Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  “Suit, please highlight the crew compartment and enhance view.”

  A red outline appeared on her heads-up, at first little more than a dot with a tongue of flame behind it. Then it zoomed in for a long moment, far too long for Katy’s liking. “Distance?”

  “326 kilometers and rising.” With the magnification, Katy could see that the Clarion had now abandoned all of the spindle and turned its nose engines to match its direction of travel and was firing them on its journey to the gate. With only a fraction of its former mass and its full capabilities in play, the remains of the Clarion resembled a high speed clipper ship more than anything else.

  “Oh, fuck.”

  Well, at least asphyxiation isn’t a painful death.

  Turning on the open channel to the general comms, Katy screamed, “Help me! Help me! Anybody help!”

  Neela answered first and switched over to a private comm. “Katy? Where are you? We thought you were dead! My heads-up says that you’re not on the ship.”

  “I got sucked out when the spindle was destroyed.”

  “Oh, fuck! I got you! I got you! I’m interfacing with your suit right now.”

  “You’re like 350 klicks away. You have to slow down. I can’t get to you!”

  Neela didn’t answer immediately.

  “Neela? Neela, you have to help me!” For a moment, a cold sense of loneliness arose from the past to engulf Katy. She might as well have been the small four-year-old alone in a cell, waiting for parents who would never come. With her last ounce of will, Katy asked the suit to turn off the nanite pain blockers. The suit objected but obeyed. In one instant, a searing bolt of pan jolted Katy back to the present.

  Gritting her teeth against the pain, she asked, “Neela, what am I going to do? Am I going to die out here?”

  Neela’s voice was very firm, almost motherly. “No, Katy, you aren’t going to die. You hear me? We won’t let that happen. Now listen carefully. We dumped the rest of the spindle a ways back. We also dropped the ship’s boat. It’s much closer to you. We couldn’t get back to you right now if we tried. It would be several hours at best. It’s far too hot there right now. So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to make your way to the boat and sit there for at least two hours. You hear me? Two hours at least. Don’t power up until you can see on your passive sensors that the gate in front of you is clear. I’m sending the last zero-day to the computer on the Strident. We’re going to go through hot. When you can see that the sensors are clear and it’s been at least two hours, you tell the suit to execute plan Neela Home. I’m going to program the nav with some information that only myself, Soren, and Freddi know—secret stuff from before the war. We’ve been sending that information to as many of our people as we can in the last couple of hours. If it all goes right, the ship will take you to our new hideout. Hopefully we’ll be there already. If we’re not there, then you’ll have to make your way. The ship should be able to autopilot you somewhere else. Got it?”

  Katy’s heart moved high into her throat, creating a lump. “I got it.”

  “Okay, I got to go. I will see you soon. I promise.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Something about the way Neela was all business and no sass didn’t sit right with Katy. Before letting the connection drop, she asked, “Neela, where’s Soren?”

  The pause was just a moment too long for Katy’s comfort. “Soren’s been hurt. We’re getting her into the auto-doc right now, but you don’t worry about that. You get to that ship, and we’ll see you at our new hideout. You hear me?”

  Katy blinked back tears, part fear for herself and part fear for Soren. She was the doctor. She’d sat on that ship for over two years and hadn’t had more than viruses and an occasional fracture. Now when someone on the crew needed her skills most, she wasn’t there. She ought to be there. Her words came out almost as a sob. “I love you all.”

  Neela lost her motherly tone. “We love you, too,” said Neela, her voice cracking. “Keep your spirits up. If all goes well, we’ll see you again. Now get to that ship. Neela out.”

  Surrounded by a sea of empty emotion, Katy sat there, afraid, alone. She wasn’t able to even think. She wondered if it was really worth the effort to try to get to the Strident. Maybe that was just delaying the inevitable. Better to die out here in the void than to be captured.

  No! Enough of that. I’m not ready to give up, yet. Katy intentionally wiggled her fingers, sending lightning bolts up her shoulder. Yep, that’s broken. Probably not too bad, though, because I can still move things.

  “Suit, highlight the Strident, and take me there at best possible speed.”

  The suit acknowledged the command and turned her almost directly away from the distant star. The jets on the back gave out a long series of puffs, changing her motion to take her toward the small shuttle still invisible but now outlined in red.

  The Strident started a good forty or so klicks out. It was also drifting away from her at a pretty good clip. It took several long burns to get her moving along at about a kilometer a minute relative to the shuttle. To keep her mind busy and away from thoughts that could only do harm, Katy kept herself focused on her consumables. Her oxygen was worryingly low, already at seven percent. On the other hand, the thrusters hadn’t done much yet, so they were in pretty good shape.

  Unfortunately, the thruster’s fuel didn’t last long, as the suit was forced to maneuver around all sorts of metal and other debris that lay hidden between Katy and her target. By the time she was about a half a kilometer away from the shuttle, she was down to less than two percent of her maneuvering power. Most of that was being used to slow her down so that she didn’t splat into the side. She worked very hard to keep herself completely still within the suit, not wanting to add any motion that might force it to adjust its course once again.

  It was only when she was within a hundred meters of the shuttle that she noticed the first flash of blue light reflecting off its hull, then another, and another.

  “Suit, can you show me a view of what’s behind me?”

  “Unable to comply. No camera available.”

  Katy thought about it for a second. “Computer, turn me 180 degrees. Preserve my motion toward the Strident.”

  The suit rotated her far more slowly than she liked. When it did, she decided that she would have been better off letting herself die of asphyxiation.

  Behind her, a Unity cruiser approached, slowly. The vessel was about the size of the Clarion, but not the thin long tube with containers attached. Instead, this was a huge, rounded design that looked something like an aircraft with a sloping triangular shape designed to pursue enemy vessels into the high atmosphere of a planet.

  The ship was moving so slowly that it had come to almost a complete stop by the time she turned toward it. She had no doubt that this wasn’t just coincidence. They wanted her alive—or rather, they wanted whoever it was in the spacesuit alive. If they had wanted to kill her, they could have simply fired a single round from a railgun on their way by or just run her over with the plasma screen that sparked every time debris from the Clarion impacted it. Soon the shield would drop, and a shuttle would launch to “rescue” her from the void.

  Forgetting she was in space, Katy flailed in her suit. She tried to turn and run to the shuttle behind her. However, her suit would have none of it. Following her previous command, it used its jets to keep her faced directly toward the oncoming cruiser. Katy stopped, worried she might have thrown herself off course from the Strident and left herself with little if any ability to adjust if that happened.

  The plasma screen in front of the bow of the cruiser snapped off.

  Only a second or two later, Katy bumped backward into the ship’s boat. Desperate, she searched with her one good hand for something to grasp. Thankfully she impacted the shuttle just where she was supposed to: right outside the airlock. She managed to find a place to hold and then carefully maneuvered herself aroun
d to stand with her magnetic boots on the short platform that the shuttle had extended to meet her. Feeling a little more secure, Katy punched in the code for the airlock and waited for it to cycle.

  She turned to look behind her and was surprised to see what looked to be a huge swarm of fireflies zipping by at tremendous speed. Katy shouted for joy in her space suit. Thousands upon thousands of containers from the Clarion rushed by. Already the first were being torn to shreds by the point defense weapons of the cruiser. Katy had no idea how the Clarion had managed to hide them from the cruiser’s sensors. She could only shout for joy as the first few impacted against the ship. They did little to no damage that she could see, simply vaporizing on contact, but she didn’t wait. Instead she turned and stepped into the now-open airlock and used her heads-up device to repressurize it.

  Cradling her broken arm against her chest, Katy stumbled into the shuttle and collapsed on the solid floor, grateful to have a tiny bubble of atmosphere around her and something resembling solid ground under her feet.

  Katy decided that she couldn’t wait the two hours that Neela had suggested.

  “Computer …”

  The computer acknowledged her command.

  “Activate program Neela Home.”

  Katy felt the automated gravity adjust to the ship’s acceleration. For a moment, she sat there both relieved and still terrified that she would suddenly find herself back in the void without a ship to rescue her. Morbidly she hoped that if the shuttle was destroyed that it all went up instantaneously. Oh, God, let it be a missile that kills me, she silently prayed, but as the seconds ticked by and nothing happened, Katy started to relax.

  Hoping beyond hope, she moved slowly toward the small fold-out auto-doc in the back of the crew quarters. She used a thought command to pop her helmet, closing her eyes as the resinlike compound disappeared into a mist and then nothing.

  “Computer, bring up an image of the Unity cruiser, and put it on the main viewscreen.”

  Still too scared to look, Katy turned away from the screen and carefully worked her broken arm out of the sleeve of her busted suit. The break was worse than she thought. It wasn’t poking through the skin, but she had a fractured radius that was clearly out of position and would need to be set.

  Professionally, she was only mildly entertained. It was an easy thing for the small auto-doc to fix, but personally she was grateful that the pain-blocker program in the emergency nanites was so complete. She would have been in agony without it. The auto-doc pinned her wrist to the fold-out table.

  Curiosity egged on by her natural instincts to avoid injuries led Katy to turn her face away as the bone was set. Instead, she turned her attention to the cruiser, shocked to find that the nose had been badly crumpled, taking away any possibility of raising the plasma screen again. Still the fireflies kept pounding themselves into the ship. Hundreds, no, thousands of them.

  When the battle started, there had been at least 60,000 containers left on board. Considering the threats they faced, Katy wouldn’t have been surprised if 20,000 had been devoted to the cruiser.

  Katy didn’t think there were anywhere near that many right now, but it was still a number far beyond any accurate estimation, and all of them moved at high velocity.

  Now that the plasma screen had been disabled, their angle of attack seemed to have moved somewhere higher up on the fuselage.

  Katy flinched as the auto-doc manipulated her arm, resetting the bone. There was no pain, but she found both the sound and the twisting uncomfortable.

  “Bone successfully realigned. Please remain still for the casting process.”

  Katy was grateful that the auto-doc had her arm held in such a vicelike grip, or she might have leapt from her seat. A huge explosion ripped through the side of the cruiser, followed shortly thereafter by another series of follow-up blasts. The few lights that were visible on the outside of the ship went out, and for a moment all was still, and then a third tremendous blast that Katy thought must have come from its compressed hydrogen tore the ship into large pieces.

  The auto-doc let go of her arm, and she immediately cradled it to her chest and stood. The auto-doc went into its Unity-approved speech about broken arms and how they took twenty-four hours to heal fully, but Katy didn’t hear it.

  Instead, she was reading and rereading the text-based message that had appeared on the front viewscreen.

  Way forward is clear. See you at our new home in just over twenty-four hours.

  24

  Dùn Dubhar

  Katy stood at the front of the cabin watching as the ship’s boat approached the dark surface of the rogue planet. Sailing in the deep space between the stars, the only way that she knew that it existed was because the computer had highlighted it in red, and she was now close enough to it that it was eating away at the distant Milky Way.

  She still couldn’t believe how she had arrived here. Once she passed through the sixth gate and entered the Jersey Frontier, her ship had taken off across the system, heading directly toward the smallest of the three suns in the cluster, all the while gaining speed. Twenty hours later she was almost halfway to the first star when her sensors started to register a small singularity. Katy hadn’t taken any astrophysics courses when she was studying with her tutor Dmitri on Athena Prime, but she thought it an odd place to find such a dense object.

  Pulled in by its gravity, she arrived a few minutes later to find nothing, only a dark hole in space. She was about to question the ship’s motivations for taking her to this desolate place when it highlighted a small, perhaps half standard wormhole that operated by remote beacon. Without breaking its speed, the Strident passed through the gate into deep space. After several hours of intense braking, using all the mass bending the ship could provide, Katy found herself descending to the surface of the rogue.

  The Strident heated only slightly in the rogue’s thin atmosphere. The planet looked solid, its mass reading nearly Earth standard. Katy strapped in as the autopilot skimmed the surface, dropping into a deep canyon that was only visible because the computer made it so. Walls of ice rose above her until they blocked out the sky and then lost their shine as they changed to dull rock.

  Traveling at relatively high speeds, the Strident ran a course through the canyons that took the precise calculations only an AI could provide—and Katy guessed they had to have been preprogrammed. Eventually the canyon turned into a tunnel system with innumerable branches. The twists and turns continued for at least another twenty minutes, as the ship ran a sure course. Eventually it came to a gentle stop in front of a lock, the size of which would have made any space-station owner proud. Lights came on in the tunnel as the huge doors slid open only a fraction of their full width, allowing the Strident to slip in with minimal effort. The ship hovered there while the huge lock was repressurized and the inner doors opened to a landing platform that could have fit hundreds of ships. As it was, there were only fifty or so clustered in the far corner.

  Katy only recognized a few of them, a couple of them she had seen on her visits to Tortuga. By the state of repair, she guessed that most belonged to the Timcree. None of them held her gaze like the shattered hulk of what remained of the Clarion. Katy had no idea how it had made it here with any atmosphere left for its inhabitants.

  By now the Strident was descending, and the Clarion was lost to view. Katy unstrapped and stepped to the back of the crew compartment, waiting for the ship to settle into place before punching the green-lit button to open the airlock.

  Freddi stood at the bottom of the two-foot jump to greet her. She was dressed in dirty coveralls with a rag hanging out of one pocket and a tool in the other hand. Her heads-up was down over her left eye.

  Katy hopped down, and the two women gripped each other tightly for a moment.

  Eventually Katy stepped back. “Where’s Soren?”

  Freddi looked at the ground for a moment. Looking up, she shook her head, eyes glistening. Her shoulders began to shake. Stepping forward, K
aty wrapped the taller woman in another hug and then let her own emotions come. Her chest felt heavy and tight. For the moment, it seemed impossible to go on.

  Katy rubbed her eyes. “Who else?”

  “Todd and Lilah. We never got back to kitchen after they hit the spine.”

  Katy rubbed her forehead. She knew that at some point she would need to cry, but for now it all seemed too unreal to take seriously, a feeling reinforced by their location. “Where are we?”

  “We are in Dùn Dubhar, the fortress of last resort for the Imperial royal family. The rumor is that when the capital fell, the Empress gave the order to move her government here, but it was already too late. Unity troops were in the palace before she even got to her ship.”

  “How?”

  “Soren, really. She helped supervise the construction of the place in the years leading up to the war, including the black gate in the Jersey system. Neela and I, along with Jones, were on board the Clarion at the time, and as part of the senior crew, we knew about the project, though we weren’t told exactly what it was about, but it wasn’t too hard to make a guess. Soren and I have been talking about this place ever since we decided to give a big finger to the Unity. I made a trip out here when you were on Bainboue. We weren’t sure if our construction codes would still work, but the place wasn’t wholly finished before the war started, so we thought they might.” Freddi shrugged a little and looked around the huge and mostly empty docking bay. “They did.”

  Katy started to ask another question. “How are …”

  The frown on Freddi’s face forestalled her.

  Katy finally noticed the fatigue in her eyes. She’s taking it hard, thought Katy. I had the easy go in the last few hours. Katy glanced at the dimpled hull of what remained of the Clarion. How she kept them alive …

  “I’m sorry, Katy. There’ll be time enough to answer all your questions. We’ve got to decide our future. For now, we both need a shower and some sleep. It’s been a tough thirty-two hours. There’s a state-of-the-art medical facility, too. You ought to get a look at that before someone goes and cannibalizes it for ship parts.”