by Bobby Adair
And five months? To hell with that!
I don’t intend to let myself be taken out of the revolution when we finally have a hope to win this thing.
Five months there. Five months back. And who knows how long searching a practically infinite number of orbital bodies for a speck of a supply depot.
Bird interrupts by stewing with, “I didn’t expect you’d be excited.”
“Why?” I ask, looking around as though Blair’s mannequin face might be grinning over my shoulder, as though this might be her plan that Bird is carrying out. “Is this a ploy to push me out of the picture for good?”
“Not at all,” answers Bird. “I can see angry, but you need to know I’m not ordering you to do this. I’m asking.”
“So I really have a choice?”
“Of course. First off, I don’t know if we can rig your ship for the journey. As you mentioned, we need answers to some unknowns before we can pull this off. Assuming we find enough of the right answers, I’ll tell you why I’m asking you, and the why has three parts.”
Glancing back at Brice, who’s watching us with an impassive face, I tell Bird, “I’m listening.”
"Part one, if we can destroy an outpost in the chain—hopefully the nearest one—then we cut off the flow of Trog cruisers into our system. We buy ourselves some time. Maybe we do better than that. It might be that tens or even hundreds of their ships make the jump to that system and arrive without enough resources onboard to make the next jump or the return trip. They’ll run out of gas, and every Gray and Trog onboard will die waiting for a rescue that nobody knows to send.”
"Okay," I agree. "I’ll buy that. If we can destroy their depot, then we break their supply and reinforcement chain."
“It’s more than buying time,” Bird clarifies. “If we can’t break their supply chain, then there’s nothing to stop the Trogs from ferrying ships and troops into this solar system. Then it doesn’t matter if we win against those here now. It doesn’t matter if we win our revolution against our Grays and their North Koreans. We’ll eventually lose a war where Trog ships show up by the dozen every few months. And what if they decide to send another fleet of fifty or a hundred to deal us a decisive blow?”
I don’t have an answer.
“You see, Kane, it doesn’t matter what we do here in our solar system. It doesn’t matter how this revolution or these battles turn out. If that supply line stays open, we lose.”
I wish I could argue, but all I can think to say is, “You said there were three reasons.”
“Number two,” Bird sounds tired, or maybe worried. “The Grays have had a pretty good dose of what our ships can do when armed with a grav lens. They’ve seen what we can do with your ship, the one Spitz’s team put together. Ships like yours won’t make theirs obsolete, but the Grays are smart enough to know any race that can create a ship that can destroy so many of theirs is a danger.
“They’ll want to capture one to take back to 18 Scorpii so they can reverse-engineer it. For all we know, they already have one stored in the hold of one of their cruisers, and they’re hauling it back. Or, what I believe is the more likely solution, they’ll stop trying to conquer us and start trying to annihilate us. These ships prove that we have the potential to be a rival, and maybe an existential threat. They’ll bring everything they can to kill us while we’re still weak. Phil’s Gray history underscores that point.”
“The only way we can prevent that,” I summarize, “is to prevent any ships from returning from earth to 18 Scorpii, and then to prevent any more Trog and Gray ships from coming down the pipe to attack us.”
“That’s right,” says Bird. “This supply route is the number one strategic target of the Free Army. It has to be.”
I can do nothing but nod, and glance back at Brice again, to see if he’s on board. I’m suddenly afraid that his recipe has too many parts hero mixed in. Turning back to Bird, I ask, “And the third thing?”
“The third follows from the others. As the commander of the Free Army, it only makes sense that I allocate my best ships to target the greatest threat. That’s you, Kane—you, your ship, and Jill’s. And especially your nav officer Phil with his connection to the Gray. Together, they’re a risk, but they also constitute our most powerful scanning asset. They can find our targets. Without them, this mission doesn’t have a chance.” Bird takes a moment for his final pitch. "At the risk of putting a melodramatic spin on it, I’m asking you to save humanity by accepting what might be a suicide mission.”
Brice laughs. “Every day I get out of bed in this damn war is a suicide mission.”
Chapter 6
Three days pass, and I’m crammed into the rear of one of Spitz’s stealthy scout ships. Brice, Silva, and Lenox are with me, four of us and the pilot. That’s all the little ship has room for. In another scout, Phil, his Gray, Penny, and Peterson follow close behind. Jill has a fire team in another ship, and we have one more squad in a final vessel. Sixteen of us, headed to earth, while our assault ships are retrofitted once more for a new mission, this time to a star system somewhere far away. How far? No one is yet sure.
Phil might be able to find the answer in his Gray’s memories. Spitz’s engineers and physicists might be able to Sherlock their way through the problem on bits of evidence that makes sense only to them.
Yippee.
“What do you think?” Brice asks over the long silent comm. “Anybody interested in placing a bet on when this clusterfuck comes unglued?”
Taking it as a joke to release the tension we all feel, we laugh. Even the pilot chuckles. Smuggling ourselves back to earth to find something that shouldn’t be there has us worried we’re risking our lives on a bet with skinny odds. Even it what we’re seeking is there, we all know what time and weather do to metal. We’re as likely to find toxic junk as something useful. And our plan to haul relics into orbit and all the way back to Iapetus without arousing the Grays or their MSS lapdogs, well, it sucks. It’s a concoction of wishful thinking and prayers.
It was the best our collective efforts could come up with.
“What do you think?” I ask, directing my question to Brice over a private comm link. “Waste of time?”
“Can’t go anywhere until Spitz finishes our ship.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Sure it is,” he says. “It’s just not the answer you want.”
“Do you have a different version?” I ask.
“Oh, how the hell would I know? We’re a crew of Trog killers on an Easter egg hunt. I’m sure there’s no better way to put us to use than that.” Brice laughs because he just loves his sarcasm.
I don’t join in. That doesn’t bother him, though. He’s self-contained, humor-wise. He thinks everything he says is funny, and I suppose, to him, it is. Who am I to judge?
I ask, “What about bringing the Gray along?” It’s a question Brice never seemed settled with, and I can’t say I was either.
“He already has a seat on this ride.” Brice studies me for a moment. “Are you having second thoughts?”
I nod. “By definition, I guess I’d have to say yes.” I grin at my humor.
Brice laughs. “Risks and rewards. The Gray is our all-access pass. Nobody will give us any shit if he’s with us. On the other hand, if he can’t hide this weird brain marriage him and Phil have going on from the other Grays, then we’re all fucked. Does that about sum it up?”
Those are exactly my fears. “Is there any way we can pull this off without the Gray?”
“We’ve had this conversation,” Brice tells me. “You know we can chance it.” He cocks his head toward the pilot. “After the Red Baron here drops us off on the space station we can try and bluff our way through.” He pats his chest. “We have military insignia painted on our suits. Construction workers won’t give us any shit. They’ll be happy to stay out of our way and let us do whatever we want.
“Supervisors, maybe the same. However, somebody somewhere up the chain might s
tart asking why a dozen space marines are hiking around a construction site trying to find a grav lift to ferry them back to earth. Some wise-ass might get the wild hair to run our unit data and figure out we went up with the heavy assault divisions on the day of the Arizona Massacre.
“That might turn to respect. It might turn to suspicion. Somebody might start guessing we’re deserters—or worse—terrorists. Too many questions, and we all end up as frozen corpses orbiting the sun for eternity."
“Or recycled back to earth,” Silva adds, drawing attention to the patched holes on her well-used suit.
I didn’t realize the comm was open to the whole crew. I look down at my d-pad. The goddamn thing is on the fritz again.
“The only way to avoid trouble is to have the Gray along for the ride,” says Brice. “Nobody will question Phil’s little friend, except another one of its kind. That’s where I’m out of my league. I don’t know what passes for social rules with those Ticks. You’ll have to ask Phil about that.”
I sigh. “I did. You know that.”
“I do.”
I know my bet is already on the table. “Phil assures me we can slip through. As long as we keep our distance from the other Grays, they won’t pay us any attention.”
“And if we run into a pod of them out for a stroll?” Brice asks.
Silva pats the barrel of her railgun. “Six fewer Grays in the world.” She follows that with a smile—or is it a flirt?
I don’t react. Silva’s smile puts thoughts in my mind that shouldn’t be there. And her subtraction of six Grays from the ecosystem ignores a more important part of the equation, the subtraction of sixteen Trog killers from the resistance.
Once the shooting starts, I’m sure that’s where the mission ends.
Chapter 7
Tricky-trick number one: getting off the ship without attracting the attention of every pair of eyes within a hundred radial kilometers.
Our black ship has turned off its light, and shut down its engines. We decelerated for five hours until we reached target speed, then slid down a ballistic path for nearly twenty hours while our reactor purred along on its lowest power output, just enough to keep the anti-grav stealth plates engaged for counteracting the ship’s mass. They made us appear invisible to the Gray’s grav sense.
Now we’re sliding through space like a string of flat-black nothings—reflecting no light, producing none, shimmering no heat, shining no blue grav—our ships are four objects stretching the limits of human tech to imitate the void.
Through the pilot’s windows, I see a debris field spread through hundreds of kilometers of space, pieces large and small, all blown away from the wagon-wheel-shaped station we’re headed for.
“They’re still working on it?” I ask. Though I’d been told, assured several times, I still have trouble believing it.
“They’re still working on all of ‘em,” says someone.
With the war going so badly for two years, trying to build an artificial Eden amongst the stars seems like such folly.
The station, nearly sixty-five kilometers in diameter and five-and-a-half wide, was one of the dozens planned by the Grays and being built by human hands under Gray supervision. They were nothing but pissant dreams compared to the behemoths the Grays envisioned us constructing in the future. Each of these rings was meant to house ten million Grays. Or thereabouts. The larger rings would provide a habitat for a billion.
To me, those aspirations were proof that the Grays planned to keep humans as slaves for all time.
They’d tease us with their promises and propaganda, dangle the seeming magic of telepathy in front of our dazzled eyes, and gift it to us as the only path out of poverty. Within a generation or two, bug-headed humans would become the norm, just as had happened with the Trogs.
Then the breeding would start. It might take a thousand years, but the Grays would slowly transform humans from the earth’s unconventional super-predator into a perverted species of cattle-monkey, always there to carry the load, turn the wrench, work the fields, and bow to the Grays. There to throw ourselves at the Grays’ enemies in mindless wave after wave, fighting the kind of wars they loved to wage, the ones where slave lives held no value except the blood in their veins and the strength in their sword hands.
Thinking about it makes me mad. It reignites my Gray-hate and cranks the flame up to burn white-hot.
I do want to slaughter some ticks.
“This is the station I worked on when I was up here,” says Brice. Leaning over my shoulder, he points toward huge holes torn through the rotating structure. “The Trogs sure shot the shit out of it.”
“Which is what I don’t understand.” I really don’t. “Why do the Grays keep sending people up to work on these things? We can’t defend them.”
“Nobody’s defended these stations since the first assaults,” explains the pilot. “Earth doesn’t try, and the Trogs don’t attack them anymore.”
“Why do you think that is?” I ask.
Brice cuts back in with the answer, “They don’t need to. Not one of the stations is habitable. It’ll be a decade at least before we get there. My guess is the Trogs are perfectly happy to let us keep working on them, thinking they’re going to take ownership one day.
“If they come in and attack again, that’ll be a sign they think they’ve lost the war. They’ll be denying us the resources to expand our population—well, the Gray population anyway. These places will be optimized for Gray life, not humans. Humans will be able to survive inside, but it’ll be uncomfortably hot, and the atmospheric composition won’t be exactly to our liking. The oxygen content will be too low, so it’ll be like walking around on a sixteen-thousand-foot mountain.”
“It’s hard enough to breathe at fourteen thousand,” I observe. Glancing back at the others who’ve mostly contented themselves so far to listen, “Those are the tallest mountains we have in Colorado, a little more than fourteen thousand. Breathing up there is difficult.” None of them are from Colorado.
“Like I said,” Brice confirms. He takes another look out the window. “We’ll need to jump in a minute. We’re close.”
A quick glance through the window at the enormous wheels tells me he’s right. I turn to Silva. “Get the door.” To the others, I order, “Out of your seats. We need to pile out as fast as possible.”
Nods all around. They know what the plan is. They know the pitfalls. They know the orders.
The side door swings wide, opening an expansive view in front of Silva.
“The other ships are ready?” I ask the pilot.
“Open and ready,” he answers. “Waiting on your word.”
“Count us down,” I tell him, knowing the countdown will go out to the other three scout ships as well.
“Five. Four. Three. Ready. Go!”
Silva bails out through the open door, followed by Lenox, Brice, and me.
Surrounded again by the black abyss, accustomed to the unmoored vertigo after spending so many days with nothing above or below, I see my squad, fourteen orange suits careening through space, and the Gray, protected by its resilient, thick skin clinging to Phil’s back, tethered to his suit, just in case.
Grav fields flash blue as we power up their suits to finish burning off the speed the ships left us all with. We’re angling toward the slowly spinning ring, and trying to match its speed.
As we slow, the four black scout ships seem to accelerate, though I know they’re still drifting at a constant speed, and will continue to do so for another twelve hours.
I goose my grav for a boost strong enough to put me out in front of the others. “We’re heading for that spoke.” It’s one of a dozen connecting the circular habitat of the rotating station with the central hub. The spoke holds no significance, it’s just the nearest landmark that seems not to have any workers toiling nearby.
“It’s on now!” Brice hollers as he zips up beside me.
“Manage your grav,” I tell them. “No sense in bringin
g Gray attention on us.”
Chapter 8
Brice and I touch down together, and I grav-lock my boots to the station’s metal outer surface, as I scan everything I can see for evidence that anyone has taken notice.
Thousands of orange suits are toiling in the gaping holes torn through the station’s outer shell by Trog railgun rounds. That damage is two years old and still not completely repaired. A hundred and twenty degrees around the giant circle, countless orange-clad workers labor at the unfinished ends, slowly growing the ring to bring the circle to completion.
Grav lifts by the hundred move through the empty space between the spokes and along the curved surface, many more emerge from the darkness as tiny pinpricks of reflected light, coming up from earth with materials. Just as many shrink into the distance as they take the trip back for another load.
“Everyone okay?” Brice asks, as the rest of the squads touch down.
All respond to the affirmative.
“The tick make it alright?” Brice asks, turning to Phil.
“Nick is fine,” Phil tells him, showing his irritation at Brice for not using the Gray’s name.
Brice looks to me for the next step.
“Lead the way,” I tell him. After years spent working on the station, he knows his way around better than any of us.
Brice points down. The outer ring of the station is built like a trough—habitable area on the bottom, walls a few kilometers tall, and open top. The station’s spin will keep the atmosphere trapped inside.
“We’re headed for that gap,” Brice announces to the group. “Stay low. Stay close. Don’t push the grav hard unless you have to. There aren’t many crews working on this part of the station. No need to call attention to ourselves.” Brice leaps off the metal and flies.
I’m right behind him, with Phil, Silva, and Lenox close on my heels. Jill takes up the rear with all of our soldiers zipping along between us.