by Sean Danker
So our fancy EV suits were the problem.
“What if we used grav carts? Or changed into tech suits?”
“Tech suits would slow us down too much. They’re for working, not walking. And grav carts can’t handle anything but smooth terrain.”
“Damn. Good point.”
“It was a good idea,” she said, surprising me. Was Deilani trying to comfort me?
“If carts are no good, then just work the numbers on what we can carry on our backs.”
“I can’t do that without knowing our transfer rate from O2 tanks.”
“Estimate. Be pessimistic if you have to.”
“Even being optimistic, this plan will not work. It won’t. So what do we do now?”
“Stay positive, Lieutenant. I’ll figure something out.”
8
PROMISING to think of something was easier than doing it. I could talk big all I wanted, but that wouldn’t make six hundred kilometers any more manageable.
Salmagard found me sitting against the bulkhead by the lockers containing the reserve cells.
“Admiral?” She was standing over me with a gravity cart. I still couldn’t read her. She was trusting me, and giving me more credit than I deserved. But under the circumstances, she didn’t really have a choice.
“Right,” I said, and got up, swallowing my nausea. This was pointless, but I couldn’t tell her that. I couldn’t tell Nils, either. They were working like people with hope.
I was boxed in, and I felt stifled. I was sweating despite my EV suit’s efforts to cool me down. My mouth was dry. “Let’s get started on these,” I said. “We have to break them open.”
It took both of us and a metal bar to lever open the lockup that housed the fuel cells. The cells themselves were hot to the touch, and even heavier than expected. The cart dipped noticeably under the weight.
We pushed the cell back to the Avenger and managed to install it, though it left us with burning muscles and aching backs. Salmagard didn’t complain, so I didn’t either.
There were three more to go. Before we could leave the container, Nils’ voice was on the com.
“Hey—hey, where is everyone?”
“We’re at the flyer,” I replied.
“You’re in the crate?”
“Yeah.”
“Grab onto something.”
“Wait—wait, don’t—not with us in here,” I hissed, but the container gave a jerk, and Salmagard and I were staggering for balance. I grabbed her and held on to one of the Avenger’s landing struts as we swung wildly.
“Can’t wait,” Nils was saying. “Cell’s draining right in front of me. I’m literally watching the readout go down. Got to do this now.”
Nils put us down gently enough that there were no fatalities, but there was still plenty of pain.
“Okay,” he said, sounding breathless, but invigorated. “That was pretty easy.”
I wondered where he was. The robotic arm used to move the containers wasn’t meant to be operated by hand—and if it was, then it would be with a feed. No power, no feeds. That meant Nils had to be somewhere from which he could see the entire bay. Somewhere high up. “Everybody needs to stay inside the flyer,” he said.
Salmagard and I staggered up the ramp and grabbed handholds.
“I’m going to crack the box.”
It was good that he’d thought to do that; I’d forgotten that to use the Avenger we’d first have to get it out of the container. There was a loud hiss, and the four walls fell away. The roof of the container remained suspended above, attached to the arm. The crane Nils was controlling moved it aside and dropped it with a resounding boom.
The freighter lurched. Metal groaned.
“Easy!” I shouted.
“Sorry,” Nils said, though it came out as a squeak.
I hurried down the ramp to take stock of things. He’d moved us nearly to the end of the bay. We were now in the open, and the Avenger was facing the main doors. They weren’t meant for launching vehicles, but they would do. The Ganraen Royal emblem stamped on the doors was massive, but faded with age.
He’d also moved us closer to the reserve cells. That would be useful if this plan wasn’t already dead in the water. We simply didn’t have the range we needed to reach the colony. I rubbed at my eyes.
I had to come clean with them. I’d tried. I had tried to help these three. This was just the hand we’d been dealt, and it was my fault. I couldn’t make it right, but I could at least tell them the truth.
I stopped myself there, and turned to look back at the Avenger. Salmagard was descending the ramp with Deilani just behind her. I looked at the aircraft. The wings, the thrusters, the roof. Not especially broad, but broad enough?
“We’re not done,” I said, turning to Deilani.
“What?”
“We can do it. We can cover that distance. There’s a way.” I turned away and keyed the com. “Nils,” I said. “There was a crawler on the manifest. Find it and crack it open while the arm still has juice.”
“Crawler? But why?”
“Do it!”
“Yes, Admiral!” I motioned to the girls and started to run.
Above, the arm swung ahead of us, lowering to open a sizable—but not too sizable—crate. The walls thudded down, and Nils set down the roof instead of dropping it.
Inside was a terrain crawler. It was an Evagardian model, wearing a white-and-gray military pattern. Third Fleet markings. Surface ops. There were six wheels and seating for five. There was a mounting for a large weapon of some sort, and the fuel cells were strapped to the side.
We wouldn’t even have to look for them.
“Nils, I want you to pick this up with the arm, and put it on top of the flyer.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me, Ensign. The flyer can’t take us all the way. We’ll need a boost for those last few kilometers.”
“On top of the personnel carrier?”
“People have been strapping things to the top of vehicles for centuries,” I said.
“To aircraft?”
“It’s a little unconventional, but it’s a combat aircraft—it can handle it. And the gravity’s light.”
“It’ll cost us fuel economy.”
“Maybe it’ll make up for it. It’s no heavier than the weapons would be. It just brings us up to normal weight.”
“It’s an assault crawler. It’s not meant for distance. Will it take us far enough on just those cells?” Deilani asked me.
That got us questioning looks from the ensign and Salmagard; they hadn’t heard our conversation from earlier. They didn’t know exactly how far we had to go.
“I don’t know. We’ll find out.”
“We’ll find out?”
“Hey,” Nils cut in. “This thing is no good—I mean, it is—but it can’t climb a mountain, and it can’t get us across, say, a big trench. It can’t swim.”
“No oceans,” I said. I was pretty sure I remembered that from the survey. “At least, I don’t think there are. As for the rest—well, the crawler has a jumper, and in this gravity, that’ll give us at least a little play if we need it.”
“We’re still gambling,” Deilani said.
“We’re gambling every second we stay here,” I told her. “The ship could fall anytime. Do you want to die out there giving it a shot, or do you want to die down there waiting for help that might not come?”
“We don’t even know if there are any people out there.” Deilani was doing her best not to panic, but fear was bubbling to the surface. I didn’t blame her, but we didn’t have time.
“There’s something out there,” I said.
“All it did was pick up the signal—it could just be a probe. We don’t have anything but your word to go on. You say there’s a colony out there, but
what if it’s something else?”
“Like what?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“Like a military base.”
“Then you’ll fit right in.”
“It’s not a probe,” Nils cut in. “A probe wouldn’t have registered. Whatever’s out there has a real com array. That still works,” he added, as though impressed that Ganraen technology could even do that much. “And if there was a Commonwealth base here, we’d know about it. We all know how the front line stands—or how it stood before the cease-fire.”
“We’re close to Demenis,” Deilani countered. “There could be bad people out there. Maybe your people,” she said to me.
“So I’m a pirate now? Come on, Lieutenant. Enough.”
“All right.” Deilani put up her hands. “I’m sorry, all right?” She meant it. At first she’d felt obliged to contradict me, and now to play devil’s advocate. But the time for arguing had come and gone a while ago.
“I’m all for trying to do this right,” I told her plainly. “But we need to be together on this one. If this plan is worse than staying here, it can’t be by much.” I shrugged. “That’s all I got. Are you coming or not?”
She nodded, eyes distant. “I’m with you.”
Nils needed to hear that; his relief was audible over the com.
“Ensign, make it happen—put the crawler on the flyer. We’ll lock it in with binders. We’ll have to bring plenty of them, because we’re going to put as many O2 tanks as we can on that thing before we go. Lieutenant—everything we stockpiled in Medical—bring it up here and get it aboard. Private, we’ve got three more cells. Everybody go.”
I had to be forgetting things, but I wasn’t going to stop and worry about it. There wasn’t time to think of everything; it was time for action.
Now that the plan was merely ambiguous instead of downright hopeless, the chore of moving the cells didn’t seem so bad. Salmagard must have picked up on my dejection before, because she seemed energized.
Deilani gamely ran off to start hauling things up.
Salmagard and I had to pause as the crawler went by overhead; I trusted Nils, but I still didn’t want to stand under it. He got it positioned on the roof . . . mostly straight. Straight enough; the Avenger’s flying wouldn’t be seriously affected.
As we were muscling the second cell into its slot, making the connections and sealing the shield over it, Nils clambered up with an armful of magnetic binders to fasten the crawler on.
“I want you to check the systems and make sure it’s ready to go,” I called up to him. “We aren’t going to have time to mess with it out there.”
“It is. Why is all this stuff ready to go, Admiral?”
“Use your imagination,” I groaned, rubbing at my shoulder. Two more cells to go.
The deck moved beneath our feet. It was only a mild tremor, barely noticeable at all—but all three of us fell silent and kept absolutely still, as though our own weight and motion were enough to influence the entire freighter. Seconds passed.
We all started to breathe again, but the morale boost that had come with finalizing our plan was gone. We were no longer wondering if the freighter would be swallowed by the planet. It would be. The question was when.
It didn’t take Nils long to finish, and after getting him to help us with the third cell, I sent him to work with Deilani. The flyer looked odd with the crawler sitting on it, but this was about staying alive, not staying dignified.
The next problem was deciding how much time we could devote to scrounging supplies. We didn’t need very many survival packs; food and water weren’t the problem. Out there we’d run out of air long before we got hungry, but we’d take some regardless.
The freighter was full of O2 tanks. There was oxygen for use with every type of suit, for maintenance vehicles to be used on the hull, for emergencies, even for engineering functions.
But how much could we take with us once we left the flyer? We could pack plenty of it into the hold, but only so much could go on the crawler.
I tried to give the breathable-air problem the consideration it deserved. The obvious thing to do was take as much as possible; if we had to leave some behind after we landed, so be it—but could we justify the time?
The terrain shuddered and the freighter settled again.
The answer was no. We could not justify the time. None of us were kidding ourselves now, not about anything.
I moved into the cockpit, checking the systems. The padded seat and soft blue lights might have been soothing under different circumstances, but my mind was racing. The shuttle’s reserve cells were feeding just fine; the Avenger had power, a welcome luxury. I plugged in the results of Nils’ ping, which gave us a destination. I downloaded it to my EV suit’s AI as well. We’d have to find our way even after the flyer was out of power.
As I familiarized myself with the controls, the trainees loaded O2 tanks and other supplies.
I unclouded the front viewer and had a look at the bay from the perspective of the Avenger. I gazed at the bay doors for several long moments, before realizing why I was so hung up on them.
“Oh, no.”
They didn’t hear me. That was fine. I wasn’t talking to them. I wasn’t talking to anyone.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that Deilani was watching me closely enough that she noticed the shift in my mood. She made her way to the cockpit and put her hand on my shoulder.
“What is it?”
“The bay doors. How are we going to get them open?”
“Well, they’re just doors . . .” She looked past me. Yes, just twenty-meter-high doors that were something like two meters thick. One couldn’t really pry them open with a bit of metal. And there was, of course, no power.
“Oh,” she said, sounding faint. She sank into the copilot’s seat, her eyes locked on the doors, just like mine. “What do we do?”
“I have no idea.”
It was one thing to plug what amounted to a large battery into something like the arm on the ceiling. You couldn’t do that with these doors. They were not going to open. That simply wasn’t going to happen.
But did that mean we were trapped? Maybe not. Maybe this was a setback, not a deal breaker.
We just had to find a way out that didn’t involve opening the doors. I looked toward the takeoff pad. Those doors wouldn’t open either; it wasn’t any different over there. Same problem.
Was there some other way out, some silly idea that would never occur to anyone? No. There were two pairs of bay doors. They were both sealed. Particularly well sealed, because in normal flight, opening them would depressurize the single largest space on the ship.
I sat back and closed my eyes. This was my life.
Deilani’s expression was numb. None of this truly awful fortune seemed to surprise her much. Salmagard was dealing with it gracefully, and Nils was holding it together only because he thought he could count on me. Probably because I liked and appreciated him; he didn’t seem like someone who was accustomed to being liked and appreciated.
I was glad I could do something for him before we all died here.
I listened to Salmagard and Nils working industriously behind us. I didn’t feel up to it. I didn’t want to tell them that I’d failed them like this. If we all ended up dead on a long shot, that was one thing, but a blunder like this . . . this stung.
Good thing I’d thrown away my sidearm, because I wanted to shoot myself.
I thought about what I’d done the last time I’d been presented with an unsolvable problem. I’d agonized. I’d given it my all and genuinely tried to be smart.
I’d tried to find a graceful way. An elegant way. A gentle way. It hadn’t worked out.
In the end I’d been forced to take the direct approach. I’d needed results, and there hadn’t been time to worry about the details.
This was no different. I couldn’t be hung up on details.
“What do you think a ship like this costs?” I asked Deilani.
She looked over at me, puzzled, then cocked her head to one side. “You mean the ship, or this ship, with all the modifications?”
I smiled. “Either.”
“In Evagardian Julians?”
“In whatever you like.”
“A lot.”
“Add it to my bill.” I took a deep breath and got to my feet. “Though I don’t have any money to pay it. Ensign,” I said.
“Yes, Admiral?”
“Is there enough energy left in that cell to move the arm one more time?”
He looked dubious. “Just one more time? Maybe, I guess. Sir.”
“You remember that crate of 14-14?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pick it up and put it in front of the bay doors.”
They all caught on at the same moment. Salmagard’s eyes widened, and she turned pale. That was the real measure of the absurdity of my plan. Only a truly mad notion would penetrate her calm that way.
Deilani squeaked something I didn’t catch. Nils’ jaw dropped, and he mouthed seven words at me that he didn’t mean to mouth, but I understood perfectly.
“I know—I know!” I said, overruling them. “And I’m open to suggestions, but I bet you haven’t got any. We’ll dedicate the flyer’s shields forward and give them full power. That might get us through it. You never know.”
“Not that!” Deilani reached for me, as though to grab my neck and shake me, but caught herself. “The blast! It’ll send us over for sure!”
“As soon as we blast the doors, we burn out. Right there, right then. We aren’t going to wait around.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then it’ll be a short flight.”
Her mouth moved, but no sound came out. We didn’t have time for this.
“It can work; 14-14 can get through armor, so it can definitely get through those doors.”
“What if the—the hole isn’t big enough?”
