by M. D. Cooper
“I don’t need to tell you that things aren’t much better than they were before—except that we didn’t burn up in Estrella de la Muerte. Unless you get us that lithium, we’re not going to be able to even course correct enough to get to Epsilon Eridani.
“Good luck, Excelsior. Intrepid out.”
Tanis leaned back. “Well, no one died, at least.”
Joe looked shaken as he leaned back in his seat. He paused to choose his words and responded softly. “Sometimes I don’t get you, Tanis. I know you are pretty hard-bitten, but sometimes you just seem blasé. Maybe just once you could have a good ole fashioned freak-out about something. It would make you more approachable.”
Tanis didn’t know how to respond. She had hoped that Joe finally got her. It wasn’t that she was an emotionless bitch; she knew wisecracks were her coping mechanism. It hurt whenever people thought she didn’t feel; the hurt made her angry.
“Get your shit together, Commander. The Intrepid can limp through space for ten thousand years if it has to. They have the equipment and resources to travel across the galaxy—if it would still be there once they made it to the other side—but we don’t.” She felt ashamed of herself the moment she said the words, but didn’t know how to take them back.
Joe wiped a hurt expression off his face. “Is that how this is going to be? You’ll pull rank and be ass-hat Tanis on me?”
Tanis lowered her eyes, staring at her cup of coffee.
“No, it’s not. I am scared, I’m scared a lot… I think it’s how I stay alive—by never letting it get to me. I push the fear down and compress it into action. Give me a problem and I’ll make a plan. Once I have that plan I put all my fear, doubt and worry into making that plan work. And it works.”
She looked up at him, his expression showing concern. “As a result I only seem to have the one pep-talk speech.” Tanis shrugged apologetically. “It involves words like shit, fuck and ass. And it always uses rank.”
“I’m not going to judge you, Tanis. I’ve seen you at your best and I’ve seen you at your worst—” Joe held up a hand to Tanis, stopping her from speaking. “You may think I haven’t seen the depths of you, but I have. I watched when you tortured Kris and Trent. I know I wasn’t supposed to, but I saw the feeds.”
Tanis’s face reddened. “I didn’t know you saw that…I…I’m not sorry I did it, but I’m not proud of it either. I’ve done that sort of thing enough that sometimes I wonder if I have a soul anymore.”
Joe reached out and turned her face so he could look into her eyes. “I know what you are capable of. You care for people around you. You care so much that you’ll sacrifice your body and soul for them. You get called a hero and a demon, often at the same time, by the people you try to save. So you lock down.”
Tanis nodded. “I know I do, I…”
“It’s ok,” Joe said, holding her close. “Like I said, I know the best and the worst of you and I still love you. Take your strength from that.”
Tanis lay against Joe for a long time. Perhaps he understood her better than she did herself.
Tanis’s head suddenly snapped up. “Damn.”
“What is it?” Joe asked, concern lining his features.
“We didn’t respond to the Intrepid. They’ll wonder why we’re taking so long.”
Joe’s quizzical look froze on his face for several long seconds before he broke into laughter.
“What is it?” Tanis looked at him, perplexed.
“You,” Joe chuckled. “I swear, there is duty imprinted on your DNA.”
“Of course there is,” she smiled. “I had it tattooed on when I enlisted.”
While she sent the message, Joe and Troy worked out the alterations they would need to make to reach the asteroid belt sooner and meet the Intrepid before a rendezvous was impossible.
“We’re going to have some hard burns in a couple of hours,” Joe informed Tanis as she completed her response to the Intrepid.
“Let’s get some food before that happens,” Tanis said, a mischievous smile on her face. “Don’t think you can get out of telling your tale, you’re still going to tell me about Makemake.”
CHURN AND BURN
STELLAR DATE: 3241792 / 08.17.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: GSS Excelsior
REGION: LHS 1565, 30 AU from stellar primary
20:21 hours to asteroid group
Tanis stood up after the meal and poured two cups of coffee, adding sugar to Joe’s and cream to hers. She handed Joe his cup and settled down in her chair, cradling the warm beverage.
“Mmm, just the way I like it,” Joe said after a long draught. “You do pay attention.”
“I did my fair share of dinner runs to the mess if you recall. It wasn’t all just you getting me my BLT.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Joe said with a wink.
“Enough stalling, it’s your turn, mister.”
Joe nodded and took another long drink before beginning.
“Like with Toro, the full story of Makemake never made it out to the public. It started before your jaunt to Toro began and ended a few months after. I was with the seventh fleet on the Midway. We were leaving Ceres on our way to meet with the rest of the fleet for maneuvers near Venus.”
“I read a briefing about that,” Tanis said. “It was to test defensive patterns after the left-over core from Uranus was positioned between Venus and Earth.”
“Yup, but we never arrived, we did a polar loop around Sol and boosted north. The word on the ship was that orders changed and we were doing a patrol of the Oort cloud, but we all knew we weren’t provisioned for a haul that long.
“There was a lot of scuttlebutt, especially with the Scattered Worlds representatives talking separation in the SolGov congress. Some were also worried that we were on an Outsystem trajectory to Alpha Centauri or Tau Ceti, though anyone who could look out a window at the stars could tell that we weren’t headed there. The captain and the XO weren’t talking but I figured we were on our way to the disk somewhere. I didn’t expect us to be going to the capital, but rather Eris or New Sedna.”
“Ballsy to go right for Makemake,” Tanis commented.
“It was. I still don’t know if that was the order or the captain was given some leeway. I don’t think she’d churn and burn on a capital world without being explicitly told to.
“Either way, we went dark at our apex and took several months to drop back down the solar plane. When we were approaching Makemake we were still going damn fast. The Midway did the burn and made for a pretty rude awakening.”
“I can imagine, I saw the vids of the Midway braking over Makemake, it was brighter than their little pseudo sun,” Tanis nodded.
“We ended up engaging the SW fleet and even did a few strafes of their capital before they capitulated and stopped their separatist movement. There weren’t a lot of casualties, but I felt pretty damn dirty shooting down pilots of a sovereign nation because they wanted to leave the union.”
“Wait a second—” Tanis double-checked a reference she remembered seeing once “—your mother was stationed on Makemake at the time!”
Joe nodded slowly. “She was—I didn’t know it, she’d transferred out there after the Midway left Ceres. I found out after all the dust had settled that one of the runs I had been on killed some of her colleagues and almost got her too.”
His voice caught and he looked down at the table, fiddling with the handle of his cup as he regained his composure.
Tanis reached across the table and took Joe’s hand. “I can’t imagine how that would have felt.”
He looked at her for a moment and then over her shoulder at some personal memory.
“Pretty shitty, I can tell you that much,�
� Joe replied. “I put in for colony the day after I found out she was there. Sol is just too messy. Everyone knows that SolGov is falling apart. The Jovians want to separate too—only the million TSF ships running around the system keep it from happening.”
Joe looked Tanis in the eyes. “You know it’s going to happen eventually. The system is going to have an all-out civil war. There are just too many people who are too balkanized. I don’t know if there should be one central government. Not when it sends sons to shoot at their mothers.”
Joe’s voice had risen and his eyes flashed with anger. Tanis laid a hand on his and nodded. “I know what you mean; I had a similar thought process. Why would I lay down my life to maintain a system that made monsters like Cardid and then threw me under the bus for killing them?”
“If a civil war had erupted I don’t even know which side I would have chosen,” Joe said. “Do you?”
“Gods above… I have no idea.” Tanis shook her head. “I guess I’d pick the one that was the least evil and would win the war the fastest. Honestly though? I’d rather be out here falling into a star than having to make that choice.”
“That’s for sure,” Joe agreed.
“I feel like it was easy for me,” Tanis said. “I have nothing in Sol, just a sister who I hadn’t spoken to long before Toro, let alone after. You, you have your mother and two brothers.”
Joe nodded slowly. “It was. My mom understood a lot more than I thought. She’s pretty old, closing in on five-hundred. She told me that I should find what makes me happy—she was also glad that I wasn’t going to stick with an outfit that had me strafing the city she was in,” Joe chuckled.
“My older brother is hundreds of years older than me; I barely know him and didn’t bother to tell him I was leaving. My younger brother took it pretty hard. He’s practically a sanctity activist and told me I was abandoning my people by leaving. He also had some choice words about me going off to help defile another system. He and I didn’t part ways on the best of terms.”
“I don’t get how people think taking lifeless worlds and terraforming them is defiling them,” Tanis said, shaking her head.
“No argument here,” Joe said. “This is a colony mission after all.”
In the three hours before the next hard burn, Tanis shared stories of her childhood on Mars and he of his youth on Vespa. He fell out of his chair laughing when she told her story of stealing a maglev train to impress a boy in college and he regaled her with stories of his flights in the TSF stunt squadron.
For a time they completely forgot the struggle that still lay ahead and the real danger that the Intrepid would never make it to its destination.
SUBTERFUGE
STELLAR DATE: 3241792 / 08.17.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: GSS Excelsior
REGION: LHS 1565, 27.1 AU from stellar primary
The figure slipped through the corridors of the Intrepid, its shimmersuit masking its presence from all sensors. Only the movement of air would give it away, but that would take a nano-cloud to detect and its own cloud showed that it was alone.
With the rewrite of the servitor code and its loss of the AI in node eleven it could not directly control enough systems to cause serious trouble, but it had learned that certain members of the command crew were uneasy with the ship’s secret cargo.
A less technological route would need to be employed to stop the Intrepid from continuing its trip to New Eden.
The first person on the list to visit was Hilda Orion; she had posted a few plans on the solution boards which suggested she was not happy about the direction the trip was taking.
The figure was not pleased either.
The threat of falling into LHS1565 was intended to force the crew to stop in the red dwarf’s star system, consume colony supplies and then divert to an inhabited system. It should have worked—would have worked if Joe hadn’t figured out a solution that allowed the Intrepid to keep on course to New Eden.
The figure considered that perhaps Joe should have been dispatched some time ago. He bolstered Tanis too much, made her hard to deal with.
Still, there were contingency plans and all it would take was a nudge here and a poke there and the crew would do exactly what was necessary.
Now that the ship was past the star, much of the crew was off-shift, getting some shut-eye before the Excelsior returned with its fuel rock.
Hilda was in her quarters and the figure stopped before her cabin’s door. A small swarm of nano slipped around the portal’s edges and reported that the woman inside was sleeping.
The figure may have lost its root access to core systems, but its public position on the Intrepid granted it enough access to open any cabin door. A few auth codes later and the door slid aside. The record would show that Hilda left for several minutes before re-entering her cabin.
No log would show the invisible figure visiting her in the night.
FISHING FOR ROCKS
STELLAR DATE: 3241791 / 08.17.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: GSS Excelsior
REGION: LHS 1565, 27.1 AU from stellar primary
Joe and Troy altered the vector, increasing burn to an uncomfortable 3.2g. As a result, when braking occurred it would be even higher at just under 5g. It was a bit of a gamble because calculations showed that if they couldn’t get enough mass knocked off Fuel Dump—the name Tanis had given their target—then there wouldn’t be enough antimatter left to rendezvous with the Intrepid on its new vector.
Over the next nineteen hours they slept, ate, watched scan, and sent a few messages back and forth to the Intrepid. A few of the colonists’ stasis pods had been disrupted by the gamma radiation and colonists were found wandering the stasis chambers, trying to figure out what was going on. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the flare hadn’t knocked out certain sections, cutting those portions of the stasis chambers off from communication.
The colonists were being treated for radiation poisoning and the engineers were working on getting the engines repaired to course correct once the lithium was extracted from Fuel Dump and brought onboard.
Bob was regaining control of the ship, though there were entire sections with nothing functioning other than the rogue machines that prowled the halls. Before the enemy AI had been destroyed, it left final commands for all of the equipment it had subverted. Ouri had teams working through the ship and hoped to have things under control soon. Not unexpectedly, Abby had begun registering formal complaints about damage to her ship.
Due in part to the heavy gravity, the tub became a favorite place to spend time, the buoyancy easing the high-g strain. Unfortunately the increased weight from the thrust made any more interesting activities impossible, or, at the very least, undesirably exhausting.
Tanis also found it difficult to sleep in the high gravity. Blankets felt untenably heavy and every pressure point on her body was aggravated from the weight. They took to sleeping in the acceleration couches on the bridge, shipsuits set to maximum cushioning. When the ship reversed and began breaking at 4.8g it only got worse. Both Joe and Tanis grew testy and had to take care not to snap at one another.
Finally their target came into view, a slightly oblong rock, a kilometer wide and slightly more than that in length. It spun slowly as it orbited its star, which at this distance was dimmer than many of the other stars in the stellar neighborhood.
“Damn, it’s got a little moon,” Joe said as he pointed at a small hundred meter companion.
“We’ll have to blow that away, won’t we?”
“I believe so,” Joe said. “Then we have to use our thumpers to knock that dust off. We’ll have to do the first one on the northeastern side then send a booster over to push it away and ensure the dust doesn’t settle, or form another moon. Then we do the other when it’s at the right point in its rotation. Boost some more then use the grapple.”
“How do you propose we take out the moon?”
Joe examined the display. “Troy and I agree. Use som
e of the smaller explosive projectiles on it every time it is moving directly away from us. That’ll accelerate it and cause it to break away.”
“Ok, I’ll take care of that.”
Joe prepared the thumpers and programmed in the precise co-ordinates, getting them checked and triple checked by Troy and Angela. Tanis played target practice with the moon and in three orbits had it increasing its speed and pulling away from Fuel Dump. Two more orbits and the hundred meter lump of aggregate went spinning off into space.
“Little moon all gone,” Tanis reported.
“Good, I’m launching the first thumper now. Check Troy’s calculations on the booster so that we can launch it as soon as the thumper does its thing.”
Tanis ran through the math, checking distances, rotations, impact velocities and gave second confirmation on the numbers. Angela rang in with a triple check moments later.
Tanis was surprised.
Angela didn’t deign to reply.
“First thumper away.” Joe manually flipped the release switch and then the holo counterpart.
They watched as the thumper launched from the Excelsior, a slight shudder running through the ship as the thrusters compensated for the motion. The thumper flew across the intervening distance and split into twenty-eight separate pieces before diving into the dust and aggregate on the northeast face of Fuel Dump.
They waited a breathless moment, and then the kilometer long rock appeared to jerk violently, a massive plume of dust and debris spraying out of the thumpers’ insertion point. Fuel Dump’s rotation began to wobble and the booster launched from the Excelsior, moving on the carefully planned route, which allowed it to avoid the wobble and dust.