by B. V. Larson
From my point of view the explosion went off under my feet, as I was standing on my dish and flying directly away from the ship. I dared to look down.
Major Welter was still firing the attitude jets, still keeping control of the ship, which rolled under his control to direct the least damaged region of the hull toward the incoming missiles. I knew how hard it was, to manipulate those Macro controls accurately under battle conditions.
Two more hits blossomed under me now. Welter had done it perfectly, putting the ship’s best face toward the warheads. I felt a flash of pride for him and all my men, but it wasn’t enough to save the ship. She’d taken too many shots. The metal of the outer hull was half-slag, brittle and burnt. Jolly Rodger broke up as I watched. Large, spinning fragments of the cruiser whirled away like newborn asteroids. Bits of debris, human, brick and otherwise, floated everywhere.
I slowed, reversed course and began braking my tiny dish. My marines were all around, scattered, dying, calling for help. Some of the bricks went rolling by. I realized we would probably never be able to collect them all.
I checked Sandra then, expecting her to be twisted wreckage or frozen to death by now. She was neither. I shined a suit-light through the frosty lid of her coffin. Her eyes were still wide, still staring. They flicked toward my light and focused there.
I swallowed hard. What the hell had the microbes done to her?
-36-
It took several precious minutes to get into contact with my people. That chaotic time made up some of the worst moments of my life. It was one thing to have your ship blown up. That was a quick, clean death. No fuss or muss. But this wasn’t pleasant. My people were everywhere, dying. I couldn’t easily talk to them, as our central communications relaying systems were down. I could only talk to them on local radio, which had several miles range, but with a hundreds squawking at once it wasn’t organized or even functional.
I could at least still see the direction we should all head in. The central mass of moving bits were ahead, with a number of blinking beacons flashing blue-white. I headed that way, as did everyone else who could control their direction of flight and we all converged.
Command and control had been broken up. No one was in contact with their unit. No one was organized. We were a horde, not an army. I pulled rank on everyone I met and ordered them to head toward the Macro cruiser, which was itself bearing down on us. Maybe they didn’t see us as a threat. I hoped they weren’t right to discount us.
Even though my marines had abandoned Jolly Rodger, we were still moving toward the enemy ship on the same course our ship had been on. In space, an object keeps moving in one direction at one speed until some kind of interference alters that motion. So although we were now scattered and had become a cloud of tiny vehicles, we were still heading toward the Macro ship.
I couldn’t see the enemy vessel, but calculating the timing, I knew we were getting close. I ordered everyone I saw to brake. Others did as well, all around us. Like a flock of birds, we took our hints from one another’s behavior, and most of us did whatever the majority did.
The cruiser was dark and unlit. It came up at us like a hand swatting flies. My marines who had not started braking slammed into it, a swarm of fleshy meteors. I saw them die, some screaming the last second as they realized their error. Others missed the cruiser and flashed by past it.
The cruiser finally reacted to our presence as we got in close. The belly turret began firing with bright flashes. There was no air to carry the sound of battle. Men and bricks vanished in silent, incandescent plumes.
I maneuvered, almost passing the ship, but managed to land with a heavy double thump upon the hull. Sandra’s coffin was the second thump. Around me, dozens of marines made their final approaches. We even managed to get a few bricks onto the hull and turned on the magnetic clamps. That would let us last a few more hours, I figured.
I didn’t even know how many of my people I’d lost yet. I didn’t want to know. In a way, it didn’t even matter. We had to take this Macro ship, as it was the only thing out here. There were no options, it was do or die.
I dragged Sandra’s coffin to the nearest brick that had managed to clamp onto the Macro hull. Except for turning their gun on us, the Macros had taken no notice of our presence. They really didn’t seem to care that we were here. They had not even deviated from their course. We would fly through the ring to the tri-star system we suspected was Alpha Centauri soon.
Men now clanked over the hull all around me. We were like a mass of bees on a sealed-up hive. There was no easy way in. I struggled to drag Sandra’s box through the airlock. It pumped and hissed. I didn’t look in through the lid, partly because it was turned away from me, and partly because I didn’t want to see what might be inside.
It was only when I got inside the brick that I realized it was a sleeping brick. I huffed in disappointment. We had bunks and air—that was it. I took off my helmet and tasted the stale air. There was nothing else here that was much use other than the water tank. I’d been hoping for a medical brick, or better yet one of our two surviving factories. I could have built something useful to blow through the hull with that.
The few men inside the brick looked as exhausted and hopeless as I did. “Take a break,” I told them. “Then find your unit and form up. We’ve got to take this ship.”
They mumbled acknowledgement, but no one sprang up to follow my orders. I looked inside the medical pod. Sandra’s eyes were finally closed. The digital gauges on the sides indicated she was still alive, however. I slumped over the pod and my sides heaved. I needed a few seconds to think.
A hand fell on my shoulder. I craned my neck around, hoping it was Kwon.
Major Sarin’s face met my eyes. I smiled. “Good to see you made it, Major,” I said.
“You too, sir,” she said.
Her hand lingered on my back. I made no move to brush her off. Finally, I heaved myself up. “Let’s have a little command conference,” I said.
She followed me into the cramped restroom. There, face-to-face, we talked in low voices so the others wouldn’t overhear. I had a feeling we were going to be discussing grim realities that the others didn’t want to know about.
“What do we have left?” I asked.
“Not much,” she said.
I saw her face tremble a fraction. I’d rarely seen emotion on her face. She must experience it, but she hid it well. Right now, she looked like she was going to cry. I didn’t blame her.
“Any casualty estimates?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know yet. Maybe half are dead or floating around without propulsion. The rest of us are standing on the cruiser.”
“We’re bugs to them now,” I said. “Fleas. We can’t easily get inside. Have we got any mines or other explosives?”
“A few…but if we light anything off out here…”
“I know,” I said. “We will be blowing ourselves off the hull.”
“We’re short of air and worst of all, power, sir,” she said. “These generators need fuel and calibration. They were built for combat, but not the battering they’ve taken.”
“Any sign of Kwon or Gorski yet?” I asked.
“No sir.”
I shook my head. I really hoped we hadn’t lost them. I’d watched Welter die, and I couldn’t afford more of my key officers. I caught Major Sarin staring at me then, and I saw the welling tears in her eyes. I realized she’d finally cracked that tough exterior of hers. The Macros had a way of doing that.
“What is it, Jasmine?” I asked, trying to soften my voice.
She looked pretty, dirty, and scared. “I don’t know,” she said, rubbing her eyes and sniffing. “I’m sorry.”
“Talk to me,” I said. “In an hour it will probably be too late.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. It just seems hopeless.”
“We’ll get this ship,” I told her. “We have to.”
“What about after that?” she asked. “I mean—eve
ry day we lose more men, more of everything. We are fighting like rats out here over scraps. I feel—I feel like we’re doomed, sir.”
I naturally felt the same way, but it was the job of every commander to stay confident to the point of absurdity. How could my marines fight if I was blubbering and moping about?
“Nonsense,” I said. “We all have our doubts, but we will survive. And even if we don’t, we are helping out the people back home with every Macro we take down.”
She licked her lips. She closed her eyes and nodded. I could see she was trying to stuff all her emotions back into that suitcase she kept them in. I marveled at her control. This was the first time I’d ever seen her crack.
Suddenly, I bent forward and kissed her. It was an impulse, and she recoiled at first, making me regret it. Then she responded, and we kissed. It felt very nice, but I wasn’t even sure why I’d started this. She was just there, looking vulnerable and sweet for a second. I was sure we were going to die a grim death, and when you are really convinced of that, people sometimes do things they wouldn’t otherwise consider. I figured she felt the same way.
I heard something and snapped my eyes open. There was a fast, flickering motion. So fast! I threw up my arm behind Major Sarin’s head, but I couldn’t completely block the blow.
Sarin went down, sprawling. Her head welled blood. A handful of her dark hair was still wadded up in her attacker’s fist.
“Sandra?” I said, incredulous.
Sandra stood there, a naked beauty dipped in black paint. The microbial creatures covering her had all dried up and turned crusty by now. In spots, they were flaking away.
“Have you gone nuts?” I asked.
She stared at me in a fury. “I heard it all,” she said. “Every word you whispered to her.”
“But how…”
“I heard you kiss her. I heard your heart accelerate. Hers too—”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my hands coming up in a calming gesture. “I’m so glad you are awake and alive.”
“Really?”
“Yes! Yes, really. This didn’t mean anything,” I said, gesturing down to poor Sarin. I knelt and checked her pulse, which was still strong. She’d awaken shortly with a headache and a burning spot on her scalp that was missing a lot of hair. “Jasmine didn’t deserve that. She was just scared.”
“I told you once I’d kill if you fooled around.”
“You can’t go around smashing fellow officers.”
“You can’t go around making out with them.”
I shook my head. “It was one kiss at a weak moment. I apologize.”
Sandra still stood over Major Sarin, watching us both intensely. I nudged Jasmine, but she wasn’t going anywhere. I felt the back of her head. “I think you fractured her skull.”
“Get away from her,” Sandra said dangerously.
I looked up at her with narrowed eyes. This was not quite the Sandra I knew. She sounded—a bit crazy. I decided it was time to redirect her anger. “Are you pissed?” I asked.
“Totally,” she said.
“How’s this: we’ll turn Sarin over to the medics, and we’ll turn some of that attitude against the Macros.”
“Together?” she asked.
Each word she spoke, I now realized, seemed to be forced from her lips, almost as if she had a bout of stuttering she was holding back.
“Yeah,” I said, standing slowly. “Let’s do this together Sandy.” I invoked a pet name I only used for her in private moments.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “Not today.”
I nodded. We walked out of the restroom and I sent help inside for Major Sarin. I was nonplussed to see Carlson responding to my call. He had survived? Great news, there.
Carlson gaped at Sandra as he went by. She was still naked, painted black and staring at everyone with wide, crazy eyes. She didn’t seem to care about her appearance at all. The rest of the guys in the brick had their mouths hanging open. Sandra took no notice of them.
“Let’s spray that gunk off and get you into a vacc suit,” I said.
She let me help her, but her muscles were tense and quivering the entire time. She almost never blinked her eyes. I had a thought as I adjusted her suit and doubtfully gave her a weapon. She was reminding me of every marine I’d seen recovering from the nanite injections. She had that look of new strength, almost as if she’d been born into a new body she didn’t quite know how to control yet.
“I don’t want a gun,” she said, handing back the light hand-beamer I’d given her.
“What then?” I asked.
She took my knife off my belt and held it with fingers that gave tiny tremors. I could see her shaking, even through her gloves. I wanted to order her to take a break, to sleep off whatever was going on in her head, but something in her eyes was electric, like a twisting live cable that snapped and sparked. She was holding herself back, I realized.
What the hell had Marvin, Ning and those microbes done to her? I figured they had probably all perished on Jolly Rodger, and I’d most likely never learn the truth.
-37-
My marines and I crawled over the hull like angry ants, but the ship was like a sealed mason jar-there just wasn’t any way in. We avoided the underside of the ship and thus were nowhere near the deadly belly-turret. Every hatch we could find was slagged shut from the inside.
Kwon showed up eventually and we tried a group burn-through, concentrating our beamers on a single spot to make it white hot. I had no doubt we could have done it with a beam tank, but blasting our way into the hull wasn’t working, at least not quickly enough. Sandra stood nearby, silent and staring.
“This is not happening, Colonel,” Kwon told me.
“Yeah,” I said. “We need something heavier.”
“Colonel?” a voice called into my helmet. It was Gorski, who was my sole man on ops right now. I’d given him Sarin’s job until she recovered.
“Go ahead, Gorski.”
“We’re about to go through the ring,” he said.
“Not much we can do about that, is there?”
“No sir,” he said, and signed off.
I looked up worriedly. I didn’t see the ring, but that wasn’t a surprise. We were going so fast, the cruiser would just sail up to the ring and through it before our eyes had time to register it. Still, I was worried. It seemed so odd, the way these Macros ignored us. They didn’t even answer our radio signals. We were less than nothing to them. We were fleas on a dead dog.
“Let’s pull back a bit onto the top of the cruiser’s hull,” I said. I led the way, and my marines followed. “I don’t really like the idea of going through a ring while standing out on top of this ship. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Our boys did it before,” Kwon said. “They all were sucked out into space from the ring in the Worm mound.”
“Yeah,” I said. “About that, the Worms had a direct conduit the last time we saw them, directly from the ring inside their giant mound out into space in another star system. A pretty nice way to launch ships. Just imagine, you build them on the ground, put them on rails and roll them out into space. Not having to lift anything up into orbit is a big savings of effort. Better yet, your construction people could build the ship under normal planetary conditions, not out in space in vacc suits, fighting with low-gravity.”
Kwon shook his head in his helmet. “If you say so, sir. I think having a hole on the surface of your world would be a big problem. Wouldn’t it suck all your air out into space?”
I chuckled. We’d reached the aft region of the ship by now, where our few bricks were clamped on. “There was some kind of control possible. When the Macros screwed me last time into going down there and connecting up that ring to turn it on, I learned it is possible to alter the behavior of the rings. The Macros did it that time. If you could choose when your ring was active, you could send through your ships whenever you wanted.”
Kwon didn’t say anything more. I thought he might be disturbe
d at the idea of playing with such forces. Maybe he thought I was getting one of my bright ideas and would try to set a ring like that up on Earth. I wasn’t that crazy…was I? I had to admit that maybe, just maybe, I was.
I was walking along the hull of the cruiser with Sandra following me. She had that knife still—and she made me oddly nervous with it. Her mannerisms weren’t the same as they’d been before she’d been in the coma.
“Sandra?” I said. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
“Try me.”
“I’m thinking about cutting people up.”
I blinked. She was right. I hadn’t wanted to know. I told myself she’d always been a hothead. She’d be all right if I just gave her some time to calm down. Maybe this was all a result of her brain injury. The microbes had fixed her—but who knew what they considered fixed to be when it came to the structure of a human brain?
We were in mid-step when we went through the ring. There was no warning from Gorski or anyone else. Maybe he didn’t know the exact moment when we’d hit it, or maybe he thought he’d already told me and didn’t think it was a big deal.
I felt the now familiar shudder of going through the ring. That feeling of dizziness, as if I’d just experienced a tiny, swaying earthquake. My left foot was clamped onto the hull, my right foot was up, and coming back down. I had the sensation that when I put my foot down it would keep going—perhaps into an abyss. It was as if I was falling, but for less than a second. Then I stomped my foot down firmly and I knew we were through. We were somewhere else, an unknown number of lightyears away from where we had been a moment before.
“I hate that feeling,” Sandra said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Especially out here. Look, we’re in the tri-star system.”
At that moment, an explosive timer was activated. I had no way of knowing it at the moment. I had a few calm seconds, which I used to lift my arm and point toward the twin yellow suns, orbiting one another tightly. One sun was close, nearly as big as the sun appeared from Earth. The second was distant and smaller from our perspective, looking like a brilliant moon. The third star, a red dwarf, glowed like a distant ember below and to the right of the twins, from our perspective.
