by Ben Weaver
“How’d you get caught?”
“Long story,” said another cadet, his dark hair thinning at the crown, his beard matted with dirt. “None of your business, though.”
“Don’t mind him,” said the blond. “By the way, I’m Tim Coris. He’s Ric Santorman, and he’s Brandon Tai.” The last guy, perhaps the leanest and frailest, glanced up to reveal tear-stained cheeks.
“This is Rooslin Halitov,” I said. “He’s usually pretty talkative.”
Halitov fought against the dirt and tape. He was cursing me, all right.
Once the Marines had locked us into our seats, the ramp cycled shut, and the shuttle pivoted west as it rose, the landing skids chinking into their bays. My bravery had not faltered thus far, but as we lifted off, the reality of the situation struck a solid blow; while I’d been a POW before, you never knew what to expect. I felt scared, breathless, and furious at myself for putting so much trust in Paul. I lay my head on the jumpseat, about to close my eyes. The two Marines who had stayed aboard to escort us sat up near the cockpit, just behind the pilot and co-pilot. Something flashed. Both slumped in their seats.
A fourth long-haired, bearded man, this one also blond, exceedingly thin, but with strikingly familiar eyes, put a finger to his lips, the Ka-bar in his hand still dripping with blood. He had willed himself into the ATC, and his gaze widened on me and Halitov before he whirled toward the cockpit, raising the knife.
8
While Halitov and I typically had bad timing and worse luck, we had stumbled our way into someone else’s rescue attempt. Perhaps the universe’s guilty conscience had something to do with that. No matter. We would happily allow ourselves to be saved. Trouble was, our “rescuer” had other plans.
The wild-haired blond with those familiar eyes stormed into the cockpit, slit the co-pilot’s throat, then held the knife at the pilot’s sternum and cried, “Get the tawt computer online. I’m going to feed you new coordinates.”
Our pilot, a man no older than the lieutenant, had a decision to make: life or loyalty. He turned his head, eyed his dead comrade, then simply said, “Roger that.” He reached forward, glided his finger over a touch screen. “Ready.”
As the knife-wielding blond rattled off the coordinates, I concentrated on the numbers and searched through cerebroed data in my head for a location, and, as usual found more than I needed. Star system: Procyon A/B. White dwarf. 11.4 light-years from Earth. Satellite: Icillica, sole moon of Procyon C. Surface gravity: .787. Atmosphere: hydrogen, with traces of oxygen and nitrogen. Terrain: craters covered by frozen water and methane. Primary colonies: Regal, Victory, Augusta, Wintadia, and Colyad, all mining operations. Chief exports: nickel, iron ore, apatite. The data was complete, though it failed to explain why we were heading to a dirty snowball in the middle of nowhere.
“Coordinates locked,” reported the pilot.
“Hey!” I cried. “We can’t tawt yet. I have to contact Colonel Beauregard and Ms. Brooks. This is urgent. It can’t wait.”
“It’ll have to, Scotty boy. Because you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this moment. You don’t recognize me, do you?”
Oh my god. I did know him. Private Eugene Val d’Or, Kilo Company, Twenty-seventh Platoon, Eightieth Squad. We had been first years together at the academy. I remembered reading his name on that Racinian Conditioning Fatality Report, the same report that listed my brother dead, and while Jarrett had been kidnapped by the Wardens and given a new identity, Val d’Or had obviously met a different fate, one he was trying to revise before my eyes.
“I know who you are,” I told him.
“And I’m sure Halitov over there remembers me cutting his rope out on old Whore Face, don’t you, big guy?”
Halitov emitted a muffled scream and fought against the locked bars.
“Eugene, please,” I said. “Let me get off that signal.”
“Scope’s full. Atmoattacks everywhere,” he replied, then regarded the pilot. “Tawt. Now!”
“Tawt clock is active,” said the pilot. “Stand by.”
“If you don’t let me contact them, we could—”
I began my sentence in Exeter’s atmosphere, felt my stomach drop, then finished that sentence over sixty light-years away:
“—lose the war…”
“Tawt complete,” reported the pilot, furiously working his touch screen to shut down the drive system.
Dim white light filtered through the canopy as the system panned into view. We streaked toward a bluish white fleck burning on the fringe of the white dwarf’s glow.
“Unlock us now,” said Tim Coris.
Val d’Or nodded and ordered the pilot out of the cockpit. They passed into the hold, then the pilot took a jumpseat and locked himself down. Only then did Val d’Or unlock his comrades’ safety bars, leaving Halitov and I trapped in our seats.
Halitov, whose hands had been bound by standard-issue force cuffs, groaned for Val d’Or to remove the tape from his mouth. Our old rival complied, and Halitov whined and leaned over to heave a disgusting mud pile.
“Is he puking?” asked Ric Santorman.
Halitov looked up, mud dripping from his chin. “What’s it look like, asshole?”
“How long till we make orbit?” Coris asked Val d’Or.
“Clock said fourteen minutes. Autopilot will put us right in the slot. See, you sonsabitches! I told you it’d work. You just had to trust me.”
“Eugene, you have no idea what’s going on out there,” I said. “I have to contact the colonel and Ms. Brooks.”
“No, you don’t.” He dematerialized. I craned my head to find him standing beside me. “You’re the last person in all the colonies I’d expect to find here.”
I faced him. “Likewise. Now, you’re going to walk over to the cockpit, and you’re going to get the pilot to activate the emergency beacon so we can tawt out a chip to Exeter.”
“I’m not giving up our location.”
“Why not? You worried about being caught? Being drafted back into the Guard Corps? They think you’re dead. You probably smashed your tac. They can’t get to you.”
“Unless someone tells them who I am, and they confirm via DNA analysis. But to tell you the truth, I’m worried more about my colleagues here, who are still classified MIA and have no desire to fight in this fucking war anymore. They’re going home with me. And we’ll figure it out from there.”
“Let me ask you a question. While you were planning this big rescue and tawt out to Icillica, did it occur to you that your home might be enemy-occupied territory?”
“Of course it did,” he answered, his voice faltering a little.
“Well, it didn’t occur to me!” shouted Brandon Tai. “Eugene, did you dump us back into the shit hole!”
Val d’Or hustled toward the cockpit, and, forgetting that the controls were user-specific, attempted to pull up long-range sensor reports from the system. He swore, raced back into the hold and fetched the pilot. After a moment’s work at his touch screen, the pilot looked back at Val d’Or and said, “Looks like two cruisers in polar orbit, and I’m betting they’ve been there for a while, which means they’re supporting ground forces. Garrisons have been established. There’s a pair of atmoattacks en route. They’ve tagged us, read our log, and one of those pilots is hailing. What do you want me to say?”
“No reply yet. Calculate a close quarters tawt into the lower atmosphere over Colyad.”
“Our drive’s a twenty-one twenty. The computer’s not equipped to handle a tawt that precise.”
Val d’Or threw his head back, whipping hair out of his eyes, then slammed a fist on the pilot’s console. “We can’t tawt? Then make up some bullshit excuse and get us past those fighters and on the ground—or I’m going to slit your throat.”
“I have no authorization codes to be operating in this system and no good reason to support why I tawted in. I can’t lie about a tawt malfunction because they’ve already read the log. Why don’t I tell them th
e truth?”
“The truth?” asked Val d’Or.
“Yeah. They might attempt to negotiate if they realize we’re carrying two Colonial Wardens. That’ll buy you some time.”
“Forget all that. I got a better plan. I’m going to take out those fighters, and you’re going to make a run for it.” Val d’Or turned back to the hold. “Timmy? Get over here.”
Tim Coris bounded forward and accepted the knife from Val d’Or, who gave his fellow highjacker a hard look and said, “Don’t let me down.”
Coris nodded, even as Val d’Or closed his eyes and dissolved.
“All right,” Coris began, placing the knife on the pilot’s neck. “When you see those fighters blow, you punch us a hole down there.”
“I’ll try,” answered the pilot. “But I’m just wondering whether getting my throat slit is a better way to go than getting blown out of the sky.”
“Stop wondering. Start flying,” said Coris.
I leaned over and squinted through the canopy. A glimmer shone at our two o’clock, then dove suddenly. That would be the first fighter. Val d’Or had probably rendered the pilot unconscious and had destroyed the onboard computer. The jet broke into a flat spin and fell out of view.
“There’s one,” Coris told the pilot. “Wait now. Wait…”
A pair of heartbeats later, the second fighter simply dove ninety degrees, dropping like a missile toward the ice.
“Okay, now! Go!” Coris shouted.
Our necks snapped sideways as the thrusters drop-kicked us forward and the pilot plotted a course between the two clouds of tumbling debris. Val d’Or returned, gripped the bulkhead, then hunched over, tanking down air. He paid the same price for that little trick that we did, though his skill seemed comparable to Jing’s. And it was then that I remembered his conditioning should be as problematic as ours was. He had been through the same accident, yet his skin, though darkened by the sun, remained fairly smooth, and his hair, long and unruly, was untouched by gray. Perhaps those were just temporary effects. Perhaps he had spent time in the Minsalo caves and his body had rejuvenated, a process that wouldn’t last long, though.
“Well, that woke them up,” said the pilot, pointing toward one of his displays. “Now we got four more in pursuit, weapons hot. Guess your work’s not finished.”
“Launch countermeasures,” cried Val d’Or, clearly too drained to will himself within those enemy cockpits. “Evade! Evade!”
The ATC slid right, darted forward, then banked hard as though riding a great breaker. The drug Paul had given us still numbed Halitov and I to the bond. I dreamed of willing myself all the way back to Vanguard One, where I could tell Colonel Beauregard to his face that his son was a traitor.
“Insertion calculations complete,” the pilot said. “Get ready for the burn—if they don’t kill us first.”
Before he finished, particle fire boomed hard against our aft skin. A few more direct hits like that would weaken the energy barrier. Once it came down, so would we.
“Ten seconds!” announced the pilot.
A needling, scraping sound erupted from the loading ramp, and I knew exactly what was happening. “Skin up!” I told Halitov.
We hit our tacs, the membranes flowing from our wrists and quick-sealing us against the sudden loss of pressure as a carefully placed round of particle fire blew a jagged gash in the ramp’s surface.
Coris, Santorman, and Tai, who were not strapped down, flew across the hold and slammed against the ramp, ribs crunching, eyes pleading as they gasped for air. Halitov and I had front row seats for their slow and untimely deaths. I couldn’t look at them anymore and glanced to the cockpit, where Val d’Or gripped the co-pilot’s seat and banged his fist on a panel, activating the cockpit’s emergency bubble. An opaque wall shimmered at the pit’s entrance. He and the pilot were now protected by the bubble, though a couple more hits might take out the drive and batteries, killing power to the bubble and leaving them to the merciless vacuum.
Indeed, another round did strike, though it spared the drive and batteries and tore the loading ramp’s gash even wider. An already unconscious and probably dead Tim Coris passed through the gap, but his feet stuck. I could only imagine what he looked like from the outside, flapping and trailing us like a banner of human misery before the heat of our entry burst him into flames. Santorman rolled into the gash, then plunged away sans grotesque drama. Tai’s body lay across the hole, and unless he turned, he would hang there until we were destroyed, reached the ground, or another round blew him into space.
We couldn’t hear the pilot’s voice from behind the bubble, and a quick scan of his channel said he was not in contact with our pursuers. With only our own senses to inform us, I felt even more helpless. “I could use a good joke about now,” I told Halitov over our private channel.
“Okay, a priest, a rabbi, and two Colonial Wardens walk into a bar, see. And the priest says—”
“I know what the priest says. You told me that one already.”
“Shit. All right. Let me think.”
One, two, three rounds sledge-hammered the living hell out of our aft quarter, tearing the entire loading ramp away, along with Tai. I gazed at the surreal ring of fire behind us as the ramp tumbled into the nothingness at the ring’s core, followed by a tiny, limp form. Our combat skins strained to protect us from the extreme heat, but they couldn’t work miracles. I activated my HUV and read a databar confirming the inevitable. We would burn up in less than a minute.
“Okay, I got another one,” said Halitov. “It’s about this old staff sergeant who’s trying to get into the officers’ club, right?”
“Heard it.”
“You know, for someone who’s about to die, you’re a demanding bastard, you know that?” said Halitov.
“Were you really in love with Dina?” I asked, knowing the question came out of nowhere, yet knowing we might be burned to cinders before it was answered.
“Yeah, I was.”
“Why didn’t you ever do anything about it?”
“Because…God, it’s hot…because she never liked me.”
I blinked sweat from my eyes. “You could’ve worked on her. I did.”
“Maybe there was too much competition. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Who cares anymore? Damn, my EC’s tapping out. How ’bout yours?”
The ENVIRONMENT CONTROL databar glowing in my HUV showed all bars in the red. “We’ll probably pass out soon. Oh, man. I didn’t want to go this way.”
“Yeah, I was hoping I’d get a heart attack while having sex. I’ve had a couple dreams of that happening.”
“You would.”
He swore through a deep sigh. “You know, I’m tired of this shit. I really am. Nothing ever goes our way. What did we do to deserve this? You know, maybe it’s something we never thought about, like that time when I was ten and I pulled up Linda Haspel’s dress then pulled down her panties and everyone could see her. Yeah, maybe my whole life’s about paying that back.”
While he continued to ramble, I noticed that the flames behind us had become smoky wisps of exhaust and that the temperature now rapidly plummeted. We had reached the upper atmosphere, and as the ATC leveled off, the moon’s gradual curve rolled up, revealing great plains of silvery white broken by tiny lines, like the veins in a leaf.
“…and there it is. My whole life is totally screwed up because I hurt that little girl’s feelings. Yeah, they made me apologize to her, but I didn’t mean it. If I had, we wouldn’t be here right now.”
“You’re right,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”
“Hey, it’s getting cold!”
“Yes, it is.” I peered beyond the tattered rim where the loading ramp had been attached, and my combat skin’s targeting computer zeroed in on three fighters narrowing the gap behind us. “I’m glad we’re not going to burn up. Getting blown out of the sky is much better.”
Salvos of particle fire streaked by, and as Halitov damned those pilots and all of their descen
dants, I braced myself as our portside thruster gulped a round and burst free from the fuselage. Tremors ripped through the bulkhead and deck with such violence that the locks securing my safety bars broke. The bar came loose in my hands, but I kept it down. Where else was I going to go? A jump at that altitude would’ve resulted in my rebounding halfway across the moon, turning me into a mushy sack of broken bones.
Shedding metal, varicolored liquids, and black smoke, we plunged at a sixty, probably even a seventy degree angle toward the surface, our remaining thruster wailing against the added burden as winds buffeted hard, knocking us against the seats. Dim flashes appeared far behind us, then blossomed into a half dozen rounds that exploded from our pursuers’ underwing cannons. A quartet of booms caught my attention as the pilot released four self-guided mines, clusters of pyramids trailing sensor antennae some six meters long. The antennae sprang to life, tilting their globulous heads back toward the fighters as the mines jetted off, carried by miniature jets.
Two of those incoming rounds struck glancing blows to the starboard wing, while the others fell a mere meter wide as an explosion thundered behind us. And there, fading fast, hung the expanding fireball of what had once been a mine and an atmoattack fighter. I suddenly liked our pilot. I would shake his hand if we survived.
“I’ve tapped into a GPS satellite,” said Halitov. “We’re heading toward Colyad. About eight hundred kilometers northeast of the primary pad and entrance.”
“But if Eugene’s smart he won’t take us in the front door.”
“Like I said, that’s where we’re headed.”
“Yeah, you’re right. He’s anything but smart.”
Our only thruster flamed out, even as the two remaining fighters barreled toward us. Had I been able to see through the cockpit, I would’ve been holding my breath. We were gliding straight for a massive, ice-covered crater whose base lay nearly a kilometer below the surface. The crater would not have startled me. The six batteries of anti-aircraft guns positioned along its rim, however, cannons jutting up like black slashes against all that ice, would have done the trick.
