by Rick Partlow
“That is considered a possibility?” Trint asked, face tightening in surprise. He had not been well educated on physics by his masters in the Tahni military: it hadn’t seemed necessary.
“Definitely,” Pete put in again. “The Predecessors knew enough to engineer a system of wormholes that connected the most valuable systems in the Cluster. There’s no reason they couldn’t have messed with the Transition lines too.”
"The Corporates said that these Predecessors evolved on your homeworld of Earth," Trint recalled, "millions of years before humans, is that correct?"
"That's what they said," Pete answered. "No one knows if they were just making that shit up, though...along with all that business about the monsters that chased the Predecessors out of the Cluster thousands of years ago."
“Anyway,” Cal went on, looking down for a moment to secure his gunbelt around his waist, “there’s always been speculation, scientific and otherwise, that there must be a Transition Line that leads out of the Cluster and into the larger galaxy. The colloquial term for it is the ‘Northwest Passage.’ It was named after some ocean-going route on Earth back centuries ago.”
“And the ViR-dramas love that shit,” Pete said, laughing. “Funky aliens and energy monsters that live beyond the Cluster.”
“So, I can see where this would be valuable information,” Trint allowed, stuffing a loaded magazine into a pouch on his tactical vest. “It would open up new worlds for colonization, give access to new resources. But why does its existence make this operation so important?”
“Because of what else could be outside the Cluster,” Cal told him. “Predecessor tech, like the ship they used to attack Inferno. The Naga might have found a new cache here in the Cluster, or they might have stolen the ship from the military, but we can’t take the chance they’ve already found the Northwest Passage and are funneling Predecessor weapons in from outside.”
“How much do we trust this Chang guy?” Pete wanted to know. He stuffed a pulse pistol into a holster on his armored vest and sat down on the bench between Trint and Caleb. “I mean, we only have his word that this place is a Naga base.”
“We’ve been over all this already,” Cal said with a dismissive slash of his hand. “We have no leads on General Murdock and no other way to find out what’s going on and stop it. We either trust Chang’s intelligence or we head back to Canaan and hope they forget about us.”
“Our forces are insufficient for this sort of operation,” Trint opined, feeling odd arguing with Cal even after the years he’d spent among them. “Between the Dutchman, the Ariel and the ships Chang was able to recruit from his business allies, we have barely twenty ships armed for combat. If the Naga base is adequately guarded…”
“Chang says he has intell on how to penetrate the defenses,” Cal said. Then his face hardened in an expression that Trint hadn’t seen too many times since he’d known the man. “And the bottom line is, we’re doing it. So the time for those question is past. We clear?”
“I’ll follow your lead, big brother,” Pete said with a shrug, as if it had never been a real question. “You know that.”
“I am with you, Caleb,” Trint said, sensing with instincts born of his years spent among humans that reassurance was required. He imitated the facial motion that humans called a grin and attempted humor to defuse the situation. “I merely wish to register my warnings now, so that I may have the gratification of telling you I was right when things go poorly.”
Cal snorted with what Trint assumed was amusement. Pete Mitchell rolled his eyes in a gesture with which Trint wasn’t familiar enough to interpret.
“All right then,” Cal said. “We come out of T-space in ten and we need to be ready to hop the minute we touch down. We’re going to be moving as a unit. I don’t know Chang’s people and I’m not going to trust them to cover our rear so that’s your job, Trint.”
“I understand,” Trint assured him.
“We’ll be moving in a wedge formation,” Caleb said, speaking more to his younger brother now than Trint. “I’ll be point with Trint in the rear and you and Rache will be wide.”
Trint’s head snapped up. “Mrs. Mitchell will be there?” he asked with surprise in his voice.
“Yes I will, Trint,” came the unexpected answer from over his shoulder.
The Tahni cyborg twisted around and saw Rachel Mitchell stepping through the hatchway from the cockpit, already dressed in a form-fitting suit of byomer armor, a pulse pistol strapped around her waist.
“I didn’t come along to sit in the ship and wait,” she went on, reaching into one of the lockers to retrieve a carbine and a tactical vest. Trint knew Rachel better than he knew the others; he was certain that her current expression indicated self-satisfaction and he deduced that there had been an extended argument between her and Caleb about her being included in the landing party.
“Follow Trint’s directions,” Cal cautioned them and Trint felt a weight of duty settle on his shoulders along with a surge of gratification that Cal trusted him with the lives of his family. “If he says to take cover, you take cover, no matter what the rest of us are doing.” Cal caught each of their eyes. “Deke, Kara and I can take a lot of damage and not get killed. You can’t.”
An alarm sounded from the cockpit and all human eyes turned toward it. Trint didn’t look: he knew it was the alarm signaling that transition to realspace was imminent. He knew they knew that as well, but there was something about being human that made them look anyway.
“Strap in,” Cal said, leading them into the cockpit. “Show’s about to start.”
Humans, Trint thought, suppressing a whistle of disdain. Always talking too much.
* * *
Rachel:
Rachel Mitchell felt the fingers of her left hand cramping up where they were digging into the end of the armrest. Her right hand was digging in even harder on the other side, but those fingers didn’t cramp. She could feel them, feel the pressure as they sank into the padding of her acceleration couch, feel the cold softness of the plastic beneath her fingertips…but there was no hint of pain, no sense of fatigue. Her right arm didn’t get tired. It had cloned flesh and bone that was as much her own as any other part of her body, but the bones were reinforced with byomer and the nerves were superconductive fibers that hooked to her brain via a neurolink installed inside her skull.
She’d grown used to the new arm, didn’t even think about it most of the time. But she was thinking about it now. She was thinking about the explosion that had taken off most of her original right arm, had nearly killed her when the Corporate shuttle had fired on their house with its proton cannon. She’d blacked out and her last thought in that fraction of a second before unconsciousness claimed her had been that she was going to die. She’d been very surprised to wake up at all…just like she’d been surprised to wake up after the Tahni missiles had collapsed her and Harry’s house on top of them during the war.
How many more times would death sidestep her? How many lives did she have left? What the hell was she doing out here anyway? And why did she keep insisting on being in the thick of the fighting when the very thought of it scared her shitless?
“Leaving Transition space now,” Cal informed the others.
There was a lurch, not physical in nature and yet not entirely mental either, as the ship reentered spacetime and suddenly the main viewscreen was awash with the riot of swirling colors that covered the face of a massive gas giant, larger than Jupiter.
“Our target’s on the other side of the planet right now,” Cal explained---out of habit, she thought, since they’d already gone over the plan three times. “The gas giant’s magnetic field should hide us from their sensors until it’s too late.”
“How the hell did they manage to buy a whole habitable planet without anyone tweaking to it?” Pete wondered from his acceleration couch off to her right.
“Habitable may be a slight exaggeration,” Cal told him, pulling up a projection on the screen. “A
nd it’s a moon, if you want to get technical. Most of the surface is too cold for a human to go without life support, but there are a few spots near each pole where volcanic activity warms it up past freezing. That’s where most of the life is…such as it is.”
“But it’s right in the heart of the Commonwealth,” Pete argued. “We’re only a couple dozen light years from Earth for God’s sake!”
“You didn’t pay attention at Major McIntire’s briefing?” Trint admonished the younger Mitchell brother. “The mines became automated nearly twenty years ago and the colony was abandoned as too expensive to maintain. The Naga bought it through a shell corporation.” His face turned more dour…maybe. Rachel was never sure exactly what the Tahni was thinking. “Or so Mr. Chang has told us, anyway.”
Rachel saw the tactical projection overlaid on the main screen, showing the Ariel and the Dutchman as blue deltas and the other ships with them as green triangles spread out in a wedge behind them.
“They’ll have orbital defenses, won’t they?” Rachel asked, trying to remember that part of the briefing.
“Chang’s already launching stealth drones to take out their satellites,” Cal assured her. “He’s using decoys to try to spoof their ground sensors…if they don’t succeed, well…” He shrugged. “His ships are going in first.”
Rachel felt a cold, hard lump in her stomach at the words. They seemed heartless and ruthless from a man she knew to be compassionate and warm…but then, she hadn’t been around him when his family had been threatened. She knew he’d done some bad things fighting the Corporates, things he’d been reluctant to talk about afterward. That was the real reason Rachel couldn’t bring herself to forgive Kara McIntire, not for the injuries she herself had suffered but for making Cal revert back to the Killing Machine they’d turned him into during the war.
“The drones are clearing the planet,” Robert Chang’s face came over the cockpit commo screen. It was a chubby, boyish face that went well with his boyish, high-pitched voice. The combination made her skin crawl. “Our ships will be in sensor range of their surface facilities in a few minutes. I recommend we go to comms silence until we know they’ve seen us.”
“Roger that,” Kara answered from her ship, her face appearing beside Chang’s.
The two of them made quite the contrast and Rachel wondered for a moment how they’d ever worked together back in the war. Of course, she couldn’t imagine Deke and Kara being involved, but Cal had confided in her that they were. People were funny that way…or maybe she just wasn’t good at reading them.
On the screen, she could see the colored bands that were the gas giant’s clouds passing beneath them, then giving way to the darkness of space and the far-off glow of the system’s primary. It was breathtakingly beautiful, she thought, suddenly wondering how much she’d missed spending her life on Canaan.
The moon seemed a bit of a bland letdown after the majesty of the gas giant: just a hazy, blue-white circle shining in the reflected light of the primary. But she knew that it was far more miraculous in that it supported life; and she knew now, after what Cal had told her of their discoveries four years ago, that the life it supported had probably been introduced there by the long-fallen civilization of the Predecessors.
Some people might think that made the life-bearing planets of the Cluster somehow less miraculous, but she thought it made them even more special. What could be more of a miracle than an entire civilization devoted to the transformation of dead worlds into living ones? And how were humans honoring the memory of such a noble and far-sighted race? By warring for the chance to use their leftover technology as weapons. Maybe it was a good thing the Predecessors weren’t around to see it.
“No indication they’ve seen us yet,” Cal said, interpreting the data on the screen for them. “Chang’s drones should be in range of the satellites by now.” There was a series of small flares on the screen across the face of the moon, near the equator. Rachel knew they had to be simulated from incoming sensor data: they were still too far away to see explosions that small visually. “There!” Cal said, stabbing a finger at the little halos of red and white. “That’s the satellite defenses going down…or the drones, I suppose.” He shrugged. “We’ll find out soon. They must know someone’s here by now.”
Almost as if God had overheard Cal’s comment, a crimson lance speared up from the moon’s surface---again a simulation, she knew, since the lasers the Naga were using for ground defense wouldn’t be visible---and came within meters of one of Chang’s lighters. The converted heavy freighter shifted in its course and an answering blast of protons slammed down through the clouds. A second lighter joined it, both ships firing again and again like Zeus pummeling the world with lightning bolts. A section of surface glowed in the Tactical simulation as the proton cannon volleys struck home somewhere below and the laser didn’t fire again.
Rachel knew this was probably the most dangerous part of the operation, where a stray shot from either side could take them down without warning, but it was too impersonal to register in her gut. She couldn’t muster any dread for anything but what was going to happen once they landed. She realized she was letting the fear build up inside her; but try as she might, she couldn’t seem to force it back down.
When Robert Chang’s face reappeared on the comm screen, it almost made her jump.
“The drones have been successful,” he announced with placid happiness. “And my ships have silenced their ground based defenses. We’ll commence with the landings; please follow my cutter in.”
“If there’s any ground fire when his ship goes in,” Kara McIntire transmitted from the Dutchman, “hang back and let their lighters take care of it.”
Rachel wondered if she’d transmitted that just to the Ariel or on the open channel…and whether Chang would have cared if he had heard it.
“Shutting down impellers,” Cal announced. “Everyone prepare for acceleration.”
Rachel absently tightened the straps of her safety harness and rested her head back against the padding of her acceleration couch just before the ship’s fusion drives ignited, pressing her back into her seat. The one thing she’d learned to hate about space travel was the constant cycling from shipboard gravity during Transition to zero gravity while using the impellers to the often oppressive hand of acceleration during fusion thrust. There never seemed to be enough time to get used to zero gravity before the acceleration started and her stomach didn’t care for it.
Rachel tried not to look at the Tactical readout, knowing there was nothing she could do to affect the opposition they were facing on the way down. Instead, she focused on the main viewscreen, watching the ice blue of the moon as it grew closer and larger. As they went lower, she could see patches of brown and green among the blue and white, probably where the thermal and volcanic activity left oases of heat amidst the ice. The patches grew larger closer to the poles, particularly the North Pole, where a swathe of land the size of a small continent stretched open in brown and green with a few large lakes of liquid water.
How would it be to live on a world like that, she wondered, trapped in a little valley of habitability by walls of ice? One seismic shift and lava could spill out and burn your home to cinders or the thermal outlet could be blocked over and the ice could swallow everything whole. No wonder people had abandoned it once they didn’t need to live there anymore. Regular people, anyway.
The ship shuddered slightly as they began to dip into the upper atmosphere of the moon, and Rachel could hear the roar of the engines once more. She glanced at Cal and saw that his eyes had the far-away look they had when he was concentrating on the feeds from his headcomp.
“We’re coming down in a spiral pattern,” he explained absently, his fingers flexing instinctively, as if he were moving the ship’s controls with his hands rather than his thoughts. “Wide spiral with the Dutchman on the opposite arc. Chang’s cutter is going straight down the center, ballistic insertion. We’ll be touching down about five minutes be
hind him.”
“I dislike being in the air this long,” Trint admitted from behind her. “It makes us an obvious target.”
“Not crazy about it myself,” Cal said with a barely-perceptible shrug. “But needs must when the devil drives.”
Trint glanced sharply at Cal, then back to Rachel. “Is this some colloquialism with which I am not familiar?”
She nodded, but didn’t say anything, not trusting herself lest she start gibbering nervously. She concentrated on keeping her eyes straight ahead as the starship began to curve into the sharp spiral and her stomach began to twist. The effort made it hard for her to think, but it also made the time pass by faster and soon she could see the green beneath them as they passed over forests of genetically modified Earth trees planted there a century before. They towered fifty meters tall in spots, their tops coated with a light dusting of snow, and among them flew birds that Rachel knew must have been imported from Earth as well.
Back home, the sight of the imported Earth life would have made her bristle, but this wasn’t home. There was no flourishing native ecology here to be crowded out, just a barely habitable world that had a breathable atmosphere thanks to simple algae and lichen. She didn’t blame the original colonists for wanting a bit more varied ecosystem to make life more interesting. Not interesting enough though, since they’d abandoned it for greener pastures.
Then they were clearing the forest and dropping so precipitously that they left Rachel’s stomach somewhere several thousand meters up. She forced herself to focus on the terrain below and saw the deep blue of a large lake passing beneath them and then they were among a cluster of dark grey geodesic domes laid out over at least two or three kilometers in a vaguely circular pattern. Chang’s cutter was already on the ground at the center of the buildings and at least ten of his operatives were spreading out around it, growing from dots to figures recognizable as humans as the Ariel descended.
Rachel blinked as a blast of light erupted from the shadow of one of the domes and three of Chang’s people disappeared in the flash, leaving behind charred and smoking grass.
