by Tim Lebbon
“Five and Six have fired,” Faulkner said, but even as he spoke Frodo had launched their countermeasures. Light bloomed on the screen as explosions grew and faded a hundred miles behind them.
“L-T, I’ve got a—” Faulkner began.
“Bastard One uncloaking!” Snowdon shouted. “Fifteen miles to starboard, laser cannons—”
The ship jumped. Atmosphere vented. The gravity system flicked off, making them sickeningly weightless. Someone screamed. Mains was pressed back in his seat as protective restraints locked down across his body, and just before a shield of hardening foam closed around him, he saw a combat suit bouncing from the bulkhead above him. Sliced neatly in two, it trailed strings of viscera.
Blood flowed, spiraled, and splashed.
5
LUCY-ANNE
Swartwood Station 3, orbiting Weaver’s World
July 2692 AD
“Of course you can have chocolate, Honey, but only after school.”
“Promise, Mommy?”
“I promise.”
Lucy-Anne pouted. “Do you have to go to work?”
Her mother smiled and tickled her, reducing Lucy-Anne to the usual squirming, giggling mess. The girl tried to run away, darting across their cabin and expecting her mother to follow, grab her back, tickle her some more—but her mother had been acting strange lately. Distracted, not sleeping very well. She looked tired, and sometimes Lucy-Anne crept from her sleeping cubby and saw her sitting in the middle of a darkened cabin, hand resting on the comms control as if expecting it to speak to her.
The only person who spoke to them regularly was Daddy, and Daddy was away.
Though only eight, Lucy-Anne already recognized the future that was laid out for her. She’d only seen her father six times in the last four years, and the joy of seeing him in his Colonial Marines uniform had dulled. Now her mommy was training to do the same, and the time would soon come when the schooling wing of Swartwood Station would become Lucy-Anne’s home.
She knew that when the time came, she would also don the uniform. She wasn’t quite sure what she felt about that. She liked the warm feel of her daddy’s combat suit, the way it closed around her, and all the things she could see, hear, and do inside. Its computer even seemed to know her name.
She would still rather they were all home together.
“Mommy?” Her mommy was looking at her in a weird way. Head to one side, eyes wide and wet, right hand fisted and tapping at her thigh as if to a tune only one of them could hear.
“You’re a good girl.”
“I know,” Lucy-Anne said.
“Chocolate after school.”
“Okay.”
Her mommy was quiet for a moment longer, and Lucy-Anne thought she was going to cry. But then she blinked a few times, turned her head as if listening, and smiled.
“So can you walk yourself to school today? Mommy’s got something to do.”
“Can I go across the walkway?”
“Sure you can.”
“Yay!” Lucy-Anne loved the walkway. It made her feel like she was flying. “Love you, Mommy!”
Her mother came close and hugged her tighter than she ever had before, but she didn’t speak.
* * *
Lucy-Anne was known among many of the residents of Swartwood Station 3. It was her bright pink dungarees that set her apart. Most girls her age were already dressing in combat fatigues matching their parents’, but Lucy-Anne had always loved pink.
People smiled and nodded to her as she left the accommodation wing, a few exchanged brief pleasantries, and soon she was halfway to the station’s hub and ready to cross the walkway. Swartwood Station 3 consisted of a large hub and four huge pods, unofficially called Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. Lucy-Anne didn’t know where the names came from, but she liked that her school was in Luke. It was a nice place, brightly decorated and run by teachers who everyone liked.
Mark was the accommodation pod, Matthew the training center, and John was the hangar, where ships came and went. The Hub was the main control center of the space station. There were almost two thousand people on board, and a third of those were kids. She liked having so many children to play with. From the moment she headed out on the walkway, she forgot that one day soon her parents would leave her here alone.
That was the main reason she liked the walkway between Mark and Luke. Not only did it feel like flying, but it helped her to forget.
Six hundred and fifty yards long, the tunnel was made almost entirely of diamonite-impregnated glass. Wide enough for several people to pass each other, it gave an all-round view that never got old. Usually when she came this way, alone, she ended up being late for school, and sometimes she got into trouble for that. That was why she normally had to go all the way to the hub and back up the main arm to Luke. It wasn’t very often mommy let her come this way. And she’d been promised chocolate after school.
Maybe she’s missing Daddy, Lucy-Anne thought. Like me.
She stood and stared.
Beneath her, visible through the clear floor, was the hub of Swartwood Station, the whole structure spinning in its orbit to provide artificial gravity. So she looked up and out, through the glass ceiling at the endless space beyond. She never tired of looking, and didn’t understand how anyone could. She was staring at forever. Anything could be out there. If space really was infinite, her daddy had told her—and scientists, he said, still couldn’t agree exactly on that fact—then somewhere out there was a square planet. In infinity, anything was possible.
Somewhere out there was another her.
Lucy-Anne still wasn’t sure whether she liked that idea, but she enjoyed staring, and thinking that if she could expand the direction she was staring, just enough, she might see an alien somewhere far, far away who was looking right back at her. She wondered what that alien was thinking, and whether it was thinking about her.
She wondered all the time.
As she watched, the glowing arc of Weaver’s World slowly swung into view. It was an amazing place that mommy told her was called a Goldilocks planet because it was already somewhere people could live. They’d been down there a few times together, and once with Daddy, all three of them taking a trip north from the space elevator station on the equator and enjoying twenty days on safari. The main island of Weaver’s World was called Ellia, and it was home to an amazing array of flora and fauna. Lucy-Anne had worried that humans being there would get in the way of the planet’s nature, but her mother had told her she shouldn’t worry about that.
They’d watched a herd of cat-sized lizards hunting massive elephantish creatures. They’d seen a cloud of sparkling bats forming complex shapes and patterns over a deep ravine at dusk. Eight-winged butterflies had sung to her, and for dinner they’d eaten fruit that tasted of coconut and chocolate.
The thought of chocolate stirred her from her reverie, and a tall Marine passing by chuckled.
“You’ll be late for school, Lucy-Anne!” he said.
“I just can’t help looking at—”
Something punched her feet. Her vision blurred, stars smeared, and the visible shoulder of Weaver’s World pulsed as if the planet had taken a deep breath.
“Oh my God!” the Marine shouted, and Lucy-Anne looked down between her feet, through the glass floor, at what was happening below. As she saw, the noise came—a boom, thumping her ears; a roar, like water boiling; a crackling, crumpling sound. The hub was birthing fire, great shattered swathes of its superstructure shoved out into space on boiling plumes of flame and debris. The fire quickly retreated as air was drawn out, and then other objects followed. A deck of seating from the large conference center. People, spinning and colliding with wreckage. Some of them were burning as they emerged. Some of them were coming apart, limbs cartwheeling away from the station, colliding with the arms and pods, disappearing into the void.
“Mommy!” Lucy-Anne screamed. She looked at the tall Marine for help, but he was already running back along the walkway
toward the accommodation pod.
A huge chunk of the hub powered into the leg connecting it with Luke, crumpling the metal like paper and ripping it aside. The chunk ricocheted up and away from the station, the leg tearing and parting, and the mass of Luke itself started to rip free of the walkway.
Lucy-Anne fell to her knees, stood again, and followed the Marine back toward Mark. Mommy would be there. Mommy with her sad eyes and far-away look, sitting awake at night listening to things Lucy-Anne couldn’t hear. Bringing stuff home she did not recognize. Making things she didn’t know.
“Mommy!”
Mark exploded. She saw its entire supporting arm fracture, and the air pressure inside the accommodation pod split its hull apart. Sparkling flames soon guttered out in the vacuum of space, and a flood of bodies spewed out from one rupture carried in a cloud of escaping atmosphere, impacting each other, grasping on, glistening frostily as air turned to ice around them.
Mommy! she tried to scream again, but her voice was swallowed by terror.
She ran. The Marine was ahead of her, sprinting, but already everything felt wrong. Lucy-Anne’s stomach dropped, she felt suddenly lighter. A deafening whistling sound filled her head.
All around her, outside the clear walkway, the darkness of space was filled with glimmering, spinning, horrific debris.
Just as the Marine reached the doorway leading into Mark, the whole walkway before him erupted. He disappeared. The glass walls sang as they were ripped apart, and still trying to shout for her mother, Lucy-Anne was grabbed by an invisible hand and tugged toward infinity.
6
GERARD MARSHALL
Charon Station, Sol System
July 2692 AD
General Paul Bassett, commanding officer of the entirety of the Colonial Marine forces, including all Spaceborne, Terrestrial, and Excursionist units, was a prick.
Gerard Marshall had long thought this, since before they’d met face to face, and now that he was on Charon Station—the General’s command center—they had met many, many times, giving Marshall cause to consider and revise his initial assessment.
The General was a complete prick.
Like now. Being summoned to his rooms by a combat droid, instead of the General finding time to call him personally. General Paul Bassett requests your attendance in his command suite at eleven hundred hours for a… A quick holo message from the great man himself would have sufficed. It wasn’t as if they had different agendas. There should have been agreement between them, a common ground. Instead, this clash of personalities that seemed to grow every time they met.
Marshall tried to analyze it dispassionately, and he’d come to the conclusion that they simply rubbed each other up the wrong way. That wouldn’t have been a problem if they were just two plebs or grunts bickering their way through the day, but when one of them was a general in charge of quarter of a million troops, and the other was one of the Thirteen, the Weyland-Yutani company board, there was so much more at stake.
Neither of them could let their egos get in the way of what they were here for, and Marshall feared that being summoned to the command suite could only mean more bad news.
Charon Station was huge. Orbiting the Sol System every thirty years at almost four billion miles from the sun, it had been the Colonial Marines’ main command base for almost sixty years. In that time it had been expanded and upgraded to such an extent that it was now more of a complex of interconnected space stations than one single structure. Seven individual vessels housed barracks, hangars, storage holds, communications, offices, and other essential needs that went to serve as a permanent home for more than seven hundred staff, as well as a rotating garrison of a thousand Marines along with their weapons, equipment, and craft.
Almost forty years earlier, a whole section of Charon Station had been destroyed by an asteroid impact, with the loss of four hundred lives. It was a huge blow to the Colonial Marines, and it came at a time when skirmishes had broken out across the Human Sphere between the Colonials and several rogue military units seeking independence. When the catastrophe occurred, doubt and paranoia had bitten in hard, but all evidence had always pointed to a freak accident. Since then, sweeper ships were stationed several thousand miles ahead of the station’s orbit, destroying any space debris that was considered even a vague threat to the station.
Gerard Marshall had been here for more than twelve weeks, and he hated the place. He hated being anywhere that involved breathing conditioned, artificially manufactured air, walking with the aid of faux gravity, eating food processed from bacteria and bugs and insects, and where a slight accident could result in him being sucked into the cold vacuum of a painful demise. As one of the Thirteen, he knew far too much about what could go wrong in space. He had covered up enough disasters, after all. He’d even initiated a few.
It was starting to look like he’d be here for a long time more. He hated the idea of that, but he could also not contain his excitement. As chief officer of the Thirteen, covering alien technology and weaponry acquisition, and director of ArmoTech, recent events meant that this was an exciting time to be alive.
The Thirteen wanted him close to Bassett. In all the military, the General was the man they trusted most. Yet complete trust wasn’t something that the Thirteen allowed, and so Marshall was here to observe, oversee, and if it became necessary, to intervene.
Bassett’s rooms were at the center of the command pod, one of the smaller sections of Charon Station, yet also the most heavily defended. A Sleek-class destroyer was docked permanently against the pod, crewed around the clock and ready to launch within thirty seconds, if the need arose. The pod itself was triple-constructed, possessed cloaking technology the equal to the Arrow-class ships used by Excursionists, and if the need arose it could break away and become its own individual spacecraft.
The first time Marshall had crossed one of the 450-yard-long connecting bridges to the command pod, Bassett had taken pleasure in telling him that each bridge was equipped with a series of explosive rings that could split it in half in milliseconds. Bad enough that the bridges were completely transparent.
Yes, Basset really was a prize prick.
“Who goes there?” The big Marine standing at the end of the bridge brought his nano-rifle to bear.
“Really?” Marshall asked.
“Second warning, Mr. Marshall.”
“You just told me my name.”
The Marine took a step back into a shooting stance, the nano-rifle’s control panel casting a faint blue glow onto his faceplate. Marshall could only make out his eyes behind the visor, all other facial features hidden. He never liked the threatening impersonality of combat suits, but supposed that was one of their more subtle weapons.
“Third warning.”
Marshall sighed. “Gerard Marshall, seventh chair of the Weyland-Yutani Thirteen, ID code seven-one-gamma-three-november.”
The marine stood to attention again, and Marshall heard the distant whisper of his combat computer confirming the identity of the man standing before him.
“Thank you, Sir. General Bassett is expecting you. You can find him in the VR suite of his control room.”
“Right.” Marshall walked past the marine toward the doorway, which faded open, then he paused. “Don’t you ever…?” The marine turned to look down at Marshall, faceplate giving nothing away. The combat suit was silent. The rifle still glowed, and Marshall wondered what setting it was kept on. He’d seen such rifles fired before in demonstrations, had witnessed their firepower. Immense, and horrific.
“Never mind,” he said. “Carry on.”
The door grew dark and solid again behind him, a containment field more impregnable than three-inch steel, and he was in the command pod.
As he moved through the command pod, several other marines watched him pass them by, then a female marine minus her combat helmet nodded and accompanied him along an elevated walkway that skirted the main control globe. The room was huge, fifty yards across, bustl
ing, filled with holo frames, computer terminal points, and people drifting back and forth on air chairs. It never failed to send a shiver down his spine. This was the beating heart of the Company’s military machine, and an uncomfortable truth beat through this place with every pulse.
The Marines were the only reason that W-Y had once again become the power it was today.
No organization could reach such a wide-ranging ubiquitousness without a powerful force behind them.
“You’ll know where to find him,” the marine said, and she handed Marshall a pair of swimming briefs.
“Really?” he asked.
The woman smiled. He was glad. Any sign of humanity among these people comforted him.
Maybe she was an android.
Marshall took the briefs and stepped through into the VR control room staging area. It was empty, apart from a small pile of neatly folded military clothing, a pair of boots, and a set of glasses. Bassett was one of the few people Marshall knew who eschewed corrective surgery for his defective eyesight. Perhaps because the glasses made him distinctive.
Marshall stripped and pulled on the briefs, feeling self-conscious of his sagging stomach and weak limbs. If he’d spent a long time in space he might at least have been able to blame his weakness on muscle and bone degeneration. Yet there were treatments to deal with that, and exercises, and everyone knew he preferred the sensation of solid ground beneath his feet. He had a great mind, but his physical laziness was apparent.
Bassett’s rooms behind the control globe were mostly functional and sparse, but the VR suite itself was a huge indulgence, an extravagance the General enjoyed courtesy of the Company. Marshall had been in there several times before, and he found it disconcerting. This time, he had no idea what to expect.
Pushing through the darkened air lock and emerging into the suite, the scene took his breath away.