by Stephen Moss
No one below gave voice to it. To the sacrifice they had just witnessed. Without a verbal order, the ships just began to open fire again, Minnie leading the charge. But now the Ubitsyas had closed the distance to the big ships and they came on in a series of strafing runs that wreaked havoc on the fleet, so slow, so big, so vulnerable as they shuddered from the pounding of their hulls being hit and the echo of their massive guns lighting up the atmosphere. Big, rolling waves washed outward from their waterlines as they shook, like great battle drums sounding out the charge.
The men and women of the fleet fought with fervent diligence, and for a moment it almost felt like they might carry the day. But where the Ubitsyas fell in a steady flow, the fleet’s losses came as great blows. The USS Port Royal, the biggest ship in the fleet, suddenly erupted, her deck awash with flame. One of her big forward guns had been targeted by four Russian fighters and had come dislodged as it fired, ripping a great wave of molten steel along her decks. When the fire breached the armory beneath, the explosion sent the mighty three-gun turret flying backward, through the bridge, crushing three hundred men in an instant and killing the command and control systems of the big ship.
Still the fleet seemed determined, but only a moment later Admiral Tokano’s flagship seemed to implode, her entire deck folding in on itself. Minnie had seen it coming only a moment before. She had been targeting an Ubitsya inbound on the destroyer, but when she winged it, it did not try to flee, but instead accelerated.
It was a kamikaze maneuver, and it had its desired effect. The fleet began to lose its cool. They began to fray, and Minnie sensed their fire beginning to falter.
Mikhail saw it to, they were failing. He smiled. It had not been a kamikaze attack at all. Mikhail had seen the foolhardy way the pilot had flown right into Minnie’s firewall and had decided the plane was now best used as a missile, rather than as fodder for Minnie’s sharp knives. So he had commandeered the plane remotely, ratcheted up its thrusters and flown it right into the bridge of the destroyer even as it continued to fire, softening the ship’s armor before impact.
The Russian pilot had screamed as he was sacrificed.
But Mikhail had smiled. These were just pawns after all. Pawns in his great gambit. And he was so close to checkmate.
- - -
Barrett: ‘the fleet is all but destroyed. and there are still more than forty russian fighters surviving. at this stage i think the stratojets would be best used as part of a strategic retreat, rather than a counterattack.’
Neal: ‘no! i will not abandon rolas.’
Barrett: ‘i am not sure what choice we have, neal. they have broken the line, we have three stratojets almost at the base but the next reinforcements will not be here for forty more minutes.’
Neal: ‘i know that, barrett, and we must do what we can to fend them off till the main fleet arrives. only a few more minutes, that’s all we need.’
Barrett: ‘neal, while we may be able to delay them slightly, there is no way we can maintain a perimeter around the elevator. no matter what we do they will be able to get close enough to fire on it, neal …’
Neal did not want to hear it. But Barrett said it anyway.
Barrett: ‘… neal, the cable is coming down. there is simply nothing we can do to stop that now.’
Neal screamed. He screamed as hard as he could, the walls of his office barely containing the sound as it reverberated around him. He did not respond to Barrett, and in the absence of a counter order from Neal, Barrett’s words became action.
Minnie:
Minnie did not mention Barrett. He was on the base’s east side, nearly a quarter of a mile from the only landing platform the StratoJet could safely come in to and get away from in time. Barrett did not discuss the implications and in the mounting panic Neal failed to grasp the full cost of their defeat.
For Barrett could see the coming Russian planes. He could see the smoldering hulks of the fleet behind them. They had only two minutes. Neal may be able to get to safety from his position on the far side of the base but Barrett knew he was not going anywhere. He would have to take his chances in the bunker along with the rest of the base personnel.
Minnie:
Barrett: ‘neal! go … now!’
Neal reacted as if possessed, running, turning this way and that as Minnie directed him in an almost drunken stumble.
Already it was beginning. Neal could hear the base’s fixed defenses opening up, blending with the reports coming into his mind from the many sensors that surveyed the surrounding area. The Russians came in hard, rushing the remaining base defenses with almost suicidal glee. But it was not suicide, it was attrition, and the odds were well and truly with them now. The base guns were not designed for this scale of attack and they barely they took out five or six more of the Ubitsyas before they too crumpled and died like the naval hulks still smoldering and sinking to the East.
Neal was barely aboard the lone StratoJet before it was banking and accelerating away. He was happy to see Quavoce and Banu were already on board, but the sight brought a dawning realization of the many that were not. He collapsed into a heap on the floor of the jet, helped by Quavoce as the G-forces immediately began tugging at the three passengers.
Mikhail considered pursuing the plane he saw taking off, but decided it was best to focus on his main target. It was exposed now. He had cut away the skin and muscle, he had sawed into the very bone, and now he could see the marrow within. He looked at it and with relish he ordered the last of his Ubitsyas to cut it down.
- - -
Thousands of miles above, at Terminus One, the crew of the big station rushed against time to try and save it. Warned of the impending attack, they had started reeling themselves in. They were sacrificing the gains of a weight positive orbit where they had used their weight to pull the mighty cable tight. Now they were furiously pulling themselves inwards, down, closer to earth, and hopefully into an orbit they could sustain once the cable was cut. It would be the widest orbit any manned craft had ever had, but it was their only hope.
As news of the first cable fraying and splitting came to them, they braced. It would be over an hour before the rippling shock wave reached them, but they were not going to wait until then to be ripped apart by it. Crews struggled to disconnect the cable they knew was now loose, to set it free before its weight came flying out from Earth.
It was a horrific sight as it started to surge outward. It was like a climber seeing ropes falling past them, ropes they were holding on to, ropes that were the only thing between them and an endless black abyss below.
It was a sight that would drag on for days as the terrific length of the cable flew outward into space, falling back and behind them as it went, but they did not have time to contemplate it, and hoped not to be around to see it. They were already receiving the signal about the second cable coming loose. Only two more left now, and their fate was resolving.
The voice came out over the PA and via spinal-link.
Captain Cashman: ‘this is the captain. i am afraid the station is not going to make it. but we have a plan. i am hereby ordering all personnel to move into crew module five. i repeat, all personnel are ordered to immediately drop everything you are doing and move to crew module five. we are going to jettison the main station. we have less than three minutes until i have to blow the hatches so let’s not dawdle. we will jettison in three minutes. not a moment longer. i repeat, not a moment longer.’
He knew it would mean giving up any hope of putting the station in steady orbit and saving the massive structure, but they would be able to use the ejection of its mass to push them down and away, and if they timed it right, they might save the bulk of the eighty or so crew that had found themselves aboard when
disaster struck.
One person, though, did not respond. The captain reached out with his mind.
Captain Cashman: ‘dr. hauptman, i must ask you to stop what you are doing. we are evacuating your section. please, doctor, you have to move. you have to move now.’
But she was not listening. She was focused on a task that was all consuming, and she had all but cut herself off from the outside world. Even if she could have heard she would not have stopped, though.
For she was giving birth. Not to a person, even that would have been easier to distract yourself from than the task she was embarked upon. For the second time in her life, she was giving birth to a starship. Far below, on a desolate island in a cold, dark sea, she was tapped into a new creation. Like New Moon One, it was the first of its kind to be made by humanity. But unlike New Moon One, this was a profoundly militant craft.
Some part of her, a muted, two-dimensional echo of her full self comprehended on some level that she was in danger. That little part of her wished she was down there, on the globe they were so tenuously attached to, at the actual site of the craft’s birth. But her work had taken her here, to the massive labs they had built for her in space, to the experiments she could only do up here, free from gravity, free from atmosphere, painting on the blank canvas of the vacuum.
But as that small part of her mind mourned what it vaguely understood as a coming departure, a break from home, her real mind was far away, transmuted by the massive subspace hammer that formed one of the hubs of the station and from there out across subspace, and into the heart of a beast.
She was fueling it, driving it, compressing stupendous energies into four minor hearts around its soul, and then, once they were beating, focusing inward, to the core, to the massive weaponized reactor that was the beast’s heart. The four ancillary hearts had needed to beat before she shocked this one into life, they were the only thing that could control the beast. They were the lion tamers. Or more apt they were like rodeo clowns that would try to poke and prod the preposterous power at the Skalm’s heart into conformity.
She could feel it coming alive in front of her machine eyes, around her, inside her. Breathing, beating with dizzying power. A massive heart, forty feet wide.
On a desolate peninsula, deep in middle of the lonely outpost that was Deception Island, technicians and engineers took shelter, hiding behind shields and bunkers as the beast began to roar. Blue flames erupting from the myriad nozzles around its five hearts. It wobbled, rising from the cradles and gantries that had carried it from its golden womb a quarter of a mile away. It rose under its own power for the first time, and seemed to hang there, swaying as its engines thrummed, balanced on a sea of improbable power, an antagonistic juggling of a thousand spurts of fusion madness every second, melting the very cranes that had held it, buffeting the ground underneath its four great wings and its spherical, spiny core.
Birgit saw it now as a perfect creation: balanced, tuned, a star of potential, waiting only for someone to command it. And away across another ocean just such a mind was being brought in to take the reins of the newly birthed dragon from its mother’s arms. To manage it and try to fly the magnificent beast. A small, innocent mind. Maybe the only person humanity yet had who could really pilot the ship.
A girl. A girl who was even now fleeing herself, lying unconscious in the back of a hurtling StratoJet in the arms of her adopted father, mechanical pulses in her mind stimulating her cortices, wakening her brain to the task at hand.
At the request of Birgit, and with the permission of Quavoce, she took the reins and the big beast began bucking and braying as its saddle was put on, a stallion to be mastered.
But Banu only giggled, giddy with joy, laughing at the feeling of the blue fusion blood now pumping through her veins. Her feet firmly in the stirrups she dug in her heals, beat her wings, puffed out her chest, and roared with all her machine might and the hundred-meter-wide Skalm erupted into the sky, thumping the ground below with titan feet and leaping straight up, a hundred supermen, a thousand Hektors, a million screams. It was epic. It was wonder, awe, and terror … it was ecstasy, love, and hate. It was power and it was possession.
Chapter 45: Outbound
A tear ran down Birgit’s cheek as she witnessed it. A tear of joy at the final creation of this first interstellar battleship; she was as proud of it as she had ever been of anything in her life. But it was also partly a tear of sadness at the dawning realization of what the birth had cost her.
In their haste to complete the first Skalm she had given all she had. Exhausted, frail far beyond her years, she opened her eyes to the harsh price she had been forced to pay. Captain Robert Cashman stood over her. Easing her return to reality.
“Dr. Hauptman, are you OK?”
She shook her head, more to clear it than to disagree. Then, locking eyes with the man, she nodded meekly. She was confused.
“Where are we?” she eventually managed to say as control of her vocal chords came back to her. She had been under for close to ten hours. Far longer than anyone should be, and her senses and limbs seemed alien to her, like a suit, like seeing the world through an apartment building intercom, the image blurry, the sound garbled.
“We are on Terminus, Doctor. You are safe.”
She looked at him, “Safe? What happened? I remember … a call … a call to evacuate?”
He looked troubled for a moment and then mastered his emotions and smiled, clearly mourning something but not wanting to let it show on his face, like a parent hiding a truth from a sick child. But she was far too smart to not figure it out on her own as the distant memory came back to her.
She struggled out of the cradle that had held her immobile body, pulling at the restraints with a growing franticness. The captain was distraught at her obvious terror, trying to calm her. She screamed.
“Doctor, please,” he pleaded. “Doctor, stop!”
But she was already clambering free, throwing herself across the white, cylindrical room to a viewport.
Nothing. Only blackness.
She pushed back, flipping in the air as she did so, her months in space giving her a grace that only came with truly living with weightlessness. She found another port. The sun, off to the left, but rolling away even as she watched it. She oriented herself with the skill of a physicist and pushed off one last time, to one last port, above her to her left.
She saw it. The Earth. Round, blue-white-green, an image of fractal detail. Her home. Drifting away.
Like a castaway on a raft watching an island move off, so close, but so far, she watched. And now she made out the tiny dot of the crew module, like a ship on that same ocean also moving away, out of reach, a vanishing hope.
“You ejected them,” she said, understanding coming to her at last.
The captain came to her side, “Yes, I had to.”
“Of course you did. You used our mass to push the module into orbit. They will be safe?” He nodded, and she struggled with a combination of happiness that her colleagues and friends would be saved and a profound longing to be with them.
The bulk of the former Terminus station continued on its slow revolution as it span away and the view shifted inexorably to the blackness of the beyond once more.
Suddenly her expression changed as a new even more tragic realization came to her. Ferociously, she wheeled on him.
“But, Captain! No! Why are you here!” she screamed at him, looking into his eyes. “No, please! Tell me you didn’t!”
She stared at him, her eyes pleading, filling with tears as she saw that he had done what she suddenly feared. He did not explain himself. He merely looked at her with the patience of a father. A man who had sworn to protect the people in his charge. A man who, when faced with having to send one of them off into the void, had done the only thing he could. He had joined her.
“Why!” she screamed at him, sobbing, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him. “Why didn’t you go with them? You could have left me here!
You could have lived!”
He did not fight her. He held her stare as she shook him. She needed to exhaust her anger and so he let her rage wash over him, eventually reaching out to her and taking her in his arms so she could sob into his chest, the two of them rotating slowly within the big lab, within the big station, spinning gently, silently, away into space.
He’d had a few more precious minutes to come to terms with their fate than she had, and when the first thrust of her grief had ebbed from her, he spoke with calm stoicism into her ear.
“Doctor, we are alone, yes, but we are not in any immediate danger. We have three functioning fusion cells on board, and no doubt many more lying dormant among your team’s many labs around the hub. We have food enough to last many lifetimes, and water recycling facilities to keep us going long into our old age.”
She pulled back from him, astonished at his serene demeanor and her tears stopped, halted by the tranquility of his cool confidence.
“And, Doctor, I think we can safely say we have the best view in town.”
She could not help but laugh, a laugh bordering on hysteria, perhaps, but a laugh nonetheless and he smiled in return. Calming herself with one, long, epic sigh emanating from her very core, she settled her emotions.
“I have two things to say to you, Captain,” she said eventually, looking into his eyes, her own still wet, but clearer now as she started to come to terms with what had happened to them, and what he had done for her. “Firstly, you are obvious completely mad.” His eyes widened, as did his smile. “Which means we are probably going to get along just fine.”
He laughed a little, shrugged, and nodded again as she went on. “And that is probably a good thing, because it seems we are, quite literally, going to spend the rest of our lives together.”
He laughed again. It was tinged with a profound pain which would take a long time to fully accept, but for now he kept that beneath the surface, a brave smile on his face as she then pulled away from him a little and deliberately took his hand in hers.