by M. J. Konkel
Benjanin stared at his wife for a moment longer before he turned and followed me to the bridge.
“I notice Marla’s not here,” Benjanin said.
“I am sorry – she didn’t make it. We’ll explain when time permits,” I said. Benjanin squeezed his eyes closed and took a deep breath.
Morgan sat in a seat off to the right as he bit down on a thumbnail and stared out through the front port. I could not imagine how I would have felt if it was my mother back there instead of his.
Drummer stood to one side; his armored suit all red with Luci’s blood. Maybe Amerigo’s too.
Too much trauma on this world. Too much spilled blood. But I had to pull myself together; keep these people alive.
“Listen, everyone,” I shouted for attention. “We’re leaving Bahram. We’ll be pushing at least 3 Gs as we go up. Maybe four or five if we run into trouble. Everyone needs to be strapped in.”
I hopped into the pilot’s seat and glanced once more toward Morgan. He stared back with apprehension.
“Those autosurgeons can do miracles.” I thought it was going to take one to save his mother.
I noticed Dr. Z remained standing.
“What are you doing, Doctor?” I inquired. “You have to be seated when we take off.”
He ignored my protest as he approached me.
“We cannot leave Bahram yet,” Dr. Z insisted.
“There’re going to be fighters screaming down our throats any minute now,” I yelled. “Not to mention a pair of destroyers above that can rain plasma bolts down on us if they spot us. With all the ruckus we raised blowing up the de Navrio’s estate, it won’t take long at all before they’re here.”
Luckily, the destroyers would have to be nearly straight overhead for the plasma bolts to do damage while we were on the surface. Otherwise, they lost their oomph plowing through too much atmosphere.
“There is another besides me that the Spits could get to,” Dr. Z revealed. “We must get to her first.”
“Doctor, I still don’t even know what this is all about,” I protested.
“It’s about wormhole generators. My paper. She was involved.”
“Shit!” I swore. “Where is this … woman?”
“She’s at the Institute of the Gletscherrand,” the doctor replied.
“Alright, we’ll go get her, but take a seat.” I pulled up a map from the ship’s database. I had to ask for the spelling before I found it on the map. The institute was located just outside a city called Jalid, located at the edge of the northern ice cap.
I popped the pilot’s goggles over my head. Time was of the essence, so I intended to take the ship up immediately. Nevertheless, I took a moment to scan around for any incoming as the covers for the front ports slid into place and a video screen popped down from above to replace the view out the front.
I craned my head back to look up at the night sky, wondering where the destroyers were in their orbits. I scanned for any bright star moving across the sky, but I didn’t spot one.
I was about to take her up when a fighter jet streaked past straight overhead. With it flying low at Mach 5, I didn’t see it until it was upon us.
“Everyone, brace yourselves,” I shouted. “We have company.”
The jet banked left and started to circle back. I hit the lift thrusters and immediately engaged the rear thrusters. As we shot forward, I was pushed hard back into my seat.
I banked the ship left toward the jet. I wasn’t trying to outmaneuver it. That would have been impossible. I was simply trying to buy some time as we accelerated.
The jet would be able to fly circles around us. I just had to make sure it had to complete more than one circle.
Fighter jets were designed to be dropped from a carrier and enter a world’s atmosphere from space. They were not designed, however, with large enough engines to return back to space.
We just had to get enough distance and altitude between us and the jet before they turned on us and got a torpedo lock. We needed only about a minute. But sometimes a minute can be an awfully long time.
I glanced at the radar. I saw another blip at very edge of detection range. Another fighter craft, but that one would be too late.
As the jet near us banked around, I tried to follow suit. The jet came around in tighter circle though.
I pulled up the nose of the corvette, and we climbed. I felt heavy G’s as we went vertical. More G’s than I had promised the others.
The jet fell behind. It had now turned on us, but it was far below.
Then I saw a new blip on the radar. A torpedo had been launched.
We continued to accelerate upward, but the torpedo had even greater acceleration. It closed the gap on us. Second by second, it got closer. And closer.
The torpedo finally slowed and then started to fall back toward the ground. It had run out of propellant. I would have breathed a sigh of relief, but that was impossible with the heavy G’s.
I cut our rate of acceleration. There wasn’t a need to continue to crush the others. Especially Luci. The autosurgeon was designed to be able to perform under heavy gravity. Luci was not. I wondered if she had survived the surgery under the tremendous stress I had just put her under.
Chapter 22
We came back down with our flight being suborbital. No plasma bolts rained down on us. I wasn’t sure if that meant the destroyers had not spotted us, or they still hoped to be able to recover their ship.
The institute was in the far north, but we couldn’t take a direct route. That would have been like setting out a sign. You can pick up your stolen ship here.
I stared through the goggles far ahead and noticed the thick cloud cover off to the north. That was the break I had hoped to spot.
The fighter fell far behind us and fell off our radar. That meant we were off theirs as well, but the problem was staying off the radar of everyone ahead.
We dove fast toward the ground. Then we came out of our dive and skimmed just above the surface. I nudged us down even closer, just above the rocks below. The sky above was more clouds than open sky. We banked to the left and flew up and over the ice cap.
The clouds thickened, and the sky no longer yielded openings. Visibility quickly evaporated as darkness fell. I nudged the ship a bit higher since I now relied on radar alone to navigate. I banked the ship, and we headed in a new direction. After a while, we approached close to the city of Jalid.
“Hang on, we’re coming in for a landing,” I announced.
We couldn’t land near the institute or anywhere around Jalid without possibly bringing attention to ourselves. As we had come around the top of the world, we went from daylight to night back to twilight as we circled back. We landed on the top of a glacier as heavy flakes of snow gently fell outside.
I flipped off my goggles and turned directly toward Dr. Z.
“Now would be a good time to give us the complete picture, Doctor. Why were the Spits really after you?” I demanded.
“I already told you. They must have just found out about the paper I published.” His eyes blinked as he spoke.
“Just the paper. You’re sticking with that?” I pressed.
“It’s the truth.” The doctor’s eyes blinked again.
“There is an old game of cards,” I said. “Poker. I’ve heard it was taught to our people by the AI that brought us to our world which means the game must have originated on Old Earth.”
“What’s an ancient card game to do with anything?”
“People who are good at the game are good at hiding that they’re bluffing. They essentially lie about the strength of their hand, and no one can tell they’re lying. You, Doctor, would be a poor poker player.”
The doctor’s eyes got big for a moment, but he recovered. “I swear it’s all about that paper. What else could it be?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But, if it were just that publication, the Spits wouldn’t have taken so long to get to you. You told Marla something. She seemed
to think it was vitally important, and she was trying to tell me before she died. But she ran out of time.”
“You’re not from Bahram.” The doctor glared at me and then turned away.
“I intend to start an alliance against the Spits,” I said. “That is going to take people from different worlds trusting each other. I ask you now to trust me.”
“I trust Trite, and Marla trusted him,” Enceladus said. “If there’s something you didn’t tell us, we all need to know. It is all our butts here that are going to get burned as well as yours.”
The doctor stared at Enceladus and then at Drummer.
“I trust him with my life,” Drummer said.
The doctor turned back toward me. “I don’t know who tipped them off, but the Spits were after me for my latest work.” He turned toward the front screen.
“Which is what?” I asked.
“We were testing a titanium chromium complex molecule that is a superatom.”
“Superatom?” I questioned. Combining the words atom with super just sounded dangerous to me. Like something that might blow up in a big way. Maybe some kind of weapon we could use against the Spits.
“It means the molecule sort of behaves as if it were a single atom rather than the many atoms that make up its structure. For this complex, the molecule contains all titanium and chromium atoms.”
“I’m guessing this is important for some reason?” I uttered. It no longer sounded like something that was going to go boom.
“This complex behaves as if it were a single atom of tantalum-180. Tantalum-180 is extremely rare. Titanium and chromium are not.”
“Holy shit!” I exclaimed. “No wonder the Spits wanted to get their gloves on you.” It would speed up their plans. They could rapidly expand their fleet and sweep across all the rest of the human occupied worlds. But now we had that tech in our hands. Maybe.
“I don’t think the Spits really know what we were onto,” Dr. Z said. “Just that we made a breakthrough. I’m still not sure how they found that out.”
“This changes everything,” I exclaimed. “And this woman helped with the testing?”
“She’s the chemist who made the titanium chromium complex,” Dr. Z replied. “I cannot resynthesize it myself. Only she can.”
“And if the Spits get hold of her …” Enceladus murmured.
“Get the doctor into a suit,” I ordered.
Probably a poor decision on my part, but I decided I was going with the extraction party. If I died or was captured, the Spits would recover their corvette. If they spotted it while I was away, they would recover it. On the other hand, if they got a hold of the formula for the superatom, they could build thousands of ships. This mission just had too much riding on it for me not to get directly involved.
Morgan stayed with his father at Luci’s side. The console next to her still flashed critical, but at least she was still with us. She was a tough lady, somehow surviving the G’s after her loss of blood.
The rest of us headed out. The twilight and heavy snowfall limited our view to a hundred meters, and the night vision filters didn’t help.
A layer of white fluff already covered the ship. I glanced up at the sky and thought there was little chance of the Spits finding the ship anytime soon.
Drummer, Enceladus, and I had donned backpacks, each carrying a part of an additional armored suit. The doctor, being less experienced moving in his suit, did not carry a pack. Drummer had been on glaciers before, so he led the way as we moved out single file.
With the heavy snow coming down, every direction appeared the same. I glanced down at my compass to note which direction was southwest, the direction we needed to go. The compass did not rely on a non-existent magnetic field. Rather, it detected the slight Coriolis effect produced by the rotation of the world and calculated the direction of the rotational north pole from that.
Initially, the field we hiked across was flat and easy to traverse. Drummer moved slowly though. He had found a long composite pole aboard the ship and kept jabbing it into the snow ahead as he hiked. We followed a bit behind him. One time, after jabbing the snow with the pole, he stopped. He turned back, and we went a good distance around that area.
Soon the snow and ice field sloped downward and became rough and uneven as jagged peaks stuck up everywhere. With the augmented hearing of the suit, I heard water running somewhere below us. The falling snow thinned as we slowly descended down between two solid basaltic hills that stuck out of the ice.
Drummer found a narrow ridge of the ice that extended toward an exposed hill of rock, and we carefully tiptoed along it, balancing ourselves so we didn’t fall down into the deep dark crevasses on either side. After a couple of hours of hiking, we finally made it down to where we hopped off the ice and onto the rocky side of one of the hills. A small river ran out at the base of the glacier at the bottom of the hill, and thick green moss covered many of the rocks around us.
Once on solid ground, our pace picked up considerably. Visibility increased. Over the next half hour, we covered several klicks, following the river as it wound between tall grass-covered hills. A valley formed in a past when the glacier had advanced, or perhaps when the river had run more violently. We approached a bend in the valley, and a trail became available.
We took to the trail and soon found ourselves at the edge of a village. Small houses with a few lit windows dotted along the edge of the valley we ran through. The path turned into a paved road that paralleled the shallow milky river that raced down the middle of the valley. Stunted evergreens now lined the sides of the valley.
The houses came closer together, and most were now lit. A few people were even out. They stopped and stared, probably wondering why four Spits jogged past their homes.
Then we came upon a large open area, covered only with short recently mowed grass, and Drummer halted.
On the far side, stood a solid block of a building, and farther beyond it were several others of similar appearance. It was like a set of building blocks that all went together.
“That’s the Institute of the Gletscherrand, at the very edge of the city.” Dr. Z huffed despite the suit helping with his movements.
“You’ve been here before, Doctor?” I inquired.
“Oh, yes, many times. This building closest to us is the chemistry building, and Dr. Carlsgood is most likely there. If not, then she is in her dorm which is on the far side of the campus. She spends most of her time in her lab though.”
I stared at the closest building. Several stories tall, blocky, and bright, with the appearance of being made of white marble. Rows of large curved glass windows lined the sides. A few were lit, but most were dark.
No one else was visible on our side of the building as we raced across the empty field to a large set of glass double doors. Closer up, I saw ornate patterns had been etched out of the white stone. I pulled on one of the brass handles to the doors, but it did not budge. I thought about shooting up the lock. Most likely, that would trigger alarms though. The last thing we needed was to draw attention to ourselves.
“The front entrance is on the other side,” Dr. Z said. “That one is sure to be open.”
I jumped into the lead, and we followed a path that hugged tight against the building.
“Halt! Show your identification,” a guard shouted.
Chapter 23
We ducked behind the hedges next to the path.
The guard had not addressed us. He was around the corner, harassing some other poor soul.
“This is new,” Dr. Z whispered. “There have never been guards on the campus before.”
“Times change,” Drummer responded.
“Take off your backpacks and leave them here,” I ordered. “Dr. Z, stay here with the packs. And stay out of sight until we come back for you. Enceladus, Drummer, follow me. Grab your rifles and hold them across your chest. March like soldiers but quickly.”
It took a minute to explain what we were doing. Then I led, and Enceladus
and Drummer marched in a line side-by-side behind me.
"Left … Left …” I kept cadence to give us a proper military appearance.
We rounded the corner.
“Halt!” the guard at the front door yelled, raising his rifle across his chest.
I reached up and flipped my faceplate up.
“Haven’t you been taught to salute an officer when one approaches you?” I barked.
The guard hesitated before throwing the rifle down to his side with one arm, and he raised his other arm up for a salute. His mistake.
I promptly lowered my rifle and sent a flechette through his chest. I grabbed the guard’s helmet and popped it off before he even fell to the ground.
I tossed the helmet to Drummer who wiggled his head into it while I grabbed one arm of the dead guard. Enceladus grabbed another, and we quickly dragged him back to where Dr. Z waited. We stuffed the body under the thick hedge and grabbed Dr. Z and the packs.
As we passed Drummer, he threw his rifle across his chest and saluted us. “Morning, Captain.”
I saluted back, chuckling.
“Alright, we act as if on official Spit business,” I said. “Dr. Z, lead the way. Act as if you were a general.”
“A general what?” Dr. Z asked.
A smartass remark (that you can probably guess) came to mind, but I held my tongue. “Act as if you were in charge of this whole frickin’ place.”
“Oh, alright.” The doctor nodded and led us down the center of the large brightly lit hallway, our boots clomping on the hard-stone floor, until we were in the middle of the building. Then we turned left down a smaller hall, and we stopped at an altcar. That is short for altitude car. In some places, they call them lifts or elevators.
A man sporting a white lab coat opened a door down the hall a short ways from us. He stared at us for a moment. As I turned my head toward him, he quickly reopened the door he had come through and scrambled back inside.
