Space Eldritch
Page 26
“You all right, Major?” Igor asked, his voice carrying the slightest tremor of fear, his black hair visibly wet even through his visor. All of Spetzna’s men and women wanted something. What Igor invariably wanted was to get the hell out of the fight.
“Shut your mouth, Igor,” Valya said, her stance as stout as her limbs, owning her sight lines, her pulser following every twitch of her eyes. The picture of a sergeant. “The Major is thinking.”
Igor looked away, panic brewing just below the surface, his lines shaking even under all that heavy armor. He cleared his throat, but Valya glanced his way without her eyes moving. Spetzna had never figured out how she did that.
“I’ve got movement fore, Major,” a voice buzzed on the comms.
They hadn’t had much resistance from that direction yet. All the soldiers had been aft, and the resistance pitched, but not too pitched.
“I’m investigating.”
Wouldn’t be much in that direction. The forecastle, but if the troops had gathered there, they wouldn’t have let the Russians run rampant while they took heavy losses aft. This was a boarding action. It was all hands on deck. Hesitation was a death sentence. There couldn’t be a force in the fore of the ship. It just didn’t make any sense.
But his gut churned. It would be stupid just to sit up in the forecastle while all this fighting happened aft. And yet, resistance had been pitched but light... and this ship was known for its cruelty in battle. Still, there was cruelty to your own men and cruelty to the enemy. No, there was nothing going on fore. They had the ship. It was just mop-up. It didn’t matter if he hadn’t been able to put together a decent count of the enemy.
“There’s a hatch ajar up there, Anya, check it out.”
His gut twisted.
“Back off!” he screamed into the comm. “It’s a trap!”
He felt that tickle in his mind even as his rage soared to the sound of gunfire on the comms, to his men screaming, to all that putrid death.
“Contact, contact, contact.”
“Men to the aft! Men to the aft!”
“Dear God, they’re everywhere!”
“Hold together, hold together!”
The voices of the commanders tumbled over one another on the comms. Igor screamed and fired down the hall at nothing, but Valya shouted him down and Spetzna barely spared him a glance. Buck fever. Let the sergeant handle it.
Instead, he shouted commands into the comm, knowing even now that he didn’t have enough data to save the soldiers. He didn’t have the layout or the placement. He’d trusted them to do what they’d done a dozen times before. Each commander knew their job. It wasn’t supposed to go wrong. The enemy wasn’t supposed to sacrifice their own people just to lull them into complacency. How dare they? How fucking dare they?
The rage burned, welling up inside him even as his mind tickled with the sensation. He roared his fury and charged forwards. He had to save them. He had to save them all.
Spetzna never lost his head in battle, the rage was always deep inside, never his master, but he couldn’t stand the thought of his men dying out there. Screaming in agony. In the back of his mind that tickling had a timbre almost like laughter.
An impact took him from behind, slamming him to the deck. He threw back an elbow with a crack and the weight lifted. He spun and raised the pulser at Pasha’s head. It was only when that writhing, abused part of his soul screamed in protest that he lowered the rifle.
“Get your damn head in the game, Major!” Pasha barked.
He was right. He’d already called what amounted to a retreat. “Fall back,” he said to his personal troops. “Back to the airlock.”
The screams of the dying still echoed on the comms. The staccato of explosive rounds tore the air in the distance. Cordite burned the nose. They were dying. All around him, his soldiers were dying.
“Fall back,” he growled, his jaw spasming.
Fall back.
***
Captain Grigory Petrovich Romanov cursed as he listened to the cross-chatter of the commanders through the whine of the jamming field. They died by the dozens... maybe by the hundreds.
“This is Catherine the Great Actual,” he said on the comm.
“I read you, Actual,” Spetzna answered.
“What’s the situation?”
“Some of the soldiers have made it back to the docking ring alive. The rest are dead or with me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in the wind, with twenty-five or so troopers.”
“I need you to get back to the docking ring.”
Pause. “Ah... that’s a negative, Actual. The entire Trojan Army is between me and the way out.”
The Captain cursed. “I’m not leaving you in there.”
“It’s my job, Actual. We always knew it would end like this.”
The Captain scanned the bridge crew, most of them tech serfs peering into their instruments in the greasy light. None of them looked up. As far as they seemed to care, this conversation wasn’t happening.
“I’m not leaving you,” the Captain said again.
“Actual, I don’t know what they have planned, but so far they’ve been fucking ruthless. They mean to get on board. Don’t let them. Live to fight another day.”
The Captain cursed again. “All teams, back onto the Catherine.” He didn’t look at the tech serfs. “When they give the all clear, disconnect and release the grapple fields. Give me one hundred klicks of separation.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Captain cursed yet again. “All right,” he said on the comm again. “We’ll reevaluate and attack again. I’m coming for you, Misha.” Not Spetzna, the nickname he used with the men, but the one he used among friends. “Do you hear me, Misha. I’m coming for you. Do not die. That’s an order.”
“Aye, aye, Actual.”
***
Thou shalt not violate the sanctity of the human form.
Icarus was never entirely comfortable in dealing with the tech serfs. On the one hand they violated the fourth proscription. On the other hand, they’d violated it by implanting themselves with the sacred, irreplaceable technology that made space travel possible.
This particular tech serf appeared to have been an amputee. When given the choice between life as a cripple and life as the tech elite, he’d chosen the latter, even though that made him something less than human in the eyes of the church and society in general. The joke was on him, however.
The legs hadn’t fit.
The man sat in an auto-chair. The three-hundred-year-old legs were different sizes, and neither integrated with his hip bones properly. In addition, the tech surfs had implanted a cerebral lobe replacement that was too small and the metal dome leaked yellow puss at the interface with his shaved head. The lobe-replacement probably held data-storage, if this conversation was any indication.
“So you’re telling me we can lose them?” Icarus said.
The tech serf looked at him, his head twitching in insect-like movements, probably damage to his fine motor control. Cyberware was sacred, since the skill of making it had been lost in the Collapse. Unfortunately, that also meant that it was all calibrated to nervous systems centuries dead.
“I believe so. The Catherine the Great has not hit full acceleration from dead stop in fifty-seven years.” His voice came with abbreviated clicking sounds for vocal ticks.
“That is a long time to be perpetrating a ruse.”
“We believe that she has a shudder.”
“A shudder?”
The tech serf took a moment to consult some inner voice. “Correct. A shudder. They must bring up their engines slowly to full acceleration, otherwise it becomes a shake.”
“And if it becomes a shake?”
The tech serf shrugged, which started him chirping, his eyes crossed in pain. After a moment it stopped and he went on like nothing had happened. Probably some form of petit mal seizure. He might not even know that had just happened.
�
��I would expect that fuel lines would crack and the entire ship would turn into a fireball... or at least that’s what they fear will happen.”
“Ah. We’re full acceleration now?”
“Yes, and they are falling behind.”
“Very well,” Icarus said and left the broken little creature. At least that would buy them some breathing room. He didn’t need to recite the Litany of Acceleration to remind himself how the universe worked. They would pull ahead steadily until the Catherine the Great could match acceleration. Even then they’d have a higher relative V. The gap would grow indefinitely unless the Catherine was faster.
Which it probably was.
But God would provide.
God. That was why he’d been trying to extract himself from conversations for the last hour. He had felt the touch of God and he had been changed.
It was simple enough to find a place alone now that he’d shaken Father Colin and the ship was more or less set straight. He could make it to one of the off-duty meditation domes and reach out again, but this time he wouldn’t be looking for the enemy ship.
He found an empty dome easily enough and climbed the ladder until he was high above Colin, above the soul-noise of the people below, up where only space stretched around him. Transparent metal circled him, invisible in the night. It looked as if he stood on a platform in the depths of space. He knelt.
He sensed the Catherine first, falling behind just as the tech serf said it would. Next he felt that nearby maelstrom, still echoing with the death cries of what had probably been a shipful of people. A large one from the noise.
Aside from that, nothing.
He slowed his breathing, shifting more deeply into that mental fugue they’d taught him so many years ago in seminary. One by one the muscles of his body released their stress. He used the Litany of Uncertainty as a vehicle to free his mind.
Priest: The Lord has blessed us with so many mysteries.
Chorus: Blessed Lord!
Priest: We see His enigma reflected in the smallest particles.
Chorus: Oh subtle Lord!
Priest: He has shown us through the mystery of uncertainty.
Chorus: Bless Saint Heisenberg!
Priest: And what did Saint Heisenberg reveal unto man?
Chorus: We cannot know both the position of a particle and its momentum.
Priest: If I know its exact position?
Chorus: Then its momentum is unknown.
Priest: If I know its exact momentum?
Chorus: Then its position is unknown.
Priest: And who help cast light on the darkness of our inability to understand uncertainty?
Chorus: Saint Bohr of the fallen atomic model.
Reciting the litany didn’t really help him relax directly, it was an educational litany and wasn’t meant to, but freeing his mind always helped, and when he truly freed his mind, the litanies came. Usually hard-science litanies—God’s greatest works. The Quantum Physical Litanies always intrigued him the most, because they were so incomplete.
His consciousness drifted up, out of the dome, into the great spiritual void of space. Nothing to disturb him other than those two blips out there in the distance. Nothing but him and the expanse of silence. Adrift.
My child.
The words came unbidden, but hand in hand with the brush of attention he’d felt earlier. It wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t his imagination. He’d done it. He’d found God.
“Father!” he cried.
The presence pressed down on his mind and he resisted like he’d been taught in his mental defense class, all those years ago. But this was God, wasn’t it? One didn’t resist the touch of the mind of God.
Submit.
He tried to submit, but every time that presence pushed into his mind, his natural walls went up. It was instinctive, and it just went to show what an unworthy sinner he really was. He had to relax. To let go. He had nothing to fear from the Almighty.
Submit.
He tried to relax, but he couldn’t. There was something powerful about the presence, and he couldn’t let go. His mind took it as an invasion. He was a sinner and he didn’t want to let God into his innermost thoughts, as silly as that was. God loved him, imperfections and all.
Submit!
He managed to pull his defenses partially down, and with a flare of might the presence reared above him, arched and plunged into his mind. Icarus screamed, and as he screamed, some small part of him cried out in the night. Colin was right. Oh Dear Father, but Colin was right.
The mind of God felt so... alien.
***
Spetzna growled at Pasha. The comm was still open to the Catherine, but the Captain probably wouldn’t hear that over the interference of the jammer. “I will not abandon you,” Spetzna said.
Pasha threw his hands up while twenty-three soldiers watched the argument with blank expressions. “Major, we can get you out. You can get back to the Catherine. You can lead the rest of the men.” This was Pasha’s one-note song, and it wasn’t any more acceptable today than it had been on that last freighter.
“And leave you to die.” He ground his teeth. He had to keep his voice down. They had found this little damaged corridor behind a proscribed area of the ship. They shouldn’t be found, and if they were it would be by men who wouldn’t be carrying guns because of the proscription, but best not to tempt fate.
“You can come back with the rest of the troops, mount a rescue mission.”
“The Catherine will have to match velocities with me to take me in. You know how she ramps up, that will take time and she’ll have to start the drive-build over again.” If only they knew how to fix that shimmy. “There’s a good chance at that point we’ll lose this ship.”
“But you would survive!” Pasha almost shouted. He looked around to see if the enemy had heard.
“I will not just leave you.” His mind itched and the joints of his jaw ached. Did Pasha really think he would just leave them all here? “If we can get to the crew life support capsules, we can all evacuate.”
“We can’t make it there,” Pasha said again. “There are so many damn Greeks between us and that part of the ship that they might as well oil up and start wrestling.” Pasha pointed down at the sketch they’d made on the deck plating. “I can get you to the captain’s pod.”
“I will not abandon you.” He might punch the little fucker in the throat until his ears ruptured, but that wouldn’t be abandoning him.
“You are the important thing.”
“They are the important thing!” Spetzna barked, pointing at the troops. He shouldn’t be having this damn conversation in front of the soldiers, but they didn’t have any other damn choice. There were only so many places to go in their hiding place. Out of earshot in either direction and they risked being spotted by Greek crewmen.
“Sir, you have more combat experience than half of them added together. You are more important to church and state than any dozen men. Don’t you understand that?” The last squeaked with just a hint of pleading.
“Do you know why they call me Spetzna?” Pasha knew. The kozel had named him Spetzna, but he addressed this to the troops. They didn’t dare speak, so he pushed on. “In the bad old days of the Soviet tyranny, the military’s most elite forces were known as the spetznas. They were death in the night to the Imperialists of the Forgotten West. They moved without sound, they killed without remorse. When Western forces woke, screaming in the night, it was because they’d dreamt the spetznas were coming to get them.”
“Myth and legend,” Pasha said.
Spetzna gave him a wry look, but didn’t mention who’d come up with the name in the first place. “I wasn’t named after the reality.” He looked back at the troops. “I will lead you out of this ship. I will get you home. All of you.” Maybe not all alive, but all accounted for. “Did you get all that, Actual?”
“Yes,” The Captain said from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.
“And do you concur?�
� He wouldn’t have asked the question if he didn’t know the answer would shut Pasha the hell up.
“What does your gut tell you, Major?”
“That my place is with my soldiers.”
“Then so be it.”
It wasn’t until that moment that Spetzna realized that almost all of his anger had gone. It hadn’t been reasonable in the first place. It was almost like a fire that someone had stoked to high flames, then bled off through a windy flue. He could almost feel it still there, as present as ever, but it didn’t quite bubble to the surface. Maybe he had just bled it off into his speech. Maybe it was the cold facade come back over him. That had to be it. He didn’t usually let anger show anyway. He was slipping.
“Let’s decide what our next objective is,” he said, then took a knee and looked at their impromptu map.
***
Captain Grigory Petrovich Romanov glanced down at the scopes, scanning for the drive flame of the Daedalus. He couldn’t see anything. “Have we lost them?”
“Off the scopes? We never had them on the scopes. Too much debris in this system.” The tech serf had several cables exiting his head and plugged into the console in front of him, the skin around them lavender with decay.
It made sense they hadn’t bothered with the scopes. This little system was largely unmapped and the priests could only spot souls. Since it took a month for a sensor crew working round the clock to scan a system, their time was better spent scanning for dangerous objects. Certain orbits and Lagrange points were ideal for parking and maintenance and they could be filled with centuries of accumulated debris.
“Fair enough. They’re probably almost out of scanning range anyway.” With both ships using their magnitude drives to contract space around them for faster-than-light speeds, the Daedelus would be several light hours ahead of them in sublight kilometers.
The comm buzzed and he strode back over to his chair. After a moment the comm operator said, “Troops reporting in, sir.”