Beckman levels his gun on the entrance. “In about thirty seconds, ten minutes is going to feel like an hour, but we’ll hold them.”
James looks over at him. “Glad you’re here with me for this.”
Beckman gives him a nod. “Remember, I’ve got armor, and you don’t. Keep your cover.”
“Roger that.”
James props his rifle into the vee formed by his crisscrossed beams. His left arm is nearly useless with his elbow tucked against his ribs. He flicks the rifle’s selector switch to automatic.
As the shuttle closes on the airlock, two floodlights illuminate from its nose, blindingly bright and filling the wrecked airlock with shifting light shafts. The shuttle plows through debris chunks and slows, rotating silently just a few meters outside of Promise.
Adrenaline surges through James as he focuses on his gun sights.
Shadows shift outside of the shuttle in the wash of the floodlights. There’s the faintest hint of the blue lights from multiple faceplates, then pulse fire flares from the shuttle and cracks into Beckman’s cover. James aims where the fire originated and squeezes his trigger. His rifle flares, blue bolts streaking across the airlock.
In the next instant, all hell breaks loose. Pulse bolts fly back and forth from all corners of the breach, showering the room with sparks. James pulls behind his beam as three bolts slice by while Beckman sprays bursts at multiple targets. The blue glow of suit lights presents a target, and James connects two shots with it. The shadow of a man spins in front of one of the floods, and James ducks down as shots zip over his head.
Two overlapping pulse streams pin Beckman down. When James peers around his cover, the dark silhouettes of two men in combat armor advance just inside the remnant of the airlock room. A third man pulls himself in behind them, his armor glowing from James’s hits.
“They’re armored,” James yells.
Beckman leans around his beam and fires at the man with the damaged armor while James shoots at the other two. As Beckman’s rounds send sparks from one man’s chest armor, one of the other men shoots Beckman, spinning him.
James fires and ducks back. “Beckman, are you okay?”
Beckman grunts and gets himself back to his position.
James leans around his beam. The man Beckman had hit is floating lifelessly in the debris field, and the other two have taken cover behind airlock wreckage. James fires a volley at the nearest man.
“James,” Ananke says over coms, “two more shuttles are en route.”
His stomach has the sinking feeling of a losing battle. He fires off another salvo. “Charge time?”
“Five minutes, thirty seconds.”
Sparks sputter from Beckman’s armor as he takes another hit.
“We don’t have five minutes,” James says, firing. “What can you do with a partial charge?”
Lin comes on. “We may be able to configure for a fractional light speed jump, like the Nightcrawler.”
Chunks spin off James’s cover as bolts eat away at it. “I’ll take any percent of light speed.”
Beckman lands a shot, and the man reels back. As James pops up to shoot, a black disk frisbees between him and Beckman, sticking to the wall behind them.
“Grenade!” Beckman yells, launching himself across the breach.
Beckman is halfway to James when the hallway detonates in a flash, catapulting Beckman into James like a linebacker. Something stings James’s shin, and his lower leg goes numb, then he’s a tangle of limbs with Beckman, bouncing off beams and cables. When he catches a glimpse of the back of Beckman’s combat suit, it is peppered with glowing shrapnel, oxygen jetting out from a breach near his shoulder. During the explosion, he heard Lin say something about Nightcrawler. He doesn’t have time for it.
“Beckman!” James says.
Beckman grunts, his teeth gritted.
Behind Beckman, two men swing in from the airlock breach. The one of the left has multiple chunks missing from his chest armor. Both men have their rifles pointed at James.
Beckman stirs and reaches behind his back, pressing his hand over the breach. He rolls away from James.
James looks to his left. His rifle floats three meters away.
The leader keeps his rifle levied on James and points with his left hand to his wrist keypad. James understands and slowly touches his own wrist keypad to change to the standard emergency frequency.
“What do you want?” James says.
The leader unclips the slate from his belt and activates it. “Instruct your AI to transfer into my slate and decrypt this ship’s Riggs drive.”
James furrows his eyebrows. “Go to hell.”
The man swings his rifle towards Beckman and fires. The bolt smashes into his chest armor, leaving a glowing crater. Beckman recoils and groans.
“Wait!” James says.
The leader keeps the gun trained on Beckman. “Next shot won’t be in the armor. Do it, now.”
James is breathing hard, staring the man down. He holds both of his hands out. “Okay.”
The man waits, motioning with his rifle to hurry.
James bends his legs slightly and sets his feet on the floor. He drops his right hand towards the ground so he can bring his left to his wrist pad. “Ananke…”
Ananke’s voice sounds on coms. “James, I’ve been monitoring. It’s okay, I’ll go…”
There’s an edge to James’s voice. “Initiate.”
The leader turns his head, confused.
An electric hum buzzes through the ship, and the bulkheads in James’s field of view take a deep breath, swell, and exhale. The brilliant blue of the Earth is visible through the airlock breach, shifting to purple as the Earth shrinks to three-quarters of its size. Metal tears and groans, sound transmitting through the ship’s hull, and James’s stomach flutters for the briefest of moments. After a hundred Riggs jumps, he barely feels the effects.
The two men with the rifles don’t fare as well. The leader vomits in his helmet as his sidekick doubles over. James pushes off towards his rifle. He grabs it as the sidekick begins to recover. James fires a burst squarely into the man’s damaged armor. As the sidekick falls, the leader tackles James. For a second, they are a jumble sailing towards the bulkhead, wrestling with each other’s rifles, then they impact the wall and rebound towards the breach. The leader wrestles James’s rifle away and tosses it to the side, trying to raise his own, but James gets both hands on it, and the two fight for control of the weapon. The wound in James’s left shoulder burns intensely as he struggles to use his left arm. They tumble along their trajectory heading through EV Prep’s wreckage towards the brilliant blue Earth waiting outside.
“First time’s a real kick in the pants,” James says, head butting his faceplate against the leader’s. The leader paddles his legs like someone who’s not used to zero-gee, and James slides both of his hands onto the rifle’s carrying handle, pulling up his own knees to his chest. A stabbing pain burns into his left shin, and he realizes his left leg isn’t working correctly, but he ignores it, planting his feet against the man’s suit and kicking off as hard as he can. It’s pure instinct for the man to reach for something, and during that instant, James strips the rifle away from him, sending him into a spin. As the leader tumbles backward out of the breach, James turns the gun towards him. The man reaches feebly for a few dangling cables and misses, then he’s falling away from Promise, past the shuttle, unable to slow his departure in the void. Behind him drift bits and pieces of debris that jumped with Promise. James watches him as he grows smaller and smaller, keeping the rifle sighted on him. The man is no longer a threat, and he doesn’t need to kill him. Instead, James returns to Beckman.
Beckman has already retrieved the sidekick’s rifle as James emerges back into the hallway. The two men point rifles at each other for a brief second until they realize that everything is clear, then James rushes over to him and fetches the emergency kit from the armor. He sprays the sealant on the suit breach, eyeing
up the sidekick’s floating body. The man’s helmet lighting still illuminates his face, but the face is unmoving. James furrows his brow.
“He’s gone,” Beckman says.
James snaps out of it, looking back at Beckman. “You okay?”
“A couple of extra holes. Still in the fight.” He hands James the sealant.
James examines his leg. A small metal shard has pierced his suit near his shin. The fragment is plugging most of its own hole. James leaves it in place and sprays the sealant over it. Fortunately, they are in zero-gee, and he won’t need to walk on it. He helps Beckman up. “Let get to the bridge.”
Sarah engages the DISPAR drive, and the Nightcrawler jumps back to LEO4, pulling out of warp just shy of shuttle two. She carves a glowing line of slag into the shuttle’s engines with her emitter. The shuttle sputters and dies, rolling onto its side as it coasts along its last trajectory. Two kilometers ahead, shuttle one is parked right up against the breach of Promise’s starboard airlock. As she watches, a prismatic shimmer sparkles along the Earthshine behind Promise, and the white clouds of the blue planet twist to the periphery of an invisible sphere. A blinding white flash radiates from Promise as it collapses in upon itself, the shipyard that housed it glowing white-hot along the severed pylons that had clamped it. A split second later, the Earth’s clouds swirl back to their original locations, and the shipyard shatters where the pylons were connected.
“Holy shit,” Sarah says aloud. “She jumped.” Chunks of the shipyard still glow where Promise had been. A feeling of elation washes over her. “Woo-hoo! Go, James!”
Before she can enjoy the relief, tactical alarms ping on her HUD, flagging the fresh volley of Seekers snaking off of Folly’s guns. She punches the throttle, and the stars swing to her right as she pulls the Nightcrawler into a high-gee turn, then it’s a game of circles, a competition between the turning radius of the Seekers versus that of her fighter. The glowing green rounds bend towards her as he turns away from them. As she completes her one-eighty, the first volley of Seekers shoot past her, and she squares up with Harper’s Folly. She pushes the center trigger, and her forward emitter carves a beam across one of Folly’s guns. She flicks the DISPAR icon and loads in another cartridge.
Coms dings, and her HUD brackets a white star gliding two thousand kilometers above her. The tag reads HPT-E17 Bernard’s Promise. “Sarah,” James’s voice says, “is that you?” His voice is raspy, and he sounds injured.
“James! Yes, are you okay?” Sarah responds. She rolls the Nightcrawler hard to the right as more Seekers launch.
“Yes. Get the hell out of there!”
She quickly taps in a new jump course. “We’ve got to help Perseus.”
“We’ve got it. Get clear.”
Her tactical bracket blinks red around Promise with the word FIRING.
The star that is Bernard’s Promise flickers brilliant green as two lasers sweep across Harper’s Folly, slagging three of Folly’s cannons and leaving a molten line scorched into its hull. Folly now completely ignores Sarah and rolls slowly to bring its starboard cannons to bear on Promise. As its Seekers fire, Promise’s beams dance over the newly-exposed cannons, blossoming explosions in the laser’s paths. The Seekers fan out towards Promise, but Promise is two thousand clicks away. One of Promise’s lasers strafes across the Seekers, picking them off at its leisure, while the other laser surgically extracts Folly’s cannons.
An electromagnetic spike alert pings on Sarah’s HUD, coming from Perseus. Perseus’s running lights fade on as Sarah’s tactical display flags the heat building up in the battle cruiser’s primary weapons.
“Oh, you are beyond screwed,” Sarah says to Maeve and Folly. She plots the jump course to Promise.
Agatha Maeve continues firing at Perseus while Promise engages Folly. Six dazzling azure suns flash from Perseus’s main emitters, and the starboard side of Maeve fractures in an expanding slag starburst. Perseus’s four rail guns fire lightning bolts that pierce Maeve like meteors, then her primary guns fire again, and Maeve breaks in two, a million incandescent chunks expanding outwards as the two halves of the ship spark, sputter, and die.
Sarah hits the ENGAGE icon, and the stars rush in and expand back out, Bernard’s Promise now five clicks from her starboard side. Promise’s lasers flash out again, and in the distance, another hit registers on Folly. She takes a deep breath and flicks her weapons back to safe.
7
Distractions
James’s hospital room at Ronald Reagan UCLA is hued chipper green with one of its walls cycling through a video of lapping waves along a beach. James sits propped up in bed with his left arm in a blue sling and the glossy bumps of a gelcast protruding from his hospital gown. With his right hand, he pokes at his lunch while reading emails on his slate. He’s wearing pajama bottoms, and his left leg rests on a cushion. When a knock sounds from his room’s doorframe, he looks up.
Ava stands at the entrance holding a tote bag. “Hey.”
“Hey, Ava!” James says. “Come on in.”
She approaches the bedside. “How are you feeling?”
James sets down his fork and waves his right hand. “Fine. Just need to sit tight for another day or two while the nanos do their thing. Home by Friday.”
“That’s good news,” Ava says, sitting in the chair beside his bed.
“I’m sure the hospital staff agrees. They’ve got to put up with Beckman and me on the same floor.”
She laughs. “Well, maybe I can help them out by keeping you distracted.”
James grins at her curiously.
She reaches into her tote. “I brought you something.” She produces a hardcover book that has an astronaut in an old twentieth-century spacesuit floating above Earth.
James accepts it and reads the title. “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything. Colonel Chris Hadfield.” He lifts his eyebrows. “This is great!” He rubs his hand over the cover and flips the book open, touching its pages. “And this is real. First edition, twenty-thirteen.” As he leafs through the pages, he notices some have notes written in the margins in Ava’s handwriting. “Is this yours?”
“One of my favorites. When I was working on my dissertation, it kept me company on many long nights. Hadfield is inspirational and his message of perseverance resonated with me, but it’s more that. He’s got this quest for exploration and adventure that I admire, and I hoped someday I could do the type of things he did.”
“Mission accomplished,” James says. He closes the book and squeezes it. “Thank you.”
“Books are best shared,” Ava says.
“Well, I’ve got one or two I’ll bet you’ll like. I’ll bring them over when I return this one.”
Ava smiles, losing her train of thought for a moment, then recomposes herself as she glances at her tote. “And,” she says, “there’s contraband.” She produces a silver thermos with an enamel-green top.
James’s eyes light up. He accepts the thermos, unscrews the lid, and takes a whiff. “Oh, Kona. Ava, you are officially my hero. You can’t imagine what passes for coffee in here.”
“I ran it by Julian, so it’s doctor-approved. In moderation, of course.”
“This is awesome. Thanks.”
“Well, I know you’ve got your slate, and it’s probably filled with work, but I hope this helps you unplug for a bit.”
James takes a sip of his coffee, closing his eyes and savoring it. When he opens them, he says, “Have you seen Beckman yet?”
Ava reaches into her bag and produces a second thermos. She smiles. “Chamomile.”
“Good call.”
She replaces the thermos. “How’s he doing?”
James screws the lid back onto his coffee and sets it on his table. “He’s one big bruise. Cracked a couple of ribs, and a clavicle took some shrapnel. They’re going to keep him through the weekend.” James pauses. “He saved me up there, you
know. Put himself between me and a grenade. The chunk of metal in his shoulder was meant for me. I owe the man my life. Again.”
“I think all of us do.”
“Now, if we could just get the man to stay in bed until Sunday.”
It’s Saturday night, and Beckman is at a bar. Two beers sit on the table in front of him, his right hand wrapped around the closest beer. His left arm dangles down, his elbow crooked at an uncomfortable angle, with his left fingers curled in the gesture of someone who’s trying to keep his arm still. He’s supposed to be wearing a sling, but then again, he’s supposed to still be in the hospital. He can’t do what needs to be done if he sticks to what he’s supposed to be doing. The bar is dark, the music is classic, and the beer was poured by an actual person. It works for him.
Miles approaches Beckman’s left and pulls up a chair. He looks a little out-of-place in his civilian clothes, and his walk gives him away as law enforcement even when he’s trying to be low-key, like now.
Beckman points at the beer by Miles. “Got you a Stella.”
“You look like hell, Beckman.”
“So you do,” Beckman nods, taking a sip of his beer. “At least I have a reason.”
Miles watches him for a moment.
Beckman sets his glass down. When Miles keeps staring, he sighs.“What?”
Mile motions at Beckman’s chest. “I’m just waiting to see if you turn into a beer sprinkler.”
“Why’d you pick law enforcement when you could’ve had such a dazzling career in comedy?”
“Seriously, are you okay? I mean, you just got out of the hospital.”
Beckman takes another sip. “I already have a mom, Miles.”
Miles holds up his hands. “Okay. Just asking.”
Beckman looks around, then back at Miles. “How’s Mary doing?”
“Mary and the kids are fine.” He leans in. “I know how much you hate small talk, so we can get right into it.” He produces a slate from inside his jacket and slides it across the table. Two men and a woman are on screen. In the bottom corner, the Department of Homeland Security logo glows.
Bernard's Dream: A Hayden's World Novel (Hayden's World Origins Book 8) Page 6
