by David Ryker
Before he could tell Bishop to get ready to catch it, the Raft tilted forty-five degrees under his feet and slid inexorably over the edge of the crater, with him still inside.
2
The lack of atmosphere prevented the ship from making a sound as it scraped against the debris that surrounded the rim of the new crater, but Quinn didn’t notice. All he knew was that he was headed down with the ship, and that ship was going to crush an Oberon One employee and, quite likely, himself at the same time.
His mind was several seconds behind his fingers, which were already in the process of unlocking the cable from the bracket on his suit. Once it was free, he pitched the winch box towards the Raft’s rear opening with all of his strength.
“Coming your way!” he grunted. “Catch it!”
“What about you?” Bishop cried as the winch struck the tips of his fingers and spun off to the left, spiraling slowly through space. Quinn saw him leap to his right and clutch at the Device with both hands as he slowly descended back to the moon’s surface.
Quinn didn’t bother to answer; he leapt toward the ramp, scrambling to be as close to the opening as possible in what was likely a vain hope to minimize the impact when the Raft hit the bottom of the crater. To his astonishment, he watched the walls of the cargo hold slide past him as the raft dropped lower, leaving him floating in empty space for almost three full seconds.
But gravity, weak as it was, still had a hold on him, and he was falling toward Sloane. Quinn sent up a brief prayer as the Raft slid toward—and then past—the technician, leaving him untouched by less than a meter.
“You stupid bastard!” Kergan yelped through the speaker. “You could have killed him!”
Too bad it wasn’t you, Quinn thought darkly, but immediately scolded himself. That’s not how Marines acted. He excused himself with the fact that he was quite possibly about to die himself—the edge of the lip on which Sloane was lying was fast approaching, and if he didn’t land there, he’d land a lot farther down, on the Raft’s metal exterior, where, light gravity or not, his armor would crack open and he’d be killed by explosive decompression.
He tried to angle his feet toward the wide part of the shelf, but his momentum was too strong and he clipped it instead, flipping his body in a horizontal roll that sent him to the edge. He was on his side, looking face-down into the abyss where the Raft had fallen as gravity pulled him over. At the last second, he reached up with his right hand and dug into the soft dirt, managing to stop his descent—for the moment.
“Little help,” he grunted at Sloane, who had pushed himself onto all fours. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of room for both men, but without Sloane’s help there was no way Quinn could make it up. And there was no way he was going to give up and sink the way that moony-eyed kid did in the old movie about the Titanic.
He looked up into Sloane’s faceplate, identical to his own, and he could see the man’s face in the dim glow of the headlamp. He looked… confused? Was that the right word?
“Do it.” Sloane’s voice was oddly small and quiet over the speaker in Quinn’s ear. “Do it now.”
“Goddamn right do it now!” Quinn snapped. “Pull me up!”
The look on Sloane’s face made Quinn think he’d startled him out of a dream, but a moment later the tech was clutching Quinn’s forearm and tugging with what little strength his thin body could provide. The loose gray soil spilt out under Quinn’s boots as he fought for purchase with them, but eventually the two men were sitting side-by-side on the lip, their feet hanging over the edge.
“You all right?” Quinn asked, trying to catch his breath.
“What?” Sloane blinked at him. “Oh. I mean yeah. Fine. Never better.”
“What the hell happened?” Kergan’s voice blared.
“We’re both fine,” Quinn replied. No thanks to you, he thought but didn’t say. “Bishop has the winch to haul us up.”
“I don’t give a shit about you! What about the Raft?”
Quinn glanced down into the crater at the cloud of dust sent up by the ship‘s impact. “Your guess is as good as mine. Someone’ll have to go down and do recon.”
“That’ll be you,” said Kergan.
Quinn shrugged. That was fine with him. He’d rather do something than sit around and watch any day.
“I’m not familiar with the ship,” he said. “If you want a decent assessment of damage, Sloane should probably come with me.”
“Officer Sloane,” Kergan said automatically. He made sure to remind the inmates of the pecking order every chance he got, on the station or on the surface.
“Uh-huh,” said Quinn. “I suggest the two of us stay put then, Officer Kergan. Once you anchor the winch, we can just descend from here. If you agree, of course. Sir.”
“You two will stay where you are,” said the guard, acting as if all of them hadn’t just heard the suggestion from Quinn. “We’ll anchor the winch and send down the cable, then lower you in.”
A year ago, Quinn might have rolled his eyes at Kergan’s childish need for control, but he’d spent more than enough time under the man’s metaphorical boot heel to know better nowadays. This would be his fate for the rest of his life—assuming he didn’t live till 2193, almost a century from now, which is when he and his men would be eligible for parole back to Earth. Quinn would be 138 by then.
“Yessir,” he said instead. “We’ll await the cables.”
Beside him, Sloane shook his head slowly.
“You sure you’re all right?” Quinn asked.
“Fine. Just… just got my bell rung, that’s all.”
Quinn liked Sloane about as much he could like anyone on Oberon One outside of his own crew. He was technically a guard, as were almost all the staff on the station, but his work was usually focused on maintenance. Kergan’s job, on the other hand, seemed to consist of nothing more than busting his prisoners’ balls.
“I can go down on my own and send video footage back to you if you want,” Quinn offered.
“No, we need to see the ship.”
We?
“Your call, Officer. Let me know if you need any help, though.”
Sloane responded with silence, and the two listened to the radio chatter from above them for several minutes as the others anchored the winch with a burrowing cable that shot thin spikes into the soil a few meters below the surface. When the tethers dropped beside them, Quinn hooked his to himself while Sloane stared at his own, looking confused again.
“Where are this suit’s gravity generators?” he said in an odd voice.
Quinn’s eyes narrowed. “The what now?”
Sloane looked startled again. “Nothing.” He fumbled with the latch but finally got it into the loop on his suit. “Let’s go.”
The Raft had kept its structural integrity to a degree that Quinn wouldn’t have believed possible if he hadn’t seen it. Inside, most of the equipment had been strewn about by the impact, but the control system in the cockpit was still intact.
He scanned the exterior of the ship—as much as wasn’t buried by dust, that was—while Sloane did a systems check. A few minutes later, he heard mumbling over the radio that sounded like fix this.
“What was that, sir?” he asked.
“What’s going on?” Kergan barked.
“Plasma leak,” Sloane muttered. “It’s repaired.”
A plasma leak? How the hell did he fix that so quickly? Quinn didn’t know a lot about ship maintenance, but he knew something like that should have required the resources of the station to even begin addressing the problem.
“The ship is ready to embark,” said Sloane. “We’ll be up there momentarily.”
“Thank heaven for small favors,” Kergan said testily. “I want to get the hell out of here and back onto the station. At least it’s got shielding.”
Quinn bounced back into the Raft through the rear entrance just as Sloane activated the engines. The ship shuddered violently as its forward thrusters pushed it level w
ith the base of the crater. Then the rear ones kicked in and the rest of the ascent was relatively smooth, until it touched down about fifty meters from the men on the surface. Quinn was amazed that the ship was moving at all, let alone as smoothly as it was.
Bishop knelt next to the winch, reeling in its anchoring cables, while Schuster, Maggott and Kergan stood watching. What happened next took only a handful of seconds, but Quinn would remember them for the rest of his life. From his vantage point, he caught sight of the second meteorite before the others, and had just enough time to shout an order before it struck the surface behind his companions.
3
“Fire the cables!” Quinn barked. “Now!”
If anyone other than Bishop had been holding the winch, the four men would likely have been killed. But it was Bishop, and he responded automatically to the order from his commander, without thinking or hesitating. The cable shot toward Quinn, who counted out three full seconds, his stomach knotting, before it reached him. He snagged the tip out of the air and clipped it to the nearest thing he could find, a stabilizing handle next to the rearmost jump seat in the cargo hold.
He turned his attention back to the rear opening just in time to see the shockwave engulf the four men in a cloud of debris. Quinn breathed another silent prayer as he counted out three more seconds. They stretched out like a lifetime before he finally saw a clump of a shadow in the thickening miasma. A moment later, the clump solidified into a shape that Quinn could actually make out: Bishop was gripping the winch box with both arms as it reeled its way toward the ship barely a meter ahead of the expanding cloud. Behind him, Maggott was clutching Bishop’s leg with one beefy glove and Dev Schuster’s leg with the other. Bringing up the rear, Schuster had hold of Kergan’s right arm. If the circumstances weren’t so dire, Quinn probably would have been laughing his ass off.
As it was, his heart was hammering in his chest.
“Prepare to lift off on my mark!” he shouted.
“Leave them,” Sloane said in a flat voice.
“That’s an order, Marine!” Quinn hollered into the mic, his instincts overriding his rational mind as they always had in battle.
He felt the Raft lurch under his feet as it lifted almost a meter off the surface. The motley daisy chain of men was still twenty yards out and the cloud was gaining on it.
“Thrusters on my mark,” said Quinn. “Steady. Steady.”
Lifetimes passed as he counted out the seconds: three… five… seven… the cloud was engulfing Kergan now. Ten… twelve… it was up to Maggott’s waist… fifteen.
Quinn had to make the call. They others wouldn’t be safely inside the cargo hold in time, but they were tethered. He would just have to pray that the cable could withstand the jolt of acceleration when the Raft suddenly blasted off. He didn’t allow himself to think about the exhaust of the thrusters frying them alive if they slipped too close.
“Now!” he cried.
For a fraction of a second nothing happened, and Quinn felt adrenaline stab him through the heart. But then Sloane responded to the order and the ship bucked forward and up. Behind it, the winch cable—and the men attached—undulated like a whip being cracked in slow motion. Quinn didn’t breathe for several seconds while he kept his gaze locked on the shadow of the men who had once again been engulfed by the cloud. Could they hold on? And why weren’t they getting any closer?
“Shit!” Bishop barked. “Winch is jammed! It’s the dust!”
“God save us!” Kergan whimpered into the mic.
The ship was almost vertical now, and the thrust was increasing exponentially with every passing second. Quinn acted without thinking, clutching the cable with both hands pulling with all his might. He pressed down with his heels to activate the electromagnets in his boots and they clamped down on the ramp, but he hadn’t been able to brace himself properly, so he would be pulling with his lower back instead of his shoulders.
“Maggott!” he yelled. “Reel them in! I can’t do it!”
A second passed before he heard the Brit’s throaty grunt and felt a sudden yank forward on the cable. A second later the shadow of the men had emerged from the debris as Maggott’s beefy arms pulled them forward. He and Bishop had somehow managed to switch positions, putting Maggott in front.
“Attaboy,” Quinn said, his pulse slowing. “Get in here.”
Maggott reached behind him and grabbed Bishop, lifting him one-handed into the cargo hold and Quinn’s waiting grip. Then came Schuster and finally Kergan, who flailed like a hyperactive kid in a swimming pool. Quinn managed to push him into one of the jump seats and buckle him in before turning his attention to the rear opening again. He and Bishop shared a nod before each reaching out to take one of the big man’s hands. With considerable effort, they managed to haul him up far enough for him to be able to grip onto a handrail and pull himself the rest of the way.
“Close the hatch!” Quinn gasped. The hydraulics pulled the ramp upward and into locking position, much to Quinn’s relief. He’d feared that they would suffer the same fate as the winch and seize up with dust. The men’s boots all clamped magnetically onto the metal floor as the ship finally broke free of the moon’s gravitational field.
The sound of heavy breathing filled Quinn’s ears as every man except Sloane tried to calm themselves and deal with the exertion of the past few minutes. Maggott had propped his hands on his knees, his wide back lifting and falling like a tide. The effort he’d just put in would have earned him a medal in the war.
“Quinn,” Kergan huffed.
“Yeah?” he huffed back.
“I should… put you all… in the Can for a week.”
“The Can?” Maggott bellowed. “What the bloody ‘ell for?”
“For touching… an officer,” said Kergan. “But I’ll let it go. This time.”
Quinn raised a hand in Maggott’s direction as an order for his man to stand down. He knew that was as close to a thank-you as they were going to get from Kergan. The sooner all of them got that through their heads, the better the next ninety-eight years were going to be.
The ship’s magnets kicked in as it reached escape velocity and the moon receded in the screens on the wall. Everyone’s boot soles clamped against the steel floor while the seats of their suits were stuck fast to the seats. It was a forty-minute flight from the surface to the Oberon One station; Quinn and his men usually passed the time in silence, but Kergan seemed to be in a talkative mood after their adventure.
“This is going to throw a wrench into mineral exploration for the foreseeable future,” he said. A hissing sound accompanied him popping off his helmet now that the cargo hold’s airlock had been activated. “The scanners on the station identified that spot as a huge lode, but it’s too unstable now. Mr. Farrell won’t be happy about that.”
Sean Farrell was ostensibly Oberon One’s warden, but he was more like its CEO. The station was a private prison, and the inmates were used as captive labor by the SkyLode mining concern, an international group that had weathered the Trilateral War and emerged as one of the world’s strongest corporations in the aftermath.
The key to its wealth was palladium, the most valuable substance in the solar system. Incredibly rare on Earth, the metal was by far the best substance for use in cold fusion, which had powered the planet since the 2050s, and its demand pushed the price to astronomical levels. Dozens of companies had scoured the solar system for decades in the hopes of discovering a sustainable supply; SkyLode had sent probes out to all the moons of Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus, and had finally hit pay dirt on Oberon during the war.
“Begging your pardon, Officer,” said Schuster, after the rest of them had followed suit and removed their helmets. “But those meteor strikes might be a blessing in disguise.”
Kergan rolled his eyes. “Why is that, genius?”
The guard used the term as an insult, but Quinn knew better: Dev Schuster was a bona fide genius, with a tested IQ of 180. Unfortunately for him, his parents—a Ger
man father who had emigrated to India in search of work and married Dev’s mother, a Dravidian from Sri Lanka—were dirt poor and couldn’t afford to send him to school. He’d enlisted in the United Free Territories Marines in the hopes of getting the military to pay for his education. Instead, he’d ended up on Oberon One, serving a hundred-year sentence.
Even now, two years later, that still hit Quinn like an arrow to the heart. But, as always, he clamped down on it. Prison was no place for what-ifs.
“The craters give us a lower starting point for sounding,” said Schuster. “And it’s quite possible the impact shook the crust enough that it created openings to the mantle.”
“Nobody cares what you think,” Kergan said dismissively. “Now pipe down.”
“He’s correct,” said a voice from the hatch that led to the passageway and the cockpit beyond. It was Sloane. “The geophysical alterations will result in better access to the ore you seek. And to other, more valuable commodities.”
Kergan’s eyes narrowed even as Quinn felt his own doing the same. He’d never heard Sloane talk like that before.
“You applying for a professor’s job or something?” Kergan asked.
Sloane didn’t answer; instead, he simply stared at the guard for an uncomfortably long time. Bishop, Maggott and Schuster had all closed their eyes in exhaustion and tuned out in their jump seats, but Quinn was watching Sloane and Kergan intently, glancing from one man to the other, wondering what was going on.
He might have simply written it off as tension between two coworkers if he hadn’t seen what he saw next: the air appeared to ripple around Sloane, circling outward until it engulfed Kergan as well. It lasted only an instant and was gone so quickly that he could almost believe it had been a trick of the light or his own tired eyes.
And then his mind’s eye was suddenly flooded with images of exploding heads. His arms were wrapped around the MAG-7 rifle that had been his constant companion through five years of war, and it was firing a non-stop stream of charged-particle rounds into an endless crowd of screaming people. They had been funneled into a holding pen of some sort, easily a thousand of them, and from Quinn’s vantage point, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Their shrieks drowned out the chattering of the rifle as it pumped hundreds of thousands of rounds into soft tissue, painting the floor with a tide of crimson.
