by R L Dean
The Lieutenant Colonel blamed himself for what happened ... just as much as she blamed herself.
They had told each other a dozen times it's not your fault. It's not your fault that you survived, your place was at the office and mine was in the field, you were boots on the ground and I trust your decision ... you couldn't have known the terrorists would blow the crater.
The outpatient center was an extension of the hospital. It was a low permafab and concrete structure with a dome shaped roof and a wide sidewalk leading up an entrance of tinted glass doors and windows. It was one of those places you knew some famous architect designed but you had no idea which one. Lights along the sidewalk, that she always thought of as running-lights, were just coming on as the burrow began to settle into evening.
At the entrance she waited for an elderly man with a brace around his waist and the thigh of one leg make his way inside. In the lobby she was tempted to move past him and step up to the receptionist's desk, but decided that would be rude and kept pace behind him.
She checked in and went to the training room.
Her therapist, a man with too perfect hair, too perfect skin, and too perfect teeth, was sitting on a weight bench talking to Private Juanita Parker. The diminutive Spanish woman was buried for almost eight hours in the slide when the crater wall came down. Her armor saved her life, but she was left with two broken shoulders and nerve damage at the base of her spine.
Parker saw Jamala enter and turned stiffly toward her, and when she crossed the distance from the door Parker tried to stand at attention, the muscles on her neck jumping briefly.
"Good evening, Gunnery Sergeant Jenkins," Parker said.
Jamala waved a hand at her. "That's enough, relax." Then she took a deep breath, resisting the urge to double over.
Her therapist— his name was Greg, or Craig— stood and raised an eyebrow. "You walked again," he said. It sounded like an accusation.
"Yes, I did."
His frown deepened, and she frowned back. Those pretty boy muscles haven't been tried, she thought. Uncharitable, she knew. But the man was irritating.
"Am I interrupting anything?" Jamala asked Parker.
She private shook her head, slowly. "No, Gunny, I'm done for today."
As Parker slowly walked away Greg shook his head and said, "You're pushing too hard."
"I'm fine," she told him. "What are we doing today?"
He scanned the nerves in her knee, then for the next hour made her stretch and bend her leg as far as she could. Then he told her it was enough, that the excessive walking was hampering her therapy, and reminded her to wear the brace.
Leaving the outpatient center she went to the hospital. Carson was still in a coma. He had been swept away in the rubble just like Jamala, and somehow ended up pinned against a boulder buried under two meters of scree. The power in his suit was almost depleted by the time they found him and the oxygen system was on emergency backup. That would have been fine, except there were hairline fractures in the chest of his armor and vac-suit. He was losing air even as it was being generated.
She sat and stared at Carson's unmoving form and listened to the respirator for ten minutes, then left.
Taking a taxi to Security Command she went inside and limped to the end of the hallway where the admin offices were. Through the glass walls she saw a dim light on in the foyer, and the assistant was gone. There were no lights on in the Lieutenant Colonel's office. Grunting, she turned and headed to the barracks. An evening inspection would liven things up. Private Goldberg was a master at finding ways to sneak his GOW inside, and Yarbury never kept his locker in order.
20 - Mat
Mat stood with his magboots solidly on the deck, looking down at the plot terminal's screen. The Sadie was tucked behind a heavy cloud of gas, dust, and rock a hundred thousand kilometers from the depot.
"I've got pressure," Haydon said from his station. Misaki was out on the hull, sealing holes from the pirates' turrets and Haydon was doing pressure tests.
Mat would have liked to have kept an eye on her while she was out there, but all the optics on the starboard side were gone— blasted loose when Misaki shot the hydrazine silos. So, instead, he stared at the plot terminal with a gnawing feeling that something had to be done about the depot ... pirate base.
"Mat, I am sorry," Yuri told him for the fifth time. The Russian pilot was sitting, dejected, in his rightful place again in the cockpit, his head down and looking at his lap. "I did not know about the pirates."
He would have never classified Yuri as pitiful before returning from the depot. Regretful yes, sullen certainly, but never so down that Mat pitied him.
"I just wanted to see my son ..."
"Yuri," Mat said, glancing up from the terminal. "We've already talked about this ..." and they had, on the navigational nightmare that Yuri took them on at hard burn from the depot. "You had to try, I understand that."
"The repairs are coming out of his share," Haydon suddenly said.
Yuri just nodded.
Mat squeezed his eyes, then looked back down at the plot. Some things would never change.
"The last patch is on, I'm heading back," Misaki said through the comm on Haydon's terminal.
"Copy that, chief," Haydon acknowledged.
The plot terminal showed him their position relative to the depot and some course projections that he was toying with.
"Mat," Haydon spoke again.
He turned to look at him, the ex-soldier's face was serious.
"Boss, you've been staring at that for over an hour. I know what you're thinking. You have that same look on your face."
"Even I know what you are thinking," Yuri added, now looking at him.
Mat frowned and looked back down at the plot terminal.
"Mat," Yuri continued. "This is the one place I know that Ivan will come."
He felt heat rise to his face. "Yuri, Ivan is a pirate ... privateer."
"You do not know that!"
"All the ships were Martian, and there are thirty year old maps in the navigation database that don't show this place. It's not hard to figure out what they're doing. The depot is a drop-off station for the ore they steal. There is no other reason for Ivan to be there."
"I know, I know ..." Yuri said, and turned his head away. "I just ... Ivan ... this is ..." His voice trailed off and he wiped this face with one hand.
The access tube hatch opened and Misaki pulled herself out. For a moment she floated in the now silent Flight deck, looking at each of them. There was a sheen of sweat on her face and neck, and her hair was damp.
"What's it look like?" He asked as she grabbed a handhold and pulled herself toward a station.
"The holes are sealed and the Crew deck is repressurized. Nothing critical, but there is a lot of rewiring to do and we're blind on the starboard side."
Mat nodded. "Okay. Do we have the parts?"
Misaki pulled herself into the seat and strapped in and tapped her screen. "Most of it. I can shift cameras three and five over to cover about seventy degrees of our blind spot, but we will need new optics."
"Boss, I'm all for killing bad guys. You know that," he continued, ignoring Misaki's report. "But, not everyone there is a bad guy. Sure, the people chasing us were hired thugs, but what if there's prisoners ..." He looked to Misaki, which Mat thought was unnecessary. "... the maintenance crew and technicians could be contracted. We don't know."
"He is right," Yuri said, turning to look at Mat again. "We don't know. We should contact UNSEC. They will send a patrol to investigate."
Yuri was grasping at the hope that his son wasn't working for the Martians, and that the depot would remain for him to return to ... for whatever reason he might go there. Both of them misunderstood what he intended.
"I'm not going to commit mass-murder," he said. "And we are going to tell UNSEC, but not before we disable their refueling capabilities."
Misaki raised her head from her terminal and was looking at him no
w, her expression inscrutable as always. When no one said anything he went on.
"The ships we saw docked know that when we get within range of a buoy we'll report what happened to UNSEC, they're probably gone by now. We can't stop them. But, the incoming ships can't risk docking at the normal drop-off stations for refueling, so they'll come straight here, drop their canisters, and refuel before leaving again."
"You want to destroy the silos of hydrazine and xenon," Misaki said quietly.
Mat nodded. "We stop them from leaving, UNSEC shows up and there are pirates to catch."
They stared at him in silence. Misaki simply turned back to her terminal and began tapping it. Haydon started nodding, then said, "I could get behind that, boss."
Mat looked at Yuri and the older man licked his lips, blinking glassy eyes. "I have to say yes. I don't know what will happen to my son, but I led us here."
A hard voice inside his head agreed with Yuri. It was his fault, he would never have taken the Sadie to the depot if not for Yuri. And I'm getting tired of being chased ... threatened. Maybe he could stop this here and now— put an end to the piracy, or Martian privateering— not just for him and his crew, but for everyone in out-system. UNSEC could launch a whole investigation from here. It could be the break they needed.
Misaki finally realized that they were all watching her.
"The turrets are working," she said to their questioning looks.
Mat felt a faint smile coming to his lips. After all this time she still didn't understand. "Okay," he said. "But what do you think?"
She blinked. "The patches will hold under high-velocity. The hull will be okay."
"Yeah, but do you want to do this?" Haydon asked her.
It took her a moment to answer. Her eyes lingered on Haydon, then segued to Mat, and finally turned down to her terminal. "Evil triumphs when good men do nothing."
* * *
A ghost of doubt came with the quietness of the Flight deck. The Sadie was in flight back to the depot at 40,000 kph. Slow enough that Yuri could maneuver as the sensors directed, yet fast enough to setup the planned slingshot around the depot and put them back on their original course. With Yuri focused on his screens and Misaki and Haydon using the time to check between the bulkheads in Medical for something that was tripping a damage alarm, it left only the hum of the hull and the occasional beep of a terminal to break the silence. And it was in that silence and stillness that Mat began to lose focus on the pictures of the depot displayed on his screen. They were taken by the Sadie's cameras as it fled the attacking ships, and he was marking the silos in an attempt to program the turrets, but his mind drifted to the inherent danger involved in his plan.
Despite his belief that the pirates would flee the base, there might still be ships docked, and those ships wouldn't be concerned with capturing the Sadie and his crew— they would be shooting to kill this time.
Mat frowned, staring at the pictures of the depot, but seeing through them. Yuri admitted that he put them in danger. What about now, wasn't Mat doing the same thing? They had escaped the depot, all they had to do was get closer to the hauler routes and then transmit the location to UNSEC or the UN authorities at a local drop-off station and let them handle it.
But here he was, leading them back to the depot on the grounds that by the time UNSEC came to investigate there wouldn't be anything to find.
It was the same excuse he used to destroy the freighter in the Belt when they left Butte. By the time they get here that ship could be long gone. We're doing something about it now. His words echoed in his ears.
Mat clenched his jaws at the memory of the freighter exploding. He had watched it several times before Misaki erased the whole incident from the Sadie's systems.
"Thirty minutes to contact," Yuri said. "They will have us on their sensors now."
He took a breath and looked up. I'm going to do this, the voice inside his head said. It had to be done, so that UNSEC would have something to find. He opened the channel to Misaki's handcomm.
"Hai?" She asked. The image on the screen from the handcomm's camera was a bouncing light showing pipes and wires. The view shifted slightly and Haydon's big hand was holding a wrench and twisting on one of the pipes.
"It's time," he said. "You two need to get strapped in."
"Hai."
The camera shifted again and then the call disconnected. Fifteen minutes later Misaki and Haydon, both sweaty, returned to the Flight deck and strapped in at their normal stations.
Time dragging out was nothing new in out-system, and Mat bore the remaining fifteen minutes with patience, but not thoughtlessness. He had made his decision, this was what they were going to do. But, that voice of doubt refused to completely go away. A million things could go wrong ... maybe the depot had defensive turrets, maybe the pirates decided to make a stand and not run away like he thought they would. Like Yuri had said— a not so subtle reminder— they could see the Sadie approaching, and not slowing.
The Sadie is not a UNSEC patrol ship, the voice reminded him. It's just a tin can with cheap pop-guns mounted on a rusty hull. And that rusty hull was the only thing between them and the cold, airless, big black. A lucky shot would kill them all.
"Five minutes," Yuri said.
Mat snapped back into focus. His screen once again showed the growing image of the depot, hanging in the dust and blackness.
"I will take turret control," Misaki said.
"No," he told her. "I got this."
She had taken control from him before, launching the rock-cracker at the freighter when he was supposed to do it. Not this time.
Mat checked his programming and brought up the targeting overlay. The system placed yellow circles on the depot's asteroid surface where the optics had captured images of clusters of silos. Ten seconds later timers appeared over the circles and began counting down.
"We are entering parabolic trajectory," Yuri said.
The asteroid was growing fast on his screen now. Two of the gangly docking arms were visible from this angle and he counted a total of five ships still in slots. A lone freighter was moving away, its main thruster sending out a stream of orange plasma half a kilometer long.
The first timer reached zero and the hull tapped as the turrets fired. Two seconds later a fireball of hydrazine consumed a cluster of silos and then as quickly as it formed it was gone.
"Scratch one," Haydon said.
Over the next eight seconds three more clusters of silos were destroyed, two were hydrazine, and the last was xenon— it exploded into white gas.
The Sadie shuddered as it picked up speed and Yuri said, "Entering escape trajectory. Standard course in sixty hours."
Another cluster of silos came in to view, they were not on his overlay. He took manual control of the turrets and fired until they exploded.
"Good shot, boss," Haydon said and it reminded him of their target practice in Cargo, before they boarded the tug and he shot the pilot.
The Sadie was swinging around the asteroid now, the depot's terminal coming into view with two more docking arms ... three ships slotted. The turrets tapped again and more silos exploded. Then the refinery appeared— where they had picked up Haydon and Yuri.
The refinery. He wouldn't get all the silos, the cameras hadn't captured all of them, and Yuri's course didn't allow for sudden maneuvers. But, he could stop their ability to produce usable fuel from the raw gases they brought in. It might even stop the remaining ships from leaving.
Mat took manual control of the turrets again and fired.
One moment the refinery was a dusty, metal collage of tanks and pipes, the next a ballooning orange light ... and Mat watched in horror as the whole forward section of the terminal dissolved in a burst of plasma fire that consumed the docks and ignited the ships in their slots.
As the image of the asteroid and depot shrunk in his camera feed, the Flight deck suddenly felt hot and sweat beaded on his forehead.
"I will erase the logs and footage
," Misaki said, quietly. "This will take some time."
21 - Tetsuya
Tetsuya spent the morning at the Divisional Proctor's office going over details of a contraband case he was investigating prior to his detachment to Criminal Investigations. The young rep he spoke with was dressed in an expensive suit and smelled of expensive cologne. But his face was an unhealthy color and he sounded tired. He was overworked. The department's caseload had rapidly grown with the increasing population. When he left it was almost noon. He called Baldwin and said he wouldn't be in for another hour, then headed to the apartment.
Itsumi was dressed in her day kimono of quilted white, with even paler satin trim and obi— a porcelain doll wrapped in a cloud, standing in the main room with a duster in one hand. When Tetsuya entered through the hatch she turned from her work and looked at him.
"What is wrong?" She asked, as he slipped out of his shoes and undid his jacket.
"Nothing," he said. "Thought we could have lunch together."
She blinked, then turned and went to the kitchen. As soon as he sat down on the couch she came back with tea, then disappeared again.
For a few moments he listened to his wife open cabinets and move about the small kitchen. The sounds might have lulled him to sleep but his handcomm beeped with a notification. He ran his hand over his face, then picked it up from the coffee table and looked at the screen. It was a message from someone he didn't recognize, but with a UNPF address. He opened it and a broad faced appeared with puffy, bloodshot eyes appeared.
"Detective Takahashi. I'm John Reese, with Division K, at Shenhau-Twelve."
Tetsuya didn't know where Shenhau-12 was, but the name sounded like the designation for an ore drop-off station. Reese spoke in monotone, his eyebrows twitching. He was clearly in an office, there were figures moving behind him in the camera and the handcomm's mic picked up the voices of people talking.