We All Died at Breakaway Station

by Richard C. Meredith

  “Well,” she said with a mock shyness to her eyes, her voice, “how about the master bedroom?”

  “I’d love to show you that,” Glenn said, taking her hands in his and pulling her close, feeling the warmth of her body even through the clothing between them. He’d show her.

  “Glenn,” she whispered in his ear, “I stopped the CP shots in time.”

  “CP?” he asked.

  “Contraceptives,” she said.

  “Oh?” And the full implication seeped into his mind, and he thought he was glad because that would make her really his wife, and, by God, he’d be brave if it killed him!

  He kept telling himself that as he took her up to the huge master bedroom and made love to her on the bed that had once belonged to the rulers of all Adrianopolis.

  7

  When Bracer reached his cabin he rolled to his desk, took a cigarette from an ornately engraved case that had been a woman’s gift, long ago, in another universe‌—‌oh, Donna, I need you now!‌—‌and slowly, carefully puffed it to glowing. He took a deep breath, lungs filling with the smoke of tobacco a hundred generations removed from the fields of Virginia, and tried hot to think, not to think of anything at all.

  A scarred, battered face riding atop the narrow shoulders of a tall, thin body clad in the uniform of a starship steward appeared in the hatchway. “Is there anything I can get for you, sir?” the face asked.

  “No, Johnson. Thank you. I’ll call you if I need you.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The steward vanished as quickly and silently as he had come, and Bracer remained in the same position, fighting thought, until memories came into his mind that he could not hold back, though these were memories he found pleasant. These were memories of Major Donna Britt, and they would be pleasant unless he thought about how she had looked the last time he saw her…

  But now, he remembered her that day in Holmdel‌—‌how long was it after they met? A week? That or a little more. And they both had a day free and they rode out of Valforth Garrison in an airbus, Commander Bracer and Major Britt, sitting silently side by side in the bus, looking at the greenness of the rolling country below them. And then, after a while, they started talking about home, about Earth, for they both had come from Earth, born within a thousand kilometers of each other.

  And Donna had talked about the city of New Portsmouth where she and her sister had lived, and she told him about her sister, Michelle, and how Michelle still lived on Earth, working sometimes as a systems analyst, more often as a playgirl. She had held her priority rating, and as yet she hadn’t been called into the services, though it was possible any day, especially if one of her male friends lost his influence. And Donna showed him a slide of Michelle, and Bracer commented that they hardly looked like sisters, and Donna agreed, and said that Michelle was far prettier, but Bracer disagreed, and they both smiled. The airbus landed in Holmdel and they had a late breakfast on the Boulevard. They went to the Assembly Building and the Palace of History and walked through the city and had an early dinner in another little restaurant on the Boulevard and rented a sailboat and took it out into the bay and lay naked under the sun until it set in the sea and then made love until the wind changed and it grew cool and Bracer had to tack against it all the way back into Holmdel Harbor and they were an hour late because of it and missed their airbus back to Valforth Garrison and had to wait half the night in the terminal for the next one, holding hands, and while they sat there Bracer asked her to take out a contract with him, and she said she would, and the following week-end they did.

  And it wasn’t much more than a month after that when Donna was assigned to Port Abell and Bracer given command of the Koniev and they saw each other only once a month until…

  Goddammit, why? he suddenly cried within himself.

  Then metallic knuckles clad in synthetic plastiskin rapped on the cabin’s hatch, and Bracer tore himself out of his memories and said, “Come in.”

  Daniel Maxel stepped through the voice-actuated hatch as it opened, the gray sphere of his upper torso reflecting the light of the lamp on the desk.

  “First Officer Maxel re…”

  “Stow it, pan,” Bracer said through tight lips, not really understanding his own tenseness, perhaps not wanting to understand it. “This is a purely social occasion. I hope. Pretend I’ve taken off my braid.”

  “Okay,” Maxel answered smiling.

  “Sit down,” Bracer said, gesturing toward a chair with the glowing tip of his cigarette.

  “Anything in particular you wanted, sir?” Maxel asked as he crossed the cabin and sat down in a large, comfortable, form-fitting chair that could adapt even to his unlikely physiology.

  “I don’t know, Dan. I’m not sure. I just‌—‌well‌—‌I wanted to talk to someone.”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  “Look, Dan, I’ve got a couple of bottles of Napoleon brandy‌—‌some sadistic medical officer’s idea of a joke, I guess.” He cut himself off. Maxel knew that he did not have anything like a natural gastrointestinal system‌—‌but there was no point in talking about it, any more than there was any point in talking about the wounds, injuries, mutilations of the other officers and crewmen of the three starships from the Paladine. That was a carefully tabooed subject aboard the Iwo Jima. “Care for a glass?” Bracer asked.

  “No, thanks,” Maxel answered. “I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”

  For a few moments Bracer was silent, wondering just why he had asked his first officer to come to his cabin, wondering what questions he really wanted to ask, what reassurances he wanted to hear.

  “What is it, captain?” Maxel asked at last, voicing his thoughts for him. “What’s eating you?”

  “I don’t know, Dan. Memories, fears, that planet down there, a million things I can’t pin down.” And pain, he thought, though he did not express it aloud, pain that he could only accept as being so, and endure and do his best to ignore when it got too bad.

  “I’ve noticed it, ever since we went into orbit around Breakaway.” Maxel paused, was silent for a few long, pregnant moments. “Or has it been since we heard that Breakaway’s relief hasn’t showed up?”

  Bracer did not answer the question. He inspected it for a moment, kept himself from thinking about it too deeply, and then filed it away somewhere deep inside, along with the other problems and questions he already had. Perhaps he would answer it later if it became necessary to answer it.

  “You’re closer to the crew, Dan,” he said after a while. “How’s morale?”

  “I think I’ll take that glass of brandy you offered,” Maxel said, forcing something like a smile onto his face. “I suspect that this is going to get rather deep before you’re finished.”

  “Okay, I’ll get it.”

  “No, just tell me where it is and I’ll…”

  “No, I’ll get it, Dan,” Bracer said firmly. “You just answer my question.”

  “Okay, I’ll try, but that’s not the kind of question you can just answer ‘good, bad or indifferent,’ not on this ship, not now.”

  “I know that, Dan,” Bracer said, rolling across the cabin to a large cabinet situated against the far bulkhead, any fears he may have had about Dan Maxel’s capabilities dissolving. Maxel had full control of himself‌—‌he was sure of that‌—‌and lived very much in the unpleasant reality of here and now. There were no escapist fantasies, no mystic delusions in the man. If his face was serene, it was because he was somehow at peace within himself, and that was a great thing to find in a man. Peace. “Just answer it in whatever fashion you can.” Bracer smiled, at least his lips smiled, and that is all the face that he had left to smile with. “That’s why I offered you the brandy in the first place.”

  “Well,” Maxel began as Bracer opened the cabinet, took out a bottle, “I think that I’d answer that morale is good, about as good as you’d expect under the circumstances. Oh, of course, Reddick and a few others are as bitter as hell, but you can’t really
blame them.” He paused. “There’s not a man or woman on this ship, expect for the marines, who, well, doesn’t have something wrong with him. They’ve all been through hell, and you can’t expect them to come out of that with a big grin on their faces.”

  Bracer returned to the center of the cabin, setting the bottle and an empty glass on the low table near the first officer’s chair.

  “Sorry I don’t have a snifter for it,” Bracer said. “My funny friend didn’t provide me with any.”

  “That’s okay,” Maxel replied. “I’m no connoisseur. Beer’s more my speed.”

  “Mine too, if the truth were known,” Bracer said. “But about what you were saying, Dan. I mean, I know it. I know what our people have been through as well as you do.”

  Maxel smiled. “I know that you know it, and so does every other man and woman on this ship. You’ve had it worse than any of the rest of us, and that helps, that helps a hell of a lot, Absolom.”

  For the first time Maxel Had used Bracer’s first name, and the captain was glad of it. He had regarded his first officer as his friend, and he had hoped that the feeling would be shared. It was, and that was a good thing.

  “I’m not sure that mine’s any worse than‌—‌than yours, Dan,” he said.

  “I think it is,” Maxel opened the bottle and poured himself half a glass of the liquor.

  “You say that morale is good, considering,” Bracer said slowly, carefully.

  “To what do you attribute this good morale?”

  “I’m not sure. Two things, I guess. Maybe three. Maybe more.”

  “What are they, Dan?” Bracer rolled back to the desk, got another cigarette, puffed it to life.

  “You’re one of them,” Maxel said slowly. “No, I mean it. What I just said. You’ve suffered as much as any of us. Even more than most of us. And they know it, Absolom, that if you weren’t a damned good starship captain, and if the Force wasn’t so desperately in need of experienced captains, well, you’d be in cold-sleep in the Cragstone where you ought to be. And they’ll follow you for it, anywhere you want to take them.”

  “Okay, so I’m a little tin god,” Bracer said, “and that’s just about literally true. A resurrected god with a plastic head.” There was a bitterness in his voice that he could not hold back. “What are the other reasons?”

  Maxel tried to smile. “They’re going home. It’s that damned simple. Oh, I know that maybe half the crew has never even been on Earth; they’re from Adrianopolis and Cynthia and half a dozen other planets, mostly out of the Paladine, but Earth is well, dammit, Earth is home. It’s even home for me, and, hell, my grandfather was born on Creon.”

  “I know,” Bracer said. “It’s the mystique of Earth. The homeworld. The planet where we evolved. Even Adrianopolis, as Earthlike as it is, doesn’t really… I don’t know how to express it either, Dan. But I know the feeling. It’s something born and bred into us during two billion years of evolution. We’re still Earthlings, all of us, and there’s no changing that.”

  Maxel nodded, continued. “And there’s the hope, belief, I guess you could call it, almost religious, that the hospitals there can put them all back together. That means a lot too.”

  Maxel’s lips tightened with his last words; Bracer could read the emotions on his face, could match them with his own. The hope that there on Earth he‌—‌they‌—‌could be transformed back into human beings again, the pain and horror of what had happened to them washed away, and then they could walk and talk and smile and laugh and mix with others of their own kind and not feel like monsters and hate the whole damned universe for what it had done to them.

  “You said there might be a third reason,” Bracer said after too long a pause. “Yes. Admiral Mothershed’s expedition,” Maxel said. “It’s common knowledge now. That and the fact that Earth is forming an armada, that we’re getting ready for something really big out there.

  “They’ve got hope, Absolom, for the first time in years they’ve really got hope that we can win this damned war and chase the Jillies back to whatever hell they came from.”

  “There are a lot of ifs, Dan,” Bracer said slowly. “If Mothershed can get back out. If he can bring back information that really helps. If the armada can find the targets that Mothershed may locate. If the Jillies don’t launch a major attack on Earth before then. If, if…”

  “Dammit, I know that!” Maxel said suddenly loudly. He paused, then said, “I’m sorry, but I know all that, and they know it too, but, hell, Absolom, it’s a hope, the first real hope we’ve had since the Jillies broke out of Dehora and overran the Salient.”

  Bracer nodded slowly, sadly. “I know, Dan. I hope it as much as you do, as much as anyone, but I just can’t let myself believe that we’ve won until we actually have. We’re still too damned close to losing now.”

  There was silence in the captain’s cabin for a few long moments. Maxel slowly relaxed, then refilled his glass with the old Napoleon brandy from the vineyards of Terra, Bracer lit still another Adrianopolitan cigarette.

  Finally Maxel spoke: “What are you getting at, Absolom? What’s this all about?”

  “I don’t really know, Dan,” Bracer said very, very slowly. “So help me, Dan, I don’t really know what I want.”

  “I think maybe you do. Maybe you just don’t want to admit it.”

  “Dan, I’ve been…”

  The desk began to buzz, very, very loudly in the suddenly quiet cabin. Bracer slowly turned on the treads of the cylinder that supported what was left of his body, rolled to the desk, punched a button.

  “Captain Bracer here,” he said.

  “Captain, this is Comm Officer Cyanta.” The young woman’s attractive image formed in the tank, and Bracer had a brief, irrational thought which he quickly suppressed. “General Crowinsky is returning your call. Shall I put him through?”

  “Yes, go on.”

  Bracer snuffed out his cigarette, glanced over his shoulder. “Stay here, Dan. I want you in on this.”

  Maxel nodded and sipped at his brandy.

  The lean face of a very tired, exhausted-looking General Crowinsky developed in the tank.

  “Captain Bracer,” the commandant of Breakaway Station said, “I’m sorry it took me so long to return your call. Can I help you?”

  “Yes, sir. Have you been in communication with Colonial Defense Coordination Headquarters?”

  “Of course I have, captain,” Crowinsky said, annoyance showing on his face. “In fact, I was talking with CDC when you called earlier.”

  “May I ask, sir, just what is the situation in regard to your relief convoy?”

  “Why are you asking, captain? I’m not sure that our situation is really any affair of yours.”

  “No offense meant, general. I don’t mean to be prying into things that don’t concern me, but‌—‌sir, if the Jillies did intercept your first convoy, then they may still be in the neighborhood. If they are, I want to be ready for them.” Is that what you’re really asking? Bracer asked himself silently. Is that really why you want to know these things? Or is there another reason you can’t even admit to yourself yet?

  “Of course. Forgive me, captain,” the general was saying. “I am a bit tired, edgy, you know.”

  “Yes, sir. I understand.”

  “Thank you, Captain Bracer. Well, both Adrianopolis and Earth seem to be in agreement: Jillie attack is the most likely thing. Certainly those ships would have been here otherwise, or at least would have reported in somewhere by now.” Crowinsky shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid that we must assume that they’ve been destroyed, captain. There’s no other alternative now.”

  “Then we were rather lucky in getting through,” Bracer said flatly, yet knowing that space is enormous and starships small, and knowing that even if Jillie ships were still in the vicinity, their failure to detect the tiny convoy was not an improbability. They had been lucky, though the odds had been highly in their favor. “What about Breakaway, general? I mean, are they sen
ding you another relief convoy?”

  The commanding officer of Breakaway Station nodded slowly. “They are,” he said, “but not from Adrianopolis. They can’t spare a single ship now, not with things going the way they are in the Paladine. Not one ship, captain.” The general’s lower lip quivered. “CDC HQ is going to send help from Earth, they say.”

  “How soon?” Bracer asked, tension within him tingling the ends of raw nerves.

  “Four weeks, five weeks, as soon as Earth can spare them,” General Crowinsky said slowly.

  “They can’t do it any sooner?” Bracer demanded almost angrily.

  “No, that’s the best they can do. We’ll just have to hold out until they do. That’s all there is to it.”

  “But can you, general?”

  “Dammit, man, we have to!” Crowinsky almost yelled. “We’ve got to keep communications open to Earth until‌—‌” the Communications Corps general paused, fought back something that was written like fear across his face. “I’m sorry, captain.”

  “That’s okay, sir. I understand.”

  “I think you do understand, Captain Bracer.” Crowinsky was silent for a few moments. “The shuttles will be coming up with your reaction mass in a short while. I suggest that you plan on moving out of orbit just as soon as you have it all on board. I wouldn’t want to guarantee your safety here.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, captain. Good day.” And with that the general’s finger stabbed a button on the desk before him; his image faded from the tank.

  Absolom Bracer slowly turned away from his own communications center and faced his first officer, a churning within his body and within his mind that approached the unbearable.

  “Haven’t we suffered enough, Dan?” he asked slowly. “Haven’t we suffered enough?”

  Daniel Maxel did not answer for a few moments, and when he finally did his voice was hollow, empty, his words slow: “Nobody’s asking us.”

  “I know.”

  For a few moments Bracer did not speak again, and when he finally did his voice was almost normal. “Dan, go back to the bridge and supervise the loading of the reaction mass. I’ll talk to you later.”