by Richard Fox
“Ugh…sir?” Bertram tapped Gage’s arm, offering a small open jar filled with gray paste.
Gage wiped a bit of the goo beneath his nose and the smell subsided.
“They really think they’ll find anyone in this mess?” the steward asked. “Been six days since the place got hit.”
“Civilians from the tsunami area fled to here, thousands thinking this area was safe.” Gage looked up as a shower of meteoroids traced thin white lines through the sky. “If their orbital warning system had been online, the loss of life would have been less.”
“If the Siam knew a damn thing about orbital mining, a lot of things would be different,” Bertram said. “The Admiral sent you down here to speak with the field hospital commander. Dare say he’s in that awful big tent, sir.”
Gage walked around the inner perimeter of the fence surrounding the field hospital. A hover stretcher floated past them on the other side of the fence, a dust-covered woman strapped to it.
“It rained two days ago,” Gage said. “That upped the survival chance for anyone still in the rubble. The doctors are no doubt busy trying to save lives. I won’t distract them now.”
“Not to be morose, sir, but I doubt they’ll be all that busy.” Bertram turned away as a robot carried three more body bags to the collection area.
A small rock bounced off the fence. Gage heard a shout and another rock sailed through the chain links and hit his shoulder. He looked over and found a teenage boy waving at him from several stories up in a nearby partially collapsed building.
The boy pointed at one of the robots working across the street, then into the mess of wrecked concrete and quick-wall.
“Bertram, find a robot master and send a unit to that building. Now.” Gage ran along the fence and then vaulted over a supply crate and into the road. He tapped a microphone on his chest and made his way up the slope of broken walls.
“What is it?” he asked, the microphone cancelling out his words and translating them into Siam for the boy.
“My grandfather! I see him inside,” the boy said, the translation running through Gage’s earpiece. He ducked his small face against a gap between the rubble and shouted off a rapid-fire sentence. “Your iron men, bring one here!”
A chunk gave way beneath Gage’s foot and went tumbling down the slope. He slowed his climb, kicking up more pulverized rock with every step.
“The rescue robots are a lot heavier than I am,” Gage said. “Let me see.” He stopped next to the boy, who was covered in dirt and ripped clothes. Gage tapped a button on the side of his hardhat and powerful headlights snapped on. He peered into the gap…and saw an elderly man lying on his side in a shallow puddle of rainwater.
“Save him, please,” the boy said, shaking Gage’s shoulder.
“Is he alive? Did he say anything to you?” Gage asked.
“I saw him move. I swear it.”
The old man’s arm bent at the elbow, then flopped back to the ground.
“Sir, I’m with an engineer,” Bertram said through his earpiece. “That building’s standing by wishes and sheer luck. If they send one of their robots up, the whole thing is liable to come crashing down.”
Gage pressed his fingers to a mic on his throat.
“I’ve got a survivor on the third floor. I’ll try and get him out. Send over a stretcher.”
“Sir, the Admiral will be most cross with me if I let you—”
Gage cut the transmission with a cock of his neck. He looked into the void between the collapsed walls again and saw thin bands of light coming through the back side.
“What’s your grandfather’s name?” Gage asked as he climbed around the pile of rubble and into what remained of a kitchen.
“Trai,” the boy said.
“There are wooden shutters back here.” Gage clawed away hunks of masonry and exposed dust-covered slats. “I can break this and get to him, probably. If things go wrong, you get out of here, understand?”
The boy shook his head.
“What don’t you understand?”
“He’s all I have left. My parents and my sister are in the bags.”
“All right, son. I’ll get him out of there.” Gage lifted a foot and rammed his heel into the wood. It took two more kicks before the shutter snapped. He pried the slats open and tossed them aside until he had an opening big enough for him to crawl through. Gage slid into the opening and felt his fatigues tug and rip against a jagged piece of wood.
As he lowered himself into the dank cave between floors of the apartment building, his wide shoulders scraped against raw concrete.
“Why didn’t I send that skinny kid in here?” he mumbled. “Looks like he could’ve crawled through a garden hose with room to spare.”
He heard a groan just beneath his feet. Gage dropped down and splashed in the puddle. A tremor reverberated through the room and dust sprinkled around them. Slowly, Gage knelt next to the elderly Siam.
“Trai? My name is Commodore Gage with the Albion navy. I’m here to help,” Gage half-whispered. He swept his hardhat lights down the man’s body. Both ankles were wedged beneath broken walls. Blood caked the bottom of his legs and the smell of rot touched Gage’s nose.
“If you could move, I guess you would have done it by now.” Gage wrapped a hand around Trai’s thin calves. The skin was fever hot and dry as a husk.
“Snowing. Snowing,” the old man said.
Gage looked over the rubble pinning Trai to the floor. A chunk of outer wall had the man’s ankles in a vise grip. Gage brushed away smaller rocks and gripped his fingers around the edge.
A rumble shook the building and a rock the size of his fist bounced off Gage’s helmet, skewing it to the side.
“Right, this was not my best idea,” Gage said.
“Snowing…”
“If we amputate, you’ll be dead from shock,” Gage said. “If we wait for the better trained sailors and better equipment from another rescue operation, the rest of this building will fall down. I’m left with only foolish, stupid options.”
Gage tugged the rock aside…and nothing else fell around him. He grunted and pulled it off Trai’s legs. Gage held the weight against his own chest, struggling to keep it from slamming to the floor and causing an avalanche.
“Move…your…” Gage tapped the side of his foot against Trai and he heard a wet shuffle as the old man crawled a few inches away. Gage set the rock back down with a thump. There was a groan and a crack broke through the floor.
Gage held stock-still, sharing wide-eyed panic with Trai. The water puddle drained through the crack, its spread slowing to a stop before it could reach the other side of the void. The old man tried to raise his head to look at his ruined feet.
“No, don’t.” Gage pushed his head back to the ground gently. He didn’t need a medical degree to know gangrene had set in, but if he could get him to a doctor, the old man was sure to live.
“Albion, you hear me?” came from overhead.
“Yes. I’ll lift him up—you pull him out,” Gage said. A rope flopped to the ground, one end running up the gap. “Or that, yes.”
“One of your drones brought that. Water too.”
Gage ran the rope beneath Trai’s shoulders and tied it into a knot over his chest. He lifted the old man off the floor, careful not to let his ruined feet touch the ground.
“Snowing,” Trai said as he grabbed Gage by the collar with surprising strength, stopping his ascent.
“Head injury.” Gage gently pulled the hand free and turned his head away as the mangled, reeking feet went past. He waited as Trai was pulled free, measuring the jump he’d have to make to pull himself into the escape route.
“Albion!” The teenager’s panicked voice filled the cave and Gage winced as dust shook free. “Albion, my sister is alive!”
“Quiet,” Gage hissed. “There’s no one else. I’m sure.”
“Grandfather says Tuyet is down there. She’s small, crawled into a shrine box in a hole. Find he
r!”
Gage touched a fingertip to a screen on the back of his hand. “Translate Siam proper name: Tuyet.”
“Snowing,” quipped in his ear.
There were times the translation software failed to account for stress or injury, skewing what came through his earpiece. He made a mental note to have a one-sided conversation with the programmers if he ever got out of this building.
“I’ll look around,” Gage called up. He got down on his hands and knees and shined his hardhat lights along the floor. He found nothing but piles of dust. He looked around again…but found nothing.
The end of the rope fell back down. Gage wrapped the line around his wrist and felt a steady pull. A hover drone must have been anchored to the other end, one with more than enough pull to get him out quickly.
He tugged the rope…when he heard a sniffle. The rope burned his wrist as he let go, setting it loose as it rose up.
Gage pulled fractured concrete away from one side of the cave and found a broken hardwood case. Peering through a triangular break in the front, he found a little girl clutching a rabbit doll.
“Tuyet, I presume.”
The little girl shivered and shrank into a fetal position.
“Been through a lot lately.” Gage grabbed the ornate brass handle on the case and pulled it open, scraping the edge against the floor. “I can understand that you’re scared of me, what with the uniform, green eyes, and that I must be taller than any Siam man you’ve ever seen.”
The girl tucked her head against the water-soaked case.
“Forgive me, sweetheart, but we don’t have time to do this the nice, calm way.” Gage gripped her by the shoulders and pulled her out. She screamed and kicked out, missing Gage and hitting a packed mass of loose rocks.
A shield-sized hunk of wall slid free and fell toward Tuyet. Gage swung her beneath his bulk and took the hit to the side of his head, just beneath his helmet. Light flashed across his eyes and his limbs went numb.
Gage felt blood flowing down the side of his neck as his left ear rang like a bell. He kept the girl cradled beneath him for a moment, waiting for the next hit. A few moments later, he lifted his head as pain stabbed up and down his shoulder.
“You OK?” he asked.
She spoke, but there was no translation.
Gage gently touched the ear with his translator/receiver, and it came away with drops of blood. The girl looked up at him with wide-eyed terror, apparently uninjured.
The rope descended back down the hole.
“Let’s try this again,” Gage said.
****
Gage sat on a gurney as a doctor ran a scanner over the left side of his head. His shoulder was stained red; the broken remnants of his earpiece lay in a metal pan. Bertram stood in the doorway of the small treatment room, worry on his face.
“If makes you feel any better, I’ve seen much worse today,” the doctor said.
“I’m sure there are others who need you more than I do right now,” Gage said.
“Blood clots in the cranium are tricky things.” The doctor held a metal pick to Gage’s ear and his face pulled into involuntary ticks. “Don’t want to let them knock around of their own volition. Bad things happen. You’ve had some very extensive reconstruction work done. Not recent either; must have been done as a child.”
The doctor tapped the side of a lens over one eye. “Which makes no sense. No Albion surgeon would have touched a minor for something elective. Did your parents smuggle you to some back-alley place in wild space? No…this work is too good.”
“Elective? I was on my bike. There was a tree. The tree won, or so I’m told. I don’t really remember what happened.”
“There are no healed fractures.” The doctor touched the pick against Gage’s ear, sewing a tear shut. “No bone realignment stents…curious. Suppose you can ask your parents once we’re back home.”
Gage held his tongue. That his father died before he was born and his mother passed away decades ago was none of the doctor’s business.
“So, what brings the Admiral’s aide down to my little slice of heaven?” the doctor asked.
“Admiral Sartorius is concerned about Yorova Pox.” The doctor’s hands pulled away from Gage’s face. “A corpse farther inland tested positive for the disease. The Admiral doesn’t want panic spreading across the planet, so he’s sending me to each field station to tell you to enact protocol zero if you come across any cases.”
“The Pox hasn’t been seen in this part of space for decades,” the doctor said as he went back to mending Gage’s face. “If it’s been dormant for so long, the chance of mutation into something worse is…”
“Exactly. The settlement has already been isolated. The impact damage probably stopped the disease from spreading further. Computer models have the chance of it spreading in the single digits, but protocol zero is in effect.”
“If I come across any cases, I’ll send up the alert and stop anyone from leaving my facility.” He picked up a sponge and dabbed it against Gage’s neck. “Christ…Yorova. Last time it made the rounds, it killed more people than the Reach Wars.”
“I’m glad you understand,” Gage said.
“Sir?” Bertram held two fingers to his earpiece. “Admiral Sartorius wants you back on the Orion immediately. Message is marked most urgent.”
“Jesus, it’s spreading.” The doctor’s hands fell to his side.
“If it was protocol zero, he’d say it was protocol zero.” Gage pushed himself off the gurney. “Done?”
“Have Seaver finish you up in her sick bay.” The doctor removed his gloves with a snap. “All that’s left is cosmetic. Unless you want to keep the scars.”
Gage looked at his bloodstained, dirt-caked uniform. He didn’t regret saving the two Siam, but he couldn’t be at the Admiral’s side looking like this.
“Shuttle’s inbound,” Bertram said.
“Must be serious,” Gage said. “Message say what the issue is?”
“No, sir, just that all the captains are recalled for conference. Highly irregular, wouldn’t you say?”
Gage felt a tinge of fear spread through his chest. Highly irregular indeed.
Chapter 17
Jeneck tipped her teapot and filled Captain Ulrich’s cup. She gave him a gentle smile and moved on to the next officer, Captain Vult of the Ajax. All the fleet’s captains were gathered in Sartorius’ ready room. All sat uneasily, and more than one tapped his teacup against his saucer in a dreadful display of manners.
“A full recall in the middle of sleep cycle.” Ulrich sipped his tea and frowned slightly. “Bit more bitter than usual, steward.”
“Apologies, Captain,” Jeneck said and moved to the next captain.
“We’re all here. What’s he waiting for?” Vult asked. “Captains only, no XOs, general recall of everything dirtside. Arlyss is moderately competent, but he can’t juggle three squadrons of supply shuttles and ready the ship to weigh anchor.”
“I’m less worried my executive officer will send the Concordia crashing into the planet. Though I did have to hit him with an alcholizer to clear his bloodstream before I left. That’ll teach him to take another nip after dinner.” Ulrich sipped his tea again. “Ugh, so bad it’s making my tongue numb.”
“Mine could do with a bit of sugar. It’s not like Sartorius to keep us waiting this long.” Vult glanced around the room. “You think he’s holding us up for Gage? Where is that commoner? Playing in the dirt again?”
“Don’t be so dismissive.” Vult swirled his tea around, “I’d take Gage over any entitled Sanquay that thinks Mummy and Daddy’s money means they deserve top marks come evaluations.”
Jeneck poured a cup waiting on Sartorius’ desk, then set the kettle on a heat pad. She glanced around the corner to the Admiral’s quarters, then turned back to the room of waiting captains. She cleared her throat and they set their cups and saucers aside as they rose to their feet.
A noticeably pale Sartorius came into the room an
d stopped behind his desk. He leaned against the lacquered wood top and stared at his tea for a moment.
“Sit.”
The Admiral stood up and straightened the front of his tunic.
“I have just spoken with a member of the King’s Intelligence Ministry, two of his sworn Genevan guards and a pair of fighter pilots off the Excelsior. I regret to inform you all that—”
The back door slid open and a filthy Gage hurried into the back of the room. Several captains twisted around to glare at him. Jeneck picked up a new teacup and started across the room when Sartorius stopped her with a raise of his hand.
“I must inform you all that Albion has come under sustained attack by an unknown enemy,” Sartorius said. Protests came from the captains, and more than one went to their feet in alarm. “The information we have is fragmentary at best, but the Home Fleet’s losses appear to be…total.”
“We can’t remain here.” Vult stood and rubbed his throat. “We must weigh anchor and…” He coughed. “Pardon me, Admiral.”
He opened his mouth again, but no words came out.
Captain Ulrich took in a strained breath. He raised a hand into the air, then collapsed.
Vult fell to his knees, both hands to his throat, gagging. A cough spread from one captain to the next as they fell over each other, knocking over chairs and shattering fine china against the deck.
“Gentlemen? Ladies?” Sartorius looked around in confusion. The only one who hadn’t collapsed was Gage, who was loosening the collar of a captain in the back of the room. The Admiral raised a panel on his desk and mashed a blinking red button. He glanced up at the untouched steaming cup of tea on his desk, then looked at Jeneck.
His steward held a pistol leveled at his chest, a wicked smile spread across her face.
“Nobis regiray.”
Her pistol snapped twice and Admiral Sartorius fell against his desk. He slid to the ground, leaving a bloody streak across the lacquered wood.
