by B. V. Larson
“I see…” he said thoughtfully. “Human friendship is more subject to emotional whim than I was led to believe. Very well. Please let me know when you like me again and we shall resume our former cordiality.” Zaxby moved away, apparently oblivious to the menacing faces on all sides.
“Don’t worry about him,” said Straker, taking Engels’ elbow and seating them both in a corner. “He’s an alien. He doesn’t think like we do.”
“You don’t think like I do either, but you wouldn’t murder four hundred civilians, some of them children.”
“No, but I am having trouble releasing them to help the Mutuality. They have no idea what they’re in for.”
Engels shrugged. “They won’t torture children, and as for the adults… we endured it. They can too. If they’re the weaklings they seem to be, they’ll cave at the first hint of pain and join the groupthinkers like good little sheep. They’ll be enjoying their workers’ paradise in no time.”
“But they’ll still be working for our enemies.”
“What if we dropped them on a neutral planet somewhere?” Engels asked.
Straker gave her a thumbs-down. “In all my readings of the Unmutual nets, there’s no such thing as neutrality with the Hundred Worlds or the Mutuality. There are only allies, enemies, or planets too distant to be at war. Anything far away wouldn’t have many humans, so they’d be refugees among aliens. That’s assuming we could even convince the Unmutuals to waste time and effort transporting them there.”
Engels massaged her temples. “Dammit. No good choices.”
“Nope. We’re at war. It will be hard to convince the Unmutuals to expend more than minimum resources on a bunch of cowards.”
“I’m glad it’s not my decision anyway. Major Ramirez is in charge, acting for DeChang. They’ll get left here for Mutuality pickup.”
Straker’s brows furrowed. “Unless I can convince her otherwise. I’ll give it another shot.”
Chapter 24
Captured asteroid habitat Freiheit.
Straker failed in his arguments to drop the refugees off at a distant planet. Ramirez stood firm, and Straker eventually accepted her military decision. That’s what he reported to Engels.
Engels wished he were as stubborn as he’d been when he refused to knuckle under to the Mutualists, but of course, this was different. They’d all joined the Unmutuals and pledged to follow orders. Otherwise, they could resign their commissions and leave, but Ramirez’s decision didn’t seem immoral, just problematic: the lesser of two evils.
The time soon came to enter sidespace. Those civilians staying behind loaded all their supplies under the watchful supervision of Unmutual soldiers, and then launched to float in the void far enough from Freiheit to avoid its transit field.
Engels sat in her lifter cockpit again and observed on multiple screens linked to Carson. The rest of the Unmutual forces clustered nearby in the open, the artificial sky dark above them in order to channel every erg of power to the engines. They stood ready to load up and flee to the frigate if the attempt failed.
If the attempt succeeded, they would ride Freiheit in comfort and Carson would follow at an easy pace. The whole trip back to the Unmutuals’ secret star system should take about two weeks.
“Final phase ready,” she heard Murdock say over the general comlink. “One minute to transit. Capacitors full. Solar array optimized. Auxiliary generators at one hundred and five percent. Field strength nominal. Sidespace engines, report.”
“Engine one nominal. We are go.”
“Engine two reading outside nominal parameters. Hold at fifty-five seconds.”
“Confirmed, hold at fifty-five seconds.”
Soon, the comlink filled with chatter, technical jargon thrown fast and furious back and forth. Engels was able to follow it. Something to do with field balance and the emitters placed around the base interacting with an unexpected ore deposit. They’d have to move them and recalibrate.
She nodded off in her seat. She wasn’t on watch, after all. She was on hold, ready to load up and lift if the sidespace gambit failed.
She awoke more than two hours later to the controlled urgency in Murdock’s voice.
“Fifty seconds. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten, nine…” She gripped the arms of her seat pointlessly. Whether a jump succeeded or failed, sidespace insertion didn’t involve actual three-dimensional motion.
When Murdock’s countdown ended, it felt like the end of the world.
“One… We’re blurring out.”
Engels felt the odd twisting that always came with transit, the impression of being shoved laterally, a sensation that had earned the process its nickname of “sidespace,” rather than, say, “hyperspace.”
Neither term was very accurate; the alternate set of dimensions they traveled through lay in no particular direction from normal space. No actual sideward motion had ever been detected on even the most sensitive instruments.
Right before the universe disappeared and all the external displays showed the deep gray of sidespace, a flash within a screen caught her eye. The display had been focused on the refugees and their floating village of docked small craft.
Cheering broke out on the broader comnet as it became clear the base had made the transit successfully.
“Congratulations, Mister Murdock,” Major Ramirez said. “You’ve made history. You’ve doubled our resource processing and manufacturing capacity, not to mention supervised the acquisition of critical Hundred Worlds technology and volunteer labor for us. Well done.”
“Thank you, Major, but I couldn’t have accomplished it without the efforts of everyone involved in this operation.”
The Unmutuals chattered happily on, continuing their back-patting. Engels tuned them out as she pulled up the record of the screen she’d been looking at and shifted it to her large high-resolution holoplate.
After running it repeatedly, it certainly looked as if there had been an explosion among the refugee craft, or at least a large fire. Something that started just as Freiheit went into sidespace. She slowed the recording as much as possible, identifying the very moment when the flash became visible.
A chill settled over her and her heart thudded. She glanced over her shoulder, making sure she was alone in the lifter’s cockpit before continuing her analysis. Could the flash have been a laser strike?
She pulled up the external feed from Carson, matching it to the chrono readings of the flash, and sighed with relief. The warship’s beam waveguides remained stowed in travel position. No railgun had discharged, no missile had been fired.
Missile… she ran the record back far enough to confirm Carson hadn’t launched a guided weapon, cold or hot, slow or fast, to strike the refugees. She sat back in her padded seat and thought about it.
Maybe it was a meaningless anomaly, an artifact of the optical sensors. Or maybe one of the refugee craft had lit its engines for some reason. A mistake? An attempt to dodge what they feared might be coming? It occurred to her that Carson, if she stayed behind, could obliterate them at leisure, with no one the wiser but the crew.
But that seemed unlikely. A horrifying secret like that, shared by so many in the crew, would get out… unless Captain Gray and her crew were far more evil than she believed.
She’d shared drinks with Ellen Gray. She’d eaten with the crew every day. The rank and file were genuinely trying to do good, even if they were wild and undisciplined. One ruthless agent might get away with such a thing, but not the captain and crew of an entire warship.
Then what had she seen? Hmm… The sensor and data store was a full-spectrum electro-optical module, which meant it recorded much farther up and down the scale than mere visible light. Expanding the display, she searched for telltales from various bands—UV, laser, IR, X-rays, particle beam scatter and many more—and located the most energetic one.
Infrared. Heat. She’d been right. It was either an engine on full power, or an explosion. She hunted up and down the bands, looking for the b
yproducts of a fusion motor, but didn’t find them.
Next, she searched for evidence of an uncontrolled hydrogen-oxygen fire, and confirmed it. The fire was real, and from its expansion curve, it had just started when Freiheit transited out of range.
Then, on a hunch, she looked for the spectroscopic emissions from chemical explosives.
Bingo.
Horror settled over her anew. A bomb? Who could have done such a thing?
She downloaded the information onto a data crystal and clipped it inside a pocket of her flight suit, still shaking. Someone else had to see this. Someone she trusted.
Before she found Straker, Engels ran into Loco inside the mechsuit parts factory, working on his partly disassembled Sledgehammer, its guts pulled out for maintenance and repair. She recognized densely packed flexible circuitry, room-temperature superconductors, and electroactive polymer muscles that were, kilo for kilo, a thousand times as powerful as those of humans.
She considered talking to him about the bomb—but changed her mind. His mouth was just too big.
“Hey, Carly-car,” Loco said when he noticed her. “How’re they hangin’? Still perky?”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Okay, Lieutenant Carly-car. How does it feel to have Derek get promoted ahead of you?”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t really bother me. I already told him he should be in charge, I’m not the commander type anyway.”
Loco smiled. “Me neither. What’s the latest, then, hotness?”
Engels suppressed a grin. Loco might be incorrigible, but at least he was cheerful. “Where’s Straker?”
“Off brooding somewhere. I think that whole thing with the refugees got him thinking.”
“Nothing wrong with thinking…” she said.
“Unless it messes with his head. You know Derek, always worried about his honor and integrity.”
Engels changed her mind about not telling Loco about her discovery. She had to tell someone. She stepped up to Loco on impulse, putting a hand on his arm. She could see a quip rising in his throat, only to die at her earnest expression.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Is there a non-networked computer suite around here that you can access privately? Something with holoscreens?”
“I’ll ask Manny,” he said, giving her a curious look. “He’s one of the local mechsuit factory techs helping me. Gonna be really valuable as we ramp up the program.” Loco patted her hand and left her standing for a moment.
When he returned, he led her down a hallway. “He said there’s a design comp-suite around here somewhere. Here it is.”
When they entered the room with its multiple holoscreens, Engels booted up the system and disconnected the network hardlink. “Not even a password… and this is a standard Hundred Worlds setup.” She plugged in the data crystal and ran the vid data. “Here we go. What do you make of that?”
Loco leaned into the screen, peering at it from a handspan away. “Looks like a fire or explosion. Meteorite strike?”
Engels colored. “I should have thought of that. For some reason my mind went straight to sabotage or attack. Wait, no! Here, let me show you.” She pulled up the multispectral analysis. “This is a chemical explosive signature, so it couldn’t have been a meteorite.”
“Hmm... Are you sure that signature couldn’t be a false positive from something caught in a hydro-ox fire? Batteries, plastics? Explosive bolts? Were any of those boats armed with missiles or mines that might have burned or exploded accidentally?”
“No, nothing that fits this signature,” she said. “Not even explosive bolts. All the boats were disarmed and thoroughly prepped. I did some of it myself, along with…” Engels trailed off, staring at nothing. Great Cosmos! She knew the Ruxin’s morality wasn’t quite like humanity’s, but she thought he’d been given clear instructions to leave well enough alone. Dammit!
“What?” Loco asked.
“Who else? Zaxby,” she said. “We’re two of the most qualified pilots, so we did the prepping.”
“But there were other people doing the checks too. Other Unmutual techs. On other boats. You didn’t do them all.”
“Yes, but it would only take one. Remember how Zaxby suggested we eliminate those people?”
Loco sat back. “Yeah. I’d forgotten. I thought it was funny as shit at the time, but… you think he might have planted something to wipe them out?”
“No… maybe…. I don’t want to think so!”
“He’s a smart guy, right? An alien brainiac. If it was me, I’d set a bomb to go off at least an hour after we left. Nobody would know.”
Engels’ voice rose. “But we had that two-hour technical delay... If he planted a bomb, he must have been biting his fingernails.”
“That squid ain’t got no fingernails, Carly.”
“Stop—”
“Okay, okay. You know it’s a term of endearment, right?” He leered.
“Never gonna happen, Loco.”
Loco spread his hand on his throat. “Oh, dear. Be still, my broken balls.”
“Shut up. You wouldn’t want me anyway. Not with my skin still scarred from torture and mottled from the Hok biotech.”
Loco scooted his seat over until it touched hers and leaned in close. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Don’t go copping a feel.”
“If I did, I’d be making my point.”
“What point?”
“That you’re not ugly. Not to me, and not to Derek, because we’ve known you for a long time. We don’t see your skin, or your bad haircut or any of that. We see you, no matter what face you got. We both love you.”
Engels put fingertips to her cheek. “Thanks, Loco. You’re a real friend.”
“Ouch, the friend zone. Okay, never mind, I’ll stop it. Since I’m such a friend and we’re talking like this, I’ll tell you something else. You and Derek were made for each other, and I’m not actually trying to get in the way of that. I got a local girl I’m seeing anyway. I just joke around, while I hope you guys will get over your stupid past and....” He mimed an explosion with his fingers. “Boom. It’s gonna be epic.”
“What past?” she demanded.
“You and him were always like binary planets, orbiting each other but never hooking up. Like, you were always afraid that if you did, there would be some kind of disaster. Well, guess what? We’re not in a rigid military structure anymore, and you guys can finally make it happen, but what do you do? You keep dancing around like you’re on eggshells. You’re both afraid.”
“I’m not afraid.”
Loco scratched his head with both hands. “Yeah, that’s what Derek said too, but he is. I think you both got this childish illusion in your heads from when you fell in love at Academy and you’re afraid of losing it. You keep each other at arm’s length because you’re petrified of dealing with reality, just like those people we left on those boats. If someone did blow them up, well, guess what? You’ll be the same as them, hoping so much for emotional safety that the chance for something real passes you up—and then you die. You guys got two weeks in sidespace here on this base. Get busy, girl! Drag that earnest fool into bed!”
“Loco, you make a rotten psych.”
“That’s because psychs don’t tell you what you need to hear. Only friends do that. You know, like you said I am.” He leaned back and pointed a finger at her while winking and nodding with exaggerated drama.
Engels sighed. “Right. Thanks, I think. Back to this explosion… should we report it to Ramirez?”
“No. Better to report to DeChang when we arrive. If Zaxby did it, we don’t want to tip him off. He might kill some more people. If he didn’t, better not to point false suspicion. Lots of people already think he’s a bloodthirsty, alien asshole that doesn’t care about human life.”
“Yeah, we don’t want him hanged by frontier justice.”
“Besides, how’d you hang a guy like that? Where’s his freakin’ neck? And all thos
e ropy arms…”
Engels slapped Loco’s shoulder and laughed. “Stay funny, Loco. We need your sense of humor.”
“Yeah, that’s me, the eternal sidekick to the tall, dark, handsome hero. Well, tall and dark, anyway. Okay, maybe just tall.” He shrugged. “I don’t mind. Not everyone’s cut out to be a Glory Girl or a Bravo Boy.”
Engels laughed again, and then she felt her face fall. “Those showvids we watched, those action figures we collected… was it all just to program us to be good little patriots? Like Lazarus said?”
“If so, it wasn’t our fault. It wasn’t the common people’s fault, either.” He paused. “Do you think that’s why Derek isn’t pushing to go back to the Hundred Worlds? And why you’re not pushing him to push?”
“Maybe,” she said. “For my part, I’m wondering where home really is.”
“Lazarus got inside your head.”
“Lazarus was a lying asshole,” replied Engels angrily. “Whatever he said, it was to turn us away from our people and toward the Mutuality.”
“Looks like he succeeded with the first part. Nobody wants to go home.”
“Because our real home is anywhere we can be with each other.”
Loco gazed at her, serious for once. “Got that right.”
Engels stood, pulling out the crystal and wiping the system. “All right. This stays under wraps for now. Don’t even tell Derek unless he needs to know. And we’ll keep our eyes on Zaxby. If he does anything suspicious, try to get the evidence on vid or pics.”
* * *
Across the habitat, Frank Murdock in the Base Control Center noticed the mechsuit factory’s design comp-suite being taken offline, and then put back online again. He was an obsessive engineer, an Unmutual techno-geek extraordinaire. At Major Ramirez’s instructions, he’d already installed monitoring software in all the high-interest facilities, and the mechsuit factory rated just below the BCC itself in importance.
Accessing the system remotely, he reviewed its offline use. Though its first layer of memory had been dumped and erased, his monitoring program kept a backup record of everything.
