by V J Kavanagh
To his right, the MECTECH labs’ yellow doors and window frames dabbed colour along the matt grey wall. Above, the enclosed gantry with large oblong windows gave access to the upper labs. He glanced left at the bulkhead, its bare wall perforated by a solitary red doorway, the inner airlock. Dee edged forward, moving his head in a circular motion. Fifty metres in, he reached the shadow of the gantry’s metal staircase, crouched, and raised his arm.
Bo arrived, his thick lips sandwiched into a sulk. ‘I do not understand why I cannot bring APR.’
Dee sighed, ‘Same reason as last time, this ain’t no intergalactic battle cruiser, there ain’t no force field.’
They cleared the upper labs last. No one was home.
Through the gantry window, Dee looked down and chewed over their options. One exit route was the opposing entrance in the right-hand bulkhead and the other the airlock. He glanced right, that’s where they’d be expecting them.
Bo rested his slab of a forehead on the glass. ‘Where is everybody?’
‘Where do you think? They ain’t gonna let you loose near anything breakable, including the crew.’
Bo’s lips curled, creasing the deep scar splitting his right cheek, ‘Then it is not real.’ His tree trunk neck cranked his head right. ‘I suppose they wait there, hiding behind door like girls.’
Dee punched him on the arm. ‘Right, so we don’t go that way.’
Bo’s eyebrows rose. ‘We not go outside?’
Dee skewed a smile. ‘Who’s the girl now? Look, I got it all figured out. We work our way across to the AM eject port, up the inspection shaft, through the AM tubes and into the control room, easy.’
‘That means we must cross exhaust.’
‘So?’
‘It is half K wide and no clips.’
‘We don’t need clips.’ Dee struck his thumb right. ‘There’re at least two jetpacks over there.’
His shoulder plate creaked under Bo’s grip, ‘Remember what Steve said, they make it easy for you to kill yourself.’
Dee huffed. ‘This is my mission, and I say we go out. Don’t worry; I ain’t ever got you killed.’
Bo released his grip. ‘You have not been in charge before.’
It took thirty minutes to inspect the Extravehicular Mobility suits and jetpacks, twenty minutes longer than it should have done.
They stood facing the airlock. Bo’s deep voice sounded tinny inside his helmet. ‘Steve was right.’
Dee grated his teeth. ‘I was gonna check anyway.’
Four of the orange EM suits hanging in closets had jetpacks and all had been sabotaged. Swopping the primary thrust potentiometer for a bridge connector was crude, but effective. It would have locked the horizontal thrusters on full burn, accelerating them into Earth’s atmosphere. Someone downstairs might have looked up and made a wish upon their spectacular cremation.
A misty film had already formed inside Bo’s visor. ‘I would like Jason and Steve to be here.’
Dee spun and grabbed Bo’s arm. ‘The suits are fine, the packs are fine, everything’s fine. We don’t need any goldtops telling us what to do.’
‘You do not like Steve because Jason choose him for Captain.’
Dee dropped his arm. ‘You know it ain’t that. It’s like always, I gotta wait in line behind every goldtop just cos I didn’t go to the Academy.’
He knew Jason was always going to choose Steve. They were at the Academy together, joined CONSEC together, practically lived together.
‘Steve try to help you.’
Dee’s shoulders slumped. ‘Yeah, I know.’ Bo was right. Steve had persuaded Jason to classify this mission as a promotion assessment, and it was Steve who’d suggested the eject port’s inspection shaft. But then, it’s easy to be generous when you’ve already got everything. Dee mused at the floor. Somewhere below his over-boots was Citadel, the best of the best Advocates stored in cryostasis. So far, they’d all been selected from Academy goldtops. Lieutenant Deon ‘Dee’ Brandleson intended to change that.
He rolled his shoulders. ‘Ready?’
‘No.’
Dee raised his right arm, tapped the attached MCD, and pointed it at the airlock interface. The doorway edge flashed red and a clanging alarm echoed in the hanger as the doors slid apart to reveal the transfer bay’s subdued interior.
He reversed into position, locking his arms through the restraining hoops lining the walls. Bo stood opposite, his breath rasping in Dee’s earpiece.
‘You okay, Bo?’
‘No.’
‘Just follow me; we’ve done this a hundred times.’
‘Six times.’
‘Just follow me.’
A dull clunk resonated through the transfer bay; they’d attached to a Highway rail. Half a kilometre wide and three times as high, the Highway allowed transference between the rotating core and the outer hull.
As his EM suit lightened, Dee looked up inside his helmet and selected the far right icon. ‘AG on.’ Artificial Gravity micro-thrusters in his shoulder plates fired.
Bo raised his thumb. ‘AG on.’
Dee waited for the light above the outer doors to flash green before walking across the bay and pulling the D-shaped lever.
His eyes widened. He’d seen it before, but it was never the same. Smooth pale blue and mottled bronze daubed with clouds of cotton white, all wrapped in a hazy blanket. Despite its size, Earth was defenceless — like a peeled egg. He’d watched the simulations; Colossus would strike off the southern tip of Italy, evaporating the Mediterranean in a blink. The shock wave would reach his parent’s New York home in six seconds, three seconds before the fireball. Dee had promised them. Neither he nor his sister would witness it.
Bo’s panting intensified; condensation streaked the inside of his visor. A bio readout on his chest blinked amber.
Dee grabbed Bo’s arm. ‘Take it easy man. It’ll clear once the anti-humidity kicks in. We’ll do this in hops. Wait here.’
‘Okay . . . okay.’
Dee scanned the illuminated icons inside his helmet, ‘AG off, MDP on. Moving out now.’
‘Okay.’ Bo’s breathy response lacked conviction.
‘No, not okay, come on.’
‘Sorry. Roger.’
The Multi-Direction Propulsion arrows appeared on Dee’s Head-Up-Display and a tracker dot followed his eye movements. Beyond his visor, a celestial band of blue bounded the curvature of Earth. He closed his mind to its captivating beauty. Many had not and their rotting remains littered the pitiless reality of space.
Inhaling pure oxygen deep into his lungs, Dee fired the horizontal thrusters and jetted into low Earth orbit.
After thirty metres he rotated right, his view filled with the shadowy curve of the number one starboard exhaust cover. Provenance had four exhausts, a starboard and port pair, five kilometres apart. Each cover had the diameter of four baseball fields and each protected a pyramid of three hexagonal exhaust vents. Dee was no quantum physicist, but he knew the anti-matter engines could produce 230,000 kilograms of vacuum thrust. Two years after engine ignition, Provenance would slice through space at 300,000 kilometres a second. If they can get ‘em started.
Dee faded into shadow as he coasted over the exhaust cover towards its mounting. A minute later, he bumped into the house-sized mounting and hooked his arm through a support bracket. He and Provenance were travelling at thirty thousand kilometres an hour.
‘Alpha two, alpha one. Three-zero h then ten d-v. Turn nine-zero d-g-r, one-ten h and drift.’
‘Alpha two . . . roger.’
Dee watched the orange EM suit glide out into the starlit expanse. Bo’s erratic breathing filled his helmet, ‘Alpha two, alpha one, you’re doing fine. Drop ten and begin your turn.’
Bo’s breathing became faster, louder, desperate.
‘Alpha two, alpha one, turn now.’
No response.
‘Turn, Bo! Turn!’
; ‘I, I cannot see. Cannot turn. Something wrong, not working.’
The orange suit had drifted a hundred metres from the hull. Dee’s chest clenched. He didn’t understand, they’d tested the anti-humidity blowers in the hanger, all had checked out. He crouched and sprang away from the mounting. ‘Hang tight, Bo. I’m on my way.’
It took three minutes of emergency thrust to reach Bo and when Dee grabbed the ‘buddy’ grips on Bo’s jetpack, he was already in full reverse. ‘Gotcha.’
‘Thank you. Why you take so long?’
Dee smiled, nothing like a near death experience to calm the nerves.
A five-minute burn was enough to return them to the sunless obscurity of Provenance’s underside and bring them within sight of the target hatch. Dee angled the thrust and drifted up to meet it.
The inner air lock normalised in two minutes, flooding them in cobalt light. Dee glanced up in his helmet, ‘All clear, visors up.’
Bo’s blue hued face glistened in the cool metallic air, ‘I do not understand, the blowers work, but visor covered with water. MDP shut down.’
Dee bit his bottom lip. ‘We must’ve missed something. We’ll check later, let’s get outta here before they send someone to check the hatch.’
They stood on a ledge in the circular air lock, their arms wrapped behind a rail. A ladder opposite would take them up alongside the ejection conduit and into the injector bay.
As Dee climbed the airtight tube, he looked through slot windows into the circular void. Strips of light curved around the walls, highlighting the vertical rods that guided the anti-matter tubes to the ejection port. MECTECHs used the inspection hatch to check the port’s emergency explosive seals. Ejecting the AM tubes was bad enough, having them slam into the ejection port door was a whole lot worse.
The ascent to the injector bay took ten minutes and if someone was coming to investigate, they hadn’t arrived yet. Dee’s eyes rested on the line of silver torpedo like cylinders slotted into the left wall. These hydrogen proton injectors fed the anti-hydrogen tubes. He didn’t intend to be in here when they inserted them.
He slid around the wall, in defilade of the cameras pointing at the tubes. Nice one, Stevie.
They exited the bay into a cramped corridor and removed their EM suits. Dee extracted the scrubber filter from Bo’s Air Supply Unit and squeezed it. A stream of water splashed onto the deck. ‘Unlucky man, you picked the suit with the booby prize. I doubt it was in the tank, probably someone with a syringe.’
Bo’s hand thumped the metal wall; a sharp boom resonated along the corridor, ‘This is an exercise!’
‘We’re Advocates, it ain’t ever an exercise.’ Dee flashed a smile. ‘Maybe it was personal.’
‘I make it personal when I meet them.’
Dee dropped his smile. ‘I need this, when the mission’s over you can do what you want. Okay?’ Gold-plated heritage aside, Steve had stuck his neck out to get them aboard Provenance, and Dee intended to prove him right.
Bo nodded his curled-up lip. ‘Okay. You tell me when mission over.’
Dee followed the narrow corridor to a silver coloured door with bold red lettering, ‘ANTI-MATTER STORAGE. UNAUTHORISED PERSONNEL WILL BE TERMINATED.’ Anti-Matter was stored in the outer hull. In the event of a catastrophic failure and as a last resort, they could jettison the outer ring and eject all the AMS storage pods. Humanity would end its days drifting into extinction. Dee unclipped his Cogent, and pulled the amplitude slider to the backstop. ‘Cogents off.’
The door slid left and Dee leaned out. In both directions, a mesh fence bounded a narrow walkway marked with yellow lines. Behind the fence, two-metre wide silver tubes sprouted from the white floor for three metres before disappearing into the charcoal ceiling. Above the walkway, a single light strip failed to disperse the shadows lurking amongst the forest of tubes.
He stepped through and turned right.
Dry air hummed. Inside the tubes, the anti-matter struggled in a vacuum against its magnetic bonds. They’d both seen the demonstration; each tube contained enough anti-matter to annihilate a ship ten times the size of Provenance. AMS 1 held one hundred and twenty tubes, a quarter of the total.
Dee glanced over his shoulder. ‘You sure your Cogent’s off.’
‘Yes.’
After forty metres, the mesh fence gave way to solid walls. The corridor opened into a monitoring station. In the far wall, a multi-point door closed off their exit.
Dee pressed against the doorway. Pale square panels covered the left-hand wall, each one a myriad of lights and digital readouts. He swapped sides. On the right, the avocado tunic of a MECTECH lounged at a long metal console. Above it, a large screen displayed the one hundred and twenty AM tubes in a ten-by-twelve matrix.
Dee stabbed his index finger right and reached behind for the Silencer. The one-piece titanium assault dagger carried an inscription that swelled his chest every time he read it. ‘People die, heroes live forever.’ It had been awarded to Dee’s father for the blood he’d lost fighting the Resistance. When his dad retired, Dee had inherited the family honour. He wouldn’t fail in defending either.
He crept into the station, his footfalls silent on the metal deck. The blond haired MECTECH idled in a low-back chair, drumming the console’s metal trim with a pen.
The chair spun around.
Dee lunged, the Silencer’s honed edge pushing up into the quivering chin. The silver number ten on the MECTECH’s tan epaulettes and single bar on his mandarin collar ranked him a Level 10 Sub-Lieutenant.
‘Steady LT. Hands away from the console.’
The pale faced lieutenant raised his hands; he didn’t look much older than a lastborn. Probably a TYPE — that’s how he heard me.
‘Alpha two, get in here and watch the door.’
Dee watched the Lieutenant’s fearful eyes track Bo across the station, ‘Yeah, big ain’t he. Stand up, Lieutenant . . .?’
‘Heinsen, sir.’
Dee shoved Heinsen towards Bo. ‘Open the door, LT.’
‘No.’
Despite his size, Bo was fast. He grabbed Heinsen’s tunic and slammed him against the flickering panels.
Dee leant in; his narrowing eyes no more than a pencil length from Heinsen’s reddened face. ‘Open the door, or my friend here is gonna break your neck.’
‘I can’t, I—I’ll be terminated.’
Dee glanced up at Bo and smiled. ‘You sure will be if you don’t.’
The tan epaulettes sloped. ‘I can’t.’
Dee chewed his bottom lip. Jason might be okay with it, but Steve wouldn’t be happy if they damaged the LT. He removed his MCD and offered it over. ‘Enter the key code for today. No one’s gonna pin that on you.’
Heinsen did as asked. ‘Thank you, sir.’
Dee studied the MCD, ‘Did you know about the exercise?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Dee looked up. ‘Did you mess with the suits in MH six?’
‘No, sir! I don’t know how to sabotage the suits.’
‘Who said anything about sabotage?’
Heinsen’s wide eyes backed away from Bo’s glare, ‘It-it was discussed, that is all I know.’
Bo’s fist flashed past Dee, the hammer blow connecting with Heinsen’s tan waistband. He crumpled to the floor, his body heaved, lungs gulped.
Dee extended his arm across Bo’s chest, ‘Who discussed it?’
Heinsen raised a colourless face, his breathing rapid and shallow, ‘Ca-Cap-Captain Neva. Starboard control.’
Dee grabbed Heinsen’s tunic and hauled him to his feet. ‘Thank you, LT, and if the alarm goes off before we reach control, I’ll tell Command you opened the door while abandoning your post.’
Once outside the station, Dee directed Bo to the nearest deck-car and tapped in the destination code. While the deck counter flipped through the numbers, he unclipped his holster. Away from the hazardous AMS area, they were Cogent free.
/> The deck-car bleeped, and the doors swished open. They were ready; the Defender guarding the entrance to Starboard Control was not.
Pointing his MCD at the keypad, Dee waited for the doors to part before stepping over the groaning Defender and entering the darkened control room.
‘Who are you?’
Dee swung his head in the direction of the female voice. ‘Everyone stay where you are.’
A two-metre-high console, illuminated with an assortment of screens, dials, and switches, curved around three walls. Four seated MECTECHs faced the screens, each enveloped in an aura of pale blue. Above them, a metre high viewer mirrored the curvature of the console, its multi-coloured schematic of the starboard drive shining out.
The female approached. ‘This is a restricted station.’
Ignoring her, Dee glanced over his shoulder. ‘Ramp up the light, alpha two, and cover the door.’ Dee blinked in the surgical glare and walked to the centre of the room, his readiness fixed on the female officer. The gold epaulettes on the figure-hugging blue uniform put her in charge.
She smiled, her sharp blue eyes piercing from beneath an even sharper platinum-blonde bun. ‘Well done, I did not think you would succeed.’
Succeed or survive? ‘Why’s that?’
She shrugged. ‘It was a difficult task.’
‘We ain’t finished yet.’ Dee pointed his Cogent up at the schematic, ‘You still haven’t reached critical mass, maybe we can help.’ He sauntered over to the console and tapped the Cogent’s barrel on the MECTECH’s epaulette. ‘Disengage the magnetic coupler on tubes one through six, load all rods, and wait for my command.’
‘Stop! No!’
Dee winced at the shrill pitch of her voice. He swung around. ‘What are you gonna do?’
‘You cannot load six tubes at once, without the sequencing code it will become unstable.’
‘But I can, can’t I?’ Dee holstered his Cogent, ‘You’d better sort it before the Resistance arrive.’
Of all the collective sighs, hers was the loudest. ‘How did you know?’
‘Never mind, just get it fixed.’ He couldn’t tell her Steve had told him — this was his mission, his kudos.