Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  “Neither am I,” Jasmine said, gripping her seat.

  Marshall made one last check of their position relative to the H-K and nodded to Max. “Cycle the gear.”

  Max pulled on the landing gear handle and slammed it down. There was a sickening groan of rending metal as the landing skids punched through the satellite’s radiator wings. Ammonia coolant escaped in a continuous, fine mist into space. “Gear up,” Max reported as he shoved the handle back into its detent. “One green, two amber.”

  As expected, Marshall thought. The nose gear was fine but the main skids were trashed.

  Max suddenly pointed at a cloud of gas that had burped up from the Peng Fei, coming from the side of the ship facing them. “Did they just fire on us?”

  “They sure did,” Marshall said as he goosed the main thrusters. “Hang on!”

  It looked like PDC fire; they didn’t want to waste a missile on him while the Borman was still out there. He moved them swiftly away from the H-K satellite, which now sat dying as its own vital fluids escaped into space. With no coolant flowing between its powerplant and radiators, it would soon overheat and shut down.

  Within seconds, a cloud of steel slugs meant for Specter instead shredded the killsat.

  “We did it!” Max exulted, but Marshall wasn’t convinced. They’d taken out one threat; a larger one remained and he had no weapons to bring to the fight. He angrily bit down on his lip: That wasn’t even the mission, genius. He turned to study the Jiangs once more—if his mission was to keep them safe, had he just failed? What options did he have left?

  The crew’s delight at their defensive guns easily defeating Borman’s remaining missile was tempered by the loss of their hunter-killer. “Laser platform is—neutralized,” Wu said solemnly. “Reactor is overheating and going into SCRAM mode, sir.”

  Liu clenched his fist and cursed silently. He would be held to account for the loss of a strategic asset, enemy action or not.

  It was time to end this game. He could continue toying with the Borman and overwhelm them with missile fire. They would eventually exhaust their point-defense magazines, but it would be a messy affair that exposed his ship to more risk. If the Borman was to be destroyed, there were much cleaner ways to do it.

  “Bring us about. Minus eighty degrees yaw, plus five degrees pitch,” he ordered. “Energize the gauss cannon.”

  Marshall called frantically over the secure channel and was surprised when Garver answered. What he had to say was even more surprising.

  “He’s out? Right now?”

  “Couldn’t be avoided,” Garver said. “They had to amputate. Rosie’s with him but he’s still under heavy sedation.”

  “Are you running the command deck solo, then?”

  “Doing my best, sir. But you understand what this means.”

  Garver could be both subtle and painfully direct. “Affirmative, Chief.” Marshall was now the ranking officer, whether or not he was physically aboard.

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  Before Marshall could wrap his mind around the enormity of what had just been put upon him, the unicom frequency barked to life.

  * * *

  “Attention, all American spacecraft. This is Colonel Liu Wang Shu. You have violated protected territory and attacked military assets of the People’s Republic of China. You are hereby directed to stand down, surrender your vessel along with the fugitives from justice you harbor.”

  Before the Americans could demand to know what would happen if they didn’t, Liu finished his message: “We have targeted the Borman with a one-hundred-fifty-millimeter, fifty-megajoule electromagnetic cannon.” He then turned to his first officer. “Major Wu?”

  “Gauss cannon is loaded and energized, targeted at RQ39’s center of mass, sir.”

  Liu nodded with satisfaction, held up a finger and keyed the microphone. “Regardless of your intentions here, you have demonstrated yourselves to be opponents worthy of respect. I believe in offering my adversaries a choice, whenever possible, between life and death. An informed choice. In case you doubt our intentions, I shall provide you a demonstration.”

  He closed his fist.

  “Firing,” Wu said.

  Being closest to the asteroid, Marshall and his passengers had a front-row seat to the devastation. There was no muzzle flash, no firebolt across space, no cloud of superheated gas and certainly no thunderous report; only a burst from Peng Fei’s aft thrusters to counteract the recoil. It was enough to show how much of a kick the magnetic gun had.

  Within seconds there was a brilliant flash from the face of RQ39, almost dead center at what approximated the misshapen asteroid’s equator. Fountains of ejecta, pulverized rock, exploded into space as if a volcano had suddenly erupted.

  “Good lord,” Max breathed. “Did they just fire a nuclear warhead?”

  “No,” Marshall said distractedly, doing the math. One hundred fifty millimeters was the size of a field artillery shell, and if propelled at enough velocity it wouldn’t even need to be explosive. It only needed to be heavy and fast, and that round had just covered over twenty kilometers in about four seconds. “It’s called a Gauss gun,” he sighed. “It’s a mass driver. It can hurl heavy projectiles extremely fast, over and over.”

  “And your—what—PDCs?” Jasmine asked. “They can’t defeat it?”

  “It’s nothing like a missile,” Marshall explained. “This would be like trying to shoot down an artillery round with a machine gun.” He had no idea if she appreciated the absurd impossibility of that, but it was all he could think of.

  In the distance, sunlight glinted off the Chinese ship. “They’re firing again!” Max exclaimed.

  “No,” Marshall said, holding out a hand to steady him. “They’re turning.”

  The unicom frequency squealed to life again. “This concludes our demonstration,” Liu said with uncommon playfulness. He knew he had the upper hand; hell, he was holding all the cards. “Do not bother yourselves wondering what our regeneration time is, I assure you it is less than you would like. Particularly when it is operating at less than full capacity, which it was. If you do not stand down, we will be forced to fire at full charge against your vessel.”

  “Forced,” Marshall scoffed. Sure they would.

  Garver’s voice came over the secure channel. “That thing’s pointed right at us now, sir. What are your orders?”

  Marshall screwed his eyes shut in frustration, forcing back a mounting headache as he racked his brain for a plan.

  “We surrender, Chief.”

  39

  “This is Ensign Marshall Hunter, acting commander of the American spacecraft Borman.”

  Liu recognized the voice. Interesting. “Ensign Hunter,” he said with mocking surprise, “you are not aboard the Borman, I believe.”

  “You have a good memory, Colonel. I’m aboard our shuttle Specter with the Jiangs.” A pause, as if the young man were working up the courage to go on. “On behalf of our—my—crew . . . we surrender. I am requesting rations and safe passage aboard your vessel to Earth.”

  It sounded as if he was choking on the words, Liu thought. That spoke well of him. “A wise choice, Ensign, which we are willing to accommodate. What is your current situation?”

  “We took some damage from your point-defense rounds and our landing gear is damaged,” he said, rubbing it in that he’d at least managed to take out their gun emplacement. “We still have maneuvering ability but do not have much delta-v left. Less than ten meters per second.”

  “Is that enough for you to rendezvous with our ship?” Liu asked, feeling magnanimous.

  “Affirmative. Please advise the berthing port you wish us to use, and transmit your rendezvous and docking procedures.”

  Liu hesitated, and shot Wu a questioning look. “He will need that information, sir,” the senior pilot advised him. “There is a significant collision risk without it.”

  “Very well,” Liu said. “Prepare the information he needs and send
it.”

  “One other thing,” Marshall said. “We sustained some damage when we, well, rendezvoused with your satellite. I’m going to have to get outside to inspect our docking ring. That’s going to delay us several hours.”

  Liu’s lips drew thin, showing his mounting irritation. “You have done enough damage for one day, Ensign. I advise you to make haste.”

  Rosie ripped off her surgical gloves and shoved them into a biohazard container, angrily enough to almost take a layer of skin with them. “We’re doing what?”

  “You heard me,” Garver said impatiently as he stripped out of his spacesuit. “The good young ensign doesn’t see any other way that keeps us alive.”

  “What about you, Chief? Hunter’s good people, but he’s not salty. There’s got to be a way out of this.”

  He took in the chaotic scene of the normally squared-away med bay—the complicated negative-pressure isolation tent could only do so much to contain the mess—and his eyes settled on an exhausted Rosie, still in her cooling garment and covered in Simon Poole’s blood.

  Emergency surgery in the field was trying enough for a paramedic; having done it in zero gravity on her CO must have left her drained in ways they’d never imagined. Or maybe it was her having taken a life for the first, hopefully only, time.

  He turned to their commanding officer, still under sedation beneath the protective cocoon of an EMS pod. Submariner, then an astronaut, now some crazy combination of the two. Garver tried to draw on his own experience, put himself in the skipper’s shoes. Poole could be insanely inventive. Would he have made the same call as Hunter?

  “If there’s an option he hasn’t considered, I can’t see it,” he finally said. “Hunter said we should expect one of their Shenzou craft to arrive here after he’s aboard Peng Fei. Let’s get the docking node prepped for that. We’ll worry about the rest later.”

  “Aye, Chief,” Rosie said, and tiredly began to strip down to her underwear. It spoke volumes of their current state that in a confined space with three other men, no one seemed to pay any mind.

  * * *

  “Ugliest weld I’ve ever done in my life,” Marshall said as he climbed back into the shuttle’s cabin. He locked down the outer hatch and placed a vacuum torch back into the equipment locker. “Not that I’ve done many. None in space, for that matter.”

  “Will it hold up?” Jasmine asked. “You’re certain this will be safe?”

  “Sure, until it’s not,” Marshall said tiredly as he began repressurizing the cabin.

  “I trust you,” she said, “but you must understand. I would rather have you open that hatch and throw me into the vacuum than be imprisoned on a PRC ship. We’ll eventually be just as dead.”

  “I’m really trying to keep it from coming to that,” he said, and gestured at a tablet strapped to the control pedestal between the pilot seats. “Are you able to make sense of their specs, Mr. Jiang?”

  The older man smiled. “I think we’re well past that. It’s Max, okay? And yes, my Mandarin is still perfect.”

  “Didn’t mean that, but it’ll be helpful. Sorry but I can’t even read a Chinese menu. I’m going to have to lean on you two pretty hard.”

  “We have no choice but to help,” Max said, and pulled up a list of procedures. “These are their rendezvous protocols, including terminal control frequencies and holding gates. And here”—he scrolled down to a vehicle diagram—“is the layout of their primary docking node.” It held three docking ports in a T arrangement. “They want us to berth at portal one, the forward ring. Portals two and three each have a Shenzou-B docked to them. They are each capable of holding up to seven crew, and maintain a normal sea-level oxygen-nitrogen mixture at fourteen psi.” He moved the image along with his fingers, tracing the ship’s length. “At the far end, adjacent to the waste reclamation compartment, is the brig.”

  “They won’t waste any time taking us there,” Marshall said. “Nice how they thought to put it at the smelliest end of the ship.” He took a deep breath. “Fourteen psi, huh? That’s what I thought. Let’s enjoy breathing without helmets for a bit longer. We might be in them for a while.” He checked each of their fittings to make sure their suit bottles were replenishing from the shuttle’s supply.

  Marshall had piloted them into the Peng Fei’s approach zone slowly, unfamiliar with the hulking ship and not wanting to waste an ounce of precious propellant. Max sat beside him, following his movements while picking up everything he could about piloting the spacecraft. The controls he’d mastered for Prospector were much more intuitive compared to Specter, which Marshall called more “government issue.” It had less glass, fewer touchscreens, more hardwired switches and buttons.

  Marshall had first needed to program their automated docking sequence, translating the procedure from Mandarin with Max’s help. The shuttle’s lidar system was still working and would guide them into the docking target on Peng Fei’s forward node. As they glided silently toward the hulking Chinese ship, he let the flight-path director pulse thrusters to keep them on course.

  “The biggest difference between this and flying an airplane is timing,” Marshall explained. “Piloting a spacecraft ultimately depends on timing. We use the RCS to fine-tune our position and everything else comes down to hitting our burns at just the right second. A flight computer in a lot of ways is just a sophisticated countdown timer.”

  As the shuttle backed into Peng Fei’s forward docking ring, he made one final pass on the routine he’d programmed into the master flight computer and checked his watch against it. As he finished, the small text screen flashed a single prompt: EXECUTE?

  Marshall entered the final command. “Yes, please.”

  The Peng Fei’s docking node was squared away, Marshall had to admit. Sparkling white, with no clutter nor a single piece of gear apparently out of place. A large red-and-yellow PRC flag dominated one side of the module while a portrait of the Party chairman adorned the other. Two unsmiling crewmen of the People’s Liberation Aerospace Force stood on either side, their feet in floor restraints in front of the open Shenzou spacecraft. SOP, Marshall thought—keep the crew vehicles on standby when an unfamiliar spacecraft is berthing. You never knew when things might go sideways and the crew would have to bug out. He just wasn’t used to seeing armed guards.

  He moved aside so the Jiangs could emerge from the docking tunnel, the three of them still in their spacesuits. They each found nearby foot restraints and approximated standing as a wiry figure emerged from the opposite end. He pulled himself upright before them, and while Marshall could not decipher the characters on his name tape he recognized the three cherry-blossom insignia on the epaulets of his jumpsuit.

  Marshall cracked open his visor to speak. “Colonel Liu,” he said stiffly. “Ensign Marshall Hunter, US Space Force, Orbit Guard.”

  Liu grunted a brusque greeting and eyed them like a cat regarding its kill. He’d seemed a lot more friendly on the radio. He nodded to one of the guards—judging by the ranks on their collars they had to be more than that, though right now Marshall could not think of them as anything else—who presented him with three bundles of clothing.

  “You know what is happening here, Ensign Hunter,” Liu said. “Remove your spacesuits and put these on,” he ordered. “You will be escorted to our secure facility.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that just yet,” Marshall said nonchalantly. He kept one hand on his visor. “We’ve been in a pure oxygen environment at five psi since yesterday. We need a few hours to adjust our gas mixture so we don’t get decompression sickness. I’m endangering myself just talking to you like this.”

  Liu glared at him. “Indeed you are. First you need time to inspect your damaged spacecraft, now you need time to acclimate your compromised bodies.” He smiled thinly. “Is there anything else you require, Ensign?”

  One hand still on his visor, Marshall’s eyes darted to the watch on his wrist ring. “No sir,” he said, looking at his companions. “Max and I were jus
t having that conversation—timing is everything in spaceflight, right?” He slid his visor back down and took a deep breath of pure oxygen.

  “In your case, it has run out.” Liu turned to one of the crewmen. “Zhou, you will stay here with the Jiangs and manage their acclimation to our atmosphere.” He angrily snapped open Marshall’s visor. “You and I, however, have much to discuss. Perhaps a little discomfort will encourage your cooperation.”

  Marshall ignored him, still eyeing his watch. “That’s five.”

  Liu furrowed his brow. “Five?” What was this idiot going on about now?

  “Three,” Marshall replied, then: “Two.” He met Liu’s eyes. “One.”

  The blast from Specter rocked the ship. A cloud of exploding hypergolics thundered out of the connecting tunnel, tearing the shuttle apart and opening them up to space. Marshall held his breath and slammed down his visor. He shoved Liu aside, the colonel’s face a mask of shock as the ship’s atmosphere emptied into the void.

  Marshall sprang off the sidewall and dove into one of the adjacent tunnels, right behind the Jiangs. “Find me the flight manual!” he shouted over their suit intercom as he slammed the hatch shut behind them. He winced at the sharp pain in his elbows, already getting his first taste of the bends. He hurriedly double-checked his helmet lock and turned up his oxygen supply to burn the nitrogen out of his system.

  The Shenzou-B layout was remarkably similar to the Russian’s advanced Soyuz. “Geez, do they have to steal everything?” Marshall wondered aloud as he strapped himself into the center pilot’s seat.

  “The answer to that is yes,” Max said, strapping into next to him as Jasmine settled into what was nominally the engineer’s seat. “And right now, you should be grateful.” He tapped a few commands into a touchscreen and the glass control panels flickered to life.

  All of the information was in Mandarin, of course. “I can’t read a damn thing,” Marshall said. The pair of hand controllers and eight-ball attitude indicator in the center of the console were easily understood, and there was no time to rely on the Jiangs translating the rest for him. “You undock us, I’ll pilot us out. Deal?”