by Love, Aimee
I saw bone poking through the flesh of my leg and swallowed hard. Being taken out this close to my objective by a spider would be bad, being taken out by a single leg was just pitiful. I unsheathed my knife and tried to pry the thing loose, glad that I couldn’t feel anything as the blade dug into my own flesh.
I gave up, dropping the knife and picking up a chunk of rubble instead and slamming it down on the far end of the spider leg with as much force as I could muster one handed. It released me finally and I went on bashing it until it was nothing more than a mass of pulp.
I tried to get to my feet and failed. Shit.
Finding the torpedo was out of the question now. I would just have to go on faith that it was somewhere under the ruined ceiling and still in working order. I hauled myself over to the transmitter, an inch at a time. One useless arm and a ruined leg were a bad combination for mobility, I decided.
I put the transmitter on my lap and crawled under the table. With a mostly intact wall at my back, it felt pretty safe and there was no way I was going to look for something better in my current state. Turning on the transmitter, I tried to raise the ship.
“Comet, this is Vixen.”
Nothing. They were supposed to still be up there, but for all I knew they’d decided to go off exploring as soon as the satellite was set.
“Comet? Please reply. This is Vixen. We have a situation.”
“You always do,” Gavin answered.
Thank God.
“I need you to do something for me,” I told him. “Not want. Need. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said hesitantly.
“This isn’t for me,” I said, looking down at my smashed leg. “I think I’m done for either way, but there are a lot of innocent people down here. You have to help them.”
“What do you mean you’re done for? What the hell is going on down there? We haven’t been able to get anyone on the com for hours and…”
“Gavin, if I don’t make it, I’m sorry about before. Not just for what I said but for not marrying you. I know it was the biggest mistake I ever made. I let my pride ruin the best relationship I ever had, and I’ve never stopped regretting it. I needed to prove I could make it on my own, but I was an idiot and I want you to know that. I love you.”
There was a long silence.
“You’re gonna ask me to do something really, really bad now, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I need you to send a long burst of high and low frequency sonics over the transmitter and then blow the torpedo you sent.”
“Wow,” he said. “That’s not only bad, it’s impossible.”
“No it isn’t,” I argued. “Just aim one of the rifles at the transmitter and fire off the sonics for a minute and then trigger the torp’s self destruct. I know you can. They all have it built in in case of a misfire.”
“I sent you all my rifles.”
“Bullshit,” I told him. “You sent the bare minimum you could to shut me up and a torpedo warhead you knew would be useless because I had no way to set it off. Are you going to do it or not?” I demanded.
“I can’t fire a rifle, even on sonic, in a ship. I’d make my whole crew sick.”
“Bummer,” I told him. “Take a pill.”
“Are you going to let me in on why?” He asked.
“How about because I asked,” I told him. “Or because it’s the right thing to do. Or because I think I’m dying and I don’t want to take the entire population of this rock with me. Better yet, do it because I’m sitting right next to the damn torpedo and if you blow it you’ll never have to deal with me again and you can tell any story you like about what happened here.”
“That’s a joke, right?” He asked. “That thing is low yield but you still can’t be within a mile when it goes…”
I hoped the hanger was more than a mile away.
“Just do it Gavin. I’ll be ready on my end by the time you get back with the rifle.”
I let the silence stretch until I was sure he was doing what I asked, then pointed the transmitter toward the hangar, dialed the volume up to max and leaned my back against the wall to wait. I could have tried to crawl out of the rubble, but spending my last few moments of life struggling when it was clearly hopeless wasn’t very tempting.
“Chapel?”
I didn’t recognize the voice. The com was going to start sending its beacon any second now and the idea that someone else was here was horrifying.
“Whoever you are, you need to get clear!” I yelled, hoping they could here me. “This building is going to be ground zero for some serious shit in a matter of seconds!”
I saw Quince’s face poke through one of the broken windows.
“She’s here!” He yelled over his shoulder.
Will wonders never cease. No wonder I hadn’t recognised his voice.
“Quince! You have to listen to me. Get away from here. Run!”
Loyal? Yes. Obedient? No.
He raised his stun baton and smashed the remaining glass out of the window frame, then wiggled through. Conrad popped up behind him and looked in.
“Bring her here and I pull her through,” he told Quince.
“No! Listen to me! I’ve rigged a trap. You’ll never make it clear if you try to get me! Just go!” I couldn’t bear the idea of taking them all out with me.
Quince reached my hiding place and pulled me out by my good leg.
“You talk too much,” he told me with a smirk, then heaved me to my feet.
I was half out the window when the sonics started. The transmitter was pointed the other way, so we were spared the brunt of it, but it was still extremely unpleasant. I heaved myself out and landed sprawling on the ice.
“We have to get away,” I told Conrad as he pulled me to my feet. I could see Iago at the corner of the dining hall, firing at anything that moved.
Conrad lifted me up and unceremoniously tossed me over his shoulder.
“Fall back to the hanger,” he yelled.
“No!” I screamed, slapping his back to get his attention. “Not the hanger. Go the other way! To the weather station!”
Timon and Walter came racing around the building.
“We’ve got incoming!” Walter yelled.
Everyone ran. Quince kept pace with Conrad, but with me on his back, he lagged behind the others and I couldn’t get a view of them to see who had made it. I did however, have an excellent view of the dining hall as any spider still able to move swarmed over it. A few of them tried to follow us, but one of the other men must have turned to cover our retreat and they fell, twitching before they got close.
It had to have been a minute. Was the torpedo too badly damaged to detonate, or had Gavin wimped out? Either way, I hoped the people in the hanger would take the opportunity to get as far out onto the ice as they could.
I heard a clang and craned around. We’d reached the weather station and they’d managed to get the door open.
“Down,” I yelled.
The hatch was completely gone, ripped off in the earlier fighting, but Quince closed the outer door and followed behind as Conrad carried me down the tight spiral stairs. I wanted to tell him to put me down, the jarring combined with all the drugs and the sonics were making me extremely nauseous, but I doubted he would listen so I just grit my teeth and took it.
He stopped on the first landing anyway and set me gently on the floor. It was pitch black and I could hear the others all around me, breathing heavily.
“What now?” Walter asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “There was supposed to be a…”
The floor buckled underneath us as if the moon had just hiccuped and then everything began to shake. A blast of noise and heat came rocketing down the stairway, throwing everyon
e who was still standing onto the ground. After a moment, a lazy cloud of dust and smoke came drifting down from above and settled around us.
“...bomb,” I finished weakly.
Epilogue
I heard the grinding of gears as one of Valhallas three main loading gates was manually cranked open, and knew that the sleds had finally returned. I also knew that I should stay at my desk and continue to work, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Instead, I pulled on my parka, switched off the portable heater to conserve fuel, and grabbed my cane.
The cluster of buildings at the city’s central hub had become the seat of the new government, and my office was near the top of the largest. Its prominent placement was meant to convey respect and importance, but every morning as I hobbled up the stairs, I wished everyone would respect me a little less. The lifts, like almost everything else in the city, were offline. Power wasn’t the problem. The orbital satellite was streaming down enough to run a dozen cities this size, but between all of the systems that had been cannibalized when the city was first abandoned, and the fact that there was no one left who knew how anything worked, we were really living in what amounted to a glorified tent.
In so many ways, we were lucky just to be alive. Marcus might have protested being sent away with the children before the assault, but that hadn’t stopped him from managing their exodus with a degree of forethought that none of the rest of us had had time for. Even amid the chaos, he’d made sure that every child on the sleds had a rabbit on his lap, seeds in his pockets, and a book to sit on. It was because of him that we hadn’t starved, yet.
I hobbled down to the street level and out into the cold - but blessedly windless -air of the city. I wasn’t the only person who’d heard the hanger open and knew what it meant. All around me, people were streaming out of buildings and heading in the same direction I was. Someone brushed my sleeve and I glanced over to find Quince walking along at my side. He’d grown taller in the months since we came to the city, but the real changes were harder to see. The combination of natural adrenaline and chemicals stimulants from my med-kit that had loosened his tongue during the attack had long since worn off, and he was as silent as ever, at least around me. But his charges were another story.
He had two of them with him now, young women around his own age whose expressions still held the remnants of an unimaginable horror. They moved around to flank us, providing a buffer from the growing crowd, and it was one of them rather than Quince who spoke.
“How is your leg?” She asked. She and the others from the pits had never been taught much language. They’d known basic commands of the type you might teach a dog - sit, stay, lay down - but they’d been strongly discouraged from speaking themselves. But Quince had proved a patient teacher, and her speech, though a bit halting, was clear and perfectly enunciated.
“It’s healing well, thank you,” I told her.
“Will your government send a doctor?” She asked hesitantly.
The council had granted me citizenship and demanded that the Colony Board release me from all off-world obligations so that I could act as their liaison, so it wasn’t my government that would or wouldn’t be sending a doctor. My government was here. But I didn’t correct her. I knew that the women felt responsible for my limp, and I thought it was much more important to take the opportunity to let her know that I didn’t blame them in the least. “You know, even if Julian were here, there wouldn’t be much he could do for it.”
Julian had been our greatest loss. The diversions my team and the one at the weather station had created had allowed him to lead Sebastian to the pits and free the women, but he hadn’t lived to enjoy his new status as a hero. They might not have had language, but the women weren’t stupid. As soon as they’d realized that they were being freed, they’d turned on him. For most of his adult life, he’d been visiting the pits, and not just the way that all of Titus’ inner circle had. They knew him as the man who came to deliver their children, and the man who took most of those children away. Even if they’d known that he was the only one of the colony’s three doctors to join our side, I don’t think they would have cared.
We reached the loading bay in time to see Iago come out with a small, tightly wrapped bundle in his arms. There were no cheers - that might have scared the newcomers - but the men who had come to greet them hadn’t come empty handed. As Iago moved aside to let the ragtag group of refugees into their new home, men were there with blankets and hot food.
And Quince was there with his charges.
He left my side and hurried forward. Experience had taught us that having other women present when the newcomers arrived went a long way toward easing tension. I watched as Quince and the women gathered the refugees together and led them to a building nearby where they’d get what medical care we could give them and begin to learn what it meant to be human. A quick head count told me the team had gotten a dozen. They were mostly women and girls, but there were a few malnourished men among them.
It wasn’t until the crowd had dispersed that Iago came over and held the bundle out to me. “This ones yours.”
I looked down at the baby and took a step back. “I can’t,” I told him, leaning pointedly on my cane.
“That’s alright, I can carry her,” Sebastian offered, coming up behind Iago. He had a coil of line slung over one shoulder, but I wasn’t fooled. He was always the last one out of the hanger, and it didn’t have anything to do with checking rope or tie-downs. He just hated the notoriety his frequent heroics had produced, most notably among the women he’d saved - and was still saving. He took the baby from Iago’s arms and headed off at a pace he knew I’d be hard pressed to match.
I hurried after him, trying to keep from smiling at the way the pompom on his hat bobbed as he walked. His wasn’t the only hat I’d knit during the long, cold nights in Valhalla, but it was far and away the silliest, so of course he wore it everywhere.
“I can’t look after her,” I protested when I finally caught up.
“Everyone will help,” he said.
Everyone will help. Not I’ll help. Not we’ll manage.
“It was your idea that the orphans should be fostered out so we could start building families,” he pointed out. “How would it look if you couldn’t be bothered when it was your turn to take one?”
He was right, as usual. It was his least appealing quality.
After a block, he asked what I thought I’d name her, but I wasn’t willing to concede the point yet.
“You know, families are a lot easier when they contain more than one adult.”
He nodded, but his expression remained impassive. “Families take time,” he said.
I knew from experience that it was as much as I was going to get, so I changed the subject. “I got a message yesterday from an old friend on Mars. She leaked me the manifest from the ship they’re sending.”
“Is there a doctor?”
I groaned. “Yes,” I said, “for the hundredth time there is definitely a doctor with them.”
“And?”
“And seeds and livestock embryos, food, medical equipment and medicine, as well as two engineers to help us get everything working again.”
“And?” He knew I wouldn’t have brought it up if there wasn’t something important. All of the things I’d listed were on our formal request.
“And three xenobiologists.”
He stopped dead. “How long until it gets here?”
“We have a few more months. Did you find anything this time?”
He shrugged. “Two men who were reported lost at sea a couple of years ago were running things. They claimed they hadn’t heard from Titus since he set them up there with their little harem.” How naive we’d been to think that ours was the only nest, that Titus didn’t have a contingency plan.
We reached my quarters and Sebasti
an waited until we were inside and I was sitting on the edge of my bed before handing me the baby.
“What will you name her?” He asked again as he rooted around for something to use as a bassinet.
I looked down at her. Her eyes were the strange, steel gray many infants are born with, her head was completely bald, and her skin was so dirty it was hard to make out much of her face. Nothing to inspire me, at least, nothing she’d appreciate as a name.
“Valkyrie,” I finally said, liking the sound of it even more when I saw Sebastian’s grimace.
“That’s an interesting name.”
“If the xenobiologists get here before we wipe out all the nests, they’ll probably declare them a protected species. If that happens, she’ll need it.”
He looked at me quizzically.
“In Norse mythology, it’s the Valkyrie who decide who will live and die, and lead the heroes to Valhalla.”
