by Ron Collins
Their footsteps were heavy against the carpet, Torrance walking first, the waiter behind with the barrel of the gun pressing against the small of Torrance’s back. The fabric of his pants rasped with each stride.
They came to the elevator.
“Get in slow,” the waiter said. “Don’t want any collateral damage, understand?”
Torrance nodded. “You’re as clear as vacuum.”
The doors opened. Four people stood in the compartment. The doors were burnished bronze, reflecting images as blobs of color. The air smelled of humid carpet and light cleanser. The waiter edged behind him, the blunt point of the weapon like a fist against his kidney. They stopped on the tenth floor and took on another passenger, then two more on the third-floor mezzanine.
Sweat pooled on Torrance’s brow.
What should he do when the doors opened? Run? Turn and punch?
How many people could die with a random laser shot?
The doors opened.
“Left,” the man said quietly.
The lobby was large and open, but still crowded.
“Outside.”
They walked across the pavilion. An automatic door opened as they approached the exit. The air at ground level was hot and stagnant. A gravcar pulled up and the back door opened to reveal a man in a business suit. Torrance could not see his face, but his hand showed another laser.
“Get in,” the waiter said.
Torrance didn’t hesitate.
The door slammed. The man was slim and smelled of soap. His hair was long and tied tightly behind his head. He reached across the bench seating.
A pinprick burned on the back of Torrance’s hand.
His world went dark.
CHAPTER 16
Somewhere in the deep swirl of dreams, Torrance decided that the question is not whether or not God plays dice. The question is what game he plays.
STARBOUND
CHAPTER 17
U3 Ship Icarus
Local Date: Unknown
Local Time: Unknown
“Welcome to Icarus, Captain Black.” The voice was distant and vaguely feminine.
“Wha—”
Bright light stabbed his temples.
His eyes burned.
A row of fluorescent lights lined the ceiling, ringed with halos of silver and blue. A pallet was hard against his back. Shadows with human form glided through his vision, shifting light like a kaleidoscope.
Torrance was hungry.
Icarus? Why was that name familiar?
The man. A laser. A car. Oscar Pentabill falling.
He took a full breath. Oxygen refreshed his body. Memory returned. Blinking brought things into better focus. A man in a blue medical uniform stood against the wall. A woman with auburn hair sat in a chair beside the bed.
“Get yourself cleaned up,” the woman said, standing. “I’ll order you something to eat.”
The man leaned forward to read numbers from the monitor over Torrance’s head. A guard came into focus on the opposite side of the room. The woman turned to the man in blue. “I’ll report he’s awake. Get him a shower and some food. Make sure he is presentable.”
“Aye, ma’am,” he replied.
Sometime later, water rushed over him.
The smell of soap was something normal to hold on to.
The warm sting against his chest and shoulders made him feel human. He was stiff and sore, and the water brought him simple comfort as the world came back to his brain.
Icarus was a carbon copy of Orion, both among the first Star Drive spacecraft ever designed, each built in cookie-cutter fashion to save cost and development time. They had been made with maintenance in mind—with service nodes placed at key junctures on every level. Each node provided access to the systems command center through sleek, holographic interfaces, the first to utilize such controls.
Torrance grimaced with the memory of a time when such trivia seemed to matter.
If it was true that Alpha Centauri A was going to be tied to a black hole, he was sitting on a ghost ship.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and stepped into his quarters. His clothes were gone, replaced by a pile on the foot of the bed. The pants were baggy and gray, tied in front with a drawstring. The shirt was blue polyfiber that hung below his hips.
Breakfast was tasteless cornbread and freeze-dried apricots in the officers’ mess. A carafe of coffee sat in the middle of the table. An armed guard stood outside.
Simple as it was, the food did wonders for the clarity of his mind.
“Good morning.”
Torrance sat up straighter.
The woman who entered the room was middle-aged—maybe sixty, maybe seventy, who could tell. Her yellow blond hair and a dark complexion spoke of Latin heritage. She wore black trousers and a zippered sweatshirt with the Icarus logo sewn into the left breast. She was thin to the point of frailty. Her eyes were watery blue with dark half-moons beneath. Her lips turned down at the corners. On the whole, she reminded him of a bird.
He took a swig of coffee and wiped nonexistent crumbs from the corner of his mouth.
The woman took a seat across from him. “I understand you have something you want to tell us?”
“I haven’t decided whether to tell you or not.”
“Choose your game carefully, Captain. Personally, I don’t believe you have a damned thing that could be useful, and I resent the acrobatics we went through to rendezvous with you. But some people think you know something. They think you might actually be able to prove we’re making a mistake. Unlike the United Government, U3 actually cares about the galaxy.”
“Sure you do. You care just enough to put a black hole right in the Solar System’s neighborhood.”
“The Solar System is not the galaxy. Besides, the people of the Solar System will have quite a bit of time to find someplace else to go if they need to.”
“But what if they like where they live?” Torrance said, his thoughts snapping to life-forms on Eden.
“Then they can stay until the end.”
Torrance stared with disbelief at the woman. “Who are you?”
“I am Katriana Martinez, captain on Icarus. More relevant at this point, I am responsible for forming the black hole link.”
“I see.”
“And you are Torrance Black, science ambassador, ex-captain in the United Government Interstellar Command, and, on the sly, one of the chief engineers on the Newton project.”
Torrance frowned, but gathered himself. He hadn’t touched Newton, but he wasn’t going to tell Martinez anything now. He supposed it was a good thing that U3’s data wasn’t airtight.
“Your information is interesting,” he said.
“You have two ex-wives and a pair of daughters: Mercedes, who is currently stationed in a cryo research lab on Europa, and Eliana, who graduates this spring from Canal University with a degree in accelerated-growth bioprosthesis. Your first marriage failed at least in part due to certain—” She paused and raised her eyebrow indelicately. “—deficiencies. Because of these same deficiencies both daughters are adopted. They both tell you they live alone. Eliana is actually holed up with another young woman who is studying multidimensional mathematics. Mercedes is preparing to get married, and has been living off and on with the man of her choice for some time.”
A chain reaction of images clouded Torrance’s mind. Mercy was getting married, and Ana—who had always had such a painful shyness about her—had someone special in her life. Why hadn’t they told him? He never thought he was overbearing about such things.
Martinez’s stare was filled with accusatory sternness.
She reached into a sweatshirt pocket and set a small vial on the table before her—the bottle Torrance had taken to Oscar Pentabill’s room. Cold light from the ceiling reflected from its surface. Martinez put it on its side. It made a hollow sound as she rolled it from hand to hand.
“Do you know what’s in here?”
Torrance shrugged, t
rying not to concentrate on the shiny bottle of microsized death.
“They’re bionites, Captain Black.”
“Really?” Torrance said with innocence.
Martinez was having none of it.
“Are you threatening me?” Torrance said.
“Why would I need to threaten you? You’re already a dead man.”
Torrance stared quizzically at her.
“You’ve surmised that Icarus will be destroyed when the black hole is set.”
“Yes.”
“What you don’t know is that Icarus has been given the honor of actually creating the link itself. We are nearing launch now.”
“We’re in the Centauri system?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you could set links remotely.”
“We can.”
“Then why send Icarus?”
Martinez smiled. “I’m the one asking questions. You gave us a cryptic warning about blowing up half the galaxy. I want to know what you’ve got.”
Torrance recalled Oscar Pentabill as he said U3 could set links in any location they wanted to within a range of error. “You can’t control the mechanism yet,” Torrance replied. “Your remote capability is fine when you have enough space and time to cast about. But now that you’ve got a black hole attached to one end, you can’t afford to drop the other end willy-nilly, can you?”
The intensity of Martinez’s gaze let him know he was right. “Doesn’t matter either way, does it?”
“So you’ll set a link like Everguard did.”
“Almost.”
“What do you mean, almost?”
Martinez’s entire face lit up in a maniacal smile. “Icarus herself will be part of the final mission.”
“I’m not sure I—” Sudden understanding made his skin contract. He sat, staring dumbly at the ship’s first officer. “You’re going to set the pods by flying Icarus into the star.”
“We’ll launch some of them directly,” she replied. “But as I understand the math and the structure of the star itself, the geometry of the launch requires we keep some behind. Which is fine. It fits our sense of poetry.”
Torrance stared at the glass vial Martinez was still rolling on the table. Who was this woman? What had her life been that she was willing to give it away so freely?
“Icarus isn’t designed to withstand the heat of a star’s core like the pods are,” Martinez said. “We’ll burn up before reaching the proper trigger point, but the ship will get sucked into the wormhole as soon as the pods are activated anyway. So we’ll get as close as we can before we launch.”
“Well,” Torrance said with what he thought was a tone of humor, “that should reduce your probability of error.”
Martinez grew smug. “You can see why this might be a good time to talk to me. And why it would be good to be convincing. If you are bluffing, you will die with us, and disappear into so many particles blowing on Centauri’s solar wind.”
She held the vial still with the fingertips of one hand.
“And if I’m not bluffing?”
Martinez’s eyes got bigger. “You tell me.”
“We’re wasting our time, you know?” Torrance finally said.
“That’s what I told Director Francis.”
Torrance laughed like he had never laughed before. It was a short laugh, a mere chuckle. But that single noise was filled with the full depth of everything he had learned in this, what he assumed would be, the final moments of his life.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what exactly is it that you mean?”
“I mean, people like you and me. We think we’re making a difference, right? We spend our lives working inside a system that we think makes sense, but we’re wasting our time, right? There’s really no way for us to win. Our leaders play us for fools, and we follow along like sheep.” Torrance remembered Willim Pinot’s discussion about sacrifices that sometimes had to be made. He looked into Martinez’s watery blue eyes and saw a fervor there that scared him. “It’s funny as hell when you think about it just right.”
Martinez glared with less-than-tempered impatience.
“I suppose,” she said, “I should also tell you that U3 has operatives on every inhabited station around the galaxy—specifically including Europa and Mars. It would be a tragedy if a vial just like this dropped into a young woman’s breakfast cereal.” She paused, rolling the vial once. He caught the clear threat to Mercy and Ana. “If you have something to tell us, now would be a good time.”
He set his jaw.
He had nothing to tell them they hadn’t heard at the conference, but this was no longer a simple game. Sheep or no, he had to do something to stop this mission. There was no other answer. He had to disrupt the launch, and he had to destroy their communications system before Martinez could give any order in regard to his daughters.
The first step, though, was to get out of here.
He looked at the vial. It still had its injection cap.
Torrance waited until it was in mid-roll.
He lunged.
Martinez’s fingers tightened, but the container slipped away, wobbling and clattering across the white tabletop.
Four hands scrabbled after it as it dropped over the edge.
It hit the floor with a solid clink.
Torrance leapt from his chair and grabbed it. He followed his motion, standing and wrapping an arm around Martinez’s waist, pinning her against the wall. He turned the vial in his hand and put the injector to her neck. His elbows and hand ached with the pressure of his grip. The room seemed to suddenly contract.
“I want out of here,” he said.
“This is a mistake, Captain.”
“Let’s go,” he said, prodding her with his hip. “Now!”
“Where?”
He thought. There was only one place where it would make sense to launch such pods in a Star Drive ship.
“Weapons Command,” he said.
***
Torrance had always heard that a man’s life flashes before him when he is about to die. As they stepped toward the mess hall’s doorway, the enormity of what he was doing closed in on him with the crushing weight of the ocean.
Torrance saw images of Ana and Mercy, and of fresh-faced, clear-skinned men and women marching into battle cruisers. He saw a star exploding, burning tracers of plasma spiraling into vacuum like twisted arms of jellyfish under Europan seas. He saw Alexandir Romanov, his captain from Everguard, and Admiral Hatch, the man in command who had never known the risk he had taken in ordering a wormhole set.
And he saw Eden, a cloud-covered planet floating in this same churning sea like a long-lost island overgrown and ugly, unworthy of second thought.
CHAPTER 18
U3 Ship Icarus, Alpha Centauri A System
Local Date: Unknown
Local Time: Unknown
The door of the officer’s mess slid open.
The guard outside glanced over her shoulder. She was young, with dirty-blond hair and round brown eyes.
Torrance pulled Martinez closer and pushed past, holding the vial to her neck. “One step and she’s dead.”
The woman raised her weapon. A flash of red energy flared, and the odor of fried brains and scorched hair was everywhere at once. Martinez’s body became dead weight in his arms. Torrance’s gaze went to the fist-sized hole in the first officer’s forehead.
The guard gave a gap-toothed grin.
She was short, with smooth muscles that showed through her uniform. Her face was set and hard, her eyes showing humor at Torrance’s confusion.
“I told ’em there weren’t no reason to play your game,” the guard said.
Torrance dropped Martinez’s body and held the vial of bionites before him like a knife. “Do you know what this is?”
“I don’t really care.”
“You should. These things touch you, you’ll die quicker than you can pull that trigger.”
The guard shrugge
d, but her gaze locked on the vial.
Torrance tore the lid away, then threw the open container at the guard and bolted for the corner. She grunted and jumped back. Ten meters to another corridor. Footsteps from behind. He ran, confused by a lack of traffic in the corridors. Orion’s hallways were always teeming.
His joints ached and his muscles were putty.
The woman was probably in shape.
In a flash of insight, Torrance understood the empty corridors. This was a suicide mission. Icarus was piloted by a skeleton crew—just enough to keep her flying.
A maintenance alcove loomed ahead. He stopped, entered a standard service code, and was rewarded with a control holo that spun before him. He toggled the fire retardant systems. Carbon dioxide foam hissed in the hallway. The guard’s surprised yelp echoed from around the corner.
Torrance raced to the lift tubes, each of his seventy-one locals weighing like lead in his lungs.
“Central Ops,” he said.
He waited.
The lift’s hydraulics creaked in the silence. The sound of the guard’s footsteps drew closer. She yelled something Torrance assumed was a call to whatever crew was aboard.
The lift arrived. The door opened.
Torrance stepped in.
The guard rounded the corner, her hair soaked and dripping, her gray uniform matted to her body. She raised her weapon, but the door closed before she could get off a shot.
The lift dropped.
His heart clattered in the silence. The system hummed around him. He was defenseless. It was, he realized, a truly harrowing sensation to be completely unaware of what he would find when the doors opened.
The lift stopped, and the doors opened.
Torrance ducked in anticipation of other guards, but none were there.
Weapons Command was around the corner. The deck’s power system was to the left. He could do some serious damage by playing with the power grid—maybe create a diversion that would leave him free to work the pods. The system’s security, however, was tricky. If he didn’t get in, the advantage of his head start would be gone.