Forty three.”
“Que?”
“Forty three votes, not forty four,” Vijay said. “Mr. Okoye is not a Global citizen.”
Elena said nothing, and after a moment he left her alone.
The inspection tour was Elena’s favorite part of the job.
She began at the very rear of the ship and received a personal report from the chief engineer, Aamani Gupta, as they weaved among the thick forest of ducts and girders that was the engine room. White vapor trails boiled from the steam pipes and twisted into the vents, and Elena’s vision fogged with each breath. The massive cryogenic tanks which housed the liquid hydrogen for the four fuel cells were so cold that the entire room had nearly frozen. But the power planet itself, barricaded next to the engines, burned flames that could melt aluminum.
Elena had the equivalent of master’s degrees in engineering and astronomy, but Gupta held an actual doctorate in applied physics, and she generally allowed her rocket scientists to run their own shop as they saw fit. If the chief engineer said that the main engines would be ready to go in a week, it would be so. Elena shook hands with Gupta and left her behind to her domain of ice and fire, and backed out into the interlock.
She stopped at the next compartment, undogged the hatch, and pulled herself inside. Sweat popped from her pores almost immediately. Almost every centimeter of the hydroponic garden was covered in green leafy plants or blue algae tanks, and the air was hot, wet, and thick. Dozens of consumable stores had been squirreled away throughout the ship inside the outer hull, but the crew could survive for weeks on the water, oxygen, and food produced within, if necessary. The garden was entirely automated, but at Elena’s insistence, everyone onboard Gabriel was now an amateur botanist.
Next she came to the main recycling center, better known as the honey pot, where the sewage was strained and sterilized. The intake pipes here mercifully opaque, and the filters thrummed beneath her touch. Beyond those was the distillery furnace which boiled the purified water to steam and allowed it to collect in a separate vat. Most of the solid waste would be compost for the garden, while over ninety percent of the liquid would be reclaimed and cycled back into the water tanks for reuse. This was a detail that was rarely portrayed in the media.
Elena moved onto the habitat section. From aft to fore ran the junior quarters and mess, followed by the wardroom and cabins for the senior staff. Unlike most of the crew, who bunked in their sleeping tubes four to a room, department heads—the executive and tactical officers, boatswain, doctor, chief steward, and chief engineer—were entitled to single accommodations, and their own dining room. Elena passed these by without a glance, as it was not her place to intrude upon their privacy, and detoured around the gymnasium and medical office—fiefdoms under the rule of Dr. Golus.
She passed by the bridge as well, with its single duty officer inside, and made her way to the next compartment, at Gabriel’s exact center of gravity. Elena punched in an access code, and allowed the computers to read her thumbprint and retina. The control panel turned a warm amber, but the hatch remained shut as the magnetic scanner searched her for the slightest hint of ferrous metal. Then the panel shone green, and the door slid open.
Elena saw that the avram chamber was deserted, as it nearly always was. The device itself was fifty times as large and far more sophisticated than the one that Moishe Avramovich had first assembled at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, but still recognizable as its descendant. The rings of magnetic coil at its core hummed gently, looped around, through, and inside each other like the arms of an astrolabe. When the avram spun up these wheels within wheels would rotate hypnotically, and when it fired they would scream like souls in hell. And Gabriel would take flight.
She drifted from the center of the chamber to its edge. Arranged around the avram were twelve cylinders, each about as tall as she was, each lined with a thin coating of soft gray lead. She unscrewed the top of the cylinder, and a sudden beam of red light shot out and pierced the chamber.
Elena set the top aside, and tapped gently a few times at her bracelet before she found the function she wanted. She shielded the opening with her hand, and peered inside between her splayed fingers. A steady ticking sound, like t
hat of a fast clock, emanated from the Geiger counter in her bracelet.
Inside the cylinder smoldered a bright round ingot of orange metal. It produced no flame, but if Elena had palmed it she would have awoken the next morning with her hand red and blistered beneath her glove. There were one hundred such nests scattered throughout the ship. Each egg burned with the constant luster of its own decay, and flooded its bottle with charged particles. Batteries such as these were the most long lived and reliable in the world, and as old as space travel itself. The eggs had been bred in a hidden nuclear reactor, the only one of its kind suffered to exist by the Treaty of Jerusalem.
Elena corked the barrel and killed the light. She had nothing to fear from it, as the egg was stillborn. The plutonium-238 it was made of decayed so rapidly that she could bring a bucket of water to boil by dropping one inside, but only plutonium-239 could explode.
The airlock door peeled open, and a single large duffel bag dropped through it. The man which followed was not much bigger. At a little more than a meter and a half Elena was the smallest person on the ship, but Ikenna Okoye was no taller than she. She shouldn’t have been so surprised, as they were nearly the same age. Elena had never wanted for food as a child, but famines had still been common in the independent nations. Even today many of them would have starved if the Global Union didn’t sell them food.
Elena grabbed the duffel as it sank past her with one hand. It was more massive than she expected, and she had to use her free hand to steady it before returning his salute.
“Welcome aboard, Officer.”
“Thank you, Chief.”
She handed the bag back and put him at ease, but his shoulders remained rigid, eyes straight ahead. It was enough to make her wonder if she’d heard him.
“How was the flight?”
“Fine, Chief, thank you.”