by Bobby Adair
“That’s what I see,” Penny confirms.
“Keep zooming,” says Brice. “See that one on the bottom of the image, closest to the wall? It’s on its side. Look at what’s painted by the airlock door.”
Phil’s fingering his d-pad and then freezes. He gasps.
I see it, too, a red flag with a big gold star in the corner and four smaller ones bordering it. The People’s Republic of China.
“What the hell?” whines Phil.
What the hell, indeed.
Chapter 52
“They’re all damaged,” says Penny.
“This doesn’t make sense,” says Brice.
Phil takes a closer look. “Why are these ships here? I thought we were getting the first assault ships.”
“Looks like maybe China got the first ones,” I conclude. “Whatever else you’re thinkin’, that much is obvious.”
“This is all bullshit,” whines Phil. He stands up. “You all see that, don’t you?”
Nobody responds.
Phil focuses on me. “This whole conspiracy thing, it’s a trap. This whole thing about getting us out here to the asteroid belt, they’re going to destroy us just like they did these other ships. It stinks so much I can’t believe we fell for it.” Phil is right in front of me. “Your contact with the Free Army was a spy. This whole thing is a ruse to weed out dissidents. That’s what this is. I’ll bet this whole war is some kind of bullshit scheme the Grays are using to manipulate their slaves to kill each other.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” argues Penny.
“Sure it does!” shouts Phil. “Don’t you see? The Grays are trying to kill off the parts of the population that are a danger to them. Hell, maybe they think there are enough of them now that they don’t need us, and they’re using us to exterminate each other.”
That theory shuts everybody up.
Could that be true?
Lenox is shaking her head and backing away. Whether it is true or not, the idea frightens her.
“I can’t accept that,” says Brice, though it’s the weakest I’ve heard his voice yet.
“Think about it.” Phil taps a finger on his helmet. “It makes sense, right?”
“It’s a guess,” I say. “A theory.” I don’t want to believe it, and I see Brice’s expression through his faceplate and I can see the idea is slowly pushing him to rage. He’s lost a lot of friends. He’s seen them fight for the survival of the earth and he’s seen them die.
Could it all be a waste?
“You’ve never told us who your contact with the Free Army is,” says Phil. “All of us at the grav factory trusted you on that. You said it had to stay secret. I think it’s time you tell us.”
“Why?” asks Penny. “We’re a half-billion miles from earth. What good will the information do you?”
“Maybe we know him,” Phil pushes.
“You don’t,” I tell him.
“Maybe we can contact him. Beam a message back. Get some answers.”
“You can’t.” I try to make it sound final.
“Our communication equipment’s not that good,” says Penny.
“Then we should go back!” shouts Phil. “We’ve been gone a long time, and that battle was a nightmare. We can show back up and tell them some bullshit about chasing a Trog cruiser. Hell, we took out those other three—”
“We?” asks Brice. “I don’t remember a lot of you in that ‘we’.”
“We,” I tell him. “We all had our part to play.”
“Who the hell cares?” Phil’s escalating. “If we go back, we’ll be heroes. Nobody’s going to question us if we say we went chasing Trogs across the solar system.” He looks around to gauge our mood, but doesn’t realize that in typical Phil fashion, he’s incapable of reading other people. “We find your contact with the Free Army and get some answers, or kill him, because it looks to me like he fucked us.”
“You can’t kill him.” I see where this is going.
“Don’t tell me he’s not real,” says Phil.
“Is he real?” asks Brice, looking for a place to focus a rage building inside.
“He was real,” I tell them. “Now he’s dead.”
“Dead?” Phil nearly explodes.
“How?” shouts Penny, matching Phil’s volume.
Lenox drops into a seat. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“The MSS arrested him this morning,” I pause. Was it this morning? “Yesterday morning? I don’t even know what day it is. I do know they arrested him, and you can be sure they’ve beaten every bit of information out he can give, and you can be sure he’s dead.”
Brice is nodding silently because he knows it’s true.
“And you led us into this shit anyway?” shouts Phil. “Even though you knew the MSS would be after us.”
“We all committed,” I tell them. “We all agreed. No turning back.”
“That’s when I thought we’d still have a chance,” yells Phil. “That’s before I knew we’d be stepping into a trap, a trap we were doomed to fall into before we even left earth.” Tears are brimming around Phil’s eyes in the light-g, not rolling down his cheeks like they would be on earth. He’s past anger and moving into despair. “I’ve known you my whole life and all you ever talked about was one day being a free man, like that’s something—something better than the life we had. Well I followed you and I went along and I let you have your secrets and now I’ve let you drag me into this, to get me killed. Dylan Kane, you fucked my wife and you fucked up my life. You toxic prick, you’ve murdered us all!”
“Phil,” I say as he seats himself back in his chair and stares at the floor. “I don’t know if any of that is true. Maybe some of it is. Maybe all of it. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the Grays’ reasons for doing what they’re doing, they’re sending us to the slaughter—not just us, but millions of us, maybe more than a billion.” I point to Brice. “He’s seen it firsthand.” I look around at the rest of those on bridge. “We’ve all seen the pirated videos. We’ve watched our towns empty out—first, all the twenty-year-olds, then most of those in their thirties, then the teenaged boys and girls. They’re all being murdered by this war. And before that, in space, killed in zero-g construction accidents or brain cancer from too much time out in the vacuum with nothing but these shitty orange suits to protect them from solar radiation. We’re being used up.”
I stop for a breather and try to put my rising anger aside. “That asteroid base with those Chinese ships, those other two ships we saw shot out of the sky, it doesn’t change anything. If this is an ambush, I don’t care. It doesn’t change my mind one single bit. I put on this fucking shitty suit today and climbed into this rusty turd of an assault ship because I chose a long time ago I wasn’t going to be a slave, and decided I’m not going to die for a bunch of Grays no matter what reason they have for it. I’ll die for you, Phil. I’ll die for Penny, and Brice and Lenox. I’ll die for every grunt on this ship and I’ll die for every human scattered on every asteroid and broken spaceship from here to earth and back again. I’ll die if I have to, because goddammit, if nothing else, we’re going to die anyway. Why do it for those little gray fucks? Let’s die for each other, for our children, and for humanity.”
I look around.
They’re all speechless.
Still no standing ovation, though.
“The way I see it,” I tell them, “is if we can figure some way to take that asteroid base, and there are more ships coming this way, we might not save the first few to arrive, but we can save the rest. And if we do that, then we have our Free Army. We all saw what we did today with our small army of two assault ships. If we can get six or ten or twenty, we can win this war. If we can win this war, we go back to earth and deal with our Gray masters.”
Brice is the first one to speak. “I’ll sign up for that.”
“I’ve always been with you,” says Penny, though she sounds like she’s reading it from a script.
“I’m in,�
�� says Jablonsky.
I look at Lenox. She nods.
And, of course, Phil is last. He despondently nods.
“Phil,” I say, “I’m proud of you.”
He says, “That makes me feel wonderful.”
It’s a great day for sarcasm.
Chapter 53
We’re all looking at the images on our d-pads again.
“On the edge of the pit,” says Brice. “Right where it bends. Zoom in and tell me what you see.”
“I noticed those, too,” says Penny. “The dust on the surface around each of them has been disturbed.”
I’m zooming and scrolling to get a look at the top edge of the canyon wall. I see it almost immediately. A perfect circle, roughly the color of the asteroid, but with an odd texture. Easily missed at a glance. It clearly doesn’t belong. In the center of the circle is a small dark-colored hole. I’ve seen these before. This one looks like the railgun emplacements the Grays built on the moon all those years ago.
Brice concludes the same thing. “Railguns.”
“Easy to miss if you’re not looking for them,” says Penny.
“Seven,” counts Lenox. “That’s how many I see. Some along the edge of the mine pit. Others among the colony buildings.”
“I saw those when I was stitching the pictures together.” Jablonsky apologizes, “I thought they were part of the mining operation.”
Brice glances at Jablonsky. “Don’t sweat it, that’s why we’re planning this together.”
I zoom out to get a bird’s-eye view, and the gun emplacements turn almost invisible. “Jill never had a chance.”
“Anybody have any suggestions?” asks Penny.
I start. “Phil, given we want to return to the base without being seen and without bubbling all the way there, how long until we get back?”
“Twenty, maybe twenty-two hours,” he answers. “Any faster and I think we’ll create too big of a gravity flare and any Grays looking our way will spot us.”
“Twenty-two it is.” I look around at the others again. “That gives us plenty of time to put together our plan, rest up, and top off our hydro and cal packs.”
“And load up our magazines,” adds Lenox. “We found plenty of ammo on Juji. It’s all for the single-shot rifles. We need to stuff our magazines with those slugs so we can fire on automatic.”
“Get everyone to work on that,” I tell her. “Let’s all get some rest for a few hours and meet back here. We’ll figure something out, then take that asteroid.”
Chapter 54
Scooping up dark gray dust by the handful, I powder myself, working it into the composite fabric. Probably not good for the longevity of the suit, but what the hell do I care? Like the sarge who gave it to me said, I probably won’t live long.
Especially with what I’m about to do.
The Rusty Turd is lying on the surface of the small asteroid, just behind me. We came in on the dark side of a stadium-sized hunk of rock, keeping the mass of oxidized nickel and iron ore between us and the potato-shaped asteroid on which the mining colony sits.
Now only a few miles of vacuum stands between us and our objective, and surprise is still with us.
As far as we can tell.
My squad of fliers is out here with me—Brice, of course, Silva, Mostyn, and Hastings—the only four left after we commandeered the Trog cruiser. Each of us is dusting ourselves in the asteroid’s gray-brown powder, camouflaging our orange suits.
Hopefully, it’s enough.
“What you’ve need to remember,” says Brice, talking to the squad, “is Trog suits aren’t that different. They’ve got a defensive grav field like ours. If you don’t shoot them from the side or behind, your round will deflect.” He pats the center of his chest. “They’ve got a big grav plate right here. Our suits don’t have those. When they power it up, nearly any shot aimed right at their chest won’t make it through.”
“What about those ghost Trogs?” asks Silva. “Seems like you couldn’t hit ‘em anywhere.”
“They have more grav plates in their suits,” guesses Brice. “Or they’re more powerful. Nobody’s ever gotten their hands on a dead ghost Trog to find out. Once that happens, we can cut the suit open and see what the defensive plate configuration is. Until then,” Brice pats his weapon, “overwhelming fire is all you’ve got.”
Silva pulls a Trog blade off her back and the intricate lines on its face glow blue. “These do the trick.”
Brice looks at me, like it’s my fault Silva is carrying a Trog disruptor, yet he’s got one, too. “Don’t depend on that thing. One-on-one, sure, why not? If you like even odds. What we saw on that ship—that was unusual. When they attack, they always come in big numbers.”
“Maybe we need to stop waiting to be attacked,” argues Silva.
That quiets everyone down for a second.
Brice takes it to heart. “Maybe. Maybe you’re right.”
“When we get over there,” I tell them, “use your grenades when you can. We need to catch them in a crossfire when we can, so at least some of us are shooting at their flanks. Then we can kill them.”
“If everything goes to shit,” says Brice, “we meet back here and wait for pickup.”
Nods all around.
“Everybody ready?” I ask.
Nods again.
“Let’s go.”
Using auto-grav set just strong enough to keep us on the surface, we skip away from our ship and slowly work across the asteroid.
Everyone’s quiet while we move. We’ll be fighting the Trogs again, and as a platoon, we lost half our number last time out. Like me, they’re probably thinking about the randomness of war and hoping a railgun slug or a Trog blade doesn’t come their way.
We make our way over the curve of the asteroid’s horizon and stay between rocky protrusions twenty and thirty feet tall, giving us good cover.
Finally, Brice says, “I think this is as good a spot as any.”
I look up. The potato-shaped asteroid is above us, with its narrowest end pointing toward the spot where we stand.
“When you kick off,” I say, “be gentle with the grav. We don’t want to arouse any Grays up there.”
“Turn off your auto-grav before you go,” says Brice, with a chuckle. “Or you’ll fall back down.”
A few of them laugh, imagining the embarrassment.
“On me.” I jump, and I’m suddenly moving at escape velocity for the asteroid’s micro-gravity. At least I hope so. Going into orbit around the rock isn’t in my plan.
Brice, Mostyn, Hastings, and Silva follow.
It’s hard to gauge my speed, though we’re moving slowly.
I look around and feel a twinge of panic. The sun is several hundred million miles away and is bright, but tiny. Jupiter is ahead and off to the left, a three-quarter crescent of orange, tan, and gray stripes filling a large swath of sky. Many of its moons are easy to spot. Twinkles from the sun glinting off other asteroids spread into the distance, almost like the faint bones of a rainbow.
Everywhere else I see black, and billions of pinpricks of light, stars, and galaxies, all so far away—too far away.
Never have I felt so small, so unmoored.
“This isn’t fun,” says Hastings, I guess feeling it, too.
“Keep your eyes on the Potato,” says Brice.
Good advice. I look forward.
We’re on course toward the tip of the asteroid far from the mining colony. I’m hoping the massive rock’s gravity will help pull us toward it, so if our aim is off a bit, it should self-correct.
I take a quick glance to make sure the others are coming along behind me.
Mostyn appears to be drifting off, separating.
“Mostyn,” I say, “are you okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Outer space can be disorienting.” Yeah, sage advice I’m just figuring out for myself.
“I’m fine,” she says, “I pushed off a little too hard with my left foot, I think.”
“Don’t use your gravity to correct, yet,” I tell her. “Wait until we’re closer. Heck, it might be the rest of us who are off course.”
They laugh.
Good.
We’re loosening up. I think we’re ready for the fight to come but we’re not obsessing about it.
“Look at Jupiter,” says Silva. “My god, there’s so much out here and we’re fighting over one planet.”
Despite Phil’s theory about extermination, I say, “It’s not the real estate, it’s the slave labor they want—us.”
“Most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” says Mostyn. She’s still gazing at Jupiter.
Turning back toward the asteroid we left, and then looking at the Potato, I guess we’re halfway across. “I think we all need to adjust a little.”
The women each take their looks and make their estimates.
“I think we’ll all overshoot,” says Mostyn.
“Very small grav corrections only,” says Brice. “We don’t want to alert them to our presence.”
I nudge my suit with a tiny push, then look forward and back again. I think I’m on course.
A quick glance at the others tells me we’re all moving in the same direction.
The potato is starting to loom large above, and I feel like I’m falling headfirst. “Don’t panic,” I tell my grunts as much as I tell myself. “Don’t hit your grav to decelerate yet. Remember, we’re coming in with the same velocity we kicked off the other asteroid with. When we get close, use your suit’s grav to get yourselves oriented feet-down. It shouldn’t hurt.”
“Unless you land face-first,” laughs Silva.
“I’ll land better than you,” says Hastings, and I guess the two of them must have some private joke about it.
Within fifty yards of the surface, we’re not in a direct line of sight to anywhere along the top or bottom of the Potato. With all the stone and metal ores between us and our enemies, we’re at a point where we can do pretty much anything with our suit grav and it won’t be seen by Trogs or Grays.
Over the command comm, I notify the ship. “We’re coming in on the surface. Give us five or ten and—”
