by Mierau,John
Then he clapped his hands together, hard and loud. “Daisy, load up all the data we’ve collected. Display it on my console. You know the kind of lists I want it broken into.”
“Yes, Captain,” the disembodied voice said, even as the smaller holos floating above the console at his chair winked to life. Ben backed away as small squares of white with black text, pictures and diagrams multiplied in the air. “Can we tight-beam data to both Ery and Martel?”
He began by duplicating all the data, then started picking and choosing what to leave out of one of the piles.
“Yes, Captain. Both network have satellites in range.”
Gruber stopped behind him, watching him deleting files from the smaller second pile. “You baiting hooks, Sam?”
“Hell yes,” Travis muttered. “We live through the day, and we will literally be sitting on a gold mine.”
Sam looked over his shoulder after a few moment’s of loud silence from his engineer.
“Look ,I’m not hurting them and I”m not selling them out. They don’t know how things work here, and we don’t really have time for an economics lesson!”
Gruber’s silence stretched. “You sure you want to send that now? Why don’t we wait and—“
“Ben, it’s my job to keep all of you alive and well. And if I can, I’ll keep them alive too, and away from the Guard, but to do that I’m gonna need resources. Pretty damn fast.”
Gruber chewed his lip. “Yeah. Lot of mouths to feed over there.”
The room shrieked around them. Gruber ran around the circular track surrounding the central holo pit and waved the next chair’s console to life.
He swore when he saw what had frozen Sam in his place.
“Sensors register nine high-velocity launches from the incoming craft!” Daisy droned. “I am detecting sequenced explosions in the wake of each object.”
Gruber and Sam looked at each other, white faced.
“Boomers,” Gruber whisper.
“How long?” Sam asked weakly.
“They coming at us or the tram?” Ben cried over his captain.
Daisy took only a moment. “There is 97% probability that six to eight of the craft will approach the larger mass of The Betty and Haskam Heliocentric Lab Six. Two are likely targeting the tram.“
“How long now?” Travis made himself ask again.
“If these crews are as willing to die as their counterparts in the dragon war-“
“How long, Daisy!” Gruber roared.
“Utilizing pulsed atomic explosions to multiply both approach and deceleration, craft could arrive in eighty-four minutes.”
“Jesus, Mary, mother of Joseph,” Gruber whispered hoarsely, his body wooden. He leaned heavily on the side of Sam’s chair. “They know we can get away before their main ship arrives. They’ll do whatever it takes to keep us here.”
Sam nodded. “And when they reach us, they kill us.” He swallowed twice before he could speak again. “We’ve got to tell Montagne.”
39
"Don't know why you let us out of that tin can, just to stuff us back in," Doc Sanders growled. The large man handed a square plastic box to a nurse, who turned and escorted two crewmen, both with metal emergency casts on arms, out the door on their way back to Cellar One.
Sanders scratched at his short gray and black hair as he floated in a circle halfway between where Arnel Villanueva stood and the door. All that were left in the med section were himself, Sanders and Taggart, Pruett -floating just outside the door- and Burkov, in another bed further down, waiting to be seen by the doctor.
Arnel Villanueva reached inside his spacesuit and scratched where the collar ring sat on his shoulder blade, watching the older black man stare blankly as he hovered there. Doctor Forrest Sanders sometimes seemed unfocused, almost doddering, but Arnel knew better. He had a long history working in space, and was credited with the creation of several life-saving zero-g procedures. Sanders was almost unflappable, and never doddering.
Sure enough, moment later he pushed off the wall by the bed where Taggart lay, loosely strapped down for testing, and nimbly grabbed onto handholds at a wall full of small doors and dispensers.
"You know why as well as I do, Forrest," Arnel said, craning his neck to check on Burkov, where the man sat at another bed. He had one leg stuck under a strap and a screen on a swing arm pulled close and lighting his manic face.
Burkov was on the line with Cellar Two. Arnel guessed the nervous wreck was checking in with Chairman Goss, catching up the closest thing to a ruler Haskam Corporation had on the events of the very eventful past day.
Burkov was whispering harshly. His eyes flicked over to Arnel, then quickly away. The man leaned in closer to the monitor.
Arnel turned back to Sanders. "The cellars are reinforced against radiation, structural damage, and have enough water and supplies to last for days in the event of an emergency. I think docking with another ship at a faster speed than has ever been attempted, then holding on while that ship uses our reactors to travel even faster, counts as an emergency."
Doc Sanders snorted. "I'm sure that makes the folks in Cellar Two feel better." He grabbed tools of his trade and returned to Taggart's bedside, flicking a bright light between the security officer's eyes. Taggart jerked away in surprise and the doctor slapped a hand to his forehead to hold the eyes open.
"Settle down," he grumbled.
Arnel closed his eyes and took a breath. The doctor wasn't sniping at either of them, he knew, he and Taggart were just the closest suitable target.
Sanders shoved the eye scope back in a pocket and felt around Taggart's head and neck. "No obvious contusions." He met Taggart's eyes. "So what number am I thinking of, Kreskin?"
Arnel could see Taggart's jaw clench from meters away. The man said nothing.
"I understand your frustrations, Doctor," Arnel said. "All of us would like us to have more control." Or any margin of error for what's coming, he thought. "But we don't, so we do what we can do, which is--"
"Get back in the sardine can," the doctor said. He patted Taggart on the head. "You seem fine on the outside."
"Gee, thanks, Doc," Taggart said.
Sardine can was an apt description, Arnel silently. The crew trapped inside Cellar Two had expected the radiation storm HHL-6 had been flying through at the beginning of this odyssey. They had not expected to cross through an unmapped cloud of micrometeorites, which had squeezed the frame around their airlock and left them trapped inside while the world around them went through the meat grinder.
All the same, Arnel thought something else might be responsible for the doctor's anger.
"Dina's in constant contact," he said quietly. "Her vitals are stable, she's reached her destination and has enough fuel to match our orbit and-"
"-and try to grab hold as we scream by?" Sanders shouted.
Arnel said nothing. Nor did Taggart. Burkov didn't appear to notice.
The doctor took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Officer Villanueva."
"Please," he offered back. "Arnel."
Sanders lifted one eyebrow. "Never took you for a first name man."
Arnel shrugged. "Things change."
"Hey Doc?" Taggart called, impatiently but respectfully from his bed. "I got things to do, you wanna..." he made a hurry-up gesture with his hands.
Arnel winced.
Forrest glared. "Oh, in a hurry, are we?" He pulled something on the chair and lifted Ron Taggart and the top of the bed loose. Ron yelped once as the older man deftly floated Taggart and the frame across to a thing circular device mounted from what blueprints called the ceiling. "Let's shoot some hoops, then."
The doctor dramatically stuck his tongue out and pushed, releasing Taggart and the top of the hospital bed, now little more than a stretcher. It flung with perfect aim towards the metal circle.
"Doc!" Taggart yelled, a little more high-pitched than usual.
Humming to himself, Sanders kicked off and beat the helplessly strapped down Taggart to his destinat
ion, and ensured the security officer slip harmlessly through the center, where he clicked the bed into place.
He patted Taggart on the shoulder as he tapped a console on the side of the circle. "Remember, the MRI likes to suck metal right out of people. No bullets in you from your gangbanger days, my man?"
"Your skin's too dark for asshole assumptions," Taggart growled. "Might still be a fragment in my right shoulder from one of my desert vacations, though."
Doc Sanders gave Taggart a skeptical gaze. "Right, you were military. And how's that different from a gang?" he asked. He didn't wait for an answer but tapped a button and kicked back toward Arnel as the machine began to whine. "We'll know soon enough."
"You sonofa---" Taggart began to shout.
"You're the one was in a hurry," Sanders called out cheerfully as he grabbed a handhold near Arnel.
Arnel looked at him quizzically. "He'll be fine," Sanders assured him in a near whisper. "X-rays show there's probably nothing left. Whoever operated was thorough."
Arnel pondered the 'probably', and how much pressure everyone was under today. What the hell, he thought. He's in a better mood after blowing off a little steam, at Taggart's expense.
"I understand we're planning to break speed records?" the doctor asked. "I hear Beacham is scurrying around setting up sensors?"
"Yeah." Arnel chuckled, staring over his shoulder at the MRI thumping all around Taggart. He turned his brain back to the doc's question. He, too, was still amazed about damn near everything around him. In the few moments he wasn't terrified. "That is, if we’re lucky. If we’re not quite lucky enough, a lot of HHL-6 is going to be exposed to vacuum. Or torn right away. Best place for the crew with HHL under thrust is the sardine— the emergency tanks."
The fight seemed to go out of Sanders' face but he nodded. "The last of the crew is cleared or triaged. My nurses and the final patients are en route-" the MRI chimed, and wound down. "-and Taggart fine on the inside too." He raised his voice. "Might need a shrink, though."
"Thanks, Doc," Taggart ground out, and Arnel heard the 'skitch' of adhesive straps being pulled loose.
A sharp sound from the monitor where Burkov was sitting drew both their attention. Burkov was shaking his head violently and Goss's was yelling something indecipherable.
"Now, Burkov: he really does need a shrink," Sanders confided. "He's beyond traumatized. He's manic and having difficulty accepting..." Sanders waved his hands in the air around them, then kicked back off to the wall to gather some last supplies.
"Noted," Arnel said with another look at Burkov. "Pruett!"
The serious-faced blond security officer appeared in the door. "Please escort Vice President Burkov to Cellar One." He pitched his voice low. "Watch close, and have the duty officer arrange for restraints until we stand down from emergency conditions."
"Sir," Pruett said. He snapped off the next best thing to a salute with a curt bob of his chin, and then coasted across to Burkov.
"If that's all, I've still got a laundry list of supplies to grab," Sanders said.
Arnel examined the man. He looked hollowed out. Exhausted. But there was a fierceness in his gaze, and all that rough fun he'd had with Taggart. He could hold his own when the wind blew crazy, Arnel decided.
"That's all. Thanks, Doc."
Sanders gave a wave and flipped back to the far wall.
A beep in Arnel's earpiece, then Montagne's voice filled the comm circuit piped in from his spacesuit.
"Keep this to yourself, First." Montagne's voice. "You’re on with me an Captain Travis. We’re moving up the timetable to dock.”
“Can we do that?” Arnel asked. “I thought we only had one shot-“
“We do!” Travis interrupted. This was not the calm, considered man Arnel had talked to before. There was a new tightness and urgency to his words. “One chance to dock and shake loose of the Thorn’s gravity, but now we gotta do it faster!”
Montagne cut in again. “I’m ordering Pilot Nishioka’s eva craft and his mechs to lay anchors on our hull and fly into the Betty’s cargo bays with guide wires. Assuming they survive the procedure, Travis assures us they can pull us in faster by those wires.”
Travis shouted over her. “We've got boarding parties inbound."
Arnel turned towards a wall. “Boarding--!" he hissed. "How?! At the speed we’re already pulling—“
Travis cut him off. “They’re coming in torpedoes. The insides are filled with a barely compressible liquid medium. They've got massive shields on their ass. They're surfing thermonuclear pellets. They'll get here fast. Less than 90 minutes. They’ll brake hard and use the explosion to disorient our efforts without destroying the assets -our ships. They'll board us and take control before we can dock, slingshot around the thorn and outpace their mother ship.”
Arnel grabbed a handhold and floated there. He was deep into 'terrified' territory again.
“Sir?” Taggart asked over his shoulder.
Arnel waved him to be silent.
“Humans aren’t rare out here,” Captain Travis said, hoarsely. “Your ship and your supplies are.”
“What the hell can live in a liquid environment and survive getting slammed around by nukes?” Arnel swallowed, gears grinding to find a way to be helpful, to decide what to ask next. “What’s coming?”
His knuckles turned white around the handhold as Captain Travis told him, pouring a nightmare into his ears.
Sanders wandered over, oblivious to the voices in Villanueva's ears. “Taggart's in great shape. Low cholesterol even.” He turned and shouted at Taggart. “Young enough to feel immortal.”
Villanueva clumsily grabbed at the doctor’s shoulder and leaned in. “Things have changed.”
Taggart had already swam over, his eyes hard, awaiting commands, all the levity and gentleness he’d shown as he and Sanders quipped gone.
Sanders dropped his relaxed attitude, but didn't panic. He showed his steel when he reached out and grabbed Arnel's elbow, helping Arnel stop his body's spin. “What are we looking at?” The doctor asked, his voice quiet too.
Arnel squeezed the man’s shoulders, grateful for the doctor's reaction reaction. “Pack field dressings, trauma kits, extra blood, whatever else you think you’ll need for large-scale triage.”
He flipped a gaze over his shoulder at Burkov. The broken vice president was huddling close to the monitor, face wet with tears and absorbed by Goss’s angry glare.
The doctor understood perfectly. The fierceness was back. Wordless, accepting what was to come, he spun back to the wall to collect what was needed.
Arnel admired him, as he swam against a deep dark current that threatened to pull him under. So much had happened, so fast...and now more was coming.
Taggart was close now, his voice low, panic held in check. "What the hell's coming, First?"
"Yes it is." Arnel said, fighting to keep control. “Hell’s coming.”
THE BOOMERS
40
“We’ve done the impossible twice today,” Lou Montagne said. Her voice echoed across C&C, and she knew it carried across all of HHL-6, and reached every ear travelling with her.
“A killer storm couldn’t kill us. FTL was Certain death. Only, we’re not dead.”
Lou looked around. Rose Okoro and Stan Renic watched. Lou smiled at them and saw them straighten, smile back. She turned to Beacham. He waved, distractedly. “Hallelujah!” he barked, but gave her a genuine smile and a nod before diving back into his screens.
Lou’s throat tightened, remembering the look in Ed Dwyer’s eyes when that first rock snuffed out the light that lay behind them.
“We’ve lost friends. We’re far from home. But we’re still alive, and we’ve met-“ she paused. “We’ve met amazing…people. And we’re going to beat the odds one more time.”
Beacham turned back to his screens. Rose and Stan’s smiles faltered.
Lou sighed, and looked up and out the window, letting her eyes catch the glitter of ships cloudin
g space near the spikes of the Thorn behind them. “You don’t need the inspirational speech, about meeting new forms of life, advancing human understanding. You’re living it. You’ve seen the Thorn, the ships, the incredible beings. All amazing. Breathtaking. World changing. But right now we all need to do our jobs, even if that just means buttoning down and waiting. Panic can kill us before anything around these parts ever gets a chance.”
She waited a moment, then laughed over the line, letting her focus, her dedication to them, her faith in them color the laughter. “Nothing’s beaten us yet. We’ve gone through hell and we’re still here. Let’s keep it that way. Man your stations, no matter what comes. We’ve got a plan, we’ve got the training, and we are going to pull this off!”
She took a deep breath. “Remember your training. Stick together. We’ll talk again when we’re in the wind. C&C out.” She tapped the microphone off.
Not bad for a first rousing ship-wide address, she thought, as she reached back with a trembling hand to buckle into her seat again. She hoped to hell her first emergency address was also her last.
“Status!” she called out.
Beacham talked out over Okoro, and Lou held a hand up to her nav officer to let the civilian speak.
“Well, you haven’t asked me for a miracle in a while,” Beacham said, crossing his arms and looking pleased with himself. “So I tho ught I’d remind you I’m still in the business.”
Lou raised an eyebrow and waited.
Beacham tapped on a screen. “Say hi, Daisy.”
“Hello Commander Montagne,” said the strangely warm but inhuman voice from all around.
Lou’s eyes narrowed. The voice seemed different from when she’d heard it before. How? she wondered.
“I must correct Doctor Beacham,” the voice announced. “I am not precisely Daisy. I am, however, an exact digital pollination.”
Warning bells climbed up Lou’s spine. “Beacham?!” she queried, her voice low and dangerous.
Beacham took no heed. “It might take me a day or two to, you know, learn an entire alien language and begin upgrading… whatever Daisy is.”