by Barry Kirwan
He was able to close the gap because Luke wasn’t flying in a straight line, as otherwise Zack could target him. Micah tried to distract him.
“Hey, Luke. Why didn’t you just detonate the nukes inside the ship?”
Luke snorted. “You missed a lecture, buddy. The nukes each have a lockout: they need command codes from Blake and Zack to activate them. Otherwise, they make a mess, but don’t detonate.”
Nearly in range. He capitalised on his own intrigue to try to stall Luke. “Then how –?”
“Out on recon we exceeded Zack’s surveillance range. We uploaded an attack simulation, convinced the nuke’s tactical computers that the hierarchy had been destroyed, and the mother ship re-taken by the enemy. The two ships had no option but to verify against each other, then they disabled the lockouts. Some of my handiwork, actually. Fear is always the key, Micah, even with computers. So, you want to see a nuclear blast at close range?”
Micah had already had a ring-side seat, twice. He picked out the blue-hot engine ahead of him jumping around like a frantic mosquito, and just as hard to swat. But the pattern wasn’t random – it never was with people, genetically upgraded or not. He switched into Optron analyst mode and did the calcs. Luke’s erratic pattern would defeat normal targeting scanners, and Blake was going to be thirty seconds too late. He made his decision. He tapped several rapid commands into the console and then let his mind follow the movements, tracing the zigs and zags in a mental 4-D grid. His breathing slowed as he tracked Luke, using the part of the mind known as the reptilian brain, homing on his prey the way a cheetah runs down a gazelle. All his fears, his inhibitions were suppressed, and now that he had a target, flying to hit it was much easier than navigating open space.
‘Hey, Micah, you been practicing?’ Luke said.
Micah didn’t – couldn’t – respond, his left brain was disabled, his right brain reflexes completely in charge. He was closing fast.
‘Hey! Micah, I’m going to fire, man, if you get any closer!’
Micah deployed the fast landing grapple, a metre-long metallic hook designed to catch a braking line if hot-landing in the hangar. He inverted his Moonwalker and flicked his joystick down. There was a deafening grating noise, like trucks colliding, as his Moonwalker slammed into Luke’s undercarriage, the grapple penetrating Luke’s hull.
“What the fuck?” Luke shouted.
Micah had to do it now. He tapped a single command and his torpedo – with the ashes of his mother and seventy-three others aboard – fired, still locked down to the wing of his craft. He set the port thrusters on full so that the two bound craft careened to the right, slewing away from the ship at a right angle. “Goodbye, Luke.”
Micah punched the eject button.
He catapulted away, spinning like a drunken gyroscope. He caught flashes of the pirouetting ensemble as Luke tried hopelessly to bring the two shackled ships under control. Micah counted down. Two. One. Goodbye Mom.
The darkness of space flashed brilliant white as the torpedo’s ion engine cut in and instantly overloaded, igniting the entire fuel cell. The incandescence wasn’t nuclear – if it had been, then he knew he wouldn’t be scrunching his eyes closed with pain – he’d be vaporised. Luke hadn’t reached the red zone, and he hadn’t detonated. It was over.
Micah did a rough calculation of which way he’d been facing when he’d ejected. Figures, he thought, as he carried on spinning at speed, further away from the Mother Ship.
Chapter 2
Premonition
The nausea had mostly passed. Micah knew he was flying at almost the same velocity with which the ejector seat had propelled him half an hour ago, but he had no real sense of motion, since relative to the stars he wasn’t moving at all. At least he’d been able to apply his suit’s micro-thrusters to stop the spinning and tumbling; dying alone in space would be bad enough, he didn’t need to suffer it watching his last moments through a vomit-encrusted visor.
He recalled one of Zack’s flying lessons, maybe a week ago…
“Space has no compassion,” Zack said, lecturing him and the other trainees, leaning forward on sturdy black forearms, wiry eyebrows meshed together beneath a shiny bald pate. “It ain’t like the sea – there you have a chance, you can trust in Lady Luck if all else fails. Ain’t so with space – you always need a Plan A, definitely a Plan B, all the way up to Plan F. That’s the one you apply when all hell breaks loose and you find yourself shouting… Well, I don’t need to spell it out, do I? Oh, and I shouldn’t have to say this either, but I will: never, ever, abandon your craft. Chances you’ll be found are?”
“Zero,” they replied, in chorus.
Never, ever leave your craft. A simple enough, intuitive rule. Try as he might, though, Micah couldn’t figure out what better course of action he could have taken – he’d already be dead. They’d all be dead. He changed tack mentally, wondering if it would make any difference to his velocity or detectability if he adopted some position or other – foetal, maybe, or star-shaped. He considered his life so far: unhappy childhood, brooding adolescence, the usual teenage angst with girls which had endured longer than most. He’d spent his life wanting to be somewhere else – away from his father, away from his job, not living with his Mom in their pokey flat. He’d always wanted to be an astronaut…
He raised his arm to view the data screen. Five minutes of air left. His long-range comms antennae had been ripped off his suit during ejection, so he couldn’t even talk to anyone – Sandy, for example – in his last moments. Better for them, he supposed. He wondered what it would be like, asphyxiating – would he thrash around, try to take his helmet off? And then after dying, there was death itself. He’d always assumed it was like switching off a computer, an easy perspective to take when you’re young and figure you’ve got another fifty years to come up with something better. He felt a shiver run down his spine as the full weight of death closed in on him. He imagined Death’s bony fingers sinking into his flesh. He shuddered. “Well, Mum, looks like we’re going to have a family reunion after all.”
“Micah, you dumb sonofabitch, what did I tell you to never, ever do?”
Micah stared wildly in his field of vision, then powered his suit thrusters just enough to turn him around. Zack was floating towards him, tethered to his Skyhawk by a gossamer thread, carrying a white cylinder.
“Don’t move, buddy.” Zack’s suit thrusters puffed wisps of evanescent air just in front of Micah. Zack flourished a hose and clamped it onto a valve on Micah’s suit, and he immediately tasted fresh, cool air. He inhaled deeply.
“Zack, how’d you find me?”
Zack pressed auto-reel and they were gently tugged back toward the ship.
“What, you think I let rookies out here without emergency tracers in their suits?” He laughed so hard it steamed up his visor, misting his black features, but not his grinning white teeth.
“Christ, Zack! I thought…” He tried to punch Zack’s arm, but in space, he realised, while there’s no compassion, anger has no purchase either.
The massive black ship loomed before them as they approached at speed. Etched out in space, visible only because it obscured the stars behind, it created a towering, disc-like shadow as they approached side-on. The four-storey conning tower had the only windows on the entire vessel, glowing green oblong slits decorating its circumference. It protruded like a lighthouse, a head with menacing jade eyes craning upwards from the dish-like vessel. Zack accelerated and skated over the seamless, featureless hull that extended like a vast metal desert. Once they’d passed the tower, complete darkness flooded in, black as the tar-pits on Jupiter’s Io. Micah could no longer see the vessel’s surface beneath him, just the far edge where pin-prick stars re-asserted themselves.
Zack swooped over the rim and gravity-surfed down past the ship’s seven floors and then dipped down to the underbelly, skimming back towards the ship’s centre.
“Invert, see?” Zack said, not missing the chance to reinforce
a valuable lesson in space-flight, namely to try to remember which way was up when you were coming back to the mother ship. He flicked the gyro-ball once with his left hand and rolled the Skyhawk. His right hand remained stable, cradling the joystick. Up ahead, a wash of yellow light spilled into space from the open hangar. Zack slowed down, and Micah could make out the other three Moonwalkers and soldiers milling about in the harsh lighting. He squinted, his vision night-adapted. He held his breath as the Skyhawk slinked through the shimmering force-field that nobody understood, which allowed them to go on recon missions without decompressing the entire ship and voiding everyone in the process. They slid smoothly to a halt, clamping into place with a welcome clunk. He breathed a sigh of relief as the plazshield above his head slid open again.
Blake was waiting for them as they disembarked. So were most of the soldiers and pilots.
“Not bad flying back there, Mr. Sanderson.” Blake handed Micah a small pair of silver wings. “You earned them today, son.” Zack started clapping, triggering a small round of applause and whistles.
Micah felt his cheeks redden, and nodded to his tall commander-in-chief, the man who led their small fleet of human refugees. Blake’s ruddy hair framed a gaunt face, pock-marked from some battle or other during the third World War, which only served to emphasise his right to lead based on his extensive experience. “Thank you, Sir.”
“Follow me.” Blake turned and strode towards the briefing room. Micah got a congratulatory thwack on the shoulder from Zack, but otherwise he said nothing. As they headed away from the dissipating throng, he noticed an orderly cleaning up bloodstains on the hangar floor. So, he thought, they’ve been busy here too. He turned to Zack, who held up four fingers as they walked. Micah felt dazed. So, there had been six Alician spies onboard, and no one had guessed; two of them had been working right under Blake and Zack’s noses.
The three of them sat down in the cramped, soundproof briefing room. Blake didn’t waste any time getting to the point.
“Micah, in three hours we make the final transit to Ourshiwann. Vince and Jennifer’s ships have both made contact in the last few hours via the Hohash – we’re converging from our different routes, so the Hohash devices are in range again.”
“And Rashid’s ship?”
Blake pursed his lips. “We’ve heard nothing from the fourth ship. Nothing from Rashid, Pierre, or Kat. Since only you and Pierre could hold all the disguised flight plans in your heads, I need you to run through them.”
Micah sat back – this was going to be tough, and he already felt wasted. “You mean right now?”
Zack answered. “Has to be, Micah, we gotta know if something’s happened. If the Q’Roth tracked us somehow, or even our Alician pals… At the least, we can prep the Moonwalkers, go in guns blazing when we arrive.”
Micah’s shoulders ached. He got off the chair and pulled off his boots. He lowered himself into a half-lotus position, his sacrum wedged against the wall. The mental gymnastics he was about to undergo required physical props, in particular a straight and alert spine. Blake and Zack, out of politeness, squatted down next to him. He closed his eyes and began the breathing routine, imagining the void, just as he’d been taught back in Palo Alto by the Zen master who trained all Optron analysts. It wasn’t so hard, given where he’d been just twenty minutes ago. It took five minutes before he could dredge up the package he’d stored in his mind two weeks earlier.
As a kid he’d always been good with numbers. But it was only when his teachers found he could visualise and multiply three-dimensional matrices that he was assigned more specialised schooling, first in mental imagery, then harmonic cipher-coding, and finally Optron reading. There had never been anything physical or medical done to alter his brain, excepting some specialised drugs, but it had altered the way he thought. Stuff often ran through his head of its own volition, processing, thinking sideways, looking for patterns and scavenging for resonances in events and data. Most of the time he could ignore it, pushing it backwards, downwards, like a radio you’re not really listening to, playing somewhere in the house. But for now, he’d achieved complete inner silence.
He was ready. The rest of the world outside was blocked out, a vast emptiness. A red, cube-shaped package hovered in the middle of a starless night. Micah visualised the mnemonic ciphers and the package unfolded into the three-dimensional space in his mind. The fractal pattern he’d encoded took shape. It was a puzzle, four coloured snake-like tubes zig-zagging away from one blue-green ball in space and converging on another dusty brown one. He picked out the blue tube – their own ship – and counted the transits, the number of times the line changed tack. Then he counted the transits for the pink line, Rashid’s ship. His head began to throb hard. A drip of sweat ran down his back. He didn’t need to count again. Micah visualised the locking cipher and let the puzzle implode, after which it was swallowed up and bound once more inside the red cube. He observed his breathing for a few minutes, then creaked his eyes open. As he’d expected, everything around him, Blake and Zack included, was in sepia, but he knew it was a temporary side effect. It would pass quicker than the headache.
He heard his own voice as if from far away, his flat, analyst voice. “Same number of transits. Route longer. Some transits pushed engines. Longer recharge times. A day, maybe two, behind us.”
Blake and Zack got up, helping Micah stand atop stiff legs. “Thank you, Micah.”
“I’ll prep a third of the squadron in any case,” Zack said, “just to be sure, and have a couple of sling-jets on hot standby.”
Micah didn’t want to hear this. He wanted it to be over. At the same time he knew these two were right, which was why they were in charge. Blake spoke softly. “Micah, go get some rest.”
He didn’t need to be told twice.
When he reached his quarters after taking a needle-shower, he brushed aside the crinkled beige curtain not quite covering the oval doorway, and found Sandy cross-legged on the mat inside, a bottle of wine and two clean glasses next to her.
“Don’t get your hopes up, Micah, or anything else.” She raised an eyebrow. “You look like hell, you know that?”
He shrugged, too tired to think of a witty reply.
“It’s the three week anniversary of this little fella” – she patted her belly – “being conceived, and his father being blown to smithereens by the Alicians.”
He sat down next to her, did the honours, and poured the wine. He read the label. “Cabernet Sauvignon, 2032 – was that a good year?”
She clinked glasses. “Year I was born, which means it’s a classic.” Her face lit up with a broad, infectious smile.
He stared into the burgundy coloured liquid. His mind instantly did the math; Sandy was thirty-three.
She took a sip. “What’s up? And don’t say ‘Oh, nothing really’, Micah, I know you too well.”
He took a long slug of wine, then another. It felt good, warming his throat. “Rashid’s ship is late.”
“That’s reasonable isn’t it? Didn’t they take the longest route?”
He put down the glass. “Blake asked me to run the numbers again, and yes, it’s reasonable, the numbers look… okay.”
Sandy parked her own glass. “But numbers can lie, can’t they?”
“Actually, no, they never lie, that’s why I like them. It’s just that, as an Optron reader, you deal with them so much that every now and again you get to glance behind them. You don’t quite see what’s there, you just know that, well, the numbers are hiding something.”
Sandy topped up his glass. “So, what do you think, Q’Roth or Alicians?”
He picked up his glass, swirled the wine around, the way his father used to, he realised – and it no longer mattered. “The Q’Roth aren’t like us. They’ve had their feed. I’m not sure they care what happens to us anymore. They’re nomadic, they’ll just move on.”
“Alicians, then, our treacherous, genetically-enhanced, bastard cousins. Super.”
They sat in silence, then Sandy raised her glass. “Well then, drink up, Micah. It may be a while before we can do this again.” She tilted her head back and drained her glass.
Sandy was wearing her hair tied back today. He’d never seen her with her hair like that before, revealing how much her face was like a ‘vee’ from her temples to her chin. Her saucer-like eyes, which missed nothing, more than compensated. But in his mind, still in its post-analysis lucid state, a connection began to form. He took another sip, hoping it would go away. But as he savoured the wine, a different face he hadn’t thought about for two weeks entered his mind: a striking, beautiful blonde with a ponytail. He gulped down more wine. He’d heard a disturbing report from Vince, just before they departed Eden, that Louise’s corpse had gone missing, right before the end. She’d almost killed all of them, back on Earth. He really hoped she was dead. But the face stubbornly remained, no longer hiding behind the numbers. He felt a chill skitter down his spine. He held out his glass to Sandy.
“Say when,” she said, pouring the wine.
Micah said nothing.
Chapter 3
Pietro
Rashid rammed the ankh key into the slot for the third time, but it was no use, the ship refused to move. He and two other crew members huddled in the mould-coloured control room whose curved walls made him feel like he was trapped inside the labyrinthine intestines of some giant monstrous being: dead, just not yet digested. They tried to make the Q’Roth vessel controls work, but everything was inert. Rashid bit hard on his lower lip. They’d already executed twelve perfect jumps, with the required twenty-four hour intervals to recharge the engines. Something else was wrong, and meanwhile, they dangled in space like bait on a hook.