by Ramy Vance
She couldn’t suppress a curse that time. “Fuck. Creeper vessels ahead. Go dark!”
She cut her thrusters and engines and let her fighter cruise on inertia alone. Kilometers behind her, the two shuttles also cut engine power and became two more dead rocks in a forest of dead rocks.
“Cutting it close,” Toner said tightly. “That asteroid missed us by meters.”
Jaeger held her breath, eyes glued to her radar screen. There were six small creeper mining vessels clustered around one larger asteroid at the edge of the range. Glancing up at the visual display, all she could see was a cloud of asteroids dotting an endless dark starfield. No visual on the Creepers.
“Gamma shuttle drifting close to a micro-asteroid cloud,” Portia warned. “We’re about to fall into it.”
Jaeger gritted her teeth. The Creeper vessels went about their business. “Do not activate thrusters,” she said. “They haven’t spotted us yet. If we activate thrusters, you risk blowing our cover.”
“Occy modified the shuttles with some micro-thruster bursts,” Toner added. “Let yourself drift into the cloud, but if you have to activate a micro-burst to avoid getting pulverized, do it. We’ll have to hope the Creepers don’t detect those.”
“Roger,” Portia said. “Drifting into the cloud now. Wish us luck.”
Silence fell across the comms channels, and it stretched on for minutes. The Creepers at the edge of the radar screen came no closer, nor did they flicker away. They must have been busy mining.
“We can’t freeze up every time we come within a thousand kilometers of them,” Toner said privately. “We’ll never get close to the base that way.”
“I know,” Jaeger said. “But we have to wait for Portia to untangle herself from that cloud. If she moves quickly, she will draw attention. We’re going to have to be careful to avoid any more clouds. We don’t have time for them.”
Toner grunted assent. A few minutes later, to Jaeger’s relief, the distant Creeper vessels activated thrusters and flew away, presumably with hulls full of mined ore.
Jaeger thought she heard a chorus of relieved sighs across the open comms channel.
“Gamma, you’re clear to break free of the cloud,” she said.
Portia didn’t answer.
“Gamma? Do you copy?”
“Shit,” Toner muttered. “I’m not reading Gamma on the comms channel anymore.”
Jaeger’s heart jumped to her throat. She scanned her screens, but Occy’s shuttle disguises were quite clever. With Gamma’s engines and thrusters inactive, she was impossible to pick out from among the millions of drifting rocks.
“Gamma, what’s your status?” she demanded.
“Damn,” Toner said. There was a distant shuffle of noise as he flicked through the shuttle’s various console displays. “Damn, damn. I don’t see her.”
“Toner,” Jaeger hissed on the private comm channels. “You have the emergency override codes at the ready?”
“I do,” he said tightly. “But I don’t want to assume remote control of a shuttle that might be passing through a dense asteroid cloud. They have a better shot at piloting it safely than I do.”
“Except they’re not responding,” she said. “I’m not even picking up the auto-comms pinging. There is literally no reason the auto-channels shouldn’t be broadcasting unless the crew has intentionally turned it off.”
“I’m going to give them thirty seconds,” Toner said. “Then I’ll try to assume control. You have to let them try to work through their problems on their own.”
Do I?
Visions swirled through Jaeger’s head. Dead Locauri, dismembered, ripped limb from limb, like flies with the wings torn off. A scrap of old Locauri wing, tattered and carefully framed in her quarters, the bleak reminder of what happened when powerfully mutated crew members went rogue. It had taken Sphynx a few days to turn on Jaeger and her crew, but they had ignored all the telltale signs of madness that had led to his final breakdown.
She remembered the failsafe chips Virgil had dangled before her. She wondered if she would ever forgive herself for refusing to use them if Portia stole a shuttle and went rogue.
“I’m giving you an order,” she snapped. “Assume remote control. Do it—”
The open comms channel hissed. “Gamma team in the clear,” Portia reported. “We had a micro-asteroid knock some of the radio arrays out of alignment and had to recalibrate. Sorry. Clear of the field now, over.”
Jaeger let out a tremulous breath, feeling her muscles unclench.
There was a pregnant pause across the comms line.
“Good to hear from you,” Toner said finally. “All troops accounted for, Captain. We’re ready to proceed.”
Chapter Eighteen
The Creeper base was a rocky, icy cluster of mid-sized space debris bound together by a network of constructed tunnels and pylons, pulsing like a heart at the center of a busy swarm of mining vessels. Occy had estimated that the mining vessels swept the area around the main base of flying debris at regular intervals to protect it from being pummeled by anything large enough that might do it damage. Between regular sweepings, however, the flying vessels seemed indifferent to the scattered boulders drifting through the area.
“Beginning final approach,” Jaeger breathed as she cleared a corner around the last major touchstone asteroid and the base came into view. “Trajectory established. Wish me luck.”
A whispered chorus of luck echoed across the coms.
Jaeger made a final minute adjustment to her trajectory, aiming the fighter at the rougher, less-manicured half of the base in perpetual shadow, and cut all power.
Once again, she became one of the countless floating rocks. This one happened to be tumbling directly toward a bouquet of jagged outcroppings on an asteroid that made up the very heart of enemy territory.
A flurry of Creeper mining vessels buzzed past, so close to the fighter that Jaeger could make out their landing gear on visuals. She gasped, heart fluttering, but the ships arched toward the distant cargo bay doors and didn’t turn back to investigate.
“This camouflage is something else,” she breathed. “I owe you one, Occy.”
“I did most of the gluing,” Toner grumbled.
“Baby did most of the gluing,” Occy answered from his station back on the Osprey.
“Whatever.”
Jaeger’s visual screen went dark as she fell into the yawning shadow of the base. “I’m coming in fast,” she breathed. “Fifteen seconds to impact.”
“Please take care of my ship,” Seeker lamented.
She thought she heard the collective intake of breath as her fighter, tiny in the shadow of the asteroid cluster, hurtled onward. Beneath her, mountains of jagged ice, as icy blue as Toner’s eyes, rushed up to swallow her. Seeker was right to worry about his ship—landing would be the most dangerous part of this mission, as far as he was concerned. They managed to approach by pretending to be nothing more than rocks. They couldn’t break the illusion now—which meant touching base exactly as a rock would: with a crash.
Jaeger waited until the walls of a deep chasm had engulfed her, taking her below the surface of the asteroid, before punching the inertial dampening trigger.
She yelped, flung tight against her harness as the dampeners activated. One of the fighter’s wings clipped an outcropping, and in the space of one heartbeat, the ship rolled into an uncontrolled spin—
And crashed into the chasm wall.
“Jaeger.” Toner was shouting over the coms. “Jaeger! Do you copy?”
Pain seared between her temples. Numbly, blinking back the temporary darkness that had swallowed her vision, Jaeger lifted a hand to her head. Blood trickled down her nose. “I copy,” she coughed. “I could use another one of those blue drinks, though.”
“What blue drink?” Occy asked between giggles of relief.
“Never mind,” Toner said gruffly. “We lost contact with you for a few seconds, Captain. If we’re going to do this,
we need to begin our descent soon. We’re bound to get noticed if we drift here much longer. Are we clear?”
Whatever that spicy blue stuff was, that Toner had pulled from the med bay cabinets to ward off Jaeger’s hangover had worked wonders—for a while. Now she felt all of that delayed retribution threatening to come home and roost. She groaned and shook her head, looking around the cockpit.
“You fucked up my ship, didn’t you?” Seeker asked.
Bleary-eyed, Jaeger studied the status readout before answering. “Systems still on and functional,” she muttered. “Your ship is going to be fine, Seeker. The hull damage is minimal.”
Seeker groaned as if she had diagnosed his favorite child with terminal cancer.
Jaeger switched on the visual display. The screen flickered, indicating that the fall damaged one of the exterior cameras. When the image resolved, she found herself staring into inky black shadows. Off to one side, a streak of stars, dully illuminating a jagged plain of dark rocks and filthy, blue-white ice. “I’m in one piece,” she said. Slowly recovering from her brief foray into unconsciousness, she activated the modified weapons controls and began the drilling sequence. The Alpha-Seeker rumbled faintly as its lances activated, sending a laser of focused energy boring down into the asteroid beneath its landing gear.
Jaeger had assumed, and her entire Tribe-trained crew agreed, that they’d have no luck trying to sneak into the base through the front door. Toner had been the one to suggest trying to make a door of their own.
The next several minutes had Jaeger jumping at every unexpected shadow and twitch on her sensors. Odds were, the Creepers didn’t have thermal sensors over every square meter of their asteroid cluster. Odds were, it would take them a while to notice the little surgery Jaeger was undertaking right under their noses.
If she was wrong, she wouldn’t know until it was too late, and the enemy had her overrun.
The Alpha-Seeker had bored a hole nearly twenty meters deep by the time the shuttles joined her, falling expertly between the narrow crevasse walls. She was a little jealous of how easily the two mutants navigated the tight spaces.
“I don’t see any good landing space,” Portia reported as her boulder-disguised shuttle hurtled toward Jaeger. In the flickering shadows cast by the glow of her energy lances, Jaeger saw several pneumatic harpoons shoot out from the shuttle’s landing gear and plunge into the crevasse walls. The shuttle halted, snugly anchored a few dozen meters from the Alpha-Seeker. “Landing successful.”
“Us too,” Toner called from a little farther down the crevasse. “All personnel accounted for.”
At the other end of the line, Jaeger heard Occy sigh in relief.
“All’s quiet outside of the belt,” Seeker said.
“Excellent.” Jaeger unstrapped herself from the harness. The asteroids beneath her weren’t large enough to generate any noticeable gravitational field, but still, she thought she felt pulled downward. Beneath her feet, the directed energy lances continued their relentless drilling into the asteroid.
“Everybody prepare for Phase Two.” Jaeger sealed the valves at the wrists and ankles of her exo-flight suit. Combined with a heavy-duty thermal hood and rebreather, the gear would keep her alive and conscious in the vacuum of space for nearly an hour before the cold and low pressure would start to overcome her. Hopefully, a few minutes would be all she needed. The rebreather cycled out limited amounts of oxygen from expelled air. Over time, this would cease to work, but it would buy her a few extra minutes in space. Over the comms channels came the quiet rustle of the rest of her crew, preparing their gear.
“What’s the status of our sensor arrays?” she asked.
“I managed to dispatch all twelve of ours,” said one of the navigators on Gamma shuttle. “They’re not picking up any change in Creeper vessel activity within the belt, either. So far, we’re in the clear.”
The quiet, steady rumble of the fighter’s energy lances stopped abruptly. The chasm around her went dark as the lances deactivated. Breath catching, Jaeger checked the sensors.
“Okay,” she said. “Fifty meters. Ground-penetrating sonar says the lances have dug as far as they can dig. They haven’t punctured into any void or tunnel within the asteroids, so we’re going to have to dig the rest of the way manually, as we planned.”
“No problem,” Toner said cheerfully. “Everybody got their shovels?”
The Alpha-Seeker’s modified energy lances had melted a smooth hole through the asteroid crust. It was about fifty meters deep and four meters in diameter— barely wide enough to accommodate the portable and pressurized airlock that Gamma team pulled out of their shuttle’s cargo bay.
“Look at them move,” Jaeger radioed privately to Toner as she watched four of the suited eagle-men lower the airlock into the tunnel with the help of pneumatic pistons. The Tribe training pre-programmed into the brains of the activated crew had included a few space infiltration scenarios. Jaeger could only watch, amazed, as her teams moved with the coordinated perfection of professional dancers, though they had never trained together in their lives.
Once they’d secured the portable airlock at the bottom of the hole, the infiltration teams climbed down into the chamber using the gripping microfibers on the fingers of their exo-gloves. Well, mostly.
Feeling another pang of jealousy as she shoved herself toward the dimly lit airlock, Jaeger watched squat little Bufo hurl himself downward on powerful, unnaturally springy legs. Happy as a frog in a pond.
Portia, the navigators, and one eagle-man remained behind to guard the shuttles and monitor the exterior situation. Jaeger had left the Alpha-Seeker locked against access and on a carefully programmed autopilot mode. If the fighter lost contact with her neural link, control would automatically shift to Toner.
If Toner wasn’t available—which would almost certainly mean he was dead—control would default to Seeker.
The airlock sealed behind them, locking Jaeger and her teams in a sparse, cramped chamber. Bufo activated the atmosphere and heat generator and gestured for the rest of them to take off their thermal hoods.
“Ugh.” Toner’s nose wrinkled. “It smells worse than Baby’s farts.”
The air was bitterly cold and uncomfortably thin to breathe, but they needed to reserve what charge they could in their rebreathers. No telling how long they’d need to rely on the devices.
“Noxious compounds tend to lace space ice and rock debris,” one of the eagle-men said as he adjusted the settings on his laser cutter. When Jaeger had told her crew they would be selecting their names, this one had opted to go with Patrick, for some reason Jaeger couldn’t quite comprehend. “Sulfur. Methane. Stuff like that.”
“You mean it’s toxic?” Toner looked down at the raw, rocky ground beneath their feet. He stomped on it experimentally, sending himself bouncing gently upward, where he bobbed near the roof of the airlock. Around him, the other eagles clutched faint divots in the walls, holding themselves in place.
“Not at these quantities,” Patrick said. “At least not immediately.” The laser-wielding eagle reset his thermal hood and pressed the tip of his laser cutter into the floor. He braced his legs against the wall and activated the tool. Brilliant light lanced through the shadowy airlock, filling the air with sparks and the burning smell of ozone. The rest of them pressed against the cold sides of the chamber, heads turned away from the retina-burning glow.
They all took turns manning the laser cutter as it bored a smaller hole through the asteroid’s crust. The time passed in stony silence—they hadn’t the atmosphere to spare for chatter, and, if she was honest, Jaeger was too nervous for small talk anyway. Even Toner took his turn operating the cutter with a quiet intensity that was unlike him, pushing himself down into the deepening hole with grim determination.
The crust glowed and refracted light as sparks from the lance cast the upper airlock in eerie, primal shadows. Jaeger became lulled into a trance-like state as the frigid, thin air wiggled beneath her flight
suit and began to settle into her blood. This was always the worst part of any dangerous operation. She watched the still figures of the crewmen perched around her. The waiting.
She stopped checking the time after a while. It was no use—the numbers never seemed to change, as the thinner access tunnel beneath them grew to five meters deep, then seven, then nine.
“Captain?”
Jaeger surged awake, prodded by Occy’s gentle voice coming over a private radio channel. “Yeah? Yes? What is it? Is there a problem?”
“Oh, no. Everything’s still all quiet out here,” the boy assured her. “I was just—I wanted to apologize for last night. I shouldn’t have broken down like that. It wasn’t…professional.”
Jaeger frowned. She knew better than to assure him that it was okay because he was a kid. He wouldn’t take that well. “We can’t all be professional all the time.” She kept her tone formal, although she wanted to reach through the radio and hug the boy. “I had…a bit of a lapse myself.”
There was a pause, and she thought that might be the end of the conversation. Then he spoke up. “It’s just that—”
There was a flurry of activity in the airlock, and Jaeger looked down to see Toner emerging from the narrow secondary access tunnel—hauling the laser cutter behind him. He was grinning.
“We can talk about this when I get back,” Jaeger said quickly. “We’re moving again.” She closed off the private channel before Occy could respond.
“Looks like we’ve broken through,” Toner said, his voice thinner and higher than normal in the scant atmosphere. “I’ve hit the exterior bulkhead. Let’s get this welcome wagon rolling.”
Chapter Nineteen
Jaeger squatted at the base of the tunnel, pressing a ground sonar sensor against the smooth metal casing. Toner hung suspended in the icy tunnel above her, holding his glowing multitool aloft for light. The rest of the team waited above him, strung out in silent single-file with thermal hoods on, stunners at the ready.
