by Victor Koman
Baker looked at closeups of the fighters. Both he and Powell floated near one end of the cylinder, the commander securely attached to Fadeaway’s hotseat. Baker hung behind him, observing. Powell punched a couple of buttons that had turned red.
“This is no moonwalk-it’s the Infernal’s final assault. They plan to kill everyone on board. That’s fourteen hundred and twelve men, eighty-six women, thirty-two kids.”
“No reason for them to.”
Powell rubbed the bridge of his nose and snorted. “No reason for them not to. No witnesses in near orbit. They blew out our comm lasers when they arrived. And they probably want to test their new weaponry. Ever hear of the Earthside town Guernica? Or Baghdad?”
Baker shook his head. “What are they testing it for? Earth is crippled and practically dead.”
Powell shrugged, shouted a terse command into his head-set, then sighed. “You weren’t here during the War. The hatred runs insanely deep, and it’s not been softened by the years. Any war of secession creates long-lasting anger.” He gazed at the advancing warship. “There are still some Southerners that resent losing the Civil War. There are still some Americans that hate the British for the actions of King George the Third.”
“Who?”
Powell made a tired half-chuckle. “Old soldiers have little to do but read about old wars.” He slapped an array of switches from orange to red. “The ones that try to fight the old wars, though, they become dead soldiers.”
“Ten seconds, sir.”
Powell’s gaze turned toward the man who spoke, then glanced at the ship’s clock.
“Battle station red.” At his command, sirens whooped, scrims switched images, men exchanged positions. “Latest ETA for destroyer is thirty-two minutes. Prepare to repel boarders.”
“No fighter ships of your own?”
“This place didn’t have any, we couldn’t build any. We’ll have to wait until they come onboard.”
“My lifeboat has a meteor laser. I could try to pick a couple-”
“You stay here. Like it or not, you’re our insurance policy. We need your help in this, so consider yourself a hostage.” Powell turned to face Baker. “They won’t kill us until they have you. Perhaps we can take a few of them with us.”
Baker silently watched the scrims while the minutes fell away, marked only by the calm voice of an ensign noting its passage. The Valli fighters surrounding the sphere did nothing. “Ten minutes. Destroyer within attack radius.”
“Final weapons check.”
Baker asked, “What weapons?”
Without breaking his concentration on the master computer, Powell replied, “Laser rifles, gloves, even a few automatic pistols and old machine guns. Ever try to correct for Coriolis while firing inside a Bernal? Good fun.”
“This is a suicide fight.”
Powell kept his gaze on the scrims. “Don’t you think my men know that?”
“I’m the reason they’re going to die.” Baker pushed away from the command seat. “You could have spaced me and told them I wasn’t here-”
“They’d have looked for you anyway. We were doomed the moment you appeared on radar.”
“You should have blasted me then.”
“You’re probably right. We’re in for it now, though, so we fight.”
“Eight minutes. We have visual.” A telescopic view of the destroyer appeared on several scrims. Its nuclear engines no longer glowed blue-white and its shape could clearly be seen. It rotated about into attack position, an off-white armored slab a hundred meters wide and two hundred long. A battery of lasers and missile launchers crested its fore end, clustered like a giant child’s overflowing carton of lethal toys. The bottom third of the destroyer bulged elliptically to hold its nuclear fuel.
“Go to internal oxygen,” a disembodied voice commanded.
“How about us?” Baker asked, watching a scrim of men and women in pressure suits busily adjusting their air flows.
“We’re airlocked,” Powell replied simply. “If the integrity here fails, we’ve lost anyway.”
“I’m not dying here.” Baker floated in front of Powell. One arm reached out and pulled him back into place.
“Relax-you’re as safe here as anywhere. If not”-Powell punched a few buttons and pointed-“There-on the center right scrim. Your lifeboat. In three minutes you can be in there and ready to transfer out, if you have any idea where Circus is.
First, though-” He punched another button and threw a series of switches. A bank of lights glowed green around him.
“This is Commander Norman Powell of Fadeaway acknowledging receipt of your request. Virgil Grissom Kinney sits behind me. We are prepared to repel your attack. We-”
Something thundered throughout the habitat. Even ComStat vibrated.
“Simultaneous Valli bombardment from all sides,” a voice called out. “Zero integrity on sphere. Atmosphere draining.” Other voices joined in.
“Twenty millimeters pressure. Fifteen.”
“Four minutes.”
“Ten millimeters. Five.”
“Twenty-four blast holes each eight to ten meters-”
A dozen light arrays simultaneously blazed red.
“Zero pressure in main sphere.”
“How many men lost?”
“Look!” a shocked old voice cried. “They’re fighting outside!” Scrims lit up with the view of troops, sucked out through the blast holes by the voiding atmosphere, still ready for battle. Half of them were dead; the survivors-flung into space toward doom-unleashed their fire against the Valli fighters and the approaching destroyer.
“It’s pointless! They can’t harm anything from there.”
“ ‘The brave may fall, but never yield,’ Jord.” Powell opened the hatch to the airlock. “Now you know why I kept you up here. They wouldn’t blast ComStat knowing you’d probably be inside. They’ll have to board and storm to capture you.” He scanned an array of scrims. “Now. Get to your boat. There’s a suit in the lock.”
“It’ll take me too long to-”
“We’ll hold them off. Get out now!”
Baker kicked down the tubeway into the lock and slammed the hatch. He removed his jet pack, slipped on the bulky suit as fast as possible and cycled the atmosphere. From the safety box he seized a fuel bottle.
“Boarding ships launched from destroyer.”
“How many men left?” Powell’s voice asked, sharp and calm on Baker’s headset.
“Telemetry received on seven hundred fifty-three still inside, sir.”
Baker tightened the jet harness and kicked out toward the shuttle bay. He fired up the engine and tried not to look anywhere but along his direction of flight.
“Deploy them evenly around the blast holes,” Powell said, “until we’re sure which ones the ships will use.”
Baker ignored the ensuing spate of orders and troop movements. He glanced down just once to see ant-people running up to black, pool-sized holes inside the sphere, above and below him. Buildings had been toppled, plants uprooted. Debris lay spiraled toward the holes as if toward a drain, turned clockwise on one side of the equator, counter-clockwise on the other, looser twists in the higher latitudes, tighter ones in the middle.
Baker rocketed along the axis toward the docking bay.
“Reroute companies Bravo, Echo, and Oscar to hole one-thirty west, forty north. The first ship’s rammed us there.”
Baker looked around. Above and behind him, he saw the blunt nose of a boarding craft jammed into the blast hole. Laser fire from the craft attempted to clear the area, but there were too many places for the defenders to hide. Suddenly, hatches sprung open and armed troops swarmed outward. Brilliant points of light flared against their armor. Some fell. The others walked over them, firing indiscriminate laser fusillades.
From behind a broken tree, a sphere of blue gunsmoke blew outward and an invader several meters away flew backward against the ship’s hull as though hit by a meteor. His pressure suit explode
d, boiling his lifeblood into the airless void.
Baker turned away from the upside-down scene in time to see the south pole of the sphere speeding toward him. He reversed and cut his engines just before reaching the hatch-way. A woman motioned to him, pointing toward a corridor; then she turned to join the fighting as soon as he had safely passed.
Hand-over-hand he pulled along the weightless passage. He felt the rumble of a another boarding craft ramming into Fadeaway.
What now? He turned the corner of the access shaft to the docking bay and continued along. I have to die again to get away from death? Is fake or real better? And where to? Circus is gone somewhere-
Yanking his way into the docking bay, he sealed the pressure doors with one hand and muscled toward the shuttle.
They’d see the ship if I move it out of the docking bay. The shuttle’s doors responded to his touch. I’ve got to transfer from inside.
Something reverberated throughout the bay. The airlock bulkhead bent inward as if hit by a battering ram. He cycled the pressurizer and removed his helmet.
“Can you take verbal commands?” he shouted to the boat’s computer. Lights turned green. The word YES appeared on a viewscrim. Strapping in, he spoke a series of carefully worded orders, all the time watching the docking bay doors; a bright point of light appeared at one corner and began to trace an outline.
“Do you understand these orders?”
YES.
Baker poised his finger over the transfer button.
“Come on. What are you waiting for?” They’re cutting the hatchway open. Come on.
Baker bit his lip and watched the outer doors slowly bend inward under the light thrust of a boarding craft. The steel plating easily gave way until part of it touched the nose of Baker’s shuttle, pitching it forward. Through the opening hatch of the boarding craft, he saw masks hiding behind the muzzles of laser rifles.
“Come on!” he cried.
WORKING.
“Damn you!” Baker reached the screeching stage as he watched the first few troops float out of the blunted nose of the other ship and cautiously propel toward him, weapons zeroed in on the cockpit. “You goddamned machine! It can’t take that long to figure out. It’s not that hard!” He jerked backward in his seat when the first of the boarding party touched the hood of the shuttle. No. They’ll pick me apart trying to find out why Kinney can survive.
The light under the transfer button glowed. Baker shrieked “Go!” and punched his thumb into it.
Darkness consumed him.
Black, swimming black. I should have stayed. I lay here so limp and unsafe. What if I don’t come back this time? I look scared. The doors! They’re bending in on me. I press beyond them into the shaft so dark and cold. I’m falling and I don’t want to fall. I’ve got to stop falling, got to stop. I’m needed. I’ve got to be needed somewhere-I know it. She’s telling me. Something needs help.
Baker took a heartbeat to realize where he was. His hands shot out for the ship’s controls and frantically punched buttons.
Directly ahead of him, a crater filled his viewing port.
Instead of falling toward it, though, the shuttle rose up and away from the planet’s surface.
The crater shrank. In a few moments, Baker saw the airless limb of the planet Mercury and beyond it the milky glow of the solar corona. The port turned nearly opaque the instant the sun blazed across the glasteel. He looked away by reflex.
I made it! He checked his instrument readouts and smiled. Intrinsic velocity retained. I’m rising into an orbit to accommodate my Earth orbital speed; I’ll be drifting beneath the halo of flak as safely as can be expected. At least it couldn’t hang too close to the surface without becoming meteorites.
“Begin search for Circus Galacticus and stand watch for other spacecraft.” Leaning back in the seat as best he could in freefall, he smiled wider.
The shuttle did not carry enough fuel to make it from the outer region of Mercury’s flak barrier to the inner orbits if he had transferred there. The flak could not reach to the surface, he suspected, and all he had to do was appear on the anti-revolutionward side of Mercury and let his Earth velocity take him away from the surface.
Something tapped at the ship’s hull once. Baker smiled after it happened again a few moments later. There it is. I was right about the flak. Starting to encounter it.
Baker stopped in the middle of his thoughts and froze.
What flak?
Another piece of debris hit the shuttle.
Where did I hear about flak? Why should I even have suspected…
He began to shake. Think, idiot. Where? The planet’s are at superior conjunction. No direct observation possible. But Circus transferred to sixty degrees above the ecliptic to- But I didn’t know that.
He swallowed with great difficulty. The back of his throat scraped like leather against brick.
That’s not my memory. It didn’t happen to me. I didn’t find it out. Someone else. Kinney!
He switched on a scrim to stare himself in the face.
“Who are you? Which mind is yours?” The face in the scrim mimicked his movements but did not answer. It stared back at him with equal fear and incomprehension.
“Who, God damn you? Who?”
❂
When Circus Galacticus rose slowly over Mercury’s horizon, Baker plotted a rendezvous course without surprise. His days-old beard scraped at the collar of his pressure suit. His bristly scalp itched.
Why did I even think of Mercury? Even suspect that Circus’d be here? Dee is here, frozen somewhere below. Kinney must know it. That’s why he brought-
He brought me… here. His body, his brain, he’s running it all and I’m just a passenger who gets to drive once in a while along the same road.
Now I can’t be sure. Can’t think anything I do isn’t controlled by him. I’m not even here really. Just a few milliliters of-juice-that got realigned into someone else’s circuitry, a nothing man, a nowhere man, a never man with a never mind.
“What is your name?” Circus’s computer radioed.
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. I don’t. No.” He grabbed at his head, then reached down for the attitude controls. “Jord. I am Jord Baker.” I am Jord Baker. All inside it’s like Jord. I die the way Jord dies. I’m here-
“Prepare to dock,” the computer said, opening the docking bay doors on its side. Baker’s hands deftly maneuvered the shuttle toward the glowing square on the dark side of the spacecraft. He hardly noticed his piloting.
I’m here and thinking and acting. I can tighten this thigh muscle, blink that eye, grind my teeth. I’m on the circuitry. If I could somehow deprogram. Deprogram. Dee. Program.
Pogrom. Pour grumbling, crumbling Kinney out of his own body. She’ll do it. Do it double-time. Triple Trine.
His hands tightened on the controls. “Ready to dock…” Looking for the first time at what he had been seeing, he realized that he had already docked the shuttle. Behind him, the outer doors slid shut and air cycled in.
Unstrapping with one swift motion, Baker kicked out of the chair, pounded a hand against the emergency hatch release and sailed into the docking bay.
“Begin immediate search for the cryonic preservation unit on the surface.” He had to shout over the hiss of air still filling the bay. His ears rang. Grabbing hold of a handrail, he yanked toward the hatch.
“Searching,” the computer replied. “Have you not noticed the large object to your left?”
Baker turned and started. A spacecraft nearly double the size of the shuttle lay fast to the repair section. Baker had indeed not noticed it.
“Sure. That’s the ship you disabled at flameout. How’d you get it?” He floated over to it. The arcing slash of a laser beam had left a deep, uneven valley in the ship’s flattened-cone hull from its blunt nose to topside aft.
“I transferred out ahead of it when Fadeaway came under attack. I matched velocities and picked it up, then transferred to
the outer region of Mercury’s flak barrier and moved slowly into a low orbit. Your method of arrival was much more elegant.”
“Have you found it yet? Delia’s redoubt?”
“No. Not yet. Please-examine the fighter.”
Baker pulled topside to check out the cockpit.
“As you’ll notice, all controls were severed by the laser, but the cockpit remained intact.”
“There’s a body in there!”
“The pilot. You will also note that the ship possesses no radio or maser equipment or, in fact, any ship-to-ship or ship-to-base communications of-”
“Why didn’t you remove the body?”
“I was waiting for you to take a look at it along with me.”
“Forget it.” He slid away from the viewing port.
“Jord,” the computer said in the softest voice it could synthesize. “The pilot is dead.”
“You need a billion miles of neurons to figure that out?”
“He was dead while piloting the fighter. He has been dead for weeks.”
Baker felt around the collar of his pressure suit for a water spigot and found none. He tried to swallow.
“Let me change.” He slipped out of the bulky pressure suit and into one of Circus’s skintights. He donned the headset with its vidlink to the computer and pushed off toward the fighter cockpit.
“Straight,” he said around the mouthpiece. “When we’re done, open the bay to space and I’ll stay here until I’m certain that any contamination on me is dead.”
He found no entrance hatch. After half an hour of thorough searching, he said, “Not even through the viewports-they’re sealed tight. Did they nail him inside here for good?”
“As I suspected-he was dead from the day he was put into the ship.”
“Yeah? Put in by whom?”
“I had a robot bring some tools down. Use the cutting torch to open the top viewport. You can squeeze in through there.”
“Have you found it yet?” Baker asked, halfway through cutting the glasteel with an ultraviolet laser.