Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “The added mass of a thousand people—”

  “Would be less than that of a couple of the drop shuttles. Dump and blow them too, if you have to, to fit the mass/acceleration window.”

  “—would overload life support—”

  “The emergency oxygen will take us to the wormhole jump point. After jump the prisoners can be distributed among the other ships at our leisure.”

  Tung’s voice grew anguished. “Those combat-drop shuttles are brand new. And my fighters—five of them—do you realize how hard it will be to recoup the funds to replace ’em? It comes to—”

  “I asked you to calculate the time, Ky, not the price tag,” said Miles through his teeth. He added more quietly, “I’ll tack them on to our bill for services rendered.”

  “You ever hear the term cost overrun, boy? You will…” Tung switched his attention back to his headset, itself but an extension of the tactics room aboard the Triumph. Calculations were made, new orders entered and executed.

  “It flies,” sighed Tung. “Buys a damned expensive fifteen minutes. If nothing else goes wrong…” He trailed off in a frustrated mumble, as impatient as Miles himself with his inability to be three places at once.

  “There comes my shuttle back,” Tung noted aloud. He glanced at Miles, plainly unwilling to leave his admiral to his own devices, as plainly itching to be out of the acid rain and dark and mud and closer to the nerve center of operations.

  “Get gone,” said Miles. “You can’t ride up with me anyway, it’s against procedure.”

  “Procedure, hah,” said Tung blackly.

  With the lift -off of the third wave, there were barely two thousand prisoners left on the ground. Things were thinning out, winding down; the armored combat patrols were falling back now from their penetration of the surrounding Cetagandan installations, back toward their assigned shuttle landing sites. A dangerous turning of the tide, should some surviving Cetagandan officer recover enough organization to harry their retreat.

  “See you aboard the Triumph,” Tung emphasized. He paused to brace Lieutenant Murka, out of Miles’s earshot. Miles grinned in sympathy for the overworked lieutenant, in no doubt about the orders Tung was now laying on him. If Murka didn’t come back with Miles in tow, he’d probably be wisest not to come back at all.

  * * *

  Nothing left now but a little last waiting. Hurry up and wait. Waiting, Miles realized, was very bad for him. It allowed his self-generated adrenaline to wear off, allowed him to feel how tired and hurt he really was. The illuminating flares were dying to a red glow.

  There was really very little time between the fading of the labored thunder of the last third wave shuttle to depart, and the screaming whine of the first fourth wave shuttle plunging back. Alas that this had more to do with being skewed than being swift. The Marilacans still waited in their rat bar blocks, discipline still holding. Of course, nobody’d told them about the little problem in timing they faced. But the nervous Dendarii patrols, chivvying them up the ramps, kept things moving at a pace to Miles’s taste. Rear guard was never a popular position to draw, even among the lunatic fringe who defaced their weapons with notches and giggled among themselves while speculating upon newer and more grotesque methods of blowing away their enemies.

  Miles saw the semiconscious Suegar carried up the ramp first. Suegar would actually reach the Triumph’s sickbay faster in his company, Miles calculated, on this direct flight, than had he been sent on an earlier shuttle to one of the troop freighters and had to await a safe moment to transfer.

  The arena they were leaving had grown silent and dark, sodden and sad, ghostly. I will break the doors of hell, and bring up the dead… there was something not quite right about the half-remembered quote. No matter.

  This shuttle’s armored patrol, the last, drew back out of the fog and darkness, electronically whistled in like a pack of sheepdogs by their master Murka, who stood at the foot of the ramp as liaison between the ground patrol and the shuttle pilot, who was expressing her anxiety to be gone with little whining revs on the engines.

  Then from the darkness—plasma fire, sizzling through the rain-sodden, saturated air. Some Cetagandan hero—officer, troop, tech, who knew?—had crawled up out of the rubble and found a weapon—and an enemy to fire it at. Splintered afterimages, red and green, danced in Miles’s eyes. A Dendarii patroller rolled out of the dark, a glowing line across the back of his armor smoking and sparking until quenched in the black mud. His armor legs seized up, and he lay wriggling like a frantic fish in an effort to peel out of it. A second plasma burst, ill-aimed, spent itself turning a few kilometers of fog and rain to superheated steam on a straight line to some unknown infinity.

  Just what they needed, to be pinned down by sniper fire now… A pair of Dendarii rear guards started back into the fog. An excited prisoner—ye gods, it was Pitt’s lieutenant again—grabbed up the armor-paralyzed soldier’s weapon and made to join them.

  “No! Come back later and fight on your own time, you jerk!” Miles sloshed toward Murka. “Fall back, load up, get in the air! Don’t stop to fight! No time!”

  Some of the last of the prisoners had fallen flat to the ground, burrowing like mudpuppies, a sound sensible reflex in any other context. Miles dashed among them, slapping rumps. “Get aboard, up the ramp, go, go, go!” Beatrice popped up out of the mud and mimicked him, shakily driving her fellows before her.

  Miles skidded to a stop beside his fallen Dendarii and snapped the armor clamps open left-handed. The soldier kicked off his fatal carapace, rolled to his feet, and limped for the safety of the shuttle. Miles ran close behind him.

  Murka and one patrolman waited at the foot of the ramp.

  “Get ready to pull in the ramp and lift on my mark,” Murka began to the shuttle pilot. “R—” His words were lost in an explosive pop as the plasma beam sliced across his neck. Miles could feel the searing heat from it pass centimeters above his head as he stood next to his lieutenant. Murka’s body crumpled.

  Miles dodged, paused to yank off Murka’s com headset. The head came too. Miles had to brace it with his numb hand to pull the headset free. The weight of the head, its density and roundness, hammered into his senses. The precise memory of it would surely be with him until his dying day. He let it fall by Murka’s body.

  He staggered up the ramp, a last armored Dendarii pulling on his arm. He could feel the ramp sag peculiarly under their feet, glanced down to see a half-melted seam across it where the plasma arc that had killed Murka had passed on.

  He fell through the hatchway, clutching the headset and yelling into it, “Lift, lift ! Mark, now! Go!”

  “Who is this?” came the shuttle pilot’s voice back.

  “Naismith.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The shuttle heaved off the ground, engines roaring, even before the ramp had withdrawn. The ramp mechanism labored, metal and plastic complaining—then jammed on the twisted distortion of the melt.

  “Get that hatch sealed back there!” the shuttle pilot’s voice yowled over the headset.

  “Ramp’s jammed,” Miles yowled back. “Jettison it!”

  The ramp mechanism skreeled and shrieked, reversing itself. The ramp shuddered, jammed again. Hands reached out to thump on it urgently.

  “You’ll never get it that way!” Beatrice, across the hatch from Miles, yelled fiercely, and twisted around to kick at it with her bare feet. The wind of their flight screamed over the open hatchway, buffeting and vibrating the shuttle like a giant blowing across the top of a bottle.

  To a chorus of shouting, thumping, and swearing, the shuttle lurched abruptly onto its side. Men, women, and loose equipment tangled across the tilting deck. Beatrice kicked bloodily at a final buggered bolt. The ramp tore loose at last. Beatrice, sliding, fell with it.

  Miles dove at her, lunging across the hatchway. If he connected, he never knew, for his right hand was a senseless blob. He saw her face only as a white blur as she whipped away into the blackne
ss.

  It was like a silence, a great silence, in his head. Although the roar of wind and engines, screaming and swearing and yelling, went on as before, it was lost somewhere between his ears and his brain, and went unregistered. He saw only a white blur, smearing into the darkness, repeated again and again, replaying like a looping vid.

  He found himself crouched on his hands and knees, the shuttle’s acceleration sucking him to the deck. They’d got the hatch closed. The merely human babble within seemed muffled and thin, now that the roaring voices of the gods were silenced. He looked up into the pale face of Pitt’s lieutenant, crouched beside him still clutching the unfired Dendarii weapon he’d grabbed up in that other lifetime.

  “You’d better kill a whole lot of Cetagandans for Marilac, boy,” Miles rasped to him at last. “You better be worth something to somebody, ’cause I’ve sure paid too much for you.”

  The Marilacan’s face twitched uncertainly, too cowed even to try to look apologetic. Miles wondered what his own face must look like. From the reflection in that mirror, strange, very strange.

  Miles began to crawl forward, looking for something, somebody… Formless flashes made yellow streaks in the corners of his vision. An armored Dendarii, her helmet off, pulled him to his feet.

  “Sir? Hadn’t you better come forward to the pilot’s compartment, sir?”

  “Yes, all right…”

  She looped an arm around him, under his arm, so he didn’t fall down again. They picked their way forward in the crowded shuttle, through Marilacans and Dendarii mixed. Faces were drawn to him, marked him fearfully, but none dared an expression of any kind. Miles’s eye was caught by a silver cocoon, as they neared the forward end.

  “Wait…”

  He fell to his knees beside Suegar. A hit of hope… “Suegar. Hey, Suegar!”

  Suegar opened his eyes to slits. No telling how much of this he was taking in, through the pain and the shock and the drugs.

  “You’re on your way now. We made it, made the timing. With all ease. With agility and speed. Up through the regions of the air, higher than the clouds. You had the scripture right, you did.”

  Suegar’s lips moved. Miles bent his head closer.

  “…wasn’t really a scripture,” Suegar whispered. “I knew it… you knew it… don’t shit me…”

  Miles paused, cold-stoned. Then he leaned forward again. “No, brother,” he whispered. “For though we went in clothed, we have surely come out naked.”

  Suegar’s lips puffed on a dry laugh.

  Miles didn’t weep until after they’d made the wormhole jump.

  Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War debuted in 2003 with Trading in Danger and focuses on Kylara Vatta, a young member of the Vatta family, which runs the interstellar shipping corporation Vatta Enterprises. After forced resignation from the military academy, Ky captains an old trading ship for the corporation and finds her military training coming to good use. This action-packed story provides the bridge between the original five-book series and Cold Welcome, the first book of a brand-new series, Vatta’s Peace.

  ALL IN A DAY’S WORK

  ELIZABETH MOON

  Ky Vatta, Grand Admiral of the fleet she had created, unpinned the decorations from her dress uniform and lifted the most recent—a broad purple-and-gold striped ribbon with an elaborate medal attached to it, courtesy of Moray System—over her head, wondering what she could possibly do with the rest of her life that would match what she’d already done.

  She wasn’t even thirty yet. She had accomplished miracles, people said, saved the lives of billions of people on uncounted planets, commanded the only combined space fleet in this corner of the galaxy. A fleet that was now recognized, supported by more and more of the systems that had told her the idea was impossible for anyone, let alone a young woman like her. But when she thought ahead—to the next round of official visits, the meetings with diplomats and politicians, the negotiations regarding contributions to the effort—the need for money and personnel and ships, the next award ceremony, the next budget cycle, and the next and the next and the next after that… she didn’t want to think about it.

  It wasn’t that she wanted the war to come back. Most of her family had been wiped out, her childhood home obliterated, the Vatta headquarters destroyed. She had been injured, almost killed, more than once; that alternation of terror and rage and relief, over and over, had ruled her life for years until she finally defeated Turek’s forces. Since then she’d seen the ruin, the cities left as piles of rubble, the land scorched and barren on the planets she had not been in time to save. And the bodies… no sane person could want war, just for the excitement of it. It had been the most intense years of her life, and during it—when she had a brief time to herself—she had yearned for peace.

  So she could not be… what she felt like. She could not be… bored. It was ridiculous. Admirals did not get bored. Intelligent, capable adults did not get bored. There were things to do; there were always things to do, decisions to make, speeches to give, complaints and demands to hear.

  And yet. She didn’t want another war exactly, but she did want something interesting. Something even surprising. An idea bubbled up. A little harmless leisure.

  “You know what I think we need?” she asked her flag captain, Pordre.

  “What, Admiral?”

  “I think we need a live-fire exercise on the way home. We need to go blow something up.” He looked startled; she grinned at him. “I know the right place; only a slight detour.”

  * * *

  Vanguard II and the other three ships—Eistfod, Quadlock, and Garnett—emerged from jump a long light-gap from the former pirate base Ky had remembered. An empty system, no inhabited planets, no active human presence. Scan cleared; the techs, scan and comm, ran through the usual checks, putting the incoming data up for all to see and hear.

  The signal was faint, but clearly a voice call. It sounded like gibberish to her, almost like the coded jargon the pirates had used years before. Her flag captain looked at her.

  “Trap, Admiral?”

  “Maybe. Let’s find out.” Ky felt a surge of energy; her earlier lethargy vanished. She’d wanted a surprise; the universe had provided one.

  “Sir—it’s a call for help.” Selanyss, their new scan tech, said, wrist tentacles clamped on the back of his chair. He was a humod from Adelaide, one of those she’d rescued from Gretna early in the war.

  “How do you know?” Ky asked.

  “It’s my native language, Mraldan. You know I’m from Polson, originally.” He held up his hands, the wrist tentacles uncurling as he spoke.

  “But you speak Trade,” Pordre said. “I thought almost everyone did, at least as a second language.”

  “Not on Polson, sir. I learned it on Adelaide, after the admiral took us there.” Selanyss’s expression convinced Ky he wasn’t telling her everything, but the message they’d received was more important.

  “So… that was a call for help? From Polson? I thought it had been razed by Turek’s troops.”

  “I don’t think it was from Polson, Admiral, but somewhere closer. There’s a ship track a couple of days old.”

  “Why don’t people from Polson speak Trade?” Pordre asked. “It’s the universal language—”

  “We… didn’t need to, sir.”

  Ky noticed that his tentacles had paled now, leaving a pattern of dark star-shaped spots. His face was paler, too. She had known he was more modded than most people when she hired him, but changing skin color and pattern surprised her. “What else was in the message?” she asked.

  “They—a group of refugees from Polson—are being attacked.”

  “Well, that’s what we’re here for,” Ky said briskly. “Rescue’s our specialty. Let’s track that down quickly. My guess is it’s the old pirate base. Someone was left there, or moved in there after Turek’s bunch left, and now someone else wants it. Com One, link me to the ship’s ansible. Captain, prepare for combat conditions.”

&
nbsp; Her flagship, Vanguard II, had the most combat-experienced crew. Eistfod, the newest ship, just delivered by Moray on her visit there, had an all-Moray crew whose training she hadn’t supervised. It matched Vanguard in size and had a newer suite of weapons control, but no experience. Quadlock, the smallest of the three warships, had a heavy weapons load and better resistance to damage. And lightly armed Garnett, their supply ship, would need to stay far back, out of any combat. Ky transmitted her orders to the others quickly, setting Garnett’s captain free to find the best hiding spot she could.

  “Scan’s found only one ship track, so we should handle anything we find easily, but don’t mix in. I’ll call when we need you. Eistfod, go on and load your skimmers. We’ll give them some exercise whether we actually need them or not. Hold your position on my starboard flank until we’re closer. Quadlock, half on my port flank.” The captains acknowledged.

  Ky turned to Pordre. “Coordinates for microjump halfway to the old supply base—”

  He recited them; Ky repeated them to the other captains. “Jump on my mark.”

  They emerged halfway to the base. Eistfod ended up ten kilometers ahead of mark, and before Ky could say anything, her captain apologized. “Recalibrating now, Admiral.”

  “Scan, where’s that ship?”

  “At a radiation source, Admiral. I think it’s that base you talked about. It’s not where it was…”

  “It wouldn’t be. It’s a rock with buildings on it… it would be going somewhere. I remember a radiation source before, too. Probably a powerplant. Well, clearly that’s where we should go. Any new transmissions?”

  “Just a repeat of Help, under attack, Admiral. Should we reply?”