“I don’t really know, general. I only know that you have no other defense to speak of now. If we remain, and if the Jillies do attack—and I’m praying to every god I know of that they don’t—but if they do, we can at least give you a better chance than you’ve got without us. And without us, general, you don’t have any chance at all.”
“I know that, Captain Bracer, but, really, this isn’t your fight. God knows you’ve done your duty. Nobody can expect more than that of you.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself, sir,” Bracer said, “but something keeps telling me that, well, this is my fight. I can’t help but look at it this way, general: if the Jillies don’t attack, we haven’t lost anything but a few weeks. If they do, and if we’ve gone on to Earth, and if they destroy you and break the communications link, Earth will be out of touch with the Paladine, and with Admiral Mothershed, if he makes it back. Then we’d be lying in hospital beds on Earth, not knowing whether a Jillie fleet is on the way to blast the homeworld out of the sky. Maybe a break in the communications chain will give the Jillies just the edge they need. Maybe not. I don’t know. But, God help me, sir, I don’t think we can take any chances with it.”
“I think I do understand you, Captain Bracer,” Crowinsky answered. “As soon as I can get a clear channel to Earth, I’ll put in your request.”
“I would certainly appreciate it,” the starship captain said. “Would you patch me in on that, sir?”
“Of course. Is there anything else, captain?”
“No, sir. I don’t suppose so at the moment.”
“I’ll be back in touch with you soon.” Crowinsky thumbed his controls and his three-dimensional image faded from the tank.
Had it not been for the heavy metal base of the cylinder that supported his body, and his life, Captain Absolom Bracer would have collapsed. As it was he slumped forward from the waist, to be caught by the strong prosthetic hands of his first officer.
“Captain?” Daniel Maxel said urgently.
“Let me rest for a minute, Dan,” he said with difficulty.
Pain. Red stinging tongues of pain like flames clawed at legs that no longer existed, blazed in a shoulder that was nothing more than a stump, flared in a scarred groin.
“Shall I call the medical officer?” Maxel asked.
“No, no. I’ll be okay.”
Pain that was too much like the blasting of a plasma torpedo tried to consume the mind of Absolom Bracer. Back, back into his skull he crept, huddling against an outcropping of bone and trying to hide from the glowing pain.
After a while he bit his lower lip, then shook himself, raised back up and looked at the other starship officers who were with him in the Iwo Jima’s briefing room.
Besides Bracer and his first officer, there were four others, starship officers who had been through their own hells not too unlike his own, who lived and moved and functioned thanks only to mechanical limbs and organs.
Captain Charles Davins of the LSS Pharsalus: he had lost half his face and there was a mechanical heart thumping in the ruined cavity of his chest.
Lena Bugioli, the black-skinned first officer of the LSS Pharsalus: from the waist up she was whole, but her body below the waist was supported by a cylinder like Bracer’s. Her face, rock-hard and anything but serene, hid the terrible pain that she must have felt. She did not let the pain interfere with her assigned duties.
Captain Zoe Medawar of the LSS Rudoph Cragstone: once a starship medical officer, promoted to captain against all tradition, then killed at her first command, now “revived” to command again, now without a face. The image that Captain Medawar showed to her tiny world was that of a plastiskin egg with two tri-D lenses, two openings for nostrils, and a nearly immobile mouth for features. No one knew what other damages she might carry, what other pains she might have. She did not speak of them, and no one dared ask. First Officer Gautier Lindquist of the LSS Rudoph Cragstone: he had a face, two arms, two legs, but the pack that he wore across his shoulders, a complex electronic network that bypassed his ruined spinal column, betrayed his injuries.
These six had come to their decision, slowly, painfully, reluctantly, yet they had all come to agree with Absolom Bracer for differing reasons that Bracer himself did not fully understand, and they had let him relay their joint decision to General Crowinsky. They would stay—until the relief ships came from Earth, or until… That they did not want to think about.
“None of you wants to back out now?” Bracer asked when he had regained complete control of himself. “You still can. My ship is staying, but as of the moment I have no authority to order the rest of you to stay.”
“We have made our decision,” Captain Davins said slowly. “The Pharsalus stays.” He glanced at his first officer who only nodded a slow, sad reply.
Bracer turned his artificial eyes to Captain Medawar.
“Captain Bracer,” said a mechanical voice from the face that wasn’t a face, “you have really given us little choice. You’ve browbeaten us, intimidated us, accused us of cowardice and even treason if we don’t agree to your scheme—though I am sure you did not realize that you were being so rough on us. And perhaps we should have called your bluff and said that we were going on to Earth despite your wishes. You haven’t the authority to make us stay, as you just said. I’m not sure we shouldn’t have gone, and I don’t believe that if we had we would have been charged with desertion.” Captain Medawar paused reflectively for a moment. “However, we have agreed.” She paused again. “I don’t know what value a hospital ship can be to you. Perhaps, as you said, the Jillies wouldn’t know that it isn’t a warship. Perhaps you can use her to make us appear stronger than we really are, if it comes to that. That’s up to you, I suppose. You’re a combat officer, and if the stories are true, a damned good one. But I do know this: I can’t and won’t try to take the Cragstone on to Earth without your escort. I don’t fully agree with you, captain, but I rather think I admire you. You’re the biggest damned fool I ever met.” There may have been laughter in her artificial voice. Bracer wasn’t sure.
“Okay,” he said slowly. “I suppose I should thank you.”
“That isn’t necessary. That wasn’t really a compliment.”
Bracer smiled at her, then turned to the others. “Assuming that CDC HQ approves, and under the present circumstances I don’t see how they can help it, I will ask General Crowinsky to begin shuttling down the wounded at once. Perhaps… Yes, captain.”
Zoe Medawar’s hand had been raised. She spoke: “No, captain, I vote against that.”
“Why?”
“We have nearly twenty thousand patients in cold-sleep in my ship now,” the Rudoph Cragstone’s captain said. “To unship them all and transfer them down to Breakaway would take at least another day or two, maybe more. And it would take a hell of a lot of energy and fuel from Breakaway’s shuttles. Anyway, the real point is this: why? If anything happens they won’t be a damned bit safer on Breakaway than they are out here. If the Jillies do come back, there won’t be enough of Breakaway Station left to collect anyway.”
Or of us either, Bracer thought. “Okay,” he said aloud. “You’ve made a point. The cold-sleepers will stay where they are.” He was silent for a few moments. “Do any of the rest of you have anything to say now?”
The others were silent, dwelling within their own silent hells.
“Okay. Return to your ships. Make what preparations you can. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”
Salutes were exchanged, and then the starship officers began to file out of the cabin.
“Go on to the bridge, Dan,” Bracer told his first officer. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
14
It was dim in the cabin, light came from a lamp that sat on a distant table, and the lamp was turned down to its minimum, but even then Hybeck could see the form of the girl who lay sleeping beside him, naked and lovely in the dimness, everything that he had ever wanted in a mi
stress. Naha Hengelo was quite a girl. How could he have ever thought of her as puritanical? She was anything but that, once she lowered her distant and reserved mask.
Hybeck lay back on the bed beside her, supporting his head with his hand, his elbow sinking deep into the softness of the pillows, smiling to himself in the darkness. In his other hand he held a cigar, its glowing tip moving through the air, making abstract patterns that vanished as quickly as they came.
Under him, through the bed and the bulkheads and deck came the throbbing of the ship, quieter even than Naha’s breathing, but still perceptible. Air circulated through the ship, temperatures remained constant, atomic engines fired shattered nuclei into the blackness, and the pseudospeed generators hummed in their strange way, flickering the starship into and out of reality. Hybeck could feel the microjumps if he thought about it, but by now he had grown used to it again, and rarely thought about it unless the ship was just going into or out of star drive.
What he had begun to think about now was what was behind them. God, what a fight that was! Something to tell his grandchildren about, if he lived that long. That was a space battle to go into the history tapes—people’d be talking about it for a long, long time—if the three human starships that had survived the battle ever got back to tell their story.
Three ships! Hybeck reminded himself of that. Three out of twelve. One fourth. That’s all that survived. The San Juan, the Hastings and the Chicago. The others were gone now, just floating wreckage. But the Jillies had lost a fleet too, damn them! Ten or eleven ships had been destroyed or disabled, and that made Hybeck feel a little better about it all. The Jillies had suffered just as badly as the humans, and they might think a little bit before they hit Mothershed again.
The admiral didn’t seem to think they were being followed. At least nothing had showed up on the scopes, but the FTL detection was a tricky and undependable thing. It just might be that Jillie ships were trailing them, but with any kind of luck at all, the humans could stay ahead of them all the way back to Adrianopolis—though that was a hell of a long way off. Weeks away even at top speed.
Still, Hybeck wasn’t too worried. There was no point in worrying anyway. The San Juan wasn’t hurt that badly. She was still in very good shape, considering what she’d been through.
And Lieutenant Commander Kamani Hybeck had something more pleasant to think about right now anyway. Lieutenant Naha Hengelo.
Dropping the cigar into the asheater beside the bed, he rolled back over, placed his hand upon her flat stomach, held it there for a moment, then slowly crept upward toward the great fullness of her breasts.
Naha stirred uneasily for a moment, then nestled closer to him, sighing. “Hy?”
“Yes?” he said softly in the near-darkness. “Do you love me?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?”
“Yes.”
Her hand found his and held it close to her breast.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I really don’t know for sure.”
“You are being honest, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I’m glad. I wouldn’t want you to lie.”
“Why?”
“I just wouldn’t. Not now, anyway.”
“Why not now?”
Naha was silent for a long while before she spoke again. “Hy, do you really think we’ll make it back?”
“Why not?”
“It was bad back there. The Jillies very nearly got us.”
“But they didn’t,” he said firmly.
“What if they come again?”
“They won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” he said.
“You don’t know. You just hope they won’t. Are you being honest now?”
“I’m trying to be.”
“I’m scared, Hy. I don’t want to die.”
“We’ll make it back to Adrianopolis. We’ve got to.”
“I know.”
Then she was silent, letting Hybeck’s hands rove across her body.
“Hy,” she said after a while, “I want to spend all my free time with you until we get back.”
Hybeck smiled to himself and pulled her closer to him if that was possible. “I’d like that.”
“I hoped you would.”
She turned her head around so that he could kiss her, and when he did he tasted a saltiness on her cheeks. She had been crying. He wondered why, and then told himself that she was a woman, and women were like that.
“Hy, I want you to make love to me again,” she said so softly that he could barely hear her.
And he did, though while he did the thrumming of the ship sounded less smooth to him than it had before, and he wondered why.
15
Three and a half hours after his conversation with Captain Bracer, General Crowinsky contacted CDC HQ on Earth. He patched Bracer into that circuit—and fifteen minutes after that, Absolom Bracer had gained the permission he had requested. The ships would stay—and Earth would send relief as quickly as she could. Perhaps in less than five weeks, perhaps only four.
Only four!
What was the reaction of the other officers and the crews of the starships when Captain Bracer made the announcement that they would remain at Breakaway Station until the relief ships arrived from Earth? That would be hard to describe. There were too many individual reactions, too many personal feelings, thoughts, hopes, fears, horrors, memories. No one wanted to stay, and as Absolom Bracer had asked himself so often, “Haven’t we done enough?”
In any war before, they would have, most of them realized. But this was like no war that mankind had ever fought before. In this war there was no surrender, no possibility of settlement, for the Jillies would accept no settlement on any human terms. There were only two alternatives: victory or death. It was that simple. If mankind lost this war, mankind would cease to exist, every last soul. No, they knew the answer to their question, most of them. As long as the Jillies stood a chance of winning, no man had done enough if he was still capable of doing more.
They would stay. And they would fight, if it came to that. Most of them.
There were some, though, who would not or could not accept it. One painful death was enough for any man, they said. No one had the right to ask for two, not for any reason in the universe.
And what were the reasons, when you boiled it down to that? To aid Breakaway Station in case of attack. Aid how? they asked. We can stand up here, the three of us, two crippled warships and a hospital ship, and pretend to put up a fight. We might even kill a Jillie or two if we’re lucky. But there’s no “might” to what they’d do to us! They’d slaughter us like cattle, and then go on to destroy Breakaway Station. Oh, we might delay them for a while, but what damned good is that going to do Breakaway or us? It’s just plain and simple suicide, and no sane man is asking that of us.
But what could they do?
16
The ball of thermonuclear flame above the mountains was tremendous, swelling and rippling, searing the dwarfed trees and brown grasses, roasting alive the goats and corbeasts. Then it slowly, very slowly lowered through the air and began to dim, to die.
Most of this Commander Glenn, Guardian Culhaven could not see, for the tanks of his patrol ship, the Messala Corvinus, assigned to temporary duty on Cynthia, had darkened until they showed hardly more than the fireball itself against a sea of blackness. The peaks of the mountains were faintly visible, glowing now as they melted and flowed under the star-hot temperatures. Still, Glenn did not stare long at the holocaust that moments before had been a Jillie warship. It had not been the only one in the sky.
At his command, the Corvinus angled up above the fireball, climbing toward the limits of Cynthia’s atmosphere, following his squadron as they chased the Jillies who had begun pulling back, upward and outward away from the planet. They had broken through the human defenses once again and fired a few missiles and
energy beams and destroyed a little more of the planet, and they were satisfied—if Jillies felt satisfaction—and they could retreat now.
The LPS Corvinus and her companions chased the two surviving Jillie warships up out of the atmosphere and as far as a thousand kilometers out. There the Outer Patrol would take over the chase, having rallied now from the initial attack that allowed the Jillies into the planet in the first place, and the patrol ships assigned to Cynthia’s atmosphere fell back toward the planet.
Now that it was over and he was still alive, Glenn, Guardian Culhaven shook with barely controllable fear. The fear had been there all along, though now it showed in the shaking of his hands as he stood on the bridge of his patrol ship, staring with sightless eyes at the tri-B tanks. I’m a coward, he told himself. I’m a worthless, Goddamned coward. I don’t even have the guts to…
And he remembered Anjenet back on Adrianopolis, living within the great hall of Culhaven with half a dozen servants and her sister Tisha, now with a full marriage contract and Glenn’s child growing within her, telling him that for the first time in her life she was happy, really Happy. And he knew that he could no longer allow himself to be a coward. He was a Culhaven and he would soon be a father. And no Culhaven was a coward. None that he’d ever heard of.
Forcing his eyes to see again, Glenn focused them on the tanks before him where Cynthia was swelling, a blue, brown and white ball, beautifully banded with clouds, not an unpleasant planet when you took it all in all, though it was hardly an Adrianopolis. Still, Glenn found himself thinking, perhaps a bit irrationally, when the war is over a man could buy a few hundred square kilometers near the Breshov and start himself a ranch. A ranch would be a good place to raise children; and Anjenet—the new Anjenet, not the one who had stripped herself naked in the Assembly on a dare—cared more about children than the social life of Holmdel. Yes, a man could find himself a good life on Cynthia, once the war was over—if he lived through it.
We All Died at Breakaway Station Page 10
