by Rick Partlow
“Do you have a system in your navigational files called Beta Tauranis?” Terrin asked, double-checking the name on his ‘link as he spoke, trying to force his mind to keep working, not to give into the panic.
“I do. It is 8.943 light years distant, a red giant with no habitable planets.”
“Our destination is at the inner edge of the system’s asteroid belt. There’ll be a nav signal once we get close enough. We’re looking for a place called Trinity.”
“Prepare for launch.” The Courier’s computer seemed cheerful about the whole thing, as if unaware of the gun battle going on just outside its hull.
Terrin checked the restraint straps on his seat and saw Franny do the same, then checking to make sure the storage box was wedged in tight at her feet. She was still leaning over, pushing experimentally at the sides of the lead container when the ship began to vibrate and a distant roar filled the cockpit, the growl of a big cat about to spring. Ten gravities slammed Terrin back into his acceleration couch with the abrupt brutality of a traffic accident and everything went black.
3
Ruth Laurent had never been in a gunfight. She’d narrowly missed out on one here at Terminus when she’d first arrived, but she’d been unconscious for most of it. This one seemed fairly boring; she was stuck in a dark stairwell, unable to see as Grieg’s Marines streamed past her. The spiteful crack of rifle fire took a deeper tone as it echoed off the narrow walls of the tunnel, growing in intensity as the seconds slipped by.
“Move!” Grieg screamed at the Marine troops who seemed to hesitate at the mouth of the stairwell exit, backlit by brilliant lights from inside the chamber. “Get in there now!”
The Marines pushed ahead and Grieg lunged forward with them. Laurent advanced behind the Colonel hesitantly, suddenly very conscious of the fact she wasn’t wearing armor. But the bulk of the fire seemed to be outgoing, so she just tried to keep Grieg’s substantial form between her and danger as she stepped down onto the stone staircase leading down into the yawning, oblong expanse of the chamber.
At first, distracted by the raucous stutter of automatic weapons and trying to pick out where the Spartan troops were while still ducking behind her superior officer, she almost didn’t notice the massive, silvery shape at the center of the room. When it did finally register, she dismissed it as a storage tank, something the enemy shooter or shooters were hiding behind. Until the screaming whine of turbines drowned out the gunfire, drowned out Grieg’s bellowed orders and she saw the gaping hole in the wall across from the cylinder and suddenly she began to understand.
It was a ship, and it was taking off.
“Sir!” she yelled into Grieg’s ear, grabbing at his shoulder. He tried to shrug her hand off but she just yanked harder. “Brannigan has to be on that ship!”
She saw realization in the man’s face and he tried to shout instructions to the Marine Captain, but the sound of the jets was just too loud. Laurent ducked down on the steps and covered her ears, knowing what was coming. The blast of superheated air wasn’t enough to kill any of the Marines, not encased from head to toe in armor, and she and Grieg were too far away and too high up for it to do more than batter their ears and take their breath away with the sudden flash of heat. But bodies went flying, at least three Grieg’s Marines tumbling off the side of the staircase and slamming into the smooth, polished stone of the floor three or four meters below.
The rush of hot wind thrashed at Laurent, threatening to break her death-grip hold on the metal railing of the stairs, bringing PTSD flashbacks to the drop-ship explosion and the months of living with the horrific burns, yet still she held fast. She squeezed her eyes shut, opened her mouth and screamed to relieve the pressure, but ran out of breath before the roaring stopped and nearly passed out. The roaring in her ears was so loud she nearly didn’t realize when the roaring of the jets faded.
When she opened her eyes, the ship was gone and all it had left behind was a roiling cloud of steam and dust, gradually being sucked upward into the ventilation system. A line of Marines, toppled like dominoes down the staircase and onto the platform, some blown a dozen meters by the blast of the engines, scrambled to their feet, some searching around them for their rifles. Grieg was still just in front of her, laid flat out on his back, a thin trickle of blood running from a cut on his cheek. His eyes blinked fitfully, his jaw working as if he was trying to pop his ears. He clawed at the stone with his fingers, looking for his weapon.
Laurent saw the handgun laying on the steps between them and grabbed it out of reflex, putting it back into his hand. He gave her an odd look, and she wasn’t sure if it was surprise at her action or mistrust of her having the weapon. Either way, he nodded his thanks and pushed himself to his feet.
“Where’s the shooter?” Grieg demanded, yelling loudly and atonally, as if he couldn’t hear himself talk.
He didn’t wait for an answer, just sprinted down the stairs, weaving through a few of the Marines still trying to recover from the blast of the jets. No gunfire greeted him and Laurent wondered if the enemy soldier had somehow managed to get on the ship before it took off.
“Over here!”
Laurent didn’t know if Grieg could hear the Marine calling from across the chamber, the other side of where the ship had been, but he definitely saw him because he sprinted over to where the man had his rifle trained on a prone figure, sprawled out and insensate, black-toned armor still smoking. A rifle lay on the ground beside him, but the Starkad trooper kicked it away and it clattered noisily across the polished stone.
“The blast of the takeoff laid him out, sir!” the Marine reported as Grieg skidded to a halt beside him. Grieg glared at the man.
“Then get his hands and feet secured and check him for weapons before he comes to.”
More of the Starkad Marines rushed in to help him and Grieg turned away, staring at the gaping circle of blackness the ship had launched through. As Laurent stepped down the stairs, closer to the hole, she saw it was a tunnel through the rock, heading upward at about a twenty-five-degree angle.
“Captain Gerhardt.” Grieg stepped over to the officer and grabbed her by the tactical vest with his left hand, his right and the pistol in it pointing at the hole. “Get that prisoner secure and get all your Marines up through this tunnel immediately. We need to get this intelligence resource…” He nodded at the unconscious Spartan, dressed in the armor their Rangers wore into combat, the visor still up on his helmet. “…out of here before the self-destruct mechanism detonates.”
“Yes, sir!” There was awe in the response, Laurent thought, either at the naked menace Grieg projected or perhaps in Gerhardt’s newfound knowledge that there was a self-destruct mechanism.
One was probably as useful a motivation as the other, and the Marines were moving in seconds. The scouts moved up the tunnel cautiously, then the others following at a quicker pace as reports were radioed back, presumedly of a lack of threats inside. Grieg waited until the fire-team charged with carrying the bound and disarmed prisoner entered before he took a step up into the laser-cut tunnel through the mountain. Laurent stayed where she was, eyeing the blackness doubtfully, and Grieg glanced back over his shoulder at her, grinned and cocked an eyebrow.
“Would you rather deal with unknown salvation or a known death, Captain Laurent?”
The question reminded her of Colonel Kuryakin. A surprise, as it was the only thing about the man that reminded her of her old superior. She wished she had more time to consider her answer to his question, but time was a luxury, survival a necessity. She followed him into the darkness.
Terrin Brannigan was having one of those nightmares where you felt as if you were falling and you woke up as you seemed to land in bed. Except when he woke up, he was still falling.
He jerked against his restraints, sucking in an agonized breath and opening his eyes. There was no gravity, no acceleration anymore, and he was surrounded by darkness. The cockpit’s holographic display projection swallowed up everyth
ing in a star-filled black emptiness, vast and unfathomable. Yet when he focused on a single patch of the heavens, it was as if he rushed abruptly forward and bits of emptiness were suddenly full, asteroids passing by dizzyingly close, ice giants rotating with gelid languor deep in the isolation of the outer system.
“This is amazing, isn’t it?” Franny’s voice pierced the haze around his thoughts and snapped him back to reality. She pointed to a readout floating in the projection beyond the sea of stars. “If I’m reading that right, we’re already travelling at relativistic speeds.”
He felt there were something he was forgetting, something important. It nagged at the back of his mind, but eluded him.
“Courier,” he said, his mouth dry. Is there water on board? There has to be, right? Shit, I hope there’s water on board… “Do you have any data about other ships in this system?”
“I do,” the computer responded. There was an odd timbre to the thing’s voice, now that he had the time to consider it. Self-satisfied, almost, a child who has learned something new and is damned proud of it. “There are two, both heading for the antisolar jump nodes.”
A computer simulation snapped into existence in front of his face, the holographic projection showing not just colored icons but the general shapes of the respective ships. The Starkad ship was a wedge-shaped monolith a kilometer long, burning across the system on the miniature sun of a hugely-outsized fusion drive, a weapon looking for a target. That target was halfway across the simulation’s field of view, running with everything it had.
He knew the lines of the escape ship, the Acrotiri, from when it had brought in Franny and the rest of the technical crew. It was a standard cargo ship, unarmed and unflagged, not registered as a Spartan government vessel but rather as a private interest. Lacking the streamlining and armor of a military ship, it was bulbous and utilitarian, but damned fast; the drive was military class even if nothing else about the ship was. It had a head start on the Starkad heavy cruiser and was boosting at somewhere around six gravities according to the sensor reading.
“How long before the ships reach the jump point?” he asked the computer.
“The smaller vessel will achieve jump capability in fifty-five minutes and thirteen seconds if it continues at its present acceleration. The larger one will arrive at the jump node nine minutes and three seconds after that, also assuming its current acceleration.”
“Thank Mithra,” Franny sighed, closing her eyes as if in prayer. They popped open abruptly and she leaned forward against her seat restraints. “Is there any way we could catch them, dock with them before they jump?”
There was no response, and Terrin repeated the question, wondering if the computer had imprinted on him like a baby chick when he’d been the first human to address it.
“No, that would not be possible,” the Courier answered. “This vessel wouldn’t be able to dock with another ship without first deactivating the drive field due to the tidal effects of the warp field. The instant the drive field is deactivated, this vessel would lose all its momentum except for the momentum gained before we achieved orbit.”
“Shit,” Terrin hissed. He nodded to Franny. “It was a good idea, anyway.” Good enough to give his brain a kickstart and remind him what he’d been trying to think of before the acceleration of launch had made him pass out. “Courier, can you get a message to the smaller ship via tightbeam transmission before it jumps?”
“This ship can transmit tightbeam using the Alanson-McCreary field as a focusing lens. If we broadcast it within the next twenty-two second, it is possible.”
Twenty-two seconds?
He tried not to stammer, tried to organize everything he should say into a sentence or two and blurted it out.
“Transmit this immediately: This is Terrin. I’m on an experimental ship with limited fuel and I have the downloaded database from Terminus on data crystals with me. I’m heading to Trinity. Will be waiting there. End transmission and send.”
He felt out of breath, as if he’d just run a forty-meter dash back for his track team in college.
“Transmission sent,” the Courier reported dutifully. “Transit time is fifty-one minutes. Probability of successful reception is sixty-three percent.”
“What?” Franny blurted before Terrin had the chance to ask the same question. Then he had to ask it anyway, because the ship kept ignoring Franny.
“We transmitted at fifty-one light minutes from the target using a tightly focused microwave signal,” the Courier explained. “At time of transmission, there were no intervening physical bodies or magnetic fields which could interrupt the signal, but my database lacks up-to-date navigational charts for the system.”
“He means if an asteroid or a moon or even a particulate cloud gets in the way,” Terrin explained to Franny, “it would block the signal.” And we’d be fucked, he added to himself, reticent about cursing in front of a woman.
“I know what it meant,” Franny fired back, her normally pale face flush with anger. “I’m not an idiot, even if I don’t have three PhD’s yet.”
“I never said you were an idiot!” he protested. “You’re a computer systems tech, how would I know what you do and don’t understand about high-energy physics?”
“Maybe if you’d listened when I was telling you about my mother working in the particle accelerator research facility in the Outer System Lab, you’d know!” She was almost shouting now, so much louder inside the tiny cockpit, and he thought he could almost feel the heat of her anger.
“I’m…” he tripped over his words. “I mean, I’m…sorry.”
He had to drag the word out of his gut kicking and screaming, but he doubted anything else would do and he didn’t want to have to deal with her flying off the handle in a space barely big enough for the both of them. It seemed to mollify her, and the red left her cheeks, retreating back to her ears, beneath the protection of her short-cut red-brown hair.
“It’s my fault,” she demurred, waving a hand. If she hadn’t been strapped in, he thought, she would have gone floating away with every word. For someone in the Navy, she hadn’t had a lot of time in zero gravity.
Neither did you until a few months ago, he reminded himself.
“I’m just…” she went on, gesturing again helplessly. “I’m just still upset. I mean, what Captain Cordova did for us and…well, I knew a lot of the people on that shuttle.”
She wiped at her eye and Terrin suddenly felt like an ass. He’d been so wrapped up with their own situation, he’d barely given a thought to all the people who’d died when Starkad had destroyed their lander. And as for Cordova…
“I hope for his sake he went down fighting.”
Franny’s head snapped up at the words and he shrugged.
“I mean,” he clarified, “I don’t want to think about what they’d do to him if they got him alive.”
The cold was a living thing, relentless and malevolent, moving through the surface of the smooth rock and through her hands and feet where she touched it, leeching through to her core despite the best efforts of her jacket’s electric heating coils. Ruth Laurent wanted to stuff her hands into her jacket pockets to warm them, but it was pitch black inside the tunnel and she needed to feel the wall to avoid walking into the back of someone else, and by the horns of Mithra, when was this damned tunnel going to end?
It hadn’t actually been so long. She knew on an intellectual level that they couldn’t have been climbing more than ten minutes. But the cold and the dark and the slickness of the floor demanding her complete concentration dragged every minute into subjective hours.
That, and the fusion bombs on a timer that could go off at any second.
When Laurent first began to see hints of movement in the blackness, she thought for just a second her eyes were adjusting before realizing how stupid the idea was. There was no light in the tunnel for them to adjust to. Unless they were nearing the surface. She moved faster, nearly colliding with the back of one of the Marines. She w
anted to push him out of the way and run, wanted more than anything to be outside again, no matter how cold it was, no matter how thin the air.
And then, almost as if someone had flipped a switch, there was the exit, the sky not so bright as she might have thought, still very early morning on a world with constant cloud cover, but a clearly delineated circle of grey against the black. Marines began clambering downward from the sharp, unnatural lip of the exit, handing down weapons to those already over the side before dropping down themselves; an efficient assembly line but it stopped abruptly when the fire team carrying the Spartan soldier between them approached.
There was an awkward process of lowering the enemy soldier from three Marines standing on the edge to four more below. The Ranger began to struggle and they nearly dropped him and the whole delay was making her want to scream. She danced from foot to foot like a child waiting to pee, and in the grey and muted light of pre-dawn, she made out the disdain on Colonel Grieg’s face.
“A little composure, Captain,” he chided her, edging forward as the Marines regained control over the enemy soldier and lowered him head first to the crew below. “This isn’t the first time you’ve faced death, after all.”
“No, sir,” she agreed, gritting her teeth to keep them from chattering. “That’s how I’m so sure I don’t want to die.”
“All humans die. We can only hope to die an honorable death in service to the Supremacy.” He nodded toward the edge, where a Marine waited with an extended hand. “But by all means, you go first.”
The tunnel had emerged high on the opposite side of the cliff face, where the lip of the Cut sank backwards at a gentle angle until it levelled off, and the wind lashed over the featureless rock, driving temperatures already below freezing down lower still. Laurent cursed vociferously, as if the heated language would warm her up, having to squint her eyes against the dirt particles carried by the wind.
