by Bobby Adair
Penny’s eyes shoot daggers at Brice.
“What?” he asks.
I ignore them. Everyone else is in their places—gunners manning the plasma gun, my grunts ready to pitch in and hump the heavy rounds out of the storage lockers and into the magazine, Tarlow watching his screens, Penny flying the ship, Phil running the nav console, and Nicky, sitting in one of the forward compartments, concentrating on the most minuscule of gravitational fluctuations.
“Tarlow,” I ask, “how many ships are out there?”
“Twenty-nine seem to be totally intact or only have minor damage. Another seventeen are in some state of—”
“Destruction,” Phil finds the word for him.
“Yeah,” agrees Tarlow. “Seventeen are too damaged to fly again.”
“Do any have their reactors running?” I ask.
“Nine aren’t as cold as the others,” says Tarlow, glancing up at me. “I have infrared capabilities.”
“Meaning?” I ask.
“They maybe ran out of fuel later?” Tarlow is guessing.
“They shut down their reactors when they sensed us coming this way,” says Phil. “They’re playing dead. They want us to leave them alone.”
“Or they’re setting a trap,” says Brice. “How long after they fire up their reactors before they can use their railguns?”
“Those reactors take nearly a half-hour to power all the way up,” says Penny. “You can’t cold-start a fusion reactor.”
“That’s something,” says Brice as he steps up to press his face to one of the small bridge windows.
“Phil,” I ask, “you said they want us to leave them alone. Is that a guess, or did Nicky read some minds to find that answer?”
“It’s not specific,” says Phil. “It’s a general feeling. Nicky senses the mood.”
“The mood?” Brice snorts and he slaps me on the back. “You like to step in the sticky shit, don’t you?”
I smile when I turn to him. “Don’t go soft on me now, Brice.”
He laughs at that, taking it just how I meant it, as a dare. “Alright, boss. I’ll play. Let’s do this. Phil, tell Nicky to find out who’s in charge out here.”
“It’s not that easy,” says Phil. “These are all Trogs out in these ships. They aren’t used to being in charge of anything.”
“Ghost Trogs aren’t just assassins,” says Brice, “looking around the bridge. They’re like the Samurai class. They’re the generals and captains over the lesser Trogs. They’re the smart ones. You can bet there’s one or two in charge on every ship, and you can bet one of them in this mess has declared himself the big cheese.”
“I thought they were all waiting to die,” says Penny.
Brice shakes his head. “Nobody waits to die. Even if they don’t stand a chance of living, it doesn’t mean they all quit. My bet is they’re trying to figure out how to get themselves out of their predicament.”
“And they can’t risk another confrontation with us,” I say. “They’re smart enough to know we can kill every ship at our leisure. That’s why they’re playing dead.”
Brice turns to Phil. “The big cheese, find him.”
Chapter 4
Of course, it didn’t go as quickly as I’d imagined it would.
Contacting the Trogs through Nicky was easy enough. We managed that on the first day. Navigating the Trogs’ evolving politics was a problem. In this case, Brice turned out to be wrong. There was no single Trog in charge. There would be, but it was taking time.
In the mean time, I issued some rules to each Trog ship: no reactor power-ups, and no Trogs outside.
They weren’t in a position to negotiate, but they broke the outside-Trog rule immediately and frequently, just not with live ones. Trog tradition, given the death of their Gray masters in battle, dictated that they kill themselves. It made perfect sense to them. They’d failed in their most important duty as soldiers, that of protecting their masters. The bodies of the dead were ejected into space, in what turned into a fairly regular stream off each ship as individual Trogs onboard arrived at their personal decision and took action. Each of the dead’s still-living buddies took upon themselves to strip corpses of hydro packs, cal packs, and weapons before sending them into the void.
The weird thing, though, was the position in which each body died. Trogs, before skewering themselves with their disruptors, went to the trouble to kneel on the ground and wrap a cord around their thighs and ankles which held their legs bent, calf to hamstring. It was Tarlow who asked Phil about the oddity as he observed a cloud of the frozen bodies on his radar screen, all in that position. Phil explained that in Trog culture, anally raping the corpses of the vanquished was a way to dishonor them in the next life. Binding the legs put their big feet in the right spot to block any attempt at entry from the rear.
Now, so many kneeling corpses were in orbit above the protoplanet it was making navigation dangerous.
Penny now has the Rusty Turd parked alongside the fractured hulk of one of the sentinel ships we destroyed early in the battle. The Trogs who’d lived through the explosions had long since crossed the void in their spacesuits for refuge on one of the intact ships. Or they’d all harakiri’d themselves off my list of concerns. It didn’t matter to me which, as long as the ship was empty of live Trogs.
I’m outside the Rusty Turd, standing on the hull near the bow with my rifle at the ready. Brice is at the stern, and a few of my grunts are also outside, keeping an eye out for movement in the wrecked cruiser’s structure.
One of the things Phil had done to pass the time between sessions where he and Nicky were telepathically communicating with the Trogs was to scan each of the cruisers for a clear picture of its contents. He was getting scary good with his bug at seeing the grav from any sized mass. He was like a portable long-range MRI. That’s how he found that this ship still held scores of full hydrogen tanks. No doubt the surviving Trogs would have found it eventually, but we’d beaten them to it. My crew had already rigged up a high-pressure hose from inside, and we were using it to top off our tanks with H.
“So where are we,” asks Brice, opening a private comm link, “with your little Trog circus?”
Keeping my eyes on my sector I say, “They have a leadership council. I asked Phil if they were going to elect a president or whatever they call it. He told me they don’t have any concept of voting.”
“So how do they decide?”
“Don’t know. Phil told me Nicky explained it to him but then he yammered on for twenty minutes describing it before I gave up and told him I didn’t care.”
Brice laughs.
“He tells me they’re going to pick one today, though. Hell, maybe they already did.”
“What then?” Brice asks. “Is there a limit to how long we’re going to wait around for the Trogs to get their shit together?”
“Don’t start again,” I tell him.
“I’m not starting. I’m just wondering what the mission parameters are.”
“But you admit it’s a good thing we came back, right?”
“Given what we found, yeah.”
It turned out the full tanks of hydro in some of the broken ships were the least of our problems. Upon scanning the derelicts, Phil also came across one that wasn’t like the others. It held refining equipment for processing hydrogen out of more complex molecules. It carried machinery for bootstrapping a new supply depot and it carried a pair of hydro tankers, atmosphere skimmers like the ones we destroyed at Cygni Saturn. Our fear that such ships might be sent out with each fleet turned out to be true.
“About those parameters?” Brice asked.
“I don’t know, exactly. I’m running on the assumption we’ll meet our goal—full cooperation from the Trogs who are left. I don’t have a backup plan.”
“We should put one together. We may have to destroy the rest of these ships and bubble back home. It’s not even a question of waiting out here unti
l we run out of patience. You have to accept the Trogs just might not do what you want them to.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I get that.”
“Maybe we call a meeting on the bridge after dinner tonight to talk about it?”
“Yeah.” The reality is I don’t want to talk too much more. I don’t want to undermine my authority.
“So what’s the deal with Nicky and Phil? I heard they were going to try something new today?”
“They’re trying to form a communal connection with the leadership council and Nicky wants to show them Gray history and their history. Kind of like an internal brain movie.”
“They don’t know their history?” asks Brice.
“No,” I tell him. “Not that we’ve been able to determine. The Grays like to keep them ignorant. The less they know, the more malleable they are.”
“So what, then?” asks Brice. “What did the Grays tell them? There had to be a story, right?”
“The Trogs believe the Grays created them out of mud and sticks. Kind of a Garden of Eden thing. The Trogs believe they’ve always served the Grays. They don’t know about anything from before.”
“So no idea they used to be the local badasses and they used to be the Grays’ masters?” Brice chuckles at that. “If you can get them to believe Nicky’s version of their history, you may get your way yet. I can’t imagine how pissed off I’d be if I found out every thing I ever believed was a lie and my species had been bred down from super-predator to lap dog.”
Phil comms in. “Dylan, are you there?”
“You know I am.”
“What’s that?” Brice isn’t on the link, not on Phil’s side, but he hears me. Comm link management is one of those things that never goes seamlessly. I loop Brice in and say, “Phil, Brice is on. What’s up?”
Phil says, “The Trogs want to meet face to face.”
Brice laughs and turns to look at me down the length of the ship. “What did you think was going to happen?”
Chapter 5
"That's stupid." Penny says it in the final way that ends arguments or escalates them to yelling. With the silence on the bridge, I wasn't sure where we'd go next.
Phil steps up to the challenge first. “What you don’t—”
“They want to meet face-to-face.” Penny raises her voice. “Not standing in spacesuits on the planet’s surface. Not on a neutral asteroid. Not even on the outer hull of one of their ships, but face-to-face in actual air. You know what that means, right?”
“Of course, I—” starts Phil.
“Of course you do,” she snaps. “But you told him anyway.” She flings an accusing finger at me. "Him. You know he doesn't have the sense to say no to any stupid idea that comes his way. You know that better than anybody, and you told him anyway."
Brice finds it all very funny.
“Hey,” I say in my defense.
Penny huffs and crosses her arms. “I’m not saying you’re stupid, Dylan—just—just. You know.”
“I’m not saying we have to do this,” I tell her. “I’m saying—”
“Cut the crap,” she shouts. “You know you’re going to do it. The only way you can have a face-to-face meeting with a bunch of Trogs is in an airlock on one of their ships. That’s it.”
Brice waves a hand at the bridge. “Here?”
“Don’t be a stupid asshole,” Penny snaps. “Even you two dumbasses aren’t stupid enough to invite a bunch of hostile Trogs onto our ship.”
I look over at Brice. “Are you and me the two dumbasses?”
“Don’t make fun,” Penny tells me. “You’re not going to let Trogs on our ship. Please tell me you’re not thinking of that?”
“No.” I reach a hand out to pat her on the shoulder. “No Trogs aboard. I won’t risk the ship for this.”
“But you are going to risk the ship,” she argues. “You know the only way this works is if you take Phil and Nicky with you. Otherwise, you can't communicate. Not effectively. You need them there to translate."
“We need them for navigation,” says Lenox, coming into the discussion on Penny's side.
“With the computerized navigation system,” I counter, “Tarlow can guide the ship home with no trouble.”
“He can’t replace Phil in a fight,” says Penny. “You know that.”
“Not even close,” I answer. It’s not much of an admission. Everybody knows Phil is a talent. “If things go badly for us here, when you get back to Iapetus you can pick up one of Dr. Gustafson’s bugheads in and use her as a navigator. Probably get a new pilot, too, since you’ll be the captain of this ship then.”
“I don’t want to be the captain of the ship,” Penny tells me.
"If we don't come back," I tell her, as deadly serious as I feel about it, "you need to step up. You're best-suited for it."
“So you’ve decided, then?” she figures, and figures right.
“Sounds that way to me,” says Lenox.
Silva, who’d been lingering near the bridge’s doorway, turns and hurries down the stairs.
Ugh.
“I’ve decided,” I admit. “I’m going. I think the risk is worth the payoff.” I glance at both Brice and Phil. “I need you two along to make this a success. Well, really just Phil. Brice, I’d like you to come and watch my back.”
Brice turns a glare at Penny when he answers me. “I’m too much of a dumbass to say no to something this stupid.”
Penny snorts and spins in her chair to put her back to Brice.
I turn my attention to Phil. “You have to volunteer.”
He nods.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Honestly. Are the Trogs looking to draw us into a trap and extract some revenge, or are they sincerely wanting to talk?”
“Nicky believes they’re approaching this in good faith.”
"But if they change their minds," says Lenox, "you'll be trapped in an airlock on one of their ships, and there's no way you'll get out alive."
“That’s true,” agrees Phil.
I know the risks already. “I’m willing to take a chance. Phil, are you in or out?”
Phil is apprehensive. “I’ll go along.”
Chapter 6
With comm links available to any of my crew at any time, and in a ship just 180 feet long, it's hard to think one of us could avoid another for any length of time. Silva, though, is making it work. In the eight hours between the end of the meeting on the bridge and where I am now, boots autogravved to the hull, Silva has managed to stay out of my sight and off the comms. Like the rest of the crew, she thinks I’ve finally chosen to do the thing that will kill me.
“No you haven’t,” says Phil over a private comm link.
“Stop reading my mind,” I tell him.
“Stop thinking so loud.”
“You’re saying it’s my fault?”
Phil shrugs.
Brice, Phil, Nicky, and me are outside, standing on the hull, watching the Trog cruiser grow to fill the sky in front of us. Only, the cruiser isn’t moving, our ship is. Penny’s instructions are to drop us off, and then to race away to a safe distance. If anything happens to us, of course, her orders are to blast the remaining Trog cruisers to junk before she takes the Turd back to earth’s solar system. In fact, if any of the Trog cruisers powers up. If anything unexpected happens, even if the Trogs take us hostage and try to negotiate for Penny to surrender the Rusty Turd, her orders were explicit: open fire.
Capture worries me, but Penny assured me she wasn't gullible enough to believe any one of us would be returned alive. To her, a hostage Dylan Kane is the same as a dead Dylan Kane.
Penny brings the ship to a halt.
An airlock door slowly opens on the side of the Trog cruiser, exposing a bay easily large enough for the Rusty Turd to fly inside.
“I’m not going in there,” Penny tells me over the comm.
“I know.”
“I don’t like that the
y think I’m dumb enough to fall into a trap like that,” she goes on. “I don’t trust them.”
“I know,” I reply, again.
“And you’re still doing this?”
“Risk versus reward.”
Penny kills the comm link. More drama than usual for her.
Twenty or thirty Trogs file out of a pair of airlocks on the back wall of the hangar bay, cross through the outer door, and form up in two neat rows, standing on the outer hull.
“They’re a disciplined bunch,” says Brice.
“They want us to come,” says Phil.
I give Brice a look, for final confirmation.
“This is your show,” he says.
“You have your railgun set on full-auto?” I asked.
“Is yours?”
“You bet your ass.” I smile, and pat the grenades attached on magnets across my chest. “The four of us might die, but if we do, we’re taking a bunch of Trogs with us.”
“Or we could kill ‘em all and go home now,” says Penny.
“Sorry,” I answer. “I thought you disconnected from this comm link.” I leap into the vacuum, steering myself toward the airlock. “C’mon.”
Chapter 7
As promised, eleven Trogs in fine black suits are waiting for us—orderly, in a straight row near the back of the airlock. They aren’t wearing regular suits, not like the ones SDF soldiers and most Trogs wear. These aren’t even like most of the Ghost Trogs I’ve seen. These guys have armor plates on their arms, legs, and shoulders. They look like ultra-mod medieval knights. They each have disruptors attached on their backs. Some carry two. Several have railguns.
Not one of them moves as we touch down on the deck and set autograv in our suits to keep our feet on the ground. With power out in the cruiser, none of its plates is operating to create internal grav in the ship. In fact, no lights are on anywhere. The entire ship feels dead.
A pair of the Trogs who’d been outside climb back inside and grab onto a large wheel they immediately start to turn. The airlock doors slowly slide closed.
“Those others are staying out there?” asks Brice.
