We All Died at Breakaway Station

by Richard C. Meredith

  “Then you really think our chances are better?”

  “I think our chances of winning this war have doubled, maybe tripled, Dan. I really do.”

  He looked back at the tanks. At this distance Sol was visible to the naked eye, not brilliant, but visible if you knew exactly where to look for her. Still, he could not locate her among the other, brighter, nearer stars. No matter. In three weeks she’d be the only star in the sky, in Earth’s daytime sky.

  “Carry on, Captain Maxel.”

  38

  Thirteen light-years from the yellow-white dwarf sun of the world called Breakaway lay the sun of Adrianopolis. Twenty-seven light-years in the opposite direction lay Sol and her nine worlds, and Earth, and across that distance, through the star-filled darkness, four starships flickered through microjumps, moved without moving at speeds far greater than that of light, came to the relief of Breakaway Station and her crippled guardians.

  Draw a line from Adrianopolis to Breakaway to Earth. It’s not a straight line; dogleg from Adrianopolis to Breakaway, then angle back to Earth. About forty lights. Now, pinpoint Breakaway again. Locate the galactic plane. Then, from Breakaway, facing Earth, draw another line on your right 5° above the galactic plane at 90° to the line connecting Breakaway to Earth. Follow that line out a couple of lights. What do you see?

  Look closely, for they are tiny in the immensity of space. There now, a lighter shade of blackness against the superblackness between the stars. See them? Yes, there are six of them. Bullet-shaped, blunt, awkward to us and somehow inhuman in design. Their shapes were never created by men, and their barbaric decorations were never conceived in the minds of the Children of Earth.

  They come, those six warships, at pseudospeeds as great as the four ships from Earth‌—‌and they, these dark ones, are much, much closer. And their path is down that line we have drawn, straight, unwavering toward the dun-colored world that men call Breakaway.

  39

  “Admiral.” The amplified voice of communications officer Eday Cyanta sounded on the bridge. “A call for you from General Crowinsky.”

  “Transfer it here,” Bracer replied from the captain’s position, where he stood with Daniel Maxel monitoring a static test of the ship’s sub-light nuclear engines. His left hand‌—‌the mechanical one‌—‌stabbed a button on the console. “Admiral Bracer, Captain Maxel,” said the voice of the commander of Breakaway Station when the connection had been completed. “Additional information is coming in concerning Admiral Mothershed.”

  “How does it look?” Bracer asked.

  “As yet, I don’t know,” Crowinsky said. “The way I understand it, a report in depth is going to be broadcast by Adrianopolis to all commands. I’ve been ordered to patch you into it.”

  “Very good,” Bracer said, feeling a vague sense of apprehension, remembering that, for some reason, Mothershed had come out of star drive still a very long way from his destination.

  “It will be both tri-D and audio,” Crowinsky went on. “We’ll transmit to you on maser channel 8-5.”

  “Okay,” Bracer replied. “I’ll put my communications people on it right now.”

  “Stand by then,” Breakaway’s commandant said. “We’ll begin broadcasting just as soon as the signal comes in from Adrianopolis.”

  “Standing by,” Bracer answered. “Miss Cyanta, prepare for reception on maser channel 8-5. Switch it to the main tank. Pipe audio to all stations.”

  “Yes, sir,” the petite communications officer replied, giving him a look that he now understood all too well. “Pharsalus and Cragstone will receive a relayed signal from us, is this correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Then he snapped a switch on the console before him that would cause his next words to be heard at all stations within the starship. “Attention,” he began slowly, thoughtfully, almost doubtfully, speaking into the microphone of the console. “This is the admiral. As you all know, Admiral Mothershed is nearing Adrianopolis. An all-commands report concerning the results of his expedition is about to be transmitted live to Earth. We will be allowed to monitor. You will hear the audio portion of the transmission at your stations.” Unconsciously the tone of his voice changed slightly as he spoke the next words. “I believe that all of you know how important Admiral Mothershed’s expedition is to us. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of the human race may well depend on the information that he is bringing back to the Paladine. So I suggest that you listen to the broadcast well‌—‌you’ll want to tell your grandchildren about it. That is all.”

  By the time Bracer had finished speaking, the image of Breakaway had faded from the main tank. It had been replaced by the head and shoulders of a man dressed in the uniform of a fleet admiral. The dark, deep eyes and seamed face of the commandant of Valforth Garrison, Adrianopolis, looked back at Absolom Bracer. Fleet Admiral Paolo Ommart was the man who had sent Bracer toward Earth with his command of living dead men and three crippled starships‌—‌and Bracer thought that perhaps he hated Ommart for it.

  Behind the admiral a window looked out on a large spaceport landing field that stretched toward the horizon nearly eight kilometers away. The field was scarred, blasted, pitted from the countless landings and liftings of the great warships which made their home port at Valforth Garrison, Adrianopolis. Here and there metallic glints of starships reflected the light of a bright, yellow-white, Sol-like sun, and more than one of the nearer ships showed the ravages of war; fused hull plating, truncated stubs of antennae, blackened, gaping holes, hastily improvised repairs. The scurrying, uniformed men on the field also attested to the fact that this was a place where war was known, known all too well.

  Yet Bracer looked beyond the admiral, beyond the battered, scarred field, and the warships it precariously sheltered, to the sky in which the yellow-white sun hung, a sky so like that of Earth, pale blue, clear, eggshell-fragile. Bracer knew that sky, that spaceport, that world. Lovely Adrianopolis, the second Earth.

  “Give us the audio,” he said.

  “… from this field,” the voice of Admiral Ommart was saying from the Iwo’s loudspeakers. “Now that trip is nearly over, Admiral Mothershed is seven light-hours from Adrianopolis, seven and a half billion kilometers, and though his pseudospeed generators are apparently inoperative, there is little doubt that he will soon be dropping gravs onto his home port.”

  A master showman, that Ommart, Bracer thought. He should have been an entertainer, not a spacer. Bracer could not help but admire the ease with which the fleet admiral presented his report, the aura of personal contact, the grace of the gestures that accompanied his spoken words. He had missed his calling by a long way.

  “The information that Admiral Mothershed carries is of supreme importance. This is a point that I cannot stress too strongly, though exactly what that information is we do not as yet know. All the details will not be declassified for quite some time. Still, we can rest assured that the armada now… Excuse me.”

  Admiral Ommart turned to look at someone who was standing outside the range of the tank, and whose words were not heard by the listeners on the starship. Ommart nodded gravely several times, though he did not speak in reply. At last he turned back to face his listeners, listeners all across the human portion of the galaxy.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I have just been informed that a second FTL probe from Admiral Mothershed’s flagship has been received by Port Abell. To insure that this information is passed on at once, I have ordered my technicians to connect us directly with Port Abell. You will see and hear Captain Farber of Port Abell as he reports directly to me on the contents of this second probe.”

  Nodding to someone outside the tank’s range of vision, the image of Admiral Ommart faded. Then the tank showed only formless grayness, flecked with bright specks of interstellar noise.

  “This is a hell of a way to give a report,” Maxel whispered. Bracer gave his equivalent of a nod.

  “I don’t understand it,” Maxel went on.
“It’s almost as if this were being broadcast for public consumption.”

  “Well,” Bracer said. “Crowinsky did say that this was going live to all the major commands.”

  “I know that,” Maxel said, “but I can’t see why they’ve dispensed with all the usual formalities.”

  “The honest-to-God official reports will follow later, I imagine, and they’ll toe the mark. This is just a way of getting the information across quickly‌—‌and letting Ommart show his skill at this sort of thing. He’ll be Chief of Staff before all of this is over.” Bracer was aware of the edge to his voice, the undercurrent of repressed almost-hatred, but he hoped that Maxel wasn’t.

  “I hope I don’t seem dense,” Maxel said, “but that still doesn’t explain why they’re doing it like a tri-D news show.”

  “Well, I imagine that they’re planning on using it as exactly that,” Bracer said. “Somebody’s probably writing the Chairman a speech right now. When Mothershed reaches Adrianopolis‌—‌well, Dan, that’ll be the biggest story since the Salient; bigger, since this one’s a victory for our side.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  There was something moving within Absolom Bracer’s mind that he did not express to the Iwo Jima’s captain, and it was something like the feeling that he had had when the LSS Crecy orbited UR-339-72-IV and listened for the cries of the dead observation station. An indefinable sense of wrongness, of impending disaster. Something wasn’t right, but he could not be sure what it was. Maxel felt it too, Bracer suspected, and if that were so, it wasn’t just his imagination. At least he didn’t think it was.

  The main tank cleared again. A battle-scarred captain stood at rigid attention within the tank. Behind him was the backdrop of a domed station on some airless world. It was Port Abell, the outermost planet of the Adrianopolitan system; the nearest human station to Admiral Albion Mothershed’s crippled flagship.

  The captain on Port Abell, apparently realizing that the FTL link between Adrianopolis and Port Abell had been completed, snapped a salute.

  “Captain Farber reporting, sir.”

  “Proceed, Captain Farber,” said the disembodied voice of Admiral Ommart.

  “Sir,” Farber began with ramrod stiffness, “Admiral Mothershed’s FTL probe has been intercepted and its message decoded. Shall I read it aloud?”

  “Please do, captain,” Ommart’s cultured voice said.

  A communications technician handed the captain a sheet of paper.

  Farber took the paper, began to read the meaningless code numbers, coordinates, salutation that began the message, then stopped cold.

  “What is it, Farber?” Admiral Ommart’s voice asked.

  “Sir,” Farber replied, anguish, fear showing on his scarred face, “Sir, Admiral Mothershed is under attack.”

  40

  We cannot know with anything like certainty what was taking place aboard the six bullet-shaped warships that were speeding toward Breakaway. We know too little of the workings of the Jillie mind even now, after all that has happened. But we can imagine, we can reconstruct, extrapolate, visualize.

  Let us then visualize the bridge of the flagship of the Jillie fleet.

  Though the leading ship of the Jillie fleet was every bit as large as the Iwo Jima, its bridge, or more properly, its control room was much smaller, half the size of the Iwo’s or less. And within that control room there were but five officers, if “officer” is the proper translation of the Jillie expression, and even of this we cannot be sure.

  The highest ranking of those five could be called “captain,” though “lord” or “autocrat” might be better terms, for the senior officer of a Jillie warship had an absolute authority unknown to even the most ruthless of mankind’s captains. Its word was Law, and the slightest infraction of it was instant and unpleasant death; we might say “painful death,” but the Jillies did not experience pain in the same sense that we do. If the senior officer of a Jillie warship were to tell its crew that the Orion Nebula was a slice of apple pie, then, by God, it was a slice of pie, and they’d do their damnedest to eat it, every crumb.

  Yet, to a Jillie, this did not have the same sort of meaning that it would have had to a human. This, to the dark, leathery aliens, was as it should be. This, in fact, was the only way it could be. Any other situation would have been inconceivable. And that made them very difficult, very dangerous opponents.

  This autocrat of the starship spent most of its time sitting in state on a dais overlooking the small bridge, each of its wide-spaced eyes roving independently around the control room. Before it were the four remaining officers, each in audio and video contact with their respective sections of the starship. One of the officers supervised weapons, of which it had many, and the craft’s defenses. One Jillie officer was the overseer of engineering and damage control; another of astrogation; and the last of communications and telemetry. Each was a lord in its own right, answerable only to its supreme lord who sat godlike above him.

  There was a sixth intelligence within the small control room, for the Jillies, like mankind, had learned the value of “organic computers,” living brains wired into the electromechanical workings of the starship, a brain, divorced of a living body, able to devote all its energies to the functioning of the starship. But, unlike its human counterparts, the organic computer of this Jillie warship had probably not been the victim of horrible mutilation prior to its incorporation into the ship. Its body had most likely been sound when its skull was opened and its living brain removed. Its mind had merely been of the proper sort for this type of work, and it had therefore been put to that task. The loss of its living body had probably been disturbing to the organic computer, but its brain had been needed, and that had most likely been enough for it. “The clan wills it.” This mind, this encased brain floating in a nutrient solution, wired to gauges and meters and sensors, was also conscious of the lord who sat over it.

  Now all was well within the Jillie flagship. All systems were functioning properly. And the yellow-glowing sun of Breakaway was swelling in the viewing tanks, a star that even now stood out far more brightly than the rest.

  We can imagine that the autocrat, tiring of sitting on its dais, rose and slowly walked around the small control room, perhaps with its six-fingered hands clasped behind its back, peering at scopes and displays and screens, checking to see whether all was as it supposed things to be.

  This extraterrestrial was probably no more than a meter and a half tall, for few of its kind ever exceeded this height, and in all likelihood its gastrointestinal sack was safely stored in its quarters until the time came for the assimilation of the foods that it had digested. So this autocrat was pinched thin at the waist like a wasp, lacking a part of its body, though that did not disturb it in the least, this being the normal state of affairs.

  As it paced it perhaps observed things of which it did not approve, for that was its job, its very reason for existing, and reprimands were given to those who had been at fault. Probably few, if any, of the violators were executed, then fed into the nutrient tanks that supplied the bulk of the food supplies aboard a Jillie starship. Such executions would have to wait until after the impending battle when every hand would be needed to man the weapons and systems that supported them. Perhaps it made notes of these infractions, or perhaps it just remembered them, for it, like all members of its species, must have had a capacious memory.

  Later it would return to its dais, sit down, and observe from a distance the actions of its officers and its crew.

  Exactly what was occurring within the mind of this Jillie autocrat as its six ships approached Breakaway would be impossible to guess, though perhaps we would not be wrong in surmising that it thought about the world before it, about the mission that its own superiors had given it: the total destruction of Breakaway Station, the shattering of the communications link between the Paladine and Earth, accursed Earth.

  And perhaps we can also guess that there were thoughts of hatred in its mind,
for surely the Jillies were capable of hatred. We cannot suppose that all their atrocities were performed coldly, without anger. It must have hated the men it had been sent to kill, though we cannot know why it hated them.

  Perhaps there were personal reasons, if the Jillies do have what we could call “personal feelings.” Perhaps a close “stomach brother” had been killed by human star-men. Perhaps the world upon which this Jillie autocrat had been born had been ravaged by the ships from Earth. Or perhaps it hated mankind for less personal reasons, for whatever reason it was that this war had begun, whatever taboo we had violated, whatever sin we had unknowingly committed. Or perhaps just for our existence, the fact that we were, and some Jillie philosophy said that we should not be.

  But then perhaps it did not hate us at all. Perhaps it came to kill us because it had been told to kill us, and for no other reason. We cannot know. We can never know.

  Yet it came, it and its six ugly ships, armed with all the weapons of destruction of which the Jillies seemed so proud‌—‌if pride was something that the Jillies could feel.

  And as those six bullet-shaped ships grew closer to Breakaway, there came a time when the autocrat of the flagship gave its command, something that might have been the equivalent of mankind’s “general quarters.” The Jillie crew moved rapidly to their stations, checked their weapons, their support systems, prepared to fight, to destroy.

  So on they came toward Breakaway Station.

  41

  Absolom Bracer stood near the center of the bridge, unmoving, barely breathing, his artificial eyes fixed on the tri-B tank that showed the interior of the domed station on Port Abell, and he waited and he prayed. The full story was coming. Perhaps it was not as bad as it sounded.

  Captain Farber was a veteran, and one whom the disciplines of military life did not escape for long. It had taken only a moment for him to regain control of himself, to return to ramrod stiffness and slowly, carefully, perhaps painfully complete his report, his disastrous report. And what it said was this: Admiral Mothershed had, in fact, achieved his goal, and his fleet had begun its return to the Paladine without serious damage. Begun, but not ended. Somewhere, somehow the Jillies had detected them as they were about to turn their bows toward the distant Paladine, and had sent after them another fleet. Perhaps, the admiral said, the Jillies had even guessed their purpose and had sent their warships to see that they never returned to human space to give their report.