by Joshua James
A faint red cloud faded from the edges of his vision.
He was crying, sobbing uncontrollably.
That meant only one thing. The Hate.
Someone whispered in his ear.
“Rocky?” he cried. “Rocky?”
“It’s okay, man,” the voice said. “You’re ok.” It was Jiang.
He lifted his head, and Malby was looking at him, frightened. “Holy hell. I can’t even,” he said. “I heard rumors, but … goddammit.”
He was floating at the other end of the room they were in.
Lucky realized now it was the control room above the platform.
Dawson pushed off the opposite wall, and Lucky took a double take.
“You’re alive,” he said.
Dawson turned, keeping his distance from Lucky. His helmet faceplate was cracked and gone, but otherwise his face was fully healed. “Yeah,” he said, shaken. “It takes more than a few cheap shots to kill me.” But his voice faltered.
He just kept staring at Lucky. They all were.
“Like battering his brain into paste,” said Malby, glancing at Lucky.
An image flickered across his mind, a slow-motion replay. He saw what The Hate had done to Nico. What he had done to Nico.
He saw other things, too, but he refused to watch more.
Outside the room, he saw the body of a Union soldier gagging and floating, bouncing off the window.
Inside, the control room looked like a war zone.
Bloody bodies were everywhere. Some of them looked like an animal had torn into them. One had its throat ripped open, another was missing an arm.
The equipment was smashed and smoking. Energy sparked and jumped from box to box.
Jiang was looking outside the control room at the chaos on the platform. The artificial oxygen field was lost when the gravity generator stopped. Unlike the Marines, these station troops didn’t have airtight suits. Bodies floated off into the larger hangar space to mingle with docked ships and gear.
“You saved us,” said Jiang.
Nothing could be further from the truth, thought Lucky.
He couldn’t keep the demon at bay now. Not without Rocky.
“No—” he started, then stopped.
Jiang put a hand on his chest plate.
“I understand,” she said.
And Lucky realized that she did.
Tears welled up in her eyes. “You can’t help it,” she said, tears flowing now. “You can’t help it.”
Lucky dreaded what she was about to say next.
A switch flipped in his head.
He knew the truth.
“I killed your brother.”
Lucky felt the air suck out of the room.
Malby and Dawson fell still.
Jiang shook her head. “No,” she said firmly, as if convincing herself. “No, It killed my brother.”
Oh, god.
Oh, god, no.
“Rocky? Is it true?”
No wonder she wouldn’t give him the info on her.
Rocky didn’t respond. He’d forgotten again.
Jiang closed her eyes and drew in a long, ragged breath. “I couldn’t forgive you for a long time. I thought I knew you. But I guess we always think we know the person we sleep next to better than we really do.” A long pause. “But I understand now. About Rocky. About The Hate.” She smiled through tears, the saddest thing he had ever seen. “You couldn’t help it. I understand that.”
The way she kept repeating that made it seem to Lucky like she didn’t understand at all.
Lucky wanted to kill himself.
“But I couldn’t be near you. You understand that, right? I had to leave. I transferred here to never see you again.”
“And yet, here I am,” he croaked, feeling tears form in his eyes, too.
“Here you are,” she said, the slightest hint of a wry smile at the corner of her mouth. “Saving us all.”
“No,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Rocky is gone. They took her.”
Jiang sat up straighter, her face now a picture of concern.
“I—I can’t keep it at bay. Not without her.”
“Who took her?”
As if on cue, a long, dark shadow fell across the control room.
One of the modified Union ships glided by. Then another. And another.
“Looks like the party’s over,” said Malby.
Lucky looked down at the platform. “She’s gone,” he said.
Happy Giant wasn’t on the platform.
“There!” said Jiang, pointing to the far side of the hangar.
A typical spaceport gate lay open, similar to ones the Empire used on their hangars. The ships were flowing through in groups of three.
Happy Giant was already through the gate and out into open space.
“Vlad,” said Lucky.
The fleet of Union ships was almost gone now, along with their T’ket’ka orbs.
And Rocky.
“That bitch,” said Jiang.
Beyond the gate, something was off.
“What the hell?” said Dawson.
Then it hit him. There were no stars. Just like the small corridor they had come through. But this wasn’t some small patch of space. The complete emptiness covered almost all the sky beyond the hollowed-out hangar.
This was the Great Corridor.
“My God,” said Jiang. “We’re too late.”
49
OIC
“Good,” said Malby, stowing his rifle. “What more can we do? It’s not like this hangar isn’t still crawling with Union soldiers. So we spaced the ones on the platform. Big deal. Look at this infrastructure.”
He pointed to the lattice of scaffolding and control rooms scattered around the outside edges of the hangar, where they reinforced the rock ore shell.
“There’re plenty more out there,” he said.
He was right. The asteroid was hollow, but it was massive. The infrastructure stretching around the outside of the space was vast.
Then again, this was clearly the central control tower for the dock, and by extension, the entire facility. As long as they could hold this, they were in control of the station.
But the Union would know that, too. And whoever was left that could organize themselves would do so shortly and start an assault on their position.
“What would you suggest we do?” asked Jiang. “Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with current events, but they’re planning to open up a passageway to another universe.”
“So what? It’s a big universe. C’mon in!” waved Malby, theatrically.
“Did you see how big that alien ship was? Vlad said they were three times our size,” she said. “And they’ll be here soon if we don’t stop this.”
“Exactly. Does an entire race of those things sound like something we should be taking on single-handedly?” Malby looked around at Lucky and Dawson. “Seriously, we can’t go chasing a fleet of ships into some black hole in space,” he said. Then more to himself, “And chasing them with what? I can’t even believe we’re talking about this!”
He turned and looked at Lucky expectantly. “Well, sir,” he said sarcastically. “What say you?”
Lucky thought for a long moment.
“Can we space jump to that lead ship?” he asked Jiang.
“What?” exploded Malby.
She cocked her head. “We don’t have our hammerheads,” she said.
“We don’t need to be fast. Those things fly at conventional speeds, and they have no weapons.”
“Unless the Union decided to modify theirs to be more offensive,” suggested Dawson.
“I can’t believe we’re talking about this,” Malby said again.
Jiang pointed out the control window. “We have all the gear we need.”
Lucky nodded. True enough. Union tech was crap, but even they could make decent hammerheads. Just point in the direction you want to go, and jump. They weren’t technically made for space-to-space jumps,
but he’d done it before. They had enough maneuvering thrusters to make it work.
“No, no, no, no!” fired Malby. “We need to regroup. We need to make contact with HQ. Am I the only one here who ain’t crazy? Dawson?”
Dawson reluctantly turned to Lucky. “The spirit is willing and all,” he said, “but … Malby has a point.”
“Thank you!” yelled Malby, face and palms upward.
Lucky took a deep breath. He was so tired. Something about the Hate had juiced his biobots, but that was wearing off fast. The Hate didn’t care about pain and suffering. It didn’t dodge damage, it dove headfirst into it. And now Lucky was paying the price.
“I understand where you guys are coming from,” he said at last. “I got the inside scoop on the hell coming our way. You didn’t.”
“Suffice it to say,” he said, looking at Dawson, “Your child will never grow up to live a happy life. This will consume our universe from now until the end of time.”
Dawson said nothing, but tightened his grip on the barrel of his pulse rifle. The smile slowly faded.
“Malby, I’m not going to argue with you,” he said. “I don’t know why the hell you came this far, but those mistakes have already been made, son.” He closed his eyes and laughed. “How’s my inspirational speech going so far?” he echoed.
No response.
Oh right. Damn.
Malby looked around. “I can’t believe this. He’s crazy. You get that, right?” He looked at Jiang. “Fubar in the head.”
“You once told me I didn’t look so tough,” said Lucky. “Do you remember that?”
Malby frowned. “Yeah, well. Okay, so, I was wrong about that.”
“No, you were right. I’m a coward,” he said. He motioned to the room. “Killing is easy. I love a good fight because I know I can win.”
He thought about Rocky and her spiders. He thought about The Hate.
“But when I have to make a tough call, I put my tail between my legs,” he said. “When it’s hard, I run.”
Malby said nothing.
“I wish to God that Sarge were here,” Lucky said. “That someone else was here in charge. I wish it was anyone but me.” He closed his eyes. “But it’s time for us to stop being cowards, Malby,” he said. “You and me. We’re Marines, and we don’t quit when everything goes tits up. We go to work.”
“I’m no coward,” Malby said under his breath.
Lucky opened his eyes and looked at him. “Well, you should at least be scared right now, asshole.” Lucky spread his arms wide. “You are standing in the presence of the most dangerous thing in any universe,” he said. “The officer in charge.”
Dawson rolled his eyes.
Jiang had a big grin on her face.
Malby just shook his head. “Except, of course, you aren’t an officer.”
“He’s got you there,” Jiang said.
“Fine, I’m the highest-ranking member in charge. Happy?”
“No,” said Malby.
Lucky ripped his punch pistol from his holster. “I could just shoot you then.”
Malby’s eyes got big as saucers.
Dawson and Jiang exchanged glances.
Then Malby burst out laughing. “You are one crazy son of a bitch, you know that, Lucky?”
Lucky put his pistol away. “You don’t know crazy yet.”
Lucky edged himself over to an undamaged console on the opposite side of the control room. He might not have had Rocky, but these control stations were pure old-school Union tech, something the operators could handle. And so could he.
“I have a plan,” he said. “A very, very, very bad plan.”
“I like it already,” said Jiang.
50
Almost
Do’ock Kun, Queen Mother of the Da’hune, stood inside the control room of her flagship battlecruiser.
Her tail swished along with the others in the cramped quarters.
Her clan deserved better for this momentous occasion. Perhaps the historians would be kind. She chided herself. Of course they would be. What kind of ruler would she be if she didn’t write her own history?
But this was what she could spare—a mere ten thousand ships from her million-strong Do’ock fleet. The endless war must be fed, even when the Do’ock would soon end it with their glorious return to their rightful home.
And she certainly didn’t need the firepower. She had seen enough of the humans to know that! She worried only for posterity. Her children must know that a ruler’s power flows through the perception they foster in their subjects.
She stroked the shell of her firstborn, her lovely, clever Do’ock Kelia.
She had been forced to relinquish her surrogate, Nico. But no matter. Do’ock Kun would soon shed her surrogate as well.
She looked down at her brutal son, Do’ock Nigh’tok. The ferocious snarl was sweet suckle to her soul. He had the spirit of the ancient ones. The purge harkened back to their ancient gods, and she saw divinity in her son’s vicious savagery.
The Queen Mother once more slid the smooth, hard exoskeleton of her talon through a set of quantum beams.
She was impatient, checking the progress of her surrogate.
But in truth, it was something more. Her surrogate Vlad was the vessel for the gift now. It resided in her, and by association, Do’ock Kun sensed she could feel its power as well. She doubted this was true, but she did not want to ask. She would rather be ignorant and bask in ancient art. Her shell trembled. She could feel it, she was sure!
She closed her eyes now and saw through her surrogate’s eyes as she rushed onward, into the Great Corridor.
How pleasant to see it from the vantage point of the other universe, to know what lay just ahead of her.
The distributed human-made ships were fanned out across the corridor, their precious T’ket’ka orbs creating a halo of protection into which her brutal son would soon guide their ships.
Almost there … Her surrogate was peering at something, and it caught the Queen Mother’s eye as well.
She leaned in, willing her surrogate to do the same.
Something was trailing behind her.
Something huge.
51
A Plan
“I have to stop supporting your plans before I see them,” said Jiang.
“It’s a good plan,” he said.
“It’s a plan,” she responded.
Lucky fired a stream of blue energy across space into the edge of the hangar’s gateway, destroying the mechanism and locking it in place as they passed through.
He looked down the alien-infused Union rifle and nodded approvingly. A nice upgrade.
“Everybody remember where we’re parked,” Dawson said, as the space jumpers emptied the firing rockets on the Union hammerheads and screamed out of the hangar at top speed, adding their own rocket burn to the ever-increasing speed of the asteroid itself.
Lucky felt his pack pull slightly starboard and compensated. The Union can’t even make hammerheads that worked right, he thought. Old Union tech was still just old Union tech.
The new stuff that Da’hune helped them with, on the other hand, was a different story.
He glanced back over his shoulder. It wasn’t every day that you saw a spaceport carved into a hollowed-out asteroid.
It was even less often you saw it under power.
Even with the push, though, Happy Giant and the other alien ships were just tiny pinpoints again the vast, complete black canvas of the Great Corridor.
Without the drones, Lucky didn’t any have technical data to review.
“Are we going to catch them?”
“It’ll be close,” said Malby. “We should get there right when they do.”
That was too close. If they weren’t tight enough to the ships and their T’ket’ka when they hit the corridor, they would never enter the fold. They would just sail right through.
A dozen drones flew a tight formation around the Marines. Without Rocky, Lucky couldn’t c
ontrol his, but he wasn’t sure he had any left to control anyway.
They had started this mission with a thousand drones per Marine. Then again, we started this mission with a hell of a lot more Marines, he thought.
Then he almost ended up next on the dead list.
Something fast screamed overhead, and he saw the other Marines scatter. Without an AI link, he got no warning.
“Skreamers!” shouted Jiang.
Lucky rolled to his right and directly into a stream of blue light. He would have been sliced in half—should’ve been—but a rogue locust made the same poor choice he had, and it exploded in his face on impact with the beam, causing a reaction from Lucky that sent him barrel-rolling in the other direction.
“Dawson called it!” said Malby.
“Not quite,” he said, his drawl casual despite their predicament. “I thought they’d add defenses to the ships, not fill them with skreamers.”
“Same difference,” said Malby.
“Dive fast, Marines!” said Jiang, as she nosed down harder.
They all did the same, but Lucky felt blind without a drone view.
The skreamers flipped in unison and started coming back around now, but they were having trouble lining them up.
They couldn’t fly slow enough to get a good shot on the jumpers. Perhaps the only advantage they had was that they were so inconsequential that the skreamers were having trouble swatting them out of space.
Three of the skreamers joined together in tandem, cutting at different angles as they dove, keeping the energy streams flowing throughout the maneuver. The result was a grid of blue energy that sliced through the tight formation of diving Marines.
Lucky felt desperately for his spiders to pluck at his mind, knowing it was irrational.
“Lucky, look out!” screamed Jiang.
He pulled up, hoping it was the best option, not having drone data to reference.
He chose poorly.
A pop and explosion from his back told him he had maneuvered right into an energy arc.
He heard a sizzle and crack from his hammerhead pack.
The hammerhead saved his life, but now it flopped and bounced off his back, one of the thrusters badly damaged. The pack compensated with the other thruster, and he found himself flying at an odd angle.
He immediately started to fall back from the others.
Jiang flared her arms and settled back with him.
