by Bobby Adair
“Might be a good time for a shot.”
“Suit Juice?”
“Gift of the gods.” Brice laughs lazily. “I don’t know what’s down there,” he points at the Potato. “My bet is we’ll wish we still had some ammo for these guns when we arrive.”
“Shit. I forgot I was empty.”
“There was that thing on the cruiser we blew up,” says Brice. “Remember all the Trogs chasing us?” He laughs because I think he’s tired, and in his exhausted brain, that seems like genuine hilarity.
Brice exhales loudly like he’s just had a very satisfying orgasm.
I glance over at him. “What are you doing?”
He smiles and shows me his d-pad. “I just juiced.”
“I thought you said the high dissipates the more you do it.”
“I don’t do it that often. Just enough.” He nods toward my d-pad. “Give yourself a kick. You’re gonna need it, and you know I’m right.”
Yes, I’m sure he is. I hit the button on my wrist and feel the instant chemical love of lying molecules telling my senses I’m not a beat-down, butt-dragging draftee, but a born-again, electric-fueled, fusion-drive, ready-to-rock motherfucking killer.
Brice laughs at me.
I bust a belly laugh, too. “I love this shit.”
“Love what shit?”
I laugh even harder. “You sound just like Penny when you do that.”
“That wasn’t me.” Brice is serious. He’s looking around.
“That’s because it was me,” says Penny.
I can’t believe it. I’m scanning the sky, too. Is Suit Juice a hallucinogen? “You’re alive?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” asks Penny.
“And Phil?” If she’s alive, then his irritating, stupid ass must be, too. “The ship?”
“We’re maybe ten klicks behind you,” says Phil.
“Phil?” Brice’s rapid improvement in fortune makes him sound happy even with Phil’s name on his lips.
I spin around, and though I can just make out the Rusty Turd against the darkness, my bug sees its mass as clear as day. “I don’t understand.” Stuck somewhere in the purgatory of not being sure Phil was dead, I suddenly feel overwhelmed with relief he’s not. Despite all the shit between us, all of his annoying foibles and his disgustingly enviable talents, he’s the friend who’s been beside me my whole life, my brother in every way except for the difference in birth-parents.
Phil says, “Gravitationally speaking, you’ve been glowing like a comet out here all day. I’d have to be blind not to see you. We’ll pick you up. Once you’re onboard, we’ll talk.”
Chapter 45
I’m not good with reunions and gushing emotions, but we hug—me and Penny, me and Phil, even Brice who’s been burdened with my non-stop company for the past three days can’t help but squeeze me like he never wants to let me go. Jablonsky smiles and gives me a perfunctory squeeze, which is satisfactory for both of us.
Lenox, Silva, and Mostyn, inexplicably on board all share in the warmth, Silva in particular. Our embrace followed by a lingering look into one another’s eyes feels like something that should be shared by two people way more intimate than us. Nevertheless, it’s not awkward, not one second of it.
It all lasts too long. Emotions bubble all over the comm, leaving smiles behind faceplates, and real human touch behind layers of worn orange composite and grav plates.
It’ll do.
With our commando squad listening in, Brice shares our story with the bridge crew, the only three people on the Rusty Turd when the Trog cruiser popped out of bubble jump nearly on top of them. They listen, ask questions, and then explain to us how the cruiser’s grav field bumped our ship like a billiard ball with such sudden force all three were knocked unconscious, and like Brice and I, they woke up shooting through space, thirty thousand miles from nowhere trying to understand what happened.
The ship suffered some damage they had to repair before they could get underway again. When they were finished and found their way back to the Potato, they saw the remnants my commando club left in their wake. Not knowing what had happened, not knowing the situation down on the surface, except that Phil sensed the presence of thousands of Trogs down there, they surveyed the outer asteroids while hailing on all the SDF frequencies. That’s how they found Lenox, Silva, and Mostyn.
After that, they waited.
“We’ve been out here in space, a few thousand miles off the surface,” says Phil, glancing at Jablonsky. “We’re able to communicate with Blair, though we lose the signal at least half the time.”
Jablonsky adds, “It’s improving as the dust settles. Better by the hour, almost.”
“We were trying to decide what to do,” says Penny. “Unfortunately, Blair’s not as forthcoming with information as she could be and she’s not open to suggestions.” Her eyes fall on Phil. “He has an idea.”
I turn to Phil. “Which is?”
“Oh,” interrupts Penny, needing to get one more word in, “Jill is back.”
More good news? It’s like real Christmas, the kind in the old vids where the kids receive so many great gifts they lose themselves in the wrapping paper pile. She says, “They shoved the other Trog cruiser into orbit around Jupiter and right now they’re eight or nine thousand klicks away on the other side of the Potato.”
“Her ship?” I ask, meaning the mining tug she and her platoon flew out with. “Her crew?”
“Fine and fine,” Penny answers. “All safe. No casualties. Nothing happened along the way. Pretty boring trip.”
Nodding, I’m mentally cataloging the pieces of my tiny military force. Where twenty minutes ago, it was Brice and me with no ammo deorbiting blindly onto a rock full of hostile Neanderthals, now I have a battle-tested fighting force, small, but effective.
“What’s the story down on the Potato?” I’m already guessing it’s not good, an easy leap given neither of my ships has chosen to land. Clever General Kane rides again!
“It’s that insufferable Blair making a mess of everything,” Phil blurts. “If she’d stop being so controlling—”
“This is not news,” I tell Phil, slipping right into the snippy tone I generally take with him, one made comfortable out of habit.
Phil follows the pattern of our well-rehearsed behavior and starts to sulk.
Penny kicks me.
I feel like an asshole. “Sorry, Phil. You know I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Maybe if you treat me like you respected me,” he responds, “it would be easier than apologizing after Penny forces you to.”
“Phil,” I’m trying for max sincerity. “I’m sorry. And thank you for saving our lives. In case that didn’t come across earlier.”
“Well not exactly,” Brice corrects. “We mostly saved ourselves. The Potato is right over there.”
Eye rolls. It’s like we’re a family.
I ask, “What’s going on with Blair and our people down there?”
Phil turns to Penny. “I’ll let her tell it. She’s good with the succinct summaries you like.”
I nod a thank you to Phil.
“Blair has nearly a hundred soldiers on sublevel three,” Penny tells me. “They have some automatic weapons, and a cache of industrial explosives.”
“Tarlow,” mutters Brice. “He must have hauled some back down to the control center.”
“That’s where they are,” says Penny, “in some control center, they have the whole level, mostly. It’s contested. The Trogs keep attacking. Our troops push them back but don’t have the strength to press a counter attack. The Trogs aren’t able to make gains, the soldiers can’t escape.”
“The prisoners down on sub nine?” I ask.
“Still there.”
“Trogs?” That’s the unanswered question that’ll have the biggest impact on how I choose to proceed. “Do we have a solid estimate of how many Trogs made it down to the Potato?”
“Shit.” Brice beats me to the exclamation.
“Shit.” I can’t help but agree with him.
Chapter 46
Time for a poor leadership move. “I’ll be honest with you.” I look around at each of them on the bridge. “I don’t know what to do here.”
“I have an idea for a way to attack,” says Phil.
Being careful with my tone, I raise an open hand to silence him first. “Before we talk about how we’ll fight those Trogs, we need to decide if we should attack at all.”
“If we should?” Phil isn’t sure how to feel about that.
Penny leans back in her chair. “I just assumed.”
“Six thousand,” mutters Brice. He knows what hordes of Trogs can do. “It may be a stalemate down on sub three right now—it won’t last. The Trogs have done this before, pretty much on every installation they’ve taken. If they can overwhelm with numbers, they do. In the narrow halls, like down in the sublevels, they can’t mass and surround our smaller units. The battles drag out, for weeks or months. Attrition is a decisive factor. Supply is, too. Both of those are in the Trogs’ favor. Eventually, Blair will have to watch all hundred of her troops die, or pray the Trogs decide to start taking prisoners again.”
“We have to do something.” Penny straightens up in her chair. “If we don’t, if Blair dies, then we all do, too, right? Her kill switch will trip when her coal-clod heart stops beating, and then we’re all gone.” Penny tries to snap her fingers through her suit. It looks awkward, and if it made a sound, it wouldn’t carry in the vacuum anyway.
“Not necessarily.” Phil slips right into his knowledge-authority voice. He’s about to enlighten us all, and he looks at me to make sure I’m paying close attention. “If we’re out of range of her tactical comm when she dies, the kill switch won’t affect us.”
Penny runs a fast deduction. “So as long as we make a point never to come back here—”
“No,” Phil interrupts. “Once her hydro pack runs dry, and her micro-reactor shuts down, her suit won’t send the signal, ever. The kill-switch problem is solved for all of us.”
I’m tempted by Phil’s suggestion for solving the Blair problem. Luckily my mouth follows my heart more than the logic centers in my brain. “Condemning a hundred soldiers to die is something I can’t do, not on the basis of this one factor. We need to set this idea aside for a moment.”
“How can we set it aside?” asks Brice.
“Not possible,” agrees Penny. “We’re human.”
“Fine.” I sigh. “Do we have a moral obligation to try and save those people down there? Do we have a higher obligation to not throw our lives away on a lost cause? I think those are the most important questions we need to answer. And even if we choose to go in, can it be done? How do we have a chance against six thousand Trogs?”
“Phil has an idea,” Penny reminds me, sounding irritated because I haven’t yet let him air it. “You should listen.”
I turn to Phil. We all do.
Phil smiles, because he has our attention. “We don’t need to kill six thousand Trogs to win. If we’re going with the theory the Grays are in charge and from everything I’ve heard from Blair, from everything we’ve learned so far, that’s what it looks like to me. So, it’s those six Grays we go after. If we capture them, we can make those legions of Trogs do anything we want.”
“How sure are you about that?” asks Brice.
“Mostly.”
“Brice.” Penny puts a hand on his arm. “You know that’s a crappy question. Phil will never be as sure as you’ll want him to be. You two are both too different to ever come to common ground on that question, whether it’s choosing to attack those Trogs or deciding how much cream to put in your coffee. So don’t be an ass.” She smiles sugar all over the medicine she just fed him.
Brice hushes right up.
I ask, “How certain, then?”
“Mostly,” answers Phil. “More than that. Dylan, we grew up with Grays. I know how they think, at least as much as any human can. I think I understand this thing they have with the Trogs. I believe if we capture those Grays, we’ll win control.”
“Are you willing to bet your life on it?”
“If you choose to believe me,” says Phil, “that’s exactly what I’m doing, right? We’re all in this together.”
I give the information a minute to sink in. I look around at the faces of my bridge crew, of my commandos who’ve been happy to sit silently and spectate. I need to make my choice first. “Those Grays are holed up in a rec room down on sub seven. Does your plan include a way to reach them?”
Phil grins. “It does.”
Chapter 47
We’re strapped into the platoon compartment—me, Brice, Silva, Lenox, and Mostyn—my commando team. Our magazines are full, topped off from the supplies we had the foresight to pilfer from Juji Station before we left earth’s orbit. I’m carrying four grenades and three C4 charges. Each of us is.
Jill’s mining tug is moving into position to support our assault. Her people know the situation. They know their part in the plan. We’re all clear on the objective.
Penny is on the bridge, pushing the ship to a speed Phil guesses will make this whole thing work just right. Jablonsky is on the radio, coordinating with Blair and making sure everything happens by the deadline.
The inertial bubble is glowing blue around us. I can sense the grav field pulse strong in the Rusty Turd’s aft drive array. In a few short minutes, Phil will power up the grav lens, and the main cabin will blaze bright.
“Major Kane,” Jablonsky calls to me.
“Yes?”
“Colonel Blair wants to postpone.”
My God, that woman is going to be the source of all my future stress-induced diseases. “Why?”
“She doesn’t have confidence.”
“In?”
“All of it.”
“Radio her back,” I tell Jablonsky, “and tell her I need some hard specifics and I need them now because we’re on our attack run and we’re not deviating without something more solid then watery bowels.”
A moment passes.
Brice elbows me. “What?”
I roll my eyes. “Fucking Blair.”
He nods. I’ve explained enough. Looking at the glowing blue waves crawling over the walls he asks, “We still going in?”
I nod.
“Good.”
Jablonsky is back on the comm. “She doesn’t believe we’ll impact in the right place. She doesn’t think we can break through.”
Exasperating. Still, I have time before we ram our target. “Does she know Phil has super-genius grav sense? He’s been out here in the ship scanning the Potato’s interior for two solid days. It’s like he’s been taking an MRI of the colony’s interior structures. He knows that rock better than she knows her face in the mirror. He knows the point on the surface we need to ram. He knows the angle we need to hit to end up where we want to be. Tell her that. Tell her quick.”
I wait.
Thirty seconds pass.
Jablonsky informs me, “She wants Tarlow to consult. He knows the geology of these asteroids. He understands the size of the force it will take to shatter them.”
“Valid point.” Mostly. “Phil can see interior structures in the rock Tarlow can only guess at. It’s a toss-up.”
Jablonsky passes that message along, and comes back with, “She can’t accept that Penny can drive the ship through a hundred and fifty feet of rock to get down to level seven, and even if she could, the energy of the collision would probably kill everybody on the Potato.”
Dammit!
I’m done. “Tell her she should have listened more carefully when we brought her into the plan. We’re ramming the asteroid from the side. We only have to break through eleven feet of stone
to bust into the main corridor running across sub seven. Lastly, tell her it’s too late to back out. Phil is already burning the g’s. The Grays inside the Potato see us coming. Right now they’re surprised and trying to figure out what we’re up to. If we back out, we’ll never have surprise on our side again.” I look at the time on my d-pad. “Impact in thirty seconds. Tell her to prepare her people.”
I comm the bridge crew. “Are we on track?”
“Impact in twenty-five seconds,” Penny assures me.
I pass it along to my squad, and brace in my seat.
Phil powers up the grav lens. The bug in my head protests to the intense field forming up behind my seat.
If the Grays didn’t see us coming before, they do now.
“Ten seconds!” shouts Penny.
Everyone is tense.
I take one more breath.
The cabin bursts in a flash of blinding blue. The ship shudders. My head swims.
Sound!
I hear wind rushing as the blue light fizzles away.
“In!” Penny shouts. “We’re in!”
“On target!” Phil confirms. “Through sub seven, through three—no four—rooms.”
I pop my seat harness free, jump to my feet, and comm the squad, “Time to pay the rent!”
Chapter 48
The outer wall of the main corridor on sub seven is broken open to space, and all the air in the station is flowing through vertical passageways and horizontal halls and decompressing out into the void. Airlock doors on every room are closing automatically. Alarms are blaring over the blast of the wind.
Having broken through eleven feet of outer shell as well as the thick stone walls separating four more rooms before coming to a stop, the ship is lying in a torrential eddy as the station’s atmosphere rushes past the holes behind us. Its backwash is howling like a deep-throated ghost, enormous and wicked.
“Careful,” Phil calls over the comm.
“Are you coded into the local network?” I ask, as I jump through an assault door down to a cracked floor just a few feet below me. My auto grav pulls my feet down and holds me in place against the buffeting wind.
