by John Mierau
A globule of liquid or plasmid, glowing hot, accelerated towards the camera.
The screens went black.
“Jesus.” Jake put his head in his hands. He looked back wordlessly at Lee, at Sameen, then clutched his scalp in his hands. “Jesus,” he gasped again.
The entire image played again. And again. No one looked away. No one spoke again.
In between each replay, the same words filled the black screen.
GOV SURRENDERS.
HUMANITY IS AT WAR.
THE TAKERS ARE COMING.
“Lee.” Jake shook Lee’s thigh. The pain finally overrode his stupor. He looked away from the nightmare playing out again on the side of the ship. He met Jake’s eyes, then looked where Jake looked.
He took in the toppled statues and destroyed buildings. The smells of war. It had all been for nothing, Lee realized. It meant nothing. The war—a wasteful squabble among siblings compared to what he’d just seen—was over. Both sides lost.
A real war was coming.
Jake shoved his leg again, and pointed. Reacher soldiers were emerging from the storm of smoke and dust, walking into the Row with weapons powered down, slung, or holstered. The slack shock on their faces made them look more like the victims of a sneak attack than the almost-victors they were.
Lee supposed they were both.
He watched an IRC officer stop to check on a Gov soldier lying in the street. The soldier was dead; the officer marched past. More Reachers marched on by, and some spat and kicked the body as they went by.
Lee struggled backwards, to raise his body over Captain Carson’s.
“We got her, Lee,” Sameen promised, easing him back down to the ground. “We’ll keep her safe.”
The woman in question was also trying to rise. The face mask muffled her words. She pointed to the left, the way they’d come.
Lee couldn’t grasp the words.
Carson made it easy for him by peeling the mask back. “Smokey!” she gasped.
Still not comprehending, Lee followed her finger.
He was just in time to see an Earth mech, smoke roiling from its back from a recent attack, raise both arms.
Lee saw its tri-cannons spin. He saw Jake jerk from bullet after bullet. Blood sprayed out his back. He heard Sameen grunt and watched the force of a bullet send her tumbling.
Lifting himself on one elbow, he pulled Captain Carson’s body down behind his.
Too late.
He saw blood spray out of her chest a moment before the bullet entered the back of his head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
In-between.
Death. Silence. Peace.
Then, dreams.
Dreams of screaming monitors, saws and drills, suction tubes.
Bone saws. Implants. Rejection, infection, fever, pain.
Death came to visit again, and again. Machines brought him back.
He no longer woke: he was switched on. When he was switched off, he dreamed.
Every time the world came back, the doctors were there. “Begin experiment number…”
At the end of every experiment, the doctors switched him off, and again he dreamed, of foothills and a woman holding his hand.
The doctors moved his heart and lungs and stuffed other things inside.
The doctors locked him in a room with no food, until he overrode the door codes with his mind and let himself out.
The doctors asked him to transform a melted blob of crysteel into a ball, a cube, an augmented dodecahedron...all with his mind.
And he did.
One day, the doctors turned his mind off, and left it off.
The doctors decided they had learned all they could.
But the man was kept alive. Just in case.
CHAPTER THIRTY
February 04 2350
Alliance Intercept Fleet staging ground
2 Million miles beyond Reach Lunar Orbit
Fold Event: Now
A Fleet of ships floated in space above Reach.
Then…it didn’t.
For hours on either end of a Fold Event, unimaginable energies gather. This storm of power mixes with local atmospheres to create auroras of violets and greens. In the vacuum of space, the fury is contained, reflected backwards on itself as bolts of red and orange plasma, raging around a sphere of purest calm.
While the power was concentrated and harnessed, the ships preparing for its rough grip felt nothing. Once the Fold Event reached its threshold, however, it was a different story altogether.
After ten months, the maelstrom reached a tipping point and breached the fabric of spacetime.
The Event lasted for less time than the human race yet had capability to measure. When it was complete, there was once again nothing in the patch of space where the convoy had been. No trace of light or heat, no errant ripple of gravity was left behind as the bubble of spacetime was Folded into another dimension.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
In-Fold
7 months and 8 days to Intercept
Like other bubbles in other mediums, the Fold immediately sought a way out of its new neighborhood, and hurtled along the path set for it by its makers.
Forces around the Fold pushed back. Light, gravity, magnetism, even time itself rebelled against the foreign body intruding where it had no business. A storm of unimaginable proportions was unleashed.
Veterans of convoys past simply called it ‘The Churn.’
Sixteen ships tumbled and rolled like dice tossed by an angry universe.
Computers did the actual piloting. The humans inside weren’t up to the task—even the most heavily modified of them. The crews could only wait for the storm to wane. Wait, and pray not too many were lost before turbulence settled into equilibrium.
Crushing gravity waves and electromagnetic pulses tossed ships into one another—or worse, to the peripheries of the Fold, where gravity and time didn’t play by the same rules.
Ships and lives were lost while crews huddled inside steel boxes they hoped would not become their coffins.
The storm passed, as all storms do, and the brave and the foolhardy ventured out to put the Fleet back together.
Days before the Fold Event, dozens of tenders—small, ultra-maneuverable prototypes designed for transport between the sixteen major vessels comprising the Fleet—had been bolted to the outsides of each ship. Some were scraped off during the Churn. Several of the craft smashed into each other, unable overcome the raging storm that was the Churn.
Still dozens more survived the storm, and immediately knuckled down to save lives.
The Fleet was stacked in a diamond, three ships deep in the middle. Ships radiated outwards in a computer-modelled pattern to reduce the potential for ship collisions and increase the likelihood of the crew’s survival. A Fleet-wide network of sensors played ‘traffic cop’ after the Fold Event, expanding and contracting the diamond in response to the best ‘storm reports’ available for the Churn.
Riding the tail end was the Peter Cloke.
The Cloke was an old ship. It had mapped the Reach system, explored asteroid belts, dove into gas giant atmospheres, it even spent a few decades within melting distance of Reach’s star. Its dubious reward for surviving the rigours of colonial exploration? The bottom-rear slot in the diamond pattern: the most unpredictable and dangerous place to ride out the Churn.
Cloke beat the odds again, making it through the storm with barely a scratch.
Each ship in the Fleet carried its own crew, a specialty service or two, redundant supplies and crew for other ships—and a component of the Marine Expeditionary Force that was the reason for the convoy’s existence. Cloke’s contribution to the war effort was to house and feed the Fifth and Sixth Battalions: over two thousand fighting men and women ready and eager to stop the Takers in their tracks and piss on their bodies. The ship was also home to Marine Aviator Squadron 3, making Cloke one of only three ships in the Fleet carrying pilots capable of navigating the Churn as good as,
some said better than, their supercomputer counterparts.
The recovery effort began with such a pilot lifting off from the Cloke, long before the silicon traffic cops permitted any other ships—with human or machine pilots—to follow. That first tender hit speeds that would have crushed a lesser-equipped ship, performing maneuvers possible only by a handful of people who ever existed. That pilot’s bravery set the standard for all the other small shops amidst the weird bolts of red and oranges plasma at the Fold’s periphery.
“What am I doing out here?” Willard’s mouth asked, back in his body. “I’m a goddamn parcel jockey!”
“You ain’t been that in a long time, Angel!” jeered the other voice in the cockpit as Lieutenant Willard “Angel” Tsu accelerated this ship away from the top-center docking port on Harrison, home of the Fleet's Third Battalion.
Willard snorted. Bowen had come a long way from being a green PFC assigned to Willard’s unit for the last op of the last war.
So had he, Willard admitted. A few years back, Willard Tsu honestly and truly had been a mild-mannered parcel service pilot. One who would have lost his shit trying to fly through this shrapnel-fest. That was before two years of civil war recalibrated his freakout-meter.
And long before the Takers.
What he saw on that flight would join the cocktail of horrors that kept him from sleeping, sometimes for days. Being busy helped, and there was plenty that needed doing. Willard had dropped a team of construction and repair specialists on Harrison to plug some holes made when a sensor array tower broke free from its neighbour, the Whipp. Before that, he’d unloaded the last of Rambler’s crew onto Thunder with minutes to spare before a ripple of explosions sucked out Rambler’s atmosphere and made it snow in the Fold.
He hoped Ops would send him back to ferry the repair techs from Harrison on to Rambler next. At least a couple of them were only moonlighting with construction and repair. Willard would bet his extra ration cards they were wielders, judging by the dozens of blue, glowing ports lining their suits. Maybe they’d share some of Special Weapons Divisions’ newest tricks on their next ferry ride.
Willard had been flying for way too long, mapping holes in ships’ hulls and ignoring the many human-shaped objects tumbling, flash-frozen, through the Fold. He figured he was half an hour away from flying his tender into something hard, and dreaming it was his pillow, when he realized the Churn might finally be blowing itself out.
Willard summoned up the live triage map being broadcast from Fleet Ops, looking for where he was needed next. No more red ship outlines, just a few oranges and yellows, and all those back where the Churn’s effects slashed deepest into the stack of ships. “I swear they stuck all-Reacher-crews at the back on purpose, Bone,” Willard growled.
“Careful, Lieutenant, we are a united people now. I hear that every day on the ‘Fleet wide,’” the voice sharing the cockpit’s oxygen deadpanned.
An authoritative woman’s voice made both marines jerk halfway to attention. “Cloke Tender Five? This is Ops, initiating audio channel. Stand by for special deployment. In the meantime…” The voice became a degree softer and brighter. “Outstanding flying today, Angel. Fleet owes you a debt, Tee-Five. A damn long line of souls from a lot of worlds are still kicking, thanks to your flying. Bravo Zulu! And a friendly reminder? This is a Fleet-wide channel you’re talking on, dumbass.”
Bone—Lieutenant Dylan Bowen—whistled innocently somewhere on Willard’s right.
Willard closed his unseeing eyes. “Copy open channel, Ops. And copy slap upside the head. Awaiting special deploym—”
An explosion lit up the blackness off up and to the right, the first of several. The tender automatically reduced light penetration through the cockpit windows and swung its nose into the shockwave that would follow. The ship faced upwards now, at another Reacher ship at the far top side of the diamond pattern. Tall, rib-shaped columns designed for large-scale, in-Fold construction and ship repair rose from the flat, rectangular hull of the Vengeance.
Or used to.
The tender’s sensors captured every instant of the ship’s demise as it fell prey to an invisible whip of gravity, one last blow from the dying Churn that cleaved the ship in half.
The front half of Vengeance disintegrated into a cloud of glittering pieces. Atmospheric gases and fuel sparked more explosions in the cloud. The back half accelerated faster and faster towards the equator-like central plane of the small bubble of spacetime and collapsed under sun-crushing pressures into tiny accretions of matter when it touched the edges of the Fold.
The other half of Vengeance was hurled forward.
Willard screamed the warnings with his implants and with his voice. He screamed even as he jockeyed Tee-Five out of the way of the death cloud of burning, collapsing spaceship. He screamed more after dozens of pieces of what had been Vengeance stabbed through the Harrison.
It took twenty-one seconds for Vengeance’s corpse to cross eighty-odd kilometres of Fold and stab into Harrison’s heart, ending her and her crew's existence. Willard experienced every instant in crystal clear resolution.
He wanted to throw up. He wanted to cry. He wanted to piddle in his flight suit. He wanted to turn tail and fly back to the Cloke.
He flipped his eyes through the electromagnetic spectrum, recording the death throes of the Harrison and her crew. Sparks from failing engines. Warm bodies turning cold and hard as ice in the vacuum. Pleas from pockets of survivors choking the comms channels.
“Ops! Request additional tenders to search for survivors. There are compartments that didn’t breach, but we have to—”
“Negative, Tee-Five!” The voice of Ops was choked and raw now, but ugly with command. “Repeat, negative. Stand by for…special deployment.”
“Ops! Harrison needs evac now!” Upon hearing its pilot name a ship, the tender’s flight computer oh-so-helpfully displayed an information packet for the repurposed gas-liquid tanker.
Including the crew complement. 577 souls.
Willard pinched his flesh and blood with eyes shut, as if that would block the data filling the virtual reality he was interfacing. It didn’t. Hauling himself out of the reclined pilot’s chair did, though.
He kept his eyes shut as the feeds from cameras, sensors, and onboard computers disappeared from his prefrontal cortex. He waited half a second, while his body stopped and started breathing again, before he opened his eyes.
Willard was back in the tender’s cockpit, inside his skull again. The space narrowed to a curving tip ahead of him. Control panels and screens lined the nose below a wide window that stretched over his head. Matching windows covered most of the left and the right of the small compartment.
The co-pilot’s chair was folded into the wall to the right. Lieutenant Bowen stood in the spot and stared out the right window. “We go on,” Bowen said, without looking back, and without a trace of the cocky attitude he worked so hard to perfect.
“On,” Willard agreed around a lump in his throat.
“Tee-Five! What is your status? Lieutenant Tsu, we’ve lost your feeds, report!”
Willard heard the panic in the voice and grimaced. He forced himself to sit back down, but he kept the back of his skull away from the matching plate on the headrest, only slipping one wrist onto the shallow groove on the chair’s arm. He wanted to stay in the cockpit with his friend Bone a little while longer, thank you very much.
The weaker implant on the inside of his wrist was contact enough to confirm his life signs and remind the ship’s sensors to keep sending data back home.
“I have a green board, Ops. Say again, Tee-Five is good to go. The pilot, though?” He stared past Bowen’s shoulder at the tumbling graveyard. “He needs a second.”
A moment’s silence and the voice came back, less intense. “Understood, Angel,” the woman said, and her voice said that she did. “Stay safe, it’s a crowded sky. Stand by for special deployment.”
Willard swallowed hard. “Acknowledged, Ops.�
��
How much was too much to take? Willard asked that question a lot. Too much. He pushed it out of his head on a breath of air, filled his lungs and held it, and repeated until the pain in his heart eased. A little.
He thought of Elena, back on Reach—safe, for the moment—and the pain eased a little more.
Both men stared out the wraparound windows of the tender’s cockpit module. Small chunks of debris echoed off the windows every so often. The tender’s autopilot moved the ship now and then to avoid bigger chunks.
Eventually, the folks in back rang the doorbell.
“Lieutenants! What happened? Why aren’t we moving?”
Thanks to the tender’s gravity drive, reverse engineered from studying field dynamics at play in the Churn of past Folds, the boys in the back had no clue what had just happened. No clue what had just been lost. The ride had been that smooth.
Willard let Bowen answer. He turned his back to his friend to look out the left window and rub the wet from his eyes. He watched the distant red and orange streaks of plasma flit by, illuminating the spherical shape of the massive Fold surrounding them all. “Ops to Tee-Five, you are ordered to make best speed to Ryson and make secure her crew for transfer. This comes directly from the Commodore Kagen, Angel. Further instructions to follow.”
Willard flashed a questioning expression at Bowen.
Ryson?
Bowen shrugged. “‘Not to reason why. Am I right?”
Fighting bone-deep exhaustion, Willard leaned back until his head rested on the chair’s interface contact. “Acknowledged, Ops. Tee-Five en route.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO