Fire on the Frontline

by Trevor Wyatt

  “This is Leader Khargona, of the Tyreesian Navy. He’s serving as a military liaison during the Summit,” the Captain of the Grace Marcus says.

  “Well, well,” the Tyreesian says in his oily voice. “A human female, piloting a Tyreesian ship. Now that’s a serious infraction of the rules, I’d say, Captain Sood.”

  “That’s what I thought, sir.”

  Khargona scowls. “There is a fair bit of advanced weaponry on that ship. What are you meaning to do with it, female?”

  “Bringing it in,” I say as evenly as possible. “This is now Terran Union property.”

  “You are a common thief,” says Khargona. “I demand that you destroy that ship, Captain Sood.”

  “But sir, that’s your ship.”

  “Indeed, and the knowledge it represents is priceless to my people. Any attempt to hijack or steal it represents a violation of treaties now in place,” Khargona says smoothly. “I cannot allow that to happen. It would threaten the peace between our two great civilizations.”

  The face of Jeryl Montgomery appears in a pop-up window to one side of the main screen. I can tell he’s talking from the communication room in the Terran Union Administrative building.

  “Stand down, Capain Sood,” he says. “I vouch for Anika. She’s got a vital piece of technology that’ll be crucial to the well-being of the Union. You’ve got to let her dock.”

  “Vouching for someone isn’t exactly SOP,” Sood says coldly. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I can’t do that on your say-so.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Montgomery says.

  “For once I agree with you, Captain,” says Khargona. He spits out a string of syllables in a tongue I don’t recognize.

  Immediately the Eskyuk Tushav’ch quivers and I hear a series of thuds as bulkhead doors snap shut, isolating the various sections of the ship from each other.

  Fuckarama. What has the fucking Tyreesian done?

  A voice comes over the freighter’s internal commlink: “Self-destruct sequence initiated,” says a calm female voice. “Five minutes and counting.”

  “Captain,” Khargona says coldly to Captain Sood, who’s frozen in his chair, “I advise you to tell your ships to stand down. I have remotely activated the Tushav’ch’s self-destruct mechanism with an emergency override.”

  My eyes widen. I know why he’s done it, of course; to prevent the second section of the teleportation unit from falling into Terran hands. That he’d sacrifice his own people, who are now on a final approach to the Tushav’ch in order to board it and take me into custody, matters not a jot to him.

  I sag in my seat. Where’s the damned bomb? I know where such devices are normally placed on Terran ships, but not on this bucket. I blink twice and at hyper-speed access the sea of data in which my nanites swam, frantically searching for any and all references to Tyreesian self-destruct protocols.

  My mind is now racing as fast as the digital net connecting the nanites. It’s a horrible feeling, and I feel my body kick into “fight or flight” mode, squirting adrenaline and cortisol into my central nervous system as the stress mounts. My endocrines will be out of whack for days after this—assuming I survive the blast.

  If that bomb is anywhere in the ship, I’ll have to fight my way through the PMFs to get to it. Then my nanites flag an encrypted file, crack it, and project it onto my retinas.

  The explosive device is outside the ship, buried in the outer hull.

  I check the time remaining until the blast. Four minutes fifteen seconds. No worries; at hyperspeed, that is the equivalent of almost two hours. I’m sure I can disarm the thing in two hours.

  Assuming the Tyreesians or the Terrans don’t start shooting at me.

  I grab my head-piece and run out of the bridge at top speed.

  I have to get to the outer airlock. The first problem is that the bulkheads are all closed, and I have to slow down to open them manually, one at a time, otherwise I’ll strip the runners and gears in the walls by yanking too hard on them. Slow and steady wins the race.

  “Three minutes, forty-five seconds,” the computer says complacently.

  “Shut up, bitch,” I growl, wiping sweat out of my eyes. When’s the last time these controls were lubricated?

  Two doors, three doors. The outer airlock will cycle in thirty seconds; there’s no way to speed up the sequence.

  “Two minutes, fifteen seconds until self-destruct.”

  Last door!

  Just as I finish turning the hand control, something whips into my peripheral vision and snatches my spacesuit’s head piece, which I’d put on the floor while working the door controls. A questing tendril from one of the PMFs! I turn to look, and see a dozen of them zeroing in on me.

  “Give that back, asshole!” I yell, then dive through the opening doorway. The PMFs crowd into the gap, trying to get at me. The airlock is dead ahead. I blink twice and run for it.

  The PMFs come to a relative halt, of course, as I shift into hyper speed. But they still have my headpiece: it’s somewhere in that twisted mass of vegetation. I shudder. I hate the things; I can’t bear the thought of digging into a pile of their slimy bodies.

  I smack the airlock controls and watch as the thing began to close. At my current rate of speed, it will take ten relative minutes for that to happen.

  Back in the “real world,” there’s a minute left until self-destruct.

  People can survive in a vacuum for about 15 seconds before passing out from lack of oxygen to the brain. Being enhanced, I can do a bit better than that—maybe I can last a minute. At hyperspeed that will be maybe twenty relative minutes, which might be just long enough for me to find the bomb and disarm it.

  I spend some time calming myself and hyperventilating, getting as much oxygen into my body’s cells as possible. The outer door cracks, and I feel the air being sucked out. At my rate of speed, it’s like a summer breeze. In real time, it would be almost explosive.

  Explosive. Bad choice of words.

  Outside the airlock I can hear—well, feel; I can’t hear anything now, as there’s no air to conduct sound—dull thuds as the PMFs try to hammer their way in. That isn’t going to happen; but I’m effectively trapped in here. The airlock has only one other exit, and that’s currently set to space. Even after I have the bomb defused, if I get the bomb defused, if I get safely back to the airlock and cycle it shut, I’ll still be trapped inside it.

  That, however, is a problem for later.

  The door is wide enough now. I step out.

  Space is beautiful, in its way, if one has the luxury to enjoy it. By “luxury,” I mean sitting in a starship’s observation lounge with a stimulating beverage and a philosophical attitude in place.

  Those things are in short supply just now. My spacesuit is magnetically charged, so I can use every part of it to stick to the ship’s outer hull. Plus, it has small emergency jets installed at the wrists and ankles, so if I accidentally come loose from the hull I can maneuver myself back into contact with it.

  Space is also silent. Dead silent. I know that I’ll soon start bleeding from my nose, mouth, ears and eyes due to the lack of atmospheric pressure around me. Medically, I know precisely what will happen. They teach us well in the Academy, and Intelligence training is even more thorough. Sometimes being highly educated can be a disadvantage.

  I inch along the hull toward the spot where the bomb is hidden. I know it’s just beneath the outer skin, with its charges aimed inward. Theoretically I can punch through the hull, grab the thing, and if I can’t disarm it quickly enough I can toss it far enough away that maybe the blast won’t kill me.

  Maybe.

  Five seconds, ten...forty seconds until self-destruction, my inner clock tells me.

  There’s the spot! I kneel, bringing more of my “sticky” suit into contact with the hull, and dig my fingers into the metal. I can’t do this at hyperspeed because I’ll knock myself off the hull and into space and no one nearby will have a good day.


  But the stars are smiling at me, because the thing is no bigger than a dinner plate and it’s right there, and I carefully extract it from its nest of diodes and look at it through ice-rimmed eyeballs.

  Two buttons, one yellow, one blue. Beside them, an LED of strange blue shapes, each one getting smaller. Time ticking down.

  Tyreesians use blue for danger. I push the yellow button.

  The shapes on the display flash yellow and stop shrinking.

  I’m cold, so cold...the device floats away from my nerveless fingers and ice closes in around my vision. I can’t breathe.

  The darkness of space...

  No One

  ...and yet. there are dreams. Or, not dreams exactly, but impressions. Something, some consciousness, some spark of me is still receiving information from outside.

  Some of them could be called memories: I hear my parents arguing, probably about money (that was the only thing they ever argued about) while I hid, afraid, in a closet listening. I’d been playing with my mother’s shoes. I could not have been more than three years old.

  I loved her shoes, the different colors, the textures. The size alone of them was more than I could take in at that age. How could anyone have feet that big? It was impossible to think that my own feet might someday be that big.

  And above me, her clothes: a Narnia of skirts, dresses, slacks...I loved being in Mommy’s wardrobe, being surrounded by all those things that smelled so comfortingly of her. But she and Daddy were arguing outside, and the air was closed...and cold, so terribly, bone-chillingly cold. And I couldn’t breathe.

  I couldn’t breathe and it was after a school track meet. I had run my heart out but still came in third. The disappointment jabbed at me even through my gasps. I’d let the team down. We’d lost the regional. It was all on me. I leaned over with my hands on my knees and with the focus of exhaustion watched my sweat drip onto the dirt beneath my head.

  The drops form the exact same pattern as when I’d shudder outside the bulkhead to Engineering. I stare down at them, wondering how that could be.

  Strange radiation sluices through me, the outpourings of the star energizing a nebula not many light-years distant. Perseus’ atmosphere shielded the planet from the radiation, but out here in space—wait, what? Space? Yes, I am in space! Floating all but naked in space, and my nanites laboring to keep me alive, staving off cellular damage, trying to get oxygen to my organs, reducing my core temperature to slow my metabolism.

  How long has it been? How many hours have I drifted helplessly out here, alternately lit and shadowed as my motionless body slowly rotated into and out of Perseus’ light? I’m dead now, or soon will be.

  It is, I decide, peaceful. I no longer feel the cold. Like a mummy, I’ll be preserved here in space, desiccated, lifeless, drifting forever between the stars, a message to future space voyagers that my species existed once upon a time. They’ll wonder who I am, what I had been doing, how I had come to be floating sans protective headpiece here in the vacuum. Was I a criminal, tossed out the airlock? Was I a hero? Was I a careless idiot?

  Shapes loom all around me. The gods of the galaxy, coming to harvest my soul. I never believed in them...never believed in a soul. Now all I know is the silence of space, a faint slug-slug-slug from my faltering heart, the brittle feel of the outer layers of my skin as they freeze and flake off.

  All right, if this is it...if this is how I am to die...it ‘s okay. I can live with that. I would have chuckled at the feeble joke had I been able to. But the vast shapes around me loom closer, almost comfortingly, and I want them to gather me in and take me away to whatever unknown Valhalla awaited me. Even oblivion would be fine.

  Everything slips away, and I’m dead.

  * * *

  Noises. Sounds, annoying sounds: rhythmic, a repetitive one-note beep beep beep worming its way into my awareness.

  Go away, let me sleep. I’m dead, I don’t need this shit. Let a poor dead girl sleep, would you?

  There’s a light out there. I swim toward it, slowly aware that there’s a tube down my throat.

  Beep beep beep.

  The tube is withdrawn. Surely they don’t mean for me to be conscious during the process? Thanks for nothing, nanites. You brought me back too soon.

  Beep beep beep.

  You can stop that now, please.

  I open my eyes.

  Mistake.

  Harsh fluorescent illumination picks highlights off the fairings of any number of weapons pointed at me by a cadre of military-grade robots, all nicely polished gleaming steel with red and white carapaces. Numbers stenciled on them. Standard issue security iron.

  Jeez, who did they think I was?

  Someone steps out from behind one of the bots.

  “No, don’t try to talk,” says Jeryl Montgomery. “Just relax.”

  Seeing my eyes flick around, he says, “You’re in the TUS Seeker’s sick bay.”

  He takes a seat on a plastic chair to one side. I am, I understand, lying in bed, hooked up to machines.

  Guarded by military-grade security bots.

  Beep beep beep.

  “Nice work out there,” he says conversationally.

  “You almost bit it, though...I’m sure you know that. You were out there for just over two minutes. A few seconds longer, and we wouldn’t have been able to save you.”

  He smiles.

  “As it was you were kind of a mess, Grayson. The docs don’t think there’s any serious tissue damage, but you’ve had a boatload of alveoli implanted into your lungs. That took a while, so they intubated you and kept you in an induced coma while they cleaned you up. Oh, and you lost a lot of skin. You’ll have full-body dandruff for a while, they tell me.”

  He crosses his legs.

  “So you’re under arrest.”

  He tilts his head at the robots.

  “Be a good girl—don’t give these things a reason to get tough with you. You’re in no shape to argue with them.”

  I figure he’s right about that. I’m on the mend, but I won’t be running any races for a while...

  I frown. I’d let the team down. We’d lost the regional.

  Beep beep beep.

  I try to access my nanites’ diagnostics to get a full run-down on my condition. I blink twice to get to the retinal menu.

  A shock: nothing happened. I blink twice again. Still nothing.

  They’re gone. My nanites are gone.

  Montgomery watches me. He obviously understands what I’m trying to do, because he says, “Oh yeah. They had your little friends deactivated. You’re offline, Anika. You’re just too much of a threat with the enhancements.”

  Beep beep beep.

  This is going to take a while to integrate. I relax back into the pillow.

  “I feel like hell,” I croak. “Under arrest?”

  He nods.

  “Crimes against the state,” he says. “I’m sorry. They think you’re a traitor. They intend to schlep you back to New Washington for trial, Anika. I’m sorry. They want to hang you out to dry.”

  Then he smiles. “On the plus side, you saved my life—which they seem to regard as a good thing, I don’t know why—and delivered a fully integrated, working teleportation unit, not to mention a Tyreesian ship. And you have in addition embarrassed the hell out of the Tyreesians and made the Tyreesian delegation look like the festering deck-splat that they are. So there are points in your favor.”

  “Good to hear,” I say. My raspy voice makes my attempt at sarcasm ineffectual, but Montgomery catches it. He reaches out and put a hand on my arm.

  “I’ll do all I can for you,” he says. Leaning closer, he murmurs, “We’re not going to blow your cover. We can’t. But the Union is out for blood. They want a scapegoat for all the carnage at the summit, and you’re it.”

  “That’s not fair,” I manage.

  He leans back in his chair and sighs.

  “You’ve worked for the government long enough to know that that word doesn’t exist
in the official lexicon.”

  True enough. I nod slowly. I glance at the security iron across the room. Without my nanites, I’m not going to get past those bots.

  His pocket tablet beeps. He takes it out, reads the notice, and frowns.

  “I have to go,” he said. “You’ve kicked up a lot of mud, Anika. I’ve got meetings all day about it.” He stands, brushes off his jacket, and steps past the security iron.

  “I’ll try to look in on you later,” he says. “Take care.”

  “Thanks.”

  After he’s gone, I find myself exhausted by his visit and the brief conversation. They aren’t going to let me come in from the cold. Well, that’s no real surprise. It’s a risk we have to take as agents. There’s cover, and there’s cover.

  Most of the Union pols will think I’m a traitor. It makes sense for them to be allowed to think that...if I’m caught and go down, they’ll think they’ve done some good. They can go home feeling proud of themselves, and brag to their constituents about what good little boys and girls they are. They’ll put on a nice show trial, convict me, and lock me up somewhere.

  I’ll get time off for good behavior, no doubt; Jeryl’s people, who have to be in the know, probably won’t let me rot in jail very long...just long enough for the rumpus to die down. Then I’ll be paroled, and maybe given a new ID and sent off to live on some little planet somewhere out of harm’s way.

  It makes me sick. I’m too tired to think about it. I cast a glance at the robots, who stand implacably. I won’t even be able to go to the bathroom without getting permission from the doctors, and even then, one of the bots would follow me in.

  It’s too depressing.

  I turn over and go to sleep.

  Terran Union New Report

  TASH AVERY: Good evening, I’m Tash Avery. Welcome to the Solar Broadcasting System’s News Hour for Thursday, February 12, 2207. Tonight, Neo-Traditionalists win big in Maxia sector elections, promising big gains for investors. Allegations of meddling by agents of the Tyreesian meddling linger despite the resounding Unionist win.

  We’ll talk with two Union officials about the election. Then, how thriving genetically modified wildlife could be a boon to tourism on Titan. In exonews, the Galactic Council pushes for economic intergrations, and the Drupadi roll out the red carpet for the Tyreesian delegation. All that and more, on tonight’s SBS News Hour.