Doomed Cargo

by Ian Cannon

  Ben couldn’t believe it. His mind spun rapidly. They missed. It was a military tactic. Targeting over multi-astro units was never exact. The first wave was an educated guess, nothing more. Half a kilometer was a very near miss. Of course! That’s why they sent three waves. He said into the comm device very rapidly, “Callan, that was wave one. They fired for effect. Wave two will be adjusting to your location right now. They’re going to narrow in. Get your people out of there!”

  The radio comm stayed open. They could hear Callan yelling orders, hear the station’s universal klaxon alarm wale out, hear the sounds of scurry and panic. Callan’s voice came back suppressing terror. “REX!”

  “Yeah, Callan,” Ben said.

  “We’re overcrowded. We don’t have enough evacuation units down here.” It was a plea for help.

  “There’s nowhere for us to dock. How many cargo crews do you have?” Ben said.

  “Maybe two dozen.”

  Tawny leaned in, “We’ll get the orphanage, Callan.” She and Ben locked eyes. They passed an entire conversation back and forth in the terse silence. They were going in, going to find somewhere to dock with a big fat target on their backs, like it or not. Ben nodded.

  He said, “REX, get us to the control promenade. Make it fast.”

  The station had been growing through the viewport as they neared, fast. Now it was upon them, huge and sprawling. Viewports showed people scurrying around inside. Cargo busses and freighter ships were docked at the station’s perimeter loading bays. A few of them began pulling away and swiveling about—with or without station passengers.

  REX dropped below the station’s orbital plane. Its modular underside slid by overhead. The main hub approached. All docking terminals were occupied with vessels, each umbilicus connected to their respective airlock hatches. There was no way to get onboard the station.

  Ben and Tawny’s eyes scanned the scene. Everything seemed frantic. One of the privateer cargo haulers began backing away and vacating one of the entryways. Tawny pointed it out. “There!”

  “Yeah, I see it,” Ben said and prepared to slide in behind. But the vessel was not yet disconnected. The umbilicus pulled taught as the ship reversed. Its directional boosters ignited, hard. The entry hub buckled. The thing ripped away still connected to the ship as it turned around and blasted the area with its primary thruster. Tawny gasped. The crew was panicking, getting the hells out of there.

  “Narse!” Tawny yelled.

  Ben adjusted against the ship’s blast wake fighting for control. There went one entry hub. The station was submerging into frenzy. It was quickly turning into an everyone-for-themselves situation. They weren’t going to find a way in here. He had to leave the promenade behind. Now there were only passages, connection nodes, junction quads—no entry points. “Rex, what do you see?”

  “Uh—I see an exterior maintenance hatch, eight hundred feet port. Look. See that corridor junction? It might work.”

  Tawny saw it first, her hungry gaze desperate and sharp. “There!”

  “Yeah, let’s try that,” Ben said.

  REX canted over and peeled around. They came to the four-way junction, hovering below. The junction released its auto-sleeve to create a seal. There was a thump, a hiss.

  “Connected,” REX said.

  “Let’s go.” Tawny bolted first as Ben swung up from his chair.

  “Hey, Cap,” REX said, halting him momentarily. Ben looked back. REX said, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this.” His voice sounded dole.

  Ben already knew. REX had spotted the incoming second wave on his local space sensors. He made an exasperated notion. “How much time?”

  “Maybe five minutes.”

  Ben snarled out loud. This was certain death. But suicide or not, there was no abandoning those children. Not for Tawny. That meant not for him either. “We’ll be coming in hot, REX. And I mean hot.”

  “I’ll be waiting.” Ben turned. “Cap.” He turned back. “How about not evaporating, today, huh?”

  “Right.”

  Ben flew through the passage, into the main hold, up to the top airlock and met Tawny at the platform. She was already struggling against the circular overhead latch. Ben grabbed the latch, strained like mad, teeth clenched. The lever jerked and the hatch popped. They threw it open and climbed up into the passage hub. They found themselves in a crowded four way bottleneck. People scurried by. Feet pounded around them. They were in.

  The klaxon wailed through the station in its grating emergency tone. An automated station voice repeated:

  “Attention all passengers, residents and crew ...”

  “This way!” Tawny yelled.

  “You are to evacuate the station immediately …”

  Ben rushed after her, said, “Go, go!”

  “Please proceed in an orderly fashion to your assigned evacuation units ...”

  Ben and Tawny ran down the corridor headlong into a station full of people herding in multiple directions.

  “This is not a drill...”

  “Over here,” Tawny called leading Ben down an adjoining corridor. He followed quickly, both of them bumping through crowds of oncoming people.

  “You sure?” he called.

  “Yeah!”

  Ben was hot on her heels. She zipped around a corner. He followed. Dizziness struck him and he had to pause. Outer space was all around—above, below, to the sides. The space tunnel. A big membrane. All around he could see the cranes and platforms of the station jutting angularly into space. To the left, a long evacuation bus drifted from its docking port, nose first. Small bursts of gas jetted from airlocks. Other ships were pivoting around, preparing for thruster flight. To the right, the moon Dalus hung huge with its brilliant, silvery glow casting light on them.

  Something stopped his heart, made it skip a beat. Several tiny dots dropped suddenly into view in rapid succession—zip zip zip zip zip—almost undetectably tiny. They would have been invisible had they not been pasted against the shinning backdrop of the moon.

  EmDrive rockets dropping out of warp.

  Tawny turned to him. “Benji!”

  Forget it—“Just go!”

  They scrambled across the bridge, down another corridor dodging station members, stormed through a junction node, and blazed into an adjoining corridor. Tawny cleared the stair way into a main thoroughfare with a single stride, her feet thundering against the metal floor, and came to the archway entrance to the orphanage. Ben followed closely only to come to a sudden, complete stop as they entered. The space was circular, eighty feet in diameter, with a low ceiling and round ports studding the wall, a line of bunks at the perimeter. But there was no one. No panicking voices, no instructing adults, no frenzied children, no orphans. Tawny stood with her mouth gaping open breathing in deep gulps of air.

  She said, “No.”

  Ben hit the nearest window throwing a frantic gaze toward the moon. The rockets were gone, lost somewhere in the gulf of space between here and there. They were on their way, though.

  He looked over. Another evacuation bus pulled away from the station, jerking against its umbilicus.

  He looked at Tawny, said, “Baby?”

  “They’re not here,” she said breathless.

  “They got out. We gotta go.”

  She spun around. A terrible doubt spilled from her. “We have to find them.”

  “There’s no time. We gotta—”

  A tiny voice jerked them both around. It said, “They went away.”

  Ben flinched. It was a girl, a tiny thing, maybe six universal years old. Wild hair that had once been a fleece of gold, but was now an unhealthy mop hanging in her eyes, stood in the corner. Her bitty shoulders were drawn up with tension and she stood with an odd, makeshift dolly held in both hands. He cocked his head at her surprised. She appeared to Ben like an angel stepping into the light. Or maybe those shadows had sloughed away from her, warded away by some internal light seething invisibly from her skin. She was immaculately pr
ecious, despite the grime.

  Tawny ran to her and got to her knees, hands on her shoulders. “Sireela,” she said, “where are the others?”

  She lifted a grimy finger to the viewport. Ben looked back out, eyes going wide.

  That evacuation bus.

  Those falling rockets.

  The first one screamed in with sudden, terrible ferocity and smashed the evacuation hub. The entire structure swelled open spitting an imposing ball of fire into space. The evacuation bus veered away desperately, but the expanding eruption engulfed it, ripped it apart at the seams.

  The station quaked making the girl yelp with terror. Passengers screaming came from the near corridor. Tawny scooped her up and they bolted for the exit. With Ben in the lead, they reversed their path through the near corridor, through the junction point and toward the spacebridge.

  Something else slammed the station taking them off their feet. The girl went sprawling painfully. They each gasped, looked behind. Fire engulfed the corridor as oxygen burned away. Fire control doors slammed down separating them from the explosion—bam bam bam!

  There were people back there. They were dying.

  No time to freeze. “C’mon, let’s go!” Ben cried.

  They got up, Ben yanking Tawny along, Tawny pulling the girl. They were in the spacebridge. Ben fired a gaze toward two-seventy degrees, toward the moon Dalus. Another rocket came in like a streak and hammered the tall logistics platform overhead. The explosion reached up in a blinding fountain of debris. The entire colony shuddered. Ben fell forward in his wild sprint across the bridge. Tawny and the girl collapsed back into the adjoining corridor.

  The entire scaffold splintered over their heads. Steel girders rent over. The whole tower came thundering down under an unintended inertial swing. Ben felt its shadow from the moon swallow him. He flipped over, looked up, watched the crane’s tonnage emerge toward him.

  Tawny released a blood-chilling scream—“BENJI!”

  The sound of her voice got him to his feet, and in a last second effort, he hurled himself toward the far end of the spacebridge. He tumbled into the corridor banging shins and elbows. The crane smashed down, cleaving the bridge in half. Superstructure wailed in pain as steel torqued into twisted, snapping shapes. The whole world banged and shook, then fell still as the crane and bridgeway plummeted down and down toward the face of Molos.

  Ben shook his head bewildered. He was still alive, hadn’t been yanked into space. Looking back, he saw the damage. The spacebridge was severed in half. Across a hundred feet of hard vacuum, his wife stood staring back at him, shocked.

  The membrane had snapped under duress allowing its contiguous form to become two wholes, separating each side from the vacuum of space. But it had also separated them.

  All he could do was stare at her. They shared an empty, lonely look. It seemed it would be for the last time. His attention got jerked away. Up above, way out by the moon, five more dots dropped in from warp.

  The third wave.

  That’s when he heard children screaming in the passages behind him.

  Orphans.

  The moment sank into a dream. Everything went euphoric. Overwhelming loss struck him. He looked back at his wife, one last time, and an idea struck him like a fist.

  Benji was waving at her with wild sweeps of his arms and yelling something she couldn’t hear. Tawny squinted at him and screamed back, “What?”

  A tiny hand grabbed two of her fingers and yanked as the girl said, “This way. It’s this way!”

  Tawny looked down, perplexed.

  “He wants us to go this way, c’mon!” she cried.

  Tawny looked back at her husband across the gulf, but he was already gone, headed back through the station. “Okay,” she said, and followed the girl.

  They scampered back to the main thoroughfare and past the orphanage. A steel lattice stairway went up into a large open space. Charging up the stairs Tawny felt her body weight begin to diminish. Grabbing the railway, she realized the artigrav casters had been pounded. The station was about to lose its internal gravity.

  “We have to go fast!” she cried spurring the girl on.

  They entered a long catwalk over a social mall two stories below, having to pull themselves along. Their feet were beginning to come up off the floor. That meant trouble. It would slow them down, dramatically. The damage already dealt to the station left the place in disarray. Control conduits running high overhead coughed sparks and flame. Debris had been scattered across the floor below. It, too, was beginning to rise.

  Sireela pulled herself to a stop, Tawny coming up behind, both of them gripping the railing. The little girl pointed across the wide-open space to a passage opening. “We have to go there!”

  Between them was a hundred feet of drift and two stories of free fall.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “Yes, uh-huh.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s what he said,” Sireela answered matter-of-factly climbing over the rail.

  “Sireela,” Tawny said, but the girl sprang out over the fall. She went forward spread eagle, lunging across the top of the weightless mall area leading with her dolly. Tawny groaned and did the same, jumping across the divide and shooting headfirst toward that corridor.

  Another impact jarred the entire colony with a—KABAM!

  Wave three was here.

  The whole place canted around Tawny and the girl throwing off their aim. The girl crashed to the other side and started tumbling out of control. She screamed. Tawny was right behind wrenching the girl’s arm with her as she sank through the passage entrance. They both flopped into the wall as if gravity took them. Tawny snarled against the sudden burden of weight. The station had been jarred from its orbital position and was beginning to wheel toward the Molosian atmosphere. Gravity was created around them, making them heavy.

  “Where to?” Tawny said through clenched teeth.

  Sireela pointed. “The bay, the bay!”

  They struggled down the hall and into the loading bay, an enormous area that had been wrecked from shell blasts. They stood at its upper level looking down at the cargo floor. Equipment and crate boxes slid across the floor with the changing gravity. They could feel themselves start to tumble portside. The cargo opening was a huge maw with a permeable shield array separating them from outer space. They could see the planet rise up to meet them. They would be entering its skies in seconds.

  “There,” the girl shouted. “Let’s go!” She jumped over the railing and plummeted in a canted fashion with the lean of gravity, landing on the lower section. Tawny followed, landing with a painful–Ooph!

  Another missile impact too close for comfort jarred the whole place again. They could hear the cargo bay being severed from the rest of Haven. The whole station screamed and moaned as it began its final deterioration. In only moments, what was left of them would start searing into molten garbage as they entered the atmosphere.

  Tawny crawled over to the kid shielding her from tumbling debris. “What now?”

  “Look!” she pointed toward the cargo bay opening.

  Tawny looked up and howled with relief. REX lowered into view with his retros firing off in spurts to match their tumble. His cargo bay door dropped open and the Menuit-B skiff came roaring forward, crossing the permeable shield and sliding across the floor in a huge fountain of sparks. The canopy lifted open and Ben screamed, “Let’s go, let’s go!” As the skiff swung around, Tawny lunged forward tossing the girl inside and then cramming herself within. The canopy came back down, the mag engines lifting them up, and they shot back out, seemingly in one choreographed motion. They pounded back through the permeable shield wall and into REX’s cargo hold, Ben yelling, “REX, get us out of here!”

  REX backed away from the station pivoting around simultaneously and blasted his thrusters like mad. The ship looped back over the station as it started breaking apart, and boomed away toward open space. One final rocket came down ripp
ing the whole station into rubble, exploding the cargo bay into pieces and sending a series of explosions thundering across the entire superstructure. Haven Crest blasted into mangled space born wreckage—the wholesale destruction of a refugee colony being pounded by forces from afar, indifferent to the lives taken or the destructive toll delivered. What was left of it exploded into a glittering field of debris soon to evaporate in the Molosian atmosphere as REX hauled narse further and further away.

  And then—BOOM—he was a dot in the distance.

  The skiff was designed for two people. Now there were three. Ben had the girl’s knees in his face. It didn’t matter. No one had the strength to move, much less speak. The three sat in sudden silence, each of them breathing like Omicron marathoners, letting the peace enwrap them in safety. That was an experience none of them would soon forget.

  Ben reached down and popped the drive canopy. It slid away and he said, breaking the silence, “Are you okay?”

  Tawny looked over at him and took his hand. “Yeah.”

  Groaning, he rolled himself from the cockpit and thudded to the floor. Sireela slid down into the pilot’s chair. She and Tawny looked at each other sharing a common sense of relief and gratitude. The girl gave her an intoxicating smile, baby teeth showing, and said, “I told ya you’d come back.”

  Tawny Leaned forward and wrapped her into a tight hug. She had gotten out of the station because of this little girl, this wondrous little creature. Tawny didn’t know how exactly, and she could never explain it, but the girl was special. She had a rare sense of the world and the things in it. For a second, Tawny wondered who’d saved whose life. She plopped her head back on the seat completely expended, and said, “You sure did.”

  Chapter Eight

  A steel beam had been driven straight through the skiff’s engine box, crushing the maglev rudder actuator. The coils were wasted. Ben didn’t even have to lift the maintenance skirt to inspect it. He thought he’d felt the skiff lose all sense of directional stability, right before they shot from the Haven Crest’s loading bay and into REX’s cargo bay. They had gotten lucky. Now the whole thing was useless, unless they decided to replace the part. Maybe their Dekkorran friend Norg could help. Now was not the time to discuss it. It was sufficient for Ben to merely mutter, “This thing’s dead weight.”