Prox Doom

by Michael Penmore

  She waited for him at the bottom. ”You took your time. Your ankle’s busted?”

  “I’ll be fine. Worry about yourself.” He was grumpy from the pain and wear.

  “I will. Come on.” Nadie slinked in the direction Major Burke had taken. Rhys limped after her as fast as he could, still outpaced. The time he took was good for reflection. He thought he understood Burke better now; permanently disabled by illness, being put out to pasture, grim about his outlook. Rhys almost sympathised, but not enough to let him go through with stealing Ender for private gain.

  Nadie

  The quarry was weak and slow, but smart. He kept stuck to winding passages instead of straight roads where she could just shoot him from a distance. This meant that Nadie had to slow down and be wary of traps. She gave up on Rhys and hurried as she could. The Captain could keep up or stay behind. She didn’t need him against one unsuspecting man.

  Fleetingly she thought about that other guy, Foley. Either she took him out with the grenade or he was lying in wait somewhere. He was the reason to be careful.

  She rounded a corner and finally saw the Major step up into a small lift. Glass door closed between them. As he turned and saw her, alarm blossomed on his face. She took up her blaster to shoot.

  “Don’t bother,” Rhys grimaced from a way off. “The door’s resistant.”

  She lowered her gun, feeling dejected. The lift rushed downward, taking Major Burke and his luggage away with it. “Where is he going?”

  “Hell if I know.” Rhys shrugged.

  “You’re even less useful than Selnov,” she said and thought about the irritating Private and then about Major Remorra. How did they fare in their mission? Should she radio them to say what was going on? No, strict ban on radio chatter. The major’s comm would be turned off anyway. They were on their own, as was she. Nadie ran to the lift’s entrance and punched the call button several times in rapid succession.

  “That’s not gonna make it go faster,” Rhys said, limping to her. “Selnov, he’s your inside man, right? How did you stumble upon him?”

  “Is this a fishing expedition?” She didn’t like answering more of his questions.

  “Well, I like chatting when I’m waiting.”

  “I prefer silence.”

  “All right then.” He sat down and proceeded with taking off his boot.

  “What are you doing?!”

  “If we’re not talking then I have time to inspect my ankle. There’s a possibility I broke a bone and it’s getting worse, not better.”

  Nadie groaned. She talked. Anything to stop him from stripping. “He came to us two months ago.”

  “Just after we set up this base.” Rhys mercifully ceased fumbling with the boot. “Did he put you in touch with Messenger.”

  “He did. Command tapped into him, encouraged him to dig deep into his contacts and come up with as much intel as fast as he could. A month ago he gave us Messenger’s first communication.”

  “And Messenger told you about Ender?”

  “No, Selnov had already told us. He was one of this base’s designers. But he had no specifics on the threat, no security clearances, not even the location. Messenger provided it all.”

  “All through Selnov?”

  “At first, then Command established other methods of communication. Why do you want to know all this?”

  “You don’t get a lot of defectors, do you?”

  Nadie felt cross. He was a slick one. First, he just asked about Selnov and the mission, and there was no harm in that, but operational methods of the CA were another thing. She wasn’t a rat to spill such details. “We get plenty. You’re not getting more out of me, you worm.” She tapped the call button furiously.

  “You know he can just block the lift from ever going up?” Rhys suggested.

  “I know,” she spat. Why didn’t she think about that?

  Nadie opened one of her pockets and produced a coil of thin black wire rope. She crouched down and wrapped one end tight around a pylon. She threw the rest down into the open lift shaft.

  “I’m not going down that way,” Rhys said.

  “No one’s asking you to.” Nadie slipped on her gloves and grabbed the wire with both hands. “Do me a favour. Make sure the knot doesn’t slip.” And with that, she rappelled down.

  Rhys

  “Oh, snaff,” he cursed under his breath. He had come this far, what difference did another thousand-foot drop make? Rhys got up and grabbed Nadie’s line in his palms; the rope was rough and he had no gloves to protect his skin. Let the good tear roll.

  He jumped down into the unlit tunnel. A light from Nadie’s flashlight bobbled far below. She was always fast. Without a light of his own, Rhys soon found himself cast in pitch darkness. He kept holding the rope no matter what; pain seared through his ankle every time it touched the shaft’s wall, his shoulder wasn’t good and the palms of his hands began to burn halfway through the exercise.

  What was he thinking? He should have gone upstairs to warn the base instead of following a Colonial insurgent through this well. His head had been busy with the wrong musings apparently. Now it was too late to climb back. He didn’t think he had enough strength left to pull himself up.

  He reached the bottom of the shaft after a minute or so. The lift was there, trapped. Major Burke had wedged his communicator into the door. Where was he headed? The road from the lift led into a tunnel cast in blue light from evenly spaced floor lamps. Rhys shuffled onwards, a lonely figure in half dark finding solace in Nadie’s blaster, thankful now that she hadn’t taken it back when he offered.

  After a quarter of a mile or so, the tunnel stretched out into an underground landing zone. A corridor leading up had been hewed into the stone ceiling so that a lone ship could have its way in and out. Rhys recognised the grey-and-green silhouette with a long nose painted into a pattern of teeth. This was the Shark, Colonel Duke’s private little battlecruiser. Rhys thought it had been left behind at the Pluto dockyards where the battalion embarked on their journey to Proxima D. It appeared he was wrong.

  Ship’s side entrance was open and he saw Nadie running towards it. No sign of Major Burke yet. He must have boarded the ship already. Red lighting came up on the Shark’s hull, a confirmation someone was bringing back power to the ship. Rhys trudged on as quickly as he could. Nadie shouldn’t be left to deal with Burke alone. She would probably kill the man on the spot, and Rhys was determined to make sure that Major lived to tell everyone what he had done, what he was responsible for. Besides, he had Ender. How could Rhys know Nadie would destroy the weapon? She could claim it for herself and fly away armed to the teeth. No, Rhys Dreyfus had to go in and be the man for the job. Afterwards, he’d lie down in a hot tub for days on end.

  Major Burke

  He had thought the insurgent dead, but she was hot on his heels. It changed nothing. Nothing!

  But it did change things; Tom Burke was rattled. He now had to hurry. His body wasn’t fit for a sprint. He congratulated himself on the trick with the communicator in the lift, but that victory was short-lived. He knew the Colon girl was coming. And if she was after him, chances were good Rhys survived and chased after him too. Two people, young, able and with a grudge, against one of him, old, weak, carrying a burden he couldn’t lose. There was no use for it but to pick up the pace.

  He must’ve been a sorry sight when he tried to run across the landing strip, lugging the unhelpful case behind like a stubborn piece of cabin baggage. Why did Duke cram the contents into this unwieldy thing instead of putting them on a levitating sledge? “Prep the bird to fly. Colonel’s orders,” he almost spluttered the words to a Marine pilot already waiting by the Shark’s entrance.

  “Major Burke. I wasn’t informed you’d be going on this flight.”

  Burke quickly scanned the man’s expression for signs of duplicity. No lie in the man. That backstabbing skunk of a colonel had never intended Burke to make it! Major teetered madly. Duke was going to taste a dose of his o
wn medicine; he was going to be severely disappointed when the hell he raised swallowed him whole.

  “This is an emergency. Colonial scumbags assaulted the base. We have to evacuate. Colonel has sent me first. He’s coordinating the defence and will be here soon.”

  The pilot went for his radio. “I haven’t heard of any assault. I need to check this with-“

  “No, you don’t.” Burke pressed his colt to the man’s torso and crisped his entrails with a volley of hot rounds. “Sorry, son. Hope you’re going to a better place.”

  Burke entered the ship as well as he could. Refusing to part with the case, he dragged it toward the ship’s control room. Ambient lighting came on as he trudged intrepidly on, revealing the extravagance of Colonel Duke’s onboard living arrangements. He’d never been invited to the Shark, perhaps Hellraiser fretted about him putting his feet on the plush sofas, dirtying those deep armchairs, drinking clean the bar with its selection of hooch and booze in varieties, shapes and colours like Burke had never seen in his life. Messenger had a predictable taste in art; a couple of paintings were huge, oppressive, depicting large scale battles, charges, bodies strewn left and round, splotches of dark paint standing in for blood pooling on the surface of the muddy ground. Duke lived and breathed military discipline. Tom Burke didn’t and he found the paintings dreary and depressing. He made a plan to burn the pictures on his way out of the Centauri system; his escape should prove more comfortable than he imagined, thanks to the Colonel’s stock of booze.

  In his haste, he forgot to close the ship’s entrance behind him. No matter, he could still send the ship to the air before anyone else came onboard. Burke entered the Shark’s trapeze-shaped bridge and it was a myriad of lights and switches, keys, knobs and levers, most of which told him absolutely nothing, and all were dead. He cursed. The pilot hadn’t prepared anything.

  “Thrusters, where on Saturn are the thrusters?” He scanned the dashboard looking for ignition. At long last, the Major located a portion marked Primary systems and flipped switches. The instruments awoke with a series of beeps, buzzes and vibrations. The Shark was coming back to life.

  A noise from the back of the ship caught his attention. The Colon was already inside. Blast all those controls, they were taking too much time to decipher. Burke grasped Ender’s case tightly with both hands and skulked into hiding behind the door he’d left opened. “Lights out,” he whispered, and the ship listened. The bridge plunged into darkness pierced by variable illuminations from the control panel. He held his breath in anticipation of his opponent. The tension made him a little light-headed. His bones ached, his muscles felt like dragged through a sheet of razors, and his joints creaked as if they were rusted hinges. His body had never felt so weak. His mind had never been sharper.

  * 13 *

  They had found her a cosy chair to sit in and tied her arms and legs to the posts. Hellraiser chose the ‘human’ side of her face as a preferred target and now the unblemished skin looked almost as disgustingly raw as its fire-mangled counterpart. With her arms restrained and powers waning, Major Remorra finally had to accept the truth: her situation had become truly hopeless.

  “You. Are. Messing. With. My. Plan.” Hellraiser punctuated each word with a forceful punch. Under continuing barrage of knuckles, Remorra had almost slipped into unconsciousness three times already; on each occasion, however, Hellraiser stopped himself just in time to allow her recovery.

  “Where is my weapon?” he asked for the seventeenth time.

  “Ack,” she gasped through the bloody remnant of her teeth. She didn’t know. She had kept her silence this long, and now when she actually wanted to tell him the truth - she didn’t know, she had nothing to do with its disappearance - she couldn’t produce one full word, forget about a sentence. Pity, she would love to see how exasperated he got with her defiance.

  “This is useless.” Hellraiser went back to the table where Selnov was picking idly at the explosives belt.

  “Maybe it wasn’t her. Burke’s not here. Maybe it was him,” the double-crossing scientist suggested.

  Colonel dismissed the idea out of hand. “No. That spineless worm’s drug-addled brain is too mediocre to come up with something like this. He’s probably lying in his bed, sleeping or feeling sorry for himself. We don’t need him anyway. Give me that.” The Colonel snatched the explosives belt from Selnov and started picking through its slots. “Which one of these will be small enough to fit in her zipper?”

  He faced Remorra again. “It’s clear you’re not willing to cooperate, daemon. So you’re gonna get your last dental rearrangement courtesy of me. What’s this?” He pulled a long and thin beige object from a narrow slot in the belt.

  “Looks like a pen,” Selnov observed.

  Remorra struggled against her restraints, succeeding only to topple the chair to its left side. She groaned as her head hit the floor. The soldier who guarded her lifted his rifle nervously.

  “At ease, Marine,” Hellraiser chuckled. “Still got some fight in you? What’s so important about this thing? Doesn’t look like a bomb to me. Old pen made of cheap plastic, just like Selnov said.”

  “I knew Colonials were poorly stocked, but who writes with pens these days?” Selnov said in a mocking tone.

  It was not a pen. Remorra did the best she could to hide her emotions, which was easy with all her face looking like a pulp. The item was a homemade remote detonator for the explosive pack. Nadie must have packed it in to trigger the blast remotely. It sounded so obvious now.

  “Actually, this will do better than the old grenade-in-the-pie-hole trick.” Hellraiser squatted down before Remorra with the pen right in front of her eyes. “I will blind you. This way you’ll still be able to speak, but you’ll have none of that daemonic obstinacy left in you.”

  “Go to hell,” she croaked with a dry throat. Inside, she was suppressing a state of panic. The prospect of living as little as one minute in a world of total, irrevocable darkness terrified her to the core of her soul, more than death ever would.

  “I’m in no doubt that I will, but first I’ll raise it for you. That’s what I do best. Let’s see. If I press the button like this...”

  Remorra watched with baited breath, which Hellraiser mistook for fear. His thumb went across the top of the pen’s button without pressing it, then it went the other way, then hovered above it. Press it, Remorra willed him do it. Press it, you remorseless pig! And he did. The writing end came out in the shape of a red-flashing LED lamp. It blinked really fast. Nadie set it to a near-instant effect. Good girl, thinking ahead to a circumstance where they needed to make every second count. Remorra always knew she’d make a good officer one day. With women like Corporal Nadie, the resistance would carry on.

  Major gathered strength enough to cry in Hellraiser’s surprised mug. “Burn in hell, son of a-!” BOOM! The room went down in the embrace of a powerful explosion, instantly killing everyone in its radius. Walls of the vault were too thick to let it through, but the transparent saves were something different. They buckled, cracked, fell off and melted under extreme heat. Licks of flame reached within them and touched scores of dormant black holes waiting for their wake up call. The balls of black began to turn within themselves, and they grew larger, more potent until they were one. They didn’t stop there. They would not stop until they swallowed the whole USSMC Proxima Centauri D Military Installation - their home and their prison - within the other-dimensional mass of their body.

  Hell had finally come to Prox D. Its name was Ender.

  * 14 *

  Nadie

  The rocket-powered shuttle was much cosier than old Danny Pendersohn. Nadie hated it. It personified everything she hated about the Earthers - they lived in opulence while the Colonies suffered toil, blood and sweat to feed and clothe them. And on top of that, there was inflated taxation.

  This wasn’t time to rehash old grudges which led to this war. She moved quickly to the open door in the front of the ship. Blaster held close,
she stopped and listened for a moment. All was quiet and she risked going in.

  The case flew out of nowhere. Nadie ducked, but it dealt a glancing blow to her temple and sent her reeling for the door frame. A little dazed, she pivoted with a roundhouse kick and hit Major Burke on his side. A shot from his gun missed her by a wide margin. Burke lost his balance and went straight into the wall. Nadie pressed him to it and put her blaster to the back of his head. “You’re done, old man.” She seized him by the wrist and made him drop the pistol he’d still been holding, and then she turned him over with savage strength and neared the blaster to his forehead. “Look at me. No, this won’t do. Where’s the light switch?”