by Bobby Adair
“Penny?” I ask.
“I’ll give up control as soon as Phil tells me,” she answers.
“Stay on this heading for a while,” Phil explains. “When we get close to the debris fields, Nicky and me will take over.”
Since the Trogs started attacking the orbital battle stations, a sphere of debris has grown around the planet, making every trip through a risk.
“Suit yourself.” Penny sighs like she’s making herself comfortable and she signs off the comm link.
“You think it’ll work?” I ask.
Phil says, “No reason it shouldn’t.”
I hook my feet beneath a tie-down cleat on the floor of the cargo box and lean my back against a wall as I adjust my suit grav to simulate laying down.
Phil is hanging from the ceiling by his feet, and he’s facing me. The orientation strikes me as odd, but I know that’s my earth-borne intuition disagreeing with my updated reality. I don’t comment on it.
“So what’s the story with you and Silva?” he asks. “I noticed you two were talking and—”
“Why is this such a big thing?” I’m defensive about it. “What’s up with you and the Tick?”
“The Tick? What do you mean?” asks Phil.
I don’t know exactly what I meant, and I hesitate.
“Oh.” Phil nods and smiles. “You were deflecting.”
I shrug.
Phil isn’t bothered. “Can I be honest with you?”
“About?”
“Me and Nicky.”
“Yes,” I cautiously answer, “but I’m already getting a weird vibe. What about you and Nick?”
“This is all going to sound pretty weird, so do me a favor and don’t judge.”
“You know I’m going to judge you anyway,” I smile, but not meanly. “I won’t say anything rude if that works for you.”
“I guess it’ll have to.”
“Or,” I suggest, “you could keep it to yourself, whatever this thing is.”
Phil shakes his head. “I need to maintain my relationships, I think. Especially with people I’m close to. With humans.”
That gives me pause. In fact, it worries me. “What are you saying, Phil?”
He’s looking at me, probing his nosey fingers through my cortex, I’m pretty sure. He says, “You’re worrying too much about it. It’s not as serious as you’re thinking, and not as problematic as it’s going to sound when I say it.”
“Okay.” I surrender. “You win. Just tell me. I’ll try to keep my mouth shut about it. I’ll try not to judge, too much.” I figure I better add one more thing. “And I’ll try not to overreact.”
“Okay. Bear with me, first. What’s going on with you and Silva? I’m not prying. I’m just trying to work my way around to helping you understand.”
I look up at the Gray sitting on the ceiling of the cargo box with one arm wrapped around Phil’s leg to hold himself in place. I already don’t like where this conversation is going. “I told you about Silva. She’s seventeen. She won’t be eighteen for a few months yet. After her birthday, maybe we’ll give it a go.”
“But you like her, right?”
I labor through a sigh as I push myself to admit it. “Yeah. I do. She’s young, but she doesn’t seem like a teenage girl.” I glance at her down at the other end of the compartment, working with Lenox to tighten the straps holding some of the nukes in place. Though she’s in her bulky, shapeless orange suit, I imagine her again in translucent aqua, with thin copper wires lacing over her skin, a hint of pink on her breasts, and the dark—I stop myself. It’s easy to slip into my fantasies when it comes to Silva.
“Everyone grows up fast these days,” Phil muses. “Do you think it’s more than just sex?”
I laugh. “We’re a long way from sex.”
“What I mean to say is, do you think it’s more than infatuation? Do you think there’s more to this thing with you and Silva than just wanting to get laid?”
Thinking for a moment, and slipping into a natural defense mode, I deflect again. “Didn’t I ask you that before you got married?”
Phil nods. “Didn’t I ask you that before you married Claire?”
Ouch. He did. And I’d lied about it.
“You did lie,” Phil tells me.
“Stop that. If we’re going to talk, let’s talk. If you want to play those telepathic games, then do it with someone else.”
“I am sorry. It’s just that sometimes I slip. With Nick and me communicating that way all the time, it becomes habit. I apologize.”
I cast a stern look at Phil and tell him, “I don’t think at the time I knew I was lying. And if I was, I think I was lying more to myself than to you. The thing is—and you know it’s true because you married her twin sister—sometimes you really, really want something to be true, and it turns into the truth in your head. It’s like you believe if you lust hard enough after a girl, the relationship can be anything you tell yourself it is. What me and Claire never had was love. I wanted it to be that. For a long time, I thought it was.” A long sigh slides past my lips as the memories bring all their emotional baggage along. “Eventually, pretending stopped working. What about you and Sydney?”
“That’s a harder question,” admits Phil. “I knew from the beginning she didn’t love me. She wanted the life that being married to a bug-head grav tech would give her. She wanted to compete with Claire, but we both figured that out, I guess. I think, for us, for a while there, somewhere in the middle, we almost loved each other. We got along. We laughed. I was happy knowing she was trying to be happy, trying to make the best of it.”
“I’m sorry for how it ended, Phil. I truly am.”
“That’s not why I’m asking you about this.”
“Still, you need to know, I’d take it all back if I could.”
Phil shakes his head. “It wouldn’t matter. By the time Sydney and you went to bed, I knew it was over. No movie can last forever.” Phil smiles sadly. His memories still hurt, too. “I’d given up on it well before that. I guess I was just standing by the grave, waiting for one of us to fall in.”
“Jeez,” I laugh. “That’s a dark way to describe it. I think you’ve been spending too much time with Brice.”
Phil laughs sadly and nods, but turns the conversation back to relationships. “What about you and Brice?”
“What?” That takes me off guard. “Me and Brice? You mean, like maybe we’re gay?”
“No,” Phil assures me. “You two are close, right? You’re friends now. Good friends.”
I look down the length of the container, to see Brice competently engaged with the platoon, following my orders. “Yeah. We are. More than that. It’s that brotherhood-of-war thing that all those old movies and books talk about. There’s a bond there.”
“Like between us?” asks Phil.
“How do you mean?”
“Do you think we’re brothers?”
“Except for that different parents thing.” Like Brice, I’m amused with my wit.
“Except for that,” Phil agrees.
“You and me are brothers. Me and Brice are brothers.” I wave a hand at my platoon. “Everyone here is my family. I guess. I’d give my life for any of them. I think they’d do the same for me.”
“Yeah,” agrees Phil, “but you’re not close with most of them, not like you are with Silva and Brice, or me and Penny and Lennox.”
“Yeah.” I nod. “I’d say that’s right. What are you getting at?”
“Nicky and I are attached. Our language doesn’t have a good way to say it, but I think the closest I can come is to say we’re soul mates.”
I can’t keep the guffaw in, and I immediately feel bad for not doing so. “I’m sorry, I just—”
Phil is hurt. I can tell, but he doesn’t say anything. He just looks disappointed.
I collect my composure and apologize again before asking, “Maybe you should explain a little more.”
“First off, I don’t want you to worry.
That’s not what this is about. There’s a hierarchy the Gray mind needs to fit within. Once it’s established, it’s very hard to break. I’m the alpha in my mental bond with Nicky. She knows it. She accepts it. She’s comfortable with it. You don’t have to worry about her taking over my mind and turning me into a zombie or anything like that.”
I’m confused by Phil’s sudden switch on gender when talking about Nick the Tick. “Go on.”
“My point is, you never had it with Claire, but you know what it’s like to be bonded to someone,—emotionally, mentally, maybe?”
“I do,” I admit.
“Nicky and I are that way.”
"So is Nick, like, your girlfriend?" It’s not a tease. It’s a sincere question. Maybe that explains Phil’s new gender pronoun choices.
Phil takes a moment with it. “That’s another weirdness about this. You know the Grays are androgynous in the sense that any one of them can be what we’d call a female. The one in the pod with the lowest status of the six, is the one who lays the eggs. With Nicky being the lowest of the two in our tiny pod, that would kind of make him the female.”
“So, Nicky, then?” I ask. “That’s where this Nicky thing is coming from?”
Phil nods, like it’s the most perfectly normal answer to a mundane question.
“Pardon me for asking this next question, but are you planning on having a physical relationship with Nicky?”
Phil belts out a big laugh at that one. “No, no, nothing like that. What I’m getting at is that in my relationship with Nicky, I feel fulfilled. I feel very strange for saying it, but it’s like what we have is what I always wanted with Sydney, you know, except for the physical part. I feel like we’re bonded, and I hate to say it, in the deepest, fully sharing kind of love.”
“Love?” That seems like a step too far.
“I know it’s weird.” Phil starts looking at the floor, not wanting to meet my eyes. “I feel like a pervert for talking about it this way.”
I give it a minute as I let the idea sink in, as I try hard not to judge. Is it so strange? Is it as perverse as it seems on the surface? What is love, if not a bond that every human seeks, a bond of total trust, of complete acceptance?
Ick?
Hell, maybe Phil has found something with the Gray that humans between themselves can only aspire to. “Phil,” I tell him, “it’ll be hard to get used to the idea, but I’ll try and understand.”
“Really?”
“All I can do is try.”
“Thanks, Dylan.”
“I wouldn’t tell the others about this if I were you.”
“I already told Penny.”
Of course. “What did she say?”
“She hugged me and smiled. She didn’t judge.”
I roll my eyes.
Chapter 20
“Can you see this?” Penny calls over the comm.
Not with my eyes, I don’t say. But that’s not what she’s asking. “Specifically?” I ask.
I glance at Phil for a hint. He has that absent look he sometimes gets when he’s overly focused on viewing his surroundings with the bug in his head rather than his eyes.
Our lift is pushing hard g’s to keep it accelerating away from earth like all of the supply lifts do. Through the muddled grav fields, I can’t make out anything but the fuzziest of shapes. “The battle stations?” I ask, trying to guess what Penny wants me to see.
“I think earth has a ring.”
I look at Phil with the question on my face.
He’s paying attention, and he nods to confirm. “We still have time before we need to start maneuvering.” He looks toward the doors at the far end of the container.
I comm Brice and Lenox in. “Anybody up for some sightseeing?”
Brice starts to grumble, but I tell him there’s nothing cryptic in my question. No hidden danger.
Lenox shames him into participating, and after she readies everyone for what’s to come, together, she and Brice swing the outer doors open. Of course, the leaky cargo container is in vacuum, so there’s no rush of escaping atmosphere. The only sounds over the comm are the oohs and ahs of those looking.
It only takes a few moments for all of us to gather inside the open doors and stare.
“It’s debris from attacks on the battle stations,” Phil tells them.
It’s forming a ring around the earth, glowing against black space with reflected sunlight. The rings aren’t as crisp or seemingly solid as the ones around Saturn. And there’s a dim glow that looks like a haze everywhere. I know that’s all debris from the battle stations.
It’s Brice who ends our awe when he points out several ships little bigger than pinpricks trudging through the glowing debris. “They’re gathering the rocks and metals.”
Of course they are, but I don’t say it.
“Recycling it for the donuts,” says Lenox. She means the big space stations like the one we stole our lift from. She seems disgusted by the destruction of something so beautiful, even if it isn’t natural, even if it is the leftovers from a dozen mauled battle stations, any number of shattered human and Trog cruisers, Arizona class assault ships, and frozen bodies.
I realize then that the ring is as much a grave as anything, and I can’t even begin to guess how many dead are out there, not just in the ring, but on the shattered battle stations, or in their broken ships caught in other orbits, cluttering the space around earth.
It makes sense, too, that all of that needs to be cleaned, or one day, earth space won’t be navigable. All that high-speed debris flying in every direction would make it a shooting gallery.
“Penny,” I ask “do—”
“I already have defensive grav maxed. Not that there’s much of it in this lift, but it’ll protect us from anything that isn’t too big, or moving too fast.”
And that’s the crux of our plan to get out of the ragged line of lifts making their way to the donut.
We button up the doors, have everyone secure themselves to a floor or wall, and max suit power to our defensive fields. Phil and the Gray take over control of the ship when Penny gives the word.
Though expected, the acceleration is brutal. The ship shoots off at max-g, not in a straight line, but cutting high-g arcs in random directions, looking every bit like a lift whose control systems were just impacted by one of the billion hunks of rock filling earth’s orbits. To any Gray or human watching, we’d be just one more lift knocked out of control. One more casualty.
The trick of our plan will be waiting long enough before picking a new course. Given enough time, anything with a brain gets bored of watching the same thing continue to happen. Eventually, any Gray watching the line of lifts climbing up from the earth’s surface, will tire of watching us spin out of control and recede into the void. Nothing they haven’t seen a thousand times already.
Chapter 21
It’s pretty amazing how much speed can be built over time with a steady application of modest acceleration. And that’s how we came to think of it—modest. The grav lift, like every other clunker in the endless fleet of utilitarian machines, would never win a race with a ship like the Rusty Turd, but at forty-thousand knots, the max speed at which we figured the lifts’ grav shields could keep us protected, we were able to cover a few million miles over two days.
We wanted to be far enough away from earth that when a small cargo ship from Iapetus came alongside, we’d be so far away from everything that we’d attract no attention.
After transferring nukes and loading ourselves on board, we abandoned the grav lift and spent a few more days bouncing around the solar system, coming in and out of light-speed jumps, obfuscating our destination.
When we arrive in Spitz’s vast hangar, I can’t help but gawk. The Rusty Turd and Jill’s ship have been transformed. Spitz himself is standing near the bow of the Turd, smiling broadly as he watches us come in.
My crew offloads and I instruct them to head for the barracks. Judging by the state of the ships, I guess
we won’t have long before we get started on the interstellar leg of our journey. That’ll be a long, brutal trek.
Penny and Brice stay by my side as Spitz steps up to greet us.
“Did all go well?” he asks.
Nodding, I point a thumb back at the cargo cruiser that brought us in. “Eighteen nukes. No casualties.”
Spitz is pleased. Of course, he already knows this. We’d gone out in search of twelve and would have been pleased to find half that. He turns toward the pair of ships and rubs his chin. “We’re running some payload simulations.” He glances back at me. “I’m guessing you want to take all eighteen with you.”
“Nine on my ship,” I say. “Nine on Jill’s.”
“We don’t need to rush your tests,” says Penny. “I’d rather fly the ship with what it’s designed for than chance it with some last-minute crap.”
Spitz cackles as he walks toward the Rusty Turd. “This is all last-minute crap.”
Brice laughs.
“But you’ve had time to plan,” argues Penny. “These aren’t the only simulations you’ve run, right?”
Spitz puts an arm over Penny’s shoulder as we walk along. “Of course, my dear. Of course.”
“Tell us what you’ve done,” asks Brice, getting down to business.
We come to a stop off the bow. It looms large and fat with all of the additions. Not any longer than it used to be, but its diameter has doubled, at least.
Spitz points down the length of a metal addition running from the back edge of the grav lens to the stern. “It’s like a hotdog bun,” he says. “Your ship is the hotdog.” He chuckles, amused by his analogy. “These tanks, the buns, run the length of the hull. You can see how the six tanks completely wrap the hull.”
“Yeah,” Brice agrees. “Where do the nukes mount?”
“You’re getting ahead,” answers Spitz, walking up and rapping his knuckles on the metal. “This tank and the other five hold your hydrogen for the trip.”
“That’s all H?” gasps Penny. “We’ll be a flying bomb.”
“Only if you’re flying through oxygen,” Spitz corrects. “Hydrogen by itself in a vacuum is just a non-combustible gas. No danger.”