by Bobby Adair
Wilkes looks at me, defiant. He glances at Brice. “I’m going back in.”
Brice tells him to stay, but Wilkes is already flying toward the hole through the hangar roof and doing it badly.
“Stop!” I yell.
Wilkes ignores us both and veers down into the hangar.
Graham looks at me and then Brice, not knowing how to react.
I don’t know either.
Brice grits his teeth and grabs Graham’s arm. “Stay here.”
“Are you going?” she asks.
“No,” he tells her before glancing at me.
“He’s fucked up.” I’m talking about Marshall, but I don’t know if Brice’s glance is a question about Marshall’s condition or an accusation for leaving him down there. “Lots of holes in his suit. He’s probably already dead.”
“Wilkes,” Brice calls over the comm.
No answer.
“Wilkes.”
Railgun rounds shoot out of the tunnel.
“Wilkes!”
Brice shakes his head and turns his attention back to Graham and me.
Just like that, we’ve put two-thirds of our small volunteer squad into the casualty column.
“Stay close.” Brice starts to rise.
I reach out to grab him. “Let’s auto grav and stay on the asteroid’s surface. We should run.”
He stops.
Graham is still looking toward the hole we came through. She hasn’t accepted the certainty that Wilkes and Marshall are dead.
“If we get too far out of this shit,” I tell them, as I wave a hand at the dust and rocks in the air, “if the Grays in that cruiser see us flying around, they might start shooting again. We have no defense against a bombardment.”
“There’s no reason they won’t fire on us anyway,” Brice spits, as his feet come back down on the roof.
I end the discussion by taking off at a sprint.
They both follow.
Chapter 24
We lose our way.
At least it seems we do.
We’ve been moving a long while. More dumbass déjà vu.
Why did I think running through this gray shit would work out better than walking?
Still, I run.
Floating rocks and pebbles bounce off my faceplate, granular gray in every shape and size. I plow into a stone the size of an end table. Its ragged surface jabs me in the gut, and I double over and tumble with it as I silently curse the advice Brice gave me to reduce my suit’s defensive grav.
I disengage from the rock, come to a stop with my ass on the ground, gasping for breath, looking around.
I’m alone.
How the hell did that happen? They were right with me two seconds ago.
The big rock that assaulted me with its inconvenient stagnancy slowly drifts.
Light-g is one thing, but mass and relative velocity still add up to ouch. How long has it been since I last cursed Newton and his goddamn Three Laws of Motion?
Damn, he’s a fucker.
I adjust my defensive grav for what seems like the tenth time in the last two hours and try to find my bearings. Still not enough air in my lungs.
I realize I don’t know which direction is which. My ass is on solid asteroid rock, so I know which way is down.
A sharp pain near my sternum makes me guess I have broken a rib. Or a developing hypochondriac tendency.
Two figures materialize out of the slurry, Brice and Graham.
Brice drops to a knee beside me, weapon at his shoulder, scanning. “Did you see where it came from?”
Graham is down by me, clutching at my arm, and turning my helmet to face hers. “Are you okay?”
I’m still catching my breath, I guess, because I can’t push out a whole word yet. I point at the damned aggressive boulder. It’s a full meter beyond my reach.
“It was the rock?” she asks, surprised, not quite believing me.
I nod, and draw a deep breath to reset my respiratory system.
“He ran into a rock, Sergeant.”
“A rock?” Brice has a hand on my shoulder, checking to see if I’m in one piece. Still looking for Trogs, he spots the stone I collided with, and then he chuckles. “That one?”
I nod.
“We need to slow down,” he tells me. “I’ll lead. You behind me. Graham, in the rear. Stay close.”
I brush away their caregiver hands and stand myself up, thankful for the minimal g.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” He’s concerned.
It was just a damn rock.
“We can haul you,” offers Graham.
I look down at myself. “You see any holes? Air leaking out?”
“No.” Graham is shaking her head as she gives me a quick exam. “Broken ribs? Can you breathe okay? You sound like you’re having trouble.”
“The wind was knocked out of me, is all.” I draw another deep breath.
“Let’s go,” says Brice.
No time to wallow in my bruises. It’s my turn to follow.
Brice sets out at a fast walk, scanning from side to side, weapon ready to kill anything that’s not a rock.
I’m looking, watching for gravity flux—indications of moving masses—things I know Brice can’t see. How I missed that damned floating boulder, though, I can’t say. Maybe I invested too much focus ten or twenty yards ahead, hoping to catch sight of Trogs before they spotted me. They have to be hunting us. They have to know we got away.
Phil comes to mind. So does Penny.
The math calculator in my head, the one quantifying a non-numerical world into digits that add up to shitty conclusions, tells me Phil and Penny are dead. It’s all about odds and evidence. However, my heart doesn’t agree. It says, ‘No sweat, don’t give up hope.’
It’s not hope.
There’s something more.
“I think I’m having motion sickness,” says Graham.
Brice stops and turns.
Suddenly, we’re in a huddle, looking at one another.
Graham is keying her d-pad. “I can’t get the medical screen to activate. I’d suck a dick for a dose of Dramamine right now.”
I take her hand and pull her arm over to look. I try to navigate to the medical screen. It won’t come up.
Fucking shit equipment.
“It’s the dust and the rocks,” Brice says to Graham. “It’s all flowing, throwing off your sense of equilibrium. Don’t look around while you walk. Keep close to Kane. Focus on his feet, or his back. You’ll be fine.”
Graham takes a deep breath. “Seems like we’ve come a long way.”
Brice glances around. “Yeah.”
“Probably wandered right past the Trogs,” she speculates, “and past the rest of the colony’s surface buildings.”
“Maybe.” Brice looks at me. I was in the lead. I fucked it up. He doesn’t say anything about that, but I know he’s thinking Graham is right.
I close my eyes, and focus on the gravity.
“Are you okay?” asks Graham.
“Bug-head,” Brice informs her.
I tell them, “With all this shit in the air, it’s hard for me. I’m straining to see the geography through the gravity of its mass.”
“Can’t you just see it?” she asks. “Isn’t that how it works for you people?”
I feel like I should come up with a clarifying analogy to help her understand. I can’t afford to burn the mental bandwidth on that right now. Maybe later. I point to our left. “Over there. Something that way.”
“Something isn’t necessarily a good thing.” Brice stares warily into the haze. “How far? What is it?”
“Sixty meters,” I tell him. “It could be a hunk of rock, a crashed ship, or a pile of bodies.” I glance at them both. “It’s something too big to be a Trog, too stationary to be a formation of them out looking for us.”
Brice shrugs and walks in the direction I indicated.
I follow with Graham on my heels, wondering if we’ve walked ourselves o
ut of the battle and right into uselessness.
My thoughts wander back to Phil again. He’d see through this shit. No doubt.
With all the death I’ve seen since I stepped off that grav lift in Arizona, it seems foolish to believe he’s still alive. Death up here in the void is easy. Every misstep is fatal, every wound catastrophic. We’re all walking a decision tree of terminal outcomes. Some branches are short. Hell, who am I kidding? It’s a goddamn drought-stunted shrub. Only luck’s unfair relationship with the bold has kept any of us alive so far.
We’ve covered maybe half the distance to the mass.
“Can you make it out yet?” asks Brice.
“Definitely not organic,” I answer, though I’ve already assured them no Trogs were ahead.
“That’s something.” Brice doesn’t slow. He trudges forward.
Peering forward with my implant, I make a further deduction. “I think it’s not a rock, either.”
“One of the buildings?” asks Graham, hopeful.
I nod, though Brice doesn’t see, and probably Graham doesn’t either. Unfortunately, a lifetime of earthly communication habits don’t die easy.
Halfway closer again, and Brice asks, “Do you see any other buildings?”
I stop, close my eyes and look into the distance, trying to piece together shapes out of the mess of grav fields. “Nothing.”
Brice looks around, like he might see something with his naked eyes. “This building is out here by itself?”
“Seems that way.”
“Let’s go see what it is,” says Graham, advising us to bypass Brice’s growing caution. Her motion sickness is influencing her choice.
Brice looks at me, silently asking my opinion on the matter. I nod toward the building. What other choices do we have?
He’s wary, but it’s the best option. He turns and leads us on.
Chapter 25
Trudging through the endless dusty crud reveals only that the building has a relatively intense gravity signature. Like most of the roofs on the surface structures, this one is layered deep with two meters of mining slag. The walls are unusual. They’re thick, way too thick, if their only purpose is to support the roof in the asteroid’s merciful gravity.
The building itself seems to be thirty meters square with a single floor and no tunnel beneath connecting it to the mining operation’s sublevels. I have no guesses for what’s inside.
I keep all that to myself. We’re close enough that speculation time is over. We need to see what this place is.
One corner of the building comes into sight first—a tall, vertical line, out of place in the chaotic flow of asteroid debris. The walls resolve as we step closer. We veer left, following Brice’s guess as to which wall has a door.
“Correct,” I tell him as I sense the break in the wall where the squat structure’s thick metal door stands closed.
A few moments after walking down the front of the building, Brice sees the entrance. He steps away from it, pointing his weapon at the crudely cast obstruction. Graham and I fan out beside him, ready to shoot.
“No airlock,” I tell them, in case they haven’t guessed already. The door looks more like one of the assault doors on our ships than a precisely sized hatch to an airlock. A triangular graphic, scratched and discolored, marks the door at face level. I can’t tell what it is, except maybe a representation of a giant asteroid colliding with a planet as it explodes into space.
It makes no sense.
Brice giggles.
I turn to see an expression of genuine happiness on his face.
“Explosives?” speculates Graham.
“Looks that way to me,” agrees Brice.
I guess I’m the only one who didn’t pick up on it.
Brice steps back, keeping his rifle aimed at the door. He glances at me, instructing me to do the same. To Graham, he says, “Open it.”
We step into position.
As I stand, waiting for what’s coming, I find myself contemplating the wisdom of pointing my railgun at a cache of explosives.
The door swings open.
Lights inside flicker on, casting everything in a uniform, daylight glow.
Nothing moves.
Brice is already stepping forward, sweeping his gun’s barrel in wider and wider arcs as he passes through the open entrance.
Right behind him, I step in, too.
The interior is neatly arranged with rows of pallets, most piled chest-high with five-gallon buckets, strapped together to keep them secure. Shelves line three walls, containing buckets, boxes, and odd pieces of equipment designed for purposes for which I can only guess.
Brice and I make a quick circuit of the building and find no Trogs. No miners. No grunts.
“Is there an airlock in here?” Brice asks.
I think I already know the answer. Still, I lower my rifle and examine the map of sublevel one.
Graham closes the door behind us. “No sense letting too much of that dust in here.”
“Good thinking.” I try to place where we are on the surface relative to the subterranean levels. “I’m pretty sure none of the tunnels come anywhere near here.”
Brice is walking the interior perimeter, scanning up and down the rows, taking moments to scrutinize individual buckets and drums. “Industrial blasting chemicals,” he muses. “There’s a shit-ton of it here.”
“Maybe a depot for the other colonies?” I guess. And why not, the place seems to have been built as much as a service base for nearby colonies as a mine. Which is probably why the Free Army chose it for their base—infrastructure that could easily be converted to support a small fleet of warships.
Brice finishes his survey of the building and marches back to stand in front of me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Weapons?” I guess. I hadn’t been thinking anything, not until he mentioned it.
“Are you okay?” he asks. “You seem kind of out of it.”
My shoulders slump at the acknowledgment. I’m tired, as tired as I’ve ever been.
Brice grabs my left arm and pulls it out while twisting so that my d-pad faces up. He points to a little green button built into one corner of the bezel. “Suit Juice. You used any yet?”
I know what some of the drugs in the cocktail are. I know how addictive they can be. “I don’t need—”
Brice pushes the button.
I feel a prick on my thigh where the suit’s inner liner houses a series of injectors, with one specifically for this purpose.
Almost immediately, I feel my fatigue melt away, and a burst of confidence radiates through every cell in my body.
I’m a god.
I’m a fucking god of war!
Bow before me lowly creatures in my universe before I smite you and your progeny to Hell!
“Stop grinning.” Brice laughs. “You look like an idiot.”
I don’t stop. I don’t care.
“First few times, you get high,” he says. “After a while, you just get a few more miles out of the tank.”
Too bad. I’m looking across the piles of buckets and barrels on the pallets, and nothing about it is familiar, no sticks of red dynamite, no Play-Doh slabs of C4. In fact, the building looks to be filled with ingredients more than finished products. “Any idea how this stuff works?”
Brice shakes his head. “I know military stuff. Not this shit.”
We both look at Graham.
Her eyes go wide. “I worked on a chicken farm before my number came up.”
Turning back to Brice. The next step is obvious, at least to me. “Tarlow. He was an explosives guy, right?”
“I think that’s what he said.”
I comm link to Blair. “Can you hear me? Do we have a signal?”
“I’ve got you in—” Blair seems lost.
Tarlow picks up for her. “The explosives bunker.”
“Is that what this is?” Blair doesn’t seem to believe him.
“It is,” he confirms. “We keep
it far from the colony in case it all blows. That’s just administrator paranoia. They don’t understand the components or the chemical processes involved. It can’t spontaneously detonate. Not in a vacuum. Impossible. You can’t tell—”
“Put a plug in it,” I order Tarlow. Time to put my divine energy to work for the good of mankind before the drug wears off. “Blair, can you do without Tarlow down there?”
“Why?” She’s not pleased, not at all.
“I need him. He’s the explosives guy, right?” I scan across the trove of combustibles. “We’ve got a warehouse of goodies here, and Tarlow can make them useful.”
Chapter 26
We’re waiting again.
There’s a lot of boredom in war.
Blair is sending some of our soldiers from the control center to bring Tarlow to the explosives shed.
Graham is still lying on her back, trying to control her nausea, or napping. She hasn’t said anything in a while. It could be either.
Brice is fumbling through what I guess are blasting caps, a variety of types, in a series of translucent bins. He cocks his head toward Graham. “She gonna be alright?”
“I suppose.” I’m looking at the bin he has a hand in, realizing I have no guesses about the functions of these odd doodads, no idea how they puzzle together to form something lethal. “You know how this stuff works?”
“In theory.”
I laugh. “You mean you’d blow us all up if you tried to rig a bomb?”
“More like I’d build a dud.” Brice is one-hundred-percent serious again. “Wouldn’t matter. Failure is death out here in the ‘stroids. No room to fuck up. If your booby trap doesn’t blow, the Trogs swarm you. Death. See what I mean?”
Booby traps sound appealing, however, I’m cultivating my ideal fantasy outcomes into something that’ll pass for a plan.
Brice seems suddenly bored, impatient, as he empties his hands. “We should wait on Tarlow.”
I agree, look around at the contents of the explosives hut, and start a slow walk along the shelf-covered wall, taking in what I can see, looking for anything I might learn while killing time, and trying not to think about other soldiers out there on the surface, still dying.
“A lot of waiting,” says Brice, coming along beside me.
“What do you do to kill the time?” I ask, not wanting to spend too much time with my thoughts, afraid of what I might find in my heart if I dwell on the echoes of last gasps over the comm and vivid memories of dying faces, watching the vacuum suck blood through gaping tears in suits.
