by Bobby Adair
“It’s one we might have to take,” I say, “if we want to get home.”
Brice shakes his head, “There’s a better place we can go.”
Chapter 64
We pop out of our fourth hop, our shortest of the trip, less than three thousand klicks above and on the opposite side of the protoplanet that used to be the cozy home of Trinity Base. Wasting not a second, Penny accelerates us down to the surface.
Tarlow, finally settled down, is scanning with his functional dishes. Phil and the Gray are trying to get a picture of every gravitationally significant body within a quarter million miles—Trog cruisers are what they’re searching for.
Through Penny’s monitors, I see the protoplanet is engulfed in what seems to be a dust storm with thunderheads standing hundreds of miles above the surface. Lightning flashes the brownish clouds and streaks of meteors burn long trails, disappearing into the thick haze below.
“I need to power up the grav lens,” says Phil. “There’s too much debris to go through without it.”
Without looking over at him, I say, “As little as we can get away with.”
“I can’t even see the planet,” says Penny.
“It’s down there,” Phil assures her. “We’ll need to be careful.”
“Anything out here?” I ask, as Tarlow seems to be spending too much time looking at Penny’s monitors, too.
Tarlow grunts and goes back to his work. “Cruisers. Some drifting. Most under power. Generally moving back toward Trinity base. Nobody in a hurry.”
“All this mess,” I ask, pointing at Penny’s screens, yet wanting an answer from anybody. “This is our handiwork?”
“Yes,” says Tarlow.
Phil agrees. “The collision of the cruiser with Trinity base pulverized mountains of rock and threw it into the atmosphere and into orbit. It’ll take years for it to settle back to the ground.”
I look over at Brice.
He shrugs. “I didn’t say there were any guarantees.”
Chapter 65
Penny has the ship down close to the surface, at less than a hundred feet, flying through the haze, descending as we close in on our target.
“Can they make us out from above?” I ask.
Phil shakes his head. “It’s all about mass. With so much debris above us, the Grays won’t see us unless we start pushing a lot of grav.”
“Can you see them?” I ask.
"I can," he answers. "A cruiser is a whale. We’re a fish. They’re far enough away and they aren’t enveloped like we are. The advantage is to us.”
“Can you tell what they’re doing?” I ask.
“Besides coming together?” answers Phil. “No.”
“Tarlow?”
“My images are fuzzy from all the crap in the air,” he says. “I think they’re forming up again.”
“Strange.” I look around. “Brice, Lenox, any ideas?”
“Staying near the base,” suggests Lenox. “Waiting for the next fleet to arrive? They can’t go anywhere, can they?”
“A few of the cruisers,” says Phil. “Maybe. We don’t know if any ever completely refueled before they took off. Maybe they weren’t even refueling yet. Maybe they were working on fitting the railgun slugs. We don’t know. As far as Nicky and I can tell, the ones who were docked when we arrived, were the same ones there when we attacked.”
“So maybe nobody has enough gas to get home.” I know it’s wishful thinking. We don’t have any evidence to the contrary yet.
“Have they landed to search for survivors?” asks Brice.
“There aren’t any,” says Phil. “We can’t pick up the presence of any life forms, Gray or Trog.”
“Could they be here?” asks Brice. “Out of range?”
Phil nods. “No Trog cruiser is on the surface. I can tell you that for sure. If they dropped off a search party and went back up, that’s a possibility. If so, they’re too far away for us to know they’re here. There might be too much rock and whatnot between us and them.”
“So you don’t know?” asks Brice.
Phil shakes his head.
“So for the ones who weren’t vaporized,” I conclude, “the shockwave killed them. Probably. As far as we know, we’re here alone.”
“With forty or fifty Trog cruisers orbiting above.” Brice smiles, because to him, that’s pretty funny. He leaves the bridge and heads to the bow. Lenox follows.
Phil directs Penny as we close in on the supply base.
We come upon the wreckage of a Trog cruiser, partially buried in rock and dirt. It’s spewing gas into the thin atmosphere. Power is trickling through its grav plates in weak pulses. It looks like a great beast struggling through the final beats of its heart.
“Phil,” I ask, “can you tell if any of the base’s underground structures survived?”
“No,” he says. “If you remember, the cruiser we crashed into the base didn’t make a direct hit, but the base is a hole in the ground now. What wasn’t vaporized was pulverized and thrown out of the impact crater. Some of that is covering this cruiser.”
“I’m bringing us down,” says Penny, as she guides the ship up close to the star cruiser.
“Anything alive inside?” I ask.
Phil doesn’t seem sure, but he says, “Nothing as far as we can tell.”
“Stay on your toes up here.” I unbuckle to follow Brice and Lenox to the bow. When I reach the forward compartment, both are there with Silva and Peterson, double-checking their equipment as Brice briefs them over a squad comm I haven’t been looped in on.
I connect with the group as I heft my railgun. “What are we looking for, exactly?”
Brice turns to me and says, “I just described it to them. A portable welding rig, the kind we used to use on station construction. It’s a Gray design, so I figure the Trogs here have the same one. Why are you here?”
I’m taken aback. “Why?”
“Yeah,” says Brice. “We got this.”
“I’m going with,” I tell him.
Brice shakes his head and waves a hand at the other three. “We’ve been locked in this can for nearly six months, doing nothing.”
Silva smiles at that comment.
“You’ve had your fun up there playing Captain Kirk,” continues Brice. “Let us earn our pay.”
“But—”
“Nothing’s alive down here,” says Brice, apparently having come to that rosy conclusion all on his own. “We don’t need an extra gun hand. This mission is a quick in and out.”
“Nothing’s ever quick,” I argue.
Brice puts a hand on my shoulder. "Stay with the ship in case something happens, and you need to hightail it outta here."
“You know we’re—”
“If you need to go,” says Brice. “You need to go. You can come back and pick us up later. We’ll wait. We know how to hide. If those cruisers decide to come down and join us, make sure none of them make it to the ground alive.”
Chapter 66
Back on the bridge, I’m stewing.
Brice’s squad is gone, inside the cruiser, out of comm range.
Phil says, “Silva will be fine.”
As usual, Phil gets right to the core of it, as I suddenly have to confront a problem I’d hoped to avoid entirely—me, as Silva’s commanding officer, putting her in harm’s way. Shit.
“Can you sense them?” I ask. “All four?”
“For the moment,” Phil nods. “Nicky and I know where they are, and we know they’re not encountering any trouble.”
“How deep are they? Have they found it yet?”
Phil shakes his head. “I told you, I don’t get that level of detail when—”
I wave a hand to quiet him down. I’ve heard it.
Phil changes the subject. “What about all those cruisers up there?”
“What about them?” Involuntarily, I look up, though I can make out nothing above me but the inside
of our hull.
“Do we leave them all here and go home, or do we chase them down and destroy them?”
Both are options I’ve been rolling around in my thoughts in the downtime since we crashed the cruiser into Trinity Base. This is the first the ideas have come into the light. “Did you read those from my mind?”
Phil shakes his head.
“Be honest.”
“Why would he lie?” asks Tarlow, getting into the discussion. “He can see the problem as easily as you can.”
I turn to Tarlow. “And you’ve been wondering about the same question?”
He shrugs. “It occurred to me, but I didn’t dwell on it.”
“Brice and I talked about it,” says Penny. “Over a private comm channel when we were refueling the ship.”
Ugh.
“Don’t worry,” says Phil. “This doesn’t mean you’re not still the smartest one here.”
I struggle to keep my voice calm. “I don’t need you to patronize me.”
Phil laughs out loud. Penny and Tarlow join in.
Penny spins her chair around to face me, putting a hand on my leg as she smiles. “You need to unwind, Dylan. It was a joke.”
I nod. She’s right. I force a smile.
“That’s a big boy,” she laughs and turns back to her console.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s discuss it. Do we hunt them down or leave?”
“We’ll never find them all,” says Tarlow. “As soon as they understand our intentions, they’ll run.”
“He’s right about that,” says Phil.
“They can’t go far,” I counter. “They have limited fuel.”
“Still some will get away,” says Tarlow.
“Yeah.” I know he’s right. “What about the value of destroying as many as we can and leaving their broken carcasses in orbit around this station. What kind of psychological affect would that have on the next Trog fleet to arrive?”
“The station won’t be operational,” says Phil. “Arriving ships will die here. The psychological effects on them are moot.”
“Unless the next fleet brings along factory ships and tankers.”
“The tankers can barely make light speed,” says Tarlow. “We learned that at Cygni Saturn. They can’t travel with a fleet.”
“Still,” I say, “they can be on the way. New tankers might arrive tomorrow, on the way here or on the way to earth.”
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” says Phil.
I hide my disdain. “Clichés won’t help.”
“All I’m saying,” says Phil, “is if we make our decision on what might be coming next, we’re making it based on a guess. That’s all. If we’re making it based on a guess, then we’re making it without taking into account the only things that truly matter.”
“And those things are?” I ask.
“What’s best for us,” says Phil, “based on what we know.”
Instead of jumping right into a counter-argument, I take a moment to think about Phil’s simplistic solution. And it occurs to me, he’s right. I glance over at Tarlow, who nods.
“What’s best for us?” asks Penny.
“We leave the fleet alone,” I tell them, working through the logic like I’m reading from a script. “We have the fastest ship. We have more just like this one back home in our fleet by now. If we bounce back to earth as quick as we can and load up as many flight crews as possible, we might be able to come back here and steal all these cruisers. We might be able to steal every one that shows up for the next decade if we play our cards right. They’ll arrive low on fuel and supplies with no way to defend themselves, and with no way to know what’s waiting for them here.”
I know Phil agrees before he opens his mouth to say, “That’s what I think.”
I look at Penny and Tarlow. “What about you two?”
“Not to ruin this perfect moment,” says Phil, “but something’s going on with the cruisers above us.”
Chapter 67
Three hours lying among the ruins of Trinity Base.
The planet’s gravity is holding the Rusty Turd to the ground. We don’t have any grav system on the ship engaged. The reactor is outputting minimum power, just enough to keep the computer systems up. Ship-wide life support systems are offline. With no atmosphere inside, what would be the point? We’re all depending on our suits, a state we’re comfortable with.
Well, except for Tarlow. We’ve been in system for weeks, and I suspect this is the longest stretch he’s ever worn an orange suit. He can’t get used to it. I’m starting to think it might be the source of his perpetually foul mood.
“Can you make any of this out?” Phil asks.
Tarlow is playing with filters and dish output settings to clean the images fuzzing across his screens.
Little of it makes sense to me, so I turn back to Phil. “Status on Brice?”
Phil makes a show of looking at his d-pad. “Eight minutes since you last asked.”
“Three hours is too long.” It’s a reasonable explanation for my impatience. In fact, it’s the truth.
“We don’t know how long it should take,” says Phil.
“Yeah,” I say. “All we know is they’re too deep for you to know where they are or if they’re alive.”
“We haven’t felt anything from inside the ship,” says Phil. “There’s no reason to believe something happened.”
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I tell them. “I’m giving them until the four-hour mark.” I look around the bridge to see everyone’s tense faces. “Then I’m taking Clawson, and I’m going to find them.”
“You’re going to search for them,” Phil corrects. “Futilely.”
“I disagree.” And that settles it. We’ve already been through it a few times. I look at my d-pad to mark the time. “What about these cruisers, then?”
“Another pair has pulled up beside that one,” says Phil. “Dangerously close. That makes four so far.”
“And?”
“Like the previous two,” says Phil, “they connected umbilicals as soon as they pulled within a few meters.”
I look at Tarlow. “Your guess might be right.”
“Transferring hydrogen,” he says. “That’s the only explanation.”
“Any more Trogs off-boarding?” I ask.
Phil shakes his head. “I think all the Trogs got off on the first two cruisers.”
“Did the Grays from these two new ships get on the one they appear to be passing their fuel to?”
“We’re not sure,” says Phil, “but we think so.”
“They’re making a lifeboat?” I ask. “Is that what it looks like to you?”
Penny nods.
Even though it was Tarlow’s theory, he’s still not sure.
“Phil?” I ask.
He nods slowly. “I still can’t believe they’d doom the Trogs and run off.”
I ask, “Is that a figure of speech, or do you really not believe it?”
“Figure of speech.”
“They’re all going to die anyway,” says Penny, unusually callous.
“She has a point,” adds Tarlow.
I think she does, too. “If that’s what they’re doing. How long before they’re done cannibalizing the fuel from their fleet? Sometime tomorrow?”
“That’s what I’d extrapolate,” says Phil.
“Then we wait,” I decide. “We’ll keep an eye on them, although I’d say this changes our immediate plans.”
Chapter 68
“There they are,” says Phil.
My only view aft is through Penny’s rear display monitors. It’s good enough to see two people have climbed through a massive rent in the cruiser’s hull and are standing on the ground. One is reaching back into the hole to take something being handed down. With distance and dust in the air, I can’t make out what.
“Brice,” I call. “Is that you?”
“Yep,�
� he answers through the static.
What I guess has to be the welding rig comes through the hole and into waiting hands. Good thing the grav is on the light side here. It looks heavy.
“Everybody okay?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“Did you get what you went in for?”
“Yep.” One of the suited figures, I guess Brice, turns and pats the heavy welding rig, now sitting on the ground.
Hands pass pieces of metal out through the hole.
“Everything?” I ask.
With some effort, Brice raises one of the pieces of metal. “Solid steel. We’ll use the other brackets as templates to cut these into shape. We brought extras so we can afford to make some mistakes.”
“Any trouble?” I ask.
Brice laughs. “You’re asking about Trogs?”
“You know I am.”
Brice fakes a gag. “They’re all in there. It’s a mess. Shockwave did a number on the bodies. Overwhelmed the inertial grav. Some look like water balloons filled with Trog jelly. Others disintegrated.”
“With all that damage, do you think the welding rig will work?”
“Move Dylan Kane to the front of the class, kids!” Brice laughs as he gets to work helping unload the metal. “We tested three others to see if they functioned before we found this one. You should see the interior of the ship, though. Just about everything is bent or broken. This cruiser is scrap. I’m amazed it held together.”
Chapter 69
The hours pass.
What seems to be the last two cruisers pull alongside the lifeboat ship. As far as we can tell, the Trogs surrendered their fuel and accepted their fate without resistance. In that act, I see a future so bleak it makes me ill. What does it say of a species willing to surrender lives by the thousand so a handful of masters can live?
Whatever the Trogs were when they left earth all those millennia in the past, earth’s first species of advanced life, they’ve been bred backward into servile monkeys. I wonder what else the Trogs lost in the deal. Can they still love? Are there artists among them painting emotions to canvas? Do they have poets? Is mathematics and writing beyond their ability now? What about stories of their ancestors? Do they talk about their glorious legends and dream of freedom and a return to those days? Are they just biological automatons?
