We Are All Enlisted

by Michael A. Hooten

  Big Mike said, “Rightside. Good to hear you, buddy.”

  “Where the hell are you?” I said. “Is there anyone else?”

  “Not likely,” he said. “As for where I am… I’m up in the reactor bay. Evidently they didn’t target the tower.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No food, no power, not much air or water...” He sighed. “I’m just dandy. For the next little bit.”

  “If you can get here—”

  “No can do,” he interrupted. “This place is designed to seal off in an emergency, remember? There’s just not supposed to be anyone inside when it does.”

  “Surely the Navy put in some kind of escape mechanism…”

  Big Mike laughed. “They did. All it takes is for the reactor to be hooked into a computer that can talk to it. How likely is that to happen?”

  “Mike,” I said. “I’ve got a mini reactor down here, remember? This thing is designed to be independent of the rest of the ship, and all my systems are working. If I can just get it hooked into the tower, I should be able to get you out.”

  There was a long silence. “Mike?” I said. “You still there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “Just thinking. And starting to hope.”

  I was already moving. Down from the hot seat, looking for tools, making sure I could still access the ship’s schematics on my tablet… and then looking at my hatch. It wasn’t safety sealed on this end like the reactor bay, and it didn’t look damaged. But I doubted it was a true airlock anymore.

  “Mike,” I said. “I need to open my hatch, but I’m pretty sure there’s no atmosphere on the other side. What do I do?”

  “Stay calm, of course,” he said. “Very important first step.”

  “Okay, but then what?”

  “Then you want to make sure you have a couple of full bottles for your suit, secure your compartment's air supply, and open the hatch slowly.”

  I followed his instructions. The system warned me of possible doom, but let me override the audible, thankfully. I turned the wheel and pulled. Nothing happened.

  “I can’t get it open,” I said.

  “Try a pry bar,” Mike said. “The air pressure is probably holding it closed. Just crack it a little, and it should release pretty quick.”

  “Right,” I said. I remembered learning that in one of my classes way back when. Was it the on the DeGrasse? At Port Washington? It was hard to recall with all the adrenaline pumping through me. I broke the seal, opened the hatch, and then grabbed the things I thought I might need. The first was a long coil of data cable, and the connector kit. I also grabbed a portable welding gun, and a kit with multimeters and all kinds of hand tools. And the big first aid kit. The whole thing was bulky and awkward, but zero g’s is great for that kind of thing.

  I headed down the ladder well head first. Big Mike started singing. It was a hymn, of course, but not one of the more rousing ones. This one was about counting your blessings. “Mike?” I said. “You should conserve your air.”

  “Gotta breathe either way,” he said. “But I can mute my mic if you want.”

  “No!” I said. Shocked at my own passion, I cleared my throat and said, “No, I want to be able to hear you, to know you’re still there. I was just worried about you running out of oxygen faster.”

  “Thanks. But I’m not breathing hard. Just trying to keep my spirits up.”

  “Okay, just don’t—Holy hell.”

  “What is it?” he asked, a note of alarm in his voice.

  I had come out of the ladder well to what appeared to be a normal, if dark, section of passageway, despite the fact the hatch didn’t seat properly anymore. But when I shined my head light towards either end, the walls ended in chunks of twisted metal. “Mike? It looks like most of the interior has been shredded. This is going to be tricky.”

  “Take your time,” he replied. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The forward end of the passage was completely tangled with the remains of several compartments: parts of monitors, chairs, and bulkheads. I also saw a suited arm sticking out of the mess, but fortunately I couldn’t see anything else of whoever it was. Big Mike started singing again, something about needing God every hour. I wished suddenly I could sing along, because I desperately needed some kind of guidance.

  I turned aft, and pulled myself down to the wreckage. It wasn’t so bad, and it looked like I could get further into the ship without tearing my suit. But first I shined my wrist light inside, to see what was waiting for me.

  The infrastructure was mostly intact, that much I could tell. You could see the ribs of the ship criss crossing a morass of floating junk. Sections of wall floated around with mangled equipment, and dangling cables stretched like tentacles into the debris.

  And too many limp steel suits, with crushed helmets or limbs bent in odd directions.

  “Are you okay?” Big Mike said in my ear.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “You’re breathing hard.”

  “It’s not pretty,” I said.

  “What did they do to us?”

  I took a deep breath as I began making my way through the mess, holding onto a thick steel beam that angled up towards the middle of the ship and out of sight. “From what I saw, they used an armor piercing round followed immediately by some kind of explosive charge. Nothing big enough to open up the hull, but enough to scramble the insides pretty well. Oh God!”

  “What? What is it?”

  “I just saw the captain. At least, part of him. The part still strapped to his chair.”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”

  “Mike?” I said as I passed more bodies. “Can you keep singing? I need something, anything, to distract me.”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  He began singing, and I recognized the chorus: “All is well, all is well.” It was surprisingly helpful, right up until he sang that one verse again:

  “And should we die before our journey's through,

  Happy day, all is well.

  Then we are free from toil and sorrow too.

  With the Saints we shall dwell.”

  I almost lost it. Evidently something slipped out, because Mike stopped and said, “I'm sorry.”

  “It's okay,” I said.

  “Boy are you a terrible liar.”

  “I sure am.” I found an intact conduit, mounted to a girder that went straight up, and started tying in my data cable. “That seems like a kind of morbid song.”

  “The Mormons sang it as they crossed the Plains,” he said. I wasn't sure what he was talking about, but it didn’t matter. “It took months, and a lot of them died. But they were headed to Zion, so they figured they were good either way.”

  “Is that how you feel right now?” I asked. When he didn't respond, I mentally cursed myself. “I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  “It's okay,” he said. “Yeah, I am good with whatever happens. But I wish I could see my kids one more time.”

  “You will,” I said. “Promise.”

  “We'll see.”

  He started another hymn, something sweet but a little sad, about the blood of Christ. I worked on tracing out the data line, fixing breaks and shorts as fast as I could. Closer to the tower I found spaces and passageways in more intact condition. The men inside tended to be swollen from the vacuum, but you could still make out expressions of surprise, shock, and terror. One guy looked almost serene, though. He had his helmet on, and his steel suit was unblemished except for two small holes, one in his chest and one in his back from the armor piercing round. I didn't recognize him, but his name patch said Buckley. It occurred to me that he was probably the first to die, and the one who least understood what was happening. I tried not to laugh, but it was hard. Stress does that to you.

  I was close to the reactor bay, but I couldn't find the right circuit to override the emergency controls. The control room was mostly intact, but the circuits leading to it were a terrible mess. Big
Mike's voice was starting to fade. “Stay with me,” I said.

  “Trying to,” he sighed. “It's really hard though.”

  “I can’t find the override controls.”

  “You have to patch into the main console,” he said. “If the tower has comms with the ship, the locks open automatically.”

  “Okay, hang on.”

  He began singing again. It started with “God be with you till we meet again,” and he sang it in almost a whisper. It was a farewell song, I knew it, and I started yelling at him even as I tried to pull apart some scrambled wires.

  “Mike! Big Mike! I’m coming for you, and you’ve got to be there when I open your door!”

  He stopped and chuckled faintly. “You done good, buddy. You done real good. But the only thing that you’re going to find is my body. My spirit’s almost gone.”

  “Don’t go!” I pleaded. “You can’t leave me here alone!”

  “We are all enlisted til the conflict is o'er,” he whispered. “Happy are we.”

  I kept working, and kept calling, but he didn’t respond. It took me almost thirty more minutes to get everything talking and pop the hatch. Big Mike was there in his steel suit, looking like he was asleep. But not really looking like himself at all. Kind of like when I saw my father in his casket, and I recognized all the features, but not the man. I still hooked a full bottle into his regulator, and got the suit defibrillator from the first aid kit. I worked on reviving him for another thirty minutes, but nothing helped.

  In the end, I took his body back to my turret. I couldn't save him, but he had been with me until the end, and I couldn't just leave him in the wreck and the mess.

  I sat in the hot seat, watching Juno below. We had maintained our speed and general attitude, so I could see the asteroid to port and the debris cloud to starboard. For the first hour or so, I felt not only hopeless, but almost suicidal. There was nothing left but a cold death. Why not put myself out of my own misery?

  But a few things changed my mind. The first was the memory of Big Mike, singing while he died, still hoping for rescue despite the odds that he couldn’t beat. And it’s one thing to say you hope for something, and another to see it so evident. I couldn’t give up after his example.

  I had also promised Katy I would tell her about Juno.

  One other thing made me reevaluate my helplessness: the miners. They launched from the space pad next to the biggest dome, and at first I couldn't tell why. But after a few orbits, it became pretty obvious: they were running salvage missions on the ships they had killed.

  I worried at first that they might notice me, or that they would come to the Rosy Roads first, but I never saw more than three crews, and they started with the Madison, the Spokane, and the Tulsa. It wasn’t a random salvage, either. They were focused on the reactor towers.

  I had plenty of time, and plenty of sensors. I mapped out all twenty six ships, and examined them closely as they passed. Every single one had an intact reactor, and most had intact engines as well. It didn’t make sense to me at first. The Navy had taught us to focus our fire on the energy plants of the enemy, because if you could breach the core, you could disable your foe. The miners seemed to have had an opposite approach: they had targeted the control centers. My sensors said we had disabled a half dozen reactors on Juno. And now they were collecting twenty seven new ones.

  The bastards had won, and magnificently so.

  When I realized that, I slumped back in my chair and just wondered what they might do when they found me. I figured I would either be killed or taken prisoner. Neither prospect seemed much better than my slow death due to lack of air, water, or food. I had plenty of power; between my small reactor and the ship’s main, I theoretically had enough to travel anywhere in the solar system.

  I took a nap. I know, it seems like a weird thing to do, but it had been almost a week since Big Mike died. It’s not like I had been awake for seven straight days, but it’s also true that my sleep was restless and filled with nightmares. So I felt drained most of the time, and feeling defeated, I just gave in to the impulse to close my eyes and hope for some real rest.

  But I dreamed instead. First I heard Big Mike singing, but no matter where I searched, I couldn’t find him. I did find Farooq, who said he was praying for me, and Smitty with his big grin and sarcastic laugh. Turnbull appeared to chide me for not being more of a team player, and pointed to Katy accusingly. Then we all sat down in a classroom with Ensign Abercrombie, listening to him go over weapons systems, capabilities, and uses.

  And then he was cut down by a rail gun shell, followed by an explosion that crumpled the walls and opened up a hole in the hull that showed me the surface of Juno.

  I woke with a start. I looked at the asteroid below, seeing the lights from the major installations. There weren’t that many, and I scrolled through the data I had collected. There were seven major bases, scattered across the surface. They weren’t too spread out, and I could see as many as five at a time, with the other two visible within an hour afterwards.

  So I checked my ammunition. I had three hundred rounds of explosive charges, and twice that of armor piercing rounds. It wasn’t a lot, but the whole setup was a kludge, so I was just glad that the ammo hadn’t been stored in the main hull. I wasn’t sure if it would let me program the guns to fire automatically, and at first it didn’t, but after feeding it data—orbit projections, maps of Juno, power readouts—it decided that I had sufficiently considered the problem. I got all my targets lined up and ready to go. Then I sat back and waited.

  The first base came into view a couple of hours later. The guns locked on to it, and swiveled as it passed underneath me. When it was near the receding horizon, I said, “God damn you all,” and hit the button.

  They fired, first the port side gun, then the starboard side. Armor piercing, then explosive. I had learned my lesson. Twenty rounds into each dome, and forty into the main base. And just like with the fleet, there were no major explosions, no outward sign that anything had happened at all, except the lights went out.

  Oh, and the salvage crews scrambled away from the wrecks they were working on and began hightailing it back to the surface. It was pretty easy to shoot them down.

  After the first rush of seeing the guns fire, and seeing the salvage ships crash on the surface, I felt pretty worn out. All the energy of the previous few days just passed right out of me, and I slept about fourteen hours. At first it was deep and dreamless, but then the quiet got so bad that my own heartbeat woke me up. I put on some music, but everything annoyed me. And despite having nearly a million songs stored on my local drives, I didn’t have any Mormon hymns. I felt my loneliness keenly—I had just destroyed the only people within a million miles. As far as I knew, I was only person left in Juno’s vicinity. And it gave me plenty more nightmares.

  I found out later, much later, that I hadn’t killed the whole asteroid, but I sure thought I had. That’s what I had been going for. And I did get about ninety percent of their population, and set them back tremendously. It took over a year before Juno was a viable base again for anyone. And it earned me the nickname Grim Reaper. I am the most despised man in the solar system—and the most feared.

  Chapter 13

  So how is it that I’m still alive, you might wonder. Well, it’s in part because I’m a stubborn son of a bitch. But mostly it had to do with boredom.

  I was sitting there all alone, and wondering what death would feel like, when it occurred to me that I could still try to live. All I had to do was figure out how to hook up the engines, the comms, and some way to navigate. I had time, so I started to work.

  I slept when I was tired, ate when I was hungry, and worked pretty steadily otherwise. First, I inventoried all my stores, and I found that had about two months’ supply. I had more air than anything, and I was still recycling water in my steel suit plus a full tank in the turret, but food was a limiting factor. I had my little stash of snacks, and two cases of MRE’s that had been there
for who knows how long, but I would need more. I did discover a recycler tucked away in the back of a cabinet. I hooked it up to my steel suit, and it sucked out the waste, performed a little molecular rearrangement, and viola, I had a nutrient pill. Great. Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “eat shit and die”.

  Next I began making excursions into the main hull, first to see if there was anything I could use as is, but then to start cleaning up. I put all the bodies into the aft shuttle bay. It was relatively undamaged, had enough room for the crew, and everyone I found ended up there. Except Big Mike.

  It took a month, but I managed to get quite a lot of the interior organized. Everything damaged beyond use went starboard, anything that might help went port. The few compartments that were somewhat intact were scrounged for supplies and equipment. Everything was such a mess, though, and even things that might have salvage value gave me little confidence.

  Then I found the radio.

  It wasn’t a large rig, really a backpack with a transceiver and a really big battery. But it powered up on the first try, and when I scanned the tags on it, my tablet showed me manual that gave me its specs, and more importantly, how to operate it.

  It was designed for short range microwave transmissions, but it had a bunch of the standard Navy encryption codes already installed. I flipped through the major channels, but didn’t hear anything. Of course, I was sitting inside a tin can, which is not ideal for receiving radio waves. If I was going to talk to anyone, I would need an external antenna. But thanks to my Grampa, I knew how to build one, and I had the equipment to do it.

  One of my 3D printers had a pretty hefty footprint, so I looked through the files stored in it, but it didn’t have anything quite right. I wasn’t sure I could design what I needed, but its CPU had some fairly powerful design tools, and I was able to print up a pretty solid parabolic dish with a mirrored interior. The transmitter was a little trickier, but again, I had time, and a ton of reference books on the local drives, and sure enough, I found some designs that I could adapt. It took some more 3D printing, and learning how to use the circuit board printer, but I got it done within a week. Plus it kept me busy, and distracted.