by Bobby Adair
Penny has us on a line, moving toward the massive rock that housed the command center. Details of the carnage come into focus as we draw closer.
“Jablonsky?” I ask.
“You want me to tell you I got nothin’? ‘Cause you can already guess that, right?”
I sigh. I was hoping. “Keep broadcasting.”
“What’s this mean?” asks Lenox.
“Exactly what it looks like,” says Brice, peeking over Tarlow’s shoulder for a glance at the radar displays.
“Brice,” I say, “make sure the gun crew is ready. Lenox, tell the squad to be ready to fight.”
“You think we lost the war?” asks Tarlow. “That’s what it looks like, right? Like we lost.”
“Tarlow,” I tell him, “no speculation. All we know for sure is there was a battle here. We need to go down, scout the installations, look for survivors, ask questions, and—”
“Or,” starts Tarlow, “we can—”
“No.” I don’t let him finish. “We go down. We check it out. Phil, you and Tarlow keep an eye on the space around us, make sure no Trogs are lurking. Keep the grav lens powered up.” It’s our defense in case anyone down there starts shooting. “We need to know what happened here.”
Chapter 13
We moved in slow, careful to keep an eye on the space around us, watching especially hard for Trogs hiding among the ruins to ambush any ship that happens by. It’s one of their tricks we learned at the Potato over a year ago.
Nevertheless, nothing attacked us, and now we’re scavenging.
Lenox and Brice are out with everyone but the bridge crew. They’re collecting H packs and cal packs, extra weapons—pretty much anything they can find that we might put to use. We have a long hose hooked up to a hydro supply we found in a buried tank farm on one of the asteroids that doesn’t seem to have taken as bad a beating as the others.
As for survivors, we spent hours drifting among the battered collection of rocks with Phil and Nicky focusing their senses into the warrens, searching for signs of life. They found nothing. Whoever lived through the battle must have fled. Or were taken prisoner.
And even those are optimistic thoughts. It’s possible no one survived.
“One hundred and forty days ago,” Tarlow tells us.
“What’s that?” asks Jablonsky, diligently scanning the radio frequencies.
“When the battle took place,” answers Tarlow. “One hundred and forty, give or take a few weeks.”
“How do you know that?”
Tarlow points at his monitor, though Jablonsky is on the other side of the bridge and can’t see. I look, though. “No friction in space,” says Tarlow. “If you map the trajectory of each piece of debris, you can draw a straight line back to where it started. All those pieces of ships and bodies out there,” Tarlow points up, “they were all blasted away from here. All their tracks point back here. By calculating the velocity of various pieces, you can tell when they started on their path away. It looks like the battle lasted a few weeks.”
“That fleet that beat us here,” says Penny, “I’ll bet it was them.”
She’s talking about the Trog fleet Prolific Man Killer told us about. I don’t disagree. I turn to Jablonsky. “Radio Brice and Lenox. Tell them to keep an eye out for any digital media, a log or something.”
“What’s the point?” asks Tarlow. “We know what happened.”
“We don’t know how it happened,” I tell him.
“They came in and blew the crap out of everything,” he argues. “Peek through the window. This isn’t rocket science.”
“Tarlow,” I stop myself from venting my frustration at him. It’s not just the loss of the base and all that implies. I don’t know if the Free Army can survive the loss of Colonel Bird. “It’s intel. Maybe the Trogs attacked like they always attack. Maybe not. If we can find a detailed record of the battle, we can start developing a set of guidelines for classifying their tactics.” We should have done it long ago. I don’t say that out loud. The weight of another loss is bearing down on us, every single one of us. Having me point out a mistake won’t help anyone’s mood. “The better we understand our enemy, the easier he’ll be to defeat.” I turn to Phil. “After you wrap up what you’re doing with Nicky, plot us a course out to Iapetus. Bounce us around the solar system a bit first, just in case the Trogs have a ship floating out there in the darkness hoping to track down anyone dumb enough to stop in here.”
Phil checks the time on his d-pad. “We’ve been here for eleven hours already. Maybe we take our time en route and give the crew a chance to sleep. We may soon lose control over our schedule.”
“Agreed.”
Penny turns to me, fresh worry on her face. “Do you think Iapetus is safe?”
Chapter 14
After spending nearly twenty hours on edge, searching, we’re back in space. The crew is frazzled. Their morale has tumbled into a dark hole. There's not much chatter on the comm. The crew is talking amongst themselves in pairs or small groups of three, rarely more. They need the kind of comfort they can only get from their closest friends. I eavesdrop because I can, and because I’m worried. They believe our successful mission out to 61 Cygni was a mistake. Colonel Bird should have kept us in system. A ship like ours could have been a difference maker in any battle with the Trogs. Most think the war is lost. If it's not, their confidence in the Free Army's commanders is shot. First, there was incompetent Blair, and now Bird. Bird was better than Blair in every imaginable way, yet in the end, the vacuum was full of bodies and broken ships.
Penny skims close in over Pluto, and we're slowing down over the surface of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. “You want me to set it down?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I answer, giving Phil a glance for confirmation.
“We’ll be less likely to be spotted on the surface,” he says, not that any of us are expecting to see a Trog or anything else way out here.
“Twelve hours,” I announce over the comm. “Get some sleep. Get out of your suits if you have the urge. This may be the last chance you have to do it for a while. We don’t know what’s waiting for us on Iapetus.”
I divvy bridge duty among the three shifts as the ship settles onto the ground. Penny starts to power down the ship’s major systems. Tarlow sets his radar antennae to scan the sky above. Phil stares silently into space, and I know he’s fully connected to Nicky in their own little telepathic fantasy world. I find I’m a little bit jealous of their closeness, and concerned that I don’t have any clue what they talk about in there. Is Nicky slowly turning Phil to the Gray side? Or is that my paranoia coming to the surface?
I comm Silva. “Library?”
"No one up here is taking off their suits."
“Really?”
In an unnecessary whisper, she says, "We're in a war zone. No one's comfortable getting naked."
Naked, a word that doesn’t mean bare skin anymore. Sure, that’s one meaning, but out here, naked means suitless.
“Some of us are going out to walk around on the surface.”
I didn’t expect that.
“Has anyone ever been here?” she asks. “To Charon? Explorers or anything?”
“Miners maybe.” It’s hard to imagine Pluto’s largest moon would have gone unsurveyed, but the solar system is enormous beyond imagination, the number of places where minerals lie is countless, and many of them are much closer to earth. “It is possible we’re the first ones ever.”
“You want to come out with us?”
I’d prefer they all sleep, but I leave it to them to decide what they need most. “I’ll stay with the ship.”
“Don’t,” she tells me. “Come. Let go of the war for a minute. Nobody knows we’re out here. Nobody’s ever going to notice. Come and sit on a mountain with me and watch Pluto set. Or rise, or whatever. It’ll be romantic.” Silva giggles, although it sounds forced. She’s trying hard to hide from other feelings. “I’l
l bet you’ve never done that with a girl.”
No doubt about that. “I’ll come forward.”
Chapter 15
We’re holding gloved hands and sitting lightly on the ground at the top of a small mountain on a world so cold the temperature would kill an unprotected human faster than the vacuum. On an icy plane far below, the Rusty Turd rests, sleek and shiny from the high-temp glazing it received chasing that hydrogen miner through the deep atmosphere on Cygni Saturn.
Over the drastically curved horizon, Pluto is frozen in the sky, huge and beautiful.
“I guess it’s not moving,” says Silva.
Neither of us realized Charon was tidally locked with Pluto. So, no setting or rising. The planet just stayed in the same place in the sky. “It looks like Pluto is tidally locked to Charon as well,” I observe. “See how it doesn’t seem to spin?” Only the shadow of Pluto’s night shows movement, creeping ever so slowly across its surface.
“You know,” she says, “when my mother was my age, she was working in a factory where she’d probably still be working if she were still alive. She was already married, already had two kids. Me and my brother.”
“The MSS likes to get fertile young ladies producing as soon as is biologically feasible.” I start to run the math in my head. Am I as old as her mom? Close?
Maybe guessing what I’m thinking, Silva says, “My mom was born before the siege. My grandma didn’t have my mom until she was thirty-six. She was a lawyer before.”
"I don't know much of anything about my grandparents. I never met them."
“You didn’t know who your father was,” says Silva, “based on what Spitz told you, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think you’ll try and look up your real grandparents when you get back to earth?”
“You think we’ll make it back?”
“I don’t know.” She turns to me, and she smiles.
“If we do, why not? I think if I were them and I had a grandkid out there in the world, I’d want to know.”
“I wonder why they never looked you up?”
“Maybe they passed before I was born,” I guess. “Maybe if my dad was one of the soldiers sent to the moon, maybe the situation with the MSS after the war made it unwise to be a family member of any of them.”
“That would make sense.” Silva sits in silence for a few minutes while her mind wanders to other things. “I hate the MSS.”
I nod.
“You know what?”
“With you, I don’t think so.”
She laughs, and for a moment, it feels like we’re two normal young lovers sitting in the moonlight and sharing our dreams of a tomorrow where we’ll live in a big house by a peaceful river and raise our kids and grow old and reminisce over faded photographs and bore our friends with stories of our grandkids. It was the kind of dream people on earth used to have before the Grays came, banal, but alluring. It’s peace.
“If we’ve lost the war,” she tells me, “I want to hijack one of those big mining tugs like that one we saw on the Potato.”
“Yeah?” I ask.
“I want to find a heavy, metallic asteroid and push it toward earth and drop it on Pyongyang.”
I nod, but I know an asteroid big enough to destroy the city would be detected by the Grays a billion miles from earth, or at least a hundred million miles away. They’d divert it long before it became a danger. Silva’s fantasy is just that, a fantasy. I don’t say anything about it. I understand how she feels, and it gets me to wondering whether there’s any way to exact some revenge on the MSS before we leave the solar system for good.
And then I realize I’ve taken a mental step. A few. I’ve accepted that we've lost the war, that our only chance at a life is to flee to the colonies. I squeeze Silva's hand again. Maybe a long life with her, fifty light years from here, wouldn't make such a bad future.
She snuggles up next to me, as much as that can be done with layers of composite cloth, insulation, and wiring separating our needy skins.
I wonder, how many trillions of worlds are out there orbiting the stars. How many cultures have evolved out of the swamp goo, built civilizations, and then died away? Did any of them find their way past the genocidal urge that pulls the Grays, the Trogs, and us to such dark places? Did any of them imagine a Heaven into existence to make their cold nights less frightening? Did any of them build a world that matched their dreams, or did they all race their nightmares down to Hell?
It bothers me with Silva so close that my thoughts fall into such bleak places.
Maybe every intelligent race is doomed the moment it forms the concept of self apart from others of its kind.
“Sometimes it seems like you’re a million miles away,” says Silva.
“Sometimes I am.”
“Were you happy before?”
“Before?” I ask.
“When you were married to Claire.”
“I’m happy with you. Back then, I can see now I was just pretending, and telling myself if I tried hard enough, it would turn real. What about you?”
“I’ve never been married.”
“You’ve had boyfriends. Have you ever been in love?”
“Puppy love. It never lasted. I thought it would at the time. Doesn’t everybody, the first time the love bug bites?”
I laugh. “And probably every time after that.”
“What about us?” she asks.
“We’ll last forever. Of course.” I don’t know if I’m being sarcastic or serious.
“I’m glad we came out here, but I wish we had time to go to the library and take our suits off before all this gets started again.”
“I have some pull with the boss,” I tell her. And then my thoughts turn dark again. “I doubt anything is urgently waiting for us on Iapetus.”
Silva squeezes my hand tightly. “I doubt it, too.”
Chapter 16
The time in the library with Silva never came. I didn’t extend the Rusty Turd’s stay on Charon. The war was calling. We left on schedule. We’ve been bouncing around the solar system on our indirect path to Iapetus, and we’re in our last bubble jump.
“Another moment,” Phil tells us. He feels the crew’s mood better than I’ll ever be able to, but even I see the tension run silently through the bridge.
“Be ready to scan the area,” I tell Tarlow.
“I know,” he whines. “You don’t have to tell me every time. I’m not one of—”
“Can it,” I tell him. “Just can it.”
“Thanks,” mutters Penny.
The shimmering blue on the hull rapidly dissipates. The feeling I get when we come out of bubble makes me want to punch something. It always feels like loss to me. I can’t explain why it affects me so much. It’s something I’ll need to talk to Phil about someday.
“We’re about 10k out,” says Phil.
“That’s what I’m showing,” says Tarlow.
Through Penny’s forward facing screens, I see all I need to see, know all I need to know. Iapetus is dead.
“Lots of debris in orbit around the moon,” says Tarlow in a clinical voice.
“Trog cruisers?” I ask, looking for danger.
“Nothing we can sense,” says Phil.
“Tarlow?” I ask.
“I’m scanning the space around us. I don’t see anything moving under power.”
“Derelicts?” I’m hoping at least the defenders of Iapetus were able to take a significant fraction of the Trog fleet with them.
“Nothing we can see,” says Phil.
Brice grumbles over the comm.
“They weren’t set up for a direct engagement with capital ships,” I say, measuring in my mind Spitz’s tiny, stealthy ships against those kilometer-long battle cruisers. They had no hope of winning. “Penny, take us in close.”
“Any of Spitz’s ships out there?” asks Brice.
“I already told y
ou,” says Tarlow, turning to cast his glare. “There aren’t—”
“Tarlow,” I interrupt, “he’s not asking about live ships. He’s asking about wrecks. Are the wrecked UN ships floating around in all the junk? We need to know what happened to their fleet.”
Tarlow grumbles and turns back to his monitor. “There’s so much debris in orbit, it might take me weeks to sort it out.”
“Then you better start,” I tell him. “I need to know if they lost everything or escaped.”
“I’m not going to be able—”
“Do your best.” I settle into my chair. The ship is picking up speed. The grav lens is glowing a conservative field, enough to keep us safe, not bright enough to announce our presence to everything on this side of Saturn.
Penny points to a discolored smudge on the mountain range that bisects the moon. “There, that’s where the base was.”
Was.
The tense seems correct.
“Phil,” I ask, “can you and Nicky sense anything below the surface?”
“We need to get closer,” he answers.
“Brice,” I say, “get the squad ready. We’re going in.”
“We’re not—”
I turn to look at him. “We are going in.” I pat Penny on the shoulder. “You’ll have the ship. You, Jablonsky and Tarlow. Phil, you and Nicky are coming with us.”
“What about the railgun crew?” asks Penny.
“They’ll stay aboard with you,” I answer. “Same rules as usual. Stay close. Wait for us, unless things get ugly. If they do, then bug out and come back for us later. Get us down there.”
“What if I want to blow up a Trog cruiser?” she asks. “If one shows up, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop myself.”
“They almost never travel alone. ” I tell her. “Not anymore. If you find one, there’ll be others lurking nearby.”
Chapter 17
We fly in like the way we did on our first visit. Penny brings the ship down near the surface and we skim over the terrain, scanning the horizon for our objective.
