So It Begins (Defending The Future)

by James Chambers

  “So how do we do this?” asked Donovich.

  “Well we know it’s after the peach cans, so we’ll put them ’n the pod, some place hard to get to ’n order to slow it down while I move up and close the hatches,” said Patterson.

  “No. For one thing you’re too big to move around quickly in the pod-bay.” Patterson started to object, but Donovich motioned for him to be quiet. “Secondly, I don’t think it will be stupid enough to just crawl into the pod, after all, it set up a diversion to get at them the first time.”

  “Okay, Chief,” Patterson agreed. “So then we’ll need somethin’ to knock or blow it into the Can.”

  “Maybe rigging a quick valve to an O2 or nitrogen tank, with a piece of pipe big enough to hold one of the cans; when it climbs up, I pull the line on the valve . . .”

  “Nope, too complicated,” Patterson interrupted. “Get me one of those Growlers out of storage.”

  It took Donovich a moment to work it all out, but he saw where Patterson was going with this. “Right, I’ll meet you back here.”

  “Do ya’ll need a hand with that?” asked Patterson as Donovich came up the ladder one-handed, cradling a wastepaper bucket-sized canister in his arm.

  “I’m fine,” he replied and stepped out onto the deck.

  Patterson was busy loading the peach cans into a utility bag; he already had an engineer’s carryall tool-pack over his shoulder. “I was goin’ to pop open one of these cans and. . .” The look on Donovich’s face said volumes about the idea. “Okay, Chief,” said Patterson, while making a calm-down gesture. “I didn’t. I was just tryin’ to figure out what it wanted with them.”

  Donovich had already played with the idea that it—or they—had come aboard in the cans, but somehow it didn’t quite make sense; it was too easy an answer. So maybe it has something to do with the material makeup of the cans themselves; but what was it about an Alluna (Lunar Aluminum) can that made it so all-important? After all, most of the ship was built from the stuff in one grade or other.

  Patterson stood up and slung the utility bag over his shoulder. “You ready?”

  Donovich nodded. “Any sign of our friend?” he asked, looking about.

  “Couldn’t rightly say,” replied Patterson, as he depressed the ‘hatch open’ button on the station’s console. Pulsating yellow lights flared to life and the chirping alert tones seemed louder than ever. Both men looked around, anxiously awaiting the inevitable appearance of the beastie.

  “Go,” instructed Patterson.

  The hatches weren’t even locked back yet and Donovich was up, through, and standing at the pod-bay’s hatch controls.

  With one last look around, Patterson scurried up the ladder. “Push it!” he yelled, even before clearing the opening. Donovich held it for just a moment before engaging. The inner hatch closed with a thump, its indicators switching to a steady-red.

  The pod-bay was a cramped toroid shape; its empty ordnance racks curved along the surface of the bay’s wall. At some point in time, the powers-that-be decided this would be a good place to mount the ship’s automated point-defense cannons. So, protruding from both the ceiling and floor there were the butt ends of the turrets, with brightly colored warning labels and yellow and black cross-hatching around each of the weapons’ ammunition feeds. But since the Garryowen was now out of the fight and heading home—as per operational doctrine—her ammunition stores were off-loaded and would be used as a reserve for the remaining ships in the squadron. We’re not paid to bring it home with us, thought Donovich.

  “I don’t know how much time it’s going to give us,” said Donovich, “So I’ll prep the pod. Here’s your quarter-of-a-million-dollar toy.” He handed the cylinder to Patterson in exchange for the utility bag. “Remember, it comes out of your pay.”

  Patterson just smiled and nodded. Carefully, he placed the cylinder on the deck before taking off and opening the tool pack. “Chief, lock the CM hatch; we don’t want Koenig buzzin’ around,” said Patterson.

  “No problem.”

  Patterson flipped over the black cylinder. Its yellow stencil markings indicated that it was a “MK 42 SLD,” along with a series of inventory tracking and ID numbers. With a practiced hand, he removed the electronic decoy’s baseplate and unfastened its separator charge; he looked it over, and then said a quick prayer before continuing.

  With a click, Donovich inserted the failsafe pin into the pod’s docking port control panel—this physically locked the port’s docking clamps, while electronically overriding the pod’s launch program—the T-handled pin had the traditional foot-long “Removed Before Flight” ribbon dangling from it.

  According to the manual, “. . . if a pod were to be launched while a ship was under drive; upon impact with the drive field, the pod would atomize, the resulting energy flux would cause the drive field to collapse and drop the ship out of hyperspace, not unlike a conventional Return Transition.” Donovich’s only problem with this answer was simple, “To date no one has tried it,” and he wasn’t about to be the one in the history books to find out.

  “Damn right,” he said. Reaching back, he grabbed the utility bag and pushed it into the causeway.

  “You set?” ask Donovich, as he crawled out a few minutes later.

  “Just about, if you’d give me a hand,” Patterson responded, as he held the charge up against the framework for the gun’s autoloaders.

  “Right.” Donovich held the charge in place while Patterson zip-tied it down. “What’s going to happen when this thing goes off?”

  Patterson screw-connected a spool of wire to the charge. “It’ll just pop, and hopefully launch the peach can into the Can with our friend sittin’ on it,” he said. “It’s a gas separator charge, works just like a car airbag. You can let go.”

  “Thanks.” Donovich moved off to ready the other pod; Patterson followed behind, playing out the wires.

  With the starboard pod now locked down and hatches opened, Patterson ran his wires up into it; then, with the AeroCom equivalent of a roll of duct tape, he secured and camouflaged the wires to the deck. “Right, get ’n,” he said.

  Donovich got down on his hands and knees and backed into the darkened pod; he lay on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, just behind the hatch in the causeway; Patterson squatted down and handed him a circuit tester to which he had connected the wires from the charge.

  “You know how this works,” stated Patterson. “Key the power on, then hold,” he said, indicating the recessed red test button.

  Donovich just nodded. “See you afterward.”

  “Yep,” replied Patterson; he then stood up and walked over to the charge, placing a can of peaches into the clamps that normally held the decoy secure. He watched as Donovich pulled his pod’s access hatch closed on the wires.

  The sight of Patterson disappearing down the ladder into the SM filled Donovich with a sense of abandonment; as an engineer, being physically alone for long periods on shift was business as usual, but he always knew there was someone else on the other end of the comm to come to his aid. This time, it was just him and the universe; waiting in the dark, while looking through a small porthole window into the lit pod-bay, half hoping that the damn creature didn’t show up.

  Time passed. How long, it was hard to say; Donovich just kept looking through the porthole at the open gap of the SM’s two-meter hatchway. From time to time, phantoms would startle him, as his mind turned passing shadows and random sounds from the service module into the approach of the unknown.

  There comes a point when fatigue wins out over fear, and the need to rest becomes all important; Donovich was already there. The urge to yawn kept forcing him to lower or angle his head away from the porthole for fear of fogging it up. “Damnit,” he whispered, as he wiped his eyes; looking back into the pod-bay his mind said, something is out there. His breathing shallowed as his fear grew more tangible. There it was, slowly crawling around the edge of the hatchway. They had thought that it would try another div
ersion; but no, stealth was its new game plan.

  Once in the bay, it stopped. It just stood there, clinging against the curvature of the wall; slowly, it started moving with spider-like locomotion toward the port pod. It looked just like the little one he had found in the DFC unit, but if it was, it had grown to almost a foot across. It stopped at the edge of the pod’s causeway, its hotdog-like head flexed, as if it was looking around; it seemed to be contemplating their trap. With surprising speed it darted off into the pod.

  Just like an ungrateful monster . . . thought Donovich as he slowly opened his hatch; he was trying desperately to be quiet as he crawled out on his elbows and knees, the circuit tester still in his hand. Now clear and standing, he could see past the loader’s framework into the pod. There was no sign of the creature; hopefully it was still under the seats trying to dig out the cans.

  He needed to keep his eyes on the pod, but he also had to be careful where he walked; now under gravity he could easily fall through the SM’s open hatchway. He briefly looked down to check his position. All was quiet in the SM. Patterson wasn’t in sight.

  Donovich was just coming around the loader when the creature came back up into view; he froze at the thought of rushing the pod, and then he remembered that he hadn’t keyed on the circuit tester. Without looking he brought his other hand to the box and turned the key.

  The beastie spun and leapt down the short length of the causeway at him. There was a boom as the gas charge went off, knocking Donovich aside. As he sat there, he realized that his thumb was firmly pressing down on the test button.

  Dropping the box, he scrambled to the hatch. The beastie wasn’t in the causeway. With everything he had left, he lifted the hatch into place. It stopped just short of closing. The beastie’s six pointy, blue-gray legs popped from around the edge of the hatch.

  “Shit!”

  He suddenly found the adrenalin-powered strength to push. His shoulder drove into the hatch. Without forethought of the consequences, he smashed his fist down at the nearest leg. The hatch snapped shut and locked as his hand connected. The beastie had pulled back.

  Breathing hard, Donovich just knelt there, both hands needlessly pushing on the hatch. Carefully, he looked through the porthole; the beastie just sat there, all bunched up, as he had seen before. Its hotdog head slowly flexed.

  “Donovich!” Patterson shouted, as he frantically climbed into the pod-bay; he stopped when Donovich turned and looked at him. Carefully, Patterson walked over and knelt down next to him; he reassuringly put a hand on Donovich’s shoulder, before looking through the porthole.

  “I didn’t get the pod’s hatch closed, just the bay’s.” said Donovich, concern and exhaustion coloring his voice, as he gestured over his shoulder.

  Patterson turned to him, “It’s okay, Chief.” he said calmly, “I’ll deal with it. It’s almost over, but you need to go tell Ware what’s happenin’.” He half-pulled Donovich to his feet. The Chief resisted. All he wanted to do was close his eyes and pretend none of this had happened.

  “It’s got to be you, Chief, you’re the guy in charge,” Patterson insisted, as he unlocked the CM’s gangway hatch; it opened with the usual lights and sound. Sluggishly, Donovich nodded and started up the ladder.

  Patterson returned to the pod. The beastie—as the Chief called it—was stretched out over the porthole. “Dear God!” he said. The creature’s legs, and in fact all of its different body parts, weren’t physically connected. They just seemed to stay in place like some stylized, computer-generated cartoon character.

  Patterson leaned back and eyed the docking port’s emergency pod jettison controls. Calmly, he reached up and removed the failsafe pin. The panel lit up as a warning klaxon sounded that the pod’s inner hatch was still open. He lifted the cover over the manual override switch and threw it. With his hand on the jettison pull bar, he looked back through the porthole.

  The creature had pulled back; its eyeless, cylinder-like head was staring back at him. Patterson leaned into the porthole “You’re not fuckin’ me over again,” he said as a little smile grew across his face, “You don’t exist,” he whispered . . . .

  THE GLASS BOX

  Bud Sparhawk

  There were twenty missiles streaking to impact the planet’s surface and I was the only passenger, but not for long.

  When the sabot blew away, I flew off with the rest of the debris as the super-dense ballistic payload continued screaming toward a Shardie location over the horizon. It carried a single altitude-sensing charge in its tail that would accelerate the payload to strike at a thousand kps. At that hypervelocity the shock wave and impact would blast a crater five kilometers across and send dirt, rock, and dust into the stratosphere.

  Twenty of these hitting the planet would be my diversion.

  The wind whipped me as I dropped deeper into the atmosphere. Tendrils of spidersilk deployed behind me, threads with hundreds of microparachutes along their length, each one exerting miniscule drag, stealing momentum from my descent, then blowing away to swiftly dissolve in the air.

  The tendrils would be indistinguishable from the thousands of smaller, broken fragments from the sabot. I just hoped that my presence was indistinguishable.

  I skimmed trees and hills, stirring trails of dust as I moved at better than ten meters per second through the last portion of my drop. When the last of the threads tore away I still carried eight mps, slow enough to give me a chance of survival on impact.

  I tucked for the bounce and roll, hoping that I’d hit where nothing would stop me before all my potential energy was dissipated. Desert sand would be nice, water better, but I’d take an open field if it came to that.

  Just no damn forests.

  The weak and fading signal had come unexpectedly from a colony world abandoned to the Shardies six months before. It was a short burst that might have been missed if fleet hadn’t had a SIGINT unit probing the Shardies’ signals.

  “We tried to get away, but the things caught us,” the high-pitched voice had cried. “I’m hiding. Please help me.”

  Fleet was conflicted. It was not impossible that some group might have been missed during the evacuation. Campers, spelunkers, or others could have been isolated when the order was sent. How long had it taken to move the twenty thousand off the planet—two weeks, eighteen days? They’d packed the colonists into any ship they could find. Most vessels barely had enough oxygen to sustain the refugees. The evacuation was chaotic, disorganized, and messy. They tried to get everyone, but still, some might have been missed.

  Should we ignore it? command asked, thinking that the loss of a single individual was as nothing compared to the risks of extracting the survivor. Maybe the call was a ruse, a trap. Then again, it might be worth the valuable intelligence we’d gain to mount an effort. Fleet was desperate to learn anything it could about the Shardies, especially how a child had managed to elude capture by our relentless enemy.

  Nobody had ever escaped the Shardies, not since we discovered how they turned any survivor into organic components for their ships. The horror of those images, the undead bodies stranded into the controls of the one captured ship, had shown everyone that there were worse things than death, should they be captured.

  The Shardies had been relentless in driving us from our colony worlds. In deep space it was no better. They destroyed our most hardened ships with better tactics and weapons. Since we’d first encountered them, they had relentlessly continued to advance. If the war persisted as it had for the past three years, with us abandoning one world after the next, the Shardies would reach Earth within a decade, or maybe less.

  Fleet needed whatever information the survivor might have. Earth needed the hope that someone could survive to report what she had seen. We all needed to know.

  Command had no choice. Someone had to find whoever sent that signal.

  The deployment was carefully planned to minimize risk. Four high-speed, light-attack ships would emerge from blink just beyond the Holzb
erg limit, fire off a stick of five Rapture missiles and blink away, hopefully before the Shardies had time to react. The theorists calculated that if the total hang time near the planet was fifteen to eighteen seconds—the upper limit only if a ship had to roll into firing position—they all might have a chance to get away.

  The seconds after firing were the dangerous time for the ships’ crews. If they didn’t reach the Holzberg limit in those eighteen seconds, the overstressed drives would turn the ship and everyone on board into an instantaneously brilliant cloud of dispersing plasma. I had the easy part, they said.

  All I had to do was survive long enough to send my signal.

  The hundreds of fragments from the sabot spread out in an elongated, egg-shaped pattern over a thousand square kilometers along the path of the payload. Even if the Shardies weren’t preoccupied cleaning up the destruction from the missiles’ impacts and suspected something, they’d still waste a lot of time finding and inspecting that many pieces. Expand those searches over twenty patterns and you came up with the faint probability of my being detected. I knew that, even with that sort of insurance, they’d eventually find my landing spot. It was only a matter of time. I had to hurry.

  I discovered I was still in one piece when I uncoiled my aching body after the long bounce and roll. My left arm dangled loosely and a chunk of that shoulder was missing. Other than that all my parts seemed to be functional. I probed the arm and found that it had been dislocated by whatever I hit. That must have been what ripped that piece of shoulder away. A little pressure in the right places, a twist of the shoulder, and the arm was nearly as good as the day it was installed.

  I checked my position and discovered that I was about two hundred kilometers away from the location of the signal. Hell of an overshoot, but not bad, considering the variables. The deviation could have come from unexpected upper level winds or some other variable. I figured two days to hike there if I didn’t stop. I set out.