by Bobby Adair
Phil is the first to provide an answer. "Think of it like putting a bucket of water on a rope back on earth. You can swing it around and spin fast enough that the water stays in the bucket despite gravity trying to spill it out.”
“But that’s just a bucket of water,” Silva argues. “It’s different.”
“Same physics,” Phil reiterates. “Same principle. It’ll work out here just like it works back on earth.”
Brice takes a turn over the rim and flies down into the trough.
Right behind him, I feel a momentary surge of terror as I suddenly seem to be falling toward the ground, the bottom of the trough, two kilometers below. Over the comm, I hear the same fright in the gasps of the others. It’s a natural human response, I guess, fear of falling.
Brice doesn’t speed up, and he doesn’t slow. He just zips along like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I decide to imagine instead of falling, I’m skimming the ground. I just have to reorient my imagination to tell myself the wall I’m skimming down isn’t a wall, but the ground, and the ground curving inside the floor of the station below me and up into the distance on both sides, is a wall I’m flying toward.
It kinda works, but the gravity of the station, simulated by its spin, reminds me at every instant that I’m lying to myself.
Soon enough, we reach the bottom, and Brice leads us in a turn to bring our ragged formation of orange suits into a line flying thirty meters above the floor, following the curve toward our target zone.
“See,” Phil points down, as he gets Silva’s attention again, “all rock, and dirt. That’s all been brought up from the earth, and the moon, and the asteroids. It all stays against the floor, pinned there by the spin of the station.”
“But that’s dirt,” argues Silva. “Dirt stays in place no matter where you are. Every asteroid in the solar system is covered with it, right? Air is different.”
Phil sighs.
“Trust him on this,” Lenox tells her. “It might not make sense, but I’m sure Phil’s right.”
Skimming over the floor, seeing the boulders and mounds of dry, frozen dirt, it’s easy to feel the scale of the structure. It is science fiction come to life, and it turns my thoughts black again. The Grays, the Trogs, and even us humans are capable of building heaven in a universe filled with enough of everything for everybody. Yet most of us have to suffer as slaves because a few of us want to be kings.
Chapter 9
We land a few hundred kilometers from a pair of holes and plant our feet on a tall mound of debris, making no effort to hide. There’d be little point. Any number of eyes from any place on the station can see us. Whether from a thousand meters away, or a hundred, we’d be pixels of color moving suspiciously. Appearing normal is our best camouflage.
Phil and the Gray stare ahead. Work crews, hundreds of people in orange suits, cut on enormous girders of steel, bent inward from a railgun impact. Other workers are fabricating a patch of framework over another hole where the ruined structures have been cut away.
“Any Grays up there?” I ask.
“None,” Phil tells me. “We’re trying to find any MSS muckity-mucks who could give us trouble.”
“Take your time.” The hours and minutes aren’t a concern for us on this part of the mission, hell, on the whole mission. If the Trogs have sent cruisers back along their supply route traveling at 8c, the journey will take many long months. If Spitz can retain the speed of the Rusty Turd at 20c after doing whatever he does to extend its range, we’ll arrive months before any Trog cruisers get there.
Silva points toward a series of odd structures built out on the opposite side of the station. “Brice, what are those?”
He looks up before he answers. “The workers’ dorm is up there. Back when I was here, that was a separate orbiting unit. Now they’ve built one into the station structure. It’ll have full grav—not quite earth grav—but 0.8 or so, the way the Grays prefer it. The three pods of Grays that run the show up here, their quarters are in there, too. The North Korean supervisors have a section as well.”
“All separate?” asks Silva.
“Just like the Trog Cruisers,” answers Brice. “That’s the way they like it.” He shrugs and adds, “That’s the way the humans like it, too. Nobody wants to smell Gray stink or look at MSS assholes when they’re trying to enjoy their off-days out of the suit.”
“Is that where they house the industrial section?” asks Lenox, scanning the circumference of the ring as she speaks.
“Yeah.” Brice turns and points to a disconnected metal girder the size of a concrete bridge support back on earth. “They’ll float that one across and re-forge it over there.” He points along that side of the ring. “A third of that section is going to be set aside for heavy industry. They had one fusion reactor over there when I left, and they were about to bring another online. Rumor was that there’d be four by the time they were finished. The Grays want to be able to process enough asteroid ore out here so they won’t have to depend on earth for supplies.”
“Why not just use earth?” asks Silva, more talkative today than usual.
Brice hesitates before answering. “To increase the speed of production, I guess. If they can get enough bodies up here to handle the materials, and they can process them all onsite, then they take a huge time-suck out of the construction process.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” argues Silva. “Earth can provide all the industrial capacity they need.”
Brice shrugs again. “Maybe right. I suppose you are, but it doesn’t matter, does it? This is the Grays’ show. They do what they do for whatever reason they do it. We’re just the grunts that make it happen.”
Listening in but not commenting, I know Brice is right on that point.
“Were you here when the Trogs attacked?” asks Lenox.
“No,” answers Brice. “I was already in the SDF, stationed with a platoon in the moon garrison when the first attack came. Why do you ask?”
Lenox points to several spots of damaged ring. “It looks like the Trogs were aiming for the bottom of the trough.”
Brice scans over the station, nodding as he looks.
I look, too, and see Lenox’s observation is accurate.
“Did they already repair the other damage?”
Brice shakes his head.
“That’s the quickest way to make the ring uninhabitable,” says Phil, getting into the conversation, “while doing the least amount of damage to the physical structure.”
Lenox looks at him, silently prompting him to explain.
"The Trogs probably didn’t know there wasn’t any atmosphere in the ring, or they did know, and they figured they’d follow their standard attack protocol for space stations."
“Their standard attack protocol?” Brice thinks Phil is full of shit.
"Yeah," says Phil. "You’ve read that report I sent. The Grays aren’t natural engineers, and they’re not that imaginative. They bred all of that out of the Trogs, so they only have a limited number of designs, really just a few for the kinds of ships they fly. It makes sense that they’d only have a few designs for space stations. So, after all their generations of war, they’re bound to have a standard way to attack one.” Phil turns and points to all the metal bent and destroyed around the gaping holes ahead. “If this station was operational, punching a hole like that would be like blasting a hole in the bottom of a water trough. All the water runs right out. If this station held an atmosphere, all of it would flow out through the hole, killing every living being on it, except for the Grays lucky enough not to be sucked out into space or killed by flying debris. They might make their way to safety.”
“That easy,” Brice realizes. “Killing the stations is just as easy as killing the cruisers. You punch a hole in the right place, and everybody inside dies.”
“They need to construct walls,” deduces Lenox, “to compartmentalize the sections. That way, one hit can’t kill everyone.”
Looking ar
ound the circumference of the trough for any evidence of such walls, Brice says, “Maybe they will. I don’t know. We’ve never completed one. Who knows?”
“We should go now,” Phil tells us. “There aren’t any MSS supervisors up there now. We should be able to find what we need.”
I give Brice the nod.
“Move out,” he orders.
Chapter 10
At first, we get nothing more than a glance. Then stares.
“Grays don’t usually come out to view the construction up close,” Brice tells us as the word spreads over the construction workers’ comm channel. One by one, they stop what they’re doing to get a glimpse.
Phil is walking in the lead with the Gray by his side. With the station spinning, the grav makes it possible. Brice is on Phil’s left, and I’m walking along on his right, both hands on my railgun, trying my best to look threatening. Our other squads are following in lines behind us, all at the ready. We want to look mean enough to deter anyone who has the slightest wayward thought about our Gray, Nick the Tick.
A pair of orange-suited workers flies down from a perch on a bent girder, planting their feet on the rough ground in front of us. They aren’t Korean, and obviously not Grays, but they are in charge of the crews working on the repairs in this section of the station. I expect they’re Americans, or at least English speakers. That’s how work on the stations is divvied up, English-speaking crews working on a few stations, Chinese speakers on another, Swahili on another one. The pair facing us are both old men, I guess in their seventies, men who had lived a full life on earth with nothing but the threat of nuclear war, terrorism, and unruly dictators to haunt their dreams, until the Grays showed up. Just like in the SDF, the prime stock of human beings has been burned through, leaving only the very young or very old to work the steel and composite framework while the solar radiation and cosmic rays slowly kill them.
One asks, “How may we be of service?”
Phil stops. The rest of us follow his lead. He’s the Grays’ mouthpiece. For anyone watching, it needs to look like the Gray is the grand marshal of our little parade. Phil says, "Tell us about your supply chain problems."
The two workers look at one another.
“We’ve been told,” says Phil, using the plural because he’s speaking for the Gray and that’s the preferred style of formal communication, “ behind on your schedule due to material shortages.”
“Material shortages?” the oldest of the pair repeats, turning to look around for some obvious problem.
The other one points to a flock of grav lifts sitting on the ground on the other side of the gaping holes. "We have all we—"
The first one cuts him off, “Yes, shortages. We work with what we have.” He looks around. “We don’t always have all we need.” He’s smart enough to guess our Gray is looking for someone to blame for a perceived problem. He’s happy to point the finger down the road. Everybody wants to live to see tomorrow.
“From where are you supplied?” asks Phil.
The old man starts to answer, but stutters himself into silence as he points vaguely at earth.
The other one takes up for him. “We don’t know. We don’t handle that.” He points toward the dorm and factory facilities on the other side of the ring. “The planning office. The engineers. They tell us what to work on. They arrange the materials.”
“And those lifts?” Phil points across to the other side of the hole. “Where are they from, exactly?”
“Pennsylvania?” one guesses. “Two from there, I think.”
“And Pueblo, in Colorado, from the foundry there,” adds the other.
“And the composites,” says the first, hurrying through is words, “are mostly from places in California and Texas.”
Phil raises a hand to shut them up, playing the role of minion to the tyrant Gray. “Take me to the lifts. I need to speak with those pilots.”
Getting what we came for doesn’t take more than thirty minutes. Having a Gray along is like having a royal scepter. You go where you want. You get what you need. And nobody asks any questions.
With the lift pilot sitting quietly on the floor of the cargo box, everybody settles in for the long trip. Even with a grav drive and plenty of H for a full-acceleration burn to the halfway point, and then an all-out decel for the last half, the trip will take at least six hours. Maybe twice that depending on how well the lift performs with its aging reactor and rickety, old grav plates.
Penny engages the lift’s drive and steers it in the direction of earth.
Chapter 11
Two hours into the trip, most everyone is asleep. Brice is chatting over a private comm link with Penny. Phil and the Gray are passed out. I’m wondering how long the Tick can remain in the vacuum before the cold seeps into its jelly core and freezes it solid.
“What are you thinking about?” asks Silva.
I look up from my thoughts to see her examining me with her high-school-girl eyes. “Nothing.”
She switches immediately to a different subject. “You think we’ll live through this one?”
“Why not?” As apprehensive as I am about the mission, it seems like the right response. “We’ve beaten the odds so far.”
Nodding, because she’s been there through most of it, Silva asks, “Do you think our lucky streak will dry up?”
“I don’t know. Somebody has to live through the war, right?” Maybe not this war, but I don’t say that. “You know, back in the old wars on earth, they’d go on for five or ten years, maybe for generations in the olden days. Soldiers always made it through. Some of them were there at the end to raise the flag in victory, or to surrender it to the conquerors. Besides, I don’t think it’s all luck.”
“Really?”
“Do you?” I ask. “You know, think our success is all luck?”
Silva’s eyes wander around the darkness inside the cargo box, lit only by the glow of lights from d-pads and suits. She’s thinking about the answer. “At first, maybe, a lot of it. Now, I think we’re good at what we do. Like you told us, Colonel Bird thinks we’re the first string, the best he’s got.”
Or just about the only troops he has left. I don’t say that. “Yeah.”
Silva switches to a different subject again. “So, what’s your story? Do you like me, or what?”
“Ah.” That’s the only syllable I can push out as I overcome my surprise.
"Phil told me you had a hangup about my age."
Trying to catch up, I tell her, “ only seventeen.”
“I’ll be eighteen in three months.”
“Three?” I instinctively look at my d-pad, instinctively as a distraction, not because I’m used to finding any information there. And even though my new suit has a mostly dependable d-pad, none of my company’s info has been uploaded yet. Something I need to see to when I have time.
Silva tells me her birthdate.
“You know,” I argue, “I’m nearly twice as old as you.”
“ barely thirty. You don’t look like anybody’s grandpa yet.”
“There was a time when it was illegal for a man my age to lay a hand on a girl as young as you.”
“There was a much longer time,” counters Silva, “when unmarried girls my age were old maids.”
I wince at that. I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration. “I’m your superior officer.”
“Nobody cares about that kind of crap out here.”
“You have all the answers, don’t you?”
Showing some exasperation, Silva asks, "Is it your wife? Is that it?"
“I am married.”
“Phil told me things weren’t good between you. That you two wouldn’t stay together. Why?”
“Phil told you a lot.”
Silva responds with a sly smile.
“Did he tell you why I won’t be with my wife? In the long-term, I mean.”
She shakes her head. “He said I should ask you.”
“We took in a hatchling.”
&nb
sp; “A Gray?” She’s surprised, disgusted.
I nod to confirm it.
“Is it true what they say?”
“They say a lot. What are you asking, specifically?”
“Do they stink up your house? I mean, they reek, right?”
I nod again. “The whole place smells like Gray stink.”
Silva grimaces.
“You get used to it once inside for an hour or so. But every time I come home and open the door, I nearly gag.”
“What about her?” asks Silva. “They say it ages the woman.”
“It does.” The picture of Claire, old and wrinkled with eyes as lifeless as they ever were, haunts its way through my memories. “She’s my age, but she looks eighty. She’s wasted down to wrinkles and bones. She’ll be lucky to live long enough to see the thing mature.”
Silva shudders. “How does that work? I never understood it.”
"Nobody knows. Nobody’s ever studied it. A doctor explained it to me once, but I think he was mostly guessing. When a Gray sleeps, an immature Gray needs the warmth of a human body, or whatever creature they used before they came to earth. Whenever our hatchling slept, Claire cuddled around it like it was a baby. Naked, skin-on-skin. The doctor told me the Gray’s skin acts like a magnet, I mean, he had a bunch of words for it about chemical reactions and things I don’t remember, but that’s what it sounded like to me. Maybe like a sponge, sucking all the nutrients through Claire’s skin. It puts stress on a body, trying to support two lives at once. After the Gray moved in, Claire started eating two or three times as much as she used to, but she kept getting skinnier. I guess that’s why people call them Ticks.”
Silva shudders again. “I never understood why somebody would do it—I mean, trading their life for a tick.”
“For the privileges. For the money. Some mothers do it to get a family exemption from military service so their sons and daughters won’t have to go to the war and die.”
“But that’s not why your wife did,” concludes Silva. “She’s still at home with the Tick, and here.”