I was frozen, ruminating on how we’d been obliviously coasting through neutral space only an hour earlier, our minds occupied by anything and everything other than the possibility of watching a fellow soldier’s head explode on a scorching, desolate planetoid in the middle of nowhere.
It was sobering. It was surreal. It had me on the verge of utter hysteria, and it didn’t take much imagination to realize I wasn’t alone in that regard.
I might never have moved from my crouch at the foot of the ramp if Salib hadn’t punched me straight in the chest. Even in a full suit, the impact jarred me out of combat shock. With the infantry’s electrical arm-bolt charges and the sergeant’s considerable strength, she packed a hell of a punch.
My eyelids snapped open immediately. Salib stood less than a foot away, motioning frantically toward the dust-veiled, dull-orange tundra. Evidently she’d realized that she couldn’t out-voice the screeching wind, but also knew she needed to get us moving to shake the paralyzing effects of Chara’s death. And it was a paralyzing event for us, especially on the heels of watching Marty’s wife die in the stasis chamber. I can personally attest to that.
No matter how hardened you become against death at sea and in the trenches, exploding heads and spousal farewells always melt your heart and your composure. If they don’t, you don’t have any business serving in the fleet in the first place, because you’ve clearly lost sight of why we do what we do. I know how ra-ra that sounds, and I certainly have my own issues with the fleet, but a cold heart goes well beyond regulations and combat training. It’s an issue of humanity, and it’s easy to lose it among aliens even without brushing it aside yourself.
Anyway, Salib avoided a major catastrophe by getting us all focused again, even if it was only a temporary fix. I calmly engaged the sight filters on my glass helmet and ran through my noise-cancelling sub-programs until I found one at the right frequency. After that, I could think a little. Not to maximum capacity, but enough to effectively remove my head from my ass.
There were still a couple soldiers on their knees along the ramp or on the ground scrambling to calibrate the systems in their suits, but nine other squad members had regained their nerve and were taking defensive positions around the ship. We had to move quickly. There was a lot to do still and the squad hadn’t requested assistance from engineering with the mechanical work, which struck me as odd. Maybe because half the engineering crew had perished in the crash.
I figured Salib was supposed to perform the evaluation herself, in that case. She was the only member of her team even remotely qualified to diagnose ship malfunctions from the outside, after all. But since the captain had sent me along for the ride and Rosie (better known as Lieutenant Iglesias, our engineer) was nowhere to be found, I grabbed the repair kit from the extended airlock ramp and hustled to the surface.
Damn, I realized halfway down. It’s my fault. I was supposed to get Rosie from engineering before we pressurized.
I’d fucked up again. Salib should have known that and reminded me, of course, but that doesn’t vindicate me. Having comm systems damaged ship-wide certainly contributed to my negligence though, and that’s not an excuse so much as a frustrating fact. If the comms had been operational when I’d exited the bridge, I could have called down to engineering and Rosie would have known to meet us at the airlock. But my head had been a mess then and I’d forgotten once I reached the lower decks.
The death of Marty’s wife shook me, which I guess makes me a good little human. Looking back, it’s amazing I even remembered to initialize the oxygen and gravity equalizers on my suit before exiting the Rockne in that mental state. As far as this particular mission goes, though, forgetting to fetch Iglesias was a relatively minor offense. It’s low on the totem-pole even among my personal indiscretions. Besides, I’m sure Rosie had her hands full in engineering, though I never thought to ask her. It’s a reasonable assumption, I’d say. There was more than enough damage on the inside to keep her busy.
With the dust swirling around me, I never got a good look at the lay of the land during that disastrous recon and repair. By the time I reached the bottom of the ramp and worked my way behind the line of soldiers to the exhaust ports for the FTL drive, my adrenaline was pumping so furiously I could barely grip the emergency repair kit, and that wasn’t like me at all. Like I’ve said, I saw plenty of crazy shit during my infantry days. I stared down the white eyes of death more times than you could ever imagine during the Kalak War. I bagged thirty-seven lizards in the Battle for Titan and was held captive by Tsoul terrorists for six weeks orbiting Mars before I grifted one of their spacesuits and hopped out an airlock (no thanks to the indifferent Crown for that escapade, who refused to negotiate with ‘terrorists’ while I was left to foot the bill for their principles).
I’m not mentioning these things because I want you to marvel at my galactic conquests or sterling fleet career. I’m just trying to paint you a picture that I was no first-term recruit with cabbage behind the ears. For me to quake with adrenaline when there were no enemies in the immediate vicinity and with no less than twelve trained fleet soldiers watching my back, it was clear something wasn’t right. It does make a certain kind of sense, though. I’m a navigator, and navigators as a rule don’t like to lose their bearings, especially when there isn’t a star visible and yet the ground beneath our feet is burning hot. On top of that, for all the missions I’d run out in neutral space, I hadn’t arrived on an uncharted planet until that day. The possibilities were terrifying. Exciting too, I guess, but mostly terrifying.
I could have been fine, though. I could have held it together in spite of my overwhelming paranoia and sense of displacement. In fact, I even managed to set the scan and repair kit down on the warm, dusty rocks and unbuckle three of the four clasps before I felt a presence behind me and my fingers locked up.
“What …” I gasped.
I guess I was a little jumpy. With good reason, as it turned out.
I turned slowly, alarmed but attempting to save face in case it was just a soldier taking position to shield me from the wind and the theoretical hostile natives. Part of me is still sure that’s what it was, because that’s the trust they drill into you during training. You’d think it would be the other way around to keep us on our toes, but there have been far too many missions on peculiar planets where soldiers get a little too excited and shoot to kill. That’s why they discourage trigger-happy behavior in Basic. The death toll on excursions to uncharted planets is about ninety percent friendly fire. Usually, if there are potential hostiles on the surface, we know well in advance of landing.
I kept my head about me as well as I could, but when I looked over my shoulder, there was no one around. Not any more, anyway. I did spot something, though. It was there one moment and gone the next, but it chilled me ten times more than watching the death of Marty’s wife and seeing Chara’s head explode combined.
It was my mother’s severed head, rolling across the dull-orange earth like a macabre tumbleweed.
“Jesus Christ…”
My stomach rose into my lungs. I fell against the side of the ship and stared at it with wide-eyed horror.
And then, it was gone. I was left trembling beneath a smashed FTL drive with blue smoke billowing from the starboard exhaust vents.
“All right, Sergeant,” I said into my (finally) functioning comm link, deciding then and there that I’d had enough. “Scanner’s broken,” I lied. “There’s nothing we can do from the outside until we get it running again.” My voice was surprisingly level. Thank God for small favors. I couldn’t think of anything more traumatizing than recounting my experiences between the stasis chamber and the severed head in detail. Even then, I knew it would cause my mind to fracture. “I’m heading back.”
Salib cursed under her breath but she must have felt something, too, because she was already waving her troops back up the ramp.
I re-buckled the kit and followed the squad before I heard the order. It was the firs
t of many direct fleet-reg violations I committed during my approximately twenty-six hour visit to Furnace.
I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast in my life.
DAMAGE ASSESSMENT
“What’s the status of the engines, Rosie?” the captain asked.
About a dozen of us were seated around an anchored steel table in the tactical briefing room. Everyone was on edge, Salib most of all. I think seeing her that way got everyone else wound even tighter. Salib didn’t rattle easily, especially in combat situations. You might have been able to catch her stammering if an officer quizzed her on fleet protocols beyond combat directives, but in all other situations, she was stone-cold steel.
Rosie sighed and rubbed sweat from her brow with a grease-smeared palm. “I couldn’t tell you. As long as the sensors are off-line, we’re running dark. We all know what we’re doing but we can’t say for sure how close we are to fixing the FTL drive until we can verify it with the scanners, and we don’t know how background systems are being affected by the repairs we’re making. I’ve got most of my crew working on bringing critical systems back online, and then we’ll see where we’re at.”
Gibbons frowned but nodded. Rosie’s report must have been exactly what he’d expected, but it looked like he’d held out hope for a better prognosis anyway. Hearing ‘I don’t know’ from his Engineering Officer probably didn’t make him feel very good. It sure as hell didn’t make me breathe any easier.
“We need the long-range comms running again immediately,” Elizabeth Gallagher interjected from across the table. Rosie stiffened and Gibbons shifted uncomfortably in his chair at the sound of her voice. The rest of us remained completely still and silent.
Gallagher was the Crown Representative for our mission and also the acting Quartermaster, remember, meaning she was charged with ensuring every action we took was in the best interest of the Crown. There’s one of them on every RSA ship, but Gallagher is by far the highest-ranking rep with whom any of us had ever flown. She was assigned to our mission because Rep. Dirlika Heindorf—the politician we were scheduled to extract from a backwater colony so the two reps could negotiate a trade alliance with a Fronov delegation—was even a few rungs higher in the Crown hierarchy than Gallagher, and that was saying something. They carried a lot of weight, and Gallagher wasn’t shy about letting the crew know it. Basically, if we fucked up, she made it clear that the fleet generals would hear of it. We’d probably be relegated to desk-jockey duty on Pluto.
So I’m betting you can guess how popular she was with the crew.
I liked Gallagher from the start. She was elitist, no-nonsense, and abrasive, but there was a weightlessness about her expressions which was endearing nonetheless. Her intellect and grasp of ship operations impressed me from the moment we left port, and I’d been hoping to get to know her a little better ever since she’d reported me to Gibbons for failing to complete our Europa landing log until our departure checks. I’m not sure what this says about me, but her sheer disregard for the feelings of our crew made me want to matter in her eyes even more.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that she was goddamned beautiful, although I suspect some of her allure was just the constant reminder of her status. You couldn’t even look at her without thinking there was a chance she would someday wind up in the Big Chair wearing the Crown, and who doesn’t want to be the one sleeping beside the most powerful woman in the solar system?
“Agreed,” Rosie said diplomatically, shrugging off Gallagher’s command. “Long range comms are definitely a priority. We’ll work as quickly as we can.”
I wonder what it’s like to date a politician, I thought.
Gibbons watched me closely while my mind wandered, though I didn’t realize it was wandering at all until Elizabeth looked me in the eye and caught me staring. Luckily, the captain interjected before I fumbled out an apology that would only have increased the tension in the room. We were all uncomfortable.
“Chalmers,” he said. “Once we get the engines up and running, what will you need to get us out of here?”
I cleared my throat and leaned over the table, watching the imprint of my palm fade from the surface. “Well, to be blunt, I need to know where the hell we are, sir. Even a general constellation to point us in the right direction. I don’t see a planet or star or anything anywhere with the naked eye, and that’s all we’ve got to go on right now.” I shrugged and leaned back in the chair. “I mean, it’s amazing the surface is even illuminated and north of absolute zero, let alone hot. When you think about it, that should be impossible.”
“I’m aware of the situation outside, Lieutenant,” Gibbons said softly. “What I need to know is which exact systems you need operational in order to get us the hell out of here. Now pull your head out of your ass and tell us how we can help you do your goddamned job.”
I gaped at him. The entire room froze around me. They were staring in my direction to see how I’d respond.
Shit…
I’d never seen the captain look at me with such stern, unyielding contempt in his eyes. I’d always been one of his favorites, so it was more than a little jarring to see him call me out like that for no greater fault than nervously rambling in the face of extreme stress. More importantly, in the wake of watching people die on an uncharted planet while I stood idly by, unable to help them in any way. It was the sort of thing for which I’d normally receive a week of recup time just for seeing outside a battlefield, and two weeks under Captain Gibbons. I never would have expected to be confronted before the Hummel’s officers for a simple nervous reaction. I was goddamned tired, after all, and goddamned sure I was about to die without ever setting foot on Earth’s humble shores again.
But the fleet doesn’t really give a shit about that, anyway. They don’t care what we see or what happens to us out there. Not once we’re far enough from investigative journalists that they don’t have to worry about PR. Besides, they know that a soldier like me with an eye on advancement would never breathe a word of dissent. The risk of subtle but thorough retribution is far too high. Like I’ve said many times before, I’ve never been keen on working Pluto Station or mining some godforsaken asteroid in the middle of nowhere with no hope of seeing real combat unless the local colony starts an uprising.
No thank you, ma’am.
Anyway, Gibbons’ snap reaction was a clear indication to me—and likely to everyone in the room who’d served under his command for more than five minutes—that he was starting to crack.
Gibbons? I thought, checking myself. No way.
Of all the miserable captains I’ve had the pleasure or misfortune of meeting during my service in the fleet, he was the last man I ever thought would cave to pressure so early in the game. The situation was dire, of course, but we hadn’t even been grounded for three hours at that point. I knew Gibbons, and that meant I knew he was made of harder stuff. Hard enough that I couldn’t truly believe he was flipping his can while I (somewhat) held it together in spite of all the shit I’d seen. That—more than anything—made me hesitate before I responded.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I finally managed through tight, dry lips and a curtain of heavy stares. “I guess the most important thing for the time being is just to get the engines running and life-support stabilized. Once we have all that taken care of and the hull breaches are patched up, I can jump us a safe distance from…whatever this place is…and we can start figuring out how to get back.”
Assuming we can get back, I thought.
As a navigator, the complete absence of starlight in space was considerably troubling. Hell, more than troubling. It shook me to the very core, and it still does. Before I saw it with my own eyes that day, I would have told you there was no conceivable point in any universe where at least a distant star wasn’t visible. I guess that may still be true considering the way things turned out, but it still bears careful consideration going forward. At the very least, the absence of constellations told me that we were far beyond the reach of any fleet
ship in the history of human spaceflight, and that the chances of us returning home before we died of old age—even with the stasis tubes—were not very good.
My assessment passed without comment from Gibbons, and that slipped my already foul mood from bad to worse.
“Agreed,” Elizabeth finally said, just to break the silence. I could see that she was fuming, but I didn’t understand why until much later when I found out she was just as terrified as the rest of us. “For the time being, we’ll have to focus on patching the ship from the inside.”
“Damn right,” Salib cut in. “No fucking way I’m going back out there.”
“And Captain Gibbons,” Elizabeth continued as though she hadn’t heard Salib’s comment at all. God, I admired her. “Would have provided that assessment himself, were he in his right mind.” She paused, allowing the accusation to sink in. “For the sake of this ship, Captain, and the wellbeing of all her crew, I strongly suggest that you return to your quarters and read over fleet regulations on what’s expected from a captain at a time like this in order to survive.”
Her voice quivered ever so slightly over the last four words. So subtle I don’t think the others even noticed. They were too shocked by her audacity, anyway. Probably annoyed, too. After all, whether she was right or not, she worked for the Crown. The infuriating, out-of-touch dictators who commanded us to perform suicide missions with no comparable payoff while they farted around in Geneva pulling each other off and writing speeches. Gibbons, on the other hand, had been through Hell and back on the front lines like the rest of us. Gallagher really had no right to talk to him that way, and especially to lecture him on the virtues of captaincy.
And, in spite of my dedication to Gibbons, it made me like her even more.
For a moment, we all watched the captain struggle to keep hold of himself while he decided whether or not to contest the point. Whether or not, in other words, duty and hierarchical constructs were worth honoring when the universe itself had slipped right out from under us. In the end, he must have decided that the lives of the crew were, in fact, more important than proving a point to some bigwig who would probably beat us all to the fiery clutches of death on that strange new world.
Furnace Page 4
