We All Died at Breakaway Station

by Richard C. Meredith

  She almost fell asleep before she roused herself, stood up, shuffled her feet to get circulation going again, and then started out.

  She had completed half heir round when she heard a voice calling her name. She turned to see a man walking down the service corridor, and it took her a few moments to recognize him. It was Tommy Decker, Dea’s new boy friend.

  “Hello, Sheila,” he said.

  “Hello, Tommy. What are you doing here?”

  “Came down to see you,” he said, leaning against a cold, riveted panel before her. “Had a few minutes off and didn’t know what to do with myself.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I know, but what the hell? Nobody’ll notice, will they?”

  “I don’t know,” Sheila said doubtfully.

  “You’ve got it pretty good down here, you know,” Decker said, looking around. “Nobody to bug you. Just go around reading these meters and things.”

  “It gets tiresome,” Sheila said, almost angrily. “I’ve been on this shift for twelve hours already and I don’t know when I’m going to get relieved.”

  “Why don’t you sit down and rest for a few minutes?” Decker suggested.

  “Nobody’ll know, and your gadgets can get along without you for a while. Anyway, I got a couple of happysticks. Care for one?”

  Sheila found herself tempted. A few moments of rest were something she desperately needed, and a few inhalations of the euphoric smoke of a happystick might get some of these tensions out of her. But she was on duty. She had a job to do. It had to be done.

  “Come on now,” Decker said. “You got to get off your feet for a few minutes. If you don’t you’ll end up like Dea?”

  “What do you mean?” Sheila asked, alarmed.

  “You didn’t hear about Dea?”

  “No.”

  “She collapsed yesterday. They put her in the hospital. Totally exhausted and on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown.”

  “How bad is she?”

  “Oh,” Decker said, “she’ll be okay in a few days after she gets rested up. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you.”

  “Why?” Sheila asked, suddenly on guard.

  “You’re Dea’s friend and I like you. Anyway, I’m lonesome too. Come on, sit down and have a whiff.”

  Sheila looked at the two happysticks he pulled from his pocket and she felt her will power drain from her. What could happen in five or ten minutes? Breakaway Station could function without her.

  “Okay,” she finally said, “but just for a few minutes.”

  “That’s my girl,” Decker said. “Where’s a good place where nobody’ll find us?”

  “This is as good as any,” Sheila said, gesturing toward an unoccupied area of the floor between two banks of relays.

  “Okay,” Decker said and led her to the place she indicated.

  In a few moments Decker had the two happysticks glowing; their aromatic smoke filled the air.

  “Take a deep whiff,” he said. “Do you good.”

  Sheila held the stick up to her nose and breathed deeply. The smoke smelled good, felt good as it traveled through her nostrils and down into her lungs, filling and warming her, easing from her the burdens of her duties.

  “Feel better now?” Decker asked.

  Sheila nodded, thought briefly about Len, wished it were he with her rather than Decker.

  The man shifted closer to her, put his arm around her shoulder. She started to shrug it away, then relaxed a little more and told herself that there wasn’t anything wrong with Decker putting his arm around her shoulder; that didn’t mean anything, really.

  “You’re from Cynthia, aren’t you?” Decker asked. “Dea said you were.”

  “Yes,” Sheila responded, for the first time in weeks really feeling at ease.

  She leaned back, supported by Decker’s arm, and felt the fatigue begin to flow out of her. That was really a good happystick, she thought, a lot better than most. “Is it true what they say about Cynthian girls?”

  “What do they say about Cynthian girls?” Sheila asked, surprised to find herself snugging a little closer to Decker‌—‌well, he wasn’t exactly ugly!‌—‌and wondering if maybe these happysticks were the kind she had heard about, the ones with a form of k’peck in them. Could it be? Did it matter?

  “You know,” Decker was saying.

  “No,” she said, teasing him, for she knew well the stories about Cynthian girls.

  “Come on. You know, what they teach about Life and all that stuff.”

  “Oh, that,” Sheila said, feeling Decker’s hand slipping down under her arm and onto her breast, and finding that she liked it. She liked Decker. She liked the whole world. “My mother was a Tribalist, but Daddy was an Orthodox Restorationist.”

  “Which are you?” Decker asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sheila answered, moving still closer to Decker and slipping one of her hands onto his thigh, and wondering why she had ever thought she didn’t like him. “A little of both, I guess. Sometimes one, sometimes the other.”

  “Which are you now?” Decker asked, pulling downward on the clasps of her blouse and snapping them open. His hand entered through the opening, worked its way into her bra, resting on naked flesh, squeezing.

  “A Tribalist, I think,” Sheila said, noticing how ethereal the lights had become and wondering why she had never noticed their beauty before.

  “You want to take this off?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Decker helped her off with her blouse, but she undid the snaps of her slacks and pulled them down without assistance. Her scant underclothing soon followed and lay in an untidy pile at the rear of the tiny enclosure in which they lay.

  “Take yours off too,” she said, feeling very warm and comfortable, and just a little bit excited about what a wonderful man Tommy Decker was and how much she wanted him.

  “You’re sure we’re safe here?” Decker asked, suddenly less confident. “There hasn’t been anyone around in hours,” Shelia told him, holding the happystick to her nose and breathing in as deeply as she could.

  Decker dropped his pants, revealing his own excitement to her but he still seemed hesitant about removing his shirt.

  “You too,” Shelia said, finding that she didn’t want to talk anymore. She just wanted Decker, though he had to play the game her way. If she was naked, he would have to be too. “Come on or I won’t do it with you.”

  “Okay, baby.” He pulled off his shirt and laid it aside. After removing the remainder of his underclothing, he was as nude as she.

  “Be gentle, Tommy,” she said as she spread her legs wide apart and Decker lowered himself onto and then into her.

  She sighed from very deep inside of her. Oh, that was good. God, she didn’t know it could be so good. Oh, Tommy, go on, go on. Tommy, do it…

  The universe exploded into a scream!

  “What’s that?” Decker cried, leaping up and grabbing for his clothing.

  “Alarm!” Sheila answered, euphoria congealing into fear as memory and thought came back to her‌—‌the meter that had been near the red. The automatics hadn’t detected it, and she‌—‌she had failed to rechannel the power. Leaping up, disregarding her clothing, she ran across the room to the bank of meters and relays containing the questionable circuit. The needle was fully in the red, yet power still flowed through it and it was burning out.

  She hit a switch that passed the power out of that circuit and into another, but that circuit was also near its capacity. The added power load drove its needle into the red area. At this point automatic safety controls came into operation, but they were too late. The damage was done. One overloaded circuit broke down, power was redistributed into other circuits that could not handle it either, one after another failing. Red lights flashed on in banks, alarm after alarm screamed.

  “Oh, God, oh, God,” Sheila cried. “What have I done?”

  Electricity jumped in crazy arcs as whole banks f
ailed under the stress. Circuit breakers kicked out. Power channels cut. Then suddenly‌—‌it all failed, all the circuits in the substation.

  And Sheila, naked, frightened Sheila, was plunged into darkness and she screamed.

  33

  For twenty-five standard days the three starships had been orbiting Breakaway, had been waiting and hoping, men and women watching the chronometers tick away the seconds, the minutes, the hours, slowly devouring the time until the relief ships would come from Earth, until they could leave, could go on to Earth, to safety, whatever safety there was for mankind as long as the Jillies chose to wage war.

  A strange double sensation was felt by most of the crewmen of those starships now, now that they had adjusted to everything else. One was: as the days went by, the likelihood of a Jillie return seemed greater and greater, for some reason, and no one could believe that the Jillies had accomplished their mission as long as Breakaway Station continued to relay messages from Adrianopolis to Earth, from Earth to Adrianopolis, and this she continued to do, despite the continual weakening of her facilities, despite the disaster that had knocked out one of the main substations in the modulation center. Despite all this, Breakaway Station still fulfilled her function, and the Jillies would be back to see that that ended sooner or later, and more likely sooner than later.

  Yet, as the tension grew, it was almost counterbalanced by the thought that the starships from Earth were, in fact, coming to relieve them. Already they had lifted from Lunaport and were out of the Solar System. They were eight days out of Earth now, and short of a disaster‌—‌which no one aboard the starships in orbit or on Breakaway wanted to consider‌—‌they would pull into Breakaway’s planetary system in no more than six days.

  Just six days, and then Captain, er, Admiral Bracer could turn his responsibilities over to his relieving officer and the three battered starships could go home, their crews with a clear conscience, the knowledge and the pride that they had been something like heroes. Why, they might even all get medals for it. The Old Man would for sure.

  So the standard minutes grew into standard hours, which in their turn became standard days. They could wait that much longer. They could!

  Sometimes, when the time stretched by too slowly, when the conversation became too dull, when the chess games lost their flavor, when the gunnery practice became too tedious, when the memories became too hard to bear, Bracer would think about those ships that were coming from Earth. He would imagine how they must look now, lost in interstellar space, four great spheres of metal and paraglas, clean and unscarred, bristling with their energy cannon, dimpled with missile tubes and torpedo launchers, reflecting distant starlight from their turrets. They would be hard to see with normal vision now, he would think; they would have a ghostlike quality, half transparent as they flickered into and out of reality under pseudospeed, but still they would be beautiful to see.

  And sometimes he would recite their names to himself: Marathon, Normandy, Nicaea, Valencia, and he liked the sounds of their names. This was a new LSS Marathon. The last ship to carry that name, like so many others, had never returned from the Salient. And the Normandy‌—‌how many ships before her had borne that name? The last Normandy before her had been destroyed by the Jillies off Rombeck, back when Rombeck still thought it could remain neutral. Nicaea was a new name for a League starship, he thought, as was Valencia, and he hoped that both ships lasted a long time and created legends with those names.

  He knew none of their captains. They were all young men, newly blooded in the Paladine and around the Vegan territory, but they were reliable men, or else they would not have been put in command of heavy battle cruisers. There were one of them to spare in the hands of men who were not equal to their demands.

  So those ships came, and Bracer sighed and hoped that he would live to meet their captains, and counted down the days like his crew.

  34

  Admiral Albion Mothershed was a man sick to his heart. So long. So much. So close. It just wasn’t possible that after all he and his crews and his ships had endured they could not make it home. Not that there was any certainty about it yet, but things continued to look worse.

  He paced the deck of the bridge of the San Juan, waited for the next report from his engineering officer. There had to be something that could be done to the pseudospeed generators. They couldn’t burn out now! Somehow they had to be nursed a little more, pushed to their mechanical limits so that the remnant of the fleet could limp back into the Paladine, could get Mothershed’s message to Earth.

  He read again the second message sent by FTL probe from Hybeck. And there was no doubt in his mind that the Jillies were still after them, growing closer all the time, and unless he were able to get back into star drive soon, they would catch up long before they reached Adrianopolis.

  Mothershed turned to the San Juan’s captain, said, “Well, what do you think, March?”

  Captain March Stalinko shook his head sadly. “I have no suggestions, sir. It would be pointless to try to transfer the data to either the Hastings or the Chicago. They’re in little better shape than we are. And probes‌—‌well, we just don’t have that many probes left.”

  Mothershed nodded gravely. “Well, there’s no two ways about it. We either get the San Juan home or the League has lost a lot of ships and men to no good purpose.”

  There was a blackness in Albion Mothershed’s soul that he had seldom felt before. He had never been a man given to despair, but now it was hard to avoid. His hope was a very fragile and precarious thing.

  He turned back to the command console and buzzed engineering. “Engineering,” answered a voice as the tank cleared.

  “Mr. Dewey?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the face that appeared in the tank, that of the chief engineering officer.

  “How are you coming?”

  Dewey was silent for a few moments before he answered. “I’m not sure, sir. I believe we can rebuild a couple of circuits and try to bypass some of the burned-out ones, but we can never expect to get up to full pseudospeed again.”

  “How soon will it be before you’re certain?”

  “Give me half an hour, sir, and then I can say something for sure.”

  “Very well, call me back as soon as you have anything at all.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mothershed snapped off the console’s communicator, and turned back to face Captain Stalinko.

  “Are you a praying man, March?”

  The Hastings was the first to sight them, very faintly registering on the scopes and scanners, a squadron of craft moving under pseudospeed at a very great distance, moving directly toward the sub-light human craft. The captain of the Hastings immediately informed the admiral.

  “Yes, I have them, sir,” the astrogation officer of the San Juan said. “It looks like five of them.”

  “Can you identify them?” Mothershed asked.

  “Do they need identification, sir?” Captain Stalinko asked. “Can there be any question about who they are?”

  Mothershed shook his head. “Get me engineering.”

  Engineering Officer Dewey’s face formed in the tank. “Dammit, Dewey, what are you doing?”

  “Sorry, sir, but I was about to call you,” the agitated engineer said. “Well?”

  “I think we can start, sir. I won’t guarantee the generators’ efficiency, but we can get a few hundred microjumps a second, I figure.”

  “How long to build potential?” Mothershed asked, looking back anxiously at the astrogator’s scopes.

  “Building now, sir,” Dewey said. “We can start jumping in, oh, five minutes, if we’ve got to.”

  “We’ve got to, Dewey. Company’s coming”

  “Yes, sir!” Dewey said.

  “I’m turning control of the ship over to the OC,” Mothershed said. “Follow his orders.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dewey said.

  Then the admiral turned to the San Juan’s communications officer. “Tell Hastings
and Chicago to proceed without us. We’ll follow them shortly.” Then, back to Captain Stalinko. “How many scouts do you have left?”

  “Half a dozen, sir.”

  “Get volunteers,” Mothershed said slowly. “I want men ready to die. It’s a suicide mission, captain, but I want them to do anything they can to slow those Jillies down.”

  “Yes, sir,” the San Juan’s captain said. “I’ll find the men.”

  “And tell them, March,” Mothershed said, his voice almost broken with emotion, “tell them I’d go with them if I could.”

  “I will, sir.”

  Soon the Hastings and the Chicago were flickering into and out of nonreality, increasing in pseudospeed, moving toward the still distant Paladine and away from the San Juan.

  Shortly after that, six tiny scout ships burst from the San Juan’s bays, picked up speed, went into star drive and headed toward the approaching Jillie warships. Albion Mothershed knew that none of them would ever return.

  Then the San Juan, its pseudospeed generators held together by little more than men’s determination, began to flicker itself, began to move again toward distant home. And deep inside it, down in the engineering department, Mr. Dewey watched the gauges and meters and quietly told himself, though he told no other, that the generators wouldn’t make it; there was no way in the universe that they could carry the San Juan all the way home. But, by damn! he’d see that they got as close as they could.

  35

  It was “morning,” ship’s time, of the twenty-sixth day when Admiral Bracer was awakened by his steward.

  “What is it, Jackson?”

  “A call from Breakaway Station, sir. Will you take it here?”

  “Yes,” Bracer said, fighting down the nameless fear, the obscure but sharp pains that always assailed him upon awakening.

  “Get me some breakfast, will you, Jackson?”

  “Yes, sir. Eggs, sir?”

  “If we have any left. And ham, too, lots of it, and a pot of the blackest coffee you can make.”