With Our Dying Breath

by Unknown

  "Momma! Did you hear it?" Her Aussie accent was as thick as her father's. "They're safe! Dadda's safe!" She was speaking to a lovely woman next to her who was obviously her mother.

  "Is it true?" Elisa Gryphon sobbed. "Oh thank goodness!" Her sobs were muffled as she and the little girl embraced.

  Anahita's step came up short and the smile vanished from her eyes, though not her mouth. "I'm sorry, who-who are you?" She asked stupidly, already knowing.

  "I'm Terrisa Annelle Gryphon and this is my mother. And my daddy is Lieutenant Colonel Paul Gryphon. He's the flight commander of Charger!"

  Elise's relieved sobs caught in her throat as she watched Anahita's face. "Is Paul alright?" she stuttered.

  Anahita's pause grew like a thunderhead, getting darker the longer it lasted. "I’m sorry Mrs. Gryphon, I didn't realize anyone but the Oswalds were in here."

  "An officer in the lobby let us down here. Is he alright?" Her voice grew insistent and her daughter looked up expectantly at Anahita.

  "I regret to inform you..." the rest of Anahita's false sounding but official regrets were lost beneath the loud sobs of the Gryphons. Her smile finally faltered and she had to look away when the Oswalds surrounded and embraced them. Now seemingly forgotten, and gratefully so, Anahita spun on her heel and stepped from the lounge. She trudged away, not bothering to look into the control centers she passed on the way to the elevator. Not knowing who had let the Gryphon's down, she spared every officer on the way to her office a withering stare. A part of her knew they'd not done anything wrong, that it was her own pride that let her speak before looking at the audience. She had been so happy that Pierce survived that all the other deaths hadn't fazed her. Maybe he had been right; had everyone become nothing more than an asset to her? She hated people who made her cry.

  Anahita looked up from her desk at the open bottle of Delamain standing before her. Just beyond the bottle, holo-pictures flickered in and out of existence. She lifted her moist cheek from the table, took a sip from the glass in her hand, and rolled her face over onto the other cheek. It was just as wet.

  She convinced herself long ago that she would gladly hop in a rocket and fight in the battle space. She would be Captain Yasmin, she would face down alien death—if only Earth Force didn't need her in the MCC.

  But she knew better. She was a button pusher, a number cruncher. Albeit a good one, she was no Oswald or Gryphon. Fifty four men had died today while she stayed buried nice and safe in terra firma, her chai never getting cold. They died because it was the best way to ensure the mission succeeded. They were volunteers. They knew the risks. They just assumed the risk came from the Centauri, not their mission controller.

  She had run the simulations in her mind before she ran the rationalizations. There was at least a fifty percent chance that she could have saved another spacecraft; but those weren't good enough odds for the sake of the mission and the war. They died fighting, they died screaming.

  "The one person you should never lie to," her father had always told her, "is yourself." She was no Captain Yasmin. But she had better get over it before the Roland, before Pierce, made it back. A picture of two young smiling cadets at their first Earth Force ball hovered in front of her. Her eyes closed.

  "Why did you marry her anyway, Pierce?"

  Don't lie to yourself, Anahita my darling.

  Chapter 8 Jump tunnel theory is one of those fields of technology where enough is known to make it useful while simultaneously not being able to answer foundational questions. Why won't tunnel gates form in significant gravity wells? Why won't they form in deep, deep space near absolute null gravity? Some called it God's game of galactic connectthe-dots.

  Where, exactly, does all that momentum go, when a craft exits a jump tunnel, that it had entering it? And how does it get the local space momentum imparted to it? Most astrophysicists agreed that conservations of momentum had to be preserved and assumed, with some mathematics to back it up, that the momentum went into creating the jump tunnel. But it wasn't the only accepted theory.

  What truly mattered to jump operations was that the effect was reproducible and that everything above the molecular level stopped moving for an instant. Coolant and fuel pumps on jump craft had to be designed to be able to get circulation restarted instantly. Even with such equipment, jumps were hard on the craft and crew—they were only done when absolutely necessary.

  Oswald groaned as his body was released from the sudden application of the mysterious physics of the jump tunnel. His heart fluttered back to life on its own this time and the vacc-suit defibrillator remained inactive. But it still caused a deep pain in his chest. He coughed to make sure his lungs were back on line. Various grunts and curses drifted over the net.

  "Astro confirm jump status." Oswald coughed loudly. "Life Support, get vitals and report. All other departments begin post jump checks."

  Rough sounding confirmations filtered weakly back from the net.

  "Rangers, this is Command."

  "Go Command."

  "Do your suits have defib units built in?" Another detail missed until too late. Hopefully some genius in Special Service had thought about it since he hadn't.

  "Negative on defib, Colonel." Luskin answered shakily. "But I do have vitals telemetry—checking now."

  "If you have any emergencies, notify Life Support immediately and start resuscitation."

  "Roger that, Command."

  Oswald muted his mic and wretched a small glob of bile which he spit into the vacuum tube in his helmet, made for just such an occasion.

  The immediate area around Roland was clear of hazards according to the display. It took time for a ship's computer to wipe the sleep from its eyes, the corresponding sphere of scanned space around the rocket slowly growing as it did.

  "Command, this is Life Support."

  "Go, Life."

  "Doctor Hines reports four defibs kicked off, all crew vitals now show green," Lieutenant Miranda Kepinski reported.

  "Sir, four? That is quite a few."

  Oswald agreed with Hashi but chalked it up to the distance of the jump, for now.

  "Eight crew riding the vomit comet." She paused, laughing softly. "And there's Sgt. Mnuku."

  "Jeez. He's had more jumps that me!" Mathesse sounded a bit rough. "Bet the rest are jump-cherries."

  "Sir, to be quite honest, I feel rather nauseous myself."

  "Agreed, Aux. All departments, go or no-go." All the department heads affirmed everything and everyone was operational. Oswald continued to monitor Roland's expanding eye. "Everyone sounds a bit rough to me, so we'll have to cut Mnuku a break this time I suppose." He realized Luskin hadn't replied. "Ranger, how's your team?"

  "Colonel, we've got a bit of mess." Luskin sounded embarrassed. "No one tapped out on me, but, uh, just about everyone puked." "Including you," Mathesse teased.

  "Maybe," Luskin replied after a long pause.

  "Do your battle suits have vomit vacuums?"

  Oswald couldn’t tell if Luskin was heaving or just clearing his throat. "No, sir."

  "Roger that, Ranger. Life Support, get a maintenance team down there ASAP." The scan area on Oswald's display expanded greatly as Roland's processors managed to gather and piece together more and more data. "Everyone is to stay in suits unless absolutely necessary. Luskin, your folks can step out and we'll make sure they get some wash kits." Apparently even the Special Service didn't think of everything.

  After two hours Oswald was satisfied that nothing nearby had fired up their jets to come chase the Roland down. All stations reported in and despite the distance of the jump, which was still only known to Oswald and McFarran, the spacecraft was in top shape.

  Unlike the Charger.

  "All departments, suit down by watch section and establish regular duty rotation. I will be addressing Roland in thirty minutes. I am logging the T-3 and concluding ops net one. It's been a doozy." Oswald hoped the weariness he felt hadn't seeped into his announcement too much.

&n
bsp; "No joke," Breen sighed.

  "Aux, dress down, do your necessary, then relieve me."

  "Sir, I shall return post haste." McFarran's mic clicked off and was followed by the rest of the department heads. He returned shortly and assumed the flight commander duty.

  Oswald stretched and cracked and popped all over after he struggled to stow his tin can. Flight Sergeant Morris gave a friendly chuckle as she tried slipping out of hers too.

  "I am definitely too old for this." Oswald grabbed a nearby handle with both hands and curled into a ball, generating a final, satisfying pop from his back. "Aux, I'll be in the staff room."

  Room might have been a bit disingenuous planetside, but Roland's staff room was spacious compared to the other compartments. It had room for eight to ten people to crowd in around a small holo-display table. It was not an armored space so was not used during battle. It was mostly used by the off-shift when the equally cramped entertainment compartment was full. It was also about the only place on the Roland where crewman might hook up to join the light-year club. Colonel Oswald was not a member himself and suffered no such hanky-panky on his spacecraft—he knew personally what trouble it could lead to.

  A technician from life support brought him a rehydrated pouch that read 'zero-gravity meal, one each' and a sippy cup of mineral water. The ingredients on the meal pouch were listed plainly in English but read like an ancient Greek pantheon. He had been assured over the years that the meals were quite nutritious and the additives and chemicals were there to help negate the ill effects of long term travel in microgravity. It wasn't that something objectionable might be in the rations that bothered Oswald about standard EF space rations, it was the designed inscrutability of what was in them. Even after eating some of them, one was unsure of what was inside.

  He opened the flight data package and let it float above the table. The mission had been classified at the highest level. Had it been a regular combat mission or recon sweep, Oswald would not be having doubts about keeping the whole thing from the crew. It wasn't a bad policy at times. Sharing operations videos post hoc had gotten him into trouble more than once. As a major, one of his young lady crew became quite distressed on learning just how close she had come to dying in battle at Alpha Centauri. She actually started official proceedings against him for permanent injury to her peaceful nature.

  The mission could of course be performed without telling anyone save those that were directly involved. But it was too monumental to keep to himself. According to security protocol, he wasn't even supposed to tell the crew what system they were in. Those few systems well known to Earth Force vets were easily recognizable once the navigation map was populated. But no one on Roland had been to Delta Pavonis.

  Any spacer worth their oxygen kept a log of what planets and systems they'd visited. They kept it and bragged about it and—when allowed—proudly wrote home about it. Oswald certainly did. Keeping such a secret from his crew would be a travesty; he'd use it to soften the blow of his announcement. McFarran would surely have something to say about it, and rightly so. But Oswald was weary of protocols and senseless regulations. He was weary of space and of being away from Misty and the kids. He was weary of dead friends. He was weary of the Centipedes and of their war.

  "Roland, this is Flight Commander Oswald." He stopped to give everyone a chance to settle in to listen. "As is my custom, since I believe an informed flight crew is a ready flight crew, I will have the operations net made available for viewing. Comms and Data, please get that ready if you haven't already.

  "Some of you do not know that we left Earth and were engaged by a squadron of Centauri spacecraft. MCC and Roland did us proud, as the whole purpose of that phase was to get us where we are now. As you will find out, one of our T-REXs chewed one of them into pieces— another kill for Roland." He paused to let the cheers he couldn't hear die down. "But also know that few battles are won without cost. The Triumph and Charger were lost with all souls. They died that we might live." Oswald took a quick drink, giving the crew a pause to let it sink in. "The Earth Force Space Service is a small orbit and many of us had friends on them. So we'll dedicate our kill to them and Roland will toast them into the deep black."

  Oswald paused again, as much for himself as for his crew. "That being said, Roland has a job to do. I'm about to tell you some amazing things. Some very amazing things." His IC chat flashed with an urgent message from McFarran. He knew it would be about security procedures and how he couldn't do it. But Oswald checked the displays anyway and seeing no navigation threats or system failures he left Aux without a reply.

  "Welcome to Delta Pavonis. For those of you scrambling to pull up a star chart and update your tourist books, Delta P is twenty light years away from Sol. No one on this ship has been this far out. Very few from Earth have. But EF has been here before—and we're not alone." McFarran was now trying to signal on two channels.

  "Go, Aux."

  "Sir! You cannot share—"

  "Be sure to log it if you need to, Hashi. Oswald out." A tinge of doubt rose as he considered the possible ramifications of not following strict protocol on such an important secret. A few years ago and he probably wouldn't have.

  "And by not alone, I mean something besides humanity. We are on a recovery mission and we are here to recover alien technology, an alien artifact if you will, that the brains at EF Command think will help us take the fight to the Centipedes.

  "Survey personnel have already died in this system. Delta Pavonis V houses the ruins of an unknown race. Unfortunately we are not here as explorers, but raiders.” That comment would get him in trouble when reported; he didn't care. “The treasure we seek is priceless and it is defended by ancient, alien defenses quite capable of killing us too. Though exciting, know that Roland is still in great danger. We all must stay sharp and do our jobs if Roland is to survive. Carry on, Oswald out."

  +++ Roland had escaped physically unharmed. But the crew realized that their friends had been sacrificed for their sake. Some would respond by redoubling their efforts to make sure the sacrifice wasn't wasted. Others would spend the rest of their lives—however long that might be—suffering from survivor's guilt. Some would just kick their troubles down the road by trying not to think about it, often with stims or booze. Oswald had tried all three but preferred sampling the chemical option. He thought about the bottle in his tube, but it was too soon for that. Apparently Anahita preferred the booze route herself.

  Oswald just witnessed the deaths of Charger and Triumph, looking on helplessly knowing that they were dying for him. Anahita had planned and plotted those deaths to save Roland. The mission parameters and spacecraft manifests danced across his display. Anahita said the Roland was best suited for the second phase of the mission, but he wondered about that. It was true that Roland had a marginal landing capability but, as Will said, if she needed to land she probably wasn't going to survive. Had Baker and Gryphon and their crews died for the mission, or had they died due to more personal reasons? Oswald again drove out the temptation for just a sip of Delamain and set about going over all the relevant sensor and navigation reports from the previous missions to Delta Pavonis, hoping to drown his sorrows instead with research.

  Chapter 9 It took Roland three weeks to get close enough to Delta Pavonis V to start detailed surface reconnaissance sweeps. With no orders to the contrary, Oswald was happy to travel without jumping. Three days into their flight they were contacted by an Earth Force sensor satellite that had been on station collecting EM and navigation data for the last five years. According to the logs Roland recovered there were two other satellites in system but they could not be found and would not reply to any Earth Force signals.

  Once the data was recovered, C'n D cleaned up the database files and requested permission to update the satellite's firmware to the newest Earth Force version. Oswald was reluctant to do so, having seen the catastrophic—or at least usually inconvenient—results of such updates. Update was used as a curse by many but
he preferred the term disimprovement. Oswald was pleasantly surprised when the update completed and the satellite showed an increased ability to process gathered signals.

  "Wooooow, Trese. That actually worked," Mathesse offered as a back-handed compliment when the sat feeds connected to Roland.

  Astrogation and Sensors managed to get video of one of the postulated outer planets during the slow burn in-system. Comparing the new data with the masses of data taken from the satellite verified the orbital pull from something even farther out as well. Oswald logged them as Charger and Triumph with a consensus from the crew, editing Roland's copy of the EF catalogue with plans apply for official recognition upon return to Earth.

  Oswald stared at Delta Pavonis V through big-eye's digital screen. It was close to the size of Mars but had a greenish tint. Not the verdant green of life, but the pale green of verdigris, of decaying lifeless metal. On full magnification he could easily make out two of the ancient sites. The lack of atmosphere had probably helped preserve these strange ruins, but he would like to know if there ever had been atmosphere and if so, whether the aliens had come before or after.

  "Just fascinating." Oswald had been saying that a lot lately. Two navigational satellites were sent to orbit the planet for three days before settling in over the weak poles of the planet. Nothing fired at them. No EM or jump signals were detected. They had a fresh map of the whole planet, including close-ups of the four cities. Four alien satellites had also been discovered, orbiting the planet in dead silence, seemingly oblivious to the approaching invaders.

  "Sir, here are all the proposed flight plans." Norris uploaded the final calculations.

  "Thank you, Norris." Oswald compared each concurrently, the navigation plots wrapping around DP V like greedy electric fingers. After going through the projections he settled on one that would get Roland very close to passing over three of the sites believed to have artifacts of interest, the UXAs.

  He scoffed at the term, artifacts of interest indeed. As if the whole planet wasn't of interest. Of the utmost interest to those with a modicum of foresight at any rate. Oswald tapped the flight plan and sent it back to Norris. "That's the one, Flight Sergeant."