by Richard Fox
There was a crack of thunder as the cannon fired and the cross beam wobbled beneath them. The hum faded away…but the cross beam started leaning toward the base of the cannon.
“Elias, think we’re in trouble,” Bodel said.
“Jump for it.” Elias stood up on the beam and tried to balance as it tipped over with a groan. Elias risked a glimpse at Bodel and saw him with a footing just as unsteady as his. The beam crashed down on the next lower beam.
Elias leaped away and activated his maneuver thrusters. He looked down and saw row after row of induction coils pass beneath him as he lost altitude. He crossed over dirt, dipped his shoulder forward and rolled over the sand and gravel. He skidded to a halt inches from the wall.
Bodel bumped off the wall and fell on his ass.
“Smooth.” Elias reached to him.
“Piss off.” Bodel took Elias’ hand and stood up.
“Good news, you didn’t break anything else with your little stunt,” Mable said. “There’s an access door to your right. Someone from Green platoon says they need your help.”
“I really do not like her,” Bodel said.
Elias knocked the back of his knuckles against Bodel’s chest.
“We need to keep moving,” Elias said.
CHAPTER 12
A cube of omnium took up the center of the round workshop. Empty workbenches, with backless chairs tucked beneath, stretched around the outer wall, broken up by a single doorway.
Torni held a hand over the cube and drew omnium into the air.
Lafayette, standing on the opposite side of the cube, held up a wide data pad with a diagram for a piece of machinery that looked like a cross between an old vinyl record player and a ramjet engine.
“Part number one, attempt fifteen,” Lafayette said into a beeping recorder on his arm.
Torni glanced at the diagram then focused on the omnium swirling just beyond her fingertips. The ghostly substance twisted against itself, colors rippling up and down as it morphed into a shape to match Lafayette’s diagram.
Torni smiled and guided the part to a workbench where Malal sat with his feet dangling over the edge, hands laid loose at his side. His chin was down, eyes closed.
“Well?” Torni asked.
Malal opened an eye, then leaned forward and sniffed at the part.
“Your mid-coupling is three degrees off axis. Do it again,” Malal said.
Torni squeezed her hand into a first and crushed the part. It melted into omnium and she tossed it back into the cube.
“This is bullshit,” she said. “The tolerances on this thing are impossible. I’m better off making more q-shells or aegis plates.”
Malal returned to his meditation without comment.
“No one has ever constructed a device like this, Ms. Torni,” Lafayette said. “The underlying design is borne out by observation, but the physics governing its function are someone theoretical.”
“What?”
“It will work. We just have to make it perfectly,” Lafayette said.
“Explain again why this is worth the time and effort.” Torni pressed two fingers against her temple. Her fingertips sank into her head. She winced and pulled her hand back. Her shell returned to normal with a quick shake.
“The details…do you still feel the connection to the Xaros General?” Lafayette asked.
“He’s out there.”
“Is he aware of you?”
Torni cocked her head to the side. “I don’t…I don’t know.”
“If he is, and I tell you our purpose, it could compromise the device’s effect,” Lafayette said. “This is important. Admiral Garret is leading the fleets over Mars to slow the Xaros advance because Ibarra and I convinced him that this will work. Thousands and thousands of your fellows are fighting to give you the time to make this work, Torni.”
Torni’s face screwed into a frown. She held fingers up next to Malal’s ear and snapped them several times.
“Malal. Malal, what am I doing wrong?” she asked.
“I find your attempts to gain my attention vexing,” Malal said.
“Answer me and I’ll leave you alone.”
Malal’s eyes half opened. “Your mind is fractured and of your own volition. Humans evolved to be humans, in human bodies. It is why your damnable armor soldiers fight in humanoid suits and not in something more elegant or effective. You fight against your natural form and that distraction follows through your efforts.”
“This is my natural form.” Torni touched her chest.
“Once.” Malal closed his eyes.
Torni looked at Lafayette.
“Stand back.” Torni looked down at her hands. Smoke rose from her fingertips, then they stretched into stalks. Torni’s body flashed to shifting patterns and morphed into an oblong drone’s body with several stalks breaking loose from the surface.
Lafayette backed into a bench and dropped his data slate.
“What?” Torni’s voice came from the drone.
“My autonomous nervous system is creating an involuntary reaction,” Lafayette said.
“You’re afraid.” Torni’s stalks went to the omnium cube and drew the substance into the air again.
“It was a mistake to keep that atavistic feature, I believe.” Lafayette picked up his data slate and held it up for Torni.
“Malal, is there anything else I should do?” Torni asked.
“There is a magnetic field coming from a surveillance device in the ceiling. It will slow our progress if it remains functional,” Malal said.
Torni moved a stalk across her shell and stabbed the ceiling where she felt the field.
In another part of the Crucible, Marc Ibarra broke into a string of profanity.
****
Torni’s stalks played over the surface of an orange crystal glowing from within. More stalks touched the crystal, then moved with blurred speed as they carved golden lines of circuitry. Torni held up the crystal, examining the scrimshaw.
“Acceptable,” Malal said. “Place it in the device.”
The work of many days had resulted in a device almost the size of a coffin. Torni set the crystal into a waiting cradle. Clamps snapped down and the device drew the final component inside its housing.
“Now what?” Torni asked.
“Now we make another one. We’ll need a resupply, of course,” Lafayette said, gesturing to the omnium mass in the center of room. The cube had been reduced to a few inches of material during the fabrication of the device Torni still didn’t understand.
The door to the workshop opened—not by sliding or swinging—they crumbled from a centerline and bled into the frame. Shannon walked in and froze when she saw Torni in her drone form.
“It’s her,” Lafayette said, “and it’s quite alright.”
Shannon’s eye twitched. “The probe needs to speak with Malal.”
Malal slumped forward, his knees buckling almost to the point of collapse when he hit the ground. His body stayed upright and he locked in place, as if a rod of iron had suddenly gone through his spine. He followed Shannon out of the room, his arms tacked to his side.
The doors closed behind him.
“He is most disconcerting,” Lafayette said.
Torni shifted back to her human form and Lafayette sighed in relief.
“I spent years with him waiting for the Breitenfeld’s jump engines to recharge,” Torni said. “He treated me like a house plant. Spoke to me only when he had direct repairs, or to give instruction on transmuting another substance. Otherwise, he acted like I wasn’t even there. It was…lonely.”
“How did you cope? Humans seem to be very social creatures. Your sense of self still seems rooted in that despite your condition,” Lafayette said.
“Yes, my ‘condition.’ The ship needed a lot of repair work—that kept me busy. I even spent a month in the void to grab an asteroid and ferry it back for raw materials. Stacey would return from time to time. Kept me supplied with books and vids. Then we fi
nally made it home and I think, ‘I can see my Marines again. Let them see me as they remembered, not as the thing they’re fighting.’”
Lafayette’s arm jerked to the side and buzzed.
“Him again.” Lafayette turned his palm to the center to the room and a hologram formed out of a projector in his wrist.
“Done? Progress? Did I pick the wrong week to quit drinking?” Ibarra asked.
“The device is complete,” Lafayette said. “I estimate we can complete the next unit in seventy-two percent of the time.”
“I’ll send up another cube. Well done, but get the next unit done in half the time.” Ibarra touched two fingers to his temple in a mock salute and faded away.
“Ibarra, wait,” Torni said. Ibarra’s hologram grew stronger.
“These proccies of yours, tell me about them,” she said. Her thumbs rubbed against her forefingers and she chewed on her bottom lip.
“There are over a billion now, almost all in the military,” Ibarra said, his face growing serious. “The answer to your question is ‘no.’ I can’t make you a new body.”
“Why not? Are you just saying that to keep me working away as some sort of…Santa’s elf?”
“The procedurally generated minds grow within the bodies as they gestate. I try to make a full-grown body without the mind and it’s nothing but a vegetable. The brains won’t take a fully formed consciousness at the end of the process,” Ibarra said.
The hologram touched its face.
“You think I like this?” Ibarra asked. “Being a ghost trapped inside a machine. I know what you want, my dear. I want it too.” He looked at Lafayette and his cyborg body. “We must adapt to what we are, not what we want. The omnium will be here shortly.” Ibarra vanished.
Torni’s chin lowered to her chest.
“You fear they won’t accept you as you are now?” Lafayette said.
“They thought I was dead. The Torni they knew is dead. I’m just a copy.” She looked at her hands and let them revert to swirling patterns. “My last moments downloaded into a Xaros matrix. If I was flesh and blood…it would be different. Better.”
“Your team helped rescue the last of my people from the Toth. Did you know this? There is a Karigole village in Africa. Men, women, geth’aar, children and adolescents. But I cannot see them, take part in the customs and celebrations of my culture. I am a pariah because of my form.” Lafayette tapped metal fingers against his chest with a clink.
“It is easy to despair,” he said. “The last hundred Karigole warriors took an oath to avenge our loss against the Toth. It gave us purpose. Reason. Once that oath was fulfilled and our people were free…they rejected me. I still love them, just as I think you still love your Marines. This work will save the Karigole. Save all of humanity. Do not despair.”
Lafayette went to Torni, took her arm, and hugged it against his chest.
“What are you doing?” Torni asked.
“Hugging. A gesture of empathy and kindness, correct?”
“Not like…come here.” Torni took her arm away and gave Lafayette a brief hug around his shoulders.
The doors opened and an omnium cube floated into the room on a robot-driven grav-dolly.
“Time to get back to work. Have a good game.” Lafayette slapped Torni on the rear end.
CHAPTER 13
Acceleration pressed Durand against her seat. Compression pads tightened around her thighs and her abdomen, keeping blood in her head where she needed it. Her Eagle shot over Charon’s surface, a barren expanse of ugly rock and ice. She glanced up and saw the distant Grinder in orbit over Pluto, light from the drones building it winking against the star field.
“Keep your eyes peeled, boys and girls,” she said. “Let’s complete this pass and drop the buoy.”
“Gall, this is Lancer,” said the Condor pilot she and two other fighters accompanied on their high-speed orbit. “Relays one and two are down. Should be done in another three minutes.”
“Why are the Xaros just sitting out there?” asked Manfred, one of her Dotok pilots. “It’s not like them to just let us limp away after a fight.”
“What’s our purpose out here?” Durand asked.
“To blow that damned thing up before it opens a portal to the underworld and floods our new home with death and destruction,” said Lothar, Manfred’s brother.
“What do you think the Xaros defenders’ purpose is?” Durand asked.
“To…not let us do that?” Manfred quipped.
“To protect the Grinder until it’s done,” Durand said. “They come after us and they’re vulnerable to another strike from Earth through our Crucible. It takes light almost six hours to get from Pluto to Earth,” she said, looking at the timer on her dashboard, “which means Earth either just saw our last fight or they’re listening to Captain Valdar explain what happened.”
“Relay three down,” Lancer said.
“And we have to wait six more hours for instructions to reach us from Earth,” Lothar said. “Or we wait for them to send reinforcements through…which could come at any time now.”
“Welcome to life at the edge of the solar system,” Durand said, “where the speed of light is just too slow to get things done.”
She tapped into the camera feed from a relay and zoomed in on the Grinder. The gap in the ring was smaller than when they’d first arrived. When Valdar first briefed the mission, he said intelligence estimated the jump gate wouldn’t be done for days. At the rate the Xaros were working, they looked like they’d be done in a few hours.
“Relay four down. The task force has eyes on the Grinder. Ready to burn home,” Lancer said.
“Maintain speed,” Durand said. “We flash the afterburners and they’ll know we’re up to something.”
Durand ignored the grumbles from the pilots, all of whom had been in their cockpits for the last twelve hours and were eager to land on the Breitenfeld for some much needed rest. She felt sweat trickling down her body and a heat rash forming around her joints. Such were the realities of life as a void fighter pilot. There was danger, glamour, mediocre bonus pay and the persistent funk of one’s own body odor.
The flight flew across Charon and came upon the task force…where Durand did not see the missile pods in the void around the Breitenfeld as she’d expected.
“Ahh…this is bullshit,” Durand said. She opened a channel to the ship’s flight tower. “Blue flight reports mission accomplished. We are running on fumes. Where the hell are we supposed to land if those big blocks of missiles are still on the flight deck?”
“This is Valdar. There’s a FARP on the port side between point defense cannons three and four. Cycle through there for new batteries and ammo.”
Durand choked down some choice words. Conducting resupply on a forward arming and refueling point while in the void was never easy. Trying to land on the pinhead’s worth of space between the two gauss turret batteries would make the task even harder. She directed Lothar and Manfred down first.
“Captain, I think there’s something you wish to tell me?” Durand asked.
“We received a transmission from Phoenix,” Valdar said. “More of those cloaked Xaros ships hit the planet and did a number on the Luna fortifications and the home fleet is decisively engaged. There’s no help coming.”
“How did we fall for the trick the Toth tried to pull on us?” Durand asked. She’d been in space over Europa when the Toth’s Naga de-cloaked after a broadcast from the Crucible disrupted their cloaking field. The Toth had attempted to sneak the dreadnought to Earth during negotiations. Only a lucky observation by Stacey Ibarra had deduced that the Toth had come to the solar system with far more than could be seen.
“Different cloaking technology,” Valdar said. “Lepton pulse didn’t disrupt it. Xaros have never used cloaking tech before and high command’s assumption that they wouldn’t use it now came back to bite us in the rear. The Crucible’s worked out a counter, which doesn’t help everyone who died on Luna.”
/> “I’m not going to worry about Earth’s problems right now, especially when we’ve got plenty of our own,” she said. “Do you see the Grinder?”
“I do…even if I started screaming for reinforcements, there’s no way Earth would get the message and send us help in time,” Valdar said.
“I look at what the Xaros have, what we have, and all I can think of is the Battle of Agincourt…and we’re the French,” Durand said.
She brought her Eagle over the FARP and locked her gaze on a crewman standing on the hull, holding two lit cones over his head. The crewman directed her down, signaling minute adjustments to her descent. Her landing gear hit the hull and crewmen slapped magnetic chocks against them to lock her fighter in place.
Durand felt her seat rock slightly as batteries, thruster pods and gauss magazines were swapped out. What she wouldn’t have given for an ice-cold soda right then and there.
“We’re not going to go charging through their guns if we can help it,” Valdar said. “Not the Breitenfeld, at any rate. Our working theory is that the Grinder is able to affect wormhole formation even if it isn’t complete, just like our Crucible. That’s why we came back into real space in the wrong spot and directly under the Xaros guns.”
“This sounds like another assumption,” Durand said, “which is the mother of all fuckups, if I am to believe the things you Americans say.”
“Have you ever heard of an American named Muhammed Ali? He had a move called the rope-a-dope,” Valdar said. “We’re going to take a chance and see if we can use that move out here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t like the sound of it,” Durand said.
****
Durand flipped her fighter upside down and keyed a maneuver thruster on the edge of a wing, pushing her over the top of a line of Eagles. She looked up and into the cockpits of her pilots, looking each in the eye as one final readiness check before the battle.
She passed last over Glue, her second-in-command. The Chinese pilot looked tired, but focused as ever. Durand maneuvered back to the other end of the line. The rest of the task force, minus the Breitenfeld, was arrayed into a loose cone. The Centaur with her gleaming energy cannons sat at the tip, while heavier ships fell into rings behind the Centaur with corvettes at the base of the cone. The Breitenfeld hung in the distance, well behind the formation.
