by Bobby Adair
Through an expansive complex of intersecting tunnels and natural caves with cathedral ceilings, we walk past offices, shops, and barracks. It’s a deeper, smaller, cruder version of the wasted city above.
Marsh leads us to Bird’s office, or what passes for an office. It’s a rectangular room burrowed into the stone with no door to secure it. A cot and small cabinet sit by one wall, telling me this is probably Bird’s apartment as well as his office. Brice and I both sit at a table with several chairs on each side, and Marsh explains that Bird will arrive soon. After that, he leaves.
"You suppose they're waiting out in the hall?" Brice asks.
I shrug. I do suppose that. I imagine Brice and I could be seen as a risk after being gone for so long. Who knows?
We wait. We don’t talk much, but I grow impatient. I get up and peek into the hall. I don’t see Marsh or any of his men. I do see others, all in suits, helmets off like the rest of them, all occupied with problems that don’t have anything to do with Brice or me.
After nearly an hour, Bird hurries through the doorway, apologies bubbling over.
Brice and I both stand, but before I salute, Bird wraps me in a hug. He does the same with Brice.
Three more officers follow in, a major and two captains. We introduce ourselves and still no salutes. I wonder if the formality has been beaten out of the Free Army by their defeats.
Bird goes behind the table and sits down like it's his desk. “Give it to me as briefly as you can.”
I run through a quick version of our arrival in the 61 Cygni system, our search, our destruction of the tankers at Cygni Saturn, and our victory at Trinity Base. I then take care to explain my justification for leaving Prolific Man Killer with a fleet that could one day be used against us should he break his word. Bird and the other officers exchange silent glances as I proceed through that part of the story, but to my surprise, not one of them protests, no one calls me out for my stupid decision.
“What about Jill’s ship?” asks Bird.
I can’t believe I’ve left that part of the story out. “We were hopping in sync for the first several weeks of the journey. When we came out of one bubble jump, she didn’t show. We waited, we searched. Nothing.” I shake my head as I recall the event. “We were hoping her ship would show up at 61 Cygni. It never did. We told ourselves she must have experienced a mechanical problem and turned back. My God, that was a year ago when we lost her.”
“She never made it back here,” says Bird, as he glances at his gathered officers.
One of them says, “If the ship didn’t disintegrate while making a jump, they might still be out there.”
“Doesn’t matter," says another. "At least if you disintegrate, it’s over. If your ship malfunctions in interstellar space, all you can do is wait until you run out of supplies and die.”
"They carried enough for eighteen months, and that's if they don't ration," says the first guy. "If they’re stranded out there, they could have sent a distress call that might have taken all year just to get here.”
“Wills,” says Bird, “have your comm people point an antenna toward 61 Cygni. Listen for a signal. If the ship is out there, they’ll be broadcasting their position. We can send a rescue.”
“So what’s the plan with the Trogs we left in 61 Cygni?” I ask. “I expected more resistance on my… ” I look for the right word, “treaty. Are you going to honor it if they show up here?”
“You took a big gamble with that,” says Bird. “We’ll honor the agreement, but it won’t matter.”
“How’s that?” I hate the fine print, even when it’s spoken. “Do we need to bring this up with the UN? I can’t imagine Secretary Kimura will be against it.”
“She’s gone,” says Bird.
“Dead?” I ask, saddened at the thought of losing another good leader.
“Off to the colonies,” says Bird. “Before the battle here, they left.”
"The Trog fleet was coming, and they detected it early?" I asked.
“It didn’t happen exactly like that,” says Bird. “A new Trog fleet showed up in system, I imagine the one your Prolific Man Killer told you about. They joined what was left of the fleet already here.”
“How long after Jill and I left?” I ask, knowing the Free Army and the UN needed time to build up their forces before they’d be able to put up a fight.
“Two months, maybe. They had a big enough fleet to go after earth’s battle stations again. We were repairing every Arizona Class ship we could get our hands on and upgrading as fast as we could, but we only had one ship like yours when you left.”
I don’t point out that was Bird’s choice. The pros and cons of that decision had been debated by people with a lot more brass on their collars than me. “Hawkins’s ship. How are they doing?”
“Still alive,” he says. “Hawkins is one fine ship captain.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“Hawkins was raiding then,” says Bird. “Quick in-and-out missions, hitting single ships whenever he could, trying to catch them when they went in for resupply. Safe missions. We didn’t want to risk our only effective ship in a fight we didn’t know we could win. As we brought other Arizona class ships online, we threw them into the war. The Trogs didn’t like that one bit. So, instead of attacking earth, they came after us. They ran around the whole solar system in pairs of squadrons, twelve ships each, turning over every rock in search of us. They found the base out near Jupiter first.”
“We saw it,” I tell him. “It’s the first place we stopped when we got back.”
“We held out for nearly a month,” says Bird, silently counting through the dead as he recalls it. "It was a loss from the beginning. I saw that. The Trogs were coming at us with over seventy cruisers, and we weren't even fully operational. Hawkins was in charge of the fleet by then." Bird shrugs. "He'd trained most of the Arizona Class ship captains, and they’d taken to calling him ‘admiral.’ It might have gone to his head a little because I ordered him to save the fleet and leave us to our fate. The fleet was still too weak and inexperienced for a direct confrontation. He didn’t listen. So, it was Ceres all over again. We knocked out nearly thirty of their cruisers, most of those destroyed, the rest disabled and probably repaired by now, but it almost cost us our whole fleet, and only bought us a few weeks.”
Bird picks up a cup of water off his desk and takes a big drink. He asks if Brice or I would like any. We decline.
“After the loss,” says Brice, “Secretary Kimura saw the writing on the wall more clearly than any of the rest of us. They had an evacuation plan all ready to go, and she gave the word."
I raise a hand to stop him. “I thought the UN didn’t have the ships to evacuate everyone to the colonies.”
“They didn’t,” says Bird. “They don’t.”
My shoulders sag as I start counting up deaths in my head. Twenty thousand of humanity’s brightest, all dead because there was no room to squeeze them into a freighter out to the colonies. “They stayed to fight off the Trog invasion here?”
“The invasion came,” says Bird, “but that’s not exactly what happened.”
“Tell me.”
"The UN took every ship that could make the journey, packed it with as much difficult-to-replace equipment, supplies, and people as they could, and they made their run. That left close to thirty thousand here."
“Jesus,” I say. “I didn’t realize there were that many people on Iapetus.”
“We set about rigging the whole complex with explosives. We didn’t want any of our advanced technology to fall into the hands of the Trogs when they took this place, and we didn’t have any doubt they would. There were too many of them, all battle-hardened warriors. We had ten or eleven thousand troops, a bunch of civilians, not enough weapons, and not nearly enough ammunition to fight through a siege.”
Bird stands up from his desk, dismisses his three officers and leads Brice and me out into the hall.
“Walk with me.”
It feels good to be on my feet again.
“You probably noticed it took a long time to get here,” says Bird.
“We did,” says Brice.
“There’s only one passage leading from the main complex all the way out here,” says Bird. “It was set with explosives and sealed up during the battle. We’ve since cleared it again so we can run patrols in the main complex. There’s still plenty left there we can use. We can probably piece together a few dozen ships capable of making it out to the colonies. We have people working on that.”
I’m looking at the rough-hewn walls, the pipes on the ceiling overhead and the exposed wiring. It’s a hiding place, not a home. “What about the rest? Are all the survivors down here?”
“All of this was built out years and years ago,” says Bird. “It was the UN’s backup plan.” Bird stops talking and leads us down a long hall, finally coming to an airlock, and leading us through.
On the other side, we step into a subterranean warehouse as large as the biggest ones I’d seen back on earth, covering acres and acres and acres of ground under a ceiling at least a hundred feet overhead. Filling the space are warehouse racks filled with coffin-sized pods. Every one of them has a small instrument panel glowing at the foot.
“What are these?” asks Brice.
“Stasis pods,” he says.
“Stasis?” I ask. I guess immediately from there, but I didn’t know the technology existed.
“They call it cryo-sleep,” says Bird. “The UN developed them initially so they could escape earth’s system when they thought the nearest safe place might require a trip of decades through space. Turns out they were right, mostly. The nearest colony is nearly a hundred light years away. That’s a twelve-year trip in one of those big Trog cruisers. Longer in the freighters we built. The problem is that you have to load so much H to fuel the trip, you have to start cutting back on payload. And by the time you figure enough food to feed the crew for twelve years, you get down to some pretty small numbers.”
“So you ship them in the pods,” I guess. “Does that save much?”
“You can run a pod for a decade on an H-packs,” he answers. "The weight savings, hence the fuel savings, is significant."
“So you can ship more colonists in one load,” I say.
“A hundred light years,” muses Brice. “That’s a long way. There weren’t any habitable worlds closer?”
“For safety, to save our race,” says Bird, “the distance is worth it.”
“How many of these pods do you have?” I ask.
“Seventeen thousand, give or take.” says Bird.
“But,” I’m thinking of the thirty thousand he said were on Iapetus before the attack.
Bird cuts me off. “We only had seventeen thousand pods.”
“Everyone else?” I ask.
“We have six thousand active people down here,” says Brice. “The rest died fighting for Iapetus.”
“Why?” I ask, “If it was a lost cause.”
“Sacrifice,” says Brice. “If the Trogs had rolled into that complex up there and nobody was home, they’d have known something was up.”
“That’s right,” says Bird. “We had to fight because we didn’t want them to spend years here scouring for survivors.”
The math of war: kill a few to save the many.
That’s what we’re talking about, yet I don’t summarize it so.
“We didn’t fight to win,” says Bird, “we fought to kill as many Trogs as we possibly could. We had miles and miles of tunnels to do it in.”
“How’d it work out?” asks Brice.
“It was expensive in lives,” says Bird, “however, we estimate killing sixty or seventy thousand Trogs.”
“Good night,” says Brice.
I’m shocked, too. “Sixty or seventy thousand?”
“We made ‘em pay,” says Brice.
“So what’s the plan now?” I ask.
“We’ll maintain our presence here until we can get all of these people shipped out,” says Bird.
“By building ships you don’t seem to have the resources to build?” asks Brice.
“And waiting for the ships already out at the colonies to return,” I add. “You’ll be here the rest of your life. What about the war?”
“Moving them all out might take twenty-five years,” says Bird.
I shake my head. “You know you’ll never keep this place secret that long, right?”
“It was a secret at least that long before,” argues Bird.
“But now the Trogs know it was a base,” I say. “They’ll be back when they finish off earth.”
“They’ve already finished off earth,” says Bird.
That’s a gut punch.
Chapter 22
“After Iapetus fell,” says Bird, “another Trog fleet showed up. No SDF fleet. No Free Army. No Iapetus.” The circumstances explain themselves from there.
Brice says, “At least those Gray bastards on the moon got what they had coming to them.”
“No,” says Bird, as we stroll down a long aisle between the tall racks of stasis pods, “as soon as that last fleet came into the system, the Grays pulled up stakes and ran for it.”
Brice stops us there. “In the original ship they arrived in? They lifted off from the moon and ran?”
I’m angry, but I’m not surprised. “We always knew they would.”
"Bastards," mutters Brice.
“After the Grays left,” says Bird, “the MSS surrendered the remaining battle stations.”
“I’ll bet they didn’t like being left behind,” I guess.
"Word has it," says Bird, "a few thousand went along. The MSS leadership and enough grunts to do the work in the next place they land."
“The next place they destroy,” I correct. “It doesn’t matter where they go, this other bunch of Grays will chase them down.”
“Their problem, not ours,” says Brice, “but I’ll tell you what, if the war here is lost, I wouldn’t mind jumping back in the Rusty Turd and chasing those bastards down whatever vector they left on. Those big Trog cruisers will take decades to catch them. We could be waiting for the Grays when they come out of bubble jump at the next star system and blast them to dust. Settle this shit once and for all.”
I nod at Brice, although I don't agree. I suspect vengeance on the Grays isn't something we can afford at the moment. "So the Trogs have the earth?"
Bird nods. “The MSS who were left behind brownnosed up to the Trogs and helped them scour the planet for Grays. Killed every Gray on the planet as far as we know."
“And the hosts?” I ask. “People who were raising the hatchlings? How were they handled?”
“Same,” says Bird, “as far as I know.”
That means Claire is dead, murdered by Trogs, unless that hatchling had already sucked the last breath out of her. The deduction passes through me like a stale wind. Pain, but I feel better when it passes. I wonder if Phil will be concerned about Sydney. She probably would have been killed, too, there in the end, trying to protect a sister she thought she hated.
“So no more Grays on the earth?” asks Brice.
“Just the ones the Trogs brought with them,” says Bird.
“Meet the new boss—” I start the cliché.
“—same as the old boss,” Brice finishes.
Chapter 23
“So you’re in charge?” I ask. “Of everything?”
“There’s no everything,” says Bird. “This is it.”
“The revolution is dead, then?”
“Sometimes,” says Bird, “we have to accept that we’ve failed, and salvage what we can from the ashes.” Bird pats one of the stasis pods. “All these people’s lives are in our hands. That's what we're working on now.”
“Is anyone still fighting?” I ask.
Bird shakes his head. "The Trogs are consolidating their position. A d
ozen of earth's battle stations were still active when they surrendered. The Trogs pulled the construction crews off those damn space wheels the Grays had them building, and they’re repairing the remaining battle stations. I don’t have any intel on how far along that effort is. Either way, earth will be a fortress again. The Trogs are fortifying the moon, too.”
“Jesus,” says Brice, “that place was already a fortress.”
“We’ve learned they plan to triple the number of railgun batteries in the next year, and they have crews excavating around the clock to expand their footprint there. When you consider the number of cruisers they have in system, they’ll be able to take a hell of a punch if war comes again.”
“If?” I ask.
Brice doesn’t respond to my question. “They’re sending out salvage crews to find the ships wrecked in the war. They’re especially interested in the Arizona Class ships. They want that technology, probably because they know how close we came to whipping their asses with it.”
“And all the people on earth who built those ships?” asks Brice.
“The MSS earthbound administration is still in place,” answers Bird. “The Trogs probably already have ships rolling off the lines down at the Arizona shipyards. The big yards in Europe and China, too.” He drills me with a hard look. “It’s everything we feared. The Trogs will use humans for labor and engineering. They’ll pick up where our Grays left off and probably expand all through the system, milking the place dry of resources to build their fleets. No doubt they’ll return to building those space stations, too. Eventually. More real estate for them to raise hatchling Grays and baby Trogs.”
“So no more war?” I push, because Bird never gave me the direct answer I wanted. “No more resistance? Nothing?”
“Nothing,” says Bird. “We save the people in these pods. That’s it.”
“I can’t accept that,” I tell him. “What about Hawkins? With my ship and his ship together, we can do some damage. We can work out some tactics that’ll give us the advantage, and then—”
“Hawkins has already taken his ship out to the colonies.”
