“Make sure everyone gets into a P-suit,” the admiral ordered. “What about the enemy?”
“Twenty-two ships remaining. The rest are destroyed or damaged enough to retire.”
“Twenty-two. That’s too many,” the admiral muttered. “Damn it. Just too many.”
“They’re taking up attack positions,” the first officer said.
I unstrapped my harness, then unstrapped Meredith’s, and took her by the hand.
“Come on. We’re leaving.”
“What!?” It was the closest thing to panic I’d yet heard in her voice.
The admiral noticed us, surprise plain on his face. “Where the hell are you going?”
“The situation has changed, Admiral,” I said, “but I still have a mission. I’m going to take Miss Capulet’s yacht and try for the wormhole.”
“It’s suicide,” the admiral said flatly. “They’ll be on you before you get a hundred yards.”
“I’m going to try a hot start,” I said. “I think I can make the wormhole.”
We met each other’s eyes, and in that second both of us knew the score. Under normal circumstances, I would ease the yacht out with maneuvering thrusters and then accelerate once I was clear of the battle hulk. A hot start meant I was going to hit full thrust while still in the hangar bay, blasting out at top speed, more or less destroying the hangar bay in the process.
Telling the admiral I was going to attempt such a maneuver was basically like telling him his ship was doomed anyway, so it didn’t matter.
The fact that he didn’t stop me meant he knew it, too.
“I’ll have the remaining gunship cover you,” the admiral said. “Whatever your mission is, I hope it’s worth it.”
I flipped him a two-finger salute. “Good luck to you, Admiral. And thanks.”
He was already barking orders at his crew again as Meredith and I left the bridge at a run. The ship rocked with the next salvo as we sprinted down the main corridor on the port side, the impact knocking us off our feet and sending us skidding across the deck. I recovered first, grabbed Meredith under one arm and hauled her to her feet.
“Keep moving!”
“My knee!” She winced.
“The admiral’s faced this side of the ship toward the attack,” I said. “If these compartments decompress, they’ll seal us off, and then our ride’s over real quick.”
“Help me,” she said. “I can make it, damn it.”
I half-dragged her along as she limped and cursed to the hatchway leading down to the hangar bay. The lifts were all offline so we had an awkward climb down the metal ladder. She favored the twisted knee all the way.
There were several huge explosions, and the decompression alarm sounded as we hit the hangar bay deck. I could feel the air being sucked out, and knew we only had a few seconds. I dragged Meredith into the yacht, and she screamed pain all the way, her eyes overflowing fat tears that ran down her cheeks. I slapped the DOOR CLOSED button with my palm, and the airlock sealed behind us.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “There wasn’t time.”
“It’s okay.” She swallowed a sob, dropped into a lounger and slowly rubbed her knee. “Damn, it hurts. I’m going to need a med patch or something.”
“As soon as we’re out of here,” I promised, “I’ll fix you up.”
“Go do what you have to do,” she said. “I’ll strap in here.”
I bolted for the cockpit, and strapped myself in as another volley of dumb fire rocked the battle hulk. Debris clanged onto the hangar deck beside the yacht. If more debris fell in front of us and blocked the bay door, we’d be trapped. I told our ship’s computer to tell the battle hulk’s computer to open the bay door, and for a long, nervous second I thought maybe nobody was left alive to approve clearance.
At last, the bay door began to slide open.
I told the yacht’s computer to skip preflight and fire the engines to full power. When the bay door was completely open I hit full thrust as the yacht shot out of the bay, riding a plume of fire.
Instantly we were thick into the center of the battle, parts of glowing Coriandon frigates floating past. In the rearview monitor I caught sight of the battle hulk. The damage to the enormous vessel was almost beyond comprehension. Three enemy ships maneuvered close to concentrate fire on the forward section.
The rearview clouded over with the shadow of an approaching ship, and I was relieved to see it was the surviving pocket gunship, on its way to cover our escape. I pointed the yacht directly at the wormhole and kept to full thrust, redlining the engines and threatening to overheat most of the systems.
The threat scanners blared at me, and I saw a dozen incoming missiles speeding toward us from a pursuing frigate. The yacht wasn’t fast enough for evasive action. We had no counter-measures.
This would be messy.
The pocket gunship swerved into the path of the missiles, and the flash on impact was so bright I had to avert my eyes momentarily. When I looked again, the gunship was in two pieces, each spinning at a different rate and in a different direction. The frigate positioned itself to fire again, but it was too late.
We entered the wormhole.
TWELVE
Wormhole travel is always a little disorienting.
Time stretched. Space compacted. There was a brief, fuzzy dreamlike feeling as the colors blurred, stars swirling and my body feeling suddenly light, as if the molecules that made up my mass were drifting apart.
Then it was over.
The stars snapped back into focus.
We were on the other side.
Immediately I turned to the scanner. The frigate hadn’t followed us—a smart move on his part. Who knows what could have been waiting on the other side? You can’t scan one side of a wormhole from the other.
I scrolled through the yacht’s repair log, and my heart sank. We’d been lucky to escape the battle hulk and reach the wormhole without being blasted to atoms, but it looked like that was all the luck we were going to get. I set the yacht to autopilot, and went aft to check on Meredith.
She slouched in the lounger, her face an ashen grey.
“We’re in the clear for now,” I told her.
She nodded, the news sinking in. “That’s something at least.” She looked down. “My knee is swollen.”
I knelt in front of her, and prodded gently. She went stiff, but didn’t complain.
“Nothing broken,” I said, “but you wrenched it real good.”
“There’s a med-kit in that compartment overhead,” she said. I retrieved the kit and administered a hypo to her thigh. She seemed to melt a little, the pain leaving her like air whooshing out of a balloon, her eyelids going heavy.
“Thanks,” she breathed.
I eased her boots off.
“So you’ve been working for Gestapo Mars.” She tsked. “I’m a bloody fool. I’ve been helping the other side the whole time.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“What’s your mission? Assassinate some resistance leader?”
“There is no mission anymore,” I said.
Some of the alertness came back to her face. “What?”
“The admiral’s men repaired the engines, but not the translight drive,” I said. “That means a trip that would normally take us about five hours will take three months. Whatever mission I was supposed to accomplish, well, it won’t matter by then.”
“Good,” she said. There wasn’t any venom in the comment. More like she was relieved that whatever part she’d played, it had become irrelevant. “I’ll never forgive you,” she added.
“Nobody’s asking.”
“You’re a bastard.” She said it coolly, like it was scientific observation.
I shook my head, suddenly feeling tired. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, we’ll have to use your ship’s cryo-chambers to go into deep sleep for the rest of the trip.”
“No!” Her eyes went wide. Alarmed.
“What’s the matter?”
> “The yacht is well-stocked,” she said. “I’ll stay awake. I can catch up on my reading.”
“Are you out of your mind? That’s three months.”
“I won’t go into a cryo-chamber,” she insisted. “They’re little glass coffins. I feel like I’m suffocating whenever I’m in one.”
“You’ll be asleep,” I said. “That’s the whole point.”
“No,” she insisted. “I’m claustrophobic.”
I stood and reached out to her. “Can you put any weight on that knee?”
She took my hand, and I helped her up. “It feels a little better.”
“Okay… Come on.”
I led her slowly down the hall to the life-support room. I hit a button on a wall and a large cryo-chamber folded down like a Murphy bed, a glass dome over a large mattress. I set the controls, made sure the computer was monitoring properly. The dome slid back.
I tapped in the parameters for the cryo-sleep—duration, contingency protocols, etc. The computer would handle everything while we snoozed.
She unzipped her jumpsuit past her navel and shrugged out of it, standing before me completely nude. Again I marveled at her beauty—a perfect body, the best money could buy. She grabbed my arm, not sexually, just to emphasize the pleading look in her eyes.
“Come into the chamber with me,” she said. “The computer can compensate for two metabolisms. If you’re with me, I won’t think about it, about being closed in.”
“I thought I was a bastard.”
A wan smile. “If it weren’t for bastards, I’d have no love life at all.”
I nodded and disrobed, and then we both climbed into the cryo-chamber, finding our way into each other’s arms as the glass dome closed over us, the circulatory system pumping in extra oxygen, preparing to reduce our brain activity. Soon we’d both be pulled into a deep slumber.
She pulled me on top of her, reaching between us to grab me and guide me in. I glided in and out of her, falling into a slow rhythm. She tossed her head back, eyes closed. Her mouth fell open, a series of little gasps uttered in time with each thrust. Her legs clamped around me, ankles crossing over my ass as she shuddered and came.
I climaxed right behind her, my vision going white, then dark, and then all consciousness left me.
THIRTEEN
The coffee was ready by the time she found me in the galley, rubbing her eyes, stretching and yawning. She’d thrown on a thin, wispy slip which concealed none of the soft curves beneath.
“That was three months?”
“That’s the point of the cryo-chambers.” I handed her a cup of coffee. “So you don’t twiddle your thumbs until you go insane.”
She wrinkled her face at me. “I still don’t like them.”
“If we can get the translight fixed, you won’t have to go back in for the return trip,” I said. “We’ll be within communications range of a few different systems in about an hour.”
She sipped coffee as she turned, shooting me a glance over her shoulder. “Just enough time to shower and make myself look perfect.” I watched her round ass sway as she left the galley and wondered how she could possibly look any more perfect.
I sipped coffee and dwelled on my immediate future. It was likely I didn’t have a mission anymore, but I’d been feeling like a man without a country anyway, two and a half centuries removed from a government which had never earned my loyalty, anyhow. Did I even know the Reich anymore?
What did they stand for?
And who was I? Just some obsolete spy. I was a tiny speck of dust in a great big galaxy, and I had no idea what I was about. Maybe I’d disappear, head to the wilds of the frontier, help tame some colony world. Would the Reich look for me if I deserted? Would they even care? Take a man away from everything he’s ever known, turn him off for a few lifetimes, then turn him on again. There was nobody alive who’d ever known me. They could turn me off again, and nobody in the whole universe would even blink. I had no purpose, no ideas, nothing going for me except a hot mug of coffee.
At least it was good coffee.
The computer chimed an incoming message just as Meredith came back into the galley. She wore one of those red crisscross suits that women favored if they had the body for it—which she did. Strips of red silk positioned in just the right places to cover the fun bits, but leaving lots of flesh exposed. Her calf-high black boots gleamed.
“Is that an incoming message?” she asked. “Have you made contact?”
“Patch it through to the galley monitor,” I told the ship’s computer.
A monitor flipped up from the galley counter, and we were looking at the face of a haggard, middle-aged man in a Reich uniform.
“—should not try to approach, orbit, or land on New Elba,” he said. “This automated message will repeat in ten seconds.” A swastika test pattern filled the screen as Meredith and I looked at each other, both of us frowning.
The message started playing again, and the Reich officer was back.
“I am Major Gunter Haas, currently in charge of the Reich garrison on New Elba,” he said. “Elements of the resistance, far stronger and more organized than we suspected, have attacked government strongholds all over the planet. Most of the major cities are in chaos, and the coastal town of South Haven—where the fighting began—is now firmly under resistance control.
“We are abandoning the garrison here in the capital, with the belief that we can be more effective by remaining mobile and connecting with scattered police units which have reaffirmed their loyalty to the Reich. We believe the uprising here was coordinated with resistance uprisings all over the galaxy, but we’ve lost all communications out of the system and cannot confirm anything. The media has dubbed the past week’s reign of terror ‘the Red Cleansing,’ although most media outlets have gone off the air, some replaced by resistance propaganda squads.
“Hundreds of thousands lie dead in the streets—” He broke off for a moment, his voice cracking. He regained his composure and continued. “Men, women, children. At first the killings targeted Reich government workers and their families, but there seems to be no pattern now. Armed mobs rule the streets. We’ve launched a distress buoy, but with communications down we have no idea how long it will take the Reich to respond. If what has happened on New Elba is also happening on other planets, then the Reich might not respond at all.
“We have no way of knowing the resistance’s strength. Some of the mobs seem more organized than others, and we suspect some are merely those who are taking advantage of the chaos in order to loot and plunder. To boil it down, the situation is dire and unpredictable, so we are issuing this alert that inbound ships should not try to approach, orbit, or land on New Elba. This automated message will repeat in ten seconds.”
I grunted and switched off the monitor.
“The time signature shows that message is six weeks old,” I said. “Anything could have happened since then.”
Meredith said nothing. She was still staring at the blank monitor, her skin paler even than before.
“That’s the work of your resistance,” I said. Not an accusation. Just a heavy, cold fact I let drop in front of her with a thud.
“You don’t know.” Her voice was small, remote. “You don’t know anything.”
“Don’t I?” I slouched against the galley counter. I’d slept for three months, yet suddenly the fatigue was back. I didn’t want to argue. “Maybe you’re right.”
She said nothing, didn’t look at me. The conversation she was having with herself was plain on her face.
I pushed away from the counter, made for the exit.
Her head snapped around. “Where are you going?”
“To the cockpit,” I said. “I have to scan the surface, find a likely landing spot.”
She frowned. “But the message said—”
“We’re low on fuel and the translight drive is still busted,” I said. “We could do a slow burn to the next habitable planet, and put ourselves back in cryo-sleep, but
that would take fourteen months, and we don’t know what we might find when we get there.”
“But New Elba…” she said. “It’s dangerous.”
I let a wry smile flicker across my face. “Then you can bring your enormous gyro-jet rifle. In case you want to shoot one of the moons out of the sky.”
FOURTEEN
I spent an hour scanning before determining a likely landing spot. The town of Corsica was about an hour from the coast, large enough to have a small spaceport but small enough to be off the beaten path. Calling the control tower got no response, and another hour of monitoring showed no air traffic at all. The place seemed dead, but it was still a good bet for fuel, and my guess was that a good mechanic might be willing to trade his services for a lift off the planet.
After entering the atmosphere I dropped to low altitude fast. Never know who might be looking to take a shot at us, especially since we were landing without clearance. I skimmed the treetops until we hit the airfield, and brought us down between two large hangars.
The view from the port bubble window wasn’t encouraging. Some kind of sub-orbital military transport sat burnt out on the edge of the closest runway. Bullet holes and blast marks pocked the walls of the hangars, and ragged bodies littered the area. There were a number of black Reich uniforms, and a hodgepodge of mismatched olive drab uniforms which were probably members of the resistance who’d gone on to their glorious reward.
Meredith came up behind me, peered through the bubble window.
“It’s a mess.”
“It’s a massacre.”
“What now?”
“The computer isn’t picking up any transmissions from the control tower,” I said. “So maybe the place is deserted. If I can find a tanker truck, I can at least refill the thruster fuel.”
“What about the translight drive?”
“That’s another story.” I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Gestapo Mars Page 7