We All Died at Breakaway Station

by Richard C. Meredith

  Then the admirals placed him on the bridge of the Iwo Jima, gave him a handful of officers and a crew in little better shape than himself, gave him another warship likewise outfitted, gave him the hospital ship Rudoph Cragstone to escort, and aimed them all Earthward.

  “We will give you cover into interstellar space,” Fleet Admiral Paolo Ommart had said. “Once clear of the system and into star drive, you should be able to avoid any Jillie warships.”

  So, with his orders, and his pain, Absolom Bracer and his three starships lifted from Adrianopolis of the Paladine, aimed toward dim and distant Sol, and went into star drive, moving in microjumps of fantastic pseudospeed, motionless motion, across the dark universe.

  Now the trip was nearly a third over. Beautiful, Earthlike Adrianopolis lay far behind, her sun almost lost among the stars. And the sun of the world called Breakaway swelled in the tanks. The worst danger was past. At least the admirals had told him it would be, but then it is not always wise to believe all that admirals say. They have a job to do too.

  …captain… the mental voice of the OC, Roger, rang within his skull. …one minute to cutoff of stardrive…

  …acknowledge…

  His right hand‌—‌the real one‌—‌automatically fell across the all-call switch of the console before him. And as automatically he spoke:

  “Attention all hands. This is the captain. Star drive will be cut in one minute. All hands to stations. Full Alert.” And he wondered, despite himself, how many of his crew had hands, real hands, and not prosthetics. Hands!

  To Roger: …begin counting…

  The voice of the Organic Computer, pieced modulations, snips of the sound of the voice of a man, confident, reassuring, fatherlike, began counting down the seconds until star drive was cut, until the three starships ceased their motionless motion, ceased microjumping through the universe, returned to normal and real space time.

  Wish I could let the crew have shore leave at Breakaway, Bracer said to himself. Might do them good to blow off a little steam. But, as Doc Jaffe says, it might be even worse than their being cooped up in this ship‌—‌to see normal people, men and women with the proper number of arms and legs and eyes. In our little universe we’ve sort of adjusted to the idea that no one has the number of things he ought to have. What would happen if they‌—‌we‌—‌I‌—‌saw normal… That’s enough of that! We don’t have time for shore leave anyway.

  Bracer touched a switch on the console before him.

  “Yes, captain,” replied the voice of Eday Cyanta, the legless communications officer.

  “As soon as star drive is cut, see if you can raise Breakaway Station.”

  “Yes, sir,” the comm officer replied. “I’m already on their frequency and will begin transmitting immediately after cutoff.”

  “Very good.”

  “Thirty seconds,” said the audible voice of Roger the OC.

  A third of the way back, Bracer said to himself again, Thirteen light-years of it behind us. Twenty-seven still to go. Pick up the wounded here, stow them in the Cragstone, move on toward Earth. It’s not going to be so bad if we all keep our heads.

  Wonder how Mothershed’s doing, he thought again. Wonder if he’s even still alive. Good chance he isn’t. The Jillies probably caught him a long time ago. But, God, I wish I were with him!

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  A flaming pain flickered in the ends of severed nerves, a place where a primitive and unreasoning part of his mind thought his left thumb was, but where he knew was nothing, nothing at all! He bit his lower lip, cursed the doctors, wished they’d allowed him drugs, knew it was best that they hadn’t, and cursed the admirals on Adrianopolis, and particularly Admiral Ommart, for making it all necessary.

  Then it came. “Star drive out.”

  That last comment from Roger had been totally superfluous. No one had to be told that he was coming out of star drive. You knew that in the marrow of your bones; to the very core of your being you knew that the pseudospeed generators were no longer operating, that the universe was again the universe and not some meaningless in-between limbo that could not be expressed in words, only in mathematical symbols. Oh, how obsolete language is in the day of star travel! Bracer looked over toward the communications officer, saw the tank before her flickering as she attempted to establish visual contact with Breakaway Station.

  …orders, captain?… Roger asked.

  …stand by… Bracer replied. Then, into the microphone: “This is the captain. We are now out of star drive and approaching Breakaway Station. The ship will remain on full alert until we have established orbit. That is all.”

  By this time there was a recognizable image forming in the communications officer’s tank.

  “Give it to me,” Bracer said.

  Moments later the communications tank in his own console came to life, flickered, then cleared, revealing the three-dimensional image of a heavy-set, middle-aged man wearing the insignia of a colonel in the Communications Corps, Armed Forces of the Galean League.

  “Colonel, I am Captain Absolom Bracer, commanding officer of the LSS Iwo Jima, registry number TU-819, flagship of Hospital Convoy 031, out of Adrianopolis, bound for Earth, flight 311-68.” All this Bracer said as an expected formality: all the necessary information about the identity and purpose of his ships had already been automatically beamed to Breakaway in the identification signals broadcast microseconds after coming out of star drive. “I think you’re expecting us,” he concluded.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the image within the tri-D tank. “You’re matching your ETA within several hours.” The Communications Corps officer on Breakaway paused for a moment, then asked, “Did you have a good trip out?” There was an odd edge to the commander’s voice when he asked about the trip, something which Bracer attributed to the half-human, half-machine appearance that he himself presented to the officer. “Good enough,” he replied. “No Jillies, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m glad to hear that, sir,” said the communications officer on the distant planet, and again with what Bracer believed to be an edge to his voice.

  Something’s eating that man, Bracer told himself, but it’s probably none of my business what it is. They’ve got their own troubles down there. If it is my business, he’ll tell me‌—‌I hope.

  “Oh, pardon me, captain,” the image said suddenly. “I’m Arthur Lasin, Breakaway’s comm officer.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, Colonel Lasin,” Bracer said, and then went on slowly, probingly, wondering suddenly whether the relief convoy that had preceded his own three ships from Adrianopolis by a week was somehow connected with the commander’s discomfort. “I trust that Captain Donnelson has arrived safely.”

  “Captain Bracer,” Commander Lasin began slowly, “I suggest that you discuss this with General Crowinsky.” Bracer felt the breath of a cold night wind where his stomach should have been. Maybe…

  “Very well,” he replied at last. “Connect me with your commanding officer.”

  “I‌—‌I believe he’s in his office, captain,” the communications officer of Breakaway Station stammered in reply. “Please stand by.”

  Oh, dear God, don’t tell me that the relief convoy never made it. That convoy left a week before we did. Should have been here six, seven days ago. Three battle cruisers and a freighter. The Jillies couldn’t have stopped it, couldn’t have prevented it from reaching Breakaway with those supplies and equipment and men. God, it couldn’t have happened!

  And another part of Bracer’s mind said slowly, coldly, bitterly, The hell it couldn’t have!

  2

  Comm Tech Sheila Brandt knelt on the cold, naked stone, cramped and uncomfortable in her vac-suit, and carefully clipped the probes of the meter she held in her hand to a set of terminals on the device embedded in the stone. There was an aching in her breast and in her loins and she didn’t know which was from the interminable fear and which was from her longing for Len. God, she was scared, she tho
ught, and asked herself why, because now there wasn’t any need to be. Nothing was going to happen now. Then she looked up, waited for the orders from her section chief, and looked across the stone and dust toward the distant, ragged hills.

  It was summer now, she thought, though summer only meant that it was always day here at the planet’s pole. It certainly didn’t make any noticeable difference in the amount of heat they received from the feeble yellow star that was Breakaway’s excuse for a sun, but then no one who had been on Breakaway for any length of time expected it to. Breakaway was simply a hell of a duty station.

  Still, she told herself, trying to drive down her unreasoning fear, it was almost nice to be able to come out onto the surface again, after being cooped up there underground for so long, cramped in there with all those other people. It was almost a kind of freedom.

  Well, it really wasn’t that long, she told herself after a few moments of thought, just three weeks, but, Lord, that seemed like a long time. But then, three weeks and a day ago she hadn’t even expected to be alive this much longer‌—‌not with those Jillie ships bombing and beaming Breakaway like they had been‌—‌and just being alive was something to be happy about in itself.

  And maybe things weren’t quite as bad as she and everybody else made them out to be. There was supposed to be help coming from the Paladine, and if the stories were true, Earth was getting ready to do something really big, like a full-scale attack on the Jillie homeworlds themselves. And if they did that, the Jillies wouldn’t even think of going to the trouble of hitting Breakaway again. So, well, who knows…

  “Brandt!” Her name sounded loudly in the headphones of her helmet and startled her back into the here and now. There was no question that her section chief was angry about something.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sheila said, half rising and raising her arm.

  “Get off your ass,” said the section chief, a middle-aged woman with both the looks and disposition of a Cynthian Rock Ape. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sheila answered again, standing fully erect now, with the meter in her hands, its test leads drooping down to where they connected with the half-buried shunt.

  Sheila stood still for a moment, waiting for what was coming next, feeling even more uncomfortable in the vac-suit than before. It pulled tightly around her thighs and constricted her breasts when she tried to breathe, and she wished that she could take the damned thing off and throw it in the chiefs face.

  “Now, are you ready for us to run this test, Miss Brandt?” The section chiefs voice dripped with sarcasm.

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m ready,” Sheila said, biting her lip inside the transparent sphere of her helmet and telling herself that it wasn’t going to do a bit of good to get angry with the old bitch. In just a few more minutes they would be finished with the day’s tests and then they could go off duty for a few hours at least, and she could get a little sleep, and then if Len was off duty too, they could do what she had found Len to be very good at doing. Well, maybe, if Len wasn’t too exhausted…

  “Okay,” the section chief said, “all of you monitoring the shunts, keep a close eye on your meters and make sure they’re recording. We’ll apply power to this net in exactly one minute. You got that, Thayer? One minute.”

  Dea Thayer, Comm Tech First, and Sheila’s closest friend, knelt beside the power-pack some dozen meters to Sheila’s left and answered, “Got it, chief.” Sheila envied Dea her confidence, her ability to look the chief right in the eye and say what she thought The old bitch didn’t bother Dea much, not if she knew what was good for her.

  Then she looked back down at the meter in her hands, punched a button that would begin running the recording tape through the device, and wished that she understood more of what they were doing out here anyway. Well, it really wasn’t her business to know what she was doing. She just took orders. If there was anybody out here who did know what was going on, it was Dea. The chief sure as hell didn’t know, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

  It wasn’t that Sheila was as ignorant as she thought herself to be‌—‌she just didn’t have confidence in her own knowledge of subspectrum physics and its related branches of more nearly conventional electronics. She did, however, know that what they were doing was checking out sections of the main antenna of the modulation station of Breakaway’s north pole. About a third of that antenna was still intact and functioning, and now carrying the full load of incoming and outgoing signals. In fact, if she shielded her eyes from the glow of Breakaway’s sun and looked in the right direction, she could see the glow of ionization in the thin atmosphere near the horizon where the outgoing signal climbed skyward.

  No, Sheila told herself as she waited for the chief to give Dea the signal to go ahead, it wasn’t that the station wasn’t functioning, but that it was functioning on a limited basis and on borrowed time. A third of the antenna array could carry the full load of communications for a while, but only for a while. More antenna was needed soon before they had burned out what they had left.

  So teams like the ones of which Sheila was a member went out onto the surface after the clean-up crews had removed the waste and rubble, found the sections of the antenna net that the clean-up crews hadn’t pulled up for scrap, and tested them.

  If they tested out good, another team of more highly trained technicians would come along behind them and begin connecting those surviving portions back into the operating antenna net. So far the teams had discovered about a hundred square kilometers of antenna that still worked‌—‌though four times that many square kilometers had proved to be less than useless. Jillie energy beams had wrecked close to half the antenna, at the very best.

  But, Sheila told herself, thank God they hadn’t gotten a nuke or two in. Then there wouldn’t be any antenna at all, or any Sheila Brandt to worry about it.

  “Give me power, Thayer!” the section chief said at last. “Watch your meters.”

  Sheila looked down at the device in her hand and waited for some sign that the section of the antenna she was connected to was still good. She made a few quick calculations in her head, figuring from the amount of power that Dea’s pack could put out, the number of shunts now under test and supposedly still good, and came up with a rough idea of how much her meter should indicate if it checked out right.

  The needle of the device wiggled against its post, and then began to climb, registering the flow of electric current through the shunt, the dropping of voltage across its resistance. Quickly, very quickly the needle came up to the point Sheila had selected for it, and then slightly beyond. It was checking out good.

  “Cut power,” the section chief said to Dea Thayer. “By number, give me your readings.”

  “Number one,” said the voice of Comm Tech Third Mami D’Ocour in Sheila’s headphones. “Seven six point six.”

  “Number two,” responded the next technician, “seven five point zero.”

  Down the line the team read off their figures, none varying more than two or three volts in either direction. “Number eight,” Sheila said, “seven six point four.”

  At last the final reading was given and the section chief was silent for a moment, looking through the globe of Her helmet at the clipboard in her hands and the figures she had jotted down.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said after a while. “Comes out real good, gang. We got ourselves another hundred square meters of antenna. That’s better than gettin’ screwed on Sunday morning.” Then she was silent for a moment, probably talking to her own superior by a private communications channel. Then, finally, she spoke again. “Okay, girls, we’ll knock off for now. Go back and get yourselves a little, and report in to me at oh-nine-fifty. Dismissed!”

  Sheila sighed, decided that she really did hate the dirty-mouthed old chief, and then made something with her face that might have been a smile if anyone had been able to see it, and walked over to where Dea Thayer stood beside her power-pack.

  “Can I give you a han
d with that?” she asked the comm tech first as she felt the beginning of the return of the fear that she had almost forgotten, the fear that she had tried to talk herself out of‌—‌unsuccessfully.

  Dea looked up as she approached, and Sheila could see her smiling through the transparent helmet. “Sure,” Dea’s voice replied in her headphones, “this bastard’s heavy.”

  Grabbing one handle while Dea grabbed the other, Sheila lifted and felt the weight of the thing rise from the cold stone, and wondered how many women it would take to carry the old, awkward power-pack on Cynthia or any other worthwhile planet where people could live, without spacesuits. Well, she hoped that she never found out. When she got back to Cynthia‌—‌God willing!‌—‌she wanted to do it as a civilian and get some decent kind of work, even if that meant going nude and being a permanent meditator in one of the Tribal meditation halls.

  Together the two women started out across the rough stone toward the air lock that led into the underground tunnels and wardens that made up the modulation station of Breakaway’s northern pole.

  “You going to see Len?” Dea asked after they had crossed about half that distance.

  “Hope so,” Sheila answered, trying to shake herself from her gloom and foreboding. “He’s supposed to get off at oh-four-hundred today.”

  “What are you two going to do?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Sheila answered in mock anger, attempting to seem as cheerful as her friend.

  “The whole time?” Dea asked, glancing over at Sheila and smiling.

  “I don’t know, Dea,” Sheila answered, giving up the effort of keeping up a cheerful front. “We might go down to the canteen for a beer or something. There’s not much else to do.”