by Alan, Craig
Are you willing to die here, Metatron?
If necessary.
So are we.
Hassoun was sweating profusely as he typed with his keysticks, and he frequently had to wipe his forehead with the back of his glove. There came a long pause.
If you die now, you die for nothing.
The other captain had known exactly how to twist the knife.
What do you suggest?
It will be easier to explain in person.
Where?
Neutral ground, Captain. All will be made clear there.
“I formally protest, Captain,” Hassoun said. “We’d be giving them a hostage.”
“And they’d be giving us one back. Do you have a better idea?”
“We can fight our way out,” Demyan said.
Elena smiled.
“You’re fucking right. But I’m getting a little tired of killing my own people. If there’s a way to end this peacefully, I’d like to try. Vijay?”
He glanced at Hassoun and Demyan, then shrugged.
“If I am to die today—and the longer we wait here, the more certain I am that I shall—then I would at least like to know what is inside that ship.”
Elena nodded.
“Mr. Masri, Mr. Yukovych, your protest is duly noted. Look at it this way, gentlemen. We’re boarding her, as planned. We’re just not doing it alone.”
I’m on my way.
I will see you soon.
It was the first time that Metatron had spoken in the first-person singular. Elena unstrapped herself, raised up from her chair, and turned to the door behind her.
“Get some relief in here. Chief Nishtha has the flight.”
“Elena.”
That stopped her cold. Vijay never used her given name in front of other officers. She turned to see her staff saluting her.
Elena left the bridge. She did not expect to ever see it again.
There were no light arms aboard Gabriel. A firearm inside a pressurized hull, even on an Archangel, was dangerously insane. There were nail guns, but for safety reasons they would not fire unless their muzzle was pressed to a surface, which made them useless as projectile weapons. The ship’s stores had hundreds of spare explosive bolts, but those would have been just as dangerous to Gabriel’s crew as the other party. Plasma cutters could torch a man’s arm from his shoulder, but they were useless outside a vacuum. And even if they could have disconnected one of the defensive guns its hard point on the hull, it would have proven difficult to aim. Each one was the size of a small truck, and fed by a barrel that was taller than she was. Elena would have only her knife, and her grapple.
It took her slightly longer to prepare than usual, but as her boarding party had been out for nearly half an hour, she figured it was only fair to give the other captain more time. Elena stepped into the airlock, bulky thruster pack around her shoulders, and found herself wishing that it was Pascal Arnaud and not Eduardo Suarez she would leave on the other side. The door sealed behind her, and the first of three red lights began to burn. When the outer lock had been vented and all three were lit, she climbed outside.
She was transfixed by the sight of the stars. Elena had not seen them since her last night on Earth, six months before, as the glare of the Sun washed them out in space. But with Jupiter between her and the daylight, a spectacular night had fallen. The sky was so bursting with stars that it had more color than darkness to it, and the belt of the Milky Way was as thick and lustrous as the clouds back home.
Elena turned to look behind her, and the sky disappeared. She could see only the dusty storms of Jupiter, sizzling with thunder bolts, as it stretched into the distance in every direction. The horizon was so distant that it didn’t fall away—it just disappeared, as if the surface of the planet was flat.
Elena brought her head around and pulled herself forward along the fuselage, as far as she could safely go. The fore airlock was sixty meters from Gabriel’s bow, and most of that length was occupied by the barrel of the ballista. She came to the furthest edge of the ship and stopped. The muzzle itself was behind her, deeply recessed into the bow, but that was for ts protection not hers. If it fired now, the vapor trail would melt her suit on her body. Her earlier thought had been correct. The entire planet appeared to boil and bubble.
Elena carefully maneuvered herself over the lip of the bow and onto Gabriel’s nose. The ballista was aimed straight at the derelict, and Metatron behind it. She allowed herself to drift down into the muzzle, and onto the thick shutter that lay over the gun port. Then she looked back up, into the universe.
The golden diamond that was the outsider ship hovered at a crooked angle in the starlight above her. There was no atmospheric diffraction in the vacuum, and her eyesight was so sharp and clear that the ship looked unreal, like a painting that was too vivid and detailed to be true to life. The glowing river of the galaxy flowed behind it, and she could see reflected on its hull the light of Jupiter’s thunder. From the bottom of her mind, Elena heard someone singing in a low voice.
Count to three, she reminded herself. Visualize it.
Elena fixed her eyes on a single point on that golden surface. She pulled her legs beneath her and bent her knees with the soles of her boots flat against the hull. In one hand she held the grappling hook. She laid the other at her side, on top of the thick metal of the gun door. Elena braced herself against Gabriel. Then she jumped.
There was no sense of speed or motion whatsoever. The stars hovered stilly to every side, and each time she blinked they remained fixed and unaltered. Her breath quickened as she imagined herself trapped and immobile in the emptiness between the two ships. But when she blinked again, the derelict had grown.
Elena knew that she had been in leap for less than a minute, and forced herself to inhale slowly. She began to close her eyes more and more, and sank down into the void for longer and longer intervals. Each time she opened them, the pyramids were a little bigger. Now she was no longer flying, but falling. The outsider ship grew steadily larger until it swallowed her vision. Without turning her head she could see nothing but the broad plane of the hull. Elena gripped the hook tightly, and plummeted.
She touched down, and swung the hook. The long, limber rod whipped out sharply to its full length and struck the hull, and the billions of tiny barbs stabbing from its surface dug into the metal. They were only a full few micrometers across, not much bigger than the needles that Rivkah used for muscular therapy, but they bit down and didn’t let go. The grappling hook could adhere to all but the smoothest materials in the universe, even glass.
Elena took the shock in her knees, and a cloud of yellow dust erupted from around her feet and nearly blinded her. The impact of the landing bounced her off the hull and back into space, but she clung to the grapple. It pulled taut and held firm, and she was jerked to a stop just a meter or two above the surface. Elena grabbed for the slack in her safety line, wrapped it around her free arm, and reeled herself in. When her boots touched the hull once more she pressed a trigger on the grapple’s handle. An electric current coursed through the shaft, and the smart fiber spikes sank beneath the smooth surface. Elena switched the safeties on and stowed the grapple in her bag.
She found the boarding party after only a minutes, huddled around a hatch. It was perfectly square, and large enough to admit three of them abreast, but there was no handle anywhere in sight. Rivkah hung to a nearby handhold with her black bag as Marco and Ikenna tied down the toolkits that they had had brought from Gabriel.
“Metatron only asked for me,” Elena said. “Anyone who wants to return to Gabriel is free to do so.”
There was a moment of silence, then her three crew looked at each other simultaneously. Marco spoke.
“I’d like to go back. Gabriel may be your command, but she’s my ship. If I’m going to die, I want it to be with her.”
Elena put a gentle hand to his shoulder, as he could not see her smile within her helmet. Montessori and Gupta had been the second two members of the project team to arrive at Glenn Station, a few weeks after she and Vijay. The boatswain spent almost as much time with Gabriel as she had, and probably knew her insides even better.
“Take good care of her,” she said. Ikenna and Rivkah nodded. Elena double checked to see that he had his own grapple, and then they watched him kick off the derelict, back to Gabriel. When he was no more than a spot on her hull, they went to work.
The plasma cutter came first. Ikenna took it by the handle and double-looped its strap around his torso. Elena hooked his safety lines onto her suit and Rivkah’s. They spread out in opposite directions, grabbed handholds, and tightened the lines until they strained. Ikenna put his boots flat on the hull, and pressed the nozzle to the hatch. The plasma jets ignited and immediately sank through the door. Ikenna turned in a slow circle, careful not to set his feet near the glowing furrow. Tiny puffs of white air trailed the plasma, and sputtered quickly in the vacuum. As soon as the jets passed, the molten metal trench cooled and sealed itself. He cut a meter wide ring into the door, and killed the plasma.
The hatch had been weakened, but it still held firm. The wound was healing rapidly, and she needed to move fast. Elena took a long tungsten crowbar from the toolkit and stabbed it into the trench. The top half sank into the soft slag and buried itself. Elena looked back once to see that both Ikenna and Rivkah were secure and still hooked into her line. Then she threw her weight onto the bar.
The burn wounds ripped open, and the pressure within the lock blasted a round chunk of the door into space. A cloud of white air surged past her and disappeared. The explosion was completely silent, and over in seconds. Ikenna removed a small pneumatic gun from the toolkit and sprayed foam around the edge of the hole, so that they would not burn or tear their suits. Elena leaned forward and carefully placed her hand on the rim. It was perfectly dark inside the airlock.
Elena was about to drop inside when someone grabbed her arm.
It was Rivkah. Silently, the doctor pointed to the surface at their feet. Elena knelt and ran her finger along the hull, and it came away laden with an inch thick layer of yellow dust. The entire ship had been caked in sulfur, but as she had moved back and forth her boots had scraped the coating apart beneath her. She could see the white hull beneath the grime—and a bit of blue.
Elena wiped the rest of the sulfur away with her free hand. Buried beneath the dust had been a symbol. Two blue triangles, meshed together to form one shape. From the right angle, it almost looked like the ship they were standing on.
It was a Star of David.
King and Country
Six months earlier
Elena slid into her chair at the flight station. Around her, the first shift bridge staff pretended to examine their own screens as she pulled the straps around her body and tightened them. Elena was not a superstitious woman—she didn’t think of herself that way at least—but it hadn’t right seemed right for her to take this chair before she had earned it. But her new orders had come down the day before, and today she took her seat on the bridge for the first time as commanding officer of Gabriel.
“Glenn Station has cleared us for departure,” Hassoun said.
She had run out the clock. Gabriel would depart Glenn Station at noon today, and the Agency would need one hell of a long rope to put a noose around her neck from a million kilometers away. And it would be tied soon enough. Helena Dixon would turn power over to Jacob Erasmus in Cairo in just a few minutes. The opposition would form the government for the first time in history, and they would demand answers.
“Mr. Nishtha, confirm that all systems are operational.”
“Aye, Chief. Let us go around the room.”
Under usual circumstances, internal communications were Hassoun’s responsibility. But as executive officer and head of the bridge department, it fell to Vijay to verify that Gabriel was spaceworthy. One by one the rest of the ship checked in, and their status indicators flipped from red to green.
Networks check.
Integrity check.
Fuel cells check.
Solar check.
Batteries check.
Electrical check.
Environmental check.
Utilities check.
Recycling check.
Medical check.
Consumables check.
Radiators check.
Rockets check.
Thrusters check.
Gyros check.
Avram check.
Telemetry check.
Communications check.
Guns check.
Missiles check.
Ballista check.
All crew present and accounted for.
“The board is green, Chief,” Vijay confirmed. This was purely ceremonial—most of the crew had volunteered to work extra shifts to get the ship in perfect flying condition, and the final diagnostic tests had all been completed over an hour before. Gabriel was now entirely self-sufficient. But the launch status check was a hallowed tradition, and it would be a bad omen to break with it.
“Mr. Yukovych, take us out. Slow ahead.”
All around the ship, the umbilicals and clamps that had tethered Gabriel to her mother station for the past two years released and retracted. The ship was free, but continued to roll slowly within her dock under momentum.
“Aye, Chief, slow ahead.”
He activated the avram, and Gabriel slid from her cradle and into the world. Elena tapped her bracelet and activated the shipwide address system.
“This is the Chief speaking. Gabriel is away.”
The bridge bulkheads were far too thick and sturdy for her to hear the cheers that had rung out.
“Mr. Yukovych, set a course for Mars.” They would briefly refuel and resupply there before setting out for the next leg, towards Pallas inside the Belt.
“Aye, Chief. Estimated transit time, forty five days and fifteen hours.”
It had once taken unmanned probes close to a year to travel to the red planet, and if it weren’t for the need to slow down upon approach,Gabriel could have shot past it in even less time. She wouldn’t get anywhere close to the outside on this deployment, and could burn her rockets as hard as she wished.
“Does the engine room report ready for ignition?”
“Yes, Chief,” Hassoun said, “Chief Gupta says we are—Wait. Emergency traffic. Helm, full stop.”
“Confirm, full stop,” Demyan said.
Such things were relative—Gabriel continued to orbit the Earth. Elena turned to Hassoun.
“Que diantres, Mr. Masri, what is this?”
“Don’t know, Chief.” Hassoun’s eyes flitted back and forth between his monitors. “Emergency traffic from Victory. Just says All ships full stop.”
“Victory? Where does she get off telling us what to do?” Elena asked.
“I don’t know, Chief,” Hassoun said.
“Vijay, threat assessment, now,” Elena said. “Mr. Masri, don’t worry, you did the right thing.”
“The sky is clean, Chief,” Vijay said a moment later. “Nothing is there that has no right to be.”
“Does Glenn know what’s going on?” she asked Hassoun. He shook his head.
“They just asked me the same thing,” he said.
“Que mierda?”
Elena took over a scope and zoomed in on HMS Victory, several thousand kilometers away. She was a sphere, with a diameter a little longer than Gabriel was wide. Heat sails lined her equator and meridians, and at six different poles stood her gunnery towers, each loaded with missiles and heavy cannons. Victory was an ugly, squat little ship to Elena’s eyes, with none of Gabriel’s predatory sleekness. She was more ruggedly armored than any vessel that Ele
na had ever served on, and better armed. But she could barely maneuver, and had spent her entire life stranded high above the Earth, to wait for an outsider invasion that had never come. The Space Agency had long since decommissioned the orbiters and turned them over to the national militaries, and it had become a patriotic honor to own one—the Royal Space Force operated Victory, and the American Guard was particularly proud of its Enterprise.
The computer scanned Victory in every band of the electromagnetic spectrum, and automatically appended its analysis to the image. Each tower was hot, and her radar was active and searching. Her fists were up.
“Mr. Yukovych, can we close on her without using rockets?”
“How close?”
“One hundred kilometers.”
“Perhaps we should maintain our current distance, Chief,” Vijay said. “She is not going anywhere, after all.”
“And she’s not telling me what to do with my ship, either. One hundred kilometers, Mr. Yukovych. Opposite thrusters only. Try not to spook her.”
While Gabriel made her approach, Elena backtracked to the minute before Victory had sent its emergency broadcast, and viewed the hologram in full spectrum. She could see drumbeats of energy radiating from the ship in the microwave band.
“Mr. Nishtha, isolate those pulses. I want to know what she was looking at.”
He quickly tracked down each individual bearing, and traced them to their destinations. Victory disappeared from the holo, and was replaced by the sphere of the Earth. One by one, radar contacts appeared in orbit. There were dozens of them, and they pocked the blue planet with tiny red wounds.
“Glenn Station,” Vijay said. “Gagarin, Tereshkova, Sarabhai. Atlanta, Kolkata, Zheng He.”
“Gabriel,” Hassoun said.
“And what looks like every unmanned satellite platform in orbit,” Demyan said.
Dozens of atmospheric generators still dotted the sky, pumping out ozone to replace what had been lost a century before during the Storm. They orbited alongside almost as many neutronium factories and carbon fiber mills, whose products could not be made under gravity. The loss of these facilities would have plunged the Global Union into a worldwide depression.