Threshold of Victory

by Stephen J. Orion

  “Sir,” Walter’s replied with an easy nod before turning to his two pilots, “Jackson, the CAG requires someone to escort Tarek back to the brig, that’s you. Soon as you’re done, get back here and help me tie off the ship.”

  “Aye aye boss,” Jackson gave his newly assigned charge a playful shove towards the door. “Move slave.”

  “Keep your fantasies to yourself,” Tarek quipped back as he headed for the hatch.

  Halfway down the ladder, he glanced back at Rease, searching for confirmation of the emptiness he’d sensed. He found only the bravado. From a distance her stage makeup was perfect, and even he’d have believed she was sincere. She gave him a last smiling salute as he slipped down the hatch to the Arcadia.

  Jackson was waiting for him in the spinal corridor. “So seriously man, are you going to tap that or what?”

  “I think you’re misreading the relationship.”

  “Really?! This again?” He held his hands out imploringly back the way they’d come. “Did you not see that! Are you hollow inside? Are you actually a robot?”

  “Lieutenant Rease is…”

  But how did you explain something like this to Jackson? That she believes she is the war. That she thinks, without her, we lose, and so the responsibility of the campaign in its entirety rests on her shoulders. That she threw herself at him, and would probably even sleep with him because it would get people talking about this rescue. Because it’d start scandalous rumours and maybe for a half hour people will talk about the two people he’d saved instead of the hundreds who died three days ago.

  Finally, he said, “She believes the spectacle will make us fight harder.”

  “Man, who cares what she believes. She has tits and other womanly features that you’re in a very real position to take advantage of. If she needs to drink for a month afterwards to forget, that’s her business, but in the meantime what may be the most attractive woman in uncountable kilometres is willing to bed down with you.”

  “That is… wow. Sometimes your ability to fly beneath even my lowest expectations astounds.”

  “I was just thinking that about you,”

  They continued on in silence, turning off the spinal corridor to take the gantry stairs down towards the hangar deck. The first Tarek realised something was off was when he saw the white uniformed EMTs amongst a crowd at the base of one of the flight elevators. From his vantage point, he could see the quickly descending lift and the state of the Snowhawk lying odd-angled on top of it.

  He bounded down the stairs three at a time, leaving Jackson behind and making it to the hangar floor before the lift did. He bolted across deck and dove into the crowd only to find Hanagan suddenly blocking his way.

  “Easy there, Andrew,” Hanagan said with upheld hands. “We’re all worried. Give the medics some space to work.”

  Tarek closed his eyes for the barest moment and grabbed the first card that appeared.

  “I’m med one certified,” he explained and pushed past.

  He broke into the open ground beyond in time to see the lift come to a halt. From where it was lying, he could easily see the crack in the blackened canopy class, the abbreviated wing, the half-foot wide serrations scored across its fuselage. Amid all the carbon scoring he could clearly make out the pilot plate: 2nd Lt. Kelly ‘Clumsy’ Smart.

  He approached the ruined fighter, the only one so close except for the two EMTs and Lieutenant Commander Phillips. They’d successfully popped the canopy, and despite their collective protests, Kelly tried to stand under her own power, half raised. Her legs began to shake and then gave way completely, toppling her to her knees on the side of the craft. The EMTs caught her quickly and eased her down onto a stretcher.

  “Tarek, what are you doing here?” Phillips asked.

  “Hanagan sent me to help,” Tarek answered as quickly as he had before. “I’ve got med one.”

  “No…” Phillips started then paused and met his eyes. “…problem, just follow my lead.”

  Tarek watched in almost morbid fascination as the EMTs pulled the breakaway cables on Kelly’s flight suit, rapidly stripping her down to a tank top and shorts. Around her clothes, he could see large ugly bruises already swelling up. She was shivering and pale, her eyes flitting from face to face as though they couldn’t find anywhere to settle.

  “Aristide, thank you,” she said in a distant and soft voice. “Andrew, don’t worry I’m fine; you… I don’t know you but you’re a doctor, tell them I’m fine, I just…”

  Her words were swallowed up as the EMTs strapped an oxygen mask to her face and covered her in a heating blanket. The two pilots escorted her to the ship’s trauma ward, assisting the EMTs where required, and then broke off. The Flight Sergeant was asked to wait outside while Phillips discussed his pilot’s condition with a triage nurse.

  Tarek leaned against the wall and waited. Patience was hard. He kept expecting a pair of marines to show up and remind him via chains and firearms that he was supposed to be in the brig. When Jackson arrived, he thought he was going to get the hurry up, but for the first time in Tarek’s experience the Warhorse’s co-pilot said nothing. Instead Jackson just took a spot against the wall a polite distance away and waited.

  “She really isn’t that bad,” Phillips said when he finally returned. “Chilled, still in shock, and perhaps slightly hypoxic but other than that, just bruises.”

  “What happened?” Tarek asked.

  “They were engaging a Mauler cruiser and its escorts. Apparently she suddenly decided to make a solo run against the ship itself,” he frowned and shook his head slowly. “I can’t fathom why, but I guess I won’t know more until she’s well enough to debrief.” He shook his head.

  “Lucky it wasn’t worse, I suppose,” said Tarek, mostly to himself.

  “Luckier than you know,” said Phillips but the response sounded distant, and he had the distinct impression the Lieutenant Commander wasn’t really talking about Kelly.

  Tarek searched Phillips’ face. “You can’t protect them all, can you?”

  Phillips rounded on him suddenly, placing a warning hand on his chest that didn’t quite pin him to the wall. “I don’t believe my decisions are yours to question, Sergeant.”

  The usually flippant and cool squadron leader had drawn himself to his full height, his eyes sharp and dark. Authority and power were bred into him, and he took such efforts to keep them hidden that this was the first-time Tarek saw him for what he was. Not just another class, but another race, more distant and aloof than even the Exodites.

  “No sir. I’m sorry, sir,” Tarek answered smartly.

  “I believe you have somewhere you need to be.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Phillips’ removed his hand and stalked away. Tarek let out a breath.

  Beside him Jackson looked pale and gave a low whistle.

  “Immortals,” he said.

  ****

  Constellation Carrier CNS Arcadia

  Battlegroup Olympian

  Grimball Local Sector, Bryson System

  22 April 2315

  Rease was sitting on one of the tables in the workshop that Commander Lyle had commandeered for his newly recovered treasures. The artefact she had dug up was half dismantled on one of the long workbenches, but the majority of the space was taken up by the bloodied hulk of the Mauler corpse he’d so macabrely requested. It had been stripped naked, and a half dozen biologists, xenologists and something-or-other-ologists were on ladders and scissor lifts around it.

  For now they were just doing preliminary observations, but on the table beside Rease were the tools they would use for an autopsy later. They looked more like abattoir equipment – or lumber yard tools – than medical instruments: everything from hatchets and chainsaws to horrifying two-handed scoops. One of the machine shops ceiling hoists had been positioned above it for what could only be an especially gruesome stage of the process.

  The Lieutenant couldn’t really understand their interest, autopsies had
been a high priority in the first days of the war and Mauler biology was now well understood. What Commander Lyle hoped to learn escaped her and she found it frankly irritating that they seemed more focused on this stinking heap than the unique artefact she’d brought back.

  “So what is it?” Rease asked.

  “What’s this?” Commander Lyles’ brow furrowed and he pointed uncertainly to the corpse.

  Rease nodded towards the artefact.

  “Oh that,” the Commander sounded almost disinterested, sparing it barely a glance before turning back to the Mauler. “It’s a transmitter.”

  “Great,” Rease said numbly. “We went through all that to steal some coffee shop’s wireless internet.”

  With some effort, Commander Lyle pulled himself away from the work on the corpse and came to stand in front of Rease. He wiped some sweat off his brow with a black kerchief.

  “Not quite, more like a beacon. Operates on hyperspace bands, very long range.”

  Rease waited for more, and then realised that Commander Lyle was looking at her with that frustratingly patient expression that meant he was going to wait for her to figure out the answer. Leaning back on her hands the Lieutenant looked up at the ceiling and thought aloud.

  “There were no caves or tunnels in the building, which meant the Maulers were shipped in. You use a beacon for… maybe drop pods… invisible drop pods… invisible drop pods that leave no impact craters.” With a sigh, Rease met the jolly man’s eye directly. “Honestly I’m dancing around what I really think because it sounds absurd, but I’m just going to put it out there, so you can correct me and we can move on.”

  Lyle grinned. “By all means.”

  “They teleported in. The transmitter provides the necessary precision to avoid popping them in half-way through a wall or neck deep in a road or something.”

  “Not absurd at all,” Lyle said.

  “But the Mauler weaponry doesn’t imply the technological clout necessary to pull something like that off. Hell, it’s science fiction even to us.”

  “Remember, Lieutenant, this whole thing is a game of cups. The other side is doing everything they can to convince us we know where the ball is because our certainty closes our mind to the alternatives. If you look at the basic Mauler rifle, it is hard to imagine they might achieve point-to-point teleportation, but by the same token it’s also tough to swallow that they’ve mastered space flight, wouldn’t you say?”

  “So never say never.”

  The Commander nodded. “At least not until you know for sure. How then do we tell where they’re teleporting in from?”

  “Well where was the beacon transmitting to?”

  “That’s a good thought. Tricky though since it can transmit in any direction, and we’ve already dug it up.”

  “What about the other settlements we’ve captured.”

  “Another solid idea. You’re two for two, and I’ve got some people looking into it, but we’re not dealing with idiots here. They appear to switch them off as soon as we capture a village.”

  “So you think the attack on Box Grid was a blunder?”

  “Absolutely. Monumentally. Cataclysmically.” Lyle held his hands broadly apart for emphasis, then lowered them and met her eye seriously. “I’m going to be callous with you for a moment here, Lieutenant. All the people you lost trying to hold Box Grid were not worth as much as the secret that the enemy can sneak troops in through the crack under the door. A new tactic loses a third of its strength once your enemy realises you’re doing it, another third once they understand how you’re doing it, and after that it’s only a matter of time until they figure out how to thwart it completely.”

  “So why do they attack all over the place like drunken savages? They could have bombed the Council on day one, the shipyards at Kestrel on day two, and by the end of one week they could have kicked us in the balls so many times we’d probably do ourselves in.”

  “That question lies at the bottom of the abyss, I suspect. But you’re getting ahead of yourself,” he said. “Also, is ‘kicked us in the balls’ a phrase you would commonly use with a senior officer?”

  “Sorry, you’re very disarming. I tend to forget where I am,”

  He waved her apology away and looked back at the Mauler as though finding his place in a book. “Anyway the piece of the puzzle with which we are currently concerned is still where they are coming from, not what they’re trying to achieve.”

  “You want me to guess how you plan to find them again don’t you?”

  “Oh yes, it makes me feel ever so good about myself.”

  Pushing off the table, Rease examined the disassembled transmitter for a moment, decided she couldn’t make any sense of it and turned to look at the Mauler. She didn’t get closer or poke and prod at it like the various-ologists were. She was tiny and unarmed and no matter how dead it appeared to be, she had to keep a solid grip on herself just to stay in the room with it. Plus it smelt awful.

  “What has it been eating?” Rease finally asked.

  Lyle looked almost genuinely surprised. “Do you know how many of my colleagues still can’t reach that conclusion on their own.” He looked at the Mauler and sighed. “I swear, if I didn’t need you causing trouble out in the field, I’d have you in black coat faster than they can tailor one.”

  “Okay. So what’s it eating then?”

  “We’re just about to cut it open and find out.”

  “Well if that isn’t my cue to leave, I don’t know what is.” Rease made an easy salute and headed for the door. “If you let me know what you find, I promise I’ll bring you another dead Mauler next time I’m down range.”

  ****

  Tarek sat in a meditative pose on the bed in his cell, his legs crossed, his hands at rest on his knees, and his eyes closed. Pilots’ Guide to Harnessing Precognitive Potential: draft 7 lay open before him – in some ways it was now draft 7.5. Entire sections had been crossed out, and new ones, written in Tarek’s own hand, had been slipped in between the pages.

  His pose was not entirely necessary, in fact, having more or less held this position since morning, his legs had gone numb, but if he was ever going to convince people of his new-found ability, he would have to start cultivating an air of mysticism. He suspected that was the real reason all the sorcerers in the holo-vids were always making dramatic gestures; after all, if your arch-nemesis gets struck by lightning, and you aren’t even looking at him, who’s to say you had anything to do with it?

  Of course, outright convincing others of his own brand of magic was a matter for another day. For now, Tarek was seeking just to understand his own powers. With time and experimentation, he had discovered that he didn’t need to be quite as committed to what he was trying to achieve as he had back at Box Grid. He would never consider attacking one of the guards, but with concentration, he had discovered he could investigate avenues like I want to knock out the cell warden and see what cards were presented.

  The difficulty of such investigations seemed to stem from the need for specifics. When he had rescued the Wolf-Lieutenant and Twos, it had been what he called a ‘true want’ in his revisions of Draft 7. A true want had a lot of subconscious qualifications: it wasn’t just that you wanted something to happen; in your head, you wanted it to happen in a particular way. A qualified want.

  He had wanted to rescue the Rease, but not if it meant getting the heavy lifter destroyed or having her die seconds after she got back to the Arcadia. There were innumerable tiny desires that hitched onto a true want and served to galvanise the options available.

  When you didn’t have a true want, you had to make sure you understood what you wanted in granular detail. Investigating something like I want to throw my pen into the corner of the cell required a staggering number of qualifications; which corner, how hard, which hand do I want to throw with and countless others. Building such a mental list of details was difficult, but it allowed him to investigate avenues that he didn’t immediately feel passionate a
bout.

  Given the metaphor, he’d subconsciously chosen for his power, Tarek wasn’t surprised to discover that he only had to limit his investigations to fifty-two possibilities before he could draw them up for use. It was still more than a little challenging, like going to a restaurant, with no menu, and having to order by saying what you didn’t want. Done right, you could cut away huge swathes of options at a time, for instance, ‘I want vegetarian’ would eliminate a lot of dishes; but you had to have some idea of the future. If you didn’t know a romaine salad could include fruit, then you couldn’t narrow down what kind, or how much.

  Presently Tarek was experimenting with how far into the future he could look; there were two limitations to this.

  The first was that, without a true want, the further into the future you looked, the more quickly the possible outcomes multiplied to impossible numbers. So the way around that was to find a long-term true want. And Tarek had one.

  I want the Constellation to win the war with the Maulers.

  The outcome was unmanageable. He was immediately presented with fifty-two cards, but with every second that passed, a dozen cards were blown away and new ones appeared. As he scrambled to view the cards before they were gone and replaced, he found the second limitation. Time.

  Viewing a possibility that stretched out months into the future in real time would take, well, months. He could compress the visions, but this was not like watching a movie on fast forward, the combination of sight, sound, scent, taste and touch at high speed quickly blurred into an unintelligible mash that guaranteed he would miss the key choices.

  With a shudder, Tarek pulled himself back to the present, shaken by the notion that, even from in his cell, there were choices that he wasn’t making and that with every second that passed it meant chances to win the war were being lost. The only consolation was that there was apparently no shortage of such chances still in the pipeline. That small comfort didn’t change the simple truth for Tarek.

  He had to get out of this cell as soon as possible.