by Jake Elwood
The Alexander continued to spin, and the wreckage slid aft and disappeared from sight. What had the range been when they fired the missile? Five hundred meters? Eight hundred? What were the odds of hitting anything smaller than a space station by dead reckoning at that kind of range?
We were lucky, he thought. We were very, very lucky.
Without scanners it would be very difficult to tell how many alien ships remained. He saw nothing through the windows. Were they annihilated? He doubted it. Fleeing in disarray? Regrouping, and preparing for another attack?
Swarming Freedom Station instead?
He had done what he could for the station, Hammett decided. He'd given them time to evacuate. It was time to retreat from the battlefield and see if he could repair what was left of his ship.
"Hello?"
Hammett turned from the window and walked to the doorway of the lounge. A cadet stood at the intersection of two corridors, a familiar pile of firefighting and medical equipment near her feet. She peered in every direction and said, "I'm looking for Captain Hammett."
"Over here." He waved.
She trotted down the corridor and said, "Lieutenant Rani says to tell you she has the main engines working."
"Go tell her to fire them up. Tell her it doesn't matter which way we're pointing." There was very little to run into, and nowhere in particular to go. They simply needed to flee.
The cadet ran toward engineering. Hammett watched her go, collecting his thoughts. He would visit a couple of thrusters, and have the cadets make random course adjustments. Wherever they ended up, it would be impossible for the enemy to predict. He plodded down the corridor, deep in thought. "What we need is a destination."
A face appeared ahead of him as a woman peeked around a bend in the corridor. She was out of uniform, he was surprised to note. He didn't recognize her until she spoke. "How about Baffin?"
He said, "You're that reporter."
She nodded. "Now I'm your civilian auxiliary corps." She grinned.
"That was you firing the thruster?"
"Yup. Did I do all right?"
"You were perfect." He frowned. "What did you say before? About a puffin?"
"Baffin. It's a research and mining station on Kukulcan."
He frowned, irritated that a civilian knew more about the system than he did. "It's new, I take it?"
"They built it six or eight months ago." She closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. "There's only about a dozen people there. Most of it's automated."
It didn't sound like much of a haven, but it was all he had. "All right," Hammett said. "I'll need you to stay at the thruster controls. You're an expert now." He moved past her and headed for the nearest ladder. Navigating to Kukulcan was going to be just about impossible. Just getting the ship pointed in roughly the right direction would be a logistical nightmare that he didn't want to contemplate.
"If you see any cadets," he said to Janice, "send them to the bridge." He was going to run them ragged, but he was going to get the ship to Baffin.
Chapter 18 – Kasim
The shuttle drifted through the silent void of space, and Gate Eleven slowly grew before them. Kasim was using a passive visual scan only. Radar, he was sure, would be suicidal. The Gate was still too far away to see with the naked eye, but it glittered on the screen before him.
The cabin was pressurized now, and the four of them wore their helmets with the faceplates retracted. They would breathe the shuttle's air, and save what remained in their suits for an emergency.
A greater emergency, Kasim thought. Every second as an emergency now.
Sally sat beside him in the co-pilot's seat. He glanced at her, and she gave him a reassuring smile. He was deeply grateful for her presence. She helped keep him calm, and if she couldn't keep the other two from being frightened, at least they were too embarrassed to voice their fears in front of her. Kasim's meagre supply of courage needed all the help it could get. It wouldn't take much fretting from his passengers to push him over the edge into panic.
"When we reach the Gate, you'll have to get out there and disable it, and no screwing around." Sally nodded. Behind him, he heard Roberts mutter, "Yeah, I understand." Sanchez was silent, which Kasim took as agreement.
"How much longer, do you think?" Sally said.
Kasim was starting to shrug when Sanchez said, "Can't we use the engines? I just want it to be over."
"He can't use the engine," Roberts said irritably. "Those other ships might see it. And the faster we go, the more we'll have to use the engine to brake at the other end."
"Ballistic, and slow," Kasim agreed. "That's the safest way."
"The safest way to do something suicidal," Roberts grumbled.
Kasim said, "We have to-"
"I know, I know," Roberts interrupted. "You're right. We have to close the Gate before more of those things come through."
"It must be rebel colonists," Sanchez said. "I mean, it stands to reason, right? No one's ever found alien life."
Kasim was pretty much certain it was aliens, but he said, "Sure. Stands to reason."
His console beeped, and he looked down. Sally gasped, and Kasim felt a cold rush like ice water through his veins.
"What is it?" said Sanchez.
"We get another chance to figure out if they're aliens," Kasim told him. "There's a ship coming this way."
He zoomed in, careful to use optical cameras only. It didn't look like it would matter, though. An alien ship, one of the littlest ones, was racing in on an intercept course.
"Has he seen us?" Sally's voice was a breathless whisper. Kasim started to say "Of course," then stopped himself. The little ship could be on a standard patrol, or on its way to pick up donuts for all he knew. His fingers ached with the need to grab the controls, fire up the engine, and race away, but he made himself wait.
Without engines, radar, or radio, the little shuttle had to be tremendously difficult to see. Without radar he couldn't be sure how far away the alien ship was, but he guessed the range to be in the hundreds of kilometers. That was practically collision distance in astronomical terms, but what if the other ship was simply patrolling around the Gate? The alien might have no idea the shuttle was even there.
Unless Kasim did something stupid, like starting the engine.
Sally whispered, "What will they do if they see us?"
With hard vacuum separating them from the alien, there was no reason at all to whisper. Nevertheless, he found himself murmuring softly as he replied. "The Alexander went silent, but it wasn't destroyed. Its transponder and radar stopped at the same instant. I bet they used some kind of EMP weapon. Fried all the electronics."
Sally looked at him, wide-eyed.
"I guess that's the first thing they'll do." He squinted at his screen. "I bet we're already in range. So it's too late to run. If I start the engines they'll fry us." He tried to look confident. "Don't worry. I don't think they see us."
The console beeped again.
"What's that beep?" Roberts demanded.
"They made a course correction."
"Does it mean they saw us?"
Kasim gestured at him to be quiet. It's not a patrol. It knows we're here. It's coming for a closer look.
But it doesn't know. If it knew we were a ship, it would have fried us already.
Wouldn't it?
He had maddeningly little information, he realized. Guesswork and supposition, mostly. But one thing he knew for sure.
The enemy ship was coming closer.
So what can I do about it? If the shuttle had guns, I could put up a fight. Well, for a second or two, until he fried all my electronics. Or just blew up the ship, or whatever they do.
He's almost on top of us. What can I do?
The alien was directly below them, or he would have tried to spot it through the window. It had to be a good ten kilometers away, still too far to see without the shuttle's sophisticated cameras, but it was closing rapidly. When would it recognize the shuttle
? How long would it take for the alien to react and fire its weapon?
Can I take it by surprise?
He reached for the controls, not actually sure what he was going to do, but trusting his instincts. With one quick motion he started the engines, brought the nose of the ship sweeping down, and accelerated hard. He activated radar, kept a thumb on the little red switch on the control column that would override the shuttle's safety protocols, and aimed for the approaching alien ship.
Acceleration shoved him back against his seat. The combined velocities of the two ships meant that he closed the distance in something less than two seconds. He didn't even have time to hold his breath before the little alien craft loomed suddenly huge in front of him.
He felt the collision as a tremor through the deck plates, the seat, and the control column. It was over in an instant, and the shuttle tumbled through space. Stars whipped past the window, and he lifted his hands from the control column, letting the shuttle's computer stabilize them.
"What did you do?" Sally's voice, shrill with fear, came through the speakers in his helmet. His faceplate was down. He looked at the dash controls.
Half the display screen was dark. On the other half he read a damage report. Collision. Hull damage. Atmospheric integrity lost.
"We seem to have bumped into the alien," Kasim said. "Sorry, the hostile colony ship. We have an air leak, but we're not badly damaged." He had a giddy urge to laugh, but if he started, he wasn't sure he could stop.
"What happened to them?" Roberts said.
Kasim checked his console. The alien ship was about a hundred meters to starboard, slowly drifting away. He zoomed in on the ship, and whistled. It was a crumpled mess, like a drink container someone had stomped on. "They aren't really built for collisions," he said.
He shut down the radar, then gave the engines a little squirt. If the alien had a transponder or an emergency beacon, he wanted to be a long way away when help arrived. He shut down the engine, then brought up a sensor log.
Quite a bit of information had come in during that brief few seconds when he'd used radar. He could see the circular shape of Gate Eleven, and half a dozen fuzzy blobs spread in an arc around it. He muttered a curse.
Sally touched his arm. "What is it?"
"They aren't as stupid as we hoped. They're keeping an eye on the remaining Gate."
She leaned over to look at his screen. "What do we do?"
"We can't keep ramming them," he said. "We'll have to avoid them." There was a bitter taste of disappointment on the back of his tongue, but also a treacherous spike of relief. I took out an alien ship. I made a contribution. I proved my courage. We can't take out the Gate, but damn it, I did something.
He checked the shuttle's trajectory. The collision had knocked them off course. Their new vector would take them past the Gate at a range of several thousand kilometers. With the least bit of luck they would sail past undetected. After that … Well, after that he had no idea what he would do. Park somewhere behind the Gate, patch the hull, and wait for Earth to send reinforcements, he supposed.
He sighed, stretched to release some of the tension in his muscles, and resigned himself to a long, tense wait.
Chapter 19 – Wyatt
Bennelong Wyatt, known as "Benny" to his friends, tightened his grip on the cricket bat and squinted down the pitch at the bowler. The harsh Australian sun blazed from a cloudless sky, and he felt a trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades. He knew none of it was real, not his dream team of the ten greatest Aboriginal cricket players of the last two hundred years, not the visiting team from London, not even the bat in his hands. But the illusion was perfect. He could have sworn he was back on Earth, standing on a field under exactly one gravity, in the middle of a close-fought cricket match in front of hundreds of breathless spectators.
The bowler took a couple of steps back, his arm went back for the windup, Wyatt felt a tingle of anticipation, and the bowler started to move.
And the entire world flickered.
Wyatt swore and let go of the bat, which vanished before it hit the ground. Everything went dark as he struggled with the transition between controlling his virtual eyes and his real eyes. Then he blinked and looked up at the ceiling of the immersion pod.
Another face looked down at him, a red-haired woman with her forehead wrinkled in concern. "Sorry, Benny. There's something really strange going on."
He nodded and sat up, feeling his head swim as it always did in the first few moments after he left the illusion of Earth-normal gravity. Kukulcan's gravity was just over 60 percent, and he needed a few seconds to adjust.
"We got an emergency message from Freedom Station. There was another call from the James Joyce. Now everyone's off the air."
Wyatt stood, keeping a hand on the side of the pod until he was sure his dizziness had passed. "What do you mean, everyone?"
"We can't raise Freedom Station, or the James Joyce, or Albuquerque." She looked pale and frightened in the subdued lighting of the game room. "It's not our com systems, either. Joey went out and sat in the runabout. It's the same thing. Everybody's silent."
Wyatt stared at her, baffled. What kind of calamity could shut down all the radio traffic in an entire star system? It made no sense. "All right," he said, heading for the door. "Let's see what's going on."
As he walked to the command center he found himself wishing, not for the first time, that he wasn't the man in charge. As the manager of Baffin Station he was the man with full responsibility in every crisis and disaster. Sometimes he deeply envied his subordinates, who could throw their hands up in despair and hand things over to him.
The little command center buzzed with activity. Jarvis, his second in command, stood leaning over a technician's shoulder. Jarvis met Wyatt's eyes and sagged with relief. He made a beckoning gesture. "You need to see this, Chief."
Wyatt stood beside him and watched as the technician tapped at the empty air in front of her. An image appeared on her screen, blurred and shaking with distance. Wyatt saw the familiar outline of Freedom Station.
"This is a recording from the main telescope," Jarvis said. "It's from less than five minutes ago." It took about twenty minutes for light from the station to reach Kukulcan. The events on the screen would be just under half an hour old, then.
He watched as strange ships swarmed around the station. When a lifeboat launched, it was little more than a bright point of light that rose from the station, then veered wildly to escape as hostile ships pursued. A minute later he could still see the shape of the lifeboat, but the attacking craft were moving away, leaving it alone.
"We got a distress call from the lifeboat," Jarvis said softly. "It went silent. I think they're dead in space."
A plume of vapour erupted from the station. They were losing air. Wyatt could see the technician's shoulders shaking softly as she cried. The recording ended and the screen went dark.
Wyatt looked at Jarvis.
"It's an attack," Jarvis said. "Either they don't know we're here, or they haven't got around to us yet."
Wyatt stared at him, trying to shake an overwhelming sense of unreality. He wanted to tell himself it was a hoax, an elaborate practical joke his staff was playing on him. The look on Jarvis's face robbed him of that sad hope.
"I want radio silence," Wyatt said. "Turn off the nav beacon. Don't send any transmissions. We can't achieve a single bloody thing by calling anyone on the radio." He raked his fingers through the curly tangle of his hair. "Bring in all the staff. I want all personnel inside the building. And load the runabout with extra water and air." They could use the little ship to evacuate perhaps half the staff. Where they would go he didn't know, but he meant to be ready for anything.
There was a brief flurry of activity. Finally Jarvis turned to Wyatt and said, "What now?"
Wyatt shrugged helplessly. "Now we wait."
Chapter 20 – Hammett
The Alexander rode its braking thrusters and fell endlessly toward the
planet Kukulcan. Hammett was back on the bridge. Every bridge station was still dead, but the bridge was in the heart of the ship, which made it an ideal communication hub. Every few minutes another breathless cadet would appear with a fresh sighting on the planet. Carruthers would do a quick calculation, then send another cadet to one of the maneuvering thrusters to make a correction.
It was an exhausting way to travel, veering constantly back and forth as they tried to keep the ship on target. For eight long hours they had careened through the void, but the long journey was nearly over.
"It's a good thing the station isn't armed," Carruthers said. "They must be trying to raise us on the radio by now."
Hammett nodded. There was simply no way for the Alexander to identify itself. They had no communications at all.
Lieutenant Yoon paced along one wall of the bridge. She had done rocket racing in her youth, which meant she had priceless experience with navigating a ship by visual data and dead reckoning. She was probably the only person on the Alexander who had ever put a ship into orbit without computer assistance.
"I can't promise a proper synchronous orbit," she said, not for the first time.
"Just do your best." Hammett glanced at the doorway to the bridge as another cadet appeared. It was a girl, short and solidly built, slumping with weariness. Her hair stood up in clumps, and a mix of dirt and smoke coated her face. At some point she had wiped her eyes, leaving streaks of white skin that stood out vividly against the soot. She gave him a sketchy salute and said, "I've got the final roster."
For a moment Hammett didn't know what she meant. Then he remembered. An hour or two before he'd sent her to get a casualty count. That meant making the rounds of the entire ship and counting who was left.
"Forty-seven dead or missing," she said. Her chin started to tremble. "I guess the missing ones aren't going to turn up, are they?" She looked at him with haunted eyes and said, "That's forty-seven dead. Thirty-two cadets, thirteen regular crew, and two officers." She held up a rumpled strip of paper towel, marked up in grease pencil. "I have all the names if you want, Sir."
