by Bobby Adair
“They made a hell of a mess when they jumped out,” says Phil, staring off in some random direction, collecting his thoughts, or looking at something with the bug in his head. “We both saw it, me and Nick, but didn’t put things together until just now. They weren’t stable. Their grav field was half-chaotic. That’s why they caused such a local grav flux when they jumped.”
“What are you saying?” I ask.
“They might not have the control they needed over direction or speed. They could be anywhere.”
Phil is right, yet I can’t let it go. “Jill is our friend. Her people are our brothers and sisters. The soldiers in the other two ships are the same. They’re us. We’re them.”
Brice laughs darkly and goes to buckle up. He knows what’s coming next.
“Phil—”
Penny raises a hand to shut me up. “We don’t have any ammunition for the axial gun. Didn’t we just decide ramming was a tactic that carried too much risk and should be avoided, given that we now have a much better way to shoot those bastards out of the sky?”
“Yes.” Of course, she’s right. I can’t let it go, though. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if we find that Trog ship, maybe nothing, maybe we’ll ram it. We’ll decide when we get there.”
“You’re missing a whole lot of ‘ifs’ in there.” Phil turns to his console and starts working the controls, which I know is mostly just a way to disengage. He does nearly all of his grav work in his head.
“Calculate their direction,” I tell him. “We’ll jump down their heading, coming out at intervals of a second or two, look around, and see if we see them.”
“If they haven’t decided to mask their destination by jumping in a random direction,” says Phil. “You know, like we do.”
“We’re going to check,” I tell him. “They’d do the same for us.”
“How far?” Phil sighs. He’s reluctant, yet he’ll do as I ask. “Out to the Kuiper belt? All the way to the next star? What?”
“We’ll run a few billion miles out. If we don’t come across the ship, then we’ll go back to the Potato and see who made it.”
“We need another load of ammo from Iapetus,” Penny tells me. She likes the power that axial gun gives us.
I nod. “We’ll squeeze it in.”
Chapter 54
We give Ceres a wide berth and come out a half-million miles away. We’re waiting on a heading to take us down the path Phil calculates is the one most likely followed by the Trog cruiser.
My bridge crew is cooperating, yet with each passing minute, it’s more and more obvious to me they believe we’re wasting our time.
Talking to Phil, I tell him, “Set your jump at intervals you can confidently scan for a cruiser.”
“You think they’ll be waiting out in space for us somewhere?” asks Penny.
“No.” I don’t take offense to the question. I simply explain, “If they’re as damaged as they seem to be, they’ll take smaller hops. I think they won’t be able to make 8c.”
“They won’t be able to stay on course,” she argues.
“Still,” I counter, “they have to have a destination, right? They’ll readjust as they go along, always moving toward the same place.”
“Well,” Phil tells us, “the only place down this heading is Pluto.”
Brice laughs.
“They have a base out on Pluto?” Tarlow asks, not sure what the joke his, not knowing that the joke only exists in the realm of Brice’s dark humor.
Nobody responds to Tarlow.
“Pluto it is, then,” I tell Phil. “Makes better sense than the Trogs just flying off to nowhere, right?”
“Nothing is nowhere,” he argues.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” scoffs Tarlow.
Phil cuts a sharp glance at him. “If you go far enough in any direction you’ll run into something eventually.”
“No, you won’t.” Tarlow isn’t buying it. “Most of the sky is black. Or haven’t you noticed?”
Phil sighs. “I’m just saying there are stars out there. There are a million, maybe a billion, within a degree of the heading we’re on, though most of what you see in front of us looks black. For all you know, those Trogs are trying to get back to their home world.”
“Only their home world would be close enough to see, wouldn’t it?” Tarlow puffs up his chest with confidence on that one. “Those cruisers will only do 8c. That’s fast, but still, it limits how far the Trogs’ home star can be, doesn’t it? Unless you think they traveled for a hundred years to get here.”
“I’m not saying that,” Phil retorts.
“They don’t have any suspended animation pods, do they?” Tarlow looks at me for confirmation. Everybody knows I’ve been on one of their ships.
I shake my head.
He glances back at Brice.
“Keep me out of it,” Brice tells him.
Tarlow looks back at me. “Any female Trogs? Any space-based agriculture? These aren’t multi-generational ships, are they?”
I shake my head again.
“What’s the point?” asks Phil, already tired of the argument.
“If they’re going to their home star,” says Tarlow, “it’s not going to be some micro-pixel of faint light from the galaxy next door. They’ll be coming from less than a few light years away. So how far are Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri—a little over four light years distant? Six months at the speeds their cruisers travel? What about Sirius A or B? Or Ross 154? You’re talking about a year to get here. I mean, what do you think the farthest distance is they traveled? How much effort is a whole planet full of human slaves worth?” Tarlow looks around to see if anybody wants to venture an answer to his rhetorical question.
“There are two hundred and fifty-nine systems within ten parsecs,” he says.
“I always wondered how long a parsec was,” mutters Penny.
Tarlow spins on her. “About 3.2 light years.”
“Good to know.” She turns back to her controls like she couldn’t care less.
“At cruiser speed,” continues Tarlow, that’s four years, right there. Anybody think the Trogs made more than a four-year, one-way trip to get here?” He looks around. “Anybody?”
I raise a hand to stop him, not because I’m tired of the rant, but because I’m suddenly thinking of a different problem. “How many of those two hundred and fifty stars are similar to our sun?”
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” answers Tarlow.”
“Jesus,” mutters Penny. “How do you know so much trivial shit?”
“Nerd stuck on a rock a billion miles from the sun,” he tells her. “What else is a curious man going to do but learn about the neighborhood? There’s so much stuff to learn when you’ve got nothing to do. You’d be amazed at the random shit I know. Ever heard of a Prince Rupert’s Drop? After the Trogs started developing unbreakable glass—”
“Tarlow, focus!” I interrupt. “How many with rocky planets in the Goldilocks zone?”
Tarlow’s animated command of the floor stops in a sudden gawk, which slowly turns to a smile. He wags a finger at me. “I know what you’re thinking.”
Phil glares at me because he’s reading the wrong portion of my thoughts.
Brice cuts in, looking at me with increased curiosity. “Now I’m interested, because I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“He’s trying to figure out where the Trogs’ home world is,” guesses Tarlow.
“That’s right,” I answer. “Not today, and not tomorrow. Maybe not even soon. But I’ll tell you what, we’re not going to win this war until we can take the fight to their doorstep.”
“Oh, shit.” Phil doesn’t like that idea one bit.
Brice laughs again.
Penny laughs also, but hers is more hysterical than dark.
Chapter 55
We start jumping. Between each one, we pause so Phil and the Gray can scan the vast empty a
rea around us for the grav signature of a Trog cruiser, and then we jump again. It gets boring very quickly.
“What if we miss them?” asks Tarlow.
I ignore him, because I don’t want to be drawn into an argument where I’m pretty sure Tarlow has already figured out an answer and cemented himself into a position.
“How so?” asks Brice.
“What if we’re leapfrogging them?” Tarlow mimics a frog hopping with his hands over one another for all to see. “What if we’re scanning while they’re jumping and we’re jumping while they’re laying out their next jump?”
Penny sighs, unwilling to hide her sarcasm. “You’re such a positive guy.”
“You’re not happy to be on this snipe hunt,” Tarlow guesses. “I’m just speaking everyone’s mind. That’s all.”
“You’re not talking for me,” Penny tells him. “You just keep speaking for yourself, okay?”
“You’re not happy about this,” Tarlow argues. “I know you’re not.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Penny doesn’t turn away from her controls to answer. “We’re doing this. We’ll try to find our friends and see if they’re alright. They’d do the same for us. It’s that simple.”
“It’s a bargain, then?” Tarlow deduces. “We’re obligated because—”
“Because,” Brice cuts in with a tone that conveys his displeasure with Tarlow, “maybe it’s a good time for you to put all that shit back up your ass and do your job. Didn’t Major Kane ask you to run an analysis on the aftermath of that fight we were just in?”
Tarlow is thrown off-balance. He’s intimidated by Brice’s veiled aggression. “I’m… I’m…”
“Where is that analysis?” I ask.
Tarlow huffs and turns back to his computer monitors, taking a few seconds to pull up a series of still shots of the ships in the sky over the Ceres base. “A lot was happening,” he starts to explain. “We weren’t in an optimal place to catch everything that was going on. We may have missed some of—”
“Tarlow,” I tell him, “I get that this may not be perfectly accurate. Can you skip the qualifications and get to the meat of the answer?”
He deflates even more. “I’m just trying…” he doesn’t finish. Instead, he points at the screen. “This one shows what things looked like when we arrived.”
I sigh. “I don’t need the blow-by-blow. Not right now, anyway.”
“But—”
“Tarlow,” I tell him, “I would like a full analysis of the battle. I want to know which tactics worked and which didn’t. Just not right now. At the moment, I need the brief version. How many ships did we lose? How many Trog cruisers did we destroy?”
Tarlow’s confidence returns. “Seven Trog cruisers destroyed. Five damaged, a few of those unsalvageable in my estimation. Another four are disabled. They won’t be leaving the system until they manage to build a new drive array.”
“And us?” I ask.
“Looks like two of them got away. Maybe three. All were Arizona-class ships.”
Two? Three?
I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. I suck in a sharp breath and try to hide my dismay.
Penny sees right through my hasty mask. “It’s not your fault. It was already clusterfucked when we got there.”
Brice is suddenly standing just behind me, boots grav-locked onto the floor. He pats my shoulder. “I can go forward and kick Blair’s teeth in if you think that’ll help.”
“Ejecting her into space would help, it just won’t help the right things.” I turn to Tarlow. “Are you counting Jill’s ships?”
Tarlow thinks it’s a stupid question. “Of course not.”
“There,” Phil is suddenly erect in his seat. He’s focused forward. “Penny, don’t jump.”
“What is it?”
Tarlow starts fiddling with his controls, trying to focus his dishes forward.
“A debris field,” Phil tells us.
Chapter 56
We grav drive through ten thousand klicks, following Phil’s honed senses.
With my bug, I don’t see anything but vague blurs until we’ve crossed most of the distance.
“Wow,” utters Penny, as we draw close. “I thought that was a gas cloud or something.”
“Keep going,” Phil tells her. “I’ll let you know when to slow down.”
“I can see it, now,” Penny responds. “And I think I know when to slow down.”
“Sorry.”
“Tarlow,” I ask. “Can you map it?”
“Space junk?”
Phil tells him, “That junk is the Trog cruiser we’re chasing. And Jill’s ship, and the other two.”
I look through one of the small forward-facing windows. I can’t make out anything with enough clarity to know what the misshapen bits are.
“I think there are survivors,” Phil tells us.
“Penny,” I order, “get us there as quick as you can.”
She gooses the power.
Tarlow speculates as to what happened, but everyone’s preoccupied.
As we close in, I can see pieces of ship hull, grav plates, and railgun barrels. Railgun slugs bounce off the hull, sounding like hail. Trogs in suits, whole and in pieces, fall into our wake.
We swerve to avoid a huge piece of the cruiser’s drive array.
“They’re alive,” says Penny, staring through her forward-facing monitors. “Some of them are moving.”
“Mostly,” says Phil, “you’re seeing the effects of gas leaks from their suits.”
“Mostly?” I ask.
“I think some are alive.” Phil says it like he doesn’t quite believe it either.
“More than some.” Penny points. “Those up ahead, most of them look like they’re moving.”
“Jablonsky,” I command, “broadcast on the suit frequencies. See if any of those bodies out there… if any of those suits out there are our people.”
Looking forward, I spot sparkles of blue grav fields in the black sky. Others come to life.
“What the hell?” asks Penny.
“Power up the grav lens,” I order. “Do it, now.”
“But—”
“Do it!”
Phil does. The points of light are lost in the blue glow of our grav lens field.
Every object in space nearby is pushed away.
“Those were disruptors,” I explain. “Some of those Trogs have the presence of mind to—”
Brice pushes past, going forward, alerting the platoon over the comm. Just before exiting the bridge he turns to me. “I need to get our soldiers outside. If we’re going to search this mess for our people, we don’t want to pick up any hitchhikers, especially Trogs with disruptors wanting to hack our ship to bits.
“Penny,” I order, “you have the ship. Jablonsky, find our survivors.”
I rush after Brice.
Chapter 57
Blair, unfortunately, is back on the bridge, restrained again, buckled into a seat and out of the way. I have someone else watching her. She’s not a priority at the moment. Silva and Lenox, her recently assigned babysitters, are with me, Brice, and the rest of the platoon, along with Hawkins and his people. We’re spread out on the Rusty Turd’s hull, boots grav-locked to the metal, weapons aimed at a black sky sprinkled with ten thousand Trogs and the remains of their cruiser.
Most of the Trogs are dead. Their stiffening bodies don’t move when we fly past. However, way too many of them are alive, and most of those are ready to activate their suit grav and attack us, despite their inherent fear of flying. They have to. They’re drifting tens of millions of miles from nowhere, and the only hope they had before we arrived was to die swiftly, without significant pain. Now they have a way out—our ship.
Beside me, Silva lets loose a burst from her railgun.
Another soldier fires.
Three hundred meters out, the slugs impact a Trog’s defensive field and send him spinning in
another direction. More weapons fire and light up a section of the void with red-hot arcs through the black.
Silva fires again.
The Trog she’s aiming at is farther away but spun around with his back facing us, his vulnerable side. The rounds tear through his suit and body and rip him apart.
“Got him!” Silva tells me.
“Good shooting.” I point at other Trogs, ten or more, glowing blue with suits pushing hard-g. “More up there,” I announce to the platoon. “Port side. Twenty degrees off our bow.”
Guns start to shoot in that direction.
Brice directs others to fire at a trio accelerating at us from the rear. On the platoon’s command comm, with just me him and Lenox, he asks, “How did anyone survive this?”
It wasn’t an impact that destroyed the ship,” Lenox deduces. “No impact. No broken bones, and no squished bodies.”
Brice laughs.
I don’t see the humor in it, well, not that much humor. I suggest, “Or one of the reactors exploded like that first one we destroyed over Arizona.”
Lenox disagrees. “If that was true, I think there’d be a lot more shredded bodies. Lots more mangled equipment.”
“And what do you call this?” Silva asks, unexpectedly on the channel.
“To me,” says Lenox, “it looks like somebody cracked an egg and spilled the contents all across ten kilometers of space. Like Phil was talking about, I think the instability in the structure because of the three assault ships caused the cruiser to rattle apart.”
Some of the cruiser’s pieces are a hundred or even two hundred meters long. In a way, they do look like giant sections of a cracked eggshell.
“The Trogs spilled out with everything else,” Lenox finishes.
More railgun rounds scatter across space, as most of my platoon’s guns erupt.
“No shortage of targets,” laughs Brice.
“We have plenty of ammunition, right?” I’m pretty sure we do, but with so many things going on and everything happening so fast, I’m not sure.
“Enough to kill twenty-thousand Trogs,” answers Lenox. “I watched as they loaded each box.”
“Keep an eye on how many rounds your people have,” I advise. “Maybe assign someone to start ferrying more out here. I have a feeling we’ll be running through a lot of ammo.”
