by Tanya Huff
“Won’t happen.”
“What makes you so fukking sure? And, God help me, Torin, if you say it’s your job to be sure, I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
“You won’t be locked down because Big Yellow was in your head.” She kept talking as he walked away, and back, and away. “Based on that visit, the intelligence behind this ship wouldn’t assume for an instant that you’d do something like this. Even after you launch, it would never believe that you’d willingly share your cabin with five people. You could hook up to the air lock and open the doors and it would know that at the last minute, as the first tiny Katrien foot stepped into your space, you’d freak and run away.”
And back. “How the hell do you know that?”
“That you’d freak and run away?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Finally said, “No. How do you know what Big Yellow believes?”
A partial smile. “Because that’s what I’d believe if I’d gone into your head.”
“But you don’t believe it, or you wouldn’t be suggesting I ride to the rescue.” Six paces away, seven back. A step into her personal space. Not threatening, although Torin suspected that was how he’d intended it. “So what makes you think that I wouldn’t have done it then but I’ll do it now? I’m a civilian, remember. You can’t order me into that padded coffin. You think I’ll do it for you? Just because you’re asking me to?”
“No.” She locked her gaze on his and held it. He was standing so close she could feel his breath on her face. “Because I expect you to.”
One corner of his mouth curved up in a mocking smile. “And you find people live up to your expectations?”
“Yes.”
She meant it. It wasn’t bullshit, it wasn’t bravado. Ryder found himself searching her face for any doubt, for the tiniest indication that she didn’t think he could pull this off.
All he saw was a frightening certainty. A complete faith. In him.
And he saw that she believed that would be enough.
“You know, you really have a fukking huge ego.” Seven paces away, six back. “I mean, you expect me to change a basic, intrinsic part of who I am...” Six away, six back. “...of who I’ve been for years—based on the strength of your personality alone and the vague possibility that when all this is over...”
Protests trailed off as one of Torin’s eyebrows slowly rose. “Fine.” He threw up his hands in surrender and turned to the nearest escape pod, ignoring the voice of reason that kept asking what the hell he thought he was doing. “Do you know how to operate these things?”
“Actually,” she admitted, and he found himself wishing she’d smile like that more often, “I haven’t the faintest goddamned idea.”
* * *
Opening the pods turned out to be relatively simple. “Fortunately,” Heer muttered, peering at the pressure pad running across the bottom of the control panel, “it defeats the purpose of escape pods if they’re too complicated to get into.”
“And to operate?” Ryder demanded.
“Usually you don’t operate them. You just pop out and drift until someone rescues you, or you lock onto the nearest planet you can exist on.”
“You mean live on.”
“Nope.” Heer punched a sequence into the pod’s control panel and didn’t elaborate.
Torin figured it was time she stepped in. “You’ll be picked up by one of the Jades and taken to the Berganitan; no drifting, no rescues, no planets.”
He shook his head, although what precisely he was denying remained unclear. “We don’t even know if I can breathe in there.”
“We’ll know that as soon as Heer gets the hatch open. If you can’t, you’ll wear Huilin’s HE suit.”
“It’d never fit.”
“Or you can hold your breath until they pick you up. Your choice.” There’d be further argument; Torin could see it in Ryder’s eyes, but Heer postponed it.
“Got it.” Stepping aside, Heer pushed his thumb against the same place on the contact pad three times. With a wet, sucking noise, the walls around the hatch folded in. “Okay. Maybe not.”
“Maybe not,” Ryder repeated to Torin. “You hear that?”
“He’ll figure it out. Won’t you, Heer?”
“It’s chrick.” He flashed Ryder a broad smile. “Trust me.”
“Nice try, but I know what it means when you guys show teeth.”
The wall had closed entirely over the hatch. A faint shudder vibrated through boot soles, and Torin thought she heard a distant pop.
* * *
“Command, this is Black Seven; there’s something being extruded from Big Yellow not far from the air lock.”
“Extruded, Black Seven?”
“Roger, Command. Extruded. Popped out like a big yellow zit.” Sibley corkscrewed the Jade to avoid an enemy fighter and swung around for a closer look. “There’s a section of hull suddenly rising up in a half circle a little less than two meters across at the point where it joins the... Shit! Shylin!”
“I see it.” She counterfired to take out a PGM almost locked on their tail.
“B7, does this half circle of hull appear to be a weapon?”
He rolled his eyes. “It appears to be a half circle. That’s it. Nothi... Hang on, it’s still coming.”
“B7, we repeat, does it appear to be a weapon?”
“Not unless they’re setting up for a game of zero gee dodgeball.”
“Say again, B7.”
When the round section of hull remained attached to the ship with only a thin umbilical cord, the yellow coating suddenly slid off a gray sphere and remerged with the ship. Floating freely, the sphere moved slowly out into space.
“It could be a mine,” Shylin said thoughtfully. “I’m reading energy but no life signs.”
“I need better than a ‘could be,’ Shy.”
“Then get me closer.”
They were moving in when an enemy fighter swooped in off their Y-axis and hit the sphere with two energy bolts at close range, destroying it.
There wasn’t so much an explosion as a sudden brilliant absence of sphere.
“B7, are you hit?”
“That’s a negative, Command.” Blinking rapidly to clear his vision, tears running from eyes still seeing a full spectrum of spots, Sibley managed to match course with the enemy fighter although he had no idea how.
“Target locked.”
“Let’s blow up a bug for Boom Boom.”
This time, the force of the explosion threw the debris field into the belly of the alien ship.
* * *
The impact was gentler than the last one had been, but there were more of them. The constant patter, patter of heavy items hitting the ship’s hull almost sounded like rain.
Working on the second pod, Heer ignored it, but Ryder grabbed Torin’s uninjured arm. “They blew it up.”
“Sounds like.”
“This may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t want to die.”
“No one does.” She dropped her voice to match his. “But we all will unless we get off this ship. The bugs’ll kill us quickly, or thirst will do it slowly, but we will die. You’re our only chance.”
“But no pressure, right? Torin, we don’t even know who blew up the pod. It could have been the vacuum jockeys from the Berganitan.”
“Yeah, it could have been, but that means they saw it and know it came from near our position. General Morris will contact me to find out what I know about it, and I’ll make sure that our side, at least, doesn’t blow you up.”
“That’s not very comforting.”
Torin shrugged.
“This is where you tell me I don’t have to go.”
“Waste of breath; you had to go from the moment I made it clear you were our only hope. You have to go because you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “You actually believe that, don’t you?”
Smiling, Torin shrugged.
“And which part of that job would you be referring to?”
“Inspiring the troops to get their collective asses blown off.”
He was still holding her left arm just above the elbow and a deep breath would be enough to bring their bodies together.
*Staff Sergeant Kerr?*
Torin jerked back, pulling her arm from Ryder’s grip, trying unsuccessfully not to feel like her father had just caught her making out on the couch. “Sir?” She mouthed General Morris at Ryder who seemed to be trying not to laugh. The bastard.
*One of Captain Carveg’s pilots has reported a sphere extruded from the ship near your position.*
Extruded? “Yes, sir. It’s an... General? General Morris? Sir?” The implant remained unresponsive.
* * *
“So the booster unit is gone?”
“Yes, Captain. Engulfed by the alien ship.”
“Engulfed?” When the communications officer nodded, the captain sighed and rubbed a hand across the back of her neck. That wasn’t good. “And we still don’t know what that sphere was or if we can expect more of them.”
“No, ma’am. We lost contact before the staff sergeant could pass on that information.”
“But it could have been a mine?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She stared down at the screen where Big Yellow blotted out twenty kilometers of stars and tiny red and white lights zipping back and forth represented the fighters from both sides. “Mines are definitely just what we need floating around out there. Flight Commander?”
He shrugged, the movement worn down to almost nothing by the last few hours. “It might be smarter to blow them while they’re still attached to the ship.”
The captain sighed again. “It very well might.”
* * *
“But you don’t know why General Morris stopped trimsmitting.”
“No, I don’t.” Her arms folded, Torin watched Ryder pace. “Maybe the Berganitan blew up. Maybe the galaxy got sucked into the ass end of a black hole, and we’re all that’s left. I do know that if we sit here with our thumbs in our mouths we will die, and I will not allow that. You give me a retina on a stick, and I’ll get in the escape pod myself but otherwise...”
He stopped pacing in what had become a familiar position; faceto-face and too close for comfort. “I never said I wasn’t going.”
“Good.”
“I wouldn’t trust one of those ham-handed Navy pilots to fly the Promise anyway.”
“Okay, this time. I’ve got it.”
Torin turned gratefully toward her engineer. In another moment they were going to start smiling at each other again, and she honestly didn’t think she was up to it. The subtext was rapidly becoming a distraction. “Show me.”
Heer pushed his thumb against the contact pad three times.
“And how was that different from the last time?” she asked, one eyebrow rising as the pod’s hatch sighed open.
“This time, I pressurized it.” Arm stuck into the pod, he checked the readout on the sleeve. “Pod has the same atmosphere as the ship, which had the same atmosphere as the shuttle—a compromise mix for all species present. Which means,” he continued, removing his arm and turning to the CSO, “you won’t freeze or asphyxiate before they blow you up.”
“That’s a big help,” Ryder muttered.
“Hey, look at the bright side. If you’d been stuffed into a di’Taykan’s HE suit you’d be humping the first sailor you saw at the end of the trip. Not necessarily a bad thing but...”
“Heer.”
“Right.” The Krai engineer twisted around until his feet were on the deck, both hands holding the upper lip of the opening, and his body arced back, allowing him to examine the pod without putting any weight inside. “There appears to be a self-contained air supply and a scrubber, but other than that, there’re only two controls. Logically, the big button launches the pod, and the T-bar unlocks the hatch when you get where you’re going.”
“You’re assuming one fuk of a lot.”
“Not much choice.” Heer straightened. “He can go any time, Staff.”
Ryder looked from the pod to Torin. “You know, if you’d say, ‘Don’t go,’ then I could say something like, ‘A man has to do what a man has to do,’ and leave a hero.”
“Or there’s always that retina on a stick option.”
“I might have known she’d get all mushy on me,” he muttered to Heer as he folded himself through the hatch. “It’s not exactly roomy in here.”
“You won’t be in there long.”
When he reached for the hatch, Torin was already there. She wanted to say something as she closed it but couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t sound trite—he knew he was their only chance to live, he knew he might die—but she watched him through the window as the walls around the hatch folded in. And stood there until she heard the distant popping sound of the pod being extruded from the ship.
“Staff, we’re getting a little more action from the bugs.”
“On my way.” Spinning around, she glared down at Heer. “What are you grinning about?”
“Not a thing, Staff Sergeant.”
All the way up the ladder, Torin listened for pieces of an escape pod impacting against the hull.
FIFTEEN
Bouncing against the padded interior of the pod, Ryder looked for straps and couldn’t find any. He didn’t mind the bouncing; he worked in zero gee most of the time and, to save money, ran the artificial gravity generator in the Promise only enough to maintain muscle tone and bone mass. Considering he was floating out to an uncertain fate, as likely to be blown up by a vacuum jockey supposedly protecting his way of life as he was to reach the Berganitan and save the day, he had to admit he felt remarkably relaxed.
Probably because he was on his own.
Granted, Big Yellow was the size of most stations but deep down, he’d always known it was still a ship. He turned a slow somersault. He did better on his own. No big deal.
But the trip back...
“...as the first tiny Katrien foot stepped into your space, you’d freak and run away.”
The muscles across his shoulders knotted as tension returned.
Being blown up on the way to the Berganitan would almost be preferable.
Almost.
His fingers sank deep into the padding, and he felt something give.
“I think this definitely proves it,” he muttered, pulling his hand away from the five impressions he’d gouged into the wall. “Some guys’ll do anything to impress a girl.”
And some girls were pretty damned hard to impress.
* * *
Torin threw herself up the last few rungs of the ladder and out onto the upper deck. “Talk to me, Harrop!”
“The good news is, they haven’t thrown any ordnance. Either they’re afraid they’ll damage the lock, or they’re out. Bad news, they’re doing a lot more firing. I think they’re getting ready for a charge.”
“I agree. Heads up, people. Bugs incoming. The packs aren’t much of a barrier, but we can’t let them get by. Jynett, Frii, join the others at the barrier. Johnston, Werst, get the captain off his stretcher and add it to the barrier. Heer, help me with Tsui.”
The injured Marine was up on his elbows fumbling for his returned benny.
Torin took a quick look into his eyes. His irises were so dark a brown it was difficult to tell, but his pupils appeared to be at a normal dilation. “Neural blockers working?”
“I hope so; I can’t feel my whole fukkin’ leg.”
“Good.” She grabbed one end of the stretcher and motioned Heer to the other. “Let’s get him down by the tank room. He can guard the hatch.”
“It’s sealed!” Heer protested as they ran crouched over, trying to stay under stray energy bursts coming from the bugs.
“Now,” To
rin amended. They slid to a stop by Nivry and set the stretcher down. “Sitting or lying, Tsui?”
“Sitting.”
She slipped her hands into his armpits. “Heer, get his legs. Mind the stump. Nivry, the stretcher. On three.”
A quick glanced showed Johnston and Werst were being a lot less careful with Captain Travik. Johnston hoisted the top end, Werst the bottom, and they both kicked the stretcher clear. The captain didn’t quite bounce as he hit the deck.
Torin sent Nivry forward with Tsui’s stretcher.
“You hear anything coming through, you let me know!” she told him as Heer propped his stump up and he checked the charge on his benny. “You see anything, you shoot it and you let me know!”
His teeth were a brilliant white arc, slightly chipped on the right side. “You worry too much, Staff.”
“Yeah, it’s what I do. Heer...” She grabbed the engineer by the arm and dragged him to the edge of the open hatch leading to the lower level. “You and Johnston are in charge of the civilians.” Three quick strides took her across the corridor; half a dozen shorter ones brought her back with the Katrien who clung silently to each other. As much as she’d come to hate the sound of their voices, the silence was disconcerting. Johnston crossed behind her, one arm half guiding, half carrying Harveer Niirantapajee.
“The bugs break through, you get them down below and into an escape pod.”
“What if they come up from below?”
“If they could, they’d be there now, flanking us. No one charges a fixed position, even a piss poor one if they have an option. Once the pods are launched...”
“We’re back up here to help kick bug butts.”
Torin looked from the Human to the Krai and saw identical expressions. “Your choice,” she told them. “But don’t spend your lives stupidly or you’ll answer to me—if not in this life then the next.”
“Staff Sergeant Kerr, I are not... are not...” Presit stared down toward the barricade, now stronger by the stretchers but still a fragile bulwark.
“It’ll be okay.” Torin pulled the reporter’s attention back to her. “We do this for a living.”