by Rick Partlow
She just kept her eyes on the display where she could still see the Shakak and the Valkyrie entangled in a fight to the death and concentrated on wanting to be there. And tried not to give voice to her doubts and fears, to the knowledge she was all alone on the ancient ship, to the worry the limited antimatter fuel remaining wouldn’t last, or the very real fear she wouldn’t be in time.
That one was harder to ignore. She could see the damage to the Shakak, could see the atmosphere venting in flares of burning oxygen through the huge rents in the hull. There was a ball of lead inside her gut, a sickening knot of terror not just at the question of how any of the crew could have lived through so much damage but also at the memory of Terry running out through the bridge hatchway with her gun to open the roof, at the realization Jonathan was back there, fighting for his life against a force twice his size. She knew she was doing the right thing, knew she’d left them so she could do her job, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Clouds glowed with fire and burnt away to glowing stars, but the merciless mistress acceleration still punished her for the hubris of daring to fly into space. The gee forces didn’t bother her, weren’t even close to what she experienced piloting an assault shuttle.
Just get me there faster, you old-ass piece of crap!
She hadn’t meant the statement as a command, hadn’t meant anything by it but a fervent wish. The ship had other ideas. She’d expected the thrusters to switch from turbojet air intakes to on-board reaction mass once the ship cleared the atmosphere, just a brief interruption in thrust during the transition. Instead, the antimatter drive cut off completely, leaving her in free-fall…but the tactical display showed the ship still accelerating, not at a just-barely-tolerable eight gees, but an impossible one hundred gravities.
The Imperial ship was already moving at sixty kilometers a second and still accelerating, somehow without a bit of gee force. She tried not to let the shock take over her thoughts, tried to keep doing whatever was making the ship speed up. She knew what it was, had known it was there before she boarded the ship, but to see it in action was like stepping back in time. It was the Alanson-McCleary stardrive, one of the lost arts of the Empire of Hellas they’d come to Terminus to retrieve. She’d just thought there’d be some special control, or alarms would go off, or she’d have to chant some weird magical incantation to make it work.
Instead, it just worked, the way you’d expect a military ship to work; and if she kept accelerating and the fuel held out, it would take her all the way past lightspeed and into another reality. For the moment, though, it was going to take her to a rendezvous with the Starkad heavy cruiser Valkyrian in less than five minutes, which meant she had exactly that long to figure out how the ship’s weapons systems worked.
“We’re losing hull integrity in section 39,” Norris announced, sounding almost bored with the announcements. In fairness, he’d had to deliver the bad news every few minutes for the last hour. “Burn-throughs in decks three and four and I think I’m seeing a power fluctuation to the deflectors.”
“Rotate the hull 180 degrees,” Donner Osceola ordered. The words were automatic, rote habit, lacking any of the anger or outrage or deep sadness they might have contained at the beginning of the battle. “Take us back to four gees.”
He’d been trapped inside his helmet so long that he almost felt as if he were talking to himself. The visor gave him tunnel vision and he didn’t dare try to look aside to Kammy’s station under emergency acceleration. For all he knew, his entire crew was Tara Gerard, his entire ship her tactical station directly in front of his. Certainly, the outside world might have not existed for all the forward screens told him. The last of the external cameras had been burned away twenty minutes ago and the clearest view the ship’s tactical computer could give him was a two-dimensional animated simulation based on lidar. And it was depressing enough he didn’t really want to see the optical view.
Here on the bridge, buried deep inside the ship, he could almost pretend this was a training simulation from back in his Navy days. The Shakak was falling apart around them, but here on the bridge, they might as well have been light years away in another system.
“We ain’t gonna be able to keep up that burn for long, boss,” Kammy told him. There was weariness in his voice, from the constant high-gee burns and from the stress of the losing battle. “We’ve lost the feed to fuel tank three, and one’s burned dry. We’re down to ten percent metallic hydrogen in tank two.” The big man paused, breath hissing out with resignation. “We’re just about done.”
Osceola didn’t respond, half because there was no real argument to make and half because he lacked the energy to make it. He felt a vibration through the hull, a stuttering bump he knew was the maneuvering thrusters turning the hull to expose a less-damaged section to the fury of the Valkyrian’s laser batteries. It was a stop-gap measure, buying minutes by giving the Starkad heavy cruiser new bits of them to blow up. She was hanging just a couple thousand kilometers off their flank, matching velocities as pretty as you please, as if she were about to dock.
“Do we have anything left to shoot at them, Tara?” he wondered, his voice a dolorous rasp.
“Railgun’s down,” the woman ticked off, grunting in the middle of the sentence when Kammy activated the four-gee burn Osceola had ordered. “Primary laser battery is down. Hell, even the point-defense guns are down. I suppose I could stand in one of the hull burn-throughs and shoot a pistol at ‘em.”
“Kammy, try to put our drive towards them, get our plasma stream between us and their lasers.”
“Roger that, boss. Brace for maneuvering…”
“Shit!” Tara snapped, fear infusing her voice with energy it had lacked a moment ago. “They’ve fired their railguns…”
Her terror was infectious and was almost welcome compared to the apathy Osceola had fallen into, but he’d barely had time to savor the sudden emotion when he heard it. He shouldn’t have been able to hear anything. There was no air on the bridge to carry the sound, but he could feel the vibration through his acceleration couch, carried up through the deck from the hull for just the barest fraction of a second. Before his battered brain could process what was happening, there was heat and light and he was spinning through space.
Wait. Hadn’t he been strapped in? Yes, he was still strapped in, but the acceleration couch had come unmoored and it was spinning across what was left of the bridge. Sparks and blackness and clouds of debris spun by him, a kaleidoscope of meaningless images until the seat assembly fetched up against the forward display screen and a painful, sharp impact robbed him of his rotational motion. And everything became clear, along with the reason for the screaming in his helmet headphones.
The bridge was deep inside the ship, but not deep enough. The rear quarter of the compartment wasn’t there anymore. There was a gap in the heavy double-bulkhead, the radiation shields and insulation between the bridge and the compartments surrounding it torn and ragged, the edges glowing white from the kinetic energy of the two-meter-long tungsten dart. It had passed through, likely all the way into their reactor room since the ship had stopped boosting as well.
Norris wasn’t going to be listing off the damage report from this hit. He and Ortiz were gone, obliterated along with their control stations. If there was anything left of them, it had been sucked away through the gaps in the hull. Tara was still at Tactical, and Tactical was still where it should be as well, though the controls were dead, the screens dark. The light panels were down, and only the pale glow of the emergency chemical light-strips shown in the dim, smoke-filled compartment.
Kammy…where was Kammy? The helm was still there, but his acceleration couch was empty. His eyes seemed to come into focus just ahead of him and he realized the big man was looming over him, his rounded, open face visible through the visor of his helmet. He seemed worried, and Osceola couldn’t blame him for that. They had no weapons, no defense, no power, and now no control. They were dead. He tried to say somethin
g, tried to say goodbye to his old friend, but for some reason he couldn’t talk. Breathing wasn’t coming so easy either, and he gradually came to notice something at the very bottom edge of his view, something dark standing out from his chest, too close to focus his eyes on.
“Boss,” Kammy was saying, his voice sounding distorted and tinny over his helmet radio. Or maybe it was his own senses that were the problem, not the helmet speakers. “You got a metal strut through your chest. You gotta’ be still, I’m gonna get you to the med bay.”
What difference does it make? He was thinking it and would have said it, if it hadn’t been for the collapsed lung, the blood coming up in his throat. We’re all going to be dead in minutes anyway…
“Shakak!” The voice in his headphones was urgent, insistent…and familiar. Was he hallucinating? “Shakak, this is Margolis! Hang on, I’m coming…”
At least I figured out how to use the damned radio.
Everything seemed to work instinctively, the way a mech’s neural helmet did, except deeper and more intricately. It wasn’t enough to just think about something, though, you had to intend to do it, which involved a combination of simultaneous concentration and confident relaxation she was having a hard time mastering. You couldn’t merely think “I want to radio the Shakak on this frequency,” you had to have a kind of certainty it would happen, the way you knew your fingers would wiggle if you told them to.
At least she was sure the Valkyrian had noticed her; the Starkad heavy cruiser had broken off from its attack run on the Shakak and began to align its weapons with her ship. Of course, she reflected bitterly, there wasn’t much left the Supremacy ship could do to the Shakak. The ship was dead in space, drifting on her momentum, holed in a dozen places. If there was anyone left alive inside, they had hours to live at most.
She hadn’t realized she’d ordered the ship to slow, yet it had…and it did not, as far as she could tell, require deceleration. It had matched velocities with the Valkyrian without reversing direction, without having to perform a braking burn. It made sense—-she recalled reading speculation the stardrive worked on the fabric of spacetime the same way a boat propeller worked on water, contracting it and expanding it to move the ship, so there were no Newtonian laws to deal with.
Of course, matching velocities with the Valkyrian meant she was putting herself into firing range of the heavy cruiser’s weapons…
She knew the laser pulses weren’t in the optical spectrum and wouldn’t have been visible outside the atmosphere either way, but the simulation in the ship’s holographic display was so real, so lifelike she nearly ducked away from the scintillating red flashes, raising her arm involuntarily as a shield. The lasers…bent. There was no other way to describe it. The pulses of light twisted away like ribbons in the wind and she knew it was because the very spacetime they were ... traveling through had been bent out of shape by the stardrive.
They couldn’t hurt her, but she couldn’t let them get away to tell Starkad about this place. She lashed out at the Supremacy ship, striking out at it with the confidence of a punch to the face. And when it happened, she wasn’t surprised. She couldn’t be sure if the actinic bolt of lightning striking across the thousands of kilometers between her ship and the cruiser was actually visible or simply a simulation, but its effects were unmistakably real. Where it touched the Valkyrian’s skin, just aft of center, the armor split, burned, and vaporized, a halo of burning gas spreading out from the strike to surround the upper hull.
She wasn’t certain if the beam was constant or pulsing so rapidly it just seemed that way, but it kept firing as if inspired by her desperation. It sliced backwards through the Valkyrian’s hull as if the armor were wrapping paper, as if the deflectors weren’t there, and when it touched the ship’s metallic hydrogen fuel stores, the entire cruiser disappeared in a circular globe of fusion fire, a miniature sun shining in the darkness.
Katy’s mouth opened in shock and the beam finally cut off. She drifted and so did the Imperial ship, rocked with disbelief and unsure what to do next. It was a transmission over the bridge speakers that woke her from her fugue.
“Katy, is that you?” It was Kammy, and she hissed out a prayer of gratitude the big teddy-bear had made it. And the prayer had gone, to her surprise, to her parents’ God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rather than Mithra. “Katy, if you’re there, we need help. The Captain’s hurt…bad. And we have other wounded, too. You’ve got to get us back to Terminus.”
“Oh, great,” she breathed. “Now they expect me to land this damned thing…”
22
Jonathan woke up.
He hadn’t expected to. The last thing he’d had time to think was that this was as good a way to die as any, and probably overdue.
Is this the afterlife? He’d expected the bridge, and the final test of his worth, the balance of his deeds, though in honesty, he wasn’t entirely sure which way the balance might have tilted. Instead, there were far-off voices and a certain stuffiness that wasn’t quite comfortable enough for Heaven nor unpleasant enough for Hell.
There was a hiss of equalizing pressures and the voices were louder and the light behind his eyelids was brighter and it was so damned cold! His eyes blinked open and he shivered, hugging his arms to his chest and realizing with a start that he was naked as the day he was born.
His brother was standing over him, grinning like an idiot, his hair uncharacteristically short, as if he’d just had it buzzed.
“What the hell?” Jonathan blurted. No, fuck it, this shit is over. I’m not Jonathan Slaughter anymore, I’m Logan Conner. “Terry? Where am I? What happened?”
He was, he saw as his head and eyes began to clear, sitting upright in some sort of coffin-shaped pod, its surface clear but tinted dark, its curved lid hanging open beside him. The pod was just one in a room full of them, most of them open but a few shut tight. A few Rangers he recognized as trained medics were huddled with the medical team from the Shakak, both Osceola’s crew and the Navy doctors they’d brought along, discussing something in hushed tones over one of the haptic holographic control panels Terminus seemed to be rife with.
“Take it easy, bro,” Terry told him, clapping a hand on his arm. Terry was wearing some sort of dark utility fatigues instead of the civilian clothes he’d last seen him in, which also seemed strange combined with the haircut. “You’ve been out a while. Here.” He had a bundle in his other hand, what looked to be the same dark grey clothing he was wearing. “We couldn’t save your skinsuit, and all the clothes you brought with you got sucked into space.”
Logan took the clothes, staring at them in utter confusion, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment just to try to organize his memories.
“The mech,” he said, seizing on the last thing he remembered. “I was fighting that Agamemnon and…”
“I’m not a mechjock or anything, but I think a contact shot with a plasma gun is contraindicated by doctrine.”
Logan turned inside the cabinet at the female voice coming from behind him, his legs coming halfway out before he remembered he was naked. It was Katy, and despite everything, he had to smile. She looked tired, overworked and a bit haggard with lack of sleep, but she was here and alive and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
“Oh, Mithra’s horns, I am so glad you’re all right,” he told her. There was a hint of pain in her eyes when she leaned in to kiss him, as if she’d been the one not expecting to see him. But she leaned her forehead against his and he could feel relief radiating off her, a weight lifted from her shoulders.
“What the hell were you thinking, brother?” Terry asked him, leaning against the side of the pod, shaking his head.
“I was thinking Colonel Kuryakin was the only thing keeping their forces from panicking,” he said with more annoyance in his tone than he actually felt, shaking out the pants from the set of fatigues Terry had given him and trying to pull them on inside the pod. “But shouldn’t I be dead? I seem to remember thinking when I pulle
d that trigger, I was going to die right next to that Colonel Kuryakin.”
He fastened the waistband of the pants and hopped out of the pod, then had to lean against Katy when the room began to spin.
“Whoa there, sir!” one of the Ranger medics rushed in, taking his arm and holding him up. He was a big man, a head taller than Logan and a full twenty kilograms heavier, all of it muscle. “These things sort of drain your blood sugar. Try to get something to eat before you do anything too strenuous.”
“These things,” he repeated, finding his balance and straightening up, Katy still holding on to his other arm, having grabbed the fatigue shirt before he could drop it. “What things?”
“It’s a long story,” Terry said, pinching his fingers against the bridge of his nose, suddenly looking as tired as Katy. “These are what the Imperials called ‘auto-docs,’ some sort of medical repair pod. We think it uses nanotechnology, but otherwise we have no idea how it works.”
Katy was helping him slip the shirt on, but he paused with it halfway onto one arm, eyes going wide, looking between the two of them.
“And you tested it on me?”
“Sir…,” the Ranger medic began, in antiphonal chorus with Katy and Terry saying “Jonathan…”
“Fuck Jonathan,” he cut them off with a slash of his hand. “No more Jonathan. I’m Logan. Captain Conner,” he added as an aside to the NCO. “And you’re Terrin,” he added to his brother.
