by Ginger Booth
“Try acting captain sometime.” The engineer shot a last thumb’s-up to the anxious doctor in the med-bay window.
Then he bounded to the catwalk, and jogged to the bridge. There, he shrugged into the top half of his suit, and racked the helmet. The captain was a pilot. For this she’d have Clay beside her as a gunner. Well, the wounded needed Zelda more, and the ship needed Porter on station. Liam wouldn’t shoot. Corky might, but he needed her in the office to coordinate with Ben over the ansible.
He reached for the ship-wide address. “All hands. Now.” He lifted to his previous parking altitude, lazy as could be, reconfiguring the ESD along the way. Belatedly he recalled his own pressure door, and sealed it. This rattled his nerves. What else had he forgotten? But to Baikonur Control’s eyes, Thrive hadn’t done anything untoward yet.
Oh. If they needed a bonus 75 meters before, they needed it now, too. He lifted again. The traffic tower bitched at him again. The armadillo started rolling toward him. They’d die if they got much closer. That thought propelled Darren’s hand to reach out and initiate the game a moment before a more rational part of his brain squeaked, Wait!
Too late now. His jammer signal’s first casualty was the Baikonur Control bitching light, as Darren had come to think of it. Corky reported that she’d notified Ben, and Merchant stood ready. Eli confirmed he’d lost his signal to the scientists. All the while, Darren gently, slowly, brought Thrive’s star drive up in power. He noted in his peripheral vision that their delivery bus made the right choice, and pealed out across the space port, seeking to be anywhere but here. Fountains of flame spewed out the ship’s nether nozzles.
There was nothing subtle or hidden about this step. All the jammer could possibly do was frustrate Baikonur’s attempts to coordinate a response. That didn’t mean individuals couldn’t take their own initiative. Darren would love to bring the engine up to full before proceeding. But he couldn’t spare the time with jets in his sky.
He gulped. He reached out and selected the auto-pilot program. He told the ship to head straight for the Lagrange point rendezvous at L5. Suddenly Thrive shot straight forward, at speeds never meant for this altitude. That sonic boom probably burst some eardrums, further complicating Baikonur’s jammed comms problem.
Or not. Actually, the moment he moved out of range, so did the jammer, and his opponents spoke mind to mind in effect. Damn, why didn’t he think of that. He shouldn’t have hit the auto-pilot until he shot above the jets. His jammer could have stayed in range longer.
Don’t get rattled!
Wintry fields blurred past beneath at a terrifying rate as Thrive curved upward into proper orientation for takeoff. The mother world’s gravity well clutched at him with a fierce and jealous embrace. Side thrusters couldn’t kick hard enough to break these steel apron strings. The main engine nozzles swung until they pointed straight down, the ship still speeding sideways.
Darren slid the engine control to its normal level for Denali takeoff, 8.2 out of a max 10, not at all sure that lever remained under his control instead of auto-pilot. Nevertheless, he spared a second to don his first hat, chief engineer, and studied the star drive’s burn signature, fingers hovering to abort and damn the consequences. Any outcome was better than his star drive going nova. But its tell-tale shone bright and true, in a pattern he recognized from the 7’s, not the 8’s. Yes, the auto-pilot had taken control, and brought the engine up more slowly.
He tore his gaze from that readout, as fast movers pinged for his attention from behind. That would be his pals the jets, finally turned around. Though he congratulated himself that the space rockets lay well behind and not capable of following. Yet.
He locked the chase gun onto the closest of four, the weakest of Thrive’s guns. The ship normally propelled forward, and asteroids rarely snuck up from behind. The main carving gun couldn’t track to anything outside a rather narrow cone from the bow. Thrive was a miner, not a fighter.
The gun caught a steady bead, fired, and one jet exploded into a chrysanthemum of flame. The remaining jets broke and veered. A second shot wouldn’t be so easy. He struggled to get a single jet locked on, to even tell the gun who its target was. Finally he nailed it in the reticle, and the gun fired. But it missed.
And the jets, now converging from three different directions, all to the rear, came into range. Thrive climbed now, in slow motion, Earth still tugging with all her heart as the ship reached 2 g, then 2.5, and the slow delta-acceleration mounted. But not fast enough. The jets flew higher than Darren expected.
Their first round of shots were all lasers. The ESD reflected those, with pyrotechnic displays of shooting orange and purple, especially dramatic as they passed upward through thin clouds. The wispy clouds curled away like paper to a match. To the eyes of the attacking pilots, who knew what they’d think of that.
Darren saw his shields drop 10% of their effectiveness under the combined onslaught. You’re not chief today. “Porter, watch the shields. Notify me if –” He broke off because an even faster mover pinged for his urgent attention. First one, then the other two jets unleashed missiles on him. He didn’t have time to figure out what kind. He locked in the rear gun as fast as he could. His fire exploded the first missile with little margin for error.
Then the ship rocked. That shouldn’t have gotten through the inertial dampeners. The windscreen view blanked white, and his hand scrabbled to switch from visual to pure schematic. Only when that view resolved did he see what was going on. He blinked, trying to make sense of it. His three fast-movers, and three even faster movers, at his hind quarter, had turned into two fast movers, much farther away, coming at him amidships. And the radiation readings were off the charts.
They nuked themselves? What a way to go. But Darren saved his sympathy for the poor people below. That likely knocked them off any power grid with the EMP – electromagnetic pulse – unleashed above the innocent and guilty alike. While radioactive fallout drizzled down upon them.
More likely one of the newcomers nuked them. Darren blinked with that realization, and got his secondary gun locked on the closer of the two beating upward toward him. He was 14 kilometers up now. When were these guys going to quit? He’d expected them to give up at 10 klicks. The gun fired and a fireball fell away below.
Feeling like a sitting duck waiting for pot-shots, he tried the joystick. Good thing the inertial dampeners were on the ball this time, as the viewscreen yawed sickeningly. But the spin slowed as the auto-pilot reasserted its mastery, resuming its dogged quest for L5.
He made a mental note to figure out what he did wrong when he had a spare second. But apparently his randomly insane move confused the fighters, because they hadn’t breached his shield yet. Which was…at 63%.
“Porter, did you report the shields going down?”
“I – sorry. Distracted by the rego nuclear explosion! Darren, they nuked their own people!”
“Unkind,” Darren allowed. “But watch the shields!”
“Aye, sar.”
There, he’d done it, he’d said something mean to Porter. He scrunched his eyes shut. “Sorry, Porter. Great job.”
“Fly the ship, chief!” Porter’s voice squeaked.
Right, back to business. Which was…? The jets had finally fallen below, unable to climb further for lack of wind beneath their wings. This was not true of the space rockets. The auto-pilot flung him away too far to see them launch, but now they too stood upon pillars of fire, like something Biblical. Darren didn’t pay any mind to Mahina’s eclectic religious scene. The urbs of Mahina Actual rarely did. For the moment, the rockets appeared to be climbing, as was he.
Time for a breather. He blew out hard. His armpits felt like oil slicks, and itched. He unzipped the suit a few inches and stuck a hand in to mop at the sweat with his shirt. That felt better, if a little gross and smelly. With the zipper back at top mast, he sipped on his water straw, and considered other displays. He caught himself trying to read what Sass’s auto-pilot sequence in
tended to do next, and grimaced at himself. It didn’t matter. Whatever the charms of Earth-Moon L5, he’d never see it.
Instead he flicked the viewscreen background to visual again, leaving the schematic displays overlaid. At this altitude – nearing 100 km and still steadily accelerating – the fluffy planet was regaining its appearance when he first laid eyes on it this trip, curving away into an overcast of mystery in every direction. They’d left the clouds far below, which mingled with Russia’s snow cover to cloak the land. Darker splotches were likely the great boreal forests, or their truncated descendants, seen through thinner cloud.
The sky, though, that was beautiful. Mid-day blue had given way to midnight above, studded with stars and a brilliant crescent of moon. The sunny direction was blinding with the low winter sun skipping across the cloud-tops. But the other edges deepened from a pure turquoise. Working around his arc of view, the Northern Lights undulated in silhouette. A beautiful place, Earth, but already its primordial allure, singing to some ancient part of his brain, was gone. He’d arrived at the cold doorway into space. Though he wasn’t there yet.
The companion rockets disturbed his peace. But he didn’t know what trouble those might cause. For the moment, they did little except trail him in progress to escaping the atmosphere.
“Shields at 40%,” Porter updated him. “Atmospheric abrasion is wearing them down.”
Had he missed the 50% report? It didn’t matter. He rolled his view downward and saw the problem in his cameras, streamers of flame boiling off his shields. His emitters worked fine – he checked that point. But they traveled fast enough now that even the rarefied air remaining generated massive heat from friction.
“Nothing you can do about it, Porter. Keep me apprised, though. We’re about to hit the LEO, where the space defense satellites dwell.” And his auto-pilot knew absolutely nothing about evading defense satellites. Oh, yeah, he meant to figure out why touching the joystick went so wrong. He hunched over to gently experiment, and found it was set too sensitive for his taste. But touching it no longer sent the ship into gyrations. That must have been due to the maneuvers he’d been doing at the time.
Focused on this pastime, he missed when they crossed above the LEO – low Earth orbit – realm of the asteroid-killers. The viewscreen blazed.
Porter said, “Bad hit, 28%!”
Darren hastily retrieved the display he and Sass used to evade the damned things when they arrived. But then they flew among the orbiting platforms, at similar altitude, zig-zagging along the seams where neighboring satellites knew better than to fire into each other.
This was a different problem. All of the satellites were designed to fire up, and work together to kill anything. He belatedly engaged the lambda whoop, and wiggled the joystick to make Thrive harder to target. And he counted slowly to three. Another laser hit them, and another. The locals had figured out how to compensate, dammit.
“Down to 13%!”
He wiggled the joystick more. How did Sass do this? Left-two-three, up-right-two, down-left, two-three-four, like a crazed waltz. The lambda whoop was howling its heart out. And another hit.
“Darren, 8%! What do I do?!” Porter screamed at him.
The other damned rockets, perched on flame, weren’t troubled a bit. They rose above the attack altitude on their glowing columns.
And Darren’s mind blanked. He had no idea what to try next. The defense satellites didn’t have that problem, coolly executing their instructions.
The shudder through the ship felt like the grinding of his molars and shaking as though he stood on a jack-hammer, the sensations of rending hull and explosive decompression.
44
The first Colony Corps agreed that Earth was doomed. They recruited the finest scientists then in space to flee with them.
Ben Acosta tapped his console on the bridge, waiting for another call on the ansible. Not directly; his security guy Wilder rode the office to relay a call if Thrive One needed an assist climbing the atmosphere.
The commandant’s ship had some distinct advantages over Darren’s. He was fully crewed, with not one, but three qualified skippers, and even more gunners and tech crew. Sass kept one mild-mannered security guy. Ben counted the bloodthirsty Wilder and Zan among his closest friends.
“Why wait again?” Zan sat to his right in the gunnery chair now, lips pursed and eyes narrowed in irritation at Ben’s tapping. The proper Denali response to a stressful situation was to cultivate a meditative Zen readiness. He hated it when Ben fidgeted.
Ben stabbed the console with his gauntleted finger. “We’re trying to pick them up and fly back to Mars with a single gateway. To conserve fuel. Also hard to snatch them from low altitude.”
“We delivered them to low orbit.”
“Orbit, yes. But Darren isn’t in orbit. To stay at that altitude takes orbital velocity on a tangent to the planet.” He curved one arm across himself to represent Earth, and zoomed the other hand on such a heading. “At this point, they exceed orbital velocity, but it’s straight up, next to nothing in the orbital direction. And to rendezvous, I need to insert at the same velocity and vector with the gateway open, sweeping across Earth’s debris fields. Before we used an empty ring slot. Sort of.”
Zan shook his head in aesthetic disapproval. “You build too much mental model. Better to go in fresh and perceive what is, instead of what you think is.”
“I can’t insert without –”
“Thrive’s hulled!” Wilder cut in over the comms. “Shields down!”
“On our way!” Ben engaged the warp gateway and opened the aperture. This wasn’t instantaneous. The glorious fractal flower light-show, a rift in space-time, unfurled at once. But it needed to stabilize before he put the ship through, or they’d suffer psychic and biophysical damage. The commandant had the universe’s most experience with those mind-bending effects. Along with his husband, he doubted his sanity as a result.
But Ben was a high-functioning madman. “Zan, first mate spiel.”
His sidekick did the honors over the comms, warning the crew they were a go. He took attendance, with everyone calling off, again, which pressurized compartment they were in. They’d already been through this when Thrive took off. No one had changed chambers, or doffed their pressure suits, because that wasn’t permitted at this stage. But the ritual was soothing, granting the crew the illusion of some say in what was about to happen.
Ben wasn’t waiting on that. Today he had the gateway’s inventor along, Teke, and the physicist monitored the space rent’s progress too. “Ready on the gate!”
The commandant would have waited a bit longer. One of the fatter arms of the light-show rocked ever so slightly. But he’d never managed to articulate this issue to Teke, whose instruments insisted it wasn’t there. In seven dimensions, nothing was ‘rocking.’ And Darren was in deep trouble.
So he grabbed onto the gateway and engaged the translation early. He felt like he oozed, skewed to upper-left and lower-right, while simultaneously existing in the same oozed state, but mirrored to his right. Minks and emus cavorted across his control panel while an angelic chorus sang a Christmas carol to punk-rock drums, with a hefty tang of ozone and rotten eggs. And he blinked and they were through.
Ben squeezed his eyes shut and blinked repeatedly, trying to gather his mind back around him. Zan started shooting while Ben still mentally wobbled like jello, including the sensation. See, this was why he preferred to wait another second for that fractal arm to stop rocking. He’d have to wait anyway for his brain to unscramble. Better that than to arrive incapable of reacting to his new locale.
“Buck up, Ben!” Zan growled.
“Right.” His fingers flew across his instruments, living their own lives independent of his still careening mind. With over twenty years flying PO-3’s, his intimacy with the dashboard layout seemed to live in his hands anyway, not his brain. Paying attention would only ruin his dexterity. Thrive below, check. Constant bearing constant range, check,
they weren’t diverging. Someone named Darren was yammering and –
Click. With a sensation like a rubber band’s snapping elastic recoil, and a waft of sizzling maple bacon, Ben mentally arrived. “Thrive Actual, I need your threat board, not your internal status.” Huh, perhaps he had heard what Darren was on about. He still didn’t care, not now.
Another laser reached out and touched Thrive One, to a gout of explosive decompression. Darren lost another compartment. The commandant felt a passing twinge of sympathy. That sure felt catastrophic on the receiving end. However, he’d flown a ship two gate jumps – no, three – back from Cantons that amounted to a star drive with a swiss cheese wrapper, not an airtight compartment remaining. Thrive’s crew could process their post-traumatic stress later. They weren’t dead yet.
The threat board arrived. Because of his mental model, he’d ridden up the atmosphere in his imagination with Darren. But his instincts were honed, where the engineer’s were not.
“Dust over the regolith, Zan. Shoot these, not those.” He lit up the satellites rotating toward them in red, the ones rotating away in purple. But once he had them highlighted, he could simply program the lighter chase gun to systematically eradicate them on auto. He did so, fingers flying.
Voronin would be mad. Ben was knocking one hell of a hole in Earth’s anti-Luna defenses today. Voronin could eat his dust.
“You’re no fun!” Zan complained.
Ben huffed a laugh. “Now for these things. Space rockets.” But before he got too far contemplating what threat they posed, Thrive One sprang another leak, outgassing air and materiel. He sobered. At a guess, that was a container. And yes, that was fuel. It was no more dangerous than kitty litter now – no water to make it volatile. But it did add further incentive to make this a one-gateway side trip.
Though in truth, twenty-odd minutes better be sufficient. At this rate, Thrive wouldn’t survive that long.
