by Bobby Adair
My feet find dirt, and I switch to auto grav and start to run.
Brice touches down ahead of me, and I point to a ravine between two ragged ridges of stone.
“Catch me if you can!” he shouts as he finds his feet, switches to auto grav, and sprints.
The asteroid rumbles as part of the cruiser impacts on the other side. The ground beneath us shifts suddenly to the left and both Brice and I tumble down.
He’s quicker to recover, and he’s moving again.
I’m crawling and pushing with my grav and running as the star field above us races across the sky. Grav around us fluctuates wildly and the stone below us shakes like it’s going to disintegrate.
Brice finds his way into the fissure first and turns to see me tumble over on top of him. We bounce off each other, and off the stone walls, as our mutual defensive grav fights with the asteroid’s ambient field and wild fields flaring through everything around us.
I’m on my back, lying on jagged rock when I stop moving. Looking up, seeing the tiny sparkle of our sun slide across the sky, I know the asteroid is spinning. That thought barely has a moment to gel when the Trog cruiser’s grav array fills the sky above and crashes into the rocks protecting us.
Chapter 38
I’m the first to poke my head through the gap of twisted steel and shredded hull composite, and notice the sky above is still moving. “I’m through.”
Brice sighs his relief.
We’ve been working our way through the wreckage trapping us in the shallow canyon for nearly two hours.
“That was a hell of an impact,” I tell Brice. “The asteroid is spinning pretty quickly.”
“Can you make it all the way out?”
“I think.” I wriggle myself through the hole, careful not to move too fast or push too hard. Plenty of sharp edges around me could tear a fatal hole in my thin orange sanctuary. If I get too anxious for freedom, it could be my death.
“I’ll admit it,” says Brice. “I wasn’t a believer.” He’s talking about our plan to use Tarlow’s TX to destroy the Trog cruiser.
I laugh. “Me neither. I was just placing a bet.”
“Same here,” Brice laughs, too.
Plenty of new metal meteors are in the sky racing away from us, remnants of the star-faring leviathan we killed.
I pull my legs up, turn, and sit on the edge of the hole. “I’m out.”
I can’t help but notice Jupiter’s ragged stripes of rust and gray coming up over the horizon, engulfing our eastern sky. Pulling my boots free, I turn to reach a hand in to help Brice.
“Jesus,” he says, as he pokes his head through the hole. “That’s a sight.” Then he grins because we’re out of immediate danger. “I can’t believe that worked.”
I’ve had a lot of time to think about it while we were exploring the wreckage to find a way through. “Those ships are built for a specific kind of warfare, big ship-to-ship engagements. It’s the kind of fight they expect to be in. The unofficial rules of their warfare. Doing things the way they’ve always done.” I look down at Brice. “They’re going to be rethinking a lot of that now that we’ve destroyed five.”
“That worries me.” Brice settles in for a moment, resting in the hole, the urgency gone now that he can see the sky. “We’re winning because we keep surprising them. What happens when we run out of surprises?”
I laugh.
“What?”
“We’re humans,” I tell him. “We’ve been killing each other since the dawn of time, and coming up with new ways to do it at every turn. We’ll never run out of fresh ideas. It’s the genius of our species.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Damn right, I’m right.” I grin.
Brice laughs.
“The Grays and the Trogs and any other imperial dipshits in this galaxy better figure it out because they’re dealing with humans now. We might not have the tech, but we have an irrepressible hankering to slaughter.”
I guess, tired of my pontifications on warfare, Brice heaves himself out of the hole and looks up to see Jupiter reach its zenith, high-noon, filling half the sky above.
I realize, we can’t be in the asteroid belt. In fact, the Potato never was. We’re way too close to Jupiter.
I stand and straighten up to look around. “I’ll bet we make a full day in ten minutes. Maybe forty-five.”
“A day.” Brice laughs as he sits on the edge of the hole with his feet dangling inside. “It’s weird to think of it that way. A day is twenty-four hours on earth’s rotation.” He watches Jupiter barrel across our sky. “We’re moving, too, right?”
He’s right. We’re not only spinning, but flying through space.
Brice scans the sky.
“You can’t see it until the sun comes up.”
“The Potato?” He asks.
“That’s what you were looking for, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Give it a minute.”
“Are we pretty far?”
I nod.
“Really far?” he asks.
I nod again. “I saw it when I was still in the hole and first spotted the sky. It was a smudgy brown spot up above us then.”
“Shit,” he says. “A big, brown spot?” He’s hopeful for the word, ‘big.’
I shake my head, straighten my arm, and hold a finger against the sky. “The size of a penny maybe. A dime.”
“How far do you reckon the asteroid is?”
I’m scrutinizing the tip of my finger. “Maybe it wasn’t that big.”
“You’re not making me feel better.”
I turn to look at him as Jupiter slides toward our horizon. “Is that what you wanted, me to make you feel better? Despite your off-color humor, I had you pegged for a no-bullshit kinda dude.”
He sighs. “Sometimes the burden of the straight scoop wears me down. Maybe a little sugar-coating now and again wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
“I think they’re sending a grav lift out to pick us up right now.” I grin.
Brice grimaces. “Too much sugar.”
“I know.”
“What do you propose?”
I take a moment to examine my d-pad, looking for info on how much H I might still have in the tank. As usual. It tells me just about nothing.
“Looking to see if anyone is in comm range?” Brice looks at his d-pad.
“H,” I tell him. “My suit burns it like it has a leak or something.”
“It’s these micro-reactors,” Brice tells me. “The smaller they are, the less efficient.”
“How are you set?” I reach around to my back and tap mine as if that’s going to give me any information.
“That’s pointless,” Brice tells me.
“I know. My indicator doesn’t work.”
“There’s a warning light built into your helmet display.”
“The light doesn’t do anything until I run completely out.”
“That’s not very convenient.”
I reach down and check for the spare canister on my leg, only to realize I never obtained a spare after the last one ran dry. “That mining hut. The one Lenox said had all the spare canisters in it. We need to find it.”
“This asteroid isn’t that big.” Brice looks back and forth across the rough landscape, then points. “They were drilling those cores down through the centerline. If we follow the line of holes, we’ll come to that shack.”
Brice is already out of our gopher hole and walking across the broken section of cruiser hull. He’s not one to dick around once he makes up his mind. I follow, letting my suit’s auto grav keep my feet oriented toward the asteroid’s center of mass.
“So we stock up on H and cal packs,” he says, “then what?”
Calories. I forgot about those. I can’t remember the last time I ate something. I take a sip through my calorie tube, and nothing comes out. “Crap. I think my cal pack is dry, too.”
“Should be plenty of both in that shack.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah.”
We make our way slowly down to the surface, and I wonder as I plant my feet on the ground why we didn’t just hop off and float down.
Jupiter is just starting to slip below the horizon when I say, “I think if we put on fresh H packs, we each load on a spare, and then grab a few more,” I tap a few of the empty magnet mounts on my belt, “We should be able to fly back to the Potato on suit grav alone. I don’t know. It can’t be more than a few thousand miles.”
Brice climbs over a tumble of rough stone and starts down the other side. “Back when I was working construction, there was this story about a guy whose lift went haywire or something. He’d just dropped his load on one of the rings.” He’s talking about the giant, ring-shaped station the crews were working to construct for the Grays. “This was back before my time, so who knows how much is true. You know how stories go over time. They get better.”
I agree.
“They said the ring was already spinning then.” Brice focuses forward as he talks. “Nobody’s sure what happened to cause the accident. Maybe he didn’t account for the spin. Maybe he was a new guy making new-guy mistakes. Long story short, the ring’s billion tons of mass collides with his lift and mashes something in his grav accelerator mechanism. His ship shoots out of there like he’s just floored it. I mean he took off faster than anybody had ever seen one of those lifts move.”
“Yeah?” I make it over the tumble of stones and follow Brice as he seems to have a good bead on where we’re headed.
“In no time, the grav lift shoots out of the orbital plain and disappears from view. Everybody figures the guy died in the collision.”
I make the brilliant deduction the story has a kicker, so I keep my mouth quiet and wait for Brice to surprise me with it. I’m polite that way.
“What they learned later was this guy was knocked unconscious by the collision. He wakes up seven or eight hours into his flight. His ship is still accelerating away from earth, and he has no way to slow it down. So his choice is to sit there and wait to die, or do something.”
That’s my prompt. “What did he do?”
“He jumped out of the ship.”
“He used suit grav to get himself back?” I ask.
“Yeah,” answers Brice. “That’s it exactly. Only he was smart enough to know he couldn’t do a max grav burn or he’d use up all of his H and then suffocate. So he did a slow burn—a real slow burn—just enough to reverse his speed. Because he was in the ship, he was already moving away from the earth at twenty or thirty thousand miles an hour. He had to burn through all of that negative speed, get up a little forward speed, and then kill it. Then he had to hope he was going fast enough to make it back to earth before he ran out of H to sustain the suit. Go too fast, you burn too much H on acceleration. Go too slow, and you burn all your H on life support during the long trip back. He prayed he made the right guess on how long and how hard to burn. All he had then was hope.”
“I take it the d-pads weren’t sophisticated enough back in those days to make the calculations for him.”
Brice shrugs. “Same d-pads we have now. Probably an older version of the software. It didn’t matter. Half the time, his was on the fritz. He had to eyeball the whole thing. Course, acceleration, everything. Then he had to rest calmly in his suit using minimum energy so he could max his time to stay alive.”
“I take it there’s a happy ending.”
“No.” Brice shakes his head like that much was obvious from the start. “He died and froze to death on the way. Solid chunk of ice when they intercepted his body floating in earth orbit one day.”
“How long was he out there?” I ask.
“Nearly two months before they found him,” says Brice. “He recorded a diary on the d-pad. One of the only features still working. That’s how they knew what happened to him.”
“Why did you tell me this story?”
“Because if you’re thinking, we’re going to suit grav back to the Potato, I don’t want to end up like a popsicle. Let’s take plenty of H and plenty of C. Like all we can haul with us.”
“Sounds like good advice.”
Chapter 39
We arrive at the shack, the remains of it, anyway. It’s been smashed. A gouge a hundred meters long runs across the ground and through its remains. Half the shack is just gone, ripped away, and who the hell knows where any of it is? The half still on the ground is crumpled flat.
Equipment that had been inside is broken and scattered, some on the surface, some floating. Other pieces drift slowly into space.
Brice, not fazed by the destruction, drops to his knees, and starts rifling through the debris. “Let’s hope the Potato didn’t take it this bad.” He glances up at me with a silent request to affirm or rebut his hope for our soldiers back there.
I’m at a loss. If thoughts of the Potato’s destruction have been bubbling through Brice’s gray matter during our hike around this little rock, he’s way ahead of me. I was too focused on our problems to think of them. Now, newbie to this set of fears, that they all might be dead, that the station might be destroyed, that the smudge of brownish-gray I saw in the distance might have suffered its own collision and might be careening so fast away from us we’ll never catch it…
Oh, fuck it!
Any combination of a thousand terrible outcomes might have befallen bitchy Blair and the soldiers we left at the mining colony, and I don’t know what to feel about any of that.
“You gonna help me?” Brice asks. “Or watch?”
“Watching is good.”
“Yes, Major.” Brice tugs at a sheet of metal once part of a flimsy wall.
I step over to help while I piece my composure together with the glue of our desperate situation. By all rights, we shouldn’t have lived this long, and we shouldn’t have any long-term aspirations in the realm of continued existence. Death is sure to wrap its bony fingers around our necks soon.
“Just kidding, man.” I bend over and grab the piece of metal Brice is tugging at. Our combined strength is enough to yank it free.
Brice crawls inside the wreckage, and I heave the sheet of metal into space, sending it into orbit around the asteroid. When I turn back toward Brice, he’s working through the jumbled mess, busy and quick, thankfully not desperate.
“H packs?” I ask, still working through my sudden dance with distress. “Any luck?”
“Looking.” He shoves junked equipment and digs through the smaller pieces, creating a cloud of metal and other materials—all sizes, all weights.
I scan the area, looking for cartridges. Could they have all been blown off into space? I look across our rugged, curving landscape. I look in the sky. How far away could those little white bottles go and still be visible? Would a hundred meters be too far? Two hundred? And what about our rotation and translational velocity?
Deep breath.
I’m not prone to panic, yet I feel like I slipped on some kind of mental banana and I’m having trouble finding my feet.
“Jackpot!” Brice could have said ‘hemorrhoid,’ and if he’d said it with that much excitement, the syllables wouldn’t have mattered. His tone told me what I needed so desperately to hear. He’s found H.
“A lot of them?”
“A collapsed cabinet.” He’s up on his feet, legs bent, straining to drag something free. “A wire cage thing.” He gasps with the effort. “Fifty, sixty bottles in here.”
“H?” I ask, “Or C?”
“Both, looks like.”
I’m beside him in a heartbeat, helping pull the deformed wire box free, looking at it with a love only someone who has starved or thirsted can understand.
“Looks like Trog stuff.”
“H is H,” I tell him. “Hydrogen has the same recipe everywhere.”
Brice doesn’t laugh.
I thought it was funny.
“Trog cal packs.” Brice isn’t happy about that. He steps backward, dragging the metal cage free.
“Can we use
their cal packs?” I ask, concerned maybe their food might be poisonous to humans.
“Can.” Brice straightens up and admires his work. “Tastes like grapefruit rind purée. Disgusting stuff. It’ll keep you alive, though.”
“Wonderful.”
“And once you plug one into your suit,” Brice grimaces, “that shit stays in your system and makes all your cal packs taste like shit for two or three months. The only way to get it out is to have the techs do an overhaul.”
“I take it you’ve had it before.”
Brice nods. “Back on Ceres. At the end, we were scavenging them off dead Trogs.” Brice drops to his knees, then bends the cage’s doorframe to open it up.
“You’ve had some experiences out here, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I suppose.”
I sit down on a hunk of stone and stare up at Jupiter rising again over the asteroid’s horizon. “When you came up, is any of this what you expected? I mean, I’ve seen some crazy shit, and it’s only been a few days for me. I can’t start to guess all you’ve been through.”
Brice laughs with the giddiness of a man who just earned a long extension on life. “I gotta be honest, things are more interesting since you arrived.”
“You mean space was just another boring version of earth?”
“No, nothing like that.” Brice seats himself cross-legged beside his prize. “If you think these past few days are par for the course, they aren’t. I think guys with lives this interesting don’t tend to live long enough to tell their friends about it.”
Still staring at Jupiter’s red spot with fascination, I ask, “You were in construction at first, right? Why’d you come up? You had to know back then that life expectancy was short for construction workers up here.”
“I did,” says Brice as he pulls an H pack out of the crunched cabinet. He shakes it and listens, definitely a habit left over from his life back on earth. There’s no way he can hear the liquid hydrogen splashing inside the bottle. That’s when I get it. He can feel the hydrogen moving inside. He tosses the H to me.
I press a small button along the top edge of the bottle, and a band of green lights flashes bright to tell me it’s full. That’s a relief. I wrap the bottle in the Velcro straps on my right thigh and breathe a well-deserved sigh.