by Joe Zieja
The Viking took a glance back to where the marines were using hoverlifts to move debris into a defensible fort around the remaining boominite containers.
“Not long,” she said. “If you’ve got a master plan, you’d better get a move on it.” She looked at him again. “But right now, that master plan really looks like running away.”
Rogers grabbed her by the shoulders, something he wouldn’t have dared to do just a few days earlier. Through the lens of the VMU, the tinted image of the Viking filled his vision.
“I promise you I’m not going anywhere. I have something else in mind. I need you to hold things down here for just a bit longer.”
The Viking gave him a slow nod. “You got it, metalhead. Are you sure you can do it?”
The scene inside the control room played back in his mind, the sight of that gargantuan goddess exploding through the door, and he felt warm all over. Rogers removed the helmet of his VMU and smiled.
“Right now,” he said, “I can do anything.”
* * *
I. Rogers would realize later that there hadn’t been a knife.
The Gravity of the Situation
The feeling of invulnerability faded the first time he dove out of the line of fire as a small platoon of marines met an oncoming group of droids. The second time he was nearly clobbered in the head by an unarmed droid attempting to droid fu him to death, he wasn’t sure he could pee in a straight line anymore. When the rear door to the hangar in which the Awesome was ready for launch opened, revealing a long stream of droid reinforcements, he just about curled up into a ball and waited to die.
In the time it took him to get out of the control room and over to the hangar, the docking bay had turned into a second front. It seemed like every available droid was being funneled into the engineering bay and the surrounding areas. Worse, he had no idea how many droids there were in the inventory, so he couldn’t even be sure that if the marines managed to finish these off, more wouldn’t come afterward. And who knew what else they were doing in the rest of the Flagship at the moment? It all seemed hopeless.
Few marines had fought their way into the hangar as yet, leaving Rogers mostly alone and terrified as he ducked and dodged between ships, making a zigzag pattern across the floor to where the Awesome lay so close to the airlock that would take him out. He could hear the disruptor pulses slamming into the ships all around him; the droids had clearly seen him. From what he could see, Deet and Oh One were still fighting it out in a hail of sparks over in the corner of the bay, and he couldn’t tell who was winning. He’d get no help there, either. Rogers was toast.
Even the orangutan that was loping across the hangar had little chance of survival.
Rogers stopped. He had seen a lot of strange things in the last couple of weeks. He’d learned the best way to make his bed in zero gravity. He’d even gone a lengthy amount of time without drinking.
But none of that, absolutely none of it, prepared him to see Corporal Tunger riding on the back of a lion, wearing a cape.
“What the hell are you doing, Tunger?” Rogers cried, standing up.
The lion reared, and Tunger, who had painted his face in swirls of random colors, gave him a grin.
“Keeping things orderly, sir. Hyaah!”
Tunger put his heels to the lion, who gave a mighty roar and charged into the oncoming horde of droids. He was followed by just about every animal Rogers had ever seen on the zoo deck and some he hadn’t even known were down there. The animals crashed into the droid reinforcements, sending metallic bodies scattering everywhere and giving Rogers a clear path to the Awesome.
Rogers ran for it.
He could hear battle all around him, feel the waves of near misses as disruptor pulses flashed by him. R. Wilson Rogers was running through the center of the apocalypse, dodging death at every turn, wondering every moment whether his next step would be his last. He kept his attention on the Awesome as he weaved around the other ships in the enormous docking bay, praying silently that whatever astral, omnipotent being there was out there would take time off from balancing his karma checkbook to save him from certain destruction.
Seeing the ramp leading into the belly of the Awesome open before him, he dove. Time slowed as he floated through the air, screaming wordlessly, and landed in his ship. Rogers turned around, not believing he was still alive, wondering what kind of massive chaos he’d just made it through.
The hangar was empty. All the fighting had moved to the Pit.
“Oh,” Rogers said to nobody at all.
Straightening his VMU and walking through his ship to the cockpit with the utmost poise and dignity, Rogers went through the startup sequence as fast as he could. Hart and his crew had done a nice job on the outside, but they hadn’t bothered to clean anything up on the inside; shattered glass was still on the floor, the sticky remnants of the most expensive Scotch in the galaxy making sucking noises against his boots.
The engines fired to life, sending a shudder through the ship, and Rogers felt the Awesome automatically lift off into a moderate hover. The controls felt responsive, fresh. Hart and his crew had definitely done well.
“Alright, baby,” Rogers said, giving the console an affectionate pat, “here we go.”
Rogers pushed the controls forward. The first massive door of the airlock opened as the Awesome approached its proximity sensors, and soon, Rogers was staring at open space for the first time in what felt like a long, long time.
Taking a deep breath, Rogers accelerated. He hoped the droids hadn’t taken control of the Flagship’s guns, or this was going to be a very short ride. Throttling the engines to full as soon as he was clear of the external airlock doors, Rogers took a hard turn to swing back and start heading toward the top of the Flagship. According to the schematics he’d pulled up on his datapad, the gravity generator was located on the opposite side of the ship from where he’d launched, and, the Flagship being the size of a small city, it was going to take time to get over there.
As he turned around to face the ship again, Rogers got the treat of a full view of the 331st’s command ship. He was a little more appreciative of its beauty this time around now that it was on the verge of being turned into a hunk of melting metal with everyone he knew dead inside of it. That sort of thing tended to increase the sentimentality of the situation, he supposed.
As he sailed up and over the Flagship, Rogers took a deep breath. There was nothing he could do to prepare, no way to rush this any further, so he just sat back and took a couple of deep breaths. Open space was all around him, the rest of the 331st totally oblivious to what was going on aboard the Flagship, thanks to the lack of communication. It almost looked peaceful, but he knew it was just a matter of perspective. If he didn’t stop the droids, the War of Musical Chairs, the largest human conflict in space history, would look like child’s play.
He didn’t feel particularly good about what he was about to do—he wasn’t really the self-sacrificing kind of person, and he thought the whole thing was kind of tacky—but he didn’t see much of a choice. Glancing around the cockpit of his ship, he remembered the events that had kicked off this insane term of military service, and couldn’t do anything except shake his head.
Doing so put his eyes on the storage locker where he had kept his supply of Jasker 120, which, he noticed, was slightly ajar. Rogers was positive he hadn’t been able to get the thing open; he’d spent many frantic days trying to do so, to no avail. But there it was. Rising out of his seat, Rogers went over to the lockers and opened it, then cursed.
He’d had eight bottles of it when he’d accidentally bashed it shut. Now there was one—and it was half empty. On it was a note.
Rogers, it said, you always had good taste. Thanks for the payment.—Hart.
Chuckling, Rogers picked up the note. On the back, it said, P.S. Stop stealing Meridan government property. And whoever did this paint job is a moron.
Rogers nonchalantly threw the note away, taking the half-empty
bottle from the shelf and walking back over to his seat. None of that was going to matter for much longer, anyway.
Unscrewing the cap, Rogers took a whiff. The Scotch smelled like heaven in a bottle, like a long-lost friend that had come back for, well, a few drinks.
Rogers sat down, put his legs up on the console, took a drink, and waited. And if he heard even one beep from that console, he was going to press the self-destruct button.
Just as the gravity generator came into sight, his console beeped.
“Damn it!” he said, leaning forward. “What? What is it? What now?”
“Rogers!” came a voice through the communication system. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” Rogers said, standing up and putting the now-empty bottle of Jasker 120 aside. He’d have to be drunk to do this. “Who is this? You’re breaking up.”
“It’s Corporal Mailn,” she said. “What are you doing out there? I swear, if you’re jumping ship . . .”
“I’m not jumping ship,” Rogers said as he prepared to jump ship. “How’s the fighting going?”
“Bad,” she said. “The Viking took a hit to the shoulder but won’t sit down, and Tunger lost a gaggle of geese. The droids are everywhere. The Viking said you had some kind of plan. Whatever it is, you’d better get a move on, because I don’t think we can hold out much longer.”
“I’m working on it,” Rogers said. Looking at the schematics again, he made absolutely sure that what he was looking at was indeed the gravity generator. The shape was right, the location was right, and there were words painted on the outside that said, NEWTON'S GRAVITY GENERATOR MK 300: KEEPING YOU GROUNDED. Rogers was pretty sure it was the right spot.
“Listen,” he said just before he put his helmet on. “I’ve got to go. Hold on to something, okay?”
“. . . Why?”
“Just do it. And if I don’t see you again . . . thanks for everything.”
Mailn was quiet for a second. “Rogers, what are you up to?”
Rogers cut the communication, disabled the Awesome’s emergency evasion features, and set the engines to a timed acceleration. Then he got his ass out of the cockpit and over to the escape hatch as fast as he could. The ship’s warning sirens were starting to blare, the computer warning of an imminent collision, even though they were still a bit away from the Flagship.
Rogers felt like he was going to vomit as he opened the hatch to vacuum and flipped on his VMU. Standing with his head out of the escape hatch, he watched the Flagship getting bigger and bigger by the second. He needed to make sure the Awesome was at maximum speed when it collided, but he also needed to make sure he wasn’t on it when it happened. He was going to have to use nearly all of the energy in the suit to stop himself from becoming a space bug on the Flagship’s windshield. And if he didn’t get inside before the Awesome hit, he risked getting impaled by high-speed debris.
“You’re an idiot,” Rogers said to himself. “You’re a god-damned idiot fool moron stupid idiot.”
The Flagship was really, really big now. The engines would be firing any second. He had to time this right. But he was an engineer; he’d done the calculations for acceleration and inertia and all that. He just wished he hadn’t left the piece of paper with the numbers on them in the control room.
Rogers jumped.
His body flew into the weightlessness of space, and he threw his VMU jets to full blast. He hadn’t done this in a while, however, so he only really succeeded in sending himself into a flat spin that did not at all help his nausea. By the time he got it under control, he’d managed to shoot himself a sizeable distance from the Awesome, and he was more or less on course to get to the hatch. Space seemed awfully big, awfully quiet. Rogers’ own breathing made his ears ring.
Looking at the heads-up-display on his helmet, Rogers saw that he had less air reserves than he’d expected, probably from using them in the flaming control room. That meant he was probably going to have to choose between breathing and making it back inside the Flagship, which was not a choice he was looking forward to making. He hoped everyone inside was alright.
LOW FUEL, said a message that popped up on his HUD.
Glancing back at the Awesome, he could see the engines flaring to life. Full speed would be in just a few seconds. Once he got inside, he’d perhaps have a minute or two before impact. He could see the hatch, a big gaping hole in the side of the ship used by maintainers in case they had to do any external repairs on the escape pod ejectors.
Almost there, Rogers thought. God, it was quiet.
NO, SERIOUSLY, LOW FUEL, said another message on the HUD.
“I know!” Rogers shouted, immediately wishing he hadn’t wasted the oxygen. Just by eyeballing the distance between him and the airlock, he knew he wasn’t going to make it.
With a couple of sequenced button presses inside his touch-sensitive gloves, Rogers began to reroute his oxygen supply to the air vents. His lungs reacted immediately by expanding for more air, but Rogers moderated it as much as he could, tears welling in his eyes from the effort. Why did it always have to be so hard? Lately, it seemed like he was dating hypoxia.
Rogers glanced at the Awesome one last time. He was going to miss that ship. And its crappy paint job.
The artificial gravity of the ship seized him and he crashed to the floor inside the airlock.
Pushing himself to his feet and resisting the urge to take off his helmet—one side of the airlock was still open to space, after all—he stumbled deliriously over to the control panel and started slamming every button that even remotely might be considered the “close the friggin’ airlock” button.
Just before his vision started to blur, his lungs burning, he saw the airlock door slam shut.
Rogers gasped as he took off his helmet, writhing on the floor like a fish out of water. He’d made it. He was breathing. He was going to need to wash this VMU with bleach.
Crawling over to the exit, Rogers finally found the strength to stand and, listening intently for any activity on the other side, opened the door.
The escape pods on the commissary deck were located far aft on the Flagship, a good distance away from the kitchens, but Rogers could immediately tell that the Viking and her marines had done the job. The whole place reeked of stale smoke and burnt metal. The floor was wet, the fire suppression systems having kicked off and doused the whole deck, likely frying the electronics of the droids’ network as well.
If anyone had panicked and tried to escape, they hadn’t done it here, likely deterred by the chaos and fire. The corridor was empty.
Except, that was, for McSchmidt.
Rogers’ first instinct was to kill the bastard, but, from what he could tell, the droids had already done a good enough job of that. The Thelicosan spy was slumped against the wall, a disruptor wound in the upper part of his chest. One of his legs was bent in the wrong direction, and, strangely, it appeared that someone had made a chalk outline around him.
One of McSchmidt’s eyes was open, and he very creepily appeared to be staring at Rogers. In fact, if Rogers didn’t know any better, he would have thought . . .
“Rogers,” McSchmidt muttered.
Rogers squealed like a little girl.
“McSchmidt!” he said once he’d recovered himself and wondered how effective bleach would be in cleaning a VMU. He walked over to the injured man and knelt down next to him.
“You really screwed things up,” Rogers said. For some reason, even though he had every right to want to reach out and throttle the spy, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. For one, it was kind of overkill—McSchmidt’s wounds were clearly mortal. Also, Rogers didn’t like touching icky things.
“I know,” McSchmidt said, his voice very froglike. He swallowed, then coughed. “You would have done the same thing.”
Rogers reeled. “What? No, I wouldn’t have done the same thing. You almost killed everyone on the ship.” He thought for a moment. “In fact, I’m still not entirely sure you haven’
t.”
“I thought I’d be a hero,” McSchmidt said, looking up at the ceiling. “I thought I’d be welcomed with a parade or something back in Thelicosa. It was a convenient thing, you know, having the droids do all my work for me. I’m an opportunist, you see.”
“No,” Rogers said. “You’re a bastard. Look, how much of this death speech am I going to have to hear? There are other things going on right now.”
McSchmidt slowly closed his eyes and sighed, then lay still.
Rogers stared at him silently for a moment, then shook his head and stood up. The saga of McSchmidt the spy was—
“It’s just that,” McSchmidt said, taking a deep breath, “I never felt like I fit in anywhere, you know?”
Rogers rolled his eyes and knelt back down. He was starting to rethink his policy on violence and/or touching icky things.
“No,” Rogers said, “I don’t know. I seriously cannot relate to you at all.” He looked at McSchmidt for a second, thinking. “You told Tunger that there really was an invasion coming. But you were lying, weren’t you?”
McSchmidt grinned a crooked, weak grin. “Lying through my teeth.”
Rogers looked up at the ceiling and yelled. “Dammit! It’s the not knowing. It’s the not knowing that’s killing me. Are you people invading or not invading? How many THEY'RE ATTACKING US buttons are going to light up? Why would you do something like that?”
“I thought it might create more confusion. It worked, didn’t it?”
“No,” Rogers said, “not really. I mean, the droids were already attacking us at that point, and—”
“I’m glad it worked,” McSchmidt said.
“I just told you—”
“Rogers,” he said, croaking, his voice barely audible. “If this all turns out okay, will you tell Mailn something for me?”
“No,” Rogers said.
“Tell her . . .” His voice trailed off. McSchmidt’s eyelids wilted, and his chest stopped moving.