The problem was, unlike on Tartarus, there was no quick death waiting for him this far into space. The best he could help for was suffocation. The worse was being flash-fried in a radiation field. Personally, it was a toss-up which one was worse. All Tully could do was keep moving and hope his little Scout ship could muster enough strength to get through. Tact would absolutely not help in calming him down, so Tully focused on the viewports and continued to push through the radiation fields. He let out a long, haggard sigh. It had been a very long day, but hopefully, it was just about over.
One way or another.
In an instant, the light flashed off. Tully wasn’t sure if that was a sign of something very good . . . or something very bad.
“Tact, are we clear of the radiation fields?” he asked.
“Affirmative,” Tact replied.
Tully let out a sigh of relief.
“Okay, Tact, let’s see who’s out there,” Tully said. “Open a channel.”
“Channel open,” Tact said.
“FDF Astraeus, do you copy?” Tully said. “This is Scout ship Two Zero Seven.”
No response.
Tully tried again. He didn’t have much choice otherwise.
“FDF Astraeus, do you read?” Tully said. “This is Scout ship Two Zero Seven. Please respond.”
Tully leaned back in his chair. He’d come this far and . . . nothing. Had they left without him? Had they missed the window?
“Tact, are we still on schedule?” he asked.
“Negative,” Tact replied. “Window closed three minutes ago.”
Three minutes. All of that work, and he was going to die . . . because he was three minutes late. It was kind of funny, really, but after all that, Tully was in no mood for laughing.
Then again, it would take the FDF Astraeus a lot longer than three minutes to light up their engines and jump out of there. There should have been some wiggle room for margin of error. That was assuming they were still listening.
“Tact, is there any . . . uhhh . . . secret code I’m forgetting?” Tully asked. Granted, this was either the pilot or Drummer’s territory. Maybe there was something he was supposed to say. He hoped he hadn’t inadvertently marked the Scout ship for destruction by the Astraeus’ big guns for forgetting the correct salutations.
“Negative,” Tact chimed in. “We have been transmitting a coded beacon since we entered this sector.”
They could have been authenticating the beacon. And knowing the Fleet, nothing moves very fast. This left Tully with two options. Either the Astraeus was gone, and he was speaking to dead air . . . or the Astraeus was moving very, very slowly.
Unfortunately, Tully’s only real option was to wait.
The seconds stretched into minutes, and soon minutes crossed into double digits. Tully sighed.
“Hey Tact, know any good jokes?” he asked.
There was a squabble of static.
“Scout ship, this is Astraeus,” a voice replied. “Coming in on your starboard side.”
Tully blinked.
“I swear, if this is your idea of a joke, Tact, I’m going to take a dump on your hard drive,” he said.
“Copy again, Scout ship Two Oh Seven?” the voice said.
Tully looked at the starboard side to see something gray growing ever closer. He soon realized it was big; much bigger than his tiny Scout ship.
The FDF Astraeus glided over the Scout ship’s nose. Already, Tully could see the dock slide open on the back of the massive frigate as the Scout ship was pulled into the interior of the FDF Astraeus.
After everything that happened today – losing his team, surviving the crash and fighting off Cole and his bizarre alien alliance, he had finally done it.
He was finally home.
Twenty
When Tully stepped off the Scout ship on to the Astraeus, he was prepared for many things. He was as prepared for a court martial as the possibility of spending the full night – or more – in the brig. What he wasn’t prepared for was the thunderous applause from the flight crew as he walked onto the deck.
Apparently, the Astraeus had pretty much written off the Scout ship crew for dead. They’d seen bits and pieces of the transmission from the Scout ship since the mission began, and while the radiation field prevented them from making any rescue attempts, they had a feeling that things were not going well on Tartarus.
Tully pivoted and spoke some final words to the Scout ship before departing. He had a feeling that command would be only slightly more hospitable than the harsh Persephone landscape.
“Catch you later, Tact,” he said.
“It is against FDF regulations to throw FDF property for anything other than designated uses,” the artificial intelligence chimed in.
Tully just chuckled. “Don’t ever change, Tact.”
“I am not due for an update for another fifty-seven cycles,” Tact replied.
Tully nodded and headed for the flight door exit. As he walked, flight deck engineers and personnel continued to cheer. He had to warn them against patting him on the back – every inch of his body was racked with pain. His arm was broken, and he still felt the pain of several cracked ribs with every step he took.
The mood turned unexpectedly somber. The cheers and claps suddenly stopped. Tully turned to see the black body bags of his team being offloaded from the Scout ship. Silence fell over the flight deck. Drummer. Rodriguez. Laskey. Conway. And the pilot, whose name Tully had never bothered to learn.
The body bags were loaded onto hover planks. They slowly drifted across the flight deck like a funeral procession. As they passed, every member of the flight deck saluted the fallen Marines and Fleet personnel. Tully did the same with his one good arm. He watched sadly as the only team he’d ever bonded with was shuffled out of the flight deck.
A skinny flight deck officer with a holo-projecting tablet approached him.
“Sir, I see seven people on the flight manifest,” the officer said. “Including you. A Private Cole Becker. Is he accounted for?”
Tully turned his thoughts to Cole, the reason behind the deaths of his team members. With any luck, Cole was suffocated, dead and buried under the snow and ice of Tartarus, but Tully couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t that simple. Every time Tully thought Cole was down for the count, he’d find a way to surprise him. Tully knew he’d probably see Cole again, and it would probably be in his nightmares.
“More like no accounting for the bad taste he left in my mouth,” Tully said before storming off. He wouldn’t get into it with the flight techs about this guy. He’d save that for the upper brass. That’s who he needed to convince.
The medics found him the moment he passed through the door. They propped him onto a stretcher and carried him to the sick bay. Tully could have walked, but after all he had been through, lying down felt pretty good.
Once inside, they administered pain meds before setting his arm and broken ribs. They worked very quickly and quietly, removing his armor while checking for other signs of injury. The medics all wore hazmat suits since his armor was incredibly radioactive at this point. They worked mostly in silence. Apparently command wanted to debrief him as soon as he was cleared by them.
Personally, Tully would have liked about a week’s sleep. Maybe more. Still, he knew he had to talk to the upper brass as much as they probably wanted to rip him a new one. They needed to know about the dangers that lay on Tartarus and throughout the galaxy. And they needed to know about the dangers presented by the likes of Cole. Cole had mentioned others. Was he just blabbering nonsense, trying to get under Tully’s skin? Or had there always been more to this? Had he accidentally set foot into a vast alien-human conspiracy, and if so, how had he made it out?
“Ouch!” Tully said as one of the medics accidentally tapped a broken rib with an instrument.
“Sorry,” the medic apologized. She was a tall brunette with a nice smile. He returned the smile, but he had a feeling this would be the extent of their exchange. He
watched as his armor was wheeled out of the room.
“Where are you taking that?” he asked.
“Command wants it scrubbed before they search it,” one of the medics said. He was slightly disappointed it wasn’t the cute brunette who had smiled at him.
“Just be careful. There’s some sensitive data on it,” Tully said.
“We understand,” the medic replied. “But it’s triggering every radiation alarm on the ship just having it here. Your armor was exposed to a great onslaught of radiation.”
“And me?” Tully asked, wondering if he had cause to worry.
“You’re fine,” the brunette replied.
“Well, I knew that already,” he said. “But thanks for confirming it.”
She rolled her eyes, but Tully still caught a smile. He then limped into a hover chair as two burly Marines arrived at the sick bay. He was pretty sure they weren’t there to swap stories.
“Are you ready, Private Tully?” one of the Marines asked. Tully just sighed. This was the part he was looking forward to the least. There weren’t enough drugs in this sick bay for this experience.
“As I’ll ever be,” he answered. The two Marines nodded to the medics and maneuvered the hover chair out of the bay. It was time for his conversation with Command. Already, Tully was started to prefer Tartarus to what came next.
Twenty-One
“Really, Tully? Aliens?” Commander Martin said through gritted teeth.
“Don’t give me that line, sir. You knew aliens were around before I set foot on Tartarus,” Tully said. After fifteen minutes of these incredulous accusations, he was done playing nice. “Just look at the footage from my heads-up display.”
“We’re trying. But the first tech who tried accessing on-board camera is being treated for radiation sickness,” General Sterns said from over his shoulder. “What the hell were you doing down there, Private?”
The trope of “good cop, bad cop” had extended well into the twenty-fifth century, but it didn’t extend into the FDF Marine Corp. In this case, it was “bad general, angry general”. Tully was hard-pressed to determine which one he liked more.
“I’m a Marine. I was doing my job,” Tully offered, before adding a very sarcastic “Sir” on the end.
“Yes, about that. Your job . . . as I recall . . . was to survey Persephone for the possibility of outpost settlement,” Commander Martin said, his eyes never leaving his tablet. He then flashed them angrily at Tully. “What happened to that assignment?
“There were . . . complications,” Tully replied.
“Yes, like the emergency landing,” Stern said.
It wasn’t an emergency landing. It was a crash landing that killed everyone else on board. Well, almost everyone.”
“After you survive, you affected repairs. But did you try to complete the mission on your own?” Sterns asked.
“There wasn’t enough time,” Tully said.
“Funny. I thought all Marines were taught to prioritize their resources. And isn’t one of the best resources time?” Sterns said.
“Okay, sure, sir, I might have been able to complete the mission and affect repairs . . . if there wasn’t interference from a third party,”
“Ahhh yes, Private Cole Becker,” General Martin said. He motioned his hand over the tablet. Cole’s service record appeared, accompanied by a picture of Cole. He looked almost normal in the picture, standing to attention, but Tully knew from experience it had been an act all along.
“Private Becker, the only member of your team you conveniently saw fit to leave behind,” Sterns said. “Has an exemplary service record for his short time in the Corp. You on the other hand . . .”
Tully sighed. He knew they were going to play this card. Every conversation with upper brass always resulted in his past inevitably coming back to haunt him.
“So here’s what I see, Private Tully,” General Martin continued. “I see an insubordinate Marine telling ghost stories while trying to cover the reasons behind his entire team being dead, and I don’t see even a shred of evidence to stop me from throwing you in the brig and leaving you to dr-”
A beep on the tablet had Martin furiously poking it.
“What?” Martin barked. “I’m in the middle of-”
“We’ve retrieved the files, sir. You’re going to want to have a look,” the voice at the other end said.
“On screen,” Martin said.
“Oh God,” Sterns immediately said. Projected before them were the pictures of the Sovereign ship. In the corner, the entire mission flashed before Tully’s eyes as the techs fast-forwarded through for signs of more intelligence. He saw every blow Cole delivered to him in an instant.
“That’s the thing from LC-7,” Sterns said.
“What’s LC-7?” Tully asked.
“It’s above your pay grade, Private,” Martin said harshly, but his voice strangely softened afterward. “And even if it weren’t, you don’t want to know.”
Tully believed him.
“It’s called the Sovereign. Or at least, that’s what Cole called . . . her,” Tully said. The two commanding officers were quiet. Tully didn’t like when they were quiet.
“Was the ship disabled?” Sterns asked, his back turned as he reviewed the footage.
“I’m not sure. I brought the whole damn cavern down on it,” Tully said.
“Good man,” Martin said, the first compliment he’d given him. “But we can’t take any chances.”
“So orbital bombardment?” Sterns asked.
“We’ll have to use shielded nukes,” Martin said. “And rail guns. Nothing else can penetrate that mess of a radiation shield.”
“Sirs,” Tully said politely in order to get their attention. “Will that be enough? It was buried under snow and ice.”
“Son,” Martin said. “By the time we’re done, there might not even be a moon left.”
Tully was at once both shocked and relieved. It wasn’t as if he had pleasant memories of that moon, but he was amazed the FDF Astraeus could bring so much force to bear on the moon.
“Private, you are dismissed,” Sterns said. “Corporal, take him back to his quarters.”
With that, his debriefing was over. The Astraeus went into battle stations immediately he departed, although Tully knew it would be a pretty one-sided battle.
Apparently, they were talking about promoting him. Still, Tully knew he was little more than a glorified poster boy now – the man who survived the Sovereign on Tartarus. It was funny. This was exactly what Cole wanted, but Cole was a manipulative bastard extraordinaire. Tully wasn’t any of those things . . . well maybe the bastard part . . . but he didn’t want this. He just wanted to do this job and get out.
Tully didn’t stay in his quarters for long. Instead, he found the nearest viewport and watched the fireworks. He couldn’t see much – just the Astraeus dumping rail gun fire and shielded missiles into the radiation field. He reflected on the mission as he leaned against the wall for support. His arm was in a sling and his torso was still bandaged to give his ribs time to heal. The good news was that he’d be off-duty for weeks at least. Plenty of time to rest . . . and to think.
His first encounter with aliens, and they’d already decided to wipe out humanity. So the FDF Astraeus was wiping them out instead. As Tully watched another nuke fly towards the vibrant colors of the radiation field, he hoped that was the end of it, even as deep down, he knew it wasn’t over.
Not by a long shot.
Twenty-Two
Colors and shapes were blurring together for Private Cole Becker. He couldn’t tell where he began and the icy moon ended. It would be over soon. Beside him, the black cube hummed.
“I’m sorry I failed you,” Cole said. “I did everything I could but . . . it wasn’t enough.”
The Box hummed in response.
“What do you mean I didn’t fail you?” Cole asked. “Tully is gone. He’s probably talking to the Fleet right now. And my faceplate is busted.”
/> His lungs made a painful sucking sound. The crack on his faceplate was small, but it was enough to expose him to the harsh radiation of the Persephone Quadrant along with the hypothermic cold. Fortunately, he would die of suffocation long before that. His air was running out, one minute at a time.
Cole reflected on his mission from the Sovereign. It had started out so well. The Scout ship had crashed. The entire team of Marines aboard dead. Except one . . . Private Lance Tully, who didn’t have the common decency to die when he was supposed to.
It didn’t matter though. Cole continued with his plans aboard the Sovereign seed-ship. It wasn’t until Tully decided to go for a little stroll that Cole was forced to reveal himself. He barely finished work on the seed-ship before Tully came snooping around.
He hoped the seed-ship’s signal had penetrated the radiation shield and got to . . . wherever it was going. He suspected the seed-ship’s ability to send messages through the radiation band far exceeded the FDF. The Sovereign might even have told him if the message was received at one point. Things were just getting . . . hazy.
Then Tully’s wrath ruined it all. He had underestimated the Marine, that much was clear. The Marine had recognized the detonation units supplied by the Sovereign and turned that technology against them. Now the seed-ship was badly damaged - beyond repair. The Sovereign told him not to worry, that everything could be fixed in its own time.
He wasn’t sure that he believed her. And that was the worst part of it all, that Tully had succeeded in making Cole doubt the faithfulness of the Sovereign. Even as the Sovereign seemed to favor that piece of trash over Cole. But in the end, his jealousy was futile. All it had achieved was to get him stranded on this icy moon with a cracked faceplate, sitting with the Box, his only means of communication with the Sovereign, waiting for death.
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