by Jay Allan
A tent city mushroomed outside the mouth of Thermopylae, soldiers, conscripts, and citizens looking to leech the heat blowing in from OA’s dome. Though Jia’s rationing had been flawless—rather than having everyone assemble at the algae vats for their food and water, where a hungry crowd could turn nasty, she’d recruited a delivery team to distribute tubs of water and still-mushy blue-green nutribricks throughout the domes—we loosened them further as the darkness cycled back to sunlight, knowing that, one way or the other, the siege would be broken with the arrival of the reinforcements on the 24th day.
An apparently bored Fay began to ask me about my mistakes and regrets, hesitantly at first, then with increasing hunger for as many stories as I could remember, especially the violent ones. I told it about my mercenary years in India guarding merchant trains, killing bandits and leaving them rotting by the roadside. About the continental wars of the 17th century that left much of what would later be Germany as dead and desolate as the yellow flatlands outside Shangri-la. The starvation and stillness had mirrored the bottleneck of northern Idaho after skyrocketing energy prices sparked a rebellion in the autumn of 2052. Hiding away from a wife who’d out-aged me, I’d returned to a cabin outside the college town of Moscow, where I drank away the days as federal troops crushed the separatists in a prolonged and bitter campaign that left thousands dead and the whole region helpless when a month-long cold front locked the valley under ice and snow. On a hike through the bombed-out dorms to see if there was any canned food left at the abandoned Rosauers, a pair of starving students jumped me in an alley. I was forced to beat them to death with a cracked cinderblock.
“That’s a terrible example of regret,” Fay said.
“I had to kill them!”
“It was you or them. Anyone would have done what you did. I want to know about when you were wrong.”
“Here’s where the rules get different for people like you and me,” I said, rubbing my icy hands together. The temperature was never supposed to change within the domes and cold-weather staples like gloves were nonexistent. “Back in the day, every Greek with a few drachma owned slaves. Once I’d earned some cash through the spice road, I bought some myself. It sounds like barbarism now—”
“Because it is!”
“That moral standard didn’t exist in the time and place I made that choice. As the shellfish-related parts of the Bible prove, there are very few moral laws that are truly timeless.”
“Everyone should know owning another sapient entity is wrong,” Fay said.
I cursed under my breath, forgetting it came through the dot mike loud and clear. “It was a confusing time. I think I did well, all things considered.”
“You should have known better.”
“I was the best owner those slaves had ever seen. I’d been one myself. I was so kind and generous, slaves poured in from every corner of Attica to be owned by me.”
“I highly doubt that,” Fay said sharply. “And that’s a dangerous rationalization. You can excuse some awfully barbaric behavior this way.”
I pulled my sleeves over my frigid hands. “At least I freed them when I had to fake my death.”
“That’s how you forgave yourself? Redemptive action?”
“It sure helps.” I frowned, failing to remember my slaves’ names. “Act in good faith. If you later decide you screwed up, all you can do is resolve to do better next time.”
“Oh,” Fay said, breathless. “I’ve got it.”
“Good. I mean, say what you will about letting yourself off the hook for what we’d call war crimes today, but it was a completely different world.”
“Not the secret of life, dummy,” it said. “I found the ship.”
“Yes!” I threw up my hands and leaped for joy. In Titan’s weak hold, I sailed so high my fists cracked into the smooth ceiling. The soldiers around me startled, unshouldering their rifles and sweeping them side to side down the tunnel.
“Sorry,” I explained to the confused faces. “I thought I could use some exercise.”
I reseated myself beside a frowning Pete. “How soon can you have it back here, Fay?”
“Do you really think it’s that easy?” Fay laughed. “We’re gonna have to steal it.”
The policeman jerked to his feet, snapped his pistol from its holster, and aimed it square at Baxter’s abdomen. The man’s lips twitched; Baxter heard the faint vibrations of speech. A flesh-colored mike bobbed alongside the man’s adam’s apple. His face was white as a page.
“This is not good,” Arthur said into Baxter’s ear.
“He’s aimed straight at my brain,” Baxter said. “What’s he doing?”
“Talking to his boss. Be quiet.”
The man kept his gun trained on Baxter’s stomach. He felt a cold energy in his chest, as if his body somehow knew it would cease functioning before he knew what had happened.
“What’s he saying now?” he said to Arthur.
“Nothing. I think his captain’s talking to someone else.”
“Who could—”
“Shut up!” Arthur yelled in his ear. “Oh my God. Kill him. Kill him now!”
21
Titan stretched beyond the dome, a flat, dead, empty seabed of yellow ice and orange dirt slicked by squalls of liquid methane, fogged by the smoglike haze that cut visibility to two miles, bone-frozen by the -300 degree cold. I flexed my free hand. The gold-leafed glove covering it and the rest of my body was no thicker than a knit mitten. Olympian Atomics’ hydrogen miners wore such suits at Saturn, which was even harsher than Titan, but it felt like gearing up to go volcano-diving in a Speedo and a pair of goggles.
“ETA five minutes,” Fay said in our ears.
“Unless you mean your goodbyes to be forever,” Baxter said to no one in particular, “you’d better get your well-wishers out of the blast zone.”
Pete wrapped his thick arms around Vance. Hermalina, towering over me, smiled and extended her hand. Shelby waved a pale hand; her lacerated kidney had all but healed and her red count was restored, but she still looked anemic.
“No dying up there,” she said. “At least not until you’ve got the ship in orbit.”
I shrugged. “It sounds pretty ritzy. Maybe we’ll take it for a cruise.”
We ushered them away and pulled the deflated bouncy-house over our heads. Pete and Jia slathered its edges with Stikkit, seaming the rubber to the plass dome.
I raised my hands to keep the heavy rubber off my head. “We’re going to be the first people to ever die inside a bouncy-castle.”
“Two minutes,” Fay said.
The door in the dome at the city outskirts was attached to nothing and thus had no airlock. Not so important to us in our warm and well-oxygenated suits—even Baxter wore one; his organic skin would be frozen by Titan’s atmosphere just as thoroughly as ours—but, depending on how long it took us to get the door shut behind us, a failure in our jury-rigged lock could prove fatal to the inhabitants of the bubble. Frankly, I doubted it would work at all, but as Fay raced back from Enceladus and launched its shuttle into Titan atmo, the work had occupied us with something other than chewing our nails to the wrist.
Under broad daylight. Fay assured us the vessel was radar- and thermal-invisible, and that Titan’s pea soup atmosphere would hide it from good ol’ fashioned human eyes, but like my gold-coated suit, it felt wrong. You wouldn’t ask a ninja to assassinate an emperor until at least twilight. The compromise was a desperate necessity: both fleets would arrive the day before Titan next slipped into nightfall. We had two days to get to the colony ship, capture it, and come back for the colonists.
Then the big guns would soar in.
“One minute,” Fay said.
“Let’s get this door open,” Jia said.
With the dome’s power cut, the door’s maglock was dead. We’d excavated its manual latches, which we now popped. Yellow air hissed through the seams, inflating the rubber bouncy-castle over our heads. Jia hauled the naked door up into
the plass. We filed to the other side, suited feet crackling over the frozen ground. Hondo held the door as Jia crossed over, then eased it back into its slots as we kicked dirt from its base, exposing its outer manuals. Pete and a third soldier locked the door shut.
“Here we are,” Fay said.
A matte black arrowhead screamed over the ground and stopped in a way rockets don’t some fifty yards from the dome. I bounded into its billowing roostertail, ice and dirt pinging my mask. The hovering vessel rotated ninety degrees to expose its open hatch. I leaped inside and buckled down. The others piled in behind me; the hatch snapped shut. Titan whisked by the windows, swiftly falling away. Yellow fog engulfed us on all sides. I twisted in my seat, trying to get a glimpse of the bubbled city.
“What if OA attacks while we’re gone?” I said.
“Yay!” Baxter said. “We won’t be there to be killed.”
“They didn’t do anything the two weeks I was out of orbit,” Fay said. “Then again, I tried not to let them know I was gone. But they won’t know you’re gone either! It all works out.”
Pete patted my shoulder. “Right now, they need us to get that ship more than they need us in the tunnel.”
The ship banked hard left, slamming me into the window. “What the hell was that?”
“Um,” Fay said. “A missile.”
“Why are they firing missiles at something they’re not supposed to be able to see?”
“They must have better tech than I anticipated. Hang on. You’ll be fine if I can get you past this stupid atmosphere.”
The invisible hand of acceleration jammed me into my seat. The shuttle pulled a tight corkscrew, wrenching me into the straps. My stomach did a backflip. With the ground shrouded in the yellow nitrous haze, I lost track of which way was down. I rediscovered my sense of direction several horrible seconds later as the sky before us darkened and darkened and we tore through the last of its ragged shreds into the eternal night of space.
“Nailed it,” Fay said. “Smooth sailing from here.”
Fay’s dark wing curved across the vacuum. The shuttle swung up to the outrigger and eased into an open rectangular portal, swallowing us up in a hangar little bigger than the shuttle. A sliver of gravity resumed, adhering me to my chair.
“We’re underway,” Fay said. “Everyone got your masks on?”
“Yes,” we replied in unison, like foil-wrapped, oversized, rifle-toting children.
The shuttle hatch popped. My old friend the box-bot led us up a set of stairs to the screen room in the middle of Fay’s guts. The gravity increased by the second, sucking my feet against the floor. In the hectic yet tedious weeks under siege, I’d spent all the time I could spare in the gym, but its equipment had been limited. After the months on Mars, Hidey-Hole, and Titan, the Earth-level gravity was a welcome challenge to my legs. Jia, Hondo, and the third soldier, Aliss, a dark-skinned woman as silent as the vacuum, all sat down on a bench.
Jia rubbed her thighs. “You trying to crush us before we even get there, you crazy ship?”
“I thought we were in a hurry?” Fay said.
“We are.” I nodded at the daffodil-like acceleration chairs lining the wall. “Slip in one of those if your baby legs can’t take it.”
“I’ve seen you naked,” Jia said.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
They didn’t take up the offer. Hondo held out for an hour, sweating, chest rising, before he ensconced himself in one of the gelatinous chairs. Jia and Aliss got up a few minutes later and eased themselves into the chairs to either side of him.
I shook my head at Baxter and Pete. “These noodle-limbs wouldn’t last five minutes on Earth.”
“We just lasted over an hour,” Jia said.
“These noodle-limbs wouldn’t last an hour and five minutes on Earth,” I said.
“Speaking of hours,” Fay said, “you have about fifteen of them until we reach the moon.”
“Fifteen hours?” I made a face at the corner of the room. “It only takes you a few days to get from Earth to Mars.”
“I have to sneak up on them. Would you rather spend 48 hours chasing them down, or fifteen doing it right?”
I spent the time remembering my life. I still wasn’t done by the time Fay alerted us we were there.
* * *
Enceladus hung in the center of the screen, as round and white as the snowball it was, flecked with craters, laced with blue veins around its south pole where cryovolcanoes blasted broad jets of icy vapor into the darkness. Caught in Saturn’s gravitational grasp, that vapor formed a diffuse ring around the gas giant, a glittering contrail tracking Enceladus’ circular path. And that water was what had drawn the colony ship here.
It hung above the moon’s southern plume, a thick habitat ring surrounded by a shiny scaffold strung with knobby engines and needles of comm gear. A coin-shaped structure stood perpendicular from the middle of the ring. During my stint establishing NightVision, I’d learned enough about spaceship architecture to take a guess at what all this weirdness meant: as the ship traveled toward Alpha Centauri, the colonists would live inside the coin, where the constant acceleration would press their feet against the floor; once it reached cruising speed and gravity ceased inside the coin, they would move to the ring, which, unless OA’s engineers were total dumbasses, would rotate, simulating gravity via centrifugal force.
Elegant enough, but about as pretty as an engagement ring caught in an industrial accident. Frankly, I thought Fay looked much cooler. Knowing the goofball mindsets of the AIs who designed the Frontier Assessment, I bet they’d made coolness a chief priority.
“Attention OAS Sunspanner,” Fay said. “This is the independent warship Frontier Assessment. I am seizing command of your vessel. Stow your escorts and shut down your engines or I’ll be forced to bring violence upon you.”
Baxter smiled from within his acceleration chair. “I like the biblical touch.”
“I thought I should sound scary,” Fay said.
Two dots drifted above the tangle of the Sunspanner. These flared and beelined at us. The screen split and zoomed in on two wedge-shaped ships, the outlines of their pilots just visible behind tinted cockpits. An impossibly white line licked across both screens. The lead fighter disintegrated into a plume of matter as fine as the water vapor venting from the volcanoes of Enceladus. The second escort peeled into a wild evasive corkscrew.
“You see what you made me do to your little friend, Sunspanner?” Fay said. “You have three seconds to decide which acronym sounds nicer: POW or KIA. Three—”
“Frontier Assessment, this is Sunspanner,” a woman replied in clipped syllables. “Awaiting your instructions.”
“Stow your escort and hold still.”
The remaining fighter leveled out and swung back to the tangled rings of the colony ship. Fay closed until we were nearly on top of it. On the main screen, two gun-mounted ovals dislodged from Fay’s underside and stopped a short distance away.
“Prepare your dorsal airlock for boarding,” Fay commanded, swinging us over the upper ridge of the coin-shaped central habitat.
Pete leaned forward in his bodyglove. “Tell them not to shoot us once we’re inside, please.”
“Disarm your crew and assemble in the bridge,” Fay said. “Violators will be shot unto death.” It laughed to itself, then said in our ears, “You guys better get to the airlock.”
My chair relaxed its hold with a fleshy smack. As I drifted away from the seat, a white bowling bag scooted in on a jet of air and hovered in my face. I inserted my left hand into the floaterball’s control glove and let Fay pilot it to the airlock. There, muffled thuds and clanks reverberated through the thick doors. Fay popped a wall hatch, exposing a rack of sidearms and stunners. Jia propelled herself to the hatch and sent weapons spinning through the nongravity. I snatched a pistol and a stunner, secured them to my belt, and sealed my faceplate, pressure bulging in my ears.
“I think my next body should have guns
for hands,” Baxter said.
“You’ve been spending too much time with these people,” Fay said. “Ready to roll?”
Jia nodded, mouth a tight line. “Open ‘er up.”
The door swung aside. The floaterball whispered as it pulled me into the dark tube linking us to the Sunspanner. At the tunnel’s edge, I tucked my foot into a rung and aimed my pistol at the closed door at the other end.
It hissed and hinged inward on a perfectly white room. Jia and Hondo scooted forward, weapons drawn. They passed the airlock and broke to either side. Jia leaned back over the rim and gestured us in.
I pushed my hand into the glove. The white ball drew me into the bright white room. Fat white pillars fifteen feet across rose from floor to ceiling, arrayed in regular rows across the room’s 200-yard diameter. A closed door was set in each column.
“What is this place?” Pete whispered.
“Living modules,” Fay said. “The stairwell to the bridge is straight across from you.”
Jia and Hondo eased through the pillars. Aliss floated in the rear. Pete, Baxter, and I fanned across the middle. It was dead silent except the soft whoosh of the floaterballs and the ambient drone of a ventilation system. I adjusted my sweaty grip on the pistol.
Automatic rifle fire puffed between the pillars with the airy whup-whup-whup of an antique helicopter. Hondo jolted backwards in a floating cloud of blood. Jia opened up with her pistol, thrown into a three-axes spin by its recoil. A man screamed; she wrestled to realign herself. Hondo’s floating body bumped into a pillar and slid toward the roof, greasing the white column with blood. The floaterball wrapping his dead arm wedged him between the column and the ceiling.
“Downed one.” Jia ejected her clip and slammed home a replacement. “Winged the other, but I lost him in the pillars.”
Baxter backed against a column, face blank. Aliss turned in a half circle, gun outstretched. Pete propelled himself to Hondo and put his fingers to the dead man’s throat. I floated to the ceiling. To the left of the pillar where Jia had exchanged fire with the two attackers, tiny spheres of blood tumbled through the air.