by Rick Partlow
“It’s being taken care of,” the Captain’s voice told him.
“Dmitry Grigor’yevich,” Jason spoke to the Russian and the man looked at him as if he’d just materialized before his eyes.
“Da… yes?” Podbyrin replied uncertainly.
“Antonov—where did he go when he went through the gateway in the asteroid belt? Where did the gateway lead?”
“We do not know the system,” he said, shaking his head. “It is somewhere behind a gas cloud—maybe the Coal Sack, our astronomers say.”
“What was the system like?” Jason asked. “Did it have planets? Habitable planets?”
“Da. One habitable world.” The Russian’s eyes crossed and he seemed to be seeing something else. “Barely habitable. There had been a war there, a thousand years ago… maybe ten thousand. We did not know. Much of the world was desert, much wasted, radioactive cities. I remember how ugly it seemed when I first saw it, like Siberia in midwinter.”
The hackles stood on the back of Jason’s neck as the man spoke.
“Colonel Podbyrin,” he asked, “how old are you?”
“It is so hard to tell—the years are different on Novaya Rodina.” His eyes seemed to clear for a moment as he calculated, swaying in his seat. “One hundred and seventy-nine Earth years.”
“Jesus,” the medic muttered.
McKay knew what the man was thinking. The human lifespan had been expanded over the last fifty years through the advancement of nanotechnology, genetic surgery and antiagathic prenatal treatments until the average life expectancy—for Earth natives, at least—was conservatively projected at well over two hundred years. But there was no way Podbyrin could have had access to those treatments, and yet the man didn’t look very much past his mid-forties.
“How have you lived this long, Colonel?” Jason asked. “Why do you seem so young?”
“On the planet,” the Russian told him mechanically, “we found one thing almost intact. A laboratory perhaps, or a hospital. Inside was a device. Not only a computer, not just a machine. Something more. It… makes things. Anything. We cannot communicate with it much. The languages are too different—different frames of reference, I am told. But if we show it something, it can make more.”
“Things like rifles?” Jason asked.
“Da.”
“And what else?”
“Organs—human organs.” A look of distaste spread across his face. “The General used three of our men—had them dissected, their organs put one at a time into the vats. The thing made more, as many as we wanted. Our scientists were able to get the machine to make the tools they needed to assemble the parts with other things and make the troopers. But first, the General had them transplant things into him and the most important of us—the ones who had to last to take back the Rodina… the Motherland.” Jason’s mouth went dry as he listened, as everything started to make sense.
“But it could only duplicate things you already had,” Jason assumed. “So you were stuck with the technology you brought with you.”
“Da,” Podbyrin agreed. “And some things we could steal from your ships, plus a few, like the walking tanks, that we put together ourselves. I argued with the General… I and others. If we could understand the device better, we could have much deadlier weapons. No one could stop us. No one would even try. But he could not wait. He came up with the plan to use what we had to take back our world, and that was that. He let me stay to wait on an experiment, to use the machine to manufacture a virus.” Jason’s blood froze, but the man slowly shook his head. “It didn’t work. Too long-lasting. I was coming to tell him, give him update on a ship we are attempting to repair, when you captured me.”
“Ask him about the gate,” Patel’s instructed, his voice sounding as grim as Jason had ever heard it.
“Colonel Podbyrin,” Jason said, clearing his throat, “the gate—the gate in the belt. How do you use it? What is it, exactly? And where is it?”
“I do not know where it is.” Podbryin shook his head. “None of us can know; only a handful, and the General.” He shuddered, remembering something. “There was a map, on Novaya Rodina, carved into the wall of the laboratory—the scientists said it held the locations of dozens of gates to this system and many others, some close, some hundreds of light-years away. The General had one of our scientists copy it, then destroyed the original. He had his men kill all but one who had seen it and fed them to the Machine.” His eyes, suddenly filled with clarity, locked on Jason’s. “No one can know! No one!” He sighed, sank back into his half-stupor.
“My ship was programmed before I left, and the program was designed to self-destruct after I passed through. The way we pass through—I do not know exactly. It involves a thermonuclear explosion—we must bring a device with us. I know it was discovered by the expedition to the asteroids when they were attempting to use fusion bombs to bring a planetoid to Earth orbit to be mined. Somehow, the explosion opens the gate—the scientists called it a wormhole, I think, but they say it is…” He hesitated. “…nonclassical, I think, but I do not know what they mean.”
“I do,” Patel’s voice announced. “That’s enough for now. Security, get him to a cell. McKay, I’ll meet you in the shuttle bay in two hours.”
Jason nodded, but didn’t get up immediately. His brain churned with speculation. If what Podbyrin was saying was true, then at least they didn’t have to worry about some mysterious alien force behind the Russians. But it also made Antonov just that much more desperate.
* * *
“…realize the consequences of acting prematurely,” Captain Patel said, gesticulating heatedly, “but we can’t simply wait for the enemy to become even more entrenched—we have to do something while we still can.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Arvid,” Joyce Minishimi argued, sitting back wearily. “But I’m not certain we have the authority, whether military or moral, to make that decision.”
“If we don’t, who does?” Patel protested.
Jason sighed, sinking into his seat. They both had a point, but they’d been bickering over the issue for over an hour now, and Jason was beginning to feel like a potted plant. He glanced around the table, wondering if anyone—or everyone—else felt the way he did.
Arrayed around the table in the Mineral Ventures Multicorporation conference room were Captains Minishimi and Patel and their senior staffs; Doctors Kovalev and Mandila from the scientific staff; Katherine Frasier, the Mineral Ventures Operations Director for the Pallas base; Lieutenant Shamir and Gunny Lambert; and Georges Kercok, the representative of the local independents—an unnaturally slim, Eastern European man with the characteristic close-cropped Mohawk and facial tatoos of the belt miners. He seemed uncomfortable with the assembled authority figures and hadn’t said more than two words since they’d arrived.
The atmosphere had seemed so momentous just a few hours ago, when he’d been strapped into Captain Patel’s private shuttle, fixated on the viewscreen image of the massive floating mountain that was Pallas, tumbling gently through the star-filled firmament with an angelic host of spacecraft surrounding it. They were little more than gnats to Pallas’ Olympian expanse, all but the Patton behind them and the Bradley to the fore—those Cyclopean pillars of metal loomed large and menacing in the darkness, the very spacetime around them shimmering as their Eysselink fields remained on guard against stray meteorites.
As they’d drawn closer to the asteroid, Jason could see the touch of man’s hand in the docking bays, communications antennae, weapons ports and sensor dishes that pocked its rocky face. It had taken over forty years to complete the installation, most of that in carving caverns deep into the nickel iron, far from the dangers of meteorites, solar flares and cosmic radiation.
A Twenty-Third Century cave, Jason had thought with cynical humor. We’ve come a long way, baby.
As he understood it from conversations with Captain Patel, the base at Pallas was usually a beehive of activity, with corporate and indepen
dent miners, brokers, entertainers, smugglers and technicians pouring through the corridors and ships swarming around the rock. But the civilians had scattered at the approaching war like cockroaches skittering out of the light, tucking themselves deep in the “storm cellars” of their habitat rocks and pulling the hole in after them.
So they had found Pallas nearly deserted, its broad halls eerily empty. Jason had been hard-pressed to keep his feet in the asteroid’s microgravity, nearly launching himself into the—thoughtfully-padded—ceiling with each step as the group from the Patton had made its way to the conference room.
Captain Minishimi had greeted them at the door. The petite, gentle-featured woman seemed an unlikely starship captain, but he knew from experience that she was as competent an officer as any in the Fleet.
“Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon, McKay,” she’d greeted him as he entered.
“I was hoping it would be under better circumstances, ma’am,” he’d said, shaking her hand—and that had been close to the last pleasant moment in the meeting.
After a replay of Colonel Podbyrin’s drugged interview, Mandila and Kovalev had fielded the many questions about the technological aspects of the story—questions ranging from the professional to the totally ignorant.
“What is a ‘nonclassical wormhole,’ Dr. Kovalev?” Minishimi had asked. “And why would they have to use a fusion device to traverse it?”
“A classical wormhole, Captain,” Kovalev had begun to wind himself up and Jason stifled a moan, “is the basic Wheeler construct, which was created during the Big Bang. Many of these may exist in our galaxy, connecting different parts of space, but they are useless to us as they are usually microscopic, making them intraversable—in theory, of course, since we still haven’t actually found one.
“A so-called nonclassical wormhole was a conceit of late Twentieth Century physics which fancied that the fabric of spacetime was a froth of constantly appearing and vanishing wormholes and singularities on the Quantum level. Later, this theory was expanded to predict that macroscopic wormholes could be created during the formation of stars—still fairly small, but large enough to keep track of, though shorter in span than a Classical version. As to why they would be able to traverse it by using a thermonuclear weapon—well, I can only assume that there may be some way to expand the entrance of the hole using a fusion explosion of correct intensity. I would have to examine the actual process to elaborate further.”
“What about the machine Podbyrin described, the one they’re using to duplicate their weapons?” Patel had asked, looking at Mandila. “Is such a thing possible?”
“Pretty far beyond our present technology, but certainly possible,” was the researcher’s reply. “We’ve been using nanotechnology since before the Sino-Russian War—you’re carrying some of the little buggers in your blood right now, injected at birth to patrol against blood clots and cancerous growths. In another thirty years or so, we might be able to use them for simple manufacturing processes. But what Colonel Podbyrin described is centuries beyond that.” The man shook his head, frowning deeply. “If they discover how to fully make use of such technology, they could roll over us like we weren’t even there.”
Then the real debate had begun—a debate unlike any Jason seen in his military career. Minishimi and Patel shared a rank and a nearly identical time in service, but not one opinion of what their strategy should be. Patel was all for an immediate attack—he felt the threat to use nuclear weapons was a bluff. Minishimi was more cautious, favoring a scout mission to evaluate the enemy forces.
The two commanders had stated their positions early on and had been arguing them for the last hour, either person-to-person or through the proxies of their staff officers. Jason had barely been able to get a word into the debate and Shamir and Lambert had sat silent as zombies—Ari seemed vaguely amused by the whole thing, while the Gunny was clearly losing patience.
Jason knew what he wanted to say: Stop arguing, Goddamnit, and come up with a course of action! But the Captains outranked him—though most of the Fleet retained traditional naval ranks, the Intelligence Division, due to Mellanby’s background in the Corps, had adapted the Marine designations, so a Fleet Captain was the equivalent of an Intelligence Colonel. The upshot was that he was two steps in rank below the shipmasters and one below even the First Officers, which put him in an uncomfortable position.
Which, he supposed, was just the position Colonel Mellanby had chosen him for.
“Excuse me, sir, ma’am.” Jason stood up suddenly, grabbing the edge of the table to keep himself from bounding to the ceiling. The two of them broke off in mid-bicker and looked at him, every head in the room swinging his way. Great. “Now, I may be speaking out of turn,” he ventured carefully, “but I don’t think you brought me in here to keep the minutes.”
“Go ahead, McKay,” Minishimi urged. “You’ve had more experience with the enemy than anyone else here.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He nodded gratefully, trying to work up his courage. “You’ve both spelled out your positions thoroughly,” he went on, “and you both have good arguments—but I think that this kind of discussion is counterproductive. This is a military operation, not a democracy, and one of you needs to take control.”
“Of course, we’ll need an operational commander,” Captain Patel allowed, “but until we settle on a course of action…”
“That’s just the point, sir,” Jason interrupted him, seizing the moment. “A commanding officer can consider the suggestions of his subordinates and accept or refuse them, but the ultimate decision and responsibility belongs to him or her. Without that responsibility, there is no decision.” He leaned forward, taking a breath. “A lot of people here and on Earth, soldiers and civilians, are going to die because of the decisions that are made right here, today. We owe it to those people to be unified in those decisions. They have the right to know who’s responsible for either our defeat or our victory. I don’t know if either of you have ever sent good men and women to die, knowing that they went to their deaths because they trusted your judgment and your decisions, but there’s a special kind of pain you feel afterward, a doubt that claws at your soul…” He trailed off, sitting back in his chair, visions of Inferno haunting the back of his mind.
“It’s the price we pay for doing what we do, and it has to be on the shoulders of one individual—anything else mocks the sacrifices we ask.” He fixed the Captains with a stare. “I’ve born that weight and it’s not something I’d wish on anyone else. But the responsibility that will rest on whoever leads us into this makes anything I’ve done look laughable by comparison.”
He fell silent, looking down at the surface of the table, studying its plastic surface intently as he tried to ignore the stares of those around him. Patel and Minishimi glanced at each other, guilt and embarrassment in their eyes.
“Excuse us for a moment.” Patel stood abruptly and headed out of the chamber. With a heartbeat’s hesitation, Minishimi followed him out.
Jason didn’t look up, his ears burning, the back of his neck hot. He’d said much more than he’d intended, and he was certain he’d pissed off the Captains and probably their staffs, but what the hell? Everything was falling apart and he’d be damned if he’d stand by and watch it happen. There was too much at stake.
He owed it to Shannon.
He was so absorbed with his thoughts that he almost didn’t notice when the starship captains returned, nearly arm-in-arm. They paused in the doorway, looking at him and then briefly at each other before they came back to the table. Minishimi took her seat while Patel stood at the head of them all.
“We find ourselves in an awkward and perhaps unprecedented position,” he said. “Our decisions will affect all humanity, yet we have no appointed leader. Either Captain Minishimi or myself is the obvious choice, but we share a rank and nearly the same time in grade.” He grimaced painfully. “What we also share is a complete lack of practical experience in fighting
this particular enemy. As a matter of fact, the only person here of appropriate rank with that kind of experience,” he said, his gaze settling on Jason, “is you, Captain McKay.”
“Me?” Jason felt a strange, disturbing tingle in his stomach.
“And,” Patel went on, ignoring the interruption, “since the last orders I have are to provide you with all the support necessary to aid in the effort against the Invaders…” He glanced at Minishimi, who nodded wordlessly. “Captain McKay, I’m loath to dump this kind of responsibility on someone else’s shoulders—we both are.” He gestured to his fellow starship commander. “But regulations and military procedure won’t do us any good if we lose this fight. I can’t order you to be our commanding officer, but we’d both appreciate it if you’d accept.”
Jason stared at him in disbelief, filled with a sudden and overwhelming sense of resentment. How could they do this to him after what he’d told them? How could they put him in this kind of position?
And how could he possibly say no?
He stood slowly, trying his best to bore a hole through Patel’s skull with his glare. Around him, he could hear the muttering from the starships’ staff officers, could feel their stares, sense the shaking of their heads. This wasn’t going to work. No one would follow him—they’d know he wasn’t qualified. They wouldn’t trust him, wouldn’t believe in his decisions—and why should they?
He wasn’t sure if he believed in them himself.
But from somewhere in a dark corner of his soul loomed an image of Colonel Mellanby, eyes as cold as death, smiling savagely.
I’m counting on you to keep on accomplishing the mission, the specter whispered. And if you don’t, I’ll rip your liver out with my bare hands and eat it raw.
“Captain Patel,” Jason said, “I’m going to need to interrogate Podbyrin again. And I need to figure out a safe way to send a wide-band message to Earth.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds you down or polishes you up depends on what you’re made of.”
