by Bobby Adair
“She can’t,” argues Phil. “How dumb is she? We’ve got a bunch of teenagers and middle-aged parents in the ranks now. What comes after that? Geriatrics? Earth is running out of disposable people.”
“Exactly.” Finally, Phil is engaged in the problem. “What can we do?”
“Switching helmets is the natural solution,” he says. “All of the kill switches are coded to the chain-of-command hierarchy. If she has kill-switch authority over the whole division, it won’t matter whose helmet you take.”
“What about all the Chinese bodies laying stacked beside the warehouse?” I ask. “What are your thoughts?”
“Some of us could swap for those helmets,” says Phil, “but are there enough for everyone? Then, whose kill-switch authority are you under? You don’t know, do you?”
He’s right.
“Maybe she’s bluffing,” offers Phil. “Have you thought about that?”
Of course, it’s possible, but that’s an expensive bluff to call.
“If she has a kill switch, then she can listen in on our conversations, too,” realizes Phil. “She’s probably listening right now.”
More Phil drama. Ugh.
Still, he has a point.
I turn and spot Blair in the company of a few sergeants over near the equipment yard, only she isn’t looking at them, she’s cutting glances at me, and she turns away just as I catch her eye.
Bitch!
I say, “I know you can hear me, Blair.”
“What?” cries Phil. “She’s actually on the line?”
“Yes,” I answer. “Chime in if you want, Blair. I don’t care if you know or if you don’t. I will find a way to disable your kill switch.”
“There isn’t a way,” she tells me, confidently.
“There isn’t a pleasant way,” I answer, thinking back to the small grav plate Captain Milliken placed on my helmet when he was trying to kill me back when this all started. “I’m not interested in harming you. I just want to make sure you don’t kill my troops.” Or me.
Phil mutters something I can’t understand, yet I can tell he’s frightened.
“Or,” I say, “You could trade out your helmet with another, and we’ll destroy that one.”
“Not on your life,” she laughs. The laugh is mean and victorious. She thinks she’s got me worried and she thinks she’s regaining the upper hand.
“It puts us all on a level playing field,” I make my argument, like logic will magically work, “like real soldiers, depending on each other and trusting each other because we share the same values, we fight for the same things. That’s how armies succeed, not by threat of death.”
“Signing off,” says Blair. “I have more important things to do than listening to you two children plot.”
“God,” says Phil. “She’s a bitch.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “See what you can figure out, okay? In the meantime, I need you and Penny—”
The ground shakes violently as everything flashes bright blue in a grav wash.
I’m knocked onto my back as the comm erupts in shouts.
Chapter 5
The pinprick gleam of a trillion stars hanging in the endless black void is obscured with a giant dirty smudge wrapped in ephemeral blue tentacles.
Jupiter, so prominent in the sky a moment before, is a sideshow of funky rust and dull, gray stripes ornamented with sixty-three moons. The herd of smaller asteroids, stable in their positions relative to the Potato a moment earlier, are all on the move. Some are drifting away. A few inch forward. More are spinning, displaying sharp sparkles as light from our faraway sun catches and reflects away.
A Trog cruiser has inexplicably appeared a kilometer above us. A moment ago there was nothing overhead except vacuum. Now it’s there, with plates sucking fusion-drive power and thrashing out repressive grav fields as it stabilizes its two million tons of mass right above us.
The asteroid quakes beneath me.
Every piece of matter within a hundred klicks is reacting to the gravitational perturbations of the cruiser’s sudden arrival.
The troops around me see what I’m seeing, and whatever they felt when gravity fluxed and knocked us all off our feet, it’s now turning to dread.
How the hell did that Trog cruiser get there?
“It just blipped out of nothing,” somebody shouts.
“Oh, Christ,” wails another.
Surprising me by how quickly she’s collected her wits to rejoin the game, Blair shouts over the comm, “Stand up. Get ready!” They’re the right words. Unfortunately, the way she says them, they sound like accusations of cowardice.
“Fucking get ready for what?” somebody mutters.
Still, that cruiser is right there.
It must have come out of bubble jump at that spot, an insanely close place to something as massive as the Potato, an occurrence that shouldn’t have been possible, at least not based on what humans understand about grav manipulation.
It’s those big-headed gray shits utilizing another talent we humans have no hope of mastering even with a bug in the head.
Then I realize something horrific, my ship is gone.
It was floating in space, just there, near where the bow of the cruiser now occupies the vacuum.
I see some hunks of debris glinting in the sparse light, spinning away from the cruiser’s hull.
Oh, my god!
Penny, Phil, and Jablonsky were on the ship.
It’s been obliterated by the instantaneous arrival of the Trogs.
I search for my three lookouts that had been a hundred meters above the surface. Lenox in her orange suit should have been easy to spot, yet she’s gone. I scan the sky for Silva and Mostyn. They’ve disappeared as well.
I bounce to my feet as the bug in my head swims through the syrup of so much grav flux. It’s disoriented and taking a moment to catch up with the rest of my brain.
I’m looking around, expecting the Trogs from inside the asteroid to be mounting their attack. They’re not, not yet. I shore up my guess: They don’t have the means to coordinate the arrival of a faster-than-light ship with a ground attack. They have no clocks and no radios—what the hell would they need radios for? Trogs are telepathic like the Grays. At least that’s what everyone believes because no one’s ever found a radio built into the suit of a dead one.
Nevertheless, we humans only have guesses about the limitations and capabilities of telepathy.
It’s time for me to take my cue from Blair’s example and get in the game, too. Over the comm link to Blair, I say, “Listen to me. There’s no time to muck around. We need to set aside our shit for a minute and get this right. Prep time is done. The battle is here.”
Already, I’m too fucking late.
The unmistakable glow of railgun slugs erupts from the tubes along one of the cruiser’s spines.
I stop breathing as I watch them come, not even a second passes, because the things fly so damn fast.
The ground around our position explodes with the impact of high-energy metal. Shattered rock spews into the void and tears its way across the asteroid’s surface. Orange suits with soldiers inside are punctured and ripped into grotesque shreds of bloody meat frothing blood instantly into the vacuum.
The comm erupts in screams and the rattle of ribs cracking through wrecked chests. It’s the sound of hyper-velocity fury finding fragile human bodies. Death in space.
“Max defensive grav!” I shout over the comm. “Max defense!”
The space around us is filling with dust and body parts suspended, drifting, or shooting violently through the chaos.
Dozens are hollering—some orders, some hysterics—sounds obscured by crackling kaleidoscopes of noise from granules of asteroid rock blown off the surface containing the ore of some conductive metal.
“Blair!” I shout, “Blair!” I run through a cloud of gray dust in the direction I last saw her standing. “Blair!” I trip, bo
unce against a squat stone the size of a couch, and somersault. My defensive grav cushions everything against the asteroid’s weak gravity, and I’m back on my feet in a few heartbeats, running, unable to see more than a meter or two ahead.
I leap over a small crater where a railgun round impacted the surface, and I come down on the other side, running until a kneeling figure resolves in the dust storm.
Another salvo pounds the asteroid, and I fall over as hunks of stone pummel me from my left.
I look up and see Blair, still on her knees, hands on the ground, shaking her head, trying to regain her senses.
I jump down in front of her, grab her helmet, and press our faceplates together. “Blair, can you hear me?”
She blinks, and nods.
“Kill all the comms except you, me, and Brice.” I can only control my own company’s comm links. That’s the way our systems come preprogrammed. With my rank and MSS position, I could take control of the equipment of just about any SDF troop in the division, but each control request through my d-pad’s interface would have to be done one at a time. Even with my implant, it would take more time than we have.
The comm link is turning into a morale-crushing chaos of sonic horror and preventing every attempt to organize a response.
“Do it!” I shout at Blair.
She reaches slowly to her d-pad.
Dammit!
If only she had a bug in her head like me.
Her fingers tap.
The comm goes dead. It’s just me and the static now. “Everyone, listen!”
Listen to what?
What am I going to tell them?
There’s only one choice. “We need to retreat underground. We need to do it now. Run to the nearest airlock. Pack yourselves inside, and as soon at it cycles, find your way to the deepest hole in this mining colony.”
Blair looks at me with the eyes of a child. Whatever resolve she had a few moments ago, the impacting slugs have shattered it. She’s not cut out for war. “It’ll cave in,” she whines. “We’ll be trapped.”
“In this g?” I argue. “A cave-in would take a week to seal a tunnel.” I hope. Yelling across the deteriorating comm I tell them all, “Head for the lowest subterranean levels, and we’ll figure out what to do from there. Go! Go! Go!”
Chapter 6
Gray dust particles, pebbles, and hunks of rock move up, down, sideways, toward me, and away. My eyes try to focus on the bigger pieces, but the crap isn’t of a uniform density. Things ghost out of sight and then back in again. The dusky, dim light darkens by the moment. The asteroid’s micro-gravity tugs every bit back in the direction of its rocky center, but that’ll take days.
If the cruiser keeps up the relentless pounding, they won’t have to kill us, we won’t be able to see a thing. We won’t be a threat.
“Blair.” I reach out and grab under the arm and pull her to her feet. “Open up the comm so everyone can talk again. They’ll need to work together to follow our orders.”
Blair fumbles with her d-pad.
I start dragging her toward the location of the last airlock I saw. It was back near the center of the colony, right where I flew superhero-style into that handful of Trogs that just came out. I guess there has to be a closer airlock. However, with visibility nearing zero, I don’t have time for an Easter egg hunt.
Before we’ve advanced a dozen steps, Blair shakes her arm loose from my grip.
I glance at her. She’s straightening her spine, a defiant veneer on her face. Back to boss mode—unlikable, and just the Blair we need.
“Brice,” I call over a private comm, hoping there’s not so much crap floating between us it’ll block the signal. “Are you alright?”
“Trog shit can’t kill me,” he laughs.
Damn, he’s the most twisted man I’ve ever met. “I’m heading for that dome in the center of the colony.”
Another volley of railgun fire slams the asteroid, and I’m back off my feet again.
Blair is down.
A new round of screams tears across the comm.
Slaughter.
“Move as fast as you can away from the warehouse,” I tell the troops. “With all the dust, they can’t see us, they can only target our last positions.” Hopes.
“Was the warehouse hit?” Blair asks me over a private comm.
“Don’t know.” I can only pray it wasn’t—it’s a huge target. If the Trogs in that cruiser wanted to destroy the building, nothing would stop them. “How many were still in there?”
“Fifty?” she guesses. “Sixty? A hundred?” Her tone of voice is riding a rollercoaster of emotion she’s not used to feeling. “Dammit, I don’t know.”
I keep her moving. While I think an auto-grav sprint across the asteroid’s surface would be the fastest way to get to the airlock, with visibility down to a meter or two, it would be dangerous.
No doubt, the Trogs massing down at the other end of the mining pit are chomping at the bit for the bombardment to stop so they can rush this way and wipe us out while the advantage of our automatic weapons is completely negated.
Over the comm link, I urge everyone to hurry. All I hear in response is unbroken static. Everyone must be too far away.
I trip, yet I don’t fall. In asteroid g, falling takes so long I’m only reoriented, looking down at a ground I’ll hit in a few days if I let nature take its course, although the ground is not what I see below me. Trog bodies carpet the ground.
“You alright?” Blair asks, whispering unnecessarily. In the silence of space with the eerie fog of rock dust everywhere, a million years of evolution is telling her to be sneaky, and she’s doing it in the way a lifetime of earth-borne intuition has taught her.
Reorienting my body with my feet beneath me, I spot the handle of a Trog disruptor blade sticking out from beneath a body. I lean over and pull it by the pommel. Straightening back up, I show it to Blair as I say, “These are the Trogs we killed in the battle before we freed you.” Lifting the blade, I reach it out toward her. “Take it. It might come in handy. These things will cut through defensive grav fields like they aren’t there.”
She accepts it like I’ve handed her a baggy of warm dog shit, but once her palm wraps around the handle, the disruptor’s field lines illuminate in a blue glow—like neon through the dust. She’s mesmerized. “Beautiful.”
I didn’t think she knew any pleasant words. She must be in shock.
I point to the blade attached to one of the magnets on my back. “It’s a handy place to keep it.”
I nod forward. We need to move.
I make my way through the bodies.
She follows, and mounts her blade across her back, clearly more comfortable to have the single-shot Trog railgun in her hands instead.
Another salvo of slugs quake the asteroid.
No screams sound over the comm. It’s just me and Blair. She stops walking, taps the side of her helmet, and tries to connect with someone. Anyone but me.
“It’s the dust,” I tell her. “It’s metallic and probably static-charged. It’s killing the comm links.”
Her grimace pulls tight across her face as she looks at the slow-motion maelstrom around us. I think some of the natural vitriol in her nature is redirecting off of me and into it.
“We need to keep moving,” I urge.
She’s stopped again, looking back in the direction of the mayhem’s epicenter.
Why?
Hell, I don’t know.
At first, I think her brain was bounced a little too vigorously inside her skull.
I nudge her. “C’mon.”
She doesn’t move, except to lean slightly toward the mayhem, like she wants to start walking that way but isn’t sure.
I make a new guess, one I can’t believe I’m making because it doesn’t fit with the black-and-white picture I’ve painted of her in my mind. There are no hints of empathy and nothing else to make me believe she gave two frog
turds about the troops that might still be back by the warehouse.
Is it truly possible she cares about somebody but herself?
I say, “You can’t.”
She turns and glares some of her silent acid at me.
“There’s a fine line between heroism and stupidity,” I tell her.
“I’m not—”
“Use your head,” I go on, half torn between doing exactly what I’m advising her not to do. “We can’t know how many are moving toward the airlocks now, but we know some of them are headed that way—probably most, maybe all.” If ever there was a hope turned into words on nothing but a handful of vacuum, that’s it. “We made a plan.” Not exactly we. “We announced it to everybody. We need to stick with it.”
I turn and trudge forward, hoping she follows. Well, half-hoping.
As the gray dust flows past my glass faceplate, I wonder, how many more of my platoon are dead? What do those stats look like now?
Chapter 7
I don’t know how long we’ve been walking, except ‘too long’ is a phrase echoing in my head.
The bombardment seems to have ceased.
The dust around us is thinning the further our feet churn us away from the target zone. I can make out shapes as far as ten feet away. Nothing to brag about, but better than arm’s length.
Puffs of dust, thicker than the surrounding murk, move through the gray haze like ghosts, putting me on edge. I keep my railgun at my shoulder while I’m looking down the barrel, ready to destroy anything that might be a Trog.
“Do you know where we are?” asks Blair.
We passed the stocky stone spire not long after finding Blair’s salvaged disruptor, and we haven’t come across anything in what seems like too long of a time. Just dust. It’s easy to imagine we’re lost in an endless fog.
I should have checked the time on my d-pad before we started. With adrenaline flooding my circulatory system, with near-complete sensory deprivation, low g, little light, and no sound but Blair’s angry wheeze, I feel decoupled from reality. We may have been walking a minute or twenty. I honestly don’t know.
