by V. M. Law
“I have senior MarsForm employees, engineers. A Vectoring Technician. He is promising to provide us with information.”
Friesing paused for a moment and then laughed. It sounded as if he hadn’t laughed since he left the Earth’s atmosphere, Kasey thought, and that must have been before she had even been born, to judge by the rigidity of his uniform and the amount of badges and pins that stapled his breasts. She doubted gunfire would even penetrate the shield of multicolored decorations glittering on the man’s chest.
“I know what you have. Who you have.”
Kasey didn’t let her gaze stray an inch, though she felt others’ wandering momentarily in her direction as she stood off frame. Anton and Sasha sat at a computer console, a controlling mechanism for—?
Even Kasey didn’t know. She let her eyes wander around the room and saw the nine people present as they shuffled their feet, averted their gazes from the screen and tried to occupy themselves with preparing weapons. Sticks, compared to what they were up against, and she knew it.
There had to be guns somewhere.
Chapter 33
“You’re free,” Jessup said, and Caspar Faulk showed no emotion. Made no reaction. His face would have been pained too greatly by the effort and his lips would have cracked again. And if he didn’t get the taste of blood out of his mouth he would lose it and they would have to shoot him in the back of the head to silence his raving.
Besides, he knew it was coming.
It was obvious, to him. He didn’t lie. The Harbinger was on its way, he had told them, and they didn’t believe it would show up so fast. They didn’t believe he would activate a warp drive and save their useless carcasses for the second god damned time if they just gave him the chance, and they probably wouldn’t believe the severity of MarsForm’s no quarter policy when its employees wandered so far from the populated areas.
He thanked Jessup for the black eye and the broken nose and busted lips with a dull, “Thanks,” but he figured the man probably assumed that he thanked him for the show of mercy and regretted speaking at all.
The keys, wedged into the lock, with Jessup standing there—tail between legs and tears brimming—and Caspar relished it. Every minute. But he didn’t stand up. He rested his head against the cold steel of the walls and wondered for a moment—with a small voice in the back of his head like the ringing left over when you plug your ears—why humanity decided that every surface in the final frontier should be made of steel or titanium or cobalt or whatever. He laughed aloud at that thought, and imagined that his mirth irritated Jessup to the point of despair, and let his laughter carry even farther down the halls.
“You want me to save you, don’t you?” His head swam. Even as he tried to keep a level gaze, the man’s shadow elongated and retracted and his silhouette shimmered.
“I want you to redeem yourself. You are still Ascendancy.” Jessup turned on his heels and left Caspar in his cell, the key and its chain hanging from the lock and swaying with the force of Jessup’s hand releasing it from his clasp.
***
She found the guns in the Captain’s liquor cabinet, behind a false wall. Illegal ones. They were sleek and heavy and she had to make two trips from the cabin to the bridge proper so that she could lug the firepower over to the other crewmembers.
“There is more where this came from,” she said, a smile spreading across her face. The other still looked like cartoon characters to her, their faces bearing the same expression of mournful waiting.
When she set the guns down, she went back for more.
Jakob ran after her.
“Kasey, what are you doing? We need to leave. The trawler is ready.”
She stopped. Turned. Processed the statement and let her mind go blank. Tried to forget it, but the words stuck.
“You are leaving these people.”
“Jessup left to prepare.”
She didn’t expect a betrayal from someone she had just met to hurt so badly, but the look in his eyes drove home the reality: she gave up everything for a militarized, quasi-patriotic collection of doomsday activists.
“You can leave. We don’t need you.”
“Not without you. Kasey, Corbin is waiting. He needs you more than these people.”
His face hung in her imagination, though after her long interment she found the features fuzzy, lacking definition, as if the entirety of her life before going under were part of someone else’s story. Corbin, alive and on Earth, waiting for her. She had to question it. Was Jakob a pathological liar, an agent of some kind? Did he make the story up to get her to come along with him?
She couldn’t answer any of these questions as she stormed off and left him screaming in her wake, but the impression that she was being tested lingered. As she entered the solitude of the Captain’s cabin, she distracted herself from the moment by setting herself a plan.
The Ides in the lower hold.
They would do well not to forget about them, for their own safety.
But for the safety of the boarding party?
She didn’t care much about that, and the Ides felt similarly to herself.
But how to release them?
She racked her brain for ideas until she found herself pacing back and forth in the cabin and talking aloud. If the ship were partitioned so that the lower decks could be cordoned off, they were safe here on the bridge as long as the seals held and the doors stayed bolted. But if they opened…
If they opened, everyone was done for. The vibrations alone would set the entire hoard buzzing and by the time they settled down again, anyone left standing would be barricaded so deeply into a closet somewhere that they would never dig themselves out. She thought, ignoring her headache and running through ideas.
The trawler?
If they boarded the trawler, stayed quiet? The boarding party could find themselves in a mess of trouble, but what would become of them when the hunt abated? They would be marooned. As far from salvation as she was, when she got pulled into Pluto’s orbit.
Nothing came to her. They would have to fight.
Right?
She questioned herself and found her reflection staring back at her from the sleek finish on the metallic table, the Captain’s work desk. She looked old. The streak of white stood out and she felt as if she would grow accustomed to its presence on the left side of her head, running from her temple to the knot on the back of her scalp where she tied her hair.
She didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to stop questioning herself and the piles of questions mounting in her heart caught up to her at once, fell on her shoulders with the weight of a body vest. A hundred pounds of iron. A boulder, crashing from the mountain tops above. Her knees trembled.
An alarm blared, shattering her nerves and announcing the proximity of an approaching vessel with heat signatures emanating from its focal weaponry. The fight would happen here, she decided. In the Cabin. One entrance, one body wide, until they fragged it. But they would last until then.
She had no doubt, and nothing left to fight for. She had banished her only chance of leaving this ship. Her only chance of seeing Corbin.
Chapter 34
He walked with a limp and his ankles looked like an exotic fruit, bulbous and red and shining. His shirt pushed against his nose, as it grew more saturated and then crusted over as the blood dried, gaining the appearance of an old man’s haggard beard, and he had to struggle not to laugh as he imagined his appearance when he made it to the bridge.
The alarms kept up and he wasn’t sure, but he felt confident that the tremors running through his knees and the low drone that penetrated his swollen ears was the sound of the Harbinger’s arrival. He tried to quicken his pace, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He winced as the needles shot to every corner of his body from their epicenter at his kneecaps. With each step, he replayed the memories: Jessup with the pistol butt, Jessup with the baton. The pipe. His fists. And through it all, the same disinterested face.
He loa
thed the man.
He pressed forth.
So close.
The bridge doors—vaulted and stark white, like slabs of alabaster concealing a mythical kingdom—loomed in front of him and their soaring height made them appear, to his eye, as if they leaned over to inspect more closely the feeble man approaching. Each step drew a wince of pain as he limped on.
Finally, he placed the palms of his hands on the cold metal and rested his forehead against the icy surface. His sweat disappeared instantly, sublimated into gas and drifted off. He ached. Every bone. Every muscle. He let his weight sag against the door and reached for the keypad, entering each digit with a shaky, trembling hand, and a finger that left an imprint of blood smeared over each number.
The door slid back, and he hobbled into the gathered assembly. His eight survivors—for he still saw them as his—and Kasey, and the two interlopers. The fucking Ascendancy. He wanted rid of his life badly that he waddled right into their paths and fell to his knees before them.
“The warp drive.”
He sounded to himself like a man rescued from a desert, and couldn’t begin to imagine how the others perceived him. He heard a gasp.
“We need to turn on the warp drive.”
And then he collapsed again thinking—right before the blackness crept in and obscured everything—that his ordeal would never end, and that maybe he was already dead, doomed to repeat his risings from and fallings to unconsciousness, a vicious cyclical loop that held its prisoners in a sickening grasp, like an anaconda.
***
The engineer had entered his code and the ship jumped into a wormhole that appeared before the windshield and terrified everyone that beheld it with its insidious shifting nature. They all felt the jangling feeling of being marbles in a shaken bag and then it stopped, and the Harbinger came to a rest with the wreck of the Vulcan suspended below it. A great roaring cheer erupted on the floor of the bridge command, and the engineer partook of the celebration. His desk neighbor took out a bottle, popped the cork.
The man offered the engineer a glass, which he accepted and they clinked their glasses together to celebrate the first successful field-test of a localized and completely controlled warp drive.
He watched the foam spew from the bottleneck and pool on the floor like vomit.
The footage would roll soon, and they would be shrouded in darkness as they monitored the weapons systems of the Vulcan, its heat signatures, and the security feed that they had hacked from its mainframes before jumping.
He took the opportunity to walk down his aisle, to where another engineer celebrated with her own libation and the he tipped his hat, which he wasn’t wearing. She returned the gesture with a smile and a laugh and they sat together as the panoramic monitors displaying the innards of the Vulcan flicked on and the soldiers stomping through the halls in tight formations lined up before the order to begin blasting through doors came down.
They looked like toys, she said, as they followed their ordained paths down one hall, through another, to rest at this door or that.
He smiled but he didn’t say anything. His mind hadn’t stopped reeling from the dawn of a new era of man. The dawn of warp speed. Since the Ides, the race of man had fallen into the dejection of a species that knew it faced extinction and didn’t care, or couldn’t change it. But they could. They had a localized warp drive.
He downed his glass. The soldiers had begun blasting and smoke rose, pooling at the ceiling and soon the feed would be completely obscured, he thought. Someone on the bridge shouted out, and a notification flashed across the woman’s screen. They had located the fugitives. On the bridge, in the Captain’s quarters.
On the screen, the soldiers stopped marauding and fell back into their close-knit formations and stomped down the hallways again, all headed for the same place. Every monitor the same: the long files of mercenaries in their armor, lugging their equipment. Blowing doors and rolling through the smoking maws that remained afterward and finding nothing and doing the same thing to the next doorway, uncaring of the time that went into its calibration, the perfection of its parameters.
A new age.
The Age of Warp Speed.
He went back to work on isolating the shipping pods contaminated with grasshoppers and relaying the information, but in his mind, he thought about the future, the frontiers, the possibilities. Humans had the warp drive, and he partook.
Chapter 35
Kasey Lee tightened her grip on the rifle she cradled and pressed her body against the steel outcropping that held up the vaulted ceiling of the bridge above her. Sweat stung the scrapes and abrasions on her fingers, the palm of her left hand, and the pain of salt in her wounds reminded her every second that the bullets would fly, any minute. She shot a nervous glance off to Caspar, who huddled over his console, and let her gaze wander to Jessup who sat at his.
This plan was insanity, pure madness, and they would all die in a few quick seconds after that door gave way. Already, she could hear the troops amassing on the other side, the grind of a laser cutter searing off the mechanisms that kept it fastened in its frame. Soon, the laser would melt through the door and as the locking wheel fell from its perch with a dull thud, the soldiers would stomp in and make short work of the janitorial staff huddled behind boxes, upturned tables, hanging from rafter like sharpshooters who never received training. They would last fourteen seconds. The number hung in her mind and she found she didn’t care. She just wanted one more shot. One more moment of life.
“Engines are primed, activate the drive,” Jakob screamed. He sat at the high command chair—the throne, as it was called—and monitored the systems that had been activated when the crew forfeited its sanity and threw their votes behind Caspar’s ridiculous scheme.
A warp drive. He still didn’t believe it, but what other chance did they have.
“We need more energy!” Caspar replied, the tenor of his voice belying his own shaking confidence.
From where Kasey took cover, she saw his profile and the wide eyed look of surprise that rested there would have terrified her if she hadn’t already given up hope of escape, hope of seeing Corbin. Hope of survival.
“The engine is going to blow; there is no more energy!” Jakob sounded furious, Kasey thought. He would be. His authority stripped, he sat on the command throne with the insolence of a peasant and occupied the seat only because he had the training to operate its computer terminals. He was no captain. Not any more. Not after the vote. Even Jessup abandoned his leader and left Jakob as the only one present not signing on for the fight against the boarding party. He had stormed off, saying that he would ready the trawler, that anyone who didn’t wish to die should meet him in the docking bay as soon as possible.
But he came back, and now sat on the throne with a busted ego and orders from an underling that jeopardized everyone’s life.
“We need it from somewhere. The drive won’t activate until its maximum energy capacity is stored and ready to fire.”
Jakob rose his voice to argue, but Kasey silenced both of them with a shout as the molten metal reached through the doors of the bay and dripped, sizzling, to the floor. “They’re almost through, two minutes!”
Anton and Sasha exchanged looks of worry and a whimpering cry escaped one of the other’s mouths.
“Take aim!” Kasey screamed as Jakob and Caspar continued arguing.
“The only way to get the power is to shut off the security systems, Jakob. Do it!” Caspar yelled. “MarsForm is through the door. Just turn off the locks, the sectioning, and we can jump before a larger party boards!”
The lock, massive and steel forged, fell off the door, bent and twisted by the laser’s extreme heat. Kasey sighted her gun, leveling it at the crack in the metal doors that would open, soon. Any second.
Jakob snarled an unintelligible phrase that everyone ignored. “Fuck,” it sounded like, to Kasey, but she couldn’t be sure. She thought only of the doors, and who would storm through them.
/> “Defense systems are going off line. Everyone be ready,” Jakob said, defeated.
The crack widened as the soldiers on the other side set to prying open the metal husks that once functioned as sliding doors. Their bars poked through. The crack widened some more. When a hand shot through the hole created by the laser tool, Kasey took a shot and put a tracer through the palm. A scream issued forth, muffled by the doors, and the others followed Kasey’s example until she had to scream for them to cease-fire and save the ammo.
A grenade, sitting in her pocket. She pulled it out and flipped its activation switch. “Ready your grenades,” she said to the others as the device in her own hands shined blue and started beeping. A pulse rifle was fired into the bridge and its report echoed. The shot missed, soared high and fizzled out when it slammed into the panoramic viewing window behind the crew of the Vulcan.
Caspar Faulk started laughing. A cackle, really. A sound only made by men who have taken leave of their sanity. Men in the throes of ecstasy that know not how else to react, except by screaming in madness and joy. “Get ready! We’re jumping!”
What followed, for Kasey, seemed to happen in the course of a few seconds at most, but her focus was honed into the events unfolding around her with such clarity that she felt as if a lifetime would pass before she could make sense of it. The engines, leeching power from the defense systems that locked up the bridge, that kept the Ides in the lower holds, that kept the soldiers on the other side of that steel door, kicked their energy expenditure up to such an extent that Kasey felt her hair standing up on every square inch of her body and a tingling warmth spread from the center of her navel outward, until it felt more like nausea than heat.
The doors gave way, and the soldiers poured in. Kasey threw the first grenade, and it exploded in a cloud of blood and fire and limbs and the shouts of young boys sent off to war. The others again followed her lead and threw their own grenades, and, one by one, they exploded in the doorway until the smoke filled the bridge and no one saw what they were shooting at. They simply pointed into the billowing smoke and depressed their triggers, hoping that their bullets found their marks.