Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  “Heads up! They’re moving again!”

  “Icky…” Six warned.

  “On it!” Ichabod answered, fingers flying through holographic controls. “Moving the aperture to compensate.”

  “Addy, stay with him.”

  “Our datalink with the ship is still down, Commander. My attempts to reconnect have been unsuccessful.”

  “Mammaknullare,” Six muttered in his native Swedish, bowing his head to the inevitable. Control of the situation was slipping away, an almost physical sensation. Failure was not something Sixten Bergman was used to and it felt horrible.

  “Six, look!” Stephane stood, hitting him on the shoulder and pointing toward the main holo. “They’re leaving!”

  Six looked up, eyes narrowing as the warship rotated as it rose into a lower, retrograde orbit and ignited its main drive. “No, they’re not leaving.”

  The numbers tracking the warship showed its speed increasing rapidly, dropping in altitude toward Erebos’ dark surface.

  “Do you think that ship can land? Here, with the gravity so high?” Stephane asked.

  “No,” Six said, “but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to send down shuttles, or marine assault landers, or giant killer robots. Who knows? It’s a big universe.”

  Stephane turned to face him, searching his face, trying to see if there was still any fight left in him. “So what do we do?”

  Six frowned and looked at her. “Get Fazion into that lifeboat and have him run like hell.”

  She pointed at the holo showing their last known link to the Path, detailing the extensive damage from the missile strike. “And if it’s inoperable?”

  Six gave her a humorless smile.

  “Have you ever heard of a small church in America called the Alamo?”

  “Merde.”

  ***

  Altitude numbers on the display on the console in front of Aptor dropped. On the main wallscreen, the curve of the planet grew, occluding more and more of the starfield beyond. He waited until they were over the horizon from the location of the human base, then keyed his intercom.

  “StrongClaw Oonipol, launch now. Get down there and kill everything that moves.”

  “For His glory and your honor, Currentmaster!”

  Aptor sat back and watched the hull-mounted cameras show five attack shuttles detaching from their cradles on the warship’s belly, firing thrusters to nose down nearly to the vertical, spreading into a perfect echelon formation. The main engines ignited as one, and Aptor’s entire contingent of combat troops rocketed down toward the hideously dark planet.

  “If they die attempting to capture the humans on the surface,” Wavisoc said, watching the same wallscreen, “then we’ll have no one left to repel boarders here.”

  “Wavisoc,” Aptor said, “perhaps you can turn your skills and training toward advising me on all the possible negative outcomes of having a pessimist on every ship.”

  Wavisoc’s mouth tentacles rustled softly, but he did not answer.

  ***

  Most of the lights in the module were dark by the time Fazion approached the end of the long passageway, panting with the effort of what felt like an endless climb up a ladder. His hands, arms, and shoulders ached, making each reach and pull a new agony. He could feel the Path shudder and buck through his gauntlets, and the thought of the ship blowing up before he could get away spurred him forward toward the hatch leading into the FTL lifeboat.

  He pulled on the last handhold and hoisted his mass toward the bulkhead, grabbing on to the handhold there with his left hand and hitting the hatch control with his right. Nothing happened.

  The little bot coiled its legs and jumped, landing on the wall next to the hatch control, pointing urgently at the access panel next to it.

  “Manually?” Fazion asked.

  The bot nodded and slipped its tiny fingers under the panel’s door to swing it open. Fazion wondered just how strong those little elasteel legs were, and whether or not the strength would scale with increased size. He could probably use arms made of such material right now.

  He pulled the ratchet handle out, took a deep breath, and started moving his arm back and forth rapidly. The ratchet clicked as it swung away from him, opening the hatch about a centimeter as he pulled it back. Fazion remembered reading about these handles when he’d memorized the operational manuals for both the Path and the various modules sent along to be dropped and installed as their base. He had tracked down Sixten Bergman’s private links and nagged him about all the details the extensive documents either didn’t cover or didn’t go into much detail about. In particular, Fazion remembered the file named Fail-Safe, about which Six never gave a satisfactory answer. Once they’d arrived over Erebos, however, Fazion had more time on his hands than he knew what to do with, so he hacked the ship’s inventory files and found several interesting entries related to Fail-Safe, including one item in particular that wasn’t on any of the declared manifests, an item Fazion feared they would desperately need.

  The hatch opened enough for Fazion to get a hand through. He tried to look through the gap, careful to line up the bot’s head he was currently using for eyes. The space behind the hatch was completely dark, which he took as a very bad sign. With status lights, console controls and holos everywhere, there were very few places on a starship that were pitch black like this.

  He suit radio buzzed and sputtered. He could hear someone calling to him.

  “—ion, can you —ear me? Faz— please an—er”

  Fazion stopped with the hatch, keeping a grip on the handle and letting his body float.

  “Doctor Bascond! I’m here! We’re getting the door to the lifeboat open now.”

  ***

  In the control center, everyone looked at each other in confusion. Matthew asked what they were all thinking.

  “Did he say, ‘we’?”

  Fazion’s voice crackled through the hisses and pops on the speaker. “The ship’s —adly damag—! I think —t’s coming apar—”

  Stephane wanted to scream at him, tell him to concentrate, but she kept her voice as level and calm as she could. “Fazion, we need you to give us a visual feed of the lifeboat’s module. We’ve lost the datalink with the ship.”

  “Addy,” Six said, “see what you can do to clear up that signal.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  ***

  Fazion detached the borrowed optics from his helmet and held them in front of the little bot. It looked up at him and trilled over the radio.

  “You’re up, little buddy. Get in there and have a look around.”

  The bot nodded and gingerly accepted its eyes back, fitting them into slot on the top of its body. It crawled up on to the top of Fazion’s helmet and jumped through the hatchway gap, into the darkened lifeboat beyond.

  The bot turned on its small headlight as soon as it crossed into the chamber, folding down in on itself and rotating to land like an Olympic-level freefall gymnast. As it panned its optics around the small compartment, Fazion remembered to add the video feed to the radio signal heading down to Erebos Base. His heart sank as the bot stopped panning, holding the view steady, pointed at the middle of the lifeboat.

  The FTL lifeboat was a rough cylinder five meters in diameter, with a U-shaped couch that the manufacturer’s manual claimed would hold six adults, but only if they were huddled in tightly, or asses-to-elbows, as Fazion’s father liked to say. It didn’t matter now, though, as nobody would be huddling into this room. A piece of pitted and scorched-black metal had pierced the hull of the lifeboat, punching in from under the control console, continuing through the open space at the middle, spearing the cushioned seat at the far end. As far as Fazion could see through the bot’s optics, there was no power to any of the systems. He opened the channel to talk as a huge tremor passed through the Path’s structure, strong enough to nearly jerk the manual hatch opener out of his hand. He held on as the ship vibrated, battering him against the bulkhead.

  �
�Commander,” he yelled into the radio, “can you see that? The lifeboat…it’s heavily damaged! And I think the Path is starting to break up!”

  ***

  Six looked at the huge chunk of medal impaling their only hope for rescue. He couldn’t think of anything to do, no clever way to outsmart the enemy, no cunning trick to save them all in the end.

  “Shit,” he said, his head back, his eyes closing.

  Stephane gaped at the damaged lifeboat. “Oh, mon Dieu. Fazion, can you hear me?” To Six, she said, “How long to get the shuttle up to him?”

  “Ten minutes,” Six said, eyes still closed.

  ***

  Anger welled up through Fazion’s chest, blossoming, spreading to every centimeter of his body. He slammed his gloved hand into the composite of the bulkhead, a growl starting that built into a full-throated scream as he punched the wall harder and harder, faster and faster, watching himself do it through the little bot’s eyes.

  “I don’t have ten minutes! This ship is coming apart right now!”

  He heard something like an anguished sob in Doctor Bescond’s voice. “Fazion, the shuttle is the only way we can get you out of there!”

  “No! Not the only way,” he yelled back. “Icky, I know you can hear me. Put the aperture outside the hull. We’ll jump for it!”

  ***

  Stephane jerked like someone had thrown ice water in her face. She blinked, astonished. The thought of trying something so risky, so likely to end in disaster, cut against every instinct she had as a manager. “Impossible,” she finally managed to say, “the device isn’t ready for something like that—”

  “All due respect, Doctor, you know that’s not true,” Fazion said, static washing in and out of the radio signal. “Nobody understands those internal structures better than I do! My papers on the Visser cubes and tensor energy stresses are what got me on this trip in the first place. It WILL work!”

  She watched the video feed as the ventilation repair robot landed on Fazion’s shoulder. The view spun wildly as it detached its own optics suite and stuck it back on to the side of Fazion’s helmet.

  “There’s too much debris,” she said meekly, hopelessly playing her last card. “If we open the aperture wide enough to make sure you don’t hit the boundary zone, the minimum safe distance will be too large. We’ll get pieces of solid matter going through with you and you’ll be cut to ribbons by gamma pulses.”

  ***

  As his boss spoke, Fazion turned to face back down the passageway and pushed off from the bulkhead with all the strength left in his legs. He aimed his jump at the largest gouge, a wound in the ship’s hull that would lead him straight back out into space. He managed to catch the jagged edge of the damaged composite as he floated over it, instead of smashing right into it headfirst. He swung his legs around and through the gash, knowing it was going to be too narrow for his thick body, but not seeing any other alternative.

  “Stephane, please!” he cried.

  ***

  Ichabod selected the exact spot for the aperture. Close enough for Fazion to jump, but perpendicular to the Path’s hull to minimize the chance of anything touching the boundary zone. He figured a ten-meter aperture would do, but knew he could adjust it on the fly. He’d had quite a lot of practice today.

  “Doctor?” he said expectantly.

  Stephane looked down at him from the command dais, frowning. She gave him a reluctant nod. “Okay, do it. Put the terminus over the landing field.”

  Ichabod’s hands flew over his station controls, making the necessary changes to the caster focus, and he initiated the move.

  Six watched a holo that showed the terminus opening over the flat, crushed gravel of the landing field outside the base. Purple-blue light scintillated off the opening, overpowering the few lights they had out there.

  “Rob, Garza, get ready,” Six said.

  Garza’s voice came back over the radio as those in the control center watched the holo showing two armored figures sprinting from the main airlock to the center of the landing field. “Roger that, skipper. We’ve been monitoring and we’ll get him when he comes through.”

  “Just keep your distance from that opening—” Six ordered.

  “Terminus,” Ichabod muttered, finalizing his settings.

  “—because we really don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  ***

  Aboard the Path, Fazion pushed against the sides of the rough, almost serrated edge of the hull puncture, worried that something sharp would rupture his spacesuit on the way outside the battered starship. He exhaled, gaining a couple of centimeters, and slid far enough to get his shoulders through. With the strongest heave his fatigued body could manage, Fazion got both arms through the hole and pushed on the outside of the Path’s hull. Purple-blue light spilled into normal space as the aperture opened parallel to the starship. Fazion craned his neck back to see the vortex only about twenty meters away. The proximity of his escape route sent new strength surging through his limbs, but he was still hung up on two or three sharp pieces of composite, the biggest digging painfully into his ribcage.

  ***

  The cavern that both sheltered and hid Erebos Base had originally been a crack in the canyon wall that averaged 150 meters wide and extended almost half a kilometer into solid rock. Six’s team had first landed with the heavy-duty bots, purposely built with four-times-standard gravity in mind, and within a week, they had carved out a tube 400 meters wide with a flat floor, curving sides, and a ceiling that arced gently overhead to a maximum height of 280 meters. Next came the artificial gravity cables, laid in a criss-cross pattern over the entire cavern floor and buried under a meter of blue-black gravel made from their excavation of the chamber itself. After the subterranean chambers, where the generators and control center would be located, the self-landing modules from No Logical Path had been flown down, pulled inside the cavern, and used to create the habitation structures, garage, workshops, and warehouse that went up in a neat semi-circle deep within the cavern, away from the opening into the canyon. SG had plans to turn Erebos Base into a permanent top-secret research facility, so Six’s crew had built bigger than necessary. There was enough space on the wide field to operate a dozen shuttles, and the base itself could house fifty people quite comfortably.

  Robert Upton and Garza Komal, both clad in black omni-environmental combat armor, stood in the middle of the landing field and looked up into the terminus, a perfect circle of starfield that appeared to hover ten meters over their heads, parallel to the ground. From their viewpoint, the Path’s hull, perforated and scored by shrapnel from the destroyed alien missile, was only twenty meters away, and they could clearly see Fazion struggling to pull himself out.

  Rob whistled appreciatively, the Irish brogue clear over the base’s intercom. “I’ll be dipped in shite if that’s not the strangest thing I’ve seen.”

  “Real hard to stand here, skipper, and not want to jump over and help him,” Garza said.

  “Yeah, well, the smartest people on the planet say you can’t go through that direction, so just stand ready,” Six answered. “And don’t die.”

  The two suited figures looked at each other with black mirrored helmets, each knowing the other well enough to know the other was grinning.

  “Did one of you remember to bring a rescue bag?” Six asked.

  Garza held up the fist-sized bundle without taking his eyes off the spectacle above him.

  “Okay, good. I don’t care what kind of shape he’s in, stuff him in that thing ASAFP.”

  “Roger that, skipper,” Garza said.

  “Come on, kid,” Rob whispered. “Get your ass out of there.”

  ***

  Fazion could feel the sharp spur of damaged hull pushing further into his ribs with each centimeter he gained. It was the only thing keeping him from getting free, but no matter how he twisted, no matter how he backed up and tried a different angle, he kept running into that same damned piece of metal. There was o
nly one way he was going to get out of this alive.

  Fazion screamed and pulled, head thrown back and back arched. He slammed his side on to the jagged piece, purposefully letting it plunge through his suit, through his side, and into his left kidney. White-hot pain radiated out from the puncture, blocking out all other sensations, all conscious thought, and Fazion almost blacked out right then. He retained just enough sense to follow through with his motion, twisting violently and snapping the spur off, half of it still buried inside his body.

  With that last piece of resistance gone, Fazion slid free of the Path. Losing consciousness, he managed a half-hearted kick as his lower body passed through the opening, sending him off at an angle rather than straight at the aperture. The little bot scrabbled down Fazion’s arm, running on long thin legs until it reached the tear in his spacesuit. It flattened itself over the hole, legs snapping out in four different directions. It grabbed hold with tiny hands pulled tight against Fazion’s body.

  ***

  “Yes!” Six screamed, pumping his fists into the air as a cheer went up throughout the control center. “Khan, he’s going to need medical attention.”

  “On my way.” Khan jumped up from his console, grabbed his helmet, and ran out of the control center.

  Stephane frowned. Something wasn’t quite right with Fazion’s trajectory. He was going to be dangerously close to the boundary zone.

  “Ichabod…” she cautioned. He manipulated the holo in front of him and slid the aperture ten meters to the side, angling to match Fazion’s trajectory. Five meters more of freefall drift and the standard gravity over the landing field would take over, pulling him down from orbit. Rob and Garza moved directly under the terminus, ready to catch Fazion when he came through.