“My God,” Huiskamp murmured. He glanced over at Lee and Haas, asleep in their chairs, and again marveled that any of them were alive. “It’s just the four of us then?”
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
Huiskamp stared at the rendering. By ordering the rest of the crew off the command deck, he’d sentenced them to death. Ms. Umarzai and all the others, pulverized by debris or sucked into the void.
“We’ve been calling it the Arc Zero, sir.”
Huiskamp frowned. “As in Noah’s?”
“As in part of a circle, sir. It didn’t seem right to call it GODCOM when we didn’t know if there were still other survivors out there. We thought there might be other Arcs.”
“Why zero and not one?”
“Zero-based arrays are perfectly sensible, sir. Also, we thought it sounded better.”
“I see. Computer systems are online?”
“More-or-less, sir. We’re running in low power mode, since we lost the reactor. All we’ve got is one partial bank of solar panels. It’s barely enough to keep air flowing through the scrubbers.”
“How did you stop the spinning?”
“That was Haas, sir. He deserves a commendation. While the rest of us were puking our guts out, he climbed into an access shaft and managed to get one of the auxiliary rockets to fire. Slowed us down enough to get stabilized.” Haas, strapped into his chair a few steps away, continued to snore, oblivious to the praise.
“Have we got comms?”
“System is online, but we have no deep space transmitter.”
“No transmissions received from the rest of the station?”
“No, sir. Not since the collision. Either their comms are down or they weren’t as lucky as we were.”
“What about the surface?”
“No word of a Cho-ta’an attack on the surface yet, sir, but things are going downhill fast. Word got out that the seedships left without most of the colonists. Most of the planet is embroiled in civil war. We haven’t heard from GSC for two days. We don’t have a transmitter capable of reaching the surface, but we’ve been monitoring news reports. It doesn’t look good.”
Huiskamp shook his head. GSC was the IDL’s Geneva Surface Command. If it had fallen, the situation was dire indeed.
“And the seedships?”
“Renaissance and Philadelphia were destroyed by the Cho-ta’an, sir, along with Alpha and Beta wings. Only Freedom remains. We received a communication from her yesterday stating that Captain Huiskamp intends to ram the Chrylis Gate.”
“He what?”
“They were being pursued by eleven Cho-ta’an ships, sir. Captain Huiskamp believed escape was impossible. They dumped their cargo in an attempt to beat the Cho-ta’an to the gate. He’s already transmitted the destruct code, but of course there’s no way to know if it worked. So he’s making sure.”
“My God,” Huiskamp murmured. “Jason, what are you doing?”
“We received another message a few hours after the first. It seems Freedom was able to eliminate the Cho-ta’an on their tail by detonating their cargo.”
“Clever tactic,” Huiskamp muttered, despite himself.
“Yes, sir. But at the cost of forfeiting their mission. They had to jettison all the colonization supplies, including the TGP. Also, there’s still been no word from Admiral Chiang. Captain Huiskamp is convinced the only chance humanity has is to cut the Geneva system off from the rest of the galaxy. If he can take out the Chrylis gate, that leaves only one access point.”
“One is all the Cho-ta’an need. We don’t have any ships left. How does he think we’re going to destroy the Geneva gate?”
“It’s all he can do, sir. Even if he could stay ahead of the Cho-ta’an, without the TGP, his mission is doomed. I can play the messages for you if you like.”
“I’ll listen to it in my quarters in a little while.” The throbbing in his head had worsened, and he suddenly felt incredibly tired. Maybe it had been a mistake to go to the command deck, but he couldn’t just lie in bed if there was something he needed to be doing.
Funny how human beings will forge purpose out of nothingness, he thought. Rather than despair, Jason had immediately pivoted to another mission. Taking out the Chrylis gate was probably pointless, but it was something. A final blow he could strike against the Cho-ta’an. Unfortunately, there was nothing Huiskamp could do to help his son. If he had a single ship, he’d have gladly piloted it into the Geneva gate himself, but he was stuck on a fragment of a dead space station, floating helplessly in orbit. Without a deep space transmitter, he couldn’t even send a message of encouragement to Jason.
“There’s something else, sir,” Aguilar said, and the reluctance in his voice told Huiskamp it was bad news.
“Go ahead, Ms. Aguilar.”
“The good news, sir, is that we’re not going to run out of food and water. We’ve got about five thousand liters of water in the tanks, and there’s enough food in the galley to last us for as long as we remain in orbit.”
“Which is how long?”
“Hard to say, sir, but our orbit appears to be unstable. We were knocked into a highly eccentric ellipse so we’re getting some atmospheric drag at the co-vertices. We’re working on triangulating our location with more precision from satellite transmissions.”
“All right, Ms. Aguilar,” Huiskamp said, too tired to process what Aguilar was saying. “That’s all for now. I’ll be retiring to my quarters.”
“Aye, sir. Do you need help, sir?”
“I’m fine, Ms. Aguilar. As you were.” He undid his restraints and pushed himself out of the chair. Even in zero gees, it was a struggle. He pulled himself along the railing and opened the door. Once on the other side, he allowed himself a moment to rest. A year and a half at one third of a gee had made him weak, and a blow on the head and nineteen hours in bed hadn’t helped either. The universe is trying to kill me, he thought, and something about the idea struck him as so funny that he burst into laughter. “Get ahold of yourself,” he mumbled. “People are counting on you.” Trembling and sweating, he pulled himself up the pole and made his way down the corridor to his quarters. He managed to climb into the elastic netting over his cot and fell asleep.
When he awoke, his wrist comm told him that six hours had passed. Six hours wasted, he thought. Six hours that could have been spent… doing what? There was nothing to do. Soon his son would destroy the ship entrusted to his command, killing everyone aboard in a futile effort to destroy the Chrylis gate, and Huiskamp and those aboard Arc Zero would burn up in Geneva’s atmosphere. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
No, he told himself. There was always something you could do. You could, if nothing else, face the end bravely, not cowering in bed. His crew was counting on him. He needed to set an example for them, give them a mission, even if that mission was as futile as his son’s. We may have lost this war, but if there’s anyone around in ten thousand years to sift through the wreckage of our civilization, I want them to know that Admiral Cole Huiskamp and the crew of GODCOM did not give up. The Choties have us outgunned, but humans never give up.
But there would be no wreckage of Arc Zero. If she were already brushing against the atmosphere, she had a few weeks at most before she broke apart and burned up, leaving no trace. Without a transmitter, she couldn’t even leave a goodbye message. The personal transmitters aboard weren’t even powerful enough to get a signal to the surface of Geneva. Arc Zero would die alone.
Huiskamp got out of bed, drank some water and ate a nutrition bar. He couldn’t get the image of the remnant of GODCOM out of his mind. GODCOM had been a self-contained environment, a spinning world floating far above Geneva. But the circle had been broken, and now she was only a fragment of the whole. Incomplete, unable to sustain herself, she drifted slowly toward oblivion. The image of the serpent biting its own tail came unbidden to his mind. Was it the answer or just a distraction, a delusion borne of desperation?
He tapped his wrist comm.
“Mr. Haas, please come to my quarters.”
Chapter Sixteen
It was the first pitched battle of the war. The Jewish forces met the Sixth Legion in the valley, less than a mile from the road that led up the Temple Mount, where the Tenth Legion was garrisoned. The Jewish regulars outnumbered the Romans nearly two to one, but the Romans were better disciplined and better equipped. Fewer than half of the Jews had any sort of armor, and what they had was mostly boiled leather pieces and fragments of armor that had been scavenged from Roman stationarii. For weapons, most carried spears, though a few had Roman gladii. Some had slings, bows or the small, curved daggers called sicae. Perhaps half carried shields.
The Romans began the engagement by hurling their javelins at the Jews, killing or wounding several dozen of the defenders. The Jews responded by firing arrows and hurling stones with their slings, to little effect; the Roman shield wall was difficult to penetrate. The Romans advanced quickly, swords drawn.
The legion, assuming a wedge formation, smashed into the Jewish lines. For a moment, all was chaos and confusion on the Jewish side, but Simon ben Kosevah, spear raised over his head, pressed forward, smashing his shield into the face of a centurion. “For Yerusalem!” he roared, and the men around him echoed the battle cry. The Romans hesitated, and the Jews regained their footing. Spears thrust forward, most glancing off shields or armor, but some sinking into flesh. Simon, exulting in the smell of sweat, leather and spilled blood, let out a joyous laugh. He was no stranger to violence, but up until now his experience had been limited to smaller skirmishes and guerilla actions. This is what he had been waiting for: a pitched battle with one of the renowned Roman Legions!
The Jews retreated slowly and fitfully, as planned, each time stopping to face the Romans again from the most advantageous point available. On Simon’s signal, the defensive line would suddenly break, and the men would turn and sprint farther down the valley, making use of familiar creek beds and deer trails that wound around the rocks and scrub to vanish in the midst of a Roman onslaught. The legionnaires pursued but quickly found themselves being pelted with stones and skewered by arrows launched by another defensive line hidden among the rocks. Often they would be harassed by stones thrown from above as well.
After the third such retreat, the Romans grew more cautious. Rufus ordered them to advance slowly, fearing more Jewish traps. Simon had anticipated this response as well, however: the Romans now found themselves in a narrow section of the valley where men with stones could easily target them from both sides. The stones themselves did little damage, usually bouncing off the legionnaires’ iron helmets or cuirasses, but they proved enough of a distraction that the group of defenders ahead of them managed to hold them off for nearly a half hour. This gave the Jews time to maneuver men around behind the Romans, so the soldiers had to defend against attacks from the rear as well.
At last Lucius Falco led a charge that broke the defenders’ line, and the legion advanced once again. Hundreds of dead men—Roman and Jewish—littered their wake. Rufus did not doubt that the legion would yet triumph, but his confidence had been shaken. These vermin were proving more difficult to exterminate than expected.
Now, though, the battle had shifted onto ground more favorable to the Romans: here the valley widened, and there were fewer rocks for the defenders to hide behind. The walls of the valley were too distant for the Jews to target the Romans with slings and arrows from above, and the Jews harassing the legion from behind, having been forced into the open, fled.
Nor was that all: they had reached the point where the road from the valley floor to the Temple Mount began. The Jews could retreat further down the valley or they could retreat up the road. If they did the former, they would have ceded their position to the Romans. If they did the latter, they would be caught between the Sixth Legion going up and the Tenth Legion coming down—for there was little doubt, now that the bulk of the Jewish force was engaged in the valley rather than guarding the road, that the Tenth would be marching toward them.
When Simon ben Kosevah ordered his men to flee into the valley, Rufus felt equal parts relief and disappointment. He had half-expected the brash Jewish leader to make a glorious final stand trying to retake the mountain, but it seemed that Simon was more pragmatic than he’d been led to believe.
The Jews fled to their caves and hideouts, and Lucius Falco shouted orders not to pursue them. There was little to be gained by hunting down a few stray fighters, and experience had taught them that the defenders would have planned ambushes just in case. Rufus had already lost more than three hundred men who had been foolish enough to follow the Jews into the seemingly endless network of caves that riddled this land.
Down the road toward him marched Septimus Laevinus at the head of several scores of men—no doubt the entire Tenth Legion was behind him. Lucius gave Septimus a salute and then asked Rufus for permission to begin mopping up operations.
“Granted, Lucius,” said Rufus. “Well fought.”
Lucius saluted and then went to instruct his staff, who would carry out the process of placing sentinels, setting up tents to care for the wounded, totaling the casualties and equipment losses, and burying the dead. Rufus dismounted, handing his horse off to an aide, and walked up the road to meet Septimus.
Septimus bowed before him. “I and my men are in debt to you for your help, Quintus Tineius Rufus. It is my shame that I was unable to be of any service to you in the battle.”
“Stand, old friend,” said Rufus. “There is no dishonor in withstanding such a siege, and I expect you will have many more chances to prove yourself in this war. These Jews turn out to be a formidable enemy.”
Septimus got to his feet. “So I have learned. Three times I ordered the legion to the valley in an attempt to purge it of the Jews, and each time I lost more men than the last. There seem an infinite number of them, and they hide in every crevice and behind every rock. The Tenth is short nearly a thousand men. Five hundred dead, five hundred badly wounded. Were your losses severe?”
“Grievously so. I believe we killed as many as we lost, but we shall not know for certain until Lucius makes his report. Speaking of whom, hello, Lucius!” Rufus shouted the legate as he approached on horseback. Lucius dismounted, handed off his steed, and walked toward the two men.
“Have you completed the task already?” Rufus asked.
“My officers are well-trained,” Lucius said. “A word to them suffices. There is a matter that may require your attention, however.”
“Speak.”
“One of the fallen Jews, apparently a lieutenant of Simon ben Kosevah, wishes to speak with you. He speaks poor Latin, and that only between groans of agony, but I believe he claims to have information for you.”
“He will not give you this information?”
“He insists he will speak only with the provincial governor.”
“Persuade him.”
“I have tried, sir. My men… what I mean to say, sir, is that I do not think we can cause the man any more suffering than he is already experiencing.”
Chapter Seventeen
Lieutenant Dietrich Haas was GODCOM’s chief engineer. He also had an advanced degree in physics and was the closest thing aboard Arc Zero to an expert on hyperspace gates. He appeared at Huiskamp’s door two minutes later, running his right hand back and forth across his close-cropped hair as he did whenever he was nervous.
“At ease, Haas,” the admiral said, pushing himself gently off the door frame to make room for Haas to come inside. “I have some questions about hyperspace.”
“Oh,” Haas replied, perking up a bit. It was rare that someone wanted to talk to him about his pet topic, and he was probably relieved to have something to think about other than the direness of their situation and the deaths of nearly everyone on board GODCOM. Haas pulled himself into the cabin after the admiral, closing the door behind him. The two floated for a moment, facing each other.
“I’d offer you a drink,” said the admir
al, “but everything I’ve got is in glass bottles. I’ve been spoiled by artificial gravity, I suppose. When I commanded a destroyer, all my booze was in plastic squeeze bottles.” Trying to drink from an ordinary liquor bottle in zero gee was hardly worth the frustration.
“It’s all right, sir. What did you want to know?”
That was Haas, always getting right down to business. Huiskamp realized he’d been stalling, hesitant to tell the level-headed engineer what was on his mind. Nothing for it but to jump right in.
“What would you say,” he asked, “if I told you the jumpgates can be used to bend time?”
“I’d say it’s not surprising, sir.”
“Really?”
“Time and space are inextricably linked. We tend to think of time as something that exists objectively, separate from material reality, but it’s better understood as an artifact of motion. Moving an object from point A to point B requires t amount of time. The customary way of explaining hyperspace gates is that they fold space, making point A and point B temporarily adjacent in space. But another explanation is that they actually fold time, so that rather than collapsing the distance between A and B, they collapse the separation between the time the ship left the origin gate and the time it arrive at the destination gate.”
“You’re saying that the ship actually traverses the full distance between the two gates, but it does so in zero elapsed time?”
“It’s one theory.”
“It would seem to present some problems, the main one being that if there was anything between the two gates, you’d collide with it at infinite velocity.”
“Well, yes, but infinite velocity isn’t a concept that really fits into our current understanding of physics. The idea of objects colliding is useful at the macro level, in Newtonian physics, but at the quantum level there aren’t any ‘objects,’ per se. Things that we think of as solid objects are in fact almost entirely empty space. Collisions are really the effects of the interaction of electromagnetic fields, but fields act over time. If you’re traveling at infinite velocity, electromagnetic fields essentially don’t exist for you.”
The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic Page 11