by Rick Partlow
"Me, too," Kara said, pushing a stack of chips at the pile.
Deke grinned at each of us, then at his cards, before dramatically spreading the hand in front of us.
"Full fucking house," he cackled.
I threw my hand down in disgust. "Goddamnit. There goes a week's pay."
Deke was about to pull the pile of chips toward him, but Kara's outstretched hand blocked his way.
"Sorry, Captain Conner." She smiled broadly. "Royal flush."
Slick's jaw dropped as he stared at the hand, his cigar nearly falling from his mouth.
"Holy shit," he breathed. "Do you know how long it's been since I lost a poker game?"
"About five seconds," she told him straightfaced, raking in the pot.
Deke sat back, eyes wide, and breathed a heavy sigh. "Caleb, old friend, I think I'm in love."
"I think," I muttered, grabbing the bottle, " I need another drink."
Interlude: Rachel
Rachel Mitchell floated in darkness, her brain trapped in a dreamlike state from which she couldn't seem to wake up, and she had almost come to the conclusion that she was dead. Only faint, semiconscious memories of armored men and the hibernation chamber of a starship held promise that she was alive, her bodily functions slowed down, her brain in a half-aware coma.
Yet that conclusion kept slipping into the fog that settled over her thoughts, swallowed by fleeting memories that seemed more real than her present. The fog parted suddenly before a dazzling light that solidified into the yellow glare of a beautiful, unceasing Canaan day...real day, not the pitiful imitation the Corporates had foisted upon them.
A cloudless, azure sky stretched above her, and she thought for a moment that her spirit was flying through it, having left the encumbrance of her body behind. But then her surroundings coalesced into a golden-brown field of wheat, nearly ready for the harvest, high as her shoulder. The stalks of wheat whipped gently at her bare arms and legs, and the sensation seemed to bring about a realization of the fact that she had a body once again. Suddenly, she could feel the denim of her shorts and the soft cotton of her shirt; she could hear the pneumatic hissing of the irrigation hoses and the far-away turbine-whine of an autoharvester...and a voice calling her name.
"Raaachelll," the call came again, annoyingly persistent.
She turned toward it and saw, with a cold feeling in her heart that could be a sensation of her present hindsight or perhaps a memory, Harry Paskowski striding purposefully toward her from the front porch of their little farmhouse. When they'd first been married she'd thought of the dwelling as "cozy." After two years of Harry, a more apt term seemed to be stifling.
"Rachel," he repeated as he approached her, seeming to be angry---but then, didn't he always seem to be angry? "Why didn't you answer me?"
"Sorry," she said automatically, though she didn't feel sorry in the least. "I was just thinking."
"Well, think about seeing to your daughter," he grumbled, his bearded face screwed up in barely-contained anger. She marveled at how she had once found that face pleasant, as the face of someone she could spend the rest of her life with. "She's crying about some damn thing or another." He jerked a thumb back at the house.
So you left her alone, you stupid bastard, she thought, not answering him as she started back toward the porch and the door left yawning open there. She didn't trust herself to speak to him when she was this irritated. Her cheek still burned with the phantom sting of two nights ago, the first time he had hit her.
He probably wouldn't do it again---she'd kicked him so hard in the nuts he'd spent an hour doubled over on the kitchen floor, and when he'd recovered she'd put the barrel of his hunting rifle in his face and let him know that if he ever struck her again she would blow his head off. She wasn't sure if that had really solved her problem. True, he was a bully and a coward and once you backed one down they tended to stop confronting you. But that left extant the fact that she was married to a bully and a coward.
Leaving him and moving back in with her parents seemed the obvious solution to her...but, apparently, not to her mother. She'd called her last night, to tell her what had happened and ask her advice. She'd been less than helpful, more eager to blame Rachel than to tearfully invite her to come home to Mommy. Not surprising, considering this marriage had been more her mother's idea than Rachel's.
From the day Caleb had left for the Service Academy, Mother had pushed her into Harry's arms...or rather, into his family, which was highly placed in the Church. Never mind the fact that she didn't love the man...love was a child's conceit. The word had lost its meaning to her, as it had years before to her mother.
Anyway, she reasoned, stepping into the house to the tune of Angela's plaintive cries, if she left Harry, what would happen to their daughter?
Angie was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, amidst a puddle of spilled fruit juice, her fallen cup beside her, wailing her lungs off. Of course, it would have been too much of a chore for Harry to clean up the mess and take care of his own God damned daughter. Trying to control her anger, she lifted Angel into her arms, making comforting noises as she moved to the kitchen closet to get a mop.
It seemed that was all she did lately, control her anger and clean up messes. Was that what it was supposed to be like? God knew it had been like that for her mother, but she just couldn't accept the fact that Caleb would have been a shorter, blonder version of Harry. As much as she'd resented Cal's leaving, at least he'd cared about something beyond himself---beyond the end of his nose. And events had proven him right. The war had expanded to envelope the whole Commonwealth, and millions had died.
Yet still the people here buried their heads in the sand, actually protesting the installation of orbital defenses. Even after all these years, her friends still talked about Cal as if he'd abandoned her, ignoring the nightmare unfolding all around them. But no matter what she'd thought of him for leaving, she couldn't imagine him blowing up at her over a malfunctioning harvester or getting violent because she'd gone into town without his permission. And she couldn't, she realized, mopping up the juice spill one-handed, imagine herself staying with this man for another day.
When he came back in, she would tell him...
"Rachel!" Harry exclaimed, bursting into the house. She turned on him, ready to deliver her decision, but the words froze on her lips as she saw the fear in his eyes. "Something's happening! There's all kinds of ships in the air!"
She felt a cold lump in her stomach as she moved past him out onto the porch, already hearing the roar of aircraft breaking the sound barrier overhead. Her eyes went to the yellow dazzle of the daytime sky, and, squinting against the glare, she saw the black dots in the distance growing swiftly into...
"Oh, my God," she whispered, hugging Angel against her, a wisp of the little girl's auburn curls passing across her vision.
"Ma-ma?" The one-year old had stopped crying, sensing her mother's distraction.
Rachel stared in disbelief at the menacing shadows thrown across the wheat fields by the black wedges of the Tahni assault shuttles, unable to accept that the war had finally come home.
"Rachel!" Harry's plaintive cry brought her to reality once again. "What are we going to do?"
"The storm cellar," she decided. "Get into the storm cellar!" Built to keep them safe during the hurricane-force storms of the Canaan Night, the shelter was the only safe place she could conceive of.
He pushed past her, sprinting through the living room, bouncing off of the hand-made furniture she'd picked out so carefully two years ago, through the kitchen to a heavy, duralloy door. Harry slammed into the storm-cellar door shoulder-first, and she stopped just short of running straight into him as he worked at the lock. The roar of the shuttles seemed to grow ever louder while he frantically punched the code into the keypad, the device mocking him with a disapproving beep as he entered the wrong digits.
Rachel chewed at her lip, glancing over her shoulder as if she could see the progress of th
e aerospacecraft through the plain white walls, absent-mindedly stroking Angel's hair to quiet her. Finally, Harry was rewarded with a cheerful acceptance tone from the keypad and the shelter door cracked open with a hermetic rasp, the dim red glow of the emergency lights inside illuminating the descending stairwell.
"Get in!" Harry shoved her at the door desperately.
She lost her balance and steadied herself against the doorframe, feeling the vibration from the shuttle engines through the walls. Standing in the doorway, she glanced back at Harry, surprised he'd pushed her in ahead of himself...and then his body was framed with a red light that was the last thing she saw.
Her last conscious sensation was a pressure beyond sound and heat and falling...
The memory faded back into the haze of her hibernating hind-brain, sparing her the images she'd confronted when she'd woken from the blast. Lying in a shelter half-collapsed around her, the first sight she'd been faced with had been the charred and lifeless bodies of Harry and Angel. The missile, she'd discovered later---after her neighbors had dug her out and tended to her various burns, contusions and broken bones---had been intended for a Constabulary hopper that had made a futile attempt at resistance. The warhead had detonated against the wall opposite the shelter, and the blast had thrown all three of them into the cellar and blown the door closed. Only the fact that Harry and Angel had shielded her allowed her to survive, and for a long time, she wished she hadn't.
The resistance movement had given her a purpose---revenge---but nothing to change that feeling of guilt. Even Cal's return hadn't been able to eradicate it, only push it down into a dark corner she never disturbed...not awake. The last coherent thought she had was that if the death of a man she hadn't loved and a child she'd hardly had time to know had left her a virtual emotional cripple, what would she do if they'd killed Cal? The only answer she received was a slide into darkness and then nothing...
Chapter Eight
"Looks bad." Deke stared without enthusiasm at the readout from the long-range scanners. "That," he said, gesturing at the glowing blip orbiting the flat, brown circle that represented the Predecessor world, "is at least an armed freighter conversion, if not an actual military cruiser. And you can bet if that's what they have in orbit, they have at least a couple assault shuttles and two or three squads of guards on the surface."
"He's right," Kara had to admit. "If we jump in at minimum safe distance, that picket ship will have all day to cruise out and meet us, and its shields and weaponry have to be nearly cruiser class."
I stared silently at the readout holo, trying to think, trying to ignore the stale tang of reprocessed air. We'd converted out of Transition Space just outside the cometary halo about an hour ago, after a long two weeks confined in that oversized beer can, and I was ready to attack a cruiser barehanded just for the privilege of breathing fresh air again. But they were right---it didn't look too good.
"Okay," I finally said. "Let's assume that it's a converted freighter, like the one back at Thunderhead. That means it has pretty heavy armament, and a good-sized reactor, but not a military command structure. Commercial ships don't have redundant bridges---if we can get one or two good shots at the command center, it'll cripple them."
"So?" Deke shrugged. "We'd never get close enough to worry about it. They can stand off about a thousand klicks and hit us with long-range lasers until our shields overload."
"The key," I said, wagging a finger at him didactically, "is jumping in close enough to keep them from being able to do that."
"But we can't jump in any closer than a ten planetary diameters," Kara pointed out, floating behind my right shoulder. "It's impossible."
"Not exactly impossible," Deke muttered, seeing where I was going, and not liking it. He fixed me with a hard glare.
"What's the matter?" I nudged him in the ribs. "It's okay if you play the long odds, but not me?"
"It's a bit like letting someone else gamble with your money, bud," he muttered sourly.
"Just what do you have in mind?" Kara shook her head. "I've been a pilot for over fifteen years, and, as far as I know, it's physically impossible to jump in or out closer than ten diameters to any spatial body that masses more than ten million metric tons. The gravitational warping of local spacetime interferes with the formation of the Teller-Fox wormhole, and you wind up with half your atoms in Transition Space and half in realspace."
"That's what they tell you in Fleet pilot training," I conceded, "but it's only half the story."
"You were a spook," Deke told her, "you just got taught enough to get you on the planet unnoticed. We both got Attack Command training, which is a good deal more involved. Attack Command ships are mean animals---they're all capacitors and weapons, and they're built to handle multiple short-range jumps, so they can pop in and out between capital ships, lay out missile spreads and pop back out. That's pretty tricky, so they teach the crews a little more about the physics of it."
"For instance..." she prompted impatiently.
"Look," I explained, waving at the sensor readout, "this planet has a good-sized moon. Not as big as Luna, but pretty significant. The moon exerts a gravitational warping effect of its own, though not even half what the planet gives out. But if you can calculate the point---I'm talking down to a few klicks here---where the moon's gravitational pull is equal to that of the planet, and jump out of T-space at exactly that point, the warping effects will cancel each other out, and your exit hole will form."
"You're talking about the Lagrangian points, right?"
"Exactly." I nodded, encouraged.
Kara cocked an eyebrow. "And you've tried this, I suppose."
"Well, yeah, sure," I nodded. "Once."
"Once?" she repeated dubiously.
"Hey," I pointed out, "it obviously worked. I think we can figure out from our long-range sensors where we need to jump, and then it's just a question of number-crunching. What we need to do is arrive when the picket ship is between the moon and the planet---that way, we can be on top of them before they can get a clear shot at us."
She smiled, obviously unconvinced. "Oh, that should be no problem at all."
"It's either that or kill our power and coast in on a Hohmann transfer orbit. That should only take, oh, about eight years."
"All right, all right," Deke interrupted. "We've come this far, we might as well go for broke. This is going to take up some major computer time, so Cal, you link up and get the AI started on figuring out where this system's Lagrangian points are. Kara, you work on the timing for our jump."
"And what are you going to do?" Kara asked him.
"Well," he snorted ruefully, "I should get roaring drunk, but since I'm going to have about ten seconds to get off a shot, I'm going to review what I've got in my personal and ship database about commercial freighters. Then," he added, "I'm going to start charging up the capacitors---we're going to need to have the backups charged to capacity to jump back out in time." He turned to me. "And we'll have to set everyone up with some heavy weapons and body armor. You know, of course, that even if this works and we can take that picket ship out, we're going to have to wade through two or three squads of mercs onplanet."
"Hell," I chuckled. "That'll be the easy part."
Four hours later, we were all stuffed into body armor, hanging with pistols and bandoleers of ammo, and strapped uncomfortably into our acceleration couches. I nervously waited out the countdown, fidgeting in my seat as images sprang unbidden into my mind of our atoms scattered across several light years. If anything went wrong, if even one of our calculations was a fraction off, nobody would ever know what had happened to us. Rachel and Pete and Jase would wait and wonder, and the Corporate types would keep hunting, but no one would ever know that our substance was scattered over the breadth of two different universes.
Even if it worked, Deke had one, maybe two shots to take out the enemy ship's bridge before they targeted us with their lasers---and the shields on this bucket wouldn't even take one sho
t from a fusion-fed laser. Even if we did make it past the ship, they might blow us out of the sky with ground-based defenses... I tried to stop thinking, telling myself again that this had been my idea.
"Two minutes," Deke announced, unnecessarily---we were all plugged into the computer net. Sometimes, Deke talked to hear himself talk. He put up a cocky, brave face, but I knew him better than that.
Kara seemed impassive, staring at the forward viewers without really seeing them. Myself, I was scared shitless, but I'd been terrified so many times in my life, I was used to it. Fear, like loss and pain, is something mortals have to learn to live with.
I passed the last two minutes going over the image of the Corporate ship we'd faced at Thunderhead, searching for key targets I could hit with the laser. Deke would take out the command bridge with the proton cannon, and I doubted there was much I could do for that target that he couldn't, but if they had any weapons ports or Gatling turrets exposed, it'd be my job to try to take them out. Not that it was a vital part of our plan---as Deke had observed, this encounter would be decided within about ten seconds.
"Thirty seconds," Deke murmured to himself, powering up the impellers. We'd have to have a hefty prejump velocity to carry us across the distance to the enemy ship before they could react, so we'd started nearly a thousand kilometers back from our jump point, and would accelerate at a rate that would bring us to the point at just the right moment. Decelerating us on arrival would be Kara's job.
We'd done this trick before...once, on a mission that had wound up going bad. But then, we'd had exact astrographical specifications for the system, and there'd been little possibility for error. I would have liked to have done it when I infiltrated Canaan, but my home planet has no moon and, thus, no Lagrangian points.
The dicey part, aside from the physics calculations, was that we'd only be in T-space for a couple of seconds. We'd have to deal with a double-dose of the disorientation that a jump entailed in only a few brief moments, then immediately have to nail a pinpoint target at near point-blank range. For a normal human, it would have been damn near impossible; but with our headcomps and our neurolinks, we could detach ourselves from our neural input. It wouldn't cancel out all the sensation---it wasn't purely physical, as I understood---but it should allow us to be able to react fast enough.