by Rick Partlow
“You aren’t in my chain of command,” she reminded him. “If you stay, I stay.” She moved around him and logged into her terminal then tapped in a series of commands with expert, practiced motions.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
“We can’t count on the charges to destroy everything,” she explained, her voice less impish, flatter and atonal when she was doing her job. “I’m going to set the system to wipe itself once the upload is over.”
He let out a breath somewhere between a sigh and a bellow, fists clenching and unclenching as he tried to think of an argument to convince her when logic clearly wouldn’t. Nothing came to mind and he checked the status bar again, the alarms beginning to wear at his nerves.
Seventy-five percent.
Shit. If the data had been uploading at a constant rate, they’d have plenty of time, but it had slowed down and sped up during the process and he had no idea how long the rest would take. At least Cordova had shut up.
“Terrin, what the fuck are you doing down here?”
It was the same self-consciously dramatic tone from the speaker, but without the remote tinny effect. Captain John Cordova was somehow in full armor and carrying his rifle, what Lyta would have called “full battle rattle,” despite the late hour and what had to have been very little warning. He was even wearing his helmet, though the visor was up, revealing the square-jawed, recruiting-ad face beneath.
“Get your ass to the shuttles right now!” Cordova snapped, pointing back out the door with the muzzle of his rifle.
“I’m uploading the Terminus database,” Terrin told him, gesturing at the row of data crystals standing upright in their slots on the console. “I wish we’d scheduled this earlier,” he added, slapping a palm against the console in frustration at how slowly the status bar was moving. “There’s just been one technical problem after another getting the two systems to synch up. But we can’t leave without it, Captain.”
Cordova’s jaw worked as if he were chewing up the curse words before he spat them out, but finally he sucked in a deep breath and seemed to calm down.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do, Dr. Brannigan,” he said. Terrin knew Cordova was angry, because the Ranger officer only addressed him as “Doctor” when he was pissed. “I’m going to go finish setting the charges to bring this place down. When I come back through here, which should be no longer than ten to fifteen minutes, you and Petty Officer Hayden are coming with me to the shuttle. If the upload isn’t finished, take what you’ve got because…” He glanced over at the readout. “…eighty percent of the Imperial database is better than nothing at all. Do you understand me?”
Terrin didn’t like it, but he knew he had no choice but to agree. Cordova was the sort who’d put him in restraints and drag him to the shuttle if he had to.
“Right,” Terrin said. He reached under the console into one of the plastic storage totes they’d stacked there to hold supplies and came up with a small, shielded lead case for the data crystals. “We’ll be ready to go.”
Cordova gave him one last, disapproving scowl before he strode purposefully from the room, breaking into a jog once he was through the door.
“He’s always so bossy,” Franny said off-handedly, not looking up from her keyboard and monitor. “You’d think he was in charge here and not you.”
“I’m in charge of the scientific staff, Cordova’s the overall commander.”
It had been Logan’s decision to leave him here along with a couple other technicians after they’d salvaged what they could from the Shakak and rigged up a docking collar for the drop-ship onto the Imperial starship. The research and salvage crew had come in later, along with food and equipment, and he’d figured a new mission director would come with them. He’d been surprised to find out he was still in charge of the technical end of things.
But Cordova was the ranking military officer, and this was definitely his decision to make.
And he’s right, most of the data is better than none at all.
Still, he was going to give it to the last second. He had nightmare visions about going through the information back on Sparta and finding out he’d cut it off right in the middle of a detailed explanation of how to construct a stardrive. Even examining the working model they had, no one had yet been able to figure out how the thing had been built. It seemed to require some sort of exotic matter no scientist in the Five Dominions had even theorized about. The antimatter it needed for power they knew how to manufacture, it would just take most of the gross planetary product of a large and well-developed world like Sparta or Stavanger to produce, and wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
Someday though…
Someday, they wouldn’t need the jump-points, wouldn’t be restricted to travelling only between systems connected by the gravito-inertial threads, trudging through the real-space between them, taking weeks to get anywhere. Someday, they’d be as advanced as the giants of myth, able to sail the universe on waves of warped spacetime.
“What did you say about giants?”
He started, realizing he must have been thinking out loud and was stuttering through an explanation when Cordova burst back through the door, his usually stalwart face pale and drawn.
“We have to go now!” he shouted, bracing himself against the side of the doorway, panting, sweat pouring down his face. “Enemy drop-ships have already launched.”
Terrin didn’t take the time to respond, instead he leaned over the control console and shut down the upload. Ninety percent. Ninety percent of the knowledge of all the ages from the time man had climbed out of the cradle of Old Earth and clawed his way to the stars, all the way to the fall of the Empire of Hellas. It would have to be enough.
The indicator flashed green and he carefully yanked each of the half-dozen crystal cards out of their slots and placed them into the cushioned interior of the lead case, then clapped the case shut and twisted the lock in place. A small square lit up red next to the lock and he pressed his right thumb against it until it changed to green. Now it was keyed to his thumbprint and any attempt to open it without that identification would destroy the contents.
He grabbed the case by handle built into the lid and Cordova moved out of the doorway, motioning for the two of them to clear out. Terrin didn’t wait for the Ranger. He pushed Franny ahead of him and ran. The dimly-lit corridors seemed to bring the looming threat closer to reality, and he was filled with a sudden desperation he’d been able to hold off before with the focus of finishing his task. Now all he could think of was the Starkad troops heading their way and the timers on the fusion charges counting down and he needed more than anything to get in the shuttle and get out of this damned place.
It wasn’t that far to the surface from the auxiliary control room through the back way. When they’d first entered the facility, months ago, they’d come in through the main cargo entrance out to the flats beside one of the finger lakes branching out from the Cut, the huge canyon running kilometers deep on the otherwise lifeless planet. They hadn’t found the second entrance until a few days later, up a set of stairs through the living quarters. He’d climbed the same stairs every day for weeks now, yet this time they seemed elongated, a kilometer instead of a couple hundred meters, and by the time they reached the external hatch, he was out of breath and dripping with sweat.
Franny passed him on the stairway and slammed her shoulder into the thick, metal door to stop herself, grabbing at the manual locking wheel and slowly, laboriously turning it to the left. Terrin hesitated for a beat before he abruptly realized he should be helping her and found space for his hands on the wheel, putting his weight into the turn. The door unlocked with a loud clank and the two of them pushed against it at the same time, sending the heavy portal swinging open so violently Terrin almost fell through it.
He caught himself with a hand on the side of the doorframe and scrambled out carefully through the narrow doorway, moving aside to make room for the others. It was dark outside, but then it
was never that light deep inside the Cut, except at high noon. It was also cold as hell, certainly below freezing, and the light windbreaker he’d been wearing to cut the underground chill seemed entirely inadequate.
Terrin hugged his arms across his chest, already starting to shiver, and tried to let his eyes adjust before he moved. The emergency exit came out much higher up the cliff than the cargo entrance, and the trail down to the landing zone was steep and treacherous and he definitely planned to let Cordova go first. Only the floodlights they’d set up on temporary tripods stood out against the blackness, illuminating the one remaining shuttle and the crew scrambling around to get it ready while the last stragglers from the base filed out of the cargo entrance and boarded.
There had been three aerospacecraft down in the flats, but only charred circles in the rocky surface remained of the other two, the marks of their belly jets from takeoff. He couldn’t even see their exhaust in the night sky. He whispered a prayer of thanks to a God he didn’t really believe in that they were in time to catch this boat.
“Come on,” Cordova urged them, switching on the blindingly bright white light attached to the fore-stock of his rifle and shining it down the path. “Follow me!”
“Wait!” Franny grabbed at the Ranger officer’s shoulder as he was about to head downward. “What’s that noise?”
Terrin hadn’t noticed it until then, mostly because his own pulse beat was louder in his ears than anything from the run up the stairs, but now he heard it. It was a distant rumble, echoing off the walls of the canyon like the thunder of a far-off storm. But this thunder didn’t fade as the seconds went by, it kept rolling down the Cut, louder and closer, and Terrin had an awful feeling he knew exactly what it was.
“Get down!” Cordova yelled, yanking Terrin by the arm, pulling him and Franny to the dirt and covering them with his own body.
Terrin wanted to protest, wanted to push him off, but then he saw the glow against the grey of the low-hanging clouds, heard the unmistakable whine of turbojets overhead.
“This is Cordova!” the Ranger was speaking into his helmet’s radio pickup but, with the visor up, his voice carried enough for Terrin to make it out. “Get the bird off the ground now!”
The calculations were cold and heartless and automatic; they ran across his mind like chalk on a blackboard and he knew. Too late.
The laser was clearly visible, refracted in the low clouds and the particulate haze at the bottom of the canyon, burning a sheath of superheated plasma through the air. The plasma was an illusion, trailing the lightspeed burst by fractions of a second, but brilliant and flashy as a thunderbolt, fooling the eye into thinking it had done the damage rather than the laser. The people in the shuttle didn’t care, they were just as dead.
Terrin squeezed his eyes shut instinctively, covered his head with his hands, but the explosion was so bright he could see it through his closed eyelids. The shuttle was a kilometer away and three hundred meters down the hill, but the sound hit him like a solid wall, running microseconds ahead of the concussion, an earthquake trying to toss the three of them off the hillside. By the time he opened his eyes, all that was left was a swiftly-rising mushroom cloud, glowing an angry red from within, and the fiery rain of debris already beginning to make its way back to the ground. And coming down just a few hundred meters away from the conflagration was another aerospacecraft, much larger and uglier, a drop-ship, lowering itself to the ground on white-hot columns of fire.
Terrin couldn’t hear, couldn’t move, couldn’t think for long seconds, but he felt something shaking him and finally realized Cordova was trying to pull him to his feet. Franny was already up, running back to the open doorway. It seemed like a damned good idea and he followed her, encouraged by Cordova pushing at his shoulder. By the time they’d made it inside, his hearing had returned enough to hear Cordova cursing in three different languages, and his thinking had recovered enough to understand the why.
“We are so fucked!” Cordova said, finally going back to a language Terrin understood. “Once the escape ship sees the shuttle’s been scragged, they’re going to be burning at high gees for the jump point.” He sucked in a deep breath, obviously trying to get himself back under control. “We can’t stay here; the fusion charges will be going off in less than an hour. Maybe we can get to those caves on the other side of the lake and try to wait them out…”
Terrin was barely listening to him. A thought was crystallizing out of memory and desperation, rising to the surface like a piece of driftwood in the ocean, the last hope of a drowning man.
“I think,” he said, his voice still sounding muffled in his battered ears, “I might have another way out of here.”
2
Saul Grieg had begun his career as a Marine, Ruth Laurent remembered. You could tell, you could still see it in the precision of his movements, the way his eyes scanned carefully for threats with every step. Even the martial riches of the old Empire, the rows upon rows of hulking, impossibly massive mecha, the ranks of three-meter tall suits of powered armor, the huge chamber full of hover tanks couldn’t entice Grieg to gawk like a tourist or drool with avarice. He simply stood beside her at the center of the wedge formation of Supremacy Marines and advanced as they did, his service pistol held at the low ready.
He hadn’t issued Laurent a weapon, but she hadn’t complained too much. If two companies of Marines and the platoon of mecha guarding the outside approaches wasn’t enough to keep her safe, it was unlikely a handgun would do it. She was just grateful to be pain-free after months of having to choose between constant agony or mind-numbing drugs. The medical bay on the heavy cruiser Sleipner had been able to repair her burns with cloned skin grafts in the three weeks it had taken them to travel from Stavanger to Terminus and her hair was even starting to grow back.
“I believe they must have evacuated everyone, sir,” Captain Gerhardt announced, her high-pitched, nasal voice incongruous coming from the external speakers of her menacing black armor and dark-visored helmet. “We haven’t been able to find any of them, but there’s plenty of evidence they left in a hurry.”
Grieg ceased his constant scan for threats long enough to eye the Marine officer balefully.
“I don’t believe they managed to get everyone out,” he declared. “They were still boarding the last shuttle when we destroyed it. Keep searching.”
“Yes, sir,” the woman said without hesitation, turning back to her troops. Her voice no longer projected from the helmet’s speakers, but Laurent knew she was addressing them over her radio because a squad detached itself from the lead platoon and double-timed their way up the corridor leading out of the chamber where the hovertanks were stored.
“I didn’t get to see much of this last time I was here,” Laurent murmured, staring at one of the hovertanks.
They were each twenty meters long and fifteen wide, resting on plenums constructed of some sort of honeycomb composite material she couldn’t readily identify, the turrets heavily armored and built around the ten-meter long emitter of what might have been a coilgun or perhaps a plasma cannon.
“It’s just as you said it was,” Grieg admitted, perhaps a bit grudgingly. “I will make sure you’re rewarded for your dedication in getting the data back to us.” His natural, perpetual scowl deepened. “Though if Kuryakin hadn’t gotten himself killed, I’d put a bullet in his head for not reporting all this before he pursued the Shakak. Had he arrived with sufficient forces, the Spartans would never have stood a chance.”
She nodded, silently acceding the point. It hadn’t been her place to tell Colonel Kuryakin how to run Military Intelligence, but he’d put his own advancement above the good of the state, and he’d paid the price.
“Colonel Grieg!” The urgent call caught Laurent’s attention a half-second before the motion drew her eye.
Both had come from the far corner of the huge chamber, where shadows swallowed what looked to her to be a storage room of some kind. A Marine fire team was dragging a man be
tween them, his arms secured behind his back with flex cuffs, desperate fear playing over his boyish, chubby face. His work uniform was Spartan Navy issue, the rank on his shoulder a Technician’s, one of their common workers.
“We found one of them, sir!” the sergeant who led the fireteam announced redundantly, his rifle trained on the captive. “He was hiding back there in that storage room.”
There was a cold pit deep inside Laurent’s stomach as she watched them bring the Technician forward, hands at his armpits, his feet limp and scraping against the floor. She should have been exhilarated at the discovery, at the intelligence the prisoner could give them, but instead she was flashing back to her own experience hiding for weeks among the enemy, terrified she might slip up and be captured or killed. He was the enemy, operating illegally in Starkad space, but all she could think was that he was living out her nightmares.
“What’s your name?” Grieg asked, stepping nearly nose-to-nose with the man.
She didn’t know why he was bothering to ask; the man’s name was printed across the tape on his left breast: “Fuentes.” Fuentes said nothing, simply staring at Grieg with eyes wide and white.
“It’s not a difficult question,” Grieg persisted, his voice dangerously quiet. “Tell me your name, Spartan.”
“Fuentes, Eduard B.,” the soft man stuttered. “Technician Second Class, Sparta Navy. ID number 549811B.”
Grieg snorted in amusement. He stroked the man’s cheek with a gloved finger and Fuentes flinched away.
“Do you really think we’re going to make an official Enemy Prisoner of War report with your service number, Fuentes? Do you imagine this whole business coming to involve ambassadors and ministers and negotiations?” He shook his head. “Because I don’t see things unfolding that way. You’re a spy, by all agreements between the Five Dominions, subject to the laws of the state in which you’re captured. Starkad executes spies. No trial necessary.”