“Crave—” Zii grunted in warning, shaking Crave so hard that his teeth clicked.
Crave’s eyes refocused. He seized Zii tighter, then slacked, leaning on Zii more than pushing him.
Zii eased off his push, and as one, they released their grips. Crave retreated a few steps.
What the hell was that?
When Crave spoke, his words were chopped and breathy, as though forced through a sprint, even though he was standing at rest. He shook his head, looked up. “I owe you, Zii. My unit agrees.”
Zii let some time go by so that his voice wouldn’t crack when he spoke. “Charis agrees?”
“Charis agrees.”
“Yeah, well, if that’s how you feel”—Zii rubbed his neck, letting his pulse gloves touch scan for damage—“maybe you shouldn’t almost choke me out of hood with your goddamn suit on.”
Crave ran his left hand over his head, pushed his hair out of his face.
He’s frustrated, recalculating. Recalculating what? I shouldn’t have pushed him about Yviss. “Nativity defense is a team sport. We both wanted to do that mission together, we both designed it, and we were all doing our jobs. Always have, always will. No one owes me for that, least of all you or Charis.” Zii paced. Since the change, sometimes it was hard to be still, like his legs itched to be used. We failed. We fucking failed. “Transmorthea got away from us, but what else could we have done to prepare?” He looked back to Crave, but he’d turned his back, staring into the module’s gloom.
I don’t want these orders, but I won’t send you there in my place. He picked up both of their hoods and came to stand next to Crave again, watching him closely. Hurts to swallow. Suit will fix that when I seal back in.
“Bluebarred orders.”
“Never seen that before,” Crave agreed.
“Never thought of passing on orders before, either.”
“You have the right to pass. What’s the point of having Nova privileges if we don’t use them?”
“It’s not just some politician. Bluebars can only come from the Council or the Council Chief. The highest-level leaders spent a serious amount of political capital to override Command and author a direct order. Although it’s later than it should have come”—he returned Crave’s hardhood—“I appreciate the advance warning. They’re shit orders, but I can’t pass them to you. They want me, I drew the lot. You’ll give me your Ridrain plan?”
“I wouldn’t let you deploy there without it, but—”
“The casualty rate while attempting to dock at Ridrain is second only to the casualty rate of the Red Theater. Am I going to have to write a secure entry op into your plan?” He grinned. “Because that would be a shit common way for a Nova to die.”
The grin wasn’t returned. “The way I’ve staged it, the risk would be lower than many noncombat entries we’ve accomplished.”
Zii nodded. “Good. I’ll take your plan, shift the orders to the mission you developed, and finalize it to my unit. You can get onto a better mission, and I swear to you that after I clear these orders we’ll go back to Transmorthea to finish what we started. There are pieces of us there.” The words tasted bitter. “But they’ll still be there in a few months. Stay ready.”
“The memo ordered a deployment of twelve months with a possible extension to eighteen. The plan I’ve developed extends the orders to twenty-four, maybe thirty-six, plus eight or nine months of prep beforehand.”
Goddamn it. Zii gripped his hardhood, buried his frustration. “Noted.” Years. That’s a long time to be in one place. No plan Crave could have devised will make that worth it.
He crossed back and forth, saw Crave watching him, and paused at the right side of the module. They’d disabled the interactive arc wall there so it didn’t animate, and while inactive it doubled as a window. Zii made out the movement of a faint reflection. Dark hair. Dark eyes. He was back up to his normal weight, but his face looked thinner than before.
A human shape floated past the opening outside. Their units were collaborating on the module’s station keeping. Zii couldn’t tell which of them had crossed the window. Maybe Widow. They’re going to hate these orders. Charis will have told them about the memo by now. He felt a strong urge to pull his hardhood on and loop in, but it wasn’t time yet, and so instead he pulsed the light at the neck of his suit, giving the module dim illumination. In the new shadows, the reflection of his face appeared fragmented, as did Crave’s in reflection over his shoulder, as if pieces of it were missing.
“We met with Council Chief Hazeriel,” Zii said.
“So did we.”
“Commander in Chief. That was something.”
Crave shrugged. “Couple of shadow badges and an increase in compensation.”
Years. What’s the longest we’ve gone between meetups? “Six months?”
“What?” Crave read him. “Five months, twelve days, four hours, thirty-two minutes.”
Zii thumped a fist against the wall of the module they’d all built together, his reflection grinning back at him. He turned. “Think any other units have something like this between them?”
“Who knows. They might.” Crave cupped his hardhood to his chest. “I doubt it.”
“Nova trust is perfect.”
“Nova trust is perfect.” The edges of a rough smile warmed Crave’s face.
That’s the first time he’s smiled tonight. Knew him from before he had that scar. Hell, I knew him before he started shaving. It should have been different. All of this should have been different. “Sometimes I think about what it would have been like if Command hadn’t thrown us that curve that split us in two after roselaurels. Service as we planned it as recruits ten years ago. Me, you, Charis, Monarch, and Yviss: one unit.”
Crave’s smile faded. “We were seventeen. What did we know?”
A series of three thumps sounded from the other side of the module’s partition hatch, leaving a hollow silence in its wake. In response Crave moved toward it, rotating and palming his hardhood, preparing to pull it over his head and seal it to his suit.
“How’s Charis taking it?” Zii asked, joining him.
“Her leg’s golden. No trace of the wound. You’ll see.”
We took too long in here. I won’t have much time with them.
“Good. But I meant…” While he and Crave were still alone and unheard, unscanned and untracked and face-to-face, Zii looked at his friend and asked as casually as he could, “She went through the full fallout health eval? All that compulsory ‘positive coping’ programming? You all did?”
“Yeah. Waste of time. Best thing to do is get back out there and fight, right?”
“Hooah.”
He reached for the hatch’s pulse lever. Crave beat him to it, stopped him leaving. “Give me the orders, Zii. I want them.”
“Small orders.”
“I’ll make them big.”
Zii hesitated. “We could double it up, go together.”
“My mission plan requires a single unit and no complications.” Crave’s face settled into a familiar expression of intense focus. Zii looked at the hatch and then back at Crave.
Goddamn, he actually does want them.
Another series of three thumps, this time louder. Zii and Crave conferred a few moments longer. A grip at the forearms turned into the embrace of old friends, a physical bridge built over years of missions together, a bridge of unshakable trust.
They pulled their hoods on, and Zii pulsed the hatch release.
On the other side, in the circular antechamber that led to the dock, Zii cupped the ends of Charis’ red hair and palmed her suited shoulder before she hooded herself, joining the rest behind the anonymity of their trepid suits. He gripped forearms with Wheck and then Skregs. Crave did the same with Bambo, Luzie, and Widow, taking up Monarch last and longest.
Charis marked the time, spoke through aural chatter in their shared hardhood loop. “Maintenance on the module is complete. We’ve got five minutes until we’ll have left e
nough scan pollution to risk compromising its secrecy.” Her curved smile was missing from her voice, and he reached out and touched her shoulder again.
“Copy that.” Zii addressed her along with the rest of Crave’s unit, but mostly spoke to Crave. “You said the orders require a full unit. Sentinel visited me while I was laid up. Said she didn’t have any recruits into their roselaurels yet, so there are no new players in Nova transition that you might recruit. Do you all have someone already established in mind?”
“Black-skull Nova units have gone on with four instead of the required five,” Charis said. Her hand brushed Wheck’s arm in acknowledgment. “Wheck found pattern precedence that it’s actually common for more experienced units to stay at four after—” She stopped.
“After a casualty.” Crave rapped his knuckles on Charis’ shoulder twice and continued, “Some parts can’t be replaced. We’re prepped for four. We’ll proceed with four.”
“Good,” Zii said. In his right peripheral he saw Monarch’s butterflied hardhood dip once in curt accord. “For Yviss, then.”
The nine of them formed a tight huddle with their hands on one another’s shoulders, the touch registering through their suits to their looped hood innerfaces as live visuals of their faces were revealed to one another. It was a part of the mission prep amp-up that he and Crave had brought over to their respective units from when they trained together as recruits, but tonight the energy of the usual last-minute instructions and banter was replaced with a funereal numbness.
On his hardhood’s innerface, Zii could see the four faces of his unit on the left, Crave and his unit’s three faces on the right. Beside Wheck there was a blank space where a fifth face should have lived. Zii cleared his thoughts and closed his eyes. They pushed to the final minute in silence.
When they were nearly out of time, they moved apart at once, severing the IF-to-IF connection, back into their separate secure unit loops. Zii heard Monarch sigh quietly at the disengagement as Crave’s unit disappeared from their IFs.
Zii’s unit departed first, cable-climbing through the modified ceiling dock ingress and into their ship’s load bridge. As Monarch, Bambo, and Widow disappeared above, Zii looked back. Crave looked up at him from where he crouched, his unit exiting through the floor into their own craft. Luzie roped out, snap-reeling the cable up behind her. Zii raised a gloved hand to Crave.
Crave nodded.
Zii took the height to the load bridge with the jumpforce of his biomech legs.
In the light of a rural star, two small stealth ships departed in different directions.
The module hung empty in frozen orbit around a dead moon.
Golden-brown dust settling over a fresh layer of rubble that smothers cries for help.
The burnt wreckage of a ship drifting cold, cavernous, and abandoned, its side split, its internal organs voided into space.
A newly redlined planet forming inaugural blues and whites as light finds it has particles to scatter against, the elemental dance of atmospheric creation culminating in a world’s first dynamic sunstar rise.
The ad’s voiceover called these visions of duty “humanity’s most extreme acts. The backstage of discovery and disaster, rescue and war.” Thwip remembered how five years ago he stayed up past his bedtime watching it on loop, the words SEE WHAT WE SEE followed by UNP SPECIAL FORCES, fading in over the moment when military scientists shifted a planet from uninhabitable to habitable. What he saw now would be worthy of the next ad.
It was midnight hour Nativity time and high hour local planetary time, and the Leto Cross intersection of the Sunway was dead. Thwip held on to one of the thousands of dish-shaped parabolic pell anchors that maintained the LC station’s position in space, shielding himself from the station’s security scanviews with the massive anchor’s bulk. He watched and marked the stillness.
Usually at this major intersecting interstellar point of the Sunway, ships docked and undocked at a rate so furious at high hour under heliospheric conditions so complex that no coordinator under a hundred years old qualified to conduct their operations. Tonight the Sunway and LC station tourist galleria, lightless for lack of ship movement, sprawled evacuated for the first time in history—empty dock after empty dock leading into the vastness of space.
A deserted faro ship remained docked at the prism concourse, MARSLIAN INTERPLANETARY emblazoned on its side, declaring its corporate ties, and a 200-kiloton humm freighter stamped with the United Nativity Planets’ spheres and stripes on the underbelly rested askew, half in and out of the locks at Dock 25, in danger of going adrift with no crew. Smaller single-passenger crafts were scattered within the honeycomb locks of the Ego Dock, stowed by their owners before boarding larger vessels destined for other planets.
Covered in thick clouds that obscured its surface, Denizen filled the top quarter of Thwip’s hardhood innerface view, rolling through its orbit at 35.1 kilometers a second. These were the hours, as the planet approached its annual near point to the Sunway, allocated to shipping more challenging and temperamental freight in or out of orbit or to terrestrial docks.
Pirates might be stealing specialty cargo that only passes through during the orbital window. Chatter protocol was hashed “essential only” during mission ops, so Thwip kept his musings about potential motives to himself as Disar joined his position, narrating her arrival in impeccable voice procedure. For this mission, he wore one of the roselaurel training hardhoods etched with roses on the outside. Disar wore one with laurels.
They’d had to suit up en route, and during the confusion of the evacuation, a ship had dropped the two of them twenty kilometers from the station. Protected by their roselaurel suits, they’d maneuvered in a series of rushes that started from the Sunway and station’s outer fortifications—rig by rig, position by position, taking advantage of available cover to get closer to the station undetected, watching and scanning at each point before proceeding.
Thwip’s hood filtered the light that caught the edges of Denizen’s main Sunway access point, the Water Gate, detecting a wider electromagnetic spectrum than the human eye could see. His hood processed the scan captures and sent them to his innerface, compositing the imagery into a single master scan he could view. The Sunway’s enormous skeletal structure became visible in greater color and detail. At each gate point, a series of three aligned rings each the size of a small moon were connected like a rib cage with a spinelike column. A ship would line up at a gate on its allocated sailmark and await the official signal to engage its dark-e punch, powering into its initial faster-than-light thrust. Vertebral three-ring structures repeated across the galaxy in clusters spaced light-years apart, as the Sunway extended star to star in multiple directions. For the rest of the ship’s journey, it would maintain acceleration by harnessing the Sunway’s focused stellar energy until it arrived at its desired gate, where it used the same power to decelerate the dark-e punch, and exit. At one far end of the largest artery lay Earth; at the other end, the Golden Gate. And war.
The Sunway was the pinnacle of human engineering, the backbone of space exploration, travel, and life across the human-settled portion of the galaxy. Yet tonight, devoid of commercial activity, it looked somehow pathetic, like the remains of a huge alien creature left to rot in a desert, its white bones bleached by the light of an unforgiving sunstar.
Thwip studied a distant line of official ships from various agencies, fanned between the Water Gate and Denizen’s orbital path. Some continued in their usual duty, protecting the planet, Sunway, and surrounding infrastructure. Others were there to respond to the attack. The array of crafts moved, broke formation, spread apart, creating the illusion that an invisible force had dispersed them, like terrestrial wind scattering flower petals.
They’re backing off even farther. Pirates must be making demands.
“Disar to Sentinel, still unscanned and unseen.” Disar drew up next to Thwip and nodded to him. “Permission to move ahead to goal position?”
Somewhe
re out in the blackness beyond the light and scan pollution waited a stealth carrier so secret that its model name remained classified above recruit access. Aboard were the three elite recruit trainers, Commander Sentinel and officers Pilo and Tomtom, who together were the permanent portion of Roselaurel unit. The carrier also held the elite unit’s support staff of 245, led by their unit handler, Captain Aullust.
“Prepare for mission redirect.” Commander Sentinel’s silvery, disembodied voice came through their hardhood aurals.
“Copy that,” Disar said. Thwip listened.
“Once you gain goal position, you are to hold there, scan, and relay observations. This isn’t our op. Confirm.”
Thwip and Disar shared a look via their innerface loop.
If this isn’t our op, then whose op is it?
“Confirmed,” Disar said. Thwip had guided their previous rush. The last rush was hers to nav. She dashed through the technical preparations.
“You are clear to proceed to goal position when ready.”
“Copy that, Sentinel. Thwip, countdown, three… two… one.”
Thwip linked arms with Disar and they pushed off from the pell anchor, propelling themselves through space toward the docks. On his IF Thwip monitored their vectors while Disar guided their trajectory. The spacewalk maneuver they planned was like a precise and dangerous three-legged race: to sharply change direction without detection, they needed to play their suits off one another.
“If the mortheans penetrate the Golden Gate and enter the Sunway, this could happen,” Disar murmured through their aural mechs. They passed behind the askew humm freighter to block a read on their presence. “A soundless extermination. This is what it would look like if humanity suddenly disappeared.”
“It’s eerie,” he agreed.
They angled toward the twelve-meter discus of the navigational waybob between Docks 23 and 25. Thwip watched for hostile scan detection. How can this be someone else’s op? There’s no one closer to the station than we are.
“Ready to reverse propulsion.” Disar timed their contact. “Execute.” Thwip followed her cues. They landed and, moving fast but with care, attached themselves to the waybob’s underside, putting the discus between them and the station.
Astral Fall Page 2
