Freedom's Fist
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fantasy; War
Description: **War in the Heavens for Freedom on Earth ** The war has taken a nasty turn. The Free Army's fleet is all but destroyed. Only a handful of ships remain. Now the Free Army needs the help of an ally if it wants to survive, if it wants to continue the fight.
Publisher: Beezle Media, LLC

FREEDOM’S FIST

Book 4 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

A novel
by

Bobby Adair

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Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L.  Adair

Credits at the end of the book.

History of The Grays: Part 1

Time casts a haze over the past, transforming whatever it had once been into a different thing, a legend of soft breezes, caressing suns, and unified Gray minds.

A million images, sensations, and communal truths condense to a core idea squeezed by primitive human speech into a pair of inadequate syllables—Eden.

Gray Eden.

The Children of the Sun lived there.

Sadly, bitter blood passed from parent to child never sweetens.  It never runs dry from the vein.  It requires no histories or sharp memories to keep it flowing.  All it requires is the fertile soil of an impressionable soul to grow the seeds of a parent’s loathing into a new generation’s hate.

All of that came later.

No living Gray holds the memory of every ancestor in the lineage from themselves all the way back to The Enlightened One—he who first shared the secret of opening his mind to another.  The depths of that past are so dark they can barely be imagined.  No Gray can directly recall a memory shared to them by a parent that encapsulates the whole of Gray history, or even a thin thread running all the way back to the beginning.

No mind could contain so much.

Nevertheless, every Gray accepts as truth that their kind once lived in an idyllic garden, on a world they still call Home, where they basked every day in the loving warmth of Mother Sun, her dim, red brother, and her four, tiny siblings, whose light seemed to glow only enough to illuminate themselves in the heavens.  These six celestials, they believed, created the Gray race, and nurtured them with their light.

It was into this paradise that Mother Sun sent The Enlightened One to share her most sacred secrets, those of Unity.  For among the Grays in the Garden at that time, there was no sharing of thoughts, no collective mind.  Grays were individuals, concerned only with their personal pleasures, doomed to loneliness, though they were always among their kind.

When the Enlightened One shared the miracle of these new secrets, some were able to accept the gift and join the collective mind.  Many were not ready.

Sadly, those who did not meld with the others grew suspicious of those who did.  Over time, the suspicious ones grew restless and jealous.  The creation of the collective mind, such a wonderment though it was, was not seen so by all.  Instead of joining all Grays, it divided them, and for the first time since the creation of Home, Grays left the Garden.

Some of the suspicious went north, following the iridescent flying animals that filled the sky with the passing of the warm season.  They believed these flyers knew secrets of the world they could share.  In chasing these creatures, this band of suspicious Grays abandoned the teachings of The Enlightened One, so Mother Sun punished them with something they’d never felt before on their skin—snow.  Just as snow kills the plants in the cold season and hardens the dirt, it hardened the souls of those Grays.  It took all the kindness out of them, and in the resulting void, something grew that the Children of the Sun never knew existed in the universe.  That thing was called evil.

That band of Grays came to call themselves the Snow Grays.

Others ventured west, seeking the place over the horizon where Mother Sun journeyed each day.  They hoped to live there and spend eternity in the bosom of her love.  These Grays called themselves the Seekers.

More went east after losing faith in the benevolence of Mother Sun.  They were convinced that The Enlightened One’s truths were valueless tricks, and that Mother Sun’s true power lay in the knowledge she kept hidden.  These Grays came to be called the Unbelievers.

Many of the suspicious Grays journeyed south.  For it was in the southern sky where the Red Sun spent his days, shining his light more generously than he did in the north.  These Grays came to believe Mother Sun’s golden rays were cold and wicked, and only the light from the Red Sun truly nourished.

While in the south, these Grays taught themselves a special secret that they called numbers.  And while all modern Grays know of numbers, it is only those descended from this sect who worship them, for it is the foundation of all they believe.  Numbers only existed because of counting.  Counting led to comparisons.  Comparisons infected these Grays with a thought-sickness called Greed.

This group came to call themselves Red Brothers, after Mother Sun’s lesser sibling in the sky.

Of the Grays who stayed in the Garden, those who were eager to learn the Enlightened One’s lessons and maintained their fidelity to Mother Sun came to call themselves the True Children of the Sun, or simply True Children.

Seasons passed.

Pods of True Children chose from among them a bearer of hatchlings, shared in raising their young, grew old, and died.  And so passed many generations as the True Children thrived and all but forgot about the suspicious Grays who left the garden to struggle in a wilderness of deficiency and despair.

Only The Enlightened One’s secrets were a cure for that loneliness.

The True Children grew to so many that they overflowed the garden in every direction, eventually coming into contact with bands of the lowly ones.  It was almost never physical contact, but touching of the minds.  The True Children would feel the presence of their long-lost cousins in the hills and forests, sometimes near, often far.  They tried to teach the Enlightened One’s gifts from a distance, never knowing if the miracle spread to those demented souls.

They were to find out through the generations that it did, but in a perverse form.

And then, the Red Brothers returned to the Garden with what they called The Truth.

They believed Mother Sun’s weak, red brother was not a brother at all, but a father to Mother Sun.  He was a parent whose kindness ran so deep that he gave his all to Mother Sun, whom they called the Greedy Yellow Goddess.  They believed that the Red Father was so benevolent he’d allowed himself to be enslaved by the Greedy Yellow Goddess, and in expending his effort to hold her up in the sky for all eternity, he’d grown weak, and was condemned by his jealous daughter to slowly die, suffering through every long moment until the end of time.

The True Children knew this story to be false and tried to show the Red Brothers that all the good in the universe flowed from golden Mother Sun.

The difference in beliefs led to disdain and rejection.  From out of which grew something new, rabid, and viral, something that could touch a Gray’s soul with barely a wisp of a breeze and twist it rotten.  This new feeling had a name and it was Hate.  Yet Hate was not a lonely thing; it bred offspring into the souls of all Grays—Fear, Murder, and War.

***

I open a comm to Phil who’s in one of the forward rooms keeping the Gray company while it sleeps.

“I’m reading this Gray History report you wrote up.”

“Your tone is bloated with meaning,” says Phil. “What do you want to ask me?”

“Are you trying to make it sound biblical?”

“No,” he answers.  “What I was trying to do was express the reverence the Grays feel toward their history, while at the same time trying to portray as much accuracy as I can distill from Nick’s memories.”

“Okay.”  I’m already winding up for my next question.  “What’s with this Eden business? Please tell me that’s a word you came up with.”

“After all these years with a bug in your head and you still don’t understand Grays.”

I sigh.  “Fine.  Tell me.”

“They don’t think in words like we do.  I mean, humans don’t necessarily think in words either, but our thoughts crystallize that way because we use spoken language to communicate.  Grays never had the need for the shorthand of a spoken language.  They never had to summarize an idea down to a few dozen constraining words.  They never had to try to describe a feeling, a memory, or a sunset that way.  They just shared what they remembered.  When I use a word like Eden, I do it because it conveys more than a biologically optimal environment.  It conveys the reverence the Grays put on their inherited memories of the place.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say.  “I get it.”

“Are you going to finish reading it now, or keep on criticizing me?

“I’m reading, Phil.  Don’t get so touchy about it.”  I cut the comm and go back to the report.

History of The Grays: Part 2

So began the Black Forever as Hate’s offspring grew in the souls of the Red Brothers, the Seekers, the Unbelievers, and even the True Children.

All Grays learned to make and use weapons to kill one another.  A long time of dying fell upon Home’s children.  It was said in those days, one’s eyes could not gaze upon any field or hill or vale without seeing the bleached skulls of Grays littering the ground.

The war lasted longer than any Gray’s life.  It went on for generations as the sides allied with one another against a foe and they betrayed each other to realign to a new advantage, with no side ever having the strength to bring the war to an end.

It was Mother Sun who finally awoke Home to the terrors of murder on her face, and when she saw—when she felt the pain of the Grays killing one another for misbegotten faith—she cried in the only way a planet can.  Her mountains spewed fire and ash into the sky for a full season, and for another, lava flowed down their slopes, finally coming to an end in a great explosion felt the world over.

The cold time followed.

Snows fell through all the seasons, and in all the places where they’d never fallen before.

Glaciers grew tall and crept slowly out of the northern mountains, dragging themselves across the land.  With them came the Snow Grays, the most vicious of all Grays.  Their numbers were few, but like their souls, they were hard.  They knew how to make war like none of the southern races, and they learned a new concept to describe Hate and Murder on previously unfathomable scales.  They called it Genocide.

The only thing that saved the dying novices to war—all the tribes in the south—was the small number of Snow Grays.  Their hard lives and constant feuds made it impossible for them to thrive.  So there were few of them to wreak their havoc on the rest.

Eventually, the home world started to warm again, but the Grays who were left had broken up into countless tribes and small bands who learned to keep to themselves, avoiding any who were unlike them.  They’d all learned indelibly about Hate and all her twisted progeny.

That’s when the Helpers from the stars arrived.

History of The Grays: Part 3

The Helpers were unlike anything the Grays had ever imagined.  They stood twice as tall as a Gray and outweighed them by four or five times.  They were powerfully muscled bipeds who tore plants from the ground and ripped the flesh off animals to cram into the spikey maws on the fronts of their heads.  This horrified the Grays, who’d thought the only way to derive energy from the universe was to soak up what was given by Mother Sun and her dim, red brother.

These great beasts were what humans would come to call Trogs.

The Trogs came into existence on a world as ancient as Home.  In a surprise the Grays could never quite accept, Trogs evolved without the ability to connect their minds.  They were doomed to live their lives like the ancient tribes who’d left the Garden to run away from The Enlightened One’s truth.  They were individuals, and always would be—hence lesser beings.

The Trogs’ inability to commune hadn’t kept them from making the darker discoveries of existence.  They knew Hate and all her terrible progeny.  They worshiped a god they’d conjured out of their imaginations, and they called her Conquest.

To prove their love for this cruel queen, the Trogs ritualized their conflicts, which were vicious beyond imagination.

They were a short-lived, prolific species.  For most of their history, their population was held in check by their continual slaughter of one another.  For those who managed to survive the wrath of their cousins, the ubiquitous diseases, hostile weather, and famine were always waiting around the corner to continue the killing.

The Trogs’ home was not like the serene, stable world where the Grays had lived their millennia.  Theirs was a fetid cesspool filled with so many nightmarish creatures and privations that no Gray could hope to survive there for more than the span of a day.

It was, reasoned the Grays, why the Trogs were such formidable beasts.  Their home world was not one for weaklings.  Unfortunately for the Grays, strength was not the Trogs’ only asset.  What set them apart from all the beasts on their world, and from the Grays on Home, was the Trogs’ mastery of the elements in the universe.  The Trogs had taught themselves to fabricate tools, and with those tools they constructed factories, and with those factories, they’d produced mechanical wonders—inorganic things without soul, devoid of life, but capable of burning a fire within their hearts so strong it could power a sun.

They’d used that power for their incessant wars, and in all their strength and cleverness, they, like the Grays so many centuries before, had summoned the ire of their gods.  With weapons that burned hotter than the soul of the universe, they’d destroyed their home world and were left no choice but to wander the stars in great ships hoping one day to find a world to replace the one they’d reduced to cinder.

The search ended on the True Children’s home planet under the golden hues of Mother Sun’s rays.

The Trogs, being beasts who were curious, ambitious, and greedy, claimed Home as their dominion and enslaved every Gray who lived upon its face.

It was not a harsh slavery, for the Trogs saw the Grays as little more than house servants and pets, incapable of doing the hard labor of tending animals, raising crops, and tearing the core out of the planet to feed their insatiable factories.

As the two cultures became one, the Trogs started to envy their Gray servants, not for the Grays’ ability to commune with one another as a single, melded mind, but for their ability to communicate thoughts between themselves.  The Trogs saw The Enlightened One’s gift in the only way their limited, singular minds were able, as a way to pass their crude words to one another in secret, as a way to make themselves stronger than their Trog brothers.

To the Trogs, The Enlightened One’s gift was merely a path to more power.

Generations passed as clever Trogs sought to resolve their envy and steal from the Grays that the last thing they had to give—The Enlightened One’s secret.  During those years, the Trogs spread across Home, even as they explored other worlds and established settlements in places far away, among the stars.  The Trogs’ medical and cellular engineers experimented with ways to surgically meld one of Home’s simple life forms into the Trogs’ bodies.  They learned to implant these creatures inside the big, boney skulls of their offspring.  The corpses of Trog children sacrificed to this cause could have filled a valley and fouled a river for a generation.  However, Trogs were persistent as well as clever.  They counted life sacrifices for the good of the clan as sacred gifts.  Parents gave willingly of their newborns.

Success did finally come.

Young Trogs would be implanted shortly after birth.  Trog and symbiont would grow together—one strong, one delicate—the Trog in control, the other the servant.  In this way, the Trogs were able to see the gravitational flow of the universe as a Grays do.  They were able to share their thoughts, not as fully as a Gray, but enough to fulfill their ambition, enough for the gift to feel like a new power in their hands.

Of course, they turned this hard-earned gift to their advantage, and it upset the balance of power among the Trog clans.

War came to the Trog Empire.

Trog killed Trog, and slaughtered children, wives, cousins, and Gray servants, too.  They fought battles with armies that stretched to the horizon.  Their machines rolled over the land, shredding bodies, obliterating homes, and burning factories.  They rained fire down from the sky without ever a thought to what might be left when the fighting was done.  For a Trog, nothing in the universe was as abhorrent as defeat.  Everything could be sacrificed for victory.

And so it was.

The Grays watched as every creature and plant on Home slowly died.  The world turned into a grand sarcophagus of sand and ash.  What remained of the Grays would have gone extinct as well, except that the Trogs took their servants away in their starships when they abandoned Home forever.

That was when the Grays learned genocide came in flavors beyond their collective imaginations.

History of The Grays: Part 4

With the Trogs, war was a lust that once aroused, had to be sated.

They took their conflict out to the stars, to the colonies Trogs had built on other worlds, and to new planets they happened upon.  Anywhere a Trog clan could be found, the war was brought to them.  The Grays didn’t understand the wanton destruction.  The Grays had learned by then what stars and galaxies were.  They understood how vast the universe lay across the black night sky.  They knew the planets where Grays and Trogs could go and live in peace had to exist in numbers so large they hadn’t even been named.

Everything the Trogs ever needed from the universe lay within reach.  All they needed to do was fly their starships into the void, search out new planets, and terraform them to their liking.  Still, lust for killing burned too hotly in Trog hearts.  Vendettas were bequeathed from parent to child in blood oaths and dark tales of wicked glory.

The once great fleet of starships shrunk to a score of battered vessels.  What remained of the Seekers, the Unbelievers, the Red Brothers, the Snow Grays, and the True Children ventured out in these ships, falling into despair as their masters drove themselves maddeningly toward destruction.

Finally, after a dreadful battle over a planet with no name orbiting a star no Gray had ever even noticed in the endless sprinkle of lights in the heavens, the surviving handful of Trog starships chose to run in order to survive.  It was the first sensible choice a Trog master had made since any Gray could remember.

Together, the cruisers jumped from star to star to star, journeying year upon year through the void, only to fight again with a fleet of ragged pursuers as they both tried to refuel and replenish their stores.

More ships were lost.  More Trogs and Grays died in the terrible, cold vacuum of space.

And then they happened upon a star system where no pursuers ever arrived.  No battle followed.  The Trogs did what they could for their ships and their people before hurriedly taking off again, jumping to another star on a years-long journey.  Knowing upon arrival they were not yet safe, they jumped again, and again, and again, until finally limping into a star system that looked like their own Eden.

They counted three habitable worlds, the best of which they chose to land on and call their new home world.

History of The Grays: Part 5

The Grays found themselves in a place where they could thrive.  They needed little more than the right spectrum of rays from a local star, warm-blooded animals on which to nest their young, and a range of minerals their bodies could slowly absorb as needed from the water, earth, and air.

Colonization for the Trogs was a more arduous process.  They were in a constant war with the local vegetation, always finding better ways to kill it lest it overrun their fields.  The animals they’d brought along struggled to stay alive.  Local predators found them a delicious addition to their diet and indigenous diseases killed entire herds.

Fortunately for the Trogs, they were nothing if not persistent and tough.

They dedicated themselves to victory over the local environment with all the enthusiasm they’d brought to the war with all the cousins they set out to cleanse from their end of the galaxy.  Perhaps that was a good thing—maybe the best thing for them and their servant Grays.  They ended up spending centuries trying to kill all of that world’s flora and fauna so their favorite plants and animals would take over.

It kept the Trogs from killing each other.

It was during these years that the survivors of the Seekers, the Unbelievers, the Red Brothers, the Snow Grays, and the True Children built an alliance that would stand for thousands of years, all bound by a single foundational concept—that the Trogs, once they’d beaten their new world into submission, would again turn on each other in a war of annihilation.  The Grays, being able to see this cycle as inherent to the Trog species, knew that extinction was certain to come one day.  Being beholden to the Trogs, the Grays would die off, too.

That was unacceptable for a species that saw itself as superior to the Trogs in every way except for brut stature, and the ability to master the elements for building tools and machines—an area of expertise that eluded even the most imaginative of Grays.  They came to understand that the Gray mind had not been created for such things.  Theirs was the transcendent realm of the collective mind.  The shaping of dirt clods into tools of destruction—that was the domain of the lesser beings, the Trogs.

So it was that the Grays developed their plan.

After war, it might be said that the Trogs’ secondary passion was that of sloth.  A Trog might lie about for days thinking no thoughts with his weak mind and doing no work with his strong hands.  Hence, the Trogs grew dependent on their Gray slaves for many things.  Teaching Trog children how to think with their big, unused brains was one area where Grays almost completely supplanted adult Trogs.  Teaching Trog children to bond their telepathic symbionts was another realm where servants shouldered the work for their brawny masters.

Ever so slowly, over many, many generations, the Grays learned to position themselves within Trog households and social hierarchies so they could exert influence.  They learned to tug and gently nudge individual Trog minds toward a desired outcome.  The Grays used this power to urge Trogs into forming breeding pairs that were likely to produce the most pliable offspring, pliable by the Grays.

It was an effort that took millennia to bear fruit, but the life of a Gray runs for a thousand years, whereas a Trog might live for a tiny fraction of that.

So it was that the Grays bred away Trog intelligence, independence, and much of their aggression, until after many generations, the Trogs were but simpleton shadows of the formidable conquerors who’d arrived on the Grays’ home world all those years before.

The Trogs retained their physical strength.  They were still smart enough to manipulate their machines, though they were no longer intelligent or creative enough to imagine and design new ones.

Most of all, they were ready for slavery.

History of The Grays: Part 6

Perhaps every creature with the capacity for complex thought believes they can change the world without being affected by it.  The Grays, in their long road from slave to master believed it, just as the Trogs did when they took the Grays as their slaves and lived through many generations walking a path toward their destruction.

They were both wrong.

The mighty Trogs learned how to serve.  The Grays assimilated a lust for conquest.

Or perhaps a new aspect of Gray nature arose, one that thrived on the conceit they felt at having mastered creatures with so much power in their minds and muscles.

The transition of slave to master, just like any change in the tide of history, requires a war to seal the deal.  So it was with the Grays.  They took their new horde of gullible Trog slaves and pitted them against the last of the Trogs who were still able to grasp the concept of free will.

It was a brutish affair that ended as all Trog wars did, with a long campaign of annihilation.  The slaughter lasted generations—Trog generations—but such lifespans were nothing to a Gray.

When all the dead had been reduced to ashes and sent into the wind, the Grays, with their new itch for killing, had only themselves to turn on.  The old animosities between the Seekers, the Unbelievers, the Red Brothers, the Snow Grays, and the True Children festered into brushfire wars that broke out between clans.  Alliances formed and shifted as clans positioned themselves for a greater share of power and land.

The battles were fought exclusively with the muscle and blood of Trog slaves, which were bred more and more for that sole purpose—to carry destruction to the enemy.

Still, Grays died.  Deaths lingered long in their memories.  Grudges went unresolved long after peace was negotiated.  Animosity was stacked with piles of distrust, kindling for igniting the next war.

Despite the fighting, the Grays and their Trog slaves thrived.  Over many thousands of years, they filled the system’s three habitable planets with billions upon billions of their kind.  They constructed star-faring ships by the hundred, and then the thousand, all of the battle-tested design they inherited from the earlier Trogs.

On the longest time-scale imaginable by a human for such an endeavor, the Gray-Trog culture slowly developed the technology to manufacture space stations.  These evolved into gigantic wheels in space, large enough to make a home for a billion Grays.  Such stations became necessary as the planets overflowed and the wars for resources grew more frequent.

Every clan and sub-clan with a ship or two to fly into space embarked on an endeavor to strip the asteroid belts, the Kuiper belt, the Oort Cloud, the moons, and rocky inner planets of every material necessary to build the great wheels.

It was during this phase of Gray history, with space stations being built all through the solar system, with clans competing for resources, fighting over what they perceived as the perfect place in orbit to build their new wonders, that the True Children realized the position in which they stood.  Over all those generations, they’d grown to such prominence of power and number, they realized they were equal to the sum of the four major clans and all the thousands of sub-clans put together.  The True Children decided they should rule the others, and secretly developed a belief that their offspring should survive to one day rule the galaxy.

And so began the most terrible war in all of Gray history.

Over a thousand years, the war ebbed and flowed, grew hot, and then cold again, as each side jockeyed for position and strived to build alliances that would evaporate as soon as the necessity of it disappeared, usually with the decimation or annihilation of an enemy.

The bleached skulls of Gray and Trog alike littered the surface of every planet.  Nearly a third of the space stations were destroyed or rendered unlivable.  Vast lands were scoured of life, regrew over centuries, and then scoured again.  Mines in the asteroid belt and on the small, rocky, inner planets were destroyed and rebuilt.

And slowly, the great fleets of ships the Gray clans used for war, for transport, for exploring the nearby star systems were whittled down.  Many were obliterated.  Many crashed into planets.  Many were damaged and repaired and damaged again so many times they lost structural integrity and disintegrated when making the jump to light-speed.

As the slaughter became unbearable, some of the small clans escaped.  They took a few ships, or a dozen, loaded as many of their kin and Trog property inside as they could, and escaped into the void, looking for a home far from the violence.

By the time the end came, Grays were down to just a tenth of their number.  The Trogs had suffered even more.  Only one was left alive for every twenty or thirty who fought in the Gray armies, worked in the fields to feed their brothers, or toiled in space on the great ring colonies.  As for the True Children, a final battle raged for weeks in which every True Child Gray and all of their Trog slaves were finally wiped out.

Except for three pods, eighteen Grays, and nearly five hundred Trogs who escaped in a single ship, racing across the stars to save themselves from the just retribution of all the suffering their clan had brought upon the Gray species.

Chapter 1

I finish reading Phil’s report on Gray History and look through my tiny, forward-facing window, as Penny brings us in slow and quiet, nearly drifting.

Given all that Phil must have learned from his little Gray friend, I need to applaud his efforts.  The report is concise for a history that covers thousands and thousands of years.  At the same time, I can’t help but wonder how much is left out.  Is there some nugget on the cutting room floor that would be of use to me in our inevitable battles?

Of course the cynic in me asks how the hell I’d even know until after the fact.

The story’s pretentious tone still bothers me, and I wonder how much of that is Phil’s conveyance of the Gray’s reverence for its history, and how much is Phil’s admiration.  It never stops worrying me that the Gray might be assimilating Phil, and not the other way around.

Either way, I hate the thought of it.

Me, with a gooey alien spaghetti bug in my head.

We’ve made our jumps all over the solar system, taking no direct approach, going out of our way to hide our destination should any Gray happen to be in the right place at a proximate distance to guess where we might be going.

Making the run back and forth for over a week ferrying everything of value that could be scavenged and stuffed inside an assault ship has been a little stressful.  We’re abandoning the Potato, expecting at any time the Trog fleet will show up to pound it to dust.  Everybody knows it’s coming.

Still, we gamble, because out in space, every piece of equipment is worth so much more than back on earth.  Unlike the UN base buried in the mountains of Iapetus, the Free Army has no manufacturing capacity off-earth.  That is, except for the rudimentary kilns and furnaces on the Potato, which were built for refining the most valuable bits out of ores and stone, not for molding and assembling complex machine parts.  Pieces of those kilns and furnaces, those that could be disassembled, make up our current load.

As I sit in my chair on the bridge of the rusty beast, silently sliding through space, while most everyone onboard dozes or talks quietly over private comm links, I wonder if the Free Army is guilty of optimism or stupidity.  Did they think their revolution would be so quick that building manufacturing infrastructure out in space would be a wasted effort? Or were they just too stupid to plan for the long-term? Or maybe I’m just a dick because it’s easy to judge others when your eyes are full of hindsight and your heart is smoldering anger over all the lives wasted for a poorly managed good cause.

And why does life have to have so many unanswered questions?

I find myself daydreaming more and more when the illusion of love made me think I had all the answers I’d ever need—a warm woman to hold in my arms, a blue sky and a bright sun, and mountains standing tall all the way to the horizon, like they were everything in the universe that mattered.

But that was an illusion back in those days, one I worked hard to get away from.

I sigh.

The sighs come easy on days when the memories tease me with an ever-sweetening past.

Spread across the void ahead of our ship, an oddity of geometry comes into view.

We’re in Jupiter’s L4 zone, one of those gravitationally stable areas in the solar plane where the pull of the Sun and the nearby planet zero out, kind of a gravitational backwater where the small crap in the solar system collects to drift forever.

For an inner-solar-system planet like earth, with a small gravitational pull relative to the gas giants in the outer solar system, not much junk gets caught.  Only one hunk of rock was ever found, floating along in earth’s L5 zone, following the planet’s orbit around the sun.

Jupiter’s L5 zone makes earth’s look like a joke so dry it needs a footnote to explain it.  Over a half-million hunks of rock, ice, and whatnot, each at least a kilometer across, are spread through the space, following along in Jupiter’s orbital wake.

The space around our sun is just chock-full of crap I never suspected was out here when I was a kid looking up at the twinkling stars in the sky.  And if our system is so full of raw materials just lying around for the taking, why would any bunch of aliens need to come so far just to get their hands on it.  Surely, their home system must be the same.  Then I remind myself, it’s not the metal ores and volatile gases they’re after, it’s us they want, an endless stock of labor.

It’s hard sometimes assimilating the concept that you’re a commodity.

Beside the point.

Up ahead of our ship, I’m counting rows and columns in a perfect grid of asteroids, dark against a black background and barely visible except for the weak glare of the sun shining on ridges and crags.  They’re all of the kilometer-plus variety—six rows, nine columns, fifty-four in all, spread out in space several kilometers apart.  It doesn’t take a genius to guess that every one of those rocks must have been surveyed and assayed and pushed here by some mining operation’s big rock-moving tugs.  Like all of the operations out here, their processing capacity is tiny relative to the wealth of raw materials.  Why not lock in your stock for future generations before your competition shows up to lay its claim?

Penny guides our ship past the first row of asteroids.  All those around loom large as she decelerates the ship past.

The Free Army’s facilities are spread across nine of these rocks, and they have railgun emplacements burrowed deep.  Unfortunately, not all of them are manned, and over a third of the big guns don’t yet have a functioning fusion reactor built to power the weapon and life support facilities.

“We’ll be down in five,” Penny tells me.

Nodding, I say, “I’ll wake everybody up.”

Chapter 2

It takes nearly four hours to do all the things that seem like they should have taken only thirty minutes, but that’s just the way life works sometimes.  Maybe all the time.

When I catch up with Colonel Bird, he’s outside, standing on the raw asteroid rock with nothing but the great black void above him glistening with stars promising a billion flavors of undefined hope.  A trillion really.  Maybe a trillion trillion.  Or probably that’s only a fraction of an estimate.  The expanse of the universe really does outstrip the capacity of the human imagination.

Opening a comm link to both me and Brice as we walk up, Bird observes, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”  I stop in front of him and salute, still feeling awkward about it.  The military training on that pointless bit of protocol never sank in with me.

“Brice.  Kane,” greets Bird as he salutes us back.  Several paces behind him, three guards stand watch.  Four others are spread out nearby, keeping an eye in all directions.  Not that there’s anyone out here but us.  The asteroid we’re standing on is near one corner of the grid of floating rocks.

Gravity, time, and the violent history of collisions over billions of years have ground most of the kilometer-sized rocks to roughly shaped ovals and spheres.  A few odd exceptions float among the others.  The one we’re standing on is oblong—not unlike the Potato, where my crew was first sent to rendezvous with the Free Army after the Arizona Massacre—and it’s standing up relative to the plane of the array, so we’re well above the others, with a good view.

The sight is gorgeous in a dark, menacing way.  And it’s unique, like everything else I see when I’m out here.  Though the beauty of novelty is losing its ability to impress me.

I start the conversation with, “There’s plenty more still there.  Back on the Potato.”

Bird nods.  “It’s too dangerous.  We’ll wait a month or two, and try then.”

“Yes, sir.”  I’m still getting used to using the words.  Too much of my personality rubbing me wrong, or too much ingrained push-back over Blair’s insistence on the honorific.  I don’t know.  “I think that’s wise.”

Brice nods, too.  He approves.

"How is your crew holding up?" Bird asks.  He does sincerely care.

“Tired.”  I need to give him more.  “The short hops, back and forth for a week, sleeping in spurts, it takes its toll.”

“War,” Bird summarizes.  “How much time do you need before you’re ready to head out again?”

“Two hours if we have to.”  If we have to? My crew needs some downtime.

“I don’t need to send you out today,” Bird tells me.  “I’m looking for an honest assessment.”

“Twenty-four hours.  We’re tired, but a good night’s sleep will get us back on track.”  Making a guess as to where we’re going with this, I ask, “Is Jill’s ship still on schedule?”

“Your UN friends tell me it will be ready the day after tomorrow.”

“And Hawkins’?”

“They’ve mobilized every tech and mechanic they have,” says Bird.  “Both ships will be ready.”

“Have Hawkins’ people decided whether to let their ship participate in joint operations with us?” It’s an important question that remains unanswered.  “We did some damage to the Trogs with just one ship at Ceres.”

“Saved us from a total loss,” agrees Bird.  “With three such ships, who knows what we could do? With ten, we’d make short work of the Trogs.”

That’s only fanciful speculation at this point.  “We’re months from having a fourth.  They don’t have the manufacturing capacity on Iapetus to produce another axial gun faster than that.  That’s what Spitz told me.”

“Now that they see the value,” Bird explains, letting me in on some new information, “they’re ramping up.  If we can keep them supplied with materials, inside of a few months they’ll be producing those guns at the rate of one every three weeks.”

“And the ships to carry them?”

“The best they can do is four or five a year.  They don’t have the infrastructure to make them from scratch faster than that.”

“Disappointing,” I admit.  “But it sounds like relations with them are progressing.”

“We’re on the same side,” Bird assures me.  “Maybe most important of all, now we’re on the same page.”

“How so?”

“They’re going to refocus all of their production to support the war effort.  They still have to take care of their colonies, but now they know we have hope.”  Bird clarifies further, “The Free Army has hope.”

Brice laughs in that dark way of his.

“Ceres convinced them?” I ask, not entirely believing it.  “That’s a huge change of policy.”

“It may be the saving grace that makes our sacrifice at Ceres—” Bird stops when he notices the look on my face, “—blunder is a better word, I suppose.”

I silently acknowledge.

“If we can unite now,” says Bird, “we can still win.  We’ll soon have the weapons to clear the Trogs from the solar system.”

“And then the Grays,” I boldly conclude.  “Our Grays, on the moon.”  Our slave masters.  “And the North Koreans.”  I see from Bird’s expression he’s not following me to that conclusion.  He has bigger worries, or deeper doubts.  “What?”

“I know where your heart lies.  You want to start this revolution in earnest and free earth.”

Bird’s remark sparks the fuse on my anger, but I do my best to keep it tamped down.  “But?”

“I need you for something else.”

“Something else?” I’m staggered as a thousand doubts explode in my mind.  If Phil were here, he’d be voicing them for me.  I’ve lived and worked for the revolution for more days than I can count.  And now, seeing a real light glowing on the horizon after our defeat at Ceres, Bird wants me to do ‘something else’?”

“Something more important.”

My defiance bubbles over when I ask, “What could be more important than freeing all of humanity from those stinking Ticks?”

Chapter 3

Bird doesn’t rise to my argument.  Instead, he points out at the array of asteroids, at the utility ships moving among them, at digging machines working on the surface of several, at people, dots of light and color busy preparing the defenses.  "Terrible configuration for defense, don’t you think?"

Obliviously! But I don’t say that.  I nod, instead.

“You wouldn’t believe how many hours we waste talking about how to reconfigure the asteroids and anti-ship guns for the best mutually defensive configuration.  Seems like every month or so, someone brings it up at the command council meeting, and we waste hours debating it.”

Not knowing where Bird is going, I muse one vague observation, “Politics.”

He shakes his head, though he says, “I suppose.”

I look across the flat array drifting in its perfect grid, hating the way humans get so caught up with inconsequential details and ignore the most important things, like defending the Free Army base from a powerful enemy.  “Too much arguing.  Not enough deciding.  This place could be a fortress.”

“And that completely misses the point.”  Bird smiles slyly.  I make the guess that he just laid a trap I stepped right into.  “We can’t move the asteroids.”

Another quick glance at the giant rocks is all I need to count the big mining tugs, just like the one we found on the Potato.  Massive though these asteroids are, any one or two of the tugs has the power to nudge them slowly into place.  “How many tugs do you have in all? I see six right now.”

“Nine altogether,” answers Bird.

“So why the hesitation?”

“You know how much energy it would take to move one of those asteroids into place and then stop it again?”

I jump to the first guess that crosses my mind.  “You have a hydrogen constraint?”

Bird shakes his head.  “It’s the grav signature that always stops us.  Those tugs, maxing their drives to get those asteroids moving, would produce a bright grav signature that a Gray might see from ten million miles away.”

Crap.

Being a bug-head with my grav sense of the world always beaming brightly in my brain, I feel embarrassed for not guessing that from the beginning.  But then again, I am a human, and no matter how early the bug was implanted, it’s still an alien, forever trying to show me the world in a way my synapses aren’t wired for.  A Gray, though, evolved with an intimate connection with the universe’s gravitational subtleties.

“Why are we talking about the configuration of the base’s defenses?” I ask.  “Are you wanting to keep my ship here in a defensive posture?"

“No,” Bird answers.  “I’m making the point that the best strategy is not always the most obvious one, and it’s almost never the one that feels good.”

“I guess we’re getting back to the ‘something else’ you were talking about a moment ago.”

“We are.”

I surrender.  “What do you have in mind?”

“That Gray of Phil’s—what does he call him—Nick?”

I nod.

“Do you think the information Phil extracted is accurate?”

“I’ve thought a lot about it,” I tell Bird.  “Phil and I have talked about it enough times to wear it thin.”  I heave a deep sigh as I’m being put on the spot to pass a final judgment.  “Yes.  I think it’s true.”

"Anything, in particular, to make you believe that?"

“The Trogs.  They’re Neanderthals from earth.  Or they’re evolved from earth’s Neanderthals.  I don’t think there’s any way we can argue that.  I think one truth leads to another.”

Bird isn’t satisfied.  “Or, one truth can mask a larger lie.”

I smile.  “ hard to talk to.”

“I’m cautious with the lives of my people.”

That’s something I like about him.  It makes it easy to be loyal.

Bird asks, “Would you bet your life on that judgment?”

“That Phil’s report is true?”

“One-hundred-percent true.”

That’s a harder question to answer, yet I already know.  “Phil and I have held one another’s lives in our hands for a long time.  I trust him, and I trust his ability to give me good information.  Yes.  If Phil says his report is gospel, then I believe it.  I’ll bet my life.”  I’m apprehensive, but I get the cold feeling Bird is preparing to hold me to it.

“There are notable omissions from Phil’s reports.”

“It’s going to take a long time for Phil to learn all the Gray knows.  And the Gray was young when he attached to Phil.  There’s plenty it never learned.”  And that pulls me out of the realm of things I know are true and steers me right into the domain of things I hope are true.

“From what the astronomers on Iapetus have guessed, the Trog home world is 18 Scorpii.”

That doesn’t mean much to me.  “So, it’s a star we have a name for? One nearby?" Of course, that makes sense.  Everybody knows the Trogs couldn’t have come from too far away in the galactic neighborhood.

“Do you know how far a Trog Cruiser can travel in interstellar flight?”

I admit I don’t.  All I have are watercooler speculations.

“It’s not the kind of question that arises all by itself, right?” Bird smiles.  At least he can see the humor in my ignorance, perhaps an ignorance he recently shared.  “They arrived, right? Just like the Grays did all those years ago.  However they got here, nobody ever thought to ask from how far away they came, because it was irrelevant.  Their ships were able to make the trip.  Maybe we all just assumed those big cruisers could fly forever.”

“But they can’t.”  It’s more than a guess.  Of course, they can’t.  No ship can.  They all need to refuel and resupply.  And just as Tarlow and Phil and I discussed before, no Trog ship of which we’ve seen the inside was set up for long-term space voyaging.

"The top speed on those cruisers," says Bird, "is eight times the speed of light."

“8c,” I confirm.

“But they can only run for six to nine months at that speed, depending on how their loads are configured.”

“Wait.”  A conclusion that should be obvious is knocking on the door to my brain.  I’ve never thought of the cruisers from this perspective before.  “So, their max out-and-back travel distance is two to three light years?”

"And their one-way distance is four to six."

“One-way?” That doesn’t make any kind of sense in terms of space travel.

“And the only way to extend that range,” says Bird, “is to lighten the load by replacing the railgun slugs with larger stores of hydrogen for the ship, and oxygen, water, and cal packs—everything you need to sustain the crew and Trog marines they keep quartered in the rear.”

“How far can they extend?” I ask.

“Estimates are for one-way trips at ten light years, maybe more.”

“Without any railguns slugs,” I mutter.  “And that would mean the passengers would spend more than a year at hyperlight speeds and then arrive with no way to defend themselves.  No way to attack.”

“It explains a lot if you think back to how the Grays first arrived in our system all those years ago,” says Bird.

Brice is on a roll, and I let him go.

“The Grays,” he says, “took up residence on the moon and sat there for years, mining ore and manufacturing railguns and slugs.  There were only eighteen Grays onboard the ship, a small contingent of Trogs, and barely enough weaponry to defend the ship from a half-ass attack.  The speculation is that they rigged the ship for a long trip across interstellar space and made some big sacrifices to do it.”

“So if we’d been able to attack them with a credible force early on,” I guess, “we might have been able to beat them.”

“Probably true,” agrees Bird, “but irrelevant now.  Where this is going is that 18 Scorpii is forty-six light years away.”

“Forty-six?” The math is easy, but makes no sense at all.  “Can a stripped-down Trog cruiser make it that far?”

“According to the engineers,” says Bird, “it should be impossible for a Trog cruiser to make it here from 18 Scorpii.”

Chapter 4

Bird has my attention.  “What are you telling me?”

“The only way the Trogs could make it here is to leapfrog.”

I don’t know if Bird is drawing an analogy, or tossing a technical term at me I’ve never heard before.  “Leapfrog?”

“Jump from star system to star system,” he explains.  “Maybe pick a system within range of your ship, say four light years, go there, build a supply depot—”

“A gas station for the cruisers," I explain to myself, feeling a little stupid because it’s such an obvious solution to the problem.

Bird nods.  "Do that five or ten times, and you end on Alpha Centauri, and  in the neighborhood.  Maybe once the network is established, your ships can make the long one-way jumps of ten light years or so.  Not much risk if you know there’s a depot at the end.”

“And then a week or so to resupply,” I add, knowing the turn-around time for the Trog cruisers in system.

“That’s right.”

I start shaking my head.  “We’d been speculating the Trog system had to be close, no more than six or eight months away, four to six light years, because we didn’t think the ships were built for long-term life support.”

“You were mostly right on that.”

“So the Grays and Trogs attacking us spent what, five or six years getting here?” That’s not even the most significant realization.  “They had to have spent decades searching for the Grays who conquered us, and building out the supply bases along the way to support moving a fleet forty-five light years across the galaxy.”

“That’s right.”

“Jesus.”  I feel insignificant and ignorant.  Creatures from such a faraway place were engineering the destruction of my world from a time when I still thought the moon was made of cheese.  I can’t help but stare into the void.  Every one of those sparkles up there could be a home to hostile monsters.  “How many of them are already on the way?”

Bird is looking up, too.  He knows how easy despair can come at moments like this.  “We’re not the kings of the jungle.  We’re the chicks in the nest learning to fly.”  He turns back to me.  “Every raptor starts out small and weak.  Tell me, Kane, are you going to grow up to be a falcon or a chicken dinner?”

"A falcon.”

“Then I need you to make a hard choice.”

“Which is?”

“We need to cut our enemy’s supply line.”

I make the guess as to what that means in exact terms.  “We need to destroy the Trogs’ supply depots?”

“Just one of them,” Bird clarifies.  “Split one link and the chain breaks.”

“And any Trog ships flying to the system will be stranded there,” I guess.  “They won’t have enough hydrogen to continue the journey and not enough to go back the way they came.”  But that can’t be true.  “Wait.”  I try to recall all I was taught about the design of the Trog cruisers.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” Bird tells me.  “Can those cruisers live off the land? Can they harvest the elements available locally?”

“Yeah,” I confirm.  “That’s exactly what I’m curious about.”

“The answer is no, they can’t.  All of their ships are built according to one design, just like ours were when we still had a fleet.  They were built for war.  They need the support of other ships that can come into a system and bring in the bodies and the machinery to build out the infrastructure to supply them.”

“Is it possible,” I ask, “that they don’t do that at all? Could they just bring along their support ships to process the hydrogen for their drive systems and the water for their crews’ needs? Could they have ships that process ore to produce the slugs for their railguns?”

Bird nods.  “That is a possibility, yet we haven’t seen any evidence of it.  We’ve never seen a factory ship.”

“But we’ve never seen a ship that comes in and sets up a processing factory on some asteroid or moon or something, either.”

“Haven’t we?” asks Bird.

Oh, shit.

Bird smiles.  “The first ship the Grays brought to our system, it was built on the same platform as all their other warships.  It landed on the moon and busied itself constructing processing facilities to refine the local ores for the elements they needed.  They created their life support supply chain and armaments factory from nothing but what they brought along.”

"That ship is still sitting up there on the moon.”  Like everyone who has watched the war these past two years, we all know that cruiser didn’t take part.  It has never moved from its dock.  Everyone speculated it was worn out, that it would never fly again.  Now, I suspect it’s something else, a lifeboat for select Grays to use once the war turns into a lost cause.

“Factory ships,” says Bird, “they’re what we’ve seen circumstantial evidence of in the supply bases the Trogs set up around the solar system.  After the permanent bases are built out, the factory ships are converted back to warships.  That’s what they do.  And if there’s anything we know about the Trogs and the Grays, once they’ve figured out how to get something done, they don’t deviate.  They don’t trouble themselves to invent something better.”

I accept that Bird is right.  “So now that we know how the Trogs are getting here, how do we find the star systems their supply depots are in? Maybe the harder question is, once we identify the system, how do we find one tiny supply depot in a solar system with dozens of planets, hundreds of moons, and billions of asteroids and Kuiper bodies? That doesn’t even bring up the difficulties of how we move a strong enough force all they way there to destroy it, or how many months or years they spend in transit.”

“Those are the details that make this mission difficult.”

And then it hits me.  “You want me to do this.”  I point an accusing finger at the infinite blackness above us.  “You want to send my ship on this snipe hunt.  That’s why we’re having this conversation.”

“That’s right.”

Chapter 5

My first instinct is to show Colonel Bird my gloved middle finger and to stomp away, because the math is easy.  Even if the Trog outpost is on some lowly asteroid orbiting the sun’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light years away, that’s nearly a five-month, one-way trip on my ship.  If the Rusty Turd could even go that far, which I know it can’t.

And five months? To hell with that!

I don’t intend to let myself be taken out of the revolution when we finally have a hope to win this thing.

Five months there.  Five months back.  And who knows how long searching a practically infinite number of orbital bodies for a speck of a supply depot.

Bird interrupts by stewing with, “I didn’t expect you’d be excited.”

“Why?” I ask, looking around as though Blair’s mannequin face might be grinning over my shoulder, as though this might be her plan that Bird is carrying out.  “Is this a ploy to push me out of the picture for good?”

“Not at all,” answers Bird.  “I can see  angry, but you need to know I’m not ordering you to do this.  I’m asking.”

“So I really have a choice?”

“Of course.  First off, I don’t know if we can rig your ship for the journey.  As you mentioned, we need answers to some unknowns before we can pull this off.  Assuming we find enough of the right answers, I’ll tell you why I’m asking you, and the why has three parts.”

Glancing back at Brice, who’s watching us with an impassive face, I tell Bird, “I’m listening.”

"Part one, if we can destroy an outpost in the chain—hopefully the nearest one—then we cut off the flow of Trog cruisers into our system.  We buy ourselves some time.  Maybe we do better than that.  It might be that tens or even hundreds of their ships make the jump to that system and arrive without enough resources onboard to make the next jump or the return trip.  They’ll run out of gas, and every Gray and Trog onboard will die waiting for a rescue that nobody knows to send.”

"Okay," I agree.  "I’ll buy that.  If we can destroy their depot, then we break their supply and reinforcement chain."

“It’s more than buying time,” Bird clarifies.  “If we can’t break their supply chain, then there’s nothing to stop the Trogs from ferrying ships and troops into this solar system.  Then it doesn’t matter if we win against those here now.  It doesn’t matter if we win our revolution against our Grays and their North Koreans.  We’ll eventually lose a war where Trog ships show up by the dozen every few months.  And what if they decide to send another fleet of fifty or a hundred to deal us a decisive blow?”

I don’t have an answer.

“You see, Kane, it doesn’t matter what we do here in our solar system.  It doesn’t matter how this revolution or these battles turn out.  If that supply line stays open, we lose.”

I wish I could argue, but all I can think to say is, “You said there were three reasons.”

“Number two,” Bird sounds tired, or maybe worried.  “The Grays have had a pretty good dose of what our ships can do when armed with a grav lens.  They’ve seen what we can do with your ship, the one Spitz’s team put together.  Ships like yours won’t make theirs obsolete, but the Grays are smart enough to know any race that can create a ship that can destroy so many of theirs is a danger.

“They’ll want to capture one to take back to 18 Scorpii so they can reverse-engineer it.  For all we know, they already have one stored in the hold of one of their cruisers, and they’re hauling it back.  Or, what I believe is the more likely solution, they’ll stop trying to conquer us and start trying to annihilate us.  These ships prove that we have the potential to be a rival, and maybe an existential threat.  They’ll bring everything they can to kill us while we’re still weak.  Phil’s Gray history underscores that point.”

“The only way we can prevent that,” I summarize, “is to prevent any ships from returning from earth to 18 Scorpii, and then to prevent any more Trog and Gray ships from coming down the pipe to attack us.”

“That’s right,” says Bird.  “This supply route is the number one strategic target of the Free Army.  It has to be.”

I can do nothing but nod, and glance back at Brice again, to see if he’s on board.  I’m suddenly afraid that his recipe has too many parts hero mixed in.  Turning back to Bird, I ask, “And the third thing?”

“The third follows from the others.  As the commander of the Free Army, it only makes sense that I allocate my best ships to target the greatest threat.  That’s you, Kane—you, your ship, and Jill’s.  And especially your nav officer Phil with his connection to the Gray.  Together, they’re a risk, but they also constitute our most powerful scanning asset.  They can find our targets.  Without them, this mission doesn’t have a chance.”  Bird takes a moment for his final pitch.  "At the risk of putting a melodramatic spin on it, I’m asking you to save humanity by accepting what might be a suicide mission.”

Brice laughs.  “Every day I get out of bed in this damn war is a suicide mission.”

Chapter 6

Three days pass, and I’m crammed into the rear of one of Spitz’s stealthy scout ships.  Brice, Silva, and Lenox are with me, four of us and the pilot.  That’s all the little ship has room for.  In another scout, Phil, his Gray, Penny, and Peterson follow close behind.  Jill has a fire team in another ship, and we have one more squad in a final vessel.  Sixteen of us, headed to earth, while our assault ships are retrofitted once more for a new mission, this time to a star system somewhere far away.  How far? No one is yet sure.

Phil might be able to find the answer in his Gray’s memories.  Spitz’s engineers and physicists might be able to Sherlock their way through the problem on bits of evidence that makes sense only to them.

Yippee.

“What do you think?” Brice asks over the long silent comm.  “Anybody interested in placing a bet on when this clusterfuck comes unglued?”

Taking it as a joke to release the tension we all feel, we laugh.  Even the pilot chuckles.  Smuggling ourselves back to earth to find something that shouldn’t be there has us worried we’re risking our lives on a bet with skinny odds.  Even it what we’re seeking is there, we all know what time and weather do to metal.  We’re as likely to find toxic junk as something useful.  And our plan to haul relics into orbit and all the way back to Iapetus without arousing the Grays or their MSS lapdogs, well, it sucks.  It’s a concoction of wishful thinking and prayers.

It was the best our collective efforts could come up with.

“What do you think?” I ask, directing my question to Brice over a private comm link.  “Waste of time?”

“Can’t go anywhere until Spitz finishes our ship.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Sure it is,” he says.  “It’s just not the answer you want.”

“Do you have a different version?” I ask.

“Oh, how the hell would I know? We’re a crew of Trog killers on an Easter egg hunt.  I’m sure there’s no better way to put us to use than that.”  Brice laughs because he just loves his sarcasm.

I don’t join in.  That doesn’t bother him, though.  He’s self-contained, humor-wise.  He thinks everything he says is funny, and I suppose, to him, it is.  Who am I to judge?

I ask, “What about bringing the Gray along?” It’s a question Brice never seemed settled with, and I can’t say I was either.

“He already has a seat on this ride.”  Brice studies me for a moment.  “Are you having second thoughts?”

I nod.  “By definition, I guess I’d have to say yes.”  I grin at my humor.

Brice laughs.  “Risks and rewards.  The Gray is our all-access pass.  Nobody will give us any shit if he’s with us.  On the other hand, if he can’t hide this weird brain marriage him and Phil have going on from the other Grays, then we’re all fucked.  Does that about sum it up?”

Those are exactly my fears.  “Is there any way we can pull this off without the Gray?”

“We’ve had this conversation,” Brice tells me.  “You know we can chance it.”  He cocks his head toward the pilot.  “After the Red Baron here drops us off on the space station we can try and bluff our way through.”  He pats his chest.  “We have military insignia painted on our suits.  Construction workers won’t give us any shit.  They’ll be happy to stay out of our way and let us do whatever we want.

“Supervisors, maybe the same.  However, somebody somewhere up the chain might start asking why a dozen space marines are hiking around a construction site trying to find a grav lift to ferry them back to earth.  Some wise-ass might get the wild hair to run our unit data and figure out we went up with the heavy assault divisions on the day of the Arizona Massacre.

“That might turn to respect.  It might turn to suspicion.  Somebody might start guessing we’re deserters—or worse—terrorists.  Too many questions, and we all end up as frozen corpses orbiting the sun for eternity."

“Or recycled back to earth,” Silva adds, drawing attention to the patched holes on her well-used suit.

I didn’t realize the comm was open to the whole crew.  I look down at my d-pad.  The goddamn thing is on the fritz again.

“The only way to avoid trouble is to have the Gray along for the ride,” says Brice.  “Nobody will question Phil’s little friend, except another one of its kind.  That’s where I’m out of my league.  I don’t know what passes for social rules with those Ticks.  You’ll have to ask Phil about that.”

I sigh.  “I did.  You know that.”

“I do.”

I know my bet is already on the table.  “Phil assures me we can slip through.  As long as we keep our distance from the other Grays, they won’t pay us any attention.”

“And if we run into a pod of them out for a stroll?” Brice asks.

Silva pats the barrel of her railgun.  “Six fewer Grays in the world.”  She follows that with a smile—or is it a flirt?

I don’t react.  Silva’s smile puts thoughts in my mind that shouldn’t be there.  And her subtraction of six Grays from the ecosystem ignores a more important part of the equation, the subtraction of sixteen Trog killers from the resistance.

Once the shooting starts, I’m sure that’s where the mission ends.

Chapter 7

Tricky-trick number one: getting off the ship without attracting the attention of every pair of eyes within a hundred radial kilometers.

Our black ship has turned off its light, and shut down its engines.  We decelerated for five hours until we reached target speed, then slid down a ballistic path for nearly twenty hours while our reactor purred along on its lowest power output, just enough to keep the anti-grav stealth plates engaged for counteracting the ship’s mass.  They made us appear invisible to the Gray’s grav sense.

Now we’re sliding through space like a string of flat-black nothings—reflecting no light, producing none, shimmering no heat, shining no blue grav—our ships are four objects stretching the limits of human tech to imitate the void.

Through the pilot’s windows, I see a debris field spread through hundreds of kilometers of space, pieces large and small, all blown away from the wagon-wheel-shaped station we’re headed for.

“They’re still working on it?” I ask.  Though I’d been told, assured several times, I still have trouble believing it.

“They’re still working on all of ‘em,” says someone.

With the war going so badly for two years, trying to build an artificial Eden amongst the stars seems like such folly.

The station, nearly sixty-five kilometers in diameter and five-and-a-half wide, was one of the dozens planned by the Grays and being built by human hands under Gray supervision.  They were nothing but pissant dreams compared to the behemoths the Grays envisioned us constructing in the future.  Each of these rings was meant to house ten million Grays.  Or thereabouts.  The larger rings would provide a habitat for a billion.

To me, those aspirations were proof that the Grays planned to keep humans as slaves for all time.

They’d tease us with their promises and propaganda, dangle the seeming magic of telepathy in front of our dazzled eyes, and gift it to us as the only path out of poverty.  Within a generation or two, bug-headed humans would become the norm, just as had happened with the Trogs.

Then the breeding would start.  It might take a thousand years, but the Grays would slowly transform humans from the earth’s unconventional super-predator into a perverted species of cattle-monkey, always there to carry the load, turn the wrench, work the fields, and bow to the Grays.  There to throw ourselves at the Grays’ enemies in mindless wave after wave, fighting the kind of wars they loved to wage, the ones where slave lives held no value except the blood in their veins and the strength in their sword hands.

Thinking about it makes me mad.  It reignites my Gray-hate and cranks the flame up to burn white-hot.

I do want to slaughter some ticks.

“This is the station I worked on when I was up here,” says Brice.  Leaning over my shoulder, he points toward huge holes torn through the rotating structure.  “The Trogs sure shot the shit out of it.”

“Which is what I don’t understand.”  I really don’t.  “Why do the Grays keep sending people up to work on these things? We can’t defend them.”

“Nobody’s defended these stations since the first assaults,” explains the pilot.  “Earth doesn’t try, and the Trogs don’t attack them anymore.”

“Why do you think that is?” I ask.

Brice cuts back in with the answer, “They don’t need to.  Not one of the stations is habitable.  It’ll be a decade at least before we get there.  My guess is the Trogs are perfectly happy to let us keep working on them, thinking they’re going to take ownership one day.

“If they come in and attack again, that’ll be a sign they think they’ve lost the war.  They’ll be denying us the resources to expand our population—well, the Gray population anyway.  These places will be optimized for Gray life, not humans.  Humans will be able to survive inside, but it’ll be uncomfortably hot, and the atmospheric composition won’t be exactly to our liking.  The oxygen content will be too low, so it’ll be like walking around on a sixteen-thousand-foot mountain.”

“It’s hard enough to breathe at fourteen thousand,” I observe.  Glancing back at the others who’ve mostly contented themselves so far to listen, “Those are the tallest mountains we have in Colorado, a little more than fourteen thousand.  Breathing up there is difficult.”  None of them are from Colorado.

“Like I said,” Brice confirms.  He takes another look out the window.  “We’ll need to jump in a minute.  We’re close.”

A quick glance through the window at the enormous wheels tells me he’s right.  I turn to Silva.  “Get the door.”  To the others, I order, “Out of your seats.  We need to pile out as fast as possible.”

Nods all around.  They know what the plan is.  They know the pitfalls.  They know the orders.

The side door swings wide, opening an expansive view in front of Silva.

“The other ships are ready?” I ask the pilot.

“Open and ready,” he answers.  “Waiting on your word.”

“Count us down,” I tell him, knowing the countdown will go out to the other three scout ships as well.

“Five.  Four.  Three.  Ready.  Go!”

Silva bails out through the open door, followed by Lenox, Brice, and me.

Surrounded again by the black abyss, accustomed to the unmoored vertigo after spending so many days with nothing above or below, I see my squad, fourteen orange suits careening through space, and the Gray, protected by its resilient, thick skin clinging to Phil’s back, tethered to his suit, just in case.

Grav fields flash blue as we power up their suits to finish burning off the speed the ships left us all with.  We’re angling toward the slowly spinning ring, and trying to match its speed.

As we slow, the four black scout ships seem to accelerate, though I know they’re still drifting at a constant speed, and will continue to do so for another twelve hours.

I goose my grav for a boost strong enough to put me out in front of the others.  “We’re heading for that spoke.”  It’s one of a dozen connecting the circular habitat of the rotating station with the central hub.  The spoke holds no significance, it’s just the nearest landmark that seems not to have any workers toiling nearby.

“It’s on now!” Brice hollers as he zips up beside me.

“Manage your grav,” I tell them.  “No sense in bringing Gray attention on us.”

Chapter 8

Brice and I touch down together, and I grav-lock my boots to the station’s metal outer surface, as I scan everything I can see for evidence that anyone has taken notice.

Thousands of orange suits are toiling in the gaping holes torn through the station’s outer shell by Trog railgun rounds.  That damage is two years old and still not completely repaired.  A hundred and twenty degrees around the giant circle, countless orange-clad workers labor at the unfinished ends, slowly growing the ring to bring the circle to completion.

Grav lifts by the hundred move through the empty space between the spokes and along the curved surface, many more emerge from the darkness as tiny pinpricks of reflected light, coming up from earth with materials.  Just as many shrink into the distance as they take the trip back for another load.

“Everyone okay?” Brice asks, as the rest of the squads touch down.

All respond to the affirmative.

“The tick make it alright?” Brice asks, turning to Phil.

“Nick is fine,” Phil tells him, showing his irritation at Brice for not using the Gray’s name.

Brice looks to me for the next step.

“Lead the way,” I tell him.  After years spent working on the station, he knows his way around better than any of us.

Brice points down.  The outer ring of the station is built like a trough—habitable area on the bottom, walls a few kilometers tall, and open top.  The station’s spin will keep the atmosphere trapped inside.

“We’re headed for that gap,” Brice announces to the group.  “Stay low.  Stay close.  Don’t push the grav hard unless you have to.  There aren’t many crews working on this part of the station.  No need to call attention to ourselves.”  Brice leaps off the metal and flies.

I’m right behind him, with Phil, Silva, and Lenox close on my heels.  Jill takes up the rear with all of our soldiers zipping along between us.

Over the comm, Silva says, “I don’t see how this could work.  Without a top, won’t the atmosphere be sucked into space?”

Phil is the first to provide an answer.  "Think of it like putting a bucket of water on a rope back on earth.  You can swing it around and spin fast enough that the water stays in the bucket despite gravity trying to spill it out.”

“But that’s just a bucket of water,” Silva argues.  “It’s different.”

“Same physics,” Phil reiterates.  “Same principle.  It’ll work out here just like it works back on earth.”

Brice takes a turn over the rim and flies down into the trough.

Right behind him, I feel a momentary surge of terror as I suddenly seem to be falling toward the ground, the bottom of the trough, two kilometers below.  Over the comm, I hear the same fright in the gasps of the others.  It’s a natural human response, I guess, fear of falling.

Brice doesn’t speed up, and he doesn’t slow.  He just zips along like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and I decide to imagine instead of falling, I’m skimming the ground.  I just have to reorient my imagination to tell myself the wall I’m skimming down isn’t a wall, but the ground, and the ground curving inside the floor of the station below me and up into the distance on both sides, is a wall I’m flying toward.

It kinda works, but the gravity of the station, simulated by its spin, reminds me at every instant that I’m lying to myself.

Soon enough, we reach the bottom, and Brice leads us in a turn to bring our ragged formation of orange suits into a line flying thirty meters above the floor, following the curve toward our target zone.

“See,” Phil points down, as he gets Silva’s attention again, “all rock, and dirt.  That’s all been brought up from the earth, and the moon, and the asteroids.  It all stays against the floor, pinned there by the spin of the station.”

“But that’s dirt,” argues Silva.  “Dirt stays in place no matter where you are.  Every asteroid in the solar system is covered with it, right? Air is different.”

Phil sighs.

“Trust him on this,” Lenox tells her.  “It might not make sense, but I’m sure Phil’s right.”

Skimming over the floor, seeing the boulders and mounds of dry, frozen dirt, it’s easy to feel the scale of the structure.  It is science fiction come to life, and it turns my thoughts black again.  The Grays, the Trogs, and even us humans are capable of building heaven in a universe filled with enough of everything for everybody.  Yet most of us have to suffer as slaves because a few of us want to be kings.

Chapter 9

We land a few hundred kilometers from a pair of holes and plant our feet on a tall mound of debris, making no effort to hide.  There’d be little point.  Any number of eyes from any place on the station can see us.  Whether from a thousand meters away, or a hundred, we’d be pixels of color moving suspiciously.  Appearing normal is our best camouflage.

Phil and the Gray stare ahead.  Work crews, hundreds of people in orange suits, cut on enormous girders of steel, bent inward from a railgun impact.  Other workers are fabricating a patch of framework over another hole where the ruined structures have been cut away.

“Any Grays up there?” I ask.

“None,” Phil tells me.  “We’re trying to find any MSS muckity-mucks who could give us trouble.”

“Take your time.”  The hours and minutes aren’t a concern for us on this part of the mission, hell, on the whole mission.  If the Trogs have sent cruisers back along their supply route traveling at 8c, the journey will take many long months.  If Spitz can retain the speed of the Rusty Turd at 20c after doing whatever he does to extend its range, we’ll arrive months before any Trog cruisers get there.

Silva points toward a series of odd structures built out on the opposite side of the station.  “Brice, what are those?”

He looks up before he answers.  “The workers’ dorm is up there.  Back when I was here, that was a separate orbiting unit.  Now they’ve built one into the station structure.  It’ll have full grav—not quite earth grav—but 0.8 or so, the way the Grays prefer it.  The three pods of Grays that run the show up here, their quarters are in there, too.  The North Korean supervisors have a section as well.”

“All separate?” asks Silva.

“Just like the Trog Cruisers,” answers Brice.  “That’s the way they like it.”  He shrugs and adds, “That’s the way the humans like it, too.  Nobody wants to smell Gray stink or look at MSS assholes when they’re trying to enjoy their off-days out of the suit.”

“Is that where they house the industrial section?” asks Lenox, scanning the circumference of the ring as she speaks.

“Yeah.”  Brice turns and points to a disconnected metal girder the size of a concrete bridge support back on earth.  “They’ll float that one across and re-forge it over there.”  He points along that side of the ring.  “A third of that section is going to be set aside for heavy industry.  They had one fusion reactor over there when I left, and they were about to bring another online.  Rumor was that there’d be four by the time they were finished.  The Grays want to be able to process enough asteroid ore out here so they won’t have to depend on earth for supplies.”

“Why not just use earth?” asks Silva, more talkative today than usual.

Brice hesitates before answering.  “To increase the speed of production, I guess.  If they can get enough bodies up here to handle the materials, and they can process them all onsite, then they take a huge time-suck out of the construction process.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” argues Silva.  “Earth can provide all the industrial capacity they need.”

Brice shrugs again.  “Maybe  right.  I suppose you are, but it doesn’t matter, does it? This is the Grays’ show.  They do what they do for whatever reason they do it.  We’re just the grunts that make it happen.”

Listening in but not commenting, I know Brice is right on that point.

“Were you here when the Trogs attacked?” asks Lenox.

“No,” answers Brice.  “I was already in the SDF, stationed with a platoon in the moon garrison when the first attack came.  Why do you ask?”

Lenox points to several spots of damaged ring.  “It looks like the Trogs were aiming for the bottom of the trough.”

Brice scans over the station, nodding as he looks.

I look, too, and see Lenox’s observation is accurate.

“Did they already repair the other damage?”

Brice shakes his head.

“That’s the quickest way to make the ring uninhabitable,” says Phil, getting into the conversation, “while doing the least amount of damage to the physical structure.”

Lenox looks at him, silently prompting him to explain.

"The Trogs probably didn’t know there wasn’t any atmosphere in the ring, or they did know, and they figured they’d follow their standard attack protocol for space stations."

“Their standard attack protocol?” Brice thinks Phil is full of shit.

"Yeah," says Phil.  "You’ve read that report I sent.  The Grays aren’t natural engineers, and they’re not that imaginative.  They bred all of that out of the Trogs, so they only have a limited number of designs, really just a few for the kinds of ships they fly.  It makes sense that they’d only have a few designs for space stations.  So, after all their generations of war, they’re bound to have a standard way to attack one.”  Phil turns and points to all the metal bent and destroyed around the gaping holes ahead.  “If this station was operational, punching a hole like that would be like blasting a hole in the bottom of a water trough.  All the water runs right out.  If this station held an atmosphere, all of it would flow out through the hole, killing every living being on it, except for the Grays lucky enough not to be sucked out into space or killed by flying debris.  They might make their way to safety.”

“That easy,” Brice realizes.  “Killing the stations is just as easy as killing the cruisers.  You punch a hole in the right place, and everybody inside dies.”

“They need to construct walls,” deduces Lenox, “to compartmentalize the sections.  That way, one hit can’t kill everyone.”

Looking around the circumference of the trough for any evidence of such walls, Brice says, “Maybe they will.  I don’t know.  We’ve never completed one.  Who knows?”

“We should go now,” Phil tells us.  “There aren’t any MSS supervisors up there now.  We should be able to find what we need.”

I give Brice the nod.

“Move out,” he orders.

Chapter 10

At first, we get nothing more than a glance.  Then stares.

“Grays don’t usually come out to view the construction up close,” Brice tells us as the word spreads over the construction workers’ comm channel.  One by one, they stop what they’re doing to get a glimpse.

Phil is walking in the lead with the Gray by his side.  With the station spinning, the grav makes it possible.  Brice is on Phil’s left, and I’m walking along on his right, both hands on my railgun, trying my best to look threatening.  Our other squads are following in lines behind us, all at the ready.  We want to look mean enough to deter anyone who has the slightest wayward thought about our Gray, Nick the Tick.

A pair of orange-suited workers flies down from a perch on a bent girder, planting their feet on the rough ground in front of us.  They aren’t Korean, and obviously not Grays, but they are in charge of the crews working on the repairs in this section of the station.  I expect they’re Americans, or at least English speakers.  That’s how work on the stations is divvied up, English-speaking crews working on a few stations, Chinese speakers on another, Swahili on another one.  The pair facing us are both old men, I guess in their seventies, men who had lived a full life on earth with nothing but the threat of nuclear war, terrorism, and unruly dictators to haunt their dreams, until the Grays showed up.  Just like in the SDF, the prime stock of human beings has been burned through, leaving only the very young or very old to work the steel and composite framework while the solar radiation and cosmic rays slowly kill them.

One asks, “How may we be of service?”

Phil stops.  The rest of us follow his lead.  He’s the Grays’ mouthpiece.  For anyone watching, it needs to look like the Gray is the grand marshal of our little parade.  Phil says, "Tell us about your supply chain problems."

The two workers look at one another.

“We’ve been told,” says Phil, using the plural because he’s speaking for the Gray and that’s the preferred style of formal communication, “ behind on your schedule due to material shortages.”

“Material shortages?” the oldest of the pair repeats, turning to look around for some obvious problem.

The other one points to a flock of grav lifts sitting on the ground on the other side of the gaping holes.  "We have all we—"

The first one cuts him off, “Yes, shortages.  We work with what we have.”  He looks around.  “We don’t always have all we need.”  He’s smart enough to guess our Gray is looking for someone to blame for a perceived problem.  He’s happy to point the finger down the road.  Everybody wants to live to see tomorrow.

“From where are you supplied?” asks Phil.

The old man starts to answer, but stutters himself into silence as he points vaguely at earth.

The other one takes up for him.  “We don’t know.  We don’t handle that.”  He points toward the dorm and factory facilities on the other side of the ring.  “The planning office.  The engineers.  They tell us what to work on.  They arrange the materials.”

“And those lifts?” Phil points across to the other side of the hole.  “Where are they from, exactly?”

“Pennsylvania?” one guesses.  “Two from there, I think.”

“And Pueblo, in Colorado, from the foundry there,” adds the other.

“And the composites,” says the first, hurrying through is words, “are mostly from places in California and Texas.”

Phil raises a hand to shut them up, playing the role of minion to the tyrant Gray.  “Take me to the lifts.  I need to speak with those pilots.”

Getting what we came for doesn’t take more than thirty minutes.  Having a Gray along is like having a royal scepter.  You go where you want.  You get what you need.  And nobody asks any questions.

With the lift pilot sitting quietly on the floor of the cargo box, everybody settles in for the long trip.  Even with a grav drive and plenty of H for a full-acceleration burn to the halfway point, and then an all-out decel for the last half, the trip will take at least six hours.  Maybe twice that depending on how well the lift performs with its aging reactor and rickety, old grav plates.

Penny engages the lift’s drive and steers it in the direction of earth.

Chapter 11

Two hours into the trip, most everyone is asleep.  Brice is chatting over a private comm link with Penny.  Phil and the Gray are passed out.  I’m wondering how long the Tick can remain in the vacuum before the cold seeps into its jelly core and freezes it solid.

“What are you thinking about?” asks Silva.

I look up from my thoughts to see her examining me with her high-school-girl eyes.  “Nothing.”

She switches immediately to a different subject.  “You think we’ll live through this one?”

“Why not?” As apprehensive as I am about the mission, it seems like the right response.  “We’ve beaten the odds so far.”

Nodding, because she’s been there through most of it, Silva asks, “Do you think our lucky streak will dry up?”

“I don’t know.  Somebody has to live through the war, right?” Maybe not this war, but I don’t say that.  “You know, back in the old wars on earth, they’d go on for five or ten years, maybe for generations in the olden days.  Soldiers always made it through.  Some of them were there at the end to raise the flag in victory, or to surrender it to the conquerors.  Besides, I don’t think it’s all luck.”

“Really?”

“Do you?” I ask.  “You know, think our success is all luck?”

Silva’s eyes wander around the darkness inside the cargo box, lit only by the glow of lights from d-pads and suits.  She’s thinking about the answer.  “At first, maybe, a lot of it.  Now, I think we’re good at what we do.  Like you told us, Colonel Bird thinks we’re the first string, the best he’s got.”

Or just about the only troops he has left.  I don’t say that.  “Yeah.”

Silva switches to a different subject again.  “So, what’s your story? Do you like me, or what?”

“Ah.”  That’s the only syllable I can push out as I overcome my surprise.

"Phil told me you had a hangup about my age."

Trying to catch up, I tell her, “ only seventeen.”

“I’ll be eighteen in three months.”

“Three?” I instinctively look at my d-pad, instinctively as a distraction, not because I’m used to finding any information there.  And even though my new suit has a mostly dependable d-pad, none of my company’s info has been uploaded yet.  Something I need to see to when I have time.

Silva tells me her birthdate.

“You know,” I argue, “I’m nearly twice as old as you.”

“ barely thirty.  You don’t look like anybody’s grandpa yet.”

“There was a time when it was illegal for a man my age to lay a hand on a girl as young as you.”

“There was a much longer time,” counters Silva, “when unmarried girls my age were old maids.”

I wince at that.  I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration.  “I’m your superior officer.”

“Nobody cares about that kind of crap out here.”

“You have all the answers, don’t you?”

Showing some exasperation, Silva asks, "Is it your wife? Is that it?"

“I am married.”

“Phil told me things weren’t good between you.  That you two wouldn’t stay together.  Why?”

“Phil told you a lot.”

Silva responds with a sly smile.

“Did he tell you why I won’t be with my wife? In the long-term, I mean.”

She shakes her head.  “He said I should ask you.”

“We took in a hatchling.”

“A Gray?” She’s surprised, disgusted.

I nod to confirm it.

“Is it true what they say?”

“They say a lot.  What are you asking, specifically?”

“Do they stink up your house? I mean, they reek, right?”

I nod again.  “The whole place smells like Gray stink.”

Silva grimaces.

“You get used to it once  inside for an hour or so.  But every time I come home and open the door, I nearly gag.”

“What about her?” asks Silva.  “They say it ages the woman.”

“It does.”  The picture of Claire, old and wrinkled with eyes as lifeless as they ever were, haunts its way through my memories.  “She’s my age, but she looks eighty.  She’s wasted down to wrinkles and bones.  She’ll be lucky to live long enough to see the thing mature.”

Silva shudders.  “How does that work? I never understood it.”

"Nobody knows.  Nobody’s ever studied it.  A doctor explained it to me once, but I think he was mostly guessing.  When a Gray sleeps, an immature Gray needs the warmth of a human body, or whatever creature they used before they came to earth.  Whenever our hatchling slept, Claire cuddled around it like it was a baby.  Naked, skin-on-skin.  The doctor told me the Gray’s skin acts like a magnet, I mean, he had a bunch of words for it about chemical reactions and things I don’t remember, but that’s what it sounded like to me.  Maybe like a sponge, sucking all the nutrients through Claire’s skin.  It puts stress on a body, trying to support two lives at once.  After the Gray moved in, Claire started eating two or three times as much as she used to, but she kept getting skinnier.  I guess that’s why people call them Ticks.”

Silva shudders again.  “I never understood why somebody would do it—I mean, trading their life for a tick.”

“For the privileges.  For the money.  Some mothers do it to get a family exemption from military service so their sons and daughters won’t have to go to the war and die.”

“But that’s not why your wife did,” concludes Silva.  “She’s still at home with the Tick, and  here.”

“Yeah.”

“So why? You already had a good job at the grav factory.  You lived in a nice house.  You even had a car and a gas ration, right?”

I confirm with a nod.

“Then why do it?”

“They started automating the grav plate factory I worked in.  My job wasn’t going to be protected anymore.”

Silva laughs.  “ not very good at lying, are you?” She points at me and waves a hand around the cabin.  “ here.”

“You already know the truth of it,” I tell her.  “I’m here because of the revolution.  I thought I made that clear on the day we blasted off from the Arizona shipyard.”

“But that doesn’t answer the question of why Claire took in the tick.  Is she a super-patriotic believer in humanity’s camaraderie with our benevolent brothers from the stars?”

I laugh, harshly, darkly.  “No.”

“Then why?”

I sigh, and go on to tell her the story of my cold relationship with Claire and the wooden stake I drove through its heart on the drunken night I slept with Claire’s sister.  The story feels like a sin oozing the stink of shame.  It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell it, or in which way I order the words.  It always comes to the same ending, that I’m a shit.

“You should forgive yourself.”

“Why?”

Silva giggles.  “Well, for one, you’re never going to have sex with me if your plan is to turn into a self-loathing old man.”

I laugh at that.  “No, that’s not my plan.”  Not consciously, anyway.  “Besides, I’m a long way from being old.”

“You’ll get there a lot faster if you let your mistakes keep eating you up.”

“You don’t talk like some one who’s seventeen.”

“I’m almost eighteen.”

"Okay, eighteen.  Are you somebody’s reincarnated grandma or something?" I laugh, because it almost sounds like a joke.

“I think you’ve spent too much time watching pre-war videos of teenagers with big, baggy pants and brightly colored shirts going to school in shiny cars and smart-assing their teachers all day.  People these days grow up fast.  We know what the world is like.”

Guiltily, I tell her, “I didn’t watch that many pre-war vids.”

“But you’re stuck with a bunch of old-fashioned ideas, like seventeen-year-old girls for some reason aren’t allowed to have sex.  Have you ever been to one of those required-attendance MSS singles’ events? It’s practically the law.  Once you turn sixteen, you need to go.  You need to find somebody who seems pleasant enough and then marry them and start having babies.  That’s what they tell us girls, anyway.  Half the girls I know already had their first kid by the time they were my age.”

“Still.”  Oh yeah, the one-word non-argument.

"What do you think, I’m a fourteen-year-old prude or something? I’m no virgin, if that worries you.  I’ve had boyfriends.  I’ve had sex.  I’m pretty good in bed.”  Then she gets miffed, like maybe she’s said too much, or tried to hard.  “Not like you’ll ever know.”

“I’m sorry.”  That’s what you do, right? When the girl gets pissed, you apologize, even if you’re not sure why.

“If you’re not interested, just say so.  I don’t need to beg for it.  I know I’m pretty.  There are other men around.”  And then she laughs at a joke even as she tells it.  “At least for now.”

I laugh, too, because Brice’s darkness is contagious and twisted.

“I am interested,” I tell her.  “I just can’t right now.  I’m sorry, but I’m old-fashioned that way.  If you want to be patient, you’ll have to wait until you’re eighteen.”

“And then what?” she asks.  “Will you tell me you can’t because you’re still married?”

“The marriage is nothing to me.  It’s a legal technicality, nothing more.”

“So, you do like me.”

In the face of her candor, it’s an easy thing to admit.  “I do.”

Silva smiles again.  “Maybe I’ll wait, but you better mark your calendar with my birthday.  I’m not going to take any more of your shit.”

Chapter 12

Sleeping and dreaming of Silva—the time I saw her wearing nothing but her suit’s blue translucent undergarment hiding nothing of her feminine curves and R-rated parts, I don’t want to wake, even though the sound of my suit alarm keeps chiming in my helmet.

It’s the shaking on my shoulder that finally pulls me away from my fantasy.

I open my eyes and sit straight up as Brice jumps back, laughing, “When you finally wake up, you wake all the way up.”

Nodding, I smile and scan the cargo container.  Light is beaming in through the rust holes and worn seams.  “What’s the story?”

“We’re getting close,” he tells me.  “We’re coming down on the day side.  We’ll be hitting the atmosphere any minute now.  I figured you’d rather me wake you than the buffeting of the wind.  Know what I mean?”

I do.  That kind of noise and jostling would turn my prurient dreams into disaster terrors in a heartbeat.  "How long before we get where we’re going?"

“Penny says an hour or two.”

“Have you slept yet?”

Brice shakes his head.

“Once we’re down in the atmosphere why don’t you give it a shot? I’ll stay on the line with Penny.”

“Aye, Captain.”  Brice has a guilty look in his eyes.

“What else?”

“They took me seriously on the bet?”

“The bet?”

“A joke I made about how likely we were to find what we’re looking for on this mission.”

I grind my teeth because I want to say something I shouldn’t say to my sergeant.  “Didn’t you bet that we were all going to die?”

"It’s a pool," explains Brice.  "You can pick any number from zero on up.”

“Did anyone pick zero?”

“‘bout half.”

I grimace.  Half of my marines think this mission is a waste, a risk of their lives for nothing.

Brice punches me on the shoulder and grins.  “Take it as a compliment.  They still followed you here.”

I straighten up and look around the container as thin air starts to whistle through the holes.  “They followed us.”

Brice smiles again.  “Don’t blame this on me.  I bet on zero.”

“What’s the pot?”

Brice shrugs again.  “We’ll figure something out.”

I laugh.  “Put me down for a full load.”

“You think we’ll find twelve?”

“Somebody’s got to believe.”

Chapter 13

The worst part of riding in the cargo box of a grav lift is that you can’t see what’s happening outside.

For me, that’s less of a problem because I can sense the grav of everything around us.  The ship’s drive system isn’t powerful enough to wash it all out.  The picture in my head isn’t clear, and it’s certainly not the vivid full-color, super-detail view I get from my eyes, but at least I’m not oblivious.

That, and Phil is keeping everyone informed.  Between he and the Gray, they have the mental power to make out everything.

We’re skimming over the waves of a calm Pacific Ocean, not thirty feet up.  It’s late in the day.  Pelicans are dive-bombing small fish near the surface.  Gulls are soaring on the breeze over the surf as Penny decelerates.  A cliff face is standing tall ahead of us, a few hundred rocky, vertical feet.

Penny warns us a few moments before she pushes the lift to leave the beach and elevator up the face of the cliff on nothing but the strength of our grav plates and her skills.  The g’s increase, not significantly, but uncomfortably so.  Not a marine in the metal box is fazed.  This is a kiddie ride compared to what we’ve been through out in the solar system’s inhospitable vacuum.

For a moment, all goes weightless as we reach the top, and Penny angles the grav lift over level, grassy ground, heading toward a forest of squat, young trees.

She brings the lift up a little higher as we skim the treetops for a bit.  She slows.

“Coming in,” she tells us.

No seatbelts on this flight.  We all need to take care to brace ourselves for unexpected bumps.

She sets the lift down on the ground as gentle as a feather.

Brice jumps to his feet, reaching for the door latch as he feels his land legs.  “Time to clock in, grunts!”

I’m on my feet in a flash with my rifle at the ready.  The trees and tropical shrubs growing up around us, getting denser toward the island interior, are too thick and chaotic for me to make anything out but them.  “Phil?”

“Nothing alive bigger than a bird that I can see.”

I give Brice a nod.

He flings the big metal door open, and my squad rushes out.

I decide I want to smell earth air and open my helmet.

With my visor up, feeling the earth air on my face, tasting and smelling the jungle’s humidity, I listen to the sound of wind through fronds and leaves.  I hear the squawk of birds, and the rustle of heavy boots through undergrowth.  The feet belong to my squad.  The troops fan out and settle into defensive positions with railguns up.

Tree trunks, flash-burned black, litter the ground—hard to see from a few paces away because of the thick growth of plants, reclaiming their minerals and repopulating the island.

Jill Rafferty calls over the comm, “Forty-seven micro-Sieverts.”  She’s carrying one of our two gauges.

I put my visor back down and seal my suit up tight.  That’s all the luxury of this tainted South Pacific paradise I’ll afford myself.

A pair of my marines power up one of the two of the hand-drive cargo lifts we brought along.

“Leave those inside, for now,” I tell them.

Chapter 14

“Phil?” I look around to see him standing near the open door of the lift with the Gray beside him, looking every bit like a plastic doll from a souvenir shop in Roswell.  “Anything?”

“A minute,” he requests, as he slowly turns his head, peering at the trees like he’s looking right through them, which I know he is.

“People,” Phil tells everyone on the channel.  He points east as we all tense.

“How many?” I ask.

“Twenty-three.”

Brice drops to a knee beside me.

Jill comes up on the other side.  “North Koreans?”

“It would be suicide to garrison this place,” Brice says as he scans the jungle.

“How close are they?” asks Jill.

“A few miles,” answers Phil.  “In some bluffs down near the ocean.”

“Fortifications?” I ask.

"I see some stone-walled buildings, none very big.”  Phil is confused.  "They seem to be set up for defense but I can’t tell what they’re defending."

“Do they know we’re here?” asks Brice, getting right down to the meat of it.

“Not that I can tell,” answers Phil.

It’s my turn to ask, “Any other threats?”

“Not that I can make out.”

“Let’s move it, then.”

Brice and Lenox pass the orders along.

Jill leads.  “The bunkers should be this way.”

We leave one squad to guard our grav lift, and the rest of us work our way quietly into the jungle.  The first bunker can’t be more than a hundred yards away, invisible from above, buried somewhere in the undergrowth.  The only way to find it is on foot.

We spread wide as we search, never straying more than a dozen paces from one of us to the next.  Everyone has their weapons up, ready to pump a dozen high-velocity rounds into any shadow that looks too ominous.  We’re all on edge.  Not one of us has ever had to fight in a jungle environment—not many trees in space.  We don’t know what dangers might be waiting for us on the island and we don’t want to invite trouble.

Sensing the tension, Phil connects over the command channel with me, Jill, Brice, and Lenox, “There isn’t anything here.  Everything on the island was killed in the siege.”

“Those people are here,” Brice tells him.

“They shouldn’t be,” Phil argues.

“Neither should we,” Brice answers.

“Over sixty micro-Sieverts,” Jill adds, to backup up Brice’s response.  “The annual occupational dose limit is fifty.”

Brice laughs.  “I don’t think those government regulations apply anymore.”

He’s right.  Nobody’s paid attention to any of that kind of stuff in over thirty years.  The Grays running the show on earth just don’t value human life the way we used to.

“What I’m saying,” Phil clarifies, “is that when the Grays bombed this island, they killed every person, every dog, every cat, every rat, every snake.  Nothing was alive when they were done.”

“The plants came back.”  I gesture at the trees.  “And the birds.”

“And those people over by the ocean,” adds Brice, making sure we don’t forget them.

The ground rises as I walk.  It’s a hill, a gentle slope.  The forest thins unexpectedly in front of us and with the sun slipping behind the trees, and the sky turning pink in the east, I step out onto the rim of a deep crater.

A long-dead leftover of our masters’ handiwork.

“This is what’s left of Anderson Air Force Base,” says Jill.

The rocky crater rim we’re standing on the edge of is pushed up from the ground around us and gives us a view over the trees and over the plains on this end of the island.  At the bottom of the steep walls, the sea has flowed in to form a lagoon that wasn’t a feature of Guam before the Grays showed up.

Three more large craters are easy to make out on the north end of the island.  Dozens of smaller craters dot the grassy hills.  Who knows how many are hidden by the trees.

“This,” says Brice, “is what it looks like when the Grays want to make sure your military is destroyed.”

The rest of us are silent.  We know he’s right.  Most of us have seen the pictures.  In the thirty years since the Grays pounded our defenseless planet, humans had plenty of time to sneak onto the sites of the destruction and take pictures and videos and share them.  Every military installation on earth looks something like this.

One thing can be said for the Grays—they’re thorough.

Jill points southeast.  “The runways and bombers were over there, where those two big craters merge.”  Pointing into the hole, and then turning back to the jungle behind us, she says, “The munitions bunkers were laid out in a grid all over this part of the island.”

Brice leans precariously over the edge and grimaces at the crashing waves far below.

Pointing back into the jungle, Jill says, “The ten or twelve bunkers that survived have to be right over there.  That’s what’s on the map the Iapetus spies gave us.”

“This close to the impact,” says Brice, looking back at the jungle, “I don’t know that survive would be the right word.  Oh, I’ll agree that they weren’t vaporized, but survived? I don’t know.”

“They were built to withstand a nuclear blast,” says Jill.

“An air burst is one thing,” argues Brice, pointing at the enormous crater, “but this? Piles of dirt are all we’re likely to find."

Lenox asks, “Do we know which bunkers held the nukes?”

“Only one way to find out,” I tell them.

Brice laughs and points to Jill’s meter, “Based on what that thing’s been telling us, I think most of them are down at the bottom of that hole.”

Chapter 15

The first bunker we find leaves us standing in the tropical jungle, staring.  Its thick steel doors are bent, its reinforced concrete walls, shattered.  Jill, looking down at her meter as she inches closer, suddenly stops.  “Doesn’t matter if anything is in there,” she says.  “The radiation…” She slowly shakes her head.

Brice isn’t bothered.  He’s already turned a wager for failure into a silver lining.

I focus on a different positive.  The munitions bunkers were built in long rows.  The fact that this one wasn’t vaporized thirty years ago means the row escaped direct obliteration in the Grays’ bombardment.

I point into the jungle, making my best guess based on what’s left of the bunker we’re in front of.  “That way.”

We spend a few minutes tromping through the thick growth to find a second bunker.  It’s a bit farther from the rim of the crater and in better shape than the first, but still doesn’t look like anything we can enter.

The third, we find, is partially collapsed, with one steel door intact, and one hanging cockeyed from a huge, rusty hinge.  As two of the soldiers approach for a peek inside, Jill orders them to stop, and then to hurry away.

She inches forward with her meter in hand.  “We can’t go in this one either.  It’s hot.  It pegged my meter at 2000.”  She casts a serious look at everyone.  “Five thousand will kill you, just like that.”  She tries to snap her fingers through her glove.

Everyone backs away on quick feet, and we move down the line, searching for the next bunker as the forest darkens with the dusk.

We bypass two more before we find one that appears intact.  Jill’s meter doesn’t show any radiation leakage, just the background levels we’ve been seeing.  The whole island is hot with it.

Lenox directs several of the marines to place C4 charges at the base of trees growing through the broken concrete in front of the doors, and more on the hinges.  As she syncs the timers on her d-pad, the rest of us back into the forest.

The ensuing explosion rumbles the air and the ground.  It sends thousands of birds squawking into the sky as they leave the perches they’d chosen for the night.  No doubt, those people in the stone houses Phil sensed in the bluffs near the ocean heard it, too.  If they are the island’s MSS garrison, they’ll be coming this way.

I instruct Brice to set up a defensive perimeter.  I put Phil and his Gray on top of the bunker mound to watch for anything coming our way.

Following Jill, who has her radiation meter held out in front, I step over the tree trunks our charges just blew the hell out of, hold my rifle at the ready, and step through the door.  Silva and Peterson come in behind.  I don’t expect anything to be inside waiting for me, but walking into a dark hole on a deserted island littered with radioactive debris is plenty of fodder to keep my imagination spinning with pouncing dangers.

The lights on our helmets illuminate the shadows.  Sturdy steel racks hold rows of what look like torpedoes, at least they’re all that size—eleven feet long, thirteen inches in diameter with pointy noses and thin stabilizing fins on the rear.  They’re bombs.

Jill rushes over to examine one closely.

I tell Silva and Peterson to search the bunker for anything inside that might be a danger to us.  “Jill,” I ask, as she lays her hands on one of the bombs, “is this it? Is that what we’re looking for?”

“Hold on.”  She’s found writing painted in blocky yellow letters down near the tail.  She opens up an image on her d-pad and compares it with what she sees.  She wipes away three-decades of dust and scrutinizes the print, before turning to me with a grin.  “Spitz’s spies were right.”

“The nukes?”

“The jackpot.  These are the B61s.  Nuclear bombs.”

I comm Brice, “You lost your bet.”

“How many?” he asks.

I glance around.  “All we need and more.”

I walk over and lay my hands on the dusty steel.  My grav sense mingles with my touch, enhancing it and telling me how solid and heavy the B61 is.  It feels like compact power.

From what Spitz told me before the mission began, I know these bombs were intended to be loaded up in B1 bombers stationed at the base and flown over North Korea, or China, or Russia or any other country who had the wild hair to threaten war with the mighty US of A, back in the days when that still mattered.  These B61s were designed to bust through a dozen meters of reinforced concrete before exploding.  No dictator was going to be safe in his hidey-hole control center buried in a mountain with weapons like the B61 in the US arsenal.

More importantly, no Trog sitting in a hole on some asteroid ten light years from here, drinking Mai Tais and running a hydrogen refueling station is going to sleep well after we show up.  Nukes leave an impression on a culture long after the last one has detonated.  I know what a runaway fusion reaction can do.  I know it won’t take many of these to destroy whatever supply depot the Trogs have set up to maintain their supply line from 18 Scorpii.

“Phil,” I call over the comm.  “Wake up Penny and help her guide the ship here.”  Turning to Silva and Peterson, “Get outside, find a flat spot close by for Penny to land.  This is what we’re looking for.”

Chapter 16

At seven hundred pounds each, the B61s are easy to move once we load them onto one of the two grav carts we brought along.  Muscling each of the nukes off its shelf and onto a cart is clumsy work.  It doesn’t proceed quickly.

Leaving nearly half our number deployed in the defensive perimeter, the rest of us work on moving bombs and disassembling racks, moving those into the lift, and reassembling them there.  We can’t just stack the bombs inside the grav lift and hope for the best.

Well, maybe we could.  As it is, every detail of the plan is dripping with lofty hopes.

After five bombs are on board, Jill asks, “How many should we take?”

“How many is Spitz rigging our ships to carry?”

“I think four each.”

“The last number I heard was six.”

Jill laughs.  And why not? “You think they’ll use duct tape to put things together last-minute?”

I appreciate the humor, but I can’t completely agree.  “The upgrades to the ship so far have been fantastic.  Everything has worked.”

Jill nods.  “Still, we’re going to be flying a prototype through interstellar space on maybe the longest journey humans have ever taken.”

“Hasn’t every longest journey been taken in a prototype?”

“You’re contrary today.”

I smile because I don’t know what to say.  Mostly, I agree with the sentiment she’s trying to get around to putting her finger on.  Spitz is using the Rusty Turd as a platform for his research team’s experimental ideas.  One day, something isn’t going to work as planned.

Those are the kind of thoughts a commander shouldn’t share with his subordinates.

I think.

“There are another twelve in the bunker,” I say, instead.  “One on the cart.  Five on the ship.  If we take them all, that gives us eighteen.”  I look down at my d-pad for the time.  We have plenty of night ahead of us.  Our goal is to be gone by dawn.

Jill gives me a nod and goes back to work with the crews.

I comm Phil.  “How are we doing up there? Any incoming ships? Planes? Boats? Does anyone know we’re here? What we’re doing?”

“Nothing like that,” he answers.  “But those people from the coast…”

“Yeah?”

“Some of them are headed this way.”

“Grav lift? Jeep?”

“They’re coming on foot.”

Thinking back to the way Phil described their position, I ask, “They have to come around the perimeter of the crater to get here, right?”

“That’s what they’re doing.”

“How long do we have?”

“They aren’t moving fast,” says Phil.  “Maybe forty-five minutes.  Maybe an hour.”

I loop Brice in.  “Phil told you about the incoming personnel?”

“He did.”

“Set your team up in—”

“An ambush?” Brice asks.

“Yes.”  I don’t know if I like or hate when he does that.

“Already done,” he tells me.

“I can send you more—”

“Nope,” he answers.  “Keep them busy with the nukes.  When the bandits get close, if our plan is to fight, then yes, let’s get everyone in position.  Better to overwhelm them quickly than give them a chance to shoot back.”

“Thanks, I’ll let you know.”

Chapter 17

We’re loading our eleventh nuke when I get the call from Brice.  “It’s time to choose.”

“Do you have eyes on them yet?”

“Nope,” he answers.  “Still depending on your boy to track them for us.”

“Do you have ambush assignments for my people?”

“I do.”

“We’re on the way.”

I turn to Jill.  “I’ll be taking Silva, Peterson, and Lenox.  Stop loading until we get this sorted out.  Deploy your squad to defend the lift.  Bug out if things go bad.”

“We’ll come to your position.”

I shake my head.  “The clearing where Penny first sat down when we got to the island, get those coordinates to everyone.  If we have to bug out, we’ll fly to make our retreat and meet up there.  You do the same with the lift.”

“Yes, sir.”

With Silva, Lenox, and Peterson following behind, I take off through the jungle, listening to Brice’s direction as he guides us in.  Once we get in position, we’ll have ten shooters, surprise on our side, plenty of battle experience, and defensive grav fields in our suits.  It should be plenty.

Minutes later, I’m settling in beside Brice.  In front of us, the trees are sparse, but the grass is tall, waist-high.  It’s a tropical meadow that borders the rim of the crater, fifty or sixty meters wide, and nearly twice that long before the trees start to thicken again.

“What’s the plan?” I ask.

Brice points down to the far end of the clearing.  “They’re coming from that direction, following the rim where the vegetation is thinnest.  We didn’t find any game trails through the bush.”  He shrugs.  “No animals on the island big enough to make one, I guess.”

“And us?” I ask.

He points to the other end of the clearing.  “I have four shooters down there in the direction the bad guys are moving.  The rest of us are here in the treeline to flank their column when they walk by.  The bad guys are traveling single-file, staying close together.”  Brice shakes his head, because militarily, it’s a bad way to move.  He points across the meadow.  “They’ll walk into our crossfire before we open up.”

I nod.  It sounds textbook to me.  We shouldn’t have any trouble taking out the column in the first few seconds of shooting.  In theory.

We space ourselves out through the trees, leaving gaps of ten meters between us, except for me and Brice.  We take up the end position together.  We’ll get the first glimpse at our adversaries.

Calmly over the comm, he tells the squads, “Wait for my signal to fire.  We want them all in the kill box before we open up.”

The tense moments of the waiting time start.

Phil updates us every minute with a position.

I can’t help but think how much we’ve come to depend on Phil and his Gray and their unparalleled skill at seeing the world around us.  It’s a tactical advantage that makes us hard to beat.

Brice points to the edge of the trees near the rim of the crater.  “There.”

I see a column of shadows file out of the forest.  They’re staying close to the edge of the rim, not silhouetting themselves against the sky—not completely—yet I’m able to make out shoulders and heads.

“I count fourteen,” says Brice.  “Phil, is that the number you have?”

“It is,” he answers.

“The rest stayed behind?” I ask, “No more sneaking in to flank us?”

“I can’t sense any flankers,” answers Phil.

“Can you tell who these people are?” I ask.  “North Korean soldiers?”

“Can’t tell,” he answers.

“Give it another minute,” Brice comms the squad.

“I can’t tell for sure,” I say to Brice, “but they don’t appear to be in uniforms.”

He stares for a second, and then shakes his head.  “I think you’re right.  Why is that important?”

“They might not be military.”

“Survivors?” he scoffs.  “No way.  There’s a naval base halfway down the island.  You saw for yourself, not even the rats survived what the Grays did to this place.  Everybody knew they had nukes stored here, not to mention the bombers to deliver them.  North Korea made sure this place was hammered hard when the Grays started dropping their rocks on us.  No survivors.”

“Tell everyone to hold their fire.”

Brice looks at me, disapproval burning hot across his face.  “Don’t do something stupid.”

“This is earth,” I tell him.  “Not everyone here is our enemy.”

“If you—”

I stand up and step out of the trees.

“Dammit,” he mutters, then calls to the squad, “hold your fire, Kane is going out to talk to them.  But if you see one shot from those fuckers, you rip ‘em.”

Chapter 18

I’m halfway across the clearing before one spots me.  That’s when things turn from nervous to dangerously tense.

Word passes between them, and in the space of a few seconds, half are down on their knees in shooting positions.  Others stand, and a few have dropped to their bellies.

If I’m wrong, I know I’ve turned our quick ambush into a firefight, as all of our easy targets now aren’t.

I flip open my visor, and call, “Do you speak English?”

I hear muted chatter between them as I close in.

“Do you speak—”

“Stop!” one calls.  In accented English, he asks.  “Who are you?”

“I mean you no harm.  Who are you?”

“What are you?”

It occurs to me then that in the dark, with the forest behind me, and my orange suit changing my silhouette just enough to make me look like a space monster, they have cause to wonder.  “I’m human.  I’m wearing a spacesuit.  Can I come closer?”

“What do you want?” he asks.  “What are you doing here?”

“I need to ask you those same questions.  Can I come closer?”

“If you hand over your weapon,” he tells me.

“Well,” I laugh, “that’s not happening.”  I keep walking.

“We will shoot,” he warns.

I’m maybe thirty feet away when I stop.  I amp up my defensive grav in case one of them decides to put my questions to an unexpected end.  In the darkness, I can’t see them clearly, but I can tell they aren’t military.  They’re each wearing something different.  Most of their clothing looks a little ragged.  Their guns are old, chemical reaction kinetics, gunpowder and lead.  I don’t sense any grav shielding.  They aren’t SDF, and I’m betting not MSS.  Hell, I already bet on that.

“One of you come over here,” I tell them, “so we can talk.”

They confer in soft words that turn loud as threats and promises are made between them about what they want to do to me.  The discussion lasts a few moments before the spokesman calls it to a halt.  Out of the short silence, he says, “I’ll come over.  I’m armed, so don’t think you can trick me.”

Brice connects over my comm.  “You’re an idiot.”

“Thanks,” I answer in a soft voice as the wary man comes toward me through the dark.

“I have a bead on that guy,” Brice tells me.  “If he raises that antique fire stick, he’ll be dead before you can say, ‘please, don’t shoot.’”

“Noted,” I answer.  To the guy coming at me, I warn him, “Don’t raise your weapon.”

“Are you afraid?” He apparently thinks I am.

“I’m not alone,” I tell him.  “If you point that gun at me, you’ll find out I’m not lying about that.”

He snorts to show me he doesn’t believe, but his pace slows as he scans the trees, maybe just now realizing how exposed he and his people are, maybe just now figuring out he’s led them into an ambush.

“That’s right,” I tell him.  “It’s exactly what it looks like.  Your people are in the open.  Mine are concealed in the trees, ready to shoot.”

He stops a few paces in front of me, and his clothes tell me he must be a rogue, one of earth’s many people searching for a place to live his life outside the control of the Grays.  I also see his hair is thin, not balding thin, sick thin, wispy and patchy.  He’s missing way too many teeth to be explained by poor dental hygiene, and his skin is with scabby with lesions.

I’m no doctor, but I guess radiation exposure.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Who are you?”

“Dylan Kane.  What should I call you?”

“Marvin.”

“Marvin, is that your real name?” It’s just a guess.

“No.”

Oh well.  "Good to meet you, Marvin.  What are you doing here? Do you live on the island?”

“What are you doing?” he asks, starting to raise his rifle.

“Don’t,” I tell him.  “Seriously, don’t raise that gun, or you and all your people will die.”

That worries him.

I figure I better give him some info.  "We’re here to salvage a few things from the base that used to be here.  Leave us alone for another couple of hours, and we’ll be out of your hair.”  I bite my tongue on that one, maybe a bad choice of clichés.

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why not?” I ask.  “I’m no threat to you?”

“We heard explosions.  What’s going on?”

“Salvage.  Like I told you.”

“What are you salvaging?”

I’m thinking we’re getting pretty close to fuck-off in our conversation, but I push my patience, because I don’t want to kill these people needlessly.  “I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because, just like you and your people being here is none of my business, what we’re doing here is none of yours.  So, you get to pick—go back home, leave us alone, or—”

“Or what?” he growls, rising to the unspoken threat.  “What?”

"Look," I tell him.  "You didn’t sit down to supper tonight thinking you were going to march into the woods just to land your people in an ambush.  C’mon.  Do the math.  I’m wearing a grav suit.  The odds of one of the bullets from your guns punching a hole through and hurting me are pretty slim.  The odds that I’m not alone here are something you can’t know, right? All you can do is guess.  I’m telling you, this is a shit situation for you.  There’s no upside.  Tell your people to go back home, okay?"

He’s staring at the dark jungle.

“Trust me.”  I know it sounds like a lie, but what are you gonna do? “You and me, we’re on the same side.  I know you can’t know that, but it’s true.  And there’s something else you should know, this place is radioactive.”

That gives him pause.

“This whole island is.  If you stay here, you’ll all die.  I’m guessing you’re not the only one who’s been sick.  It’s not going to get any better.  There have to be other places where you can escape.  Go there.”

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes after the guy returns to his people.  They turn around and head back the way they came, shooting nothing but dirty looks in my direction.

Phil comes over the comm first.  “That was a good thing, Dylan.”

"It was a stupid thing," Brice tells us.  "Playing Mr. Nice Guy will get you killed if you get a taste for it."

Silva opens a private comm link.  “I’m proud of you.”  And of course, I immediately think of her in the translucent blue.  That image has riveted itself to my gray matter.  She’s a sugar-shine piece of sex candy, forbidden and unforgettable.

Argh!

Two hours later, we have our nukes loaded, eighteen of them.  We’re onboard, and Penny is skimming over the waves again.  We don’t shoot straight into the sky because we don’t want to bring any attention to the island.  Nine of the munitions bunkers back there are still intact.  Many hold nukes that we might want to return for one day.

Chapter 19

“Time for the next tricky part,” Brice tells me as the lift leaves the atmosphere coming onto a trajectory that roughly follows the path of others rocketing out of a mine complex in northeast China.

“Make sure everyone has their defensive grav set.”  I turn an eye to the nukes.  “And make double sure those are all secure before we start maneuvering.”

“Will do.”  He gives me a nod and readies our marines.

I comm link to Phil and loop in Penny.  “Phil, it’s about time for you and the Tick to put on your show.”

“Me and Nicky are both ready.”

Nicky? What happened to Nick?

“Penny?” I ask.

“I’ll give up control as soon as Phil tells me,” she answers.

“Stay on this heading for a while,” Phil explains.  “When we get close to the debris fields, Nicky and me will take over.”

Since the Trogs started attacking the orbital battle stations, a sphere of debris has grown around the planet, making every trip through a risk.

“Suit yourself.”  Penny sighs like she’s making herself comfortable and she signs off the comm link.

“You think it’ll work?” I ask.

Phil says, “No reason it shouldn’t.”

I hook my feet beneath a tie-down cleat on the floor of the cargo box and lean my back against a wall as I adjust my suit grav to simulate laying down.

Phil is hanging from the ceiling by his feet, and he’s facing me.  The orientation strikes me as odd, but I know that’s my earth-borne intuition disagreeing with my updated reality.  I don’t comment on it.

“So what’s the story with you and Silva?” he asks.  “I noticed you two were talking and—”

“Why is this such a big thing?” I’m defensive about it.  “What’s up with you and the Tick?”

“The Tick? What do you mean?” asks Phil.

I don’t know exactly what I meant, and I hesitate.

“Oh.”  Phil nods and smiles.  “You were deflecting.”

I shrug.

Phil isn’t bothered.  “Can I be honest with you?”

“About?”

“Me and Nicky.”

“Yes,” I cautiously answer, “but I’m already getting a weird vibe.  What about you and Nick?”

“This is all going to sound pretty weird, so do me a favor and don’t judge.”

“You know I’m going to judge you anyway,” I smile, but not meanly.  “I won’t say anything rude if that works for you.”

“I guess it’ll have to.”

“Or,” I suggest, “you could keep it to yourself, whatever this thing is.”

Phil shakes his head.  “I need to maintain my relationships, I think.  Especially with people I’m close to.  With humans.”

That gives me pause.  In fact, it worries me.  “What are you saying, Phil?”

He’s looking at me, probing his nosey fingers through my cortex, I’m pretty sure.  He says, “You’re worrying too much about it.  It’s not as serious as you’re thinking, and not as problematic as it’s going to sound when I say it.”

“Okay.”  I surrender.  “You win.  Just tell me.  I’ll try to keep my mouth shut about it.  I’ll try not to judge, too much.”  I figure I better add one more thing.  “And I’ll try not to overreact.”

“Okay.  Bear with me, first.  What’s going on with you and Silva? I’m not prying.  I’m just trying to work my way around to helping you understand.”

I look up at the Gray sitting on the ceiling of the cargo box with one arm wrapped around Phil’s leg to hold himself in place.  I already don’t like where this conversation is going.  “I told you about Silva.  She’s seventeen.  She won’t be eighteen for a few months yet.  After her birthday, maybe we’ll give it a go.”

“But you like her, right?”

I labor through a sigh as I push myself to admit it.  “Yeah.  I do.  She’s young, but she doesn’t seem like a teenage girl.”  I glance at her down at the other end of the compartment, working with Lenox to tighten the straps holding some of the nukes in place.  Though she’s in her bulky, shapeless orange suit, I imagine her again in translucent aqua, with thin copper wires lacing over her skin, a hint of pink on her breasts, and the dark—I stop myself.  It’s easy to slip into my fantasies when it comes to Silva.

“Everyone grows up fast these days,” Phil muses.  “Do you think it’s more than just sex?”

I laugh.  “We’re a long way from sex.”

“What I mean to say is, do you think it’s more than infatuation? Do you think there’s more to this thing with you and Silva than just wanting to get laid?”

Thinking for a moment, and slipping into a natural defense mode, I deflect again.  “Didn’t I ask you that before you got married?”

Phil nods.  “Didn’t I ask you that before you married Claire?”

Ouch.  He did.  And I’d lied about it.

“You did lie,” Phil tells me.

“Stop that.  If we’re going to talk, let’s talk.  If you want to play those telepathic games, then do it with someone else.”

“I am sorry.  It’s just that sometimes I slip.  With Nick and me communicating that way all the time, it becomes habit.  I apologize.”

I cast a stern look at Phil and tell him, “I don’t think at the time I knew I was lying.  And if I was, I think I was lying more to myself than to you.  The thing is—and you know it’s true because you married her twin sister—sometimes you really, really want something to be true, and it turns into the truth in your head.  It’s like you believe if you lust hard enough after a girl, the relationship can be anything you tell yourself it is.  What me and Claire never had was love.  I wanted it to be that.  For a long time, I thought it was.”  A long sigh slides past my lips as the memories bring all their emotional baggage along.  “Eventually, pretending stopped working.  What about you and Sydney?”

“That’s a harder question,” admits Phil.  “I knew from the beginning she didn’t love me.  She wanted the life that being married to a bug-head grav tech would give her.  She wanted to compete with Claire, but we both figured that out, I guess.  I think, for us, for a while there, somewhere in the middle, we almost loved each other.  We got along.  We laughed.  I was happy knowing she was trying to be happy, trying to make the best of it.”

“I’m sorry for how it ended, Phil.  I truly am.”

“That’s not why I’m asking you about this.”

“Still, you need to know, I’d take it all back if I could.”

Phil shakes his head.  “It wouldn’t matter.  By the time Sydney and you went to bed, I knew it was over.  No movie can last forever.”  Phil smiles sadly.  His memories still hurt, too.  “I’d given up on it well before that.  I guess I was just standing by the grave, waiting for one of us to fall in.”

“Jeez,” I laugh.  “That’s a dark way to describe it.  I think you’ve been spending too much time with Brice.”

Phil laughs sadly and nods, but turns the conversation back to relationships.  “What about you and Brice?”

“What?” That takes me off guard.  “Me and Brice? You mean, like maybe we’re gay?”

“No,” Phil assures me.  “You two are close, right? You’re friends now.  Good friends.”

I look down the length of the container, to see Brice competently engaged with the platoon, following my orders.  “Yeah.  We are.  More than that.  It’s that brotherhood-of-war thing that all those old movies and books talk about.  There’s a bond there.”

“Like between us?” asks Phil.

“How do you mean?”

“Do you think we’re brothers?”

“Except for that different parents thing.”  Like Brice, I’m amused with my wit.

“Except for that,” Phil agrees.

“You and me are brothers.  Me and Brice are brothers.”  I wave a hand at my platoon.  “Everyone here is my family.  I guess.  I’d give my life for any of them.  I think they’d do the same for me.”

“Yeah,” agrees Phil, “but you’re not close with most of them, not like you are with Silva and Brice, or me and Penny and Lennox.”

“Yeah.”  I nod.  “I’d say that’s right.  What are you getting at?”

“Nicky and I are attached.  Our language doesn’t have a good way to say it, but I think the closest I can come is to say we’re soul mates.”

I can’t keep the guffaw in, and I immediately feel bad for not doing so.  “I’m sorry, I just—”

Phil is hurt.  I can tell, but he doesn’t say anything.  He just looks disappointed.

I collect my composure and apologize again before asking, “Maybe you should explain a little more.”

“First off, I don’t want you to worry.  That’s not what this is about.  There’s a hierarchy the Gray mind needs to fit within.  Once it’s established, it’s very hard to break.  I’m the alpha in my mental bond with Nicky.  She knows it.  She accepts it.  She’s comfortable with it.  You don’t have to worry about her taking over my mind and turning me into a zombie or anything like that.”

I’m confused by Phil’s sudden switch on gender when talking about Nick the Tick.  “Go on.”

“My point is, you never had it with Claire, but you know what it’s like to be bonded to someone,—emotionally, mentally, maybe?”

“I do,” I admit.

“Nicky and I are that way.”

"So is Nick, like, your girlfriend?" It’s not a tease.  It’s a sincere question.  Maybe that explains Phil’s new gender pronoun choices.

Phil takes a moment with it.  “That’s another weirdness about this.  You know the Grays are androgynous in the sense that any one of them can be what we’d call a female.  The one in the pod with the lowest status of the six, is the one who lays the eggs.  With Nicky being the lowest of the two in our tiny pod, that would kind of make him the female.”

“So, Nicky, then?” I ask.  “That’s where this Nicky thing is coming from?”

Phil nods, like it’s the most perfectly normal answer to a mundane question.

“Pardon me for asking this next question, but are you planning on having a physical relationship with Nicky?”

Phil belts out a big laugh at that one.  “No, no, nothing like that.  What I’m getting at is that in my relationship with Nicky, I feel fulfilled.  I feel very strange for saying it, but it’s like what we have is what I always wanted with Sydney, you know, except for the physical part.  I feel like we’re bonded, and I hate to say it, in the deepest, fully sharing kind of love.”

“Love?” That seems like a step too far.

“I know it’s weird.”  Phil starts looking at the floor, not wanting to meet my eyes.  “I feel like a pervert for talking about it this way.”

I give it a minute as I let the idea sink in, as I try hard not to judge.  Is it so strange? Is it as perverse as it seems on the surface? What is love, if not a bond that every human seeks, a bond of total trust, of complete acceptance?

Ick?

Hell, maybe Phil has found something with the Gray that humans between themselves can only aspire to.  “Phil,” I tell him, “it’ll be hard to get used to the idea, but I’ll try and understand.”

“Really?”

“All I can do is try.”

“Thanks, Dylan.”

“I wouldn’t tell the others about this if I were you.”

“I already told Penny.”

Of course.  “What did she say?”

“She hugged me and smiled.  She didn’t judge.”

I roll my eyes.

Chapter 20

“Can you see this?” Penny calls over the comm.

Not with my eyes, I don’t say.  But that’s not what she’s asking.  “Specifically?” I ask.

I glance at Phil for a hint.  He has that absent look he sometimes gets when he’s overly focused on viewing his surroundings with the bug in his head rather than his eyes.

Our lift is pushing hard g’s to keep it accelerating away from earth like all of the supply lifts do.  Through the muddled grav fields, I can’t make out anything but the fuzziest of shapes.  “The battle stations?” I ask, trying to guess what Penny wants me to see.

“I think earth has a ring.”

I look at Phil with the question on my face.

He’s paying attention, and he nods to confirm.  “We still have time before we need to start maneuvering.”  He looks toward the doors at the far end of the container.

I comm Brice and Lenox in.  “Anybody up for some sightseeing?”

Brice starts to grumble, but I tell him there’s nothing cryptic in my question.  No hidden danger.

Lenox shames him into participating, and after she readies everyone for what’s to come, together, she and Brice swing the outer doors open.  Of course, the leaky cargo container is in vacuum, so there’s no rush of escaping atmosphere.  The only sounds over the comm are the oohs and ahs of those looking.

It only takes a few moments for all of us to gather inside the open doors and stare.

“It’s debris from attacks on the battle stations,” Phil tells them.

It’s forming a ring around the earth, glowing against black space with reflected sunlight.  The rings aren’t as crisp or seemingly solid as the ones around Saturn.  And there’s a dim glow that looks like a haze everywhere.  I know that’s all debris from the battle stations.

It’s Brice who ends our awe when he points out several ships little bigger than pinpricks trudging through the glowing debris.  “They’re gathering the rocks and metals.”

Of course they are, but I don’t say it.

“Recycling it for the donuts,” says Lenox.  She means the big space stations like the one we stole our lift from.  She seems disgusted by the destruction of something so beautiful, even if it isn’t natural, even if it is the leftovers from a dozen mauled battle stations, any number of shattered human and Trog cruisers, Arizona class assault ships, and frozen bodies.

I realize then that the ring is as much a grave as anything, and I can’t even begin to guess how many dead are out there, not just in the ring, but on the shattered battle stations, or in their broken ships caught in other orbits, cluttering the space around earth.

It makes sense, too, that all of that needs to be cleaned, or one day, earth space won’t be navigable.  All that high-speed debris flying in every direction would make it a shooting gallery.

“Penny,” I ask “do—”

“I already have defensive grav maxed.  Not that there’s much of it in this lift, but it’ll protect us from anything that isn’t too big, or moving too fast.”

And that’s the crux of our plan to get out of the ragged line of lifts making their way to the donut.

We button up the doors, have everyone secure themselves to a floor or wall, and max suit power to our defensive fields.  Phil and the Gray take over control of the ship when Penny gives the word.

Though expected, the acceleration is brutal.  The ship shoots off at max-g, not in a straight line, but cutting high-g arcs in random directions, looking every bit like a lift whose control systems were just impacted by one of the billion hunks of rock filling earth’s orbits.  To any Gray or human watching, we’d be just one more lift knocked out of control.  One more casualty.

The trick of our plan will be waiting long enough before picking a new course.  Given enough time, anything with a brain gets bored of watching the same thing continue to happen.  Eventually, any Gray watching the line of lifts climbing up from the earth’s surface, will tire of watching us spin out of control and recede into the void.  Nothing they haven’t seen a thousand times already.

Chapter 21

It’s pretty amazing how much speed can be built over time with a steady application of modest acceleration.  And that’s how we came to think of it—modest.  The grav lift, like every other clunker in the endless fleet of utilitarian machines, would never win a race with a ship like the Rusty Turd, but at forty-thousand knots, the max speed at which we figured the lifts’ grav shields could keep us protected, we were able to cover a few million miles over two days.

We wanted to be far enough away from earth that when a small cargo ship from Iapetus came alongside, we’d be so far away from everything that we’d attract no attention.

After transferring nukes and loading ourselves on board, we abandoned the grav lift and spent a few more days bouncing around the solar system, coming in and out of light-speed jumps, obfuscating our destination.

When we arrive in Spitz’s vast hangar, I can’t help but gawk.  The Rusty Turd and Jill’s ship have been transformed.  Spitz himself is standing near the bow of the Turd, smiling broadly as he watches us come in.

My crew offloads and I instruct them to head for the barracks.  Judging by the state of the ships, I guess we won’t have long before we get started on the interstellar leg of our journey.  That’ll be a long, brutal trek.

Penny and Brice stay by my side as Spitz steps up to greet us.

“Did all go well?” he asks.

Nodding, I point a thumb back at the cargo cruiser that brought us in.  “Eighteen nukes.  No casualties.”

Spitz is pleased.  Of course, he already knows this.  We’d gone out in search of twelve and would have been pleased to find half that.  He turns toward the pair of ships and rubs his chin.  “We’re running some payload simulations.”  He glances back at me.  “I’m guessing you want to take all eighteen with you.”

“Nine on my ship,” I say.  “Nine on Jill’s.”

“We don’t need to rush your tests,” says Penny.  “I’d rather fly the ship with what it’s designed for than chance it with some last-minute crap.”

Spitz cackles as he walks toward the Rusty Turd.  “This is all last-minute crap.”

Brice laughs.

“But you’ve had time to plan,” argues Penny.  “These aren’t the only simulations you’ve run, right?”

Spitz puts an arm over Penny’s shoulder as we walk along.  “Of course, my dear.  Of course.”

“Tell us what you’ve done,” asks Brice, getting down to business.

We come to a stop off the bow.  It looms large and fat with all of the additions.  Not any longer than it used to be, but its diameter has doubled, at least.

Spitz points down the length of a metal addition running from the back edge of the grav lens to the stern.  “It’s like a hotdog bun,” he says.  “Your ship is the hotdog.”  He chuckles, amused by his analogy.  “These tanks, the buns, run the length of the hull.  You can see how the six tanks completely wrap the hull.”

“Yeah,” Brice agrees.  “Where do the nukes mount?”

“You’re getting ahead,” answers Spitz, walking up and rapping his knuckles on the metal.  “This tank and the other five hold your hydrogen for the trip.”

“That’s all H?” gasps Penny.  “We’ll be a flying bomb.”

“Only if you’re flying through oxygen,” Spitz corrects.  “Hydrogen by itself in a vacuum is just a non-combustible gas.  No danger.”

“Enough to get us there,” asks Penny, “and back?”

“Of course,” answers Spitz, “and back again.  You’ll have extra just in case.”

“Just in case?” asks Brice, as though he doesn’t understand contingency planning.  “Besides being in system there longer than expected, why are you sending us out with so much H?”

“You don’t know how efficiently the ship will burn, do you?” guesses Penny.

Spitz wags a finger at Penny, not scolding, yet in a way that suggests she’s guessed perfectly.

“What?” I ask.  “This doesn’t sound good.”

“Oh,” Spitz turns to me.  “It’s not bad.  We’ve made more tweaks to the reactor control software and drive array field-shaping algorithms, and run some tests with the ship.”

“It’s ready to fly?” I ask.

“We’ve been testing it nearly non-stop for three days,” he answers.

“And?”

Spitz’s brow furrows and I can’t tell if he’s frustrated or perplexed.  “We’re on the edge of what we understand here.”

“Oh, Jesus,” mutters Brice as he heaves a dramatic sigh.

“Do you want to get out of your suit,” I ask, “for some downtime before we pack up again to head out?”

“Oh, no,” he puts on a plastic happy face.  “I need to hear this.  This 20c thing, this whole jumping across interstellar space, is that the part where you tell us that we’re back to rolling the dice again?”

“No,” answers Spitz.  “What we’ve done is manage to squeeze so much power out of this ship’s reactor it can do 30c, at least.”

“But?” I ask, because the unspoken word is hanging on Spitz’s lips like a flashing neon sign.

“But.”  Spitz crosses an arm and taps a finger against his chin.  "Mind you, we can’t be certain on some of this, it’s based on instability measurements we don’t yet understand, coupled with theory in new areas."

Penny grimaces.  “This sounds awful.  Why didn’t you just leave the drive system the way it was?”

Spitz laughs.  “I’m not explaining myself very well.”

“Maybe you should,” I suggest.

“Your ship,” he looks each of us in the eye, “is fine.  You can run at 20c all day.  All the way there and back.  You can run it up to around 25c if you want to go that fast.  And that’s the interesting part, once you pass 22 or 23c, an odd phenomenon crops up.”

“Oh,” says Brice sarcastically, “please keep up the suspense.”

Grinning, Spitz says, “Mass resistance drops.  Maintaining the shape of the drive field requires less energy the faster you go from there.”

“What?” I don’t believe I heard him correctly.

“That’s right,” says Spitz.  “At first, the savings aren’t significant, but as you approach 30c, you might use only half as much energy than traveling at 20c.”

"That doesn’t make any sense at all," says Penny.  "Going faster for free? How can that be?"

Spitz shrugs, “Something we don’t understand.  Yet, it’s not exactly for free.”

“And?” I ask, hearing the hammer coming down.

Spitz says, “Instabilities in the reactor develop at those speeds—instabilities that we can’t explain.  The possibility of spontaneous runaway reactions starts to go up."

“How quickly?” I ask.

“Once you pass 30c or so,” he answers, “you run about a one-in-ten-thousand chance that in any given hour, the reactor will explode.”

Not terrible odds, but I grimace anyway.  “And if we go faster?”

“By the time you hit 37c,” Spitz tells me, “it’s a virtual certainty that in any given hour, you’ll explode.  By forty, the reactor will probably explode instantly.”  He smiles widely again.  “But that’s theoretical at this point.  We didn’t fly your ship that fast.”

Brice is looking at Penny.  “I don’t see why we’ll ever need to go that fast.  You?”

Penny shakes her head.  “I like 20.  Maybe 25.  Maybe 29 for the fuel savings.  I think over 30 is off the table.”  She looks at me.

“30c sounds like the speed limit to me.”  I turn back to Spitz.  “We’ll be safe just below?”

“With plenty of hydrogen to get you there and back, twice.  Keep the speedometer at 29.99 and round up.”

“What else?” I ask.  “Right now, this doesn’t sound so bad, as long as Penny doesn’t get a lead foot.”

“The ship will pull over fifty g’s at sub-light speeds now,” he answers.

“And there’s a but,” I add, knowing there’s go to be one.

"Yes," he’s nodding.  "In that respect, it’s just like speeding in your car back on the highway.  Only increased wind friction isn’t the limiting factor, it’s decreasing reactor efficiency as you pass the machinery’s limits."

"Surpassing its physical limits?" asks Brice.  "You mean it breaks?"

"Passing forty-three g’s, not exactly, but pretty close, you risk damaging the reactor.  Get up to fifty, and it’ll come apart, and you’ll be vaporized in a fusion reaction."

“Like a hydrogen bomb,” I guess.

Spitz nods.  “Exactly like that.”

“And the internal inertial systems?” asks Penny.  “They can handle this extra acceleration?” She looks at me as if to back her up.  We’ve been through plenty of scrapes where the internal systems weren’t able to match the rapid changes in acceleration we were able to punch out of our drive array.

Spitz shrugs like it’s no big deal.  "There is that.  The over-grav limit on the internal plates could probably generate an anti-g field on the order of twenty-eight or twenty-nine g’s.  Add some g’s for your suit’s max field and throw in the body’s ability to withstand hard g’s and you might get close to forty.”

“While our internal grav plates are rupturing,” concludes Brice, “and our eyeballs are liquefying into our sinuses and draining out our ears.”

Penny elbows Brice.  “That’s graphic.”

“We don’t want to sacrifice the internal plates for the extra speed,” I tell them both.  “We don’t want to kill ourselves, either.  I turn to Spitz, “What’s the max sustainable sub-light g we can pull without damaging the ship or injuring the crew?”

“We haven’t had time to thoroughly test the ship’s capabilities in that respect,” answers Spitz.  “We’ve been focused on getting stable light speed numbers worked out.”

I nod.  “And since we’re already the fastest ship in the solar system and far faster than anything in the Trog fleet, we won’t need to accelerate that fast.”

Looking at Penny, Brice says, “Be careful with your hotrod.”  He looks back at Spitz.  “Now about those nukes?”

Chapter 22

Spitz points to a substantial steel bracket down in the gap between two tanks.  “Notice anything unusual about this?”

Brice shakes his head and snorts.  He’s already guessed.

I’m still looking at it.  Not understanding why it’s not just a piece of solid metal, why it appears to be constructed of heavy hinges and joints.

“The whole tank system,” says Spitz, “it’s a collar that fits around the ship.  It can be taken on and off.”

“Taken on and off?” Penny doesn’t believe it.

“Once you come out of your last bubble jump and you’ve arrived at your destination,” Spitz pats the tank, “you send some people out to manually disengage the brackets.”

“How many?” I ask.

“Nearly a hundred,” Spitz answers.

“A hundred brackets?” Brice is not impressed.  “How long does that take?”

“An hour or two,” shrugs Spitz.  “Once the tank system is disconnected, you reverse the drive array’s grav field and slowly slide out the rear.  To re-engage, you simply line up from the rear, and slide the assault ship inside.  Mounting guides make it easier than it sounds.  Once you’re all the way in, the brackets automatically lock in place, so the mounting occurs much more quickly than dismounting.”  He looks at Penny and smiles.  “Just don’t come in too fast, or you’ll rip the brackets right off the tank ring system, and you’ll be stuck.  Forever.”

"And all this works?" asks Brice.

“We’ve tested it,” responds Spitz.  “It takes some practice to line the ship up straight.”

“And if we come in at the wrong angle?” asks Penny.  “If the bow collides with a tank and rips it open?”

“That’s where speed becomes a factor,” says Spitz.  “As long as you come in slow enough, the worst that’ll happen is some scratching and grinding.  Be patient when you dock.”

“Assuming we can even find it,” says Brice, looking first at me and then Penny.  “What do we do, leave this thing drifting in space while we go marauding and then hope we can find it after we’re finished, after we’ve been gone for a few weeks or months?”

“We put it in orbit around one of the planets or moons,” I suggest.  “That way it’ll always be where we left it.  Pretty much.”

“That’s what we’d suggest,” says Spitz, “but there’s a multidirectional transmitter installed in the ring that sends out a burst once every ten seconds.  Using the radio receiver on the ship, the software should be able to read the Doppler shift in the signal and calculate the direction and relative velocity of the ring.”

“And the nukes?” asks Brice, tired of harping on the question.

“Once the tank ring is off,” Spitz points up at the brackets again, “You can mount six nukes in their place.  The foremost pair of mounts for each tank is designed to be actuated from inside the ship.  We fabricated collars for the B61s with connectors for the brackets.  They can be released from the bridge.  Then, momentum carries them to the target.”

“So,” asks Brice, “we’re carrying the nukes inside, and we have to manually mount those after the tank ring is disengaged?”

“Exactly,” answers Spitz.

Looking at the other two, I say, “It’s not optimal, but it’ll work.  What do you think?”

“Lots of failure points,” says Brice.  “Lots of transition time.”

Glaring back at him, Penny says, “I trust Spitz and his engineers.  I think we’ll be fine.”

I don’t share Penny’s optimism, but I’m not ready to step under Brice’s black cloud, either.  “We’ll make it work.”

The blue grav screen that holds the atmosphere inside Spitz’s hangar shimmers bright and catches our attention.  I turn to see an Arizona class assault ship gliding through.

Chapter 23

All four of us are there when Hawkins and his crew exit.  He smiles when he sees us.  “You lived?”

I laugh.

Brice reaches out to shake Hawkins’ hand.  “Is this your ship now?”

Hawkins nods proudly.  “We just took her out on a shakedown run.”

“Already modified?” I turn to Spitz as I ask it, and he nods.

“Just like the Rusty Turd,” answers Hawkins, and he follows it with a shrug.  “Before you got the next round of upgrades.”

“It’s as fast as the Turd?” asks Penny.

“In that,” answers Spitz, “both ships received the same modifications.  Both ships can pull the same g loads.”

“And the axial gun?” I ask.  “The same?”

“The same,” confirms Hawkins.  “But we’ve sacrificed most of the crew compartment for extra H stores and magazines.  This isn’t an assault ship anymore.  It’s a destroyer.”

“A destroyer?” I like the sound of that.

“We’re going out to kill cruisers,” says Hawkins.  “No boarding.  No capturing.  So, no platoons of marines, or whatever you call yourselves.  Just the bridge crew, the gun crew, and a few more to keep everything running.”

Turning to Spitz, I ask, “Colonel Bird told me the UN is finally embracing the war effort? It’s true, then?”

He nods.  “We’ll support the colonies, and continue to send as many colonists out of the system as we can with our current fleet of transports, but all production efforts now are shifting to the war.”

“What’s your strategy?” I ask Hawkins as we start walking toward the airlock doors at the back of the hangar.

"Hit and run for now," he tells me.  "With you and Jill going on vacation, we don’t want to risk our only ship in a protracted engagement against big odds—"

“Like we would,” Brice laughs as he looks at me.

As strange as it seems, I don’t take the remark as a snipe.  Between he and I, it’s a compliment.

“—where we’ll have a high chance of getting knocked out,” finishes Hawkins.  “We have our scouts out looking for opportunities.  We’ll try to catch them in ones and twos when they’re resupplying, come in fast, kill one ship on a quick strafing run, and max-grav out of the area before they can think to shoot back.”

I nod.  It sounds like a solid tactic.  “They’ll adjust their habits once they’ve lost two or three cruisers that way.  The Trogs and Grays aren’t imaginative, yet they aren’t stupid.  They’ll react.  They’ll lay a trap for you.”

Hawkins nods, and I see that he knows the truth of that as well as I do.  “We’ll adjust our tactics as we go along.  Don’t worry so much about us, granny.  You have your own suicide mission to live through.”

I smile and brush the remark away, and turn to Spitz.  “How long before you’ll have more ships to help?”

“We have salvage crews out now,” answers Spitz.  “It’ll be months before we have another axial gun ready to install in one, but we’re optimistic that we’ll be able to put together a small fleet by then.”  He slaps Hawkins on the back.  “With the colonel keeping the Trogs busy, we should buy the time we need.”

“As long as you and Jill shut off the pipeline,” adds Hawkins.

"Will do," I tell them, though none of us mentions the possibility that any number of Trog cruisers might already be traveling at hyper-light speed to our system.  It’s something we won’t know until a year or two after Jill and I close the supply line to Trog traffic.

Chapter 24

We spend a few days out of our suits, though not one of my crew goes off the clear liquid diet.  We’ll be back in space too soon to indulge the luxury of hydroponic vegetables, chem-lab beef, and pseudo-chicken.  At least there’s no prohibition against sexual activity.

Penny seems to have made it her business to keep up with the budding relationships and casual encounters of our crew and platoon.  It’s not something I give half a care about, but she’s obsessed enough with the topic that she can’t help but share her secrets with me.

Thankfully, she’s already inside the conference room, chatting up Jill Rafferty.  I’m in the hall outside, talking with Brice about the status of our ship’s supplies, while others pass by to enter.

Colonel Bird walks up with two of his officers in tow.  He greets us and waves the two in.

“Good work on that raid,” Bird tells me, reaching out to shake my hand.

“Thank you,” and as I recall almost too late, I add, “sir.”

He congratulates Brice as well, and then says, “You’ve had plenty of time to think about what’s ahead.  Are you still up for it?”

No is the answer I want to give.  I dread the long months I’ll spend traveling interstellar space, but I understand the necessity.  I give him the only answer—the right answer, “Yes, sir.”

Seeming to read my mind, he tells me, “I know it’ll be a difficult assignment.  I appreciate you taking it on.”

He pats Brice on the shoulder.  “You okay with it?”

“I’m a soldier, sir,” answers Brice.  “I go where I’m pointed, and do what I’m told.”

Bird accepts Brice’s answer at face value, and he turns back to me.  "How’s your crew holding up?"

“Good.  The nuke raid went well.  We’ve not suffered a casualty in—” I find myself searching for the date of the last loss.  And then it seems odd that I’d subconsciously started marking time that way, days since the last death.  A corpse-driven calendar.  The brutality of war does funny things to people.

“Success does a lot for morale,” he says.

I accept the tidbit of mean-nothing wisdom, and try not to judge him for it.  He’s trying to make conversation, trying to form a bond beyond the bounds of our military relationship.

Perhaps sensing my sudden discomfort and Bird’s unexpected long pause, Brice asks, “Sir, if you don’t mind my curiosity, I have some questions.”

Turning back to him, Bird says, “I’ll answer what I can.”

“What did you end up doing with Blair and Sokolov?”

“Reassigned.”  Bird says it the same way he might answer a question about the weather.

Brice doesn’t take it that way.  His face betrays his disapproval.  “Reassigned?” Like me, he expected something more permanent.  “In the Free Army?”

“Of course,” answers Bird.  “What did you expect?”

Brice glances at me before he answers, looking to see if I’m on his side.  He guesses right.  “Something harsher.”

Bird turns to me and asks, “What are your thoughts on Blair?”

“I’m in agreement with Sergeant Brice.  She can’t be trusted.”

“Would you have me jail her?” Bird asks.  “Execute her and Sokolov, both?”

I suspect Bird is maneuvering me toward an answer I don’t want to give.  I hesitate to respond.

Brice doesn’t suffer the subtleties of conscience that nag me.  He sees the right course and doesn’t mind taking it.  “Yes.  Execution is the best solution.”

“We’re not the MSS,” Bird tells him.  “I can’t do that.”

Brice misinterprets Bird’s answer.  "I can.  A railgun round through the back of the head.”  He shrugs, like he can’t understand the difficulties of it.  And then, sensing that maybe he’s suggested the wrong method, he offers an alternative.  "Or just dump them in deep space and let nature take its course.  Reassignment to a new command."

“She was stupid, selfish, and ambitious,” Bird explains.  “She didn’t commit a crime.”

“People died,” Brice argues.  “Lots of good people.  Not just in the battle for Ceres.  Her ambition and paranoia cost us—” Brice suddenly finds himself at a loss trying to quantify the Blair effect.

I can’t put a number to it, either.  “Perhaps an investigation,” I suggest.  “So we’ll understand how many she killed through her choices.”

“Incompetence isn’t a crime,” Bird reminds us.  “What am I to do, execute every officer who makes a bad decision?”

“Bad decision?” Brice snorts.  He’s well out of line considering the rank difference.  He shakes his head and then drills Bird with a challenging glare.  "Officers sticking together? Same story in every army.”

That accusation is a step too far for Bird’s patience.  “Sergeant, I understand your point of view, and you have a right to it, but whatever accusation you think you’re making, you’re wrong.  At least in the Free Army, under my command, you’re wrong.  Nobody, including those of high rank, gets favoritism.  We all live by the same rules.  Anyone who breaks them will be investigated and court-martialed.  Anyone—officer or enlisted person.  Colonel Blair, as I said, made mistakes.  Her mistakes resulted in a lot of deaths.  The one thing you need to keep in mind, Sergeant Brice, is that soldiers make the wrong choices every day, whether they’re squad leaders, platoon sergeants, captains, or commanders.  Every time a bad choice comes down the chain of command, people in an orange suit pay the price.

“You and me, we can sit on the sidelines and make our retrospective judgments, but we both know, things look different in the battle than they do afterward.  Would you have me punish everyone who makes a bad call? Would you have me execute every officer and non-comm who screws up? If that’s what you want, then there’ll be a long line at the guillotine, I can tell you that much.”

“No, sir,” answers Brice.  “We can’t execute everyone.”

Bird’s stare doesn’t let up.

Brice doesn’t back down.

I know the words that just passed between them didn’t change either’s opinion, not even an inch.  Bird believes in equal, pedantic justice.  Brice has seen too much criminal behavior by too many officers, and seen them get away with it.

With no idea how to defuse the tension, I say, “We should get inside.  The meeting is starting in a moment.”

Chapter 25

It’s an oblong, bland conference room with seats for twenty-five, every one filled.  Jill Rafferty is present with her pilot, navigator, and sergeant.  Brice and Penny are here, Phil isn’t.  He and the Gray are inseparable, and nobody wants the Gray in a meeting where so many secrets might be shared.

Spitz is present along with some from his staff.  Bird and his two aides are across the table from Brice and me.  The rest of the people in the room are officers in what passes for Iapetus’s military branch, and several are from the ruling council, whatever they call themselves.

“What’s up Brice’s ass?” Penny whispers.

I glance over at Brice.  I know he’s steamed over his conversation with Colonel Bird out in the hall, however, he’s doing a gold-medal job at hiding it.  Penny sees through his guise.  I shrug.  "Nothing important."

“You’re lying,” she whispers.

“Is Phil teaching everybody to be a mind reader, now?”

She smiles.  “You’re not as clever as you think.”

“Nobody is.”

She leans back in her chair as a spectacle-wearing pair of women takes up places near a large, blank video screen at the end of the room.

One of the ministers calls the meeting to order and introduces the women—one astronomer, one a navigational engineer.

Dr. Leeds, the astronomer, starts as the room lights dim and a map of several dozen stars sprinkle the black screen.  Using her laser pointer, she selects a dot in the center labeled as ‘Sol.’ "This is our sun.”  Streaking the red dot across the screen, it comes to rest on another star.  “This is 18 Scorpii, forty-five light years from us.  From the information we’re able to glean from the Gray, we know to a high degree of certainty that this is the home system of the Trogs and Grays who’ve been attacking us.”

“Forty-five light years away?” mutters one of the ministers whose name I didn’t catch.  “I thought their cruisers couldn’t go more than—”

“Minister Ward,” Dr. Leeds interrupts, “all of this is in the data file you’ve had access to for two weeks.  We’ve been updating it with the latest information as we make our determinations.”

Minister Ward points at the screen and starts in, “But you’re—”

“Providing a brief overview to make sure we’re all up to date,” she tells him.  “If you have questions about the veracity of our information or the methods utilized to deduce our conclusions, please review the data file and I’ll be pleased to talk with you offline.”

Minister Ward snorts and turns his attention to his d-pad, making a show of reviewing all he’s missed right here in the meeting while the rest of us proceed with our business.

"Based on the data and what we know of Trog cruiser design, it’s our belief they are following this path to reach us.”  On the screen, several systems are circled in red, with straight red lines joining them as they zigzag through the star map.  "Making jumps as long as two calendar years, sixteen light years based on the cruisers’ max hyper-light capability, the Trogs are able to leapfrog through these star systems, stopping at supply depots in each to refuel for the next leg of the journey.  Our engineers have been studying the problem and running simulations based on what we know about the Trog cruisers.  By completely removing the payload of railgun slugs, and the railguns themselves, the cruisers can store enough hydrogen fuel for their ships and enough food for the crews to make a sixteen-light-year jump.”

“No railguns?” Minister Ward scoffs.  “They sure show up here ready to fight.”

“Precisely,” Dr. Leeds responds.  “The last leg of their journey is only eleven-and-a-half light years.  We believe 61 Cygni is where their last supply depot is before earth.  We believe they have the facilities there to harvest and store hydrogen to fuel the ships, oxygen, factories to produce food for the crew, and also the industry to build the railgun systems they install in the ships when they arrive.  We believe the ships all arrive in the earth system ready for war, but low on hydrogen, supplies to support the crews, slugs for their railguns.  They stock up at one of the Trog outposts in system before going into battle.”

“We have three assault ships fitted with axial guns,” says Ward.  “We saw at the battle of Ceres how effective a single one of these ships can be against a whole fleet of those cruisers.”

Penny kicks me under the table and puts on a smug face.  She appreciates the adulation even if the minister isn’t naming us.  Everybody knows.

“Why don’t we just wait for them here?” asks the Minister.  “We can ambush them when they’re completing their jumps and shoot them out of the sky when they’re low on fuel with no ammunition for their guns.”

Plenty of people around the table sigh loudly.  Ward’s questions have apparently been answered already in other meetings.

A high-ranking military man leans over the table and tells Ward, “It’s not that easy.  The Trogs have dozens of bases scattered around the system and we can only guess at that.  We suspect we don’t know where half of them are.  Hell, they could be all over the Oort Cloud, and we wouldn’t have a clue.  Earth hasn’t sent a ship out there, and we haven’t either.  No warships.  No scout ships.  All we have are long-range scans from ships stopping for a short time, enough to calculate their next jump on the way to one of the colony systems."

"That’s what I don’t understand," Ward tells him, coming to a triumphant point,  "if we can’t find a Trog base in our solar system with all the resources and scout ships and surveillance satellites we have floating around, how the hell are we going to be able to search an entire alien system with just two ships?"

“We have a pretty good idea where the base is,” says Dr. Leeds.  “Information from the Gray.  It’s in your data file.”

“From the Gray,” snorts Ward, and then he repeats it, emphasizing it in slow syllables as he looks around the table for supporters.  “We’re putting our trust in this creature not one of us can communicate with.  We have to believe this Phil character to interpret what it says.”  Ward throws himself back in his chair in a dramatic tantrum.

I’m offended, but keep my cool.

Penny glances at me, I guess to make sure I’m going to play nice.

“Well?” Ward looks around.  “Anybody got anything to say about that? We’re going to trust this alien creature with our safety.  With our future.  We’re going to send our two most powerful ships—”

“Your ships?”  asks Bird, underscoring an unresolved fracture between the UN and the Free Army.  Both were cooperating on the ships, but Colonel Bird hasn’t suborned the Free Army to UN authority.

"A discussion for another time," says another minister, stepping into the budding argument with a placating tone.  "We’re all on the same side, human against invaders.  Whatever our differences, we’ll find a way to work together, or we’ll perish, every one of us.”  And then he glares at both Ward and Bird.  "Have we learned nothing from the MSS and our decades of occupation?"

Chapter 26

With relative silence settling over the meeting’s participants, Dr. Leeds finishes explaining our plan and the logic behind it.

A UN admiral stands and takes over, spending time talking about the salvage opportunities available with the broken assault ships floating in earth orbits, near the Potato, around Ceres, and around the Free Army’s former headquarters.  He paints an optimistic picture of how quickly the UN and Free Army working together will be able to scale up the fleet.  He talks about training based on the tactics we know work against the Trogs, and he tries to leave the room with the understanding that sending two assault ships into the void is only a temporary setback regarding fleet strength.  In a few months, the ships will be replaced.  In six months, optimistically, or a year at worst, the two ships won’t even be missed.

Minister Ward groans several times during the presentation, but his ire doesn’t rise enough to turn into an argument.

Dr. Spitz goes to the head of the table and gives everyone a rundown on the status of the two ships—the Rusty Turd, and Jill’s assault ship.  He explains how we’re each going out with the necessary crew and only a squad each of marines.  The plan doesn’t call for anything that would make their presence necessary.  They’re along as a backup system.  What for, he can’t explain, except to say that this is a military operation.  Things will go wrong, and we need to be as prepared as we can afford to be.  He finishes by explaining that that’s why they’re sending their best, my ship and Jill’s ship.

As Spitz is taking his seat, the conference room door opens, and Secretary General Kimura strides in on a presence that bigger than stature would suggest.

All side chatter in the room ceases.

“My apologies, I couldn’t get here sooner,” she says.

“We’re just finishing up,” says Spitz.  “You have the floor.”

She looks over the room, and in a reassuring voice starts in with a speech I guess she’d already planned to make upon entering the room at exactly this time.  “This is the first step we’re taking here.  The first huge step, not just in reuniting humanity to work together, but to take the fight to our enemy.  We’re sending a military force to another star system.  We’re no longer hiding in holes on minor moons and scurrying off to uninhabited star systems in hopes we’ll be able to thrive outside of the view of races more advanced and numerous than ourselves.  This expedition, more than anything is humanity asserting its freedom.”

That raises a standing ovation from the room.

At least we’re all able to unite behind that ideal.

Penny leans over and whispers, “Maybe there’s hope for us.”

I chuckle and tell her, “I thought I was the cynical one?”

Once we all sit down, feeling more optimistic than at any moment since coming in, Minister Ward decides it’s time to open up his box of grievances.  “Secretary Kimura I agree, that if nothing else, we’ll remember this day as the first time the UN and Free Army joined together to fight for our freedom in interstellar space.  We’ll all talk about it for as along as we live.  But you know as well as I do, it’s nothing more than a wasted Doolittle Raid.”

Brice bristles at that and Penny puts a restraining hand on his forearm.

I decide I don’t like Ward at all.

"In that, I disagree," answers Secretary Kimura looking down at Ward, who is still seated.  "Colonel Doolittle flew sixteen bombers to Tokyo on a one-way mission of little material effect but significant propaganda value for America during the Second World War.  This raid is nothing like that.  We fully intend for both ships to return.  What’s more, we’ll disrupt the Trog supply line.  There’s much about the Trog military and supply methods we don’t understand, but if they are sending warships from depot to depot and from system to system, it’s possible that news of the destruction of this one supply depot will take four or five years before it reaches the Trog home system.  Another four or five years will pass before work crews with construction equipment will arrive in system to start the repairs, another process that might take years.  So, we might be buying ourselves ten years.  That’s time in which not a single Trog vessel will be able to make it into earth’s solar system.”

Ward takes the opportunity to follow up.  “That’s a very rosy picture you paint Madam Secretary.  What if every fleet that leaves their home world does so with support vessels capable of foraging the necessary volatile elements from whichever system they arrive in, or worse still, brings along vessels with the crews and equipment necessary to build out their bases, as we know they must have done when they arrived undetected in earth’s system some time before starting the war.  Then what do we buy with this folly, a few weeks? A few months? Maybe not that.”

“That’s the most pessimistic view,” allows Secretary General Kimura.

"And what if this isn’t the only system where the Trogs have a base?" Ward is smug about this supposition.  "What if they have depots in two or three—or every star system within a dozen light years of earth? What if they come to earth down different paths, and this Gray we’re depending on only knows the one way? What then? We accomplish nothing except to throw away two ships.”

I can’t help but notice Ward doesn’t mention the lives of the people on board.  He’s an easy man to despise.

“Eventually,” responds Kimura, “we’ll send scout ships to every system within a dozen light years, and farther.  As you well know, we’ve scouted or have colonies in four systems already, and we haven’t found any sign of Trogs.  However, we need to search the rest.  We need to know what’s in our neighborhood if we’re to survive.”

Kimura scans the room to catch every eye watching.  “We’ll need outposts and garrisons to monitor our frontier.  We’ll need a fleet to protect it.  We’ll need a navy and an army, marines, air force, everything as we expand.

“We live in a hostile universe.  The only way we’ll survive as a species is if we militarize and grow our population at a rate never seen in human history.  Just like the Grays figured, we need to have people getting married and having babies by the dozen, so we’ll have the bodies to spread across our colonies and to build out our ships, and we damn well better figure out how we’re going to pay for the endeavor.  We may need a new set of economic and social theories to support the kind of interstellar expansion required.  Money might become irrelevant when survival of the species is the only return on investment that matters.

“The danger we’ll face when we build out this enormous military-industrial-imperial complex is that it could turn into a Frankenstein that draws us into a state of perpetual fascism from fear of the infinite universe and its endless possibilities? We have to find a way not to lose who we are as a species.  We’re not just colonists and soldiers, expansionists and constructors—we’re artists and scientists, parents and poets.

Secretary Kimura catches herself and smiles.  "I get carried away with the future sometimes.  I apologize for that.  But if we don’t plan for the future we want, and don’t start asking today what world we want to leave our children, then we won’t have a say in it, and that’s exactly what happened to humanity this time around.  We weren’t prepared for what we knew was coming.  The Grays showed up three decades ago and took our freedom, and now the Trogs are here.  Do they intend to enslave us for all time or annihilate us? Either way, we can’t leave the decision to them.

“Right now we need to fortify what we have, build our massive navy, protect earth and the colonies.  We need this mission to 61 Cygni to succeed in cutting off the Trog supply route.  If we can defeat this union of Trogs and Grays, then we can overthrow the union of the MSS and Grays here at home.  It all starts here with us, in this room, in every room and hall on Iapetus, and in every Free Army base in the solar system, on every ship, and in every heart.  We need to bond ourselves together as humans to a single purpose, survival.  No longer can we squabble as nations, ethnicities, religions, organizations, and armies.  We need to become one, or we’ll be swept away by a species that is capable of acting together.  Survival and freedom, those are the two things we fight for.  Who stands with me?”

Everybody does.  Of course we do.  That was the kind of speech the old sci-fi epics creamed in their pants for.  We all cheer.

For the first time in a long time, I feel pretty optimistic about us.  And then I know why Kimura is running the show on this rock.  She dreams big, and she inspires.  She’s the hero earth needs.

Chapter 27

It takes us a day to put a comfortable distance between us and the nearest gravitationally significant mass.  No planets nearby.  No moons.  Even Jill’s ship is over a thousand klicks distant.  As unlikely as the occurrence might be, we don’t want to chance a light-speed collision during our trip.  The Rusty Turd jumps first, leaving the solar system at nearly 30c.  Jill will follow in a minute or two.

We’re traveling with a light crew, just Phil and the Gray, Penny, of course, Jablonsky, Tarlow who’s become a bridge fixture, Brice, Lenox, Silva, and Peterson, along with two techs who run the axial gun.  The two techs, a man, and a woman went through that battle over Ceres with us, and they’re starting to feel like they’re part of our platoon.  The only outsider is Clawson.  He’s one of Spitz’s people, an engineer.  He’ll be in charge of arming the nukes when we get where we’re going.

For now, thirteen humans and an alien.  Jill has the same number.

The latest round of modifications to the Rusty Turd have changed its purpose.  Technically we still have the ability to ram a Trog cruiser.  It’s a tactic I want to leave in the playbook because we’ve had such success with it in the past.  Of course, ramming with the tank ring attached will destroy our tanks.  Ramming with the tank system removed will likely break off enough brackets to make re-coupling with the ring impossible.  Both outcomes lead to us being stranded in 61 Cygni.

As for seizing a Trog ship after ramming it—even if we had enough marines onboard to mount an assault, all of the assault doors off the platoon compartment, except for one, have been welded shut.  Only the foremost section of that compartment remains in vacuum.  That’s where we store the nukes, tucked right up behind the grav lens.  The assault door on the starboard side of the ship up there has been widened to make it possible for the nukes to be loaded inside, and for them to be pulled back out again once we shed our tank ring after reaching 61 Cygni.

The rest of the ship is now livable space, well, those parts of it that aren’t packed to the brim with ammunition for the axial gun and supplies to keep the crew alive for eighteen months.  The trip there and back is only supposed to take ten—five each way—so we have some cushion built in.

And that underscores the one thing that’s going to make this journey survivable, from a morale perspective, anyway.  With so much of the Rusty Turd’s interior now livable space, the plan, after the first day of flight, is to remove our orange suits and spend the five months living like humans.  We’ll walk, exercise, work, and recreate in artificial earth g generated by our interior grav plates.  We’ll breathe, eat, use the restroom, and take a shower just like normal humans back on earth.  We’ll each have a berth a little larger than a coffin to sleep in.  We have a few common areas, one, a multi-purpose space that’s large enough to hold us all snuggly.  We can configure it as a dining room, a workout space, even a theater for watching old vids from back before the siege, back when humans had the resources to waste on such frivolities.  The infirmary is smaller than in the original ship design, but is convertible to be a quiet reading or socializing space with a couch and a few chairs.  Several computers are set up in another area just down the hall.

It sounds like more space than it is, but the ship wasn’t designed for roominess, and it sure was never intended for a long voyage across the stars.

I’ve set the crew up in three shifts.  With a third of us on the bridge at all times, a third sacked out, so four at a time can take advantage of the ship’s leisure spaces.  Phil is the only one left out of the rotation.  His up and down time is on the Gray’s schedule.

Chapter 28

Two months into the journey, and boredom has set in.  It’s worse than the long shifts I worked in the grav factory.  At least there, I had something to keep myself busy with through the sweaty hours.

Now, there’s little of importance.

Every day, I spend time with Phil and Nicky—it’s still hard to call it that—trying to get a deeper understanding of Gray history and behavior, trying to put myself in the mind of the Trogs, hoping I’ll earn an insight that gives me an advantage when we face them again in combat.

Nothing yet.

I push Phil for answers on the exact location of the Trog supply depot in 61 Cygni, but nothing Phil can dredge out of the Gray’s secondhand memories points us where we need to go.

Tarlow has gone to the trouble to put together a dynamic map of the system based on all we’ve learned from Spitz’s astronomers, what we’ve been able to observe in our brief periods out of bubble as we inch closer, and mostly what he’s assembled from the Gray’s memories interpreted through Phil.

61 Cygni is a binary system, two stars orbiting one another at roughly eighty-six Astronomical Units, eighty-six times the distance from earth to the sun, nearly twice as far out as the old planet, Pluto.

Cygni A has the most planets, a dozen varying in size from half the size of Mercury on up to some much larger than earth.  They’re rocky–some are layered in gases like Venus, others are tidally locked, half-frozen, half-molten.  Most are barren, though a few sound like they might one day evolve life.

Cygni B has only two gas giants, one so large we guess that it’s eaten up any smaller planets in that system.  But that’s pure, uneducated conjecture.  Not one of us is an astronomer.

Cygni A has two dense asteroid belts, both fairly close to the star.  A giant Oort cloud encompasses the whole binary system, and Lagrange points dot the system in places that aren’t intuitively obvious to any of us.  The largest, most populace Lagrange zone is a vast swath of space where we think the supply depot sits.  It covers an area larger than Sol’s inner solar system, and it’s something of a system-wide dumping ground for asteroids, everything from sand particles and golf-ball-sized pieces of ice and rock to moon-sized spheres and protoplanets.

Based on what we know of earth’s asteroid belts, Kuiper belt, and Lagrange zones around Jupiter, we guess this place holds millions, and maybe billions of bodies large enough to house a Trog supply depot.  What we’re trying to get out of the Gray is a concept of landmarks, the largest of the moon-size objects that we can use as a means to narrow down our search.

Unfortunately, the Grays’ navigation methods are so intertwined with their innate sense of gravity and not based on anything mathematical, the way the memories are stored don’t translate well to Phil’s human brain.  What does come through is garbled in Phil’s attempt to translate into words concepts that exist outside human vocabulary.

So, we find ourselves listing and defining, and correcting and shuffling words around to try to invent the language to describe the concepts from a Gray point of view.  It frustrates us all.  Brice and Penny sit in on the sessions from time to time, as does nearly everyone on the ship.  It’s a problem we all need to solve.  It’s central to the success of our mission.

What we do with the navigation information we glean is pump it into a piece of military battle simulator software used for gaming out scenarios.

Tarlow sets each game up with modified situations and different pitfalls.  Sometimes, we arrive in system, and no Trog cruisers are there to greet us.  Other times, the depot is heavily defended with gun emplacements fortified in bunkers on the surface of a moon-like object in a constant and predictable grav field.  And on occasion, the base is sitting on an asteroid roughly the size of the Potato, in a swirling field of other rocks with gun batteries buried all through, with grav fields bent every which way, and in flux in strength and direction with the positions and rotations of the asteroids.

In that kind of system, any railgun round fired is likely to miss its target unless a great deal of care is calculated to account for every variable field line that a ballistic object needs to cross.  That part is nearly impossible to simulate to any close approximation of reality.  We do the best with what we have.

We imagine having to evade or engage with fleets of Trog cruisers.  We simulate the battle with two assault ships, and sometimes just one.  We discuss plans for how we’ll mount our attack if both ships are disabled and we have to go in commando-style to destroy the facility.

I don’t know if we’re learning anything from all the effort, building false confidence, or just killing time.  At least it takes our mind off the slowly moving calendar and gives my people something to look forward to when I’m not pressing them to make progress on a cross-training schedule.

We’re in the common area—me, Tarlow, Brice, Lenox, and Silva—discussing the last round of the battle simulator, trying to list the flaws in a failed attack plan, when a call comes over the comm from Penny.  It’s short and ominous.  “They’re not here.”

Chapter 29

I make my way down the main hall.  It’s cramped with the axial railgun running right down the center.  Once on the bridge, I see my first-string team.  Penny and Phil greet me with silent, worried faces.  Jablonsky is on the radio, calmly hailing Jill’s ship to no reply.

Our plan upon heading out had been to stop at waypoints along our trip, to touch base.  Neither of us had the ability, or that’s to say the accuracy in navigation, or the balls to try and make the trip to 61 Cygni in a single long bubble.  We agreed to attempt to stop at all the same places along the way, places where we’d compare notes on anything that might have gone wrong or right with the other’s ship, or just as a way to develop some best practices for interstellar navigation with humans being so new to it.

Over the first several days of our trip, we’d stopped every hour and managed to keep ourselves on parallel paths and similar speeds, which meant that once coming out of bubble, we seldom had to wait long to find and contact the other ship.  Overall, it slowed us down, but we figured it wouldn’t add more than five or six days to the length of our journey.

“How long since we stopped?” I ask.

“Nearly four hours,” answers Penny.

“That’s a while.”  I was aware we’d come out of bubble.  Everybody on the ship was.  The interior inertial bubble always glows steadily when we were in that state.  I’d been so caught up in the evaluation discussion I’d lost track of time.  I connect to Tarlow over the comm.  “Get up to the bridge as soon as you can make it.”

He grumbles something in typical Tarlow fashion, but I’ve learned to ignore his perpetual moods.  His jack-of-all-trades genius is worth the price of his quirky personality.  So far.

“Tarlow can run a scan with his radar systems,” I announce, hoping that solves our problem.

“I’m broadcasting in all directions,” says Jablonsky, “on all frequencies.”  He doesn’t say the radio works on electromagnetic radiation, just like the radar system, but he clearly thinks Tarlow’s radars will add nothing to the effort to search the vast space around us.

“Keep it up,” I tell him.  Turning to Phil, I ask, “How long was this last jump? Two weeks?”

“The first two-week jump,” Phil confirms, though I knew the answer before I asked.  I’m just gearing up to start talking through the solution to a problem that will get more and more serious with each passing hour.  Nobody wants to mention the possibility that we’ve lost half our attack force before getting halfway to 61 Cygni.

“Two weeks at 30c,” says Phil.  “That puts us six billion kilometers from our last rendezvous point.”

“And any small errors in heading or speed magnify over that distance,” Penny reminds us.

“What’s the longest we’ve had to wait for them so far?” I dredge my memory of all the meet-up points.

“Nearly two hours,” says Jablonsky, accessing the computer on his console.  “Our first three-day jump.”

“Did we figure out what happened?” I ask.  “Was that a speed problem?”

"Yes," Penny confirms.  "We realized their reactor was putting out slightly less than ours, or that’s to say their drive array was converting it less efficiently to speed.  We re-calibrated over the next several jumps, and thought we had it fixed.  After that, we were jumping in near-perfect sync, always coming out of bubble within a few seconds of one another, always within a hundred thousand miles of the other ship.”

“And suddenly this?” I ask it, but I don’t expect an answer.  “Thoughts on how to proceed?” I do expect answers on this one.

“Do we go back?” Jablonsky asks, between calls over the ship-to-ship.

“First we wait,” suggests Penny.  “I don’t know how long, but I think we need to decide now, rather than later.  The longer we sit here, the more likely we are to become emotionally involved with the problem.  If that happens, we’ll be less likely to make a rational decision.”

"Agreed.”  I give her a nod.  "We’re at four hours now.  Do we wait for another four?"

“Eight total?” Penny asks, grimacing as she comes to her choice—a hard one—but maybe the necessary answer.  “Yes.”

Tarlow stumbles up the stairs.  I fill him in on the situation and direct him to take a seat at his station and start scanning.  His muttering disappears once he understands the seriousness.  He gets right to work.

Brice and Lenox both come onto the Bridge.  Penny explains things to them as I lean over Tarlow’s shoulder to get a first peek at his initial results.

“We’re deciding at what point we give up on the rendezvous and proceed to 61 Cygni,” she says.  “We’re thinking eight hours.”

I stand up and look around at the others.  “Any input?”

“Choosing a time to go is wise,” Brice tells us, glancing at Penny to acknowledge her good choice.  “We’ve waited four hours.  That’s probably enough already.  Waiting another four isn’t likely to impact the situation when we arrive in system at 61 Cygni.  I don’t know that waiting longer will increase the likelihood the other ship will arrive.  For all we know, they’re a few million miles away, trying to make the same decision we are right now.  Obviously, if we both wait out here for the other immobile ship to show up, we’ll wait forever.  Four more hours is plenty.”

I scan around the bridge.  “Any other thoughts?”

Phil, surprisingly, is the first to agree with Brice.

Penny does, of course.  I get nods from Lenox and Jablonsky.  Tarlow doesn’t seem to care one way or the other.

“Four more, then.”

Chapter 30

Time ticks slowly past.

We spend a good deal of it speculating and reviewing what we know of Jill’s ship, her crew, and what they communicated to us at each of our previous stops as we worked through the calibration and reactor output problem.  Nothing comes of it except frustration that infects the whole crew, as we’re all involved.

Tarlow’s scans pick up nothing.  Everything, he explains, is just too far away for his scans to do any good.  As far as he can tell, we’re surrounded by a void at least several light-years across, exactly what we’d expect to find in interstellar space.

After the eighth hour of our wait ends, we don’t discuss it further.  I give the order.  Phil uploads the nav data.  Penny powers up the drive array, and we bubble jump into another two-week hop.

Chapter 31

I’m staring at the ceiling in the dark.  Well, the blue glow.

Silva, that’s what I call her.  It seems like the only name she’s ever had.  The only one that feels natural.  She’s asleep, with my arm wrapped under her, holding her to me.

We’re both off-shift.  We have the library to ourselves.  The library, that’s what everyone in the crew has taken to calling the private space with a couch and a door that latches from the inside.  We don’t have any books in the library.  I’m not even sure who tagged it as such.  Maybe people sneak inside in pairs and try to be quiet.

Penny is good about it when she’s inside with Brice.

Lenox surprises me because she’s quite the screamer when she’s snuck off with Clawson.

Silva isn’t loud, but she’s not quiet.  We’ve been in here enough over the two months since her birthday that I think I know every sound she’s going to make and how she’s going to make it.  We’ve practiced our encounters with such frequency and—I laugh, trying to keep my silence, so I won’t disturb her.

Practice our encounters?

She teases me because I am, at times, too clinical.

We fit together like two people who’ve grown comfortable over years.  She’s told me she loves me, not two weeks after we first slept together.

I don’t know that I love her.

I can’t trust myself to make the call on that one.  I sold myself a heaping lie on it once before.  Once to a plastic-eyed beauty queen who rolled down the assembly line at the baby factory when the angel in charge of plugging souls into infants had slipped off to take a dump.

The question that nags me is, if I could fall into Claire’s trap, what won’t I fall into?

Have I been cursed with a gullible heart?

I don’t know if Silva’s my soul mate, if she and I are intertwined like Phil and Nicky.  I am infatuated with her so much it hurts, and the only thing that makes that sweet pain go away is when her lips are kissing mine, and my hands are sliding across her bare skin, and her legs are wrapped around me, and we’re doing what lovers have always done when they’re alone.

In seven hours, everyone onboard is scheduled to suit up again.  We’ve all been on the liquid diet for three days.  I checked out my suit before my last shift started.  It’s been sitting in a locker for five months.  I had to run a check on the system.  Everything worked, but damn if it didn’t smell like a mildewed jockstrap.  Something you don’t notice when you first put them on, because they’ve just been steam cleaned, but these are pungent, having last held us.  And we don’t have the facilities onboard to give them a thorough washing.

The first few days back inside are going to suck.

They’ll suck even more because the closest I’ll come to touching Silva again will be through layers of translucent undergarment, insulating material, micro-sized grav plates, and the flexi-composite orange stuff they make these suits out of.

I don’t know if still being able to see her and talk to her whenever I want is going to make our time apart easier.  I make a point to talk to Brice about how he managed the relationship he had with that girl he told me about when he was working construction after first blasting into space before he joined the SDF.

They got together for a few days once every two weeks.

I wonder how long we’ll be in system.  Will we find the Trog base a day or two after arriving, drop our nukes, and get back on a long, slow trip back to earth? A long trip I’m no longer dreading.  Maybe that’s the measure I need to think about as I try to put a label on what it is I feel for Silva.  The only passion I’ve had room in my heart for all these years was the revolution.  Now, the thought of lying in this room with her in my arms seems like the most important thing I can ever do.

Maybe that’s love.

Chapter 32

After five months of faster-than-light travel in the Rusty Turd, we’re all suited up.  The underlying tension we felt about the journey to another star has eased.  The anxiety over not being in the war, killing Trogs, and stomping Grays, has dissolved away.  We’re reaching our destination, coming into a hostile system.  We’ll all be ready for action as soon as we pop out of bubble.

Of course, we’re not expecting to see anything but empty space around us.  We still have to find the enemy.  Every one of us has seen what happens to the unprepared.  That’s not going to be us.  We’re not going to die with our pants around our ankles.

Passing by my pair of techs at their stations on the axial gun, I give them each a confident nod as we head for the steps at the end of the hall.  In moments, I’m on the bridge.

“‘bout time,” says Phil.  I can’t tell if he’s perturbed or pretending.

Penny smiles and winks.  She thinks I’ve been with Silva again.

She’s right.  Silva and I spent several long minutes staring at one another through our faceplates, knowing uncertainty was coming.

“We’ll be exiting bubble in about thirty seconds,” announces Penny.

Jablonsky is at his station, ready to broadcast a call to Jill’s ship.  Phil is watching his console though the heavy lifting of the grav work is all taking place in his head.  Tarlow’s systems are powered up, and he’s ready to scan the space around us.

Brice, Lenox, Peterson, and Silva are in the forward section of the ship with the nukes, already in the vacuum of space.  Clawson is with them.  They’ll open the forward assault door and squeeze out in the narrow gap between the H tanks and the hull, then work their way down the length of the ship, disconnecting each bracket, so Penny will be able to back the ship out of the tank ring.

Hauling the tanks into battle is a bad idea.  First off, we can’t afford to have them damaged and leaking.  We’ll need a good portion of the remaining hydrogen to get us back to earth.  Second, the ship would be hard to maneuver with the extra mass, and in battle, quick maneuvers could mean the difference between living and dying.

Once the ring is disconnected, we’ll leave it in orbit around 61 Cygni A’s third planet with the radio beacon powered on so we’ll be able to find it again when we need an H refill, or we’re ready to dock and head home.

It’s a plan nearly as simple as plans get.

What could go wrong?

Inside my head, I laugh at the phrase, because I’m cynical enough to know every plan has its failures baked in from the moment it’s conceived and layered on thickly through every step of preparation and execution.  All you can do is minimize the pitfalls and work hard to avoid stepping into them.

“Coming out of bubble,” Penny tells us as the glow in the hull seems to get sucked right back into the rough metal.

The living ship always seems like it dies when we leave bubble.

I sense the grav plates creating the field around us, even as Phil powers them down and says, “Going to point one internal g.”

I amp up my suit grav to keep my ass pinned to my chair, and think to wrap my seat belt across my lap.  I leave the shoulder straps off.  We’ve got nothing big planned.  “Are we alone?”

“Nothing here but us,” Phil tells me.

“I don’t see anything,” adds Tarlow.

Jablonsky is already broadcasting.

“Anything from Jill?” I ask.  If she’s already in system, we should find her tank ring orbiting the planet.

“Nothing,” says Jablonsky.

“Orbital speed?” I ask Penny as I feel the ship’s drive array pushing us.

“Not yet,” she tells me.  “I’m adjusting.  Just a few minutes.”

“Nothing nearby,” says Tarlow.  He’s not talking just about Jill’s ship or tank ring.  He’s talking about Trogs and bases.

“Should we undock the tank ring?” asks Penny.  “We’ve reached orbit.”

“One more check on the surrounding space?” I tell Phil and Tarlow.

They spend some time at it while the rest of us wait patiently.

After several minutes, Penny asks, “How long?”

“A few minutes,” answers Tarlow, perturbed.

“No,” Penny looks at me.  “This is where we’re supposed to meet up with Jill’s ship on arrival.  How long do we wait here?”

And that’s the big question none of us has yet discussed.  Most of us have thought about it, but nobody voiced it.  Nobody wanted to do anything except hope that we’d fallen out of sync on the hops with Jill’s ship on the way here from earth, and that was the full explanation of why we hadn’t seen her in over four months.

“We’ll wait for a day,” I decide.  “If they don’t show by this time tomorrow, we’ll decide then what to do.”  Looking over at Tarlow, I tell him, “Take your time.  Scan as far as you’re able.  Take as long as you need.  We’ll disconnect the tank ring when we know we’re alone.”

Chapter 33

The tank ring disconnects without a hitch.

Deciding it would be better not to fly through the system with armed nukes mounted outside the hull, we decide to keep them stored inside.  We do use one for the crew to practice mounting and testing the detachment mechanisms, which are triggered from one of the buttons on Phil’s grav console.  He’s the clear choice for bombardier.  The bombs are ballistic weapons, meant to be dropped onto a target from a B-52 or B1 flying at twenty-thousand feet over a target and then following a ballistic arc, probably breaking the speed of sound at terminal velocity—nearly a half-ton of aerodynamic steel with an H-bomb core, ready to explode after burrowing fifty or a hundred meters into the ground.

Out here, our plan isn’t to depend on the gravity of earth to pull the nukes down to the target, but to depend on our momentum.  We’ll barrel out of space at ten or twenty thousand miles per hour, slam on the brakes to reach a speed at which the nukes can collide with stone and not vaporize on impact, but burrow through, and then release one or several of them to rain down on our target, punch holes into the earth, and turn the supply depot into a heap of radioactive slag.

Phil’s Gray—I still have trouble thinking of her as Nicky—has an old, secondhand memory of a depot that’s expansive.  Like the mining installation on the Potato, it has tunnels running nine levels deep and in every direction.  Only it’s larger.  It covers an area, as near as we can guess, maybe a mile square, and maybe a half-mile deep.  It’s a huge place, on a protoplanet larger than earth’s moon, large enough to sustain a colony of maybe a hundred thousand Trogs, all toiling away to stockpile metals and volatile elements to top off any number of Trog cruisers that comes passing through.

And if the size of the place isn’t enough to give us a sense of inadequacy even with our eighteen measly nukes, we can’t help but speculate as to the size of fleets Trogs built this facility to support.

The sixty-two that showed up with the first fleet that attacked the moon, and the subsequent reinforcement fleet of twenty-one, were just the beginning.  This base is built to handle much more.  And maybe it’s not just earth the Trogs are interested in.  Perhaps this is one of many steps in their plan to expand beyond their home system.  Maybe they’ve grown large enough, numerous enough, and ambitious enough that eyeing all the nearby stars has set them to dreaming that all of it might be theirs, if only they could build out their armies, fleets, and infrastructure.

Those kinds of thoughts set my mind to spinning up a whole different set of worries.  If the Trogs and their Gray masters are capable of building such a supply depot as only one of several in a chain that allowed them to leapfrog from earth all the way back to 18 Scorpii, what else might they be up to? Or more pointedly, what else might they be capable of? How vast is their military power now? How expansive is their industrial might?

Is it possible that their expedition to earth is little more than a distraction for them, something of a police action on which they wasted a tiny fraction of the squadrons at their disposal just to handle an irritant, to get revenge, to bring a band of rogues to justice?

What would happen to earth if the Trogs decided to bring the might of their whole fleet to bear?

How many thousands, or tens of thousands of star cruisers might they have at their disposal?

I shudder when I think about it.

It’s not just the numbers—the vast, vast numbers of soldiers and ships, and all the power they represent, it’s the timescale involved.  War in space is nothing like what passed for conflict at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when countries like the United States could project power anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes, with ICBMs, anyway.  Not that there were any countries like the United States.  Militarily, it was in a class all its own, with the Soviet Union looking on enviously, and the Chinese working at a ferocious pace to catch up.  With conventional bombs flown in B1s or B2s, they could bring the might of the US arsenal to any human on earth in under twenty-four hours.  The US could fly in troops, jet fighters, even tanks and artillery, all in a matter of days.

And communication? Instantaneous from nearly anywhere on earth.

But this war in space?

A radio signal would take nearly forty-five years to travel one way from earth to 18 Scorpii.  That’s a ninety-year round trip.

At best, a Trog cruiser could make the one-way trip in seven or eight years.

What does that tell me? The rogue Grays first showed up in the earth system some thirty years ago.  Even if their pursuers were right on their heels, and knew where they landed, it’d take the chasing cruiser seven years to get back to 18 Scorpii.  And it would have had to have been a stripped-down version of one of their battlewagons.

Calculating in seven years of return time for the fleet that finally arrived to go to war, that means the Trogs must have built out their chain of supply depots in twelve to fifteen years.

Scarier, is that they either had sixty-two extra cruisers waiting around to send on the mission to earth, plus another twenty-one two years later, or they built them for the purpose.  I don’t know which problem frightens me more, that of a vast stockpile or a production capacity of at least ten cruisers a year.

The whole of earth builds one cruiser every two years.

Now with the war on, they surely know the potential value of earth—a reasonably advanced population of slaves.  Who knows what the Trogs will send in order to take control of us.  There might be thousands of ships in the pipeline.

And holy crap, that’s a sobering thought.

Chapter 34

Three days sitting in a spot, with nothing going on except for the Newtonian dynamics of the 61 Cygni binary system moving the planets and moons and asteroids and comets and every little rock and leftovers from the formation of the system.

And no Jill.

Is it possible they arrived so far ahead of us they tired of waiting, ran the mission, and headed home already? Yeah, sure, one of a hundred speculations we churned through as we sat in our orange suits and stared at one another.

We were more productive than that, it just doesn’t seem that way, though our inaction and uncertainty has left the crew on a slow drift toward poor morale and it’s something I need to change.

I have the crew crammed together in the largest space on the ship, having an impromptu meeting over breakfast.  Not really.  We’re on three shifts.  Those of us who want to are sucking liquid calories through a straw.  Others aren’t.  If we were a million miles away from one another talking over a comm, it wouldn’t be less personal.  But it’s a life that feels comfortable in its odd way for those of us used to it.  It carries with it a kind of independence for those who can live without human touch.

“Today,” I tell them, “we proceed with the mission.”

Looking pointedly at Phil, Penny asks, “Do we know yet where we’re going?

Knowing that Phil and Nicky haven’t been able to resolve our destination down to anything narrower than a few billion cluttered cubic kilometers at the Lagrange zone between the two stars, I say, “We’ll fly out to the border of the zone, cut grav power and zip through like a comet.”  I look pointedly at Phil, too.  “We’re thinking if Nicky gets a closer view of the asteroid and whatnot, maybe something will trigger her memory to lead us in.”

“And if it doesn’t?” asks Penny.

There’s no answer that doesn’t leave me sounding like Captain Ahab, at least in my head.  “We have a mission.  All of you know how important it is.  You can guess as easily as I can what the Trogs might one day send this way.  We’ve all talked about it a hundred times.”  Looking to Penny, so she’ll know I’m answering her, “We’ll give it our best shot.  We’ll search as long as we think we need to.  We’ll talk.  We’ll decide.  Let’s not start assuming we’re going to fail.”  I look down at my d-pad, peck at it with a finger, and then add, “Not until Tuesday.”  I laugh so everyone knows it’s a joke.

They laugh, too, because they’re all just polite that way.

Chapter 35

Easy to say, hard to do, maintaining a positive outlook on the success of the mission when you can’t find the objective.

We’re on our eleventh day searching an asteroid field with so many hunks of rock large enough to house a supply depot we could conceivably spend the rest of our lives here, flying the endless distances between them, scanning each in detail, and then moving on to the next.  Even then, we’d never finish.  There aren’t enough days in a human life to make such an endeavor practical.

So, we didn’t even consider approaching the problem that way.

We spend most of every day drifting down a path through the zone, one of hundreds we’ve mapped, in hopes that Phil and Nicky, with their refined grav sense, and Tarlow with his radar array, can examine large cubic swaths of seemingly empty space for the rocks and spheres and the gravitational anomalies and stark geometric patterns that would be the markers of intelligent life—Trog and Gray life.

It’s as boring as boring can be.

Luckily, no one has yet chosen to stand on a soapbox to make an argument that we’re on a futile mission, and we and earth would be better served if we’d turn around and head back.  At least there, we’ll be able to find the enemy in earth’s solar system.

The talks we tend to have most often now are those preceding that inevitable stump speech, what are the factors we should consider when we do get to the point of deciding whether to stay or go?

Hydrogen fuel stores are going to be part of the discussion.  Food and water supplies will also be part of it.  The immeasurable level of the crew’s sanity from being bottled up in the Rusty Turd for half a year with little to do has been agreed as something we all need to consider in determining our length of stay in 61 Cygni.

What about the ship? When will it break? Or wear out? When will it need maintenance? The things were originally built on earth and sent aloft with crews that only carried H packs and cal packs enough for a few days of fighting.  Earth’s generals never expected the ships to last this long.  And not one of us ever thought to ask Spitz or his people any of those questions.  We were all too focused on short-term goals—how fast will it go, how many rounds can it shoot, will we live to see the sunrise tomorrow?

At some point, we’ll have rounded out all the parameters of the question, and then we’ll start talking about the milestone we need to pass that’ll trigger our return home.  That’s when the arguments will come, if they do.  That’s when the measure of the crew’s trust in their leadership—in me—will be tested.

I know how this group will stand up in battle.  We’ve all fought and bled together.  Some of us have worked the long years slogging through pools of our own sweat in the grav factory, always thinking about a far-off goal.  I know Penny and Phil will back me up no matter what I decide.  Maybe that’s a hope I’ve convinced myself is a certainty.

As for the rest, idle time is not good for soldiers.  There’s only so much busywork on a ship like the Rusty Turd.  We may have to come to—

“Dylan.”

I look up from my thoughts as I sit in the captain’s chair on the bridge.

My comm crackles again.  “Dylan?”

“Phil?” he’s not on the bridge.  It’s his off-time.  Lenox is on the nav station, doing her best with what training she got from Phil.  Unfortunately, she has no bug in her head.  She can only do so much.

“Yeah?” I ask.

“Nicky sensed something big.”

I sit up straight in my chair, catching the attention of the others on the bridge.  “What?”

“I’m coming up.”

Chapter 36

Phil is bubbling with excitement when he mounts the stairs to the bridge.  “Nearly a hundred million miles,” Phil tells us.  The Gray is following behind him, staying close.

Penny climbs the stairs, and so does Brice.  The bridge is getting crowded.

Lenox surrenders the nav seat to Phil and moves to one of the benches at the back of the bridge.

“Is this it?” I ask, hoping.

Tarlow pokes his head through the doorway.

“Come in,” I tell him.  “Take your station.  His backup moves away.  The first string is on duty.

“I think so,” Phil finally answers as he settles into his seat.

“Give Tarlow the heading.”

Penny is looking at me for orders.

“If it’s as far as Phil says, accelerate us in the direction,” I explain.  “Don’t push too hard, but get us moving.”

She understands.  Take our time on the accel, and get us up to speed.  Don’t flash a huge grav plume that every Gray in the neighborhood will see.

Phil sends the details over to Tarlow.

“Got it,” he grunts and focuses on his work with his backup looking over his shoulder.

“Okay, Phil,” I say.  “Tell me what we’re chasing.”

“Grav signatures,” he says.  “At this distance, it’s difficult for us to get a clear picture, but my guess is cruisers coming out of bubble jump and pushing their plates to accelerate.”

“All to the same point?” I hope, as I make my guess.

Phil nods.  “It’s hard to be sure from this distance, but they’re all moving in the same direction, generally.  That’s all I can tell you for sure.”

“How many?” I ask, as the excitement at finally having the scent for our Trog supply depot fades under the realization that we’re going to have to face Trog cruisers.

“I counted seventeen pulses,” says Phil.

“Pulses?” asks Brice.

“When they come out of bubble jump,” says Phil.  “Think of it like a splash on a pond, that’s the way the cruisers hit the local grav space, sending out waves and—”

Brice raises his palms to stop Phil.  “I got it.”

“Seventeen?” I ask.

“Another just pulsed,” says Phil.  “I don’t know when it’ll stop.”

“Keep counting.”  I turn to Brice.  “You have the logs of all the simulations we ran?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Get Lenox, Silva, and Peterson to help.  Sort the logs for anywhere we engaged at least twenty cruisers when we attacked.  We need to know our options.”

Chapter 37

As much as we don’t want to, we have to bubble jump.  That much became obvious to everyone on the bridge as soon as the hundred-million-kilometer number sank in.

Phil and Nicky, while keeping an eye on the grav anomaly, plan our jumps.  We take them slow, hopping from position to position, trying to come out with any large mass between our bubble-out position, and the direction from which the Trog pulses are coming.

I hope the effort keeps our presence a secret.

It takes most of a day, and we finish our last jump and come out behind a spherical asteroid nearly the size of Ceres.  We’re within a half-million miles of our target, a protoplanet larger than earth’s moon.  At twice the distance from the earth to the moon, I have little doubt the Grays would spot us if we’d popped out into open space.  As it is, Phil has brought us out perfectly.

Penny wastes no time in bringing the Rusty Turd in low over the asteroid’s surface, flying toward the horizon.  If she does it right, not one Gray in any of those cruisers or in that supply base will think we’re anything but a piece of a comet.

Chapter 38

Penny brings the ship down on the sloped wall of a crater that stretches wide enough to hold a large city back on earth.  The crater is old, and on its floor and along one edge, other smaller craters mark the impact of rocks that crashed into this one in the millennia after the big one that made the hole that’s keeping us hidden.

She shuts down most of the grav systems, leaving just enough running to magnify the asteroid’s natural grav to keep the Rusty Turd safely planted in the dust.

Silva swings our single assault door open and exits first, with Brice, Peterson, and Lenox right behind.  They all have their railguns at the ready, eager to fulfill the duties of their role on this mission—to annihilate anything that even smells like it might be a live alien.

“Come,” Brice tells us as he scans the area for movement.

None of us expect it.  In fact, we’d all be deathly surprised if Trogs and Grays started popping up to give us a peek.  From everything we’re able to tell about this rock, it’s lifeless.  Not one alien has chosen to use it for an outpost.  We’ve seen no evidence that they’ve even explored it for the raw materials it might hold.

Nonetheless, as small as it is on the scale of worlds drifting in the great void, it’s still damned enormous on the human scale.  It would take us months to survey the surface in detail, maybe years to assay all the kinds of elements and alloys hiding in its depths.

None of that today, though.

Today, we’re living on the edge.  Taking our calculated risks to achieve our objective.  We’re soldiers, set to the task all soldiers were born to, delivering the horrors of war to the enemy.

We’re all out, my four grunts, Phil and the Gray.  The rest of the crew are staying on the ship, ready to blast off at the first hint of trouble, hopefully with enough time to spare to pick the rest of us up.  However, we’re not the priority, those of us on the surface, or so I explained in detail before I left the ship.  The Rusty Turd and its skeleton crew are our most important assets.  If things turn to shit while the rest of us are out, Penny is to rocket the hell out of here and make a plan to attack the depot on her own.

Using only enough g to keep our feet on the surface we hike and hop.  We dare not fly.  Though the grav used to drive a suit should be imperceptible to a Gray cozied up in a warm Trog cruiser a half-million miles away, there’s no sense in tempting fate.

We have time.  Not enough that we can screw around for months on end, but we have days or weeks if we need them.

The hours we’ll spend hiking up the slope to the crest of the crater rim are hours we can invest in victory.

Chapter 39

We peek over the ragged edge like we’re sneaking up on rabbits we’re hunting in a veggie patch back on Brice’s farm.  Well, his parents’ farm, anyway.

Over the horizon, hanging in space in a sky full of dull white and gray spots, not nearly as bright as stars, and other asteroids caught in the vast gravitational well, we see a protoplanet roughly the size of Mercury.  Well, we can’t tell that just by looking.  Tarlow scanned and measured it.  He told us.  Being so large, it likely holds enough materials that the need to expand operations to other asteroids in the system might be a very long time coming.

Extrapolating the gravitational force of the protoplanet, Tarlow also guessed it was about a third of earth-g, light enough to make for comfortable living and easy mining, but not so light as to become troublesome as it was back on the Potato.

A flash of blue bursts like a speeding bubble up over our horizon, way out in space.

“That’s one,” says Phil.

I feel it as well as see it.

He says, “That’s a cruiser coming out of bubble jump.”

It seems to drift for a handful of seconds before it powers up its drive array to push it lazily toward the supply depot.  That last business, I sense with the bug in my head.  My eyes can’t make out that kind of detail at this distance without the aid of a telescope.

“How many have you counted so far?” I ask, as I squint at the protoplanet’s dull surface.  I see plenty of grav signatures, some strong, most weak.  Mostly I see tiny, dull, blue blurs.

“You’ll have a better chance with your bug,” Phil tells me.

He doesn’t realize I’m already doing that.  He forgets sometimes my bug isn’t as sensitive as his, and it’s nothing near what he and the Gray can do together.

“Over sixty,” Phil tells us.

“Sixty?” Brice doesn’t want to believe it.  “Sixty cruisers?”

I see the ominous count sag the shoulders of my marines.  “Not one of those cruisers has a load of railgun slugs,” I say.  “They’re all low on H.”  And that makes we wonder what the chances are of us simply swooping in and shooting them like a bunch of fat ducks sitting on the park pond with clipped wings, with instincts so dulled by a cush life they’ve forgotten what it’s like to flee a predator.

“Were any there already?” asks Brice.  “Sentinels for the depot?”

We’d gamed out the scenario of sentinels, as many as six, a full pod in Gray terms.  We didn’t expect the Trogs to leave more than a squadron to guard a base nobody but them knew was there, in a part of the galaxy where they probably expected they were the dominant species.

Assumptions, of course.

We only know the Grays and Trogs through our interactions.

No!

We know what Nicky told us.  If Phil’s history of the Gray empire turns out to be true, then many assumptions can be made.  And a squadron of sentinel ships, as a max number of armed protectors, is a valid assumption.

Sixty cruisers on deck for resupply with more trickling in, that scenario wasn’t one we’d ever seriously gamed out.  Yet one we did work through was the presence of a resupplying fleet mixed in with the sentinels, sheep mixed in with the wolves.

Maybe a worst-case scenario for us regarding what we’re getting into.

“How many arrival pulses did you and the Gray witness?”

“Nearly forty,” Phil answers, guessing right away where I’m going with my question.  “We don’t have any way of knowing if every one of those ships arrived today, or if twenty of them have been here for a month, resupplying and resting.  We can’t even be sure we noticed right away when the pulses started.  We didn’t see any when we were bubble jumping.  We’re blind to long-range scanning aside from the masses that are down our path of translation.”

Brice glances at me and rolls his eyes.  He’s never amused when Phil slips into the technical lingo.  Brice thinks Phil uses it to make himself seem smart.  I think it’s just the way Phil thinks, and he’s always taken aback when he realizes others don’t.  One more way he’s different.

Another blue bubble bursts, much farther from the planetoid than the last one.

“I wonder how far they’re jumping from,” muses Lenox.  “If it were close by, they’d be coming in much more accurately, I think.”

I nod.

Phil does, too.

“Any indication they know we’re here?” asks Brice.

“Not that we can tell,” answers Phil.

With a pretty big spoonful of snark, Brice asks, “Can your girlfriend eavesdrop?”

Phil ignores the inflection.  “It doesn’t work that way.”

I turn to Phil.  “Seriously, how does it work?”

Turns out, not very well, at least not for what Brice and I are both hoping to get.

Phil explains it on the way back down to the ship.  Mostly, it comes down to Nicky not being old enough.  Long-distance communication skills in Grays don’t fully develop until they’re a hundred or two hundred years old.  Since people don’t live that long, Nicky might never get there.  After spending so much of her life bonding with Phil, by the time he goes, she’ll likely die as a result.

Depressing stuff.

Chapter 40

As much as we want to zip our way across a half-million miles, release our bunker busting nukes, and get the hell out of 61 Cygni with victory in our teeth and only a long, lazy cruise between us and home, we don’t.

Fools rush in.

“We need to understand what’s going on here,” I say.

“More than resupplying?” asks Brice.  “One thing to keep in mind before we decide on the cautious approach is how much time we have.  They’re down there refueling their cruisers right now.”  He glances at Phil for confirmation.

Phil nods.  "We can make it out, but at this distance, it’s difficult.  It looks like six cruisers are docked."

“There’s urgency,” I agree.

"It might take them a day to refuel each ship," says Brice.  "It might take an hour.  For all we know, half the fleet is already done, and they’re preparing to bubble on to earth."

“That could be true.”  I keep my eyes on the protoplanet sitting out there across all that emptiness.  “At the supply depots back home, it took them a week to resupply.”

“With everything,” says Brice.  “Water, food, railgun slugs, and H.  And that week was the turnaround time on the whole fleet.  Nobody ever asked exactly how long it took to rearm one cruiser.  Somebody said a week, and we all accepted that, never clarifying that difference—one week for a cruiser, or one week for the fleet.”

“They had to run them through resupply in parallel,” says Phil.  “That base down there seems to be doing six at once.”

“We didn’t come all this way to make an amateur mistake.”  I decide.  “We need to gather more intel before we attack.”

“From here?” asks Brice.

I shake my head.  “Tarlow can point the radar dishes at the base and give us a clear picture.  We need to move the ship.”

Chapter 41

I’m back on the bridge, and the rest of the crew is onboard.

We’ve spent hours finding the right place, and Penny has the ship drifting, taking advantage of the planetoid’s weak gravity while pushing the bare minimum of power through our plates to keep the Turd under her control.

The hull hits rock on the port side with a grinding sound so gritty and harsh I can’t help but think we’re ripping the steel off our side.

“No need to worry,” Phil grins as the bottom side of the hull bumps.  “Just scraping the rust off.”

“Slowing,” says Penny.

“Don’t forget the tank ring brackets,” I tell her.  “We’ll need those intact to get back home.”

“No worries,” says Penny.

I turn to Tarlow.  “What can you see?”

“I don’t want to angle my dishes until we stop moving.”  More surly than usual today.  “If we tear them off on these rocks…well, let’s just say there are no service centers out here.”

“Noted.”  I turn to Penny.  “Put it where you think best.”

“Just trying to find the right spot to settle us in.”  She glances back at Tarlow and rolls her eyes.  It’s how we all deal with his attitude.

With my grav sense, I see rocky cliffs rising on both sides of the ship.  We’re on the rim of a crater that might be only a million years old.  In the vacuum, its jagged edges have barely had time to show wear under the pelting from small impacts.

The crater falls away to its depths behind us.  In front of us, hanging five hundred thousand miles away and glowing dully from Cygni A’s light, the Trog’s protoplanet is waiting for our peeping-Tom eyes to learn its secrets.

The Rusty Turd finally grinds to a slow halt.

“This is it,” Penny announces.

“Tarlow,” I remind.

He doesn’t answer.  He taps at his keyboards and controls.  His screen images flash to blurs of nothing.  He senses me looking over his shoulder and says, “Radiation, like every form of electromagnetism, has to obey the speed limit.  186,000 miles per hour.  It’s a million miles round trip there and back.”

The screens come to life with the image of the Trog depot with cruisers moving overhead.

He says, “This is all a few seconds old.”

"I can live with it," says Penny as she powers down the drive systems.

I spin in my chair to scrutinize Tarlow’s monitors.  “Can you zoom in? Give us a closer look?”

Tarlow sighs loudly.

“Somebody doesn’t like being back in his suit?” Brice speculates, a smile in his voice.

“It doesn’t help with all of you watching me,” Tarlow bites.

“Get used to it,” I tell him.  “You’re our eyes now.  Are you recording all this?”

He turns and glares at me.

I take that as a yes.

“Give me—”

“I know what you want,” he snaps.  “Let me configure everything.  I’ll take requests when I’m done.”

The rest of us on the bridge share a look.

While waiting on Tarlow to simmer down, I give Jablonsky my attention.

He answers before I ask.  “Broadcasting every hour, now.  In case Jill shows up.”

I give him a satisfied nod.

Over a private comm, Penny asks, “You still think there’s a chance?”

I shrug.  “We don’t know what happened.”

Chapter 42

On our perch, hiding in plain sight, we sit four days, watching and learning about our enemy before we cram onto the bridge for our planning meeting.

“Let’s start with the elephants,” I suggest.

A few laugh.

Tarlow isn’t in any better mood than he’s been in since we first came into the 61 Cygni system.  And though I’ve tried to talk to him and get to the bottom of it, my efforts have gone nowhere.  He’s content to torture everyone around him with his mood.

He responds to my suggestion first.  “You mean those freighters?”

"The tanker ships," I confirm.  We’re a small crew and don’t have any secrets, at least not concerning our situation.  Still, I want to make sure we’re all reading from the same playbook.  "Phil and Nicky have analyzed the grav signatures—"

“Recognized is a better word,” Phil interjects.

“Let’s talk about resupply times first,” says Brice.  “Do we have a count on which ships are ready to go?”

“Three of the six docked when we arrived,” I say, “have disengaged and have been replaced by three others.  In four days, we haven’t seen a complete resupply cycle.  So, at least four days.”

Brice is satisfied.

“The elephant?” Tarlow reminds me.

Glancing around at my audience, I say, “They’re the same four tankers.  They disappear for thirty hours or so, and then they return and dock at the base.  They stay roughly five hours, and then they disappear again.”

“And we’re sure there are only the four?” asks Lenox.

I shake my head.  “We’re only sure that we’ve seen four—the same four going and coming.  If there are more, they haven’t made a stop by the depot while we’ve been here.”

“And these are hydrogen tankers?” she asks.

"As near as we can tell.”  I pause, then go on to correct myself.  "It’s a guess they’re tanking hydrogen, though they could be grabbing methane or ethane and stripping the hydrogen out the molecules in a refinery located underground at the depot.  We can only speculate on that part of the process, but it’s irrelevant."

No one argues with me on that point.

“What we know,” I tell them, “is that after the tankers offload, they fly seven or eight thousand miles away from the protoplanet, always on the same heading, and they bubble jump.”

“Down what heading?” asks Peterson.

“A gas giant orbiting 16 Cygni B.”  I point.  With the ship’s grav systems down, I can see all the major masses in the Cygni system.  “It’s a monster of a planet, with rings just like Saturn, and who knows how many moons.  We can make out a few from here but—”

“The moons are irrelevant,” Phil tells me.

I shrug.  He’s right.  “What we suspect, is if this gas giant is similar to Saturn in more than just its rings, it may have an atmosphere containing mostly hydrogen.  We think the tankers are going there and skimming through the atmosphere, filling up and flying back.”

“How do we know they aren’t hauling something away from the protoplanet to the gas giant?” Lenox asks.

I glance at Phil.

“The mass of the ships,” he answers for me.  “Nicky and I working together can accurately sense the mass of the freighters.  They come in full and they leave empty.”

“That explains a lot, then,” says Brice.  “They have specialized ships for harvesting hydrogen out of the gas giants.  That’s how they keep their fleets fueled.  Why haven’t we seen these kinds of ships back in earth’s system?”

“I think they’re there,” I answer, “but the war has been going so badly for us, we haven’t had the scout ships to go out looking for them.  I’ll bet they have these same ships doing the same thing in earth’s system, ferrying H from Saturn to their bases, so whenever a cruiser shows up, they’re ready to top off the tanks when they’re reloading the hold with railgun slugs.”

“So,” argues Brice, “if we’d only had the good sense to find and destroy their tankers back in our solar system, we could have cut off their supply of fuel and probably won this war a long time ago.”

“We can talk about that when we get back to earth.”  I look around, and see enough agreement on that point.  “For that exact reason, Brice, we need to blast these tankers out of the sky, or destroying the supply depot will be a wasted effort.”

“So the tankers, and the base?” asks Brice.  “They’re all our objective now?”

I nod.  “Absolutely.  All we need to do is decide which to kill first.”

Chapter 43

Using minimal grav thrust, Penny slides the Rusty Turd off its rocky perch and lets it fall slowly into the crater behind, sinking farther and farther from peeping Gray eyes, putting more and more asteroid rock between us and them.  We skim over the bottom of the crater and pop up over the opposite rim in a maneuver that feels like a roller coaster ride race toward the backside of the hulking asteroid.

Everybody is excited.  We’re finally going to war.

Once we reach the backside, Penny accelerates hard, having the asteroid eclipsing our view from anything looking this way from the supply depot.  As soon as Phil and Nicky deem it safe, Penny juices the grav plates with a full dose of fusion-powered electrons, and we bubble jump fifty million miles out.  It takes nearly five minutes.

Penny turns the ship and lines it up on 16 Cygni B.  Phil, and Nicky provide the fine-tuning on our heading to point us right at the gas giant we suspect is the target for the Trog tankers.  Penny punches it again.

“Because of the angle we flew out of the Lagrange zone,” says Phil, “our travel time on this jump will run just over eleven minutes.”

I ask, “How close will we be to Cygni Saturn when we arrive?”

“Cygni Saturn?” Penny asks.  “You named it?”

“Why not?”

“Do we have a name for the supply depot?”

I can’t think why we didn’t give it a name already.  Maybe because during the five-month trip here, we thought of this whole binary system of stars, planets, protoplanets, asteroids, comets, moons, dust, and particles as just one thing—61 Cygni.  I glance around the bridge.  “Any suggestions?”

Brice doesn’t miss a beat.  “Hiroshima.”

Tarlow laughs.  It’s the first thing he’s found funny since we arrived in system.

Penny is mortified.  “You can’t be serious.”

Brice smiles in a way that tells you just how twisted his humor is.  Maybe Nagasaki is his second choice, but he doesn’t say it out loud.

"Trinity," I suggest, following Brice’s line of thought back to the name of the site in Nevada where the USA tested its nuclear bombs before deploying them against Japan.

“Is the name important?” asks Phil.

"Maybe not to you," says Penny.  "You and Nicky don’t use words with your direct connection of images and emotions.  Us primitive beings still think words are useful.”

Brice laughs.  Tarlow joins for that one, too.

“Why are we having this conversation?” asks Lenox, from where she sits on the padded bench in the back of the bridge, bathed in the living blue glow of our bubble field.

She’s right, mostly.  We don’t need to debate this.  I tell them, “Trinity Base.  That’s the Trog supply depot.  We’re going to nuke the hell out of it.  It fits.  Anybody have a problem with the name Cygni Saturn?”

Chapter 44

The best-laid schemes go awry, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Isn’t that what the old Scottish poet went on about? Isn’t it a lesson that should be hammered into the brain of any soldier who’s carried a weapon or rode a ship into war?

Yeah.

We come out of bubble above Cygni Saturn’s rings.  We’re nearly two hundred thousand miles out from the planet, nearly as far as the moon is from the earth, so no problems with our arrival being too close.

As the afterimage of the blue jump bubble has faded from my eyes, I peek through Penny’s monitors, I see an expanding circle, like in a pond, perturbing the ring from our position out.

“How close are we to the ring?” I ask.

“Twenty clicks,” answers Phil, awe in his voice.  He sees the rings, too.  They’re massive.  Thousands of concentric circles of varying widths, in colors of red, blue, and orange with every shade in-between.  All perfectly flat, at least they seem so from where we float, and they spread off toward forever, looking to simply fade in the distance.

Out toward the edge of the rings, clouds—if you could call them that given that they’re made up rocks and ice crystals as small as a grain of sand or as big as train engines—pile up on themselves like mountains rising from the flat plain, soaring to rugged heights of a hundred or two hundred kilometers, standing all the way around the curve, hiding the outermost rings from our view.

I catch myself gawking when Phil hollers at me—I think.  Maybe it was just in my head, but I see it immediately, now that I’m looking.  It’s half-in, half-out of the rings, right at the base of the mountains.  “A cruiser! Trogs!”

Penny jerks.

The crew not already in their place on the bridge rushes to their stations.

I shout, “Slam it, Penny!” letting emotion run away with my orders as I piece the situation together.

“They know we’re here,” says Phil.

Taking every syllable of instructional ambiguity and converting it into kinetic reality, Penny maxes the grav to our drive array.

“Powering the grav lens to fire,” Phil informs us.

Over the ship comm, I announce, “Strap in, kids.  It’s going to get bumpy!”

Jablonsky is informing everyone of the details.

Penny brings the ship around in a hard turn.

Phil tells us, "The cruiser is powering up its deflection fields and coming about."

The strength of the field coming off the grav lens is fogging my view out front, and I have to depend on the visual images on the bridge video monitors.  Cygni Saturn’s rings spread out deceptively in front of us, their scale lost, except for the speck of blue grav glow coming off the kilometer-long Trog cruiser running across their face.

Several guns along the cruiser’s dorsal spine fire at us, red-hot railguns slugs tearing through the vacuum, growing large and ominous, as they close the distance.

“Phil?” I ask, making sure he’s aware of the incoming rounds.

The grav lens is already pulsing brighter.  “I have them,” he tells me.

Penny swings the ship to starboard anyway, getting out of their path, and then angles down on the cruiser, riding a new vector.

More guns come online.

“They’re having to wake their crew up,” says Brice.  “They weren’t expecting anyone to show up.”

Doh!

I don’t say that, of course.  How could any cruiser’s crew doing guard duty out here, a trillion miles from nowhere, ever expect to be unwaveringly at the ready? Not possible.

“If we kill them quick,” Brice goes on to explain, “it’ll be easy.  Things will be harder once they’re all awake.”

“Zero in,” I tell Penny.  “And do it.  They can’t know what we are or what we can do.  Word hasn’t gotten this far out, yet.”

More and more of the cruiser’s guns are coming alive, and it’s rolling as it brings them up broadside so that two rows of its gun spines can shoot at us.

“Can we take all that?” I ask Phil.

“Yes,” he answers calmly.  “Because of the shape and power of our grav lens—”

“Can it?” I tell him.  “Penny, keep evading, just in case.  Don’t give them a shot at our flank.”

Chapter 45

The attack comes together fast, though the adrenaline-laced seconds seem to stretch into minutes.

The distance is ungodly enormous, though we chew it up under 20 g’s of acceleration, as all the cruiser’s guns finally come online, and it looks like we’re flying into a red, pelting rain.

“They’re afraid we’re going to ram them,” says Phil.  “They’re veering into the dust towers.”

“They’ve never seen anything as fast as us,” I tell him.  “They don’t know what we’ll do.”  I turn to Penny.  “Fire!”

I feel the rounds rip through our axial gun and spray out our bow in plasma traveling at speeds those Trogs and Grays will never have imagined.

Penny rips another stream, and another.

“The cruiser is—” Phil stops, and then calmly says, “Hit it.”

Penny shoots again.

“They’re pushing the grav hard,” Phil tells us.

We’re in close.  The sky is alive with red-hot slugs, heavy blue grav fields, and a white-hot stream of our plasma rounds tearing through everything.

The cruiser’s drive array blasts into pieces that careen in every direction on gouts of vacuous fire as it slips off its course and suddenly turns down, passing through the ring to get on the other side.

“Veer left,” Phil tells Penny, knowing the cruiser is suddenly invisible to her, but seeing the gravity of its mass hiding behind the orbiting debris disk as easily as if it was in plain sight.

Penny does, and fires again as the ring debris explodes in lightning flashes as stone vaporizes.

“It’s going for the deep clouds below,” Phil tells us.

The cruiser’s guns are still firing, some of its rounds getting through, the rest blowing the ring into a dense cloud of fast-moving particles that dissipate the plasma as it rips through.

But, like the first cruiser we tore open over Arizona that first day of fighting, the bridge crew on this one didn’t react fast enough.  Whatever it thought it was going to do about us, it all became moot pretty early into the engagement.  Physics can only be teased to your liking by degrees.

Penny keeps the nose pointed at our prey as she rips out another stream of plasma rounds, and she pulls back on the trigger for a last, long volley as we rake the cruiser’s hull.  As we blast through the rings, she spins the ship backward in a trick we learned over Iapetus—to keep the grav lens pointed at the enemy.

We all sway as the ship’s internal field tries to compensate for the maneuver.

I keep my eyes on the screen and see the Trog cruiser’s hull crack.  Gas blasts into the vacuum.  Its grav fields scintillate over the hull and flicker.

Penny is firing again.

“You got at least one of the reactors,” Phil tells Penny.

She’s pouring power into the drive array, trying to reverse the ship’s momentum.  Bulkheads rumble under the strain as our inertial bubble bends and pulses.

I hold onto my seat, trying to keep myself still, as groans sound over the comm.  The intense grav hurts.

Penny doesn’t let up.

“It’s not dead,” Phil unnecessarily tells us, “but the main power systems are spotty.  The drive array is down.  They’ve lost vacuum in their central bay.  They can’t shoot at us.”

The cruiser is rolling and trying to keep control as it slides sideways through the mountainous towers of gas and rock, standing tall below the rings as they stood on the other side.

“Aim for the bridge,” I tell Penny.  “I want all those Grays dead.”

“Aye.”  She’s focused.  She has the ship moving forward again, back toward the cruiser.

Its hull plates are flashing brightly as the bridge crew tries to use them to drive the great dying beast in an evasion maneuver.  Hull plates over-grav and pop all through the ship’s aft quarter.

And it’s already too late.

Penny is lining our nose up on the bridge, coming in slower this time, as not a single railgun is shooting.

“Don’t go too slow,” Phil warns.  “They shouldn’t have any guns active with the vacuum in the hold, but with a full complement of Trog soldiers in the rear with suits, they can man them again pretty quickly.”

“Reactors,” I tell Penny.  “Take out the reactors first.  Once the ship is dead, we can finish off the Grays on the bridge without danger.”

The ship shifts under me as Penny realigns and starts us on an arc to bring us in close, not on a direct path, but on a heading run up the length of the cruiser from stern to bow.

No sooner do I see what she’s doing than I feel the axial gun rip through another dozen rounds, and then another sixty or seventy, obliterating the enemy’s hull, right up the length of the ship, and through the three reactors suspended in the hold down its centerline.

“It’s dead,” Phil tells us as Penny bursts through the rings again, sending thousands of hunks of debris splashing out ahead of us.

“Bring us back around,” I instruct.  “Let’s finish off the bridge crew and be done with this thing before the tankers arrive.

Chapter 46

The clock is running.

We know the distance from Trinity Base to Cygni Saturn.  We know when the tankers left.  Us beating them to the destination was a foregone conclusion.  We’re riding the fastest damn thing Trogs or humans have ever seen.  What’s important is learning at how many multiples of light speed those tankers can cruise.

“If the first one doesn’t get here in the next ten minutes,” says Tarlow, checking the time logged on his computer, “they won’t even be making light speed.”

“We saw them bubble jump,” Penny argues.  She turns to Phil.  “Can you bubble jump at sub-light speed?”

That question puzzles Phil.  As far as any of us know, it’s a question that’s never been posed.  A sub-light bubble jump in a world where hyper-light speed jumping was a reality? Why even think about it?

Into Phil’s silence, I turn to Tarlow, silently shifting the question to him.

“I’m no physicist,” he tells me.  “It’s not my job to know everything, is it?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, only half-joking.  I reach over and slap him on the back.  “You need to unwind.  We’ll be headed home soon enough.”

“I doubt it.”

Penny rolls her eyes.  Tarlow has decided not to give up on the mood he’s spent so much time cultivating.

“So,” I ask, “Let’s say they do arrive and—” I turn to Phil as a new thought interrupts my question.  “What if they aren’t coming here?”

“This is the best gas giant in the system,” he answers.  “Around Cygni A, all the planets are rocky except for a Venus-like planet orbiting in close.  Its atmosphere doesn’t have much free hydrogen.  Of the two gas giants around Cygni B, this one makes the most sense.  Chemically, it’s the solid choice for harvesting H.”

“And their bodyguard was here,” Penny adds, referring to the cruiser we knocked out of commission, the one floating in the gas clouds a few hundred klicks off our stern, far enough that the Trogs inside will be unlikely to brave an excursion out in just their suits to mount an attack on us.  We’re close enough to the orbital position they staked out that when the tankers show up to do their work under their shepherd’s watchful eye, we’ll be able to ambush.

“Any activity from that cruiser?” I ask, now that it’s back on my mind.  “Any Trogs coming out?”

“They’re all over the hull,” Phil answers.  “It’s difficult to make anything out clearly with all the ring debris between us.  They aren’t coming this way yet.  I think they’re assessing the damage.  Maybe starting repairs.  They have the equipment onboard repair a lot.”

“Do they know we’re still in the neighborhood?” I ask, wondering if any cruiser could possibly self-repair all the damage we did

“Impossible to say,” answers Phil, with a labored sigh.  “I keep telling you, Nicky and I share thoughts.  We can pick up some of what’s around us, but we’re not omniscient.”

“Yeah, yeah.”  I sigh, too.  “We’re good, though, right? None coming this way? You’d know that for sure?”

“Probably.”  Phil turns his attention to his console.  “If not when they leave, then before they get here.  You’ll have plenty of warning, Captain.”

Great.  Now Phil is getting surly, too.  “What,” I ask, “does it tell us if the tankers can only make light speed—barely light speed?”

“It tells us how long it takes to get here,” says Tarlow, as though the circular deduction is any help at all.

“You think they only have the one tanker design?” asks Penny.  “You think they all move at the same speed?”

“Of course,” answers Brice, beezling into the conversation.  “That’s what we know about them for sure, right Phil?”

Phil nods.

“That’s one of their weaknesses,” I explain.  “Neither the Grays nor the Trogs are creative races.  They don’t invent things, not like we do back on earth.  They find a design that works and don’t see any reason to improve or replace it.  Ever.  My bet is if they have one type of tanker for harvesting H, then they’re all the same.”

“So if they all travel at light speed," deduces Tarlow, finally getting his quirky, smart brain involved, "that might explain the beginning of the war two years ago.”

Tarlow’s conjecture captures the attention of everyone on the bridge.

With the ego affirmation of having everyone looking at him, Tarlow smiles and says, “If the Trogs started chasing the rogue Grays from 18 Scorpii toward Earth pretty much right after the rogues escaped, traveling at light speed, the tankers…” Tarlow stops talking, a perplexed look coming across his face.

“What?” Brice asks.

“It’s forty-five years,” says Phil.  “18 Scorpii is forty-five light years from earth.  Any tankers sent to earth from there would still be on the way.”

I make the deduction first.  “That means at least some of these supply bases existed before the war started, before the Grays even arrived on earth, thirty years ago.”

“What if,” asks Brice, “the Trogs were in system before the war started? What if they were already out there in the asteroid belt, setting up their supply bases, and our Grays knew about it all along? With the size fleet that eventually attacked, and knowing the kind of logistical support we now know they had to have, yeah, I’d say they did.”

"And our Gray masters knew war was coming that whole time.”  This idea makes Brice angry.  "And they could have told us, but they didn’t.  They could have prepared us better, but they didn’t.”  Brice lost a lot of friends in that first surprise attack that came on the moon.  Only our Grays probably weren’t surprised.

“They knew,” Penny muses, agreeing with Brice’s conclusion.

“Or our Grays were negotiating with their Grays,” guesses Tarlow, “trying to avert a war.  They wouldn’t have told us about that, probably not even the North Koreans.  Why would they? They wouldn’t want the lowly humans to think the godly Grays had any equals in the universe.  That would undercut their power over us.”

“It didn’t matter in the end,” I conclude.  “The war came.  Humans were slaughtered by the billion, and the little Gray bastards are still in charge.”

“A ship just exited bubble jump,” says Phil.  “One of the tankers.”

Chapter 47

Tarlow marks the time.

“How long before the next one arrives?” I ask.

“If they travel at exactly the same speed,” answers Tarlow, “four minutes.”

“Distance?” I ask.

Penny is shaking her head.  “We can’t get in range before number two shows up.  They came out of bubble too far from the ring.”

“Course?” I ask.

“Headed this way, generally,” answers Phil.  “Cruising.  No rush.  No hesitation.  Looks routine.  They’ll be down in the atmosphere in about twenty minutes.”

“And the other three will be here by then?” I ask.

Tarlow answers in measured words.  “If they all travel at the same speed—the exact speed.”

Of course, I know there could be some differences in speed due to manufacturing imperfections.  There have to be.  Trogs and Grays are competent at building spacecraft, but they don’t seem to have the knack for creating machinery that’s perfect.  So far, the humans of earth are the best race we know of for that.  And the Turd, despite its dubious beginning, is a finely-honed tool of war.

"If we wait for all four to arrive," suggests Phil, "if we wait for them to get down in the atmosphere, they won’t be able to bubble jump away.  Bubbling out of atmosphere is suicide.”

“Suicide for sure?” I ask.  “Or theoretically?”

“Theoretically,” Tarlow answers.

“There’s that cruiser,” says Phil.  “Early on in the war, the Captain was flying it out of the Arizona shipyard and tried to bubble jump before he was ten thousand feet up.”

Everyone grimaces.  The images of that huge monster going supernova in the air over Arizona are burned into everyone’s brain.

"The air will slow us down, too," I conclude, knowing we have more to lose in terms of speed than those lumbering tankers do.  Air friction isn’t a linear function.  It whips your ass exponentially as your speed increases.  “It’ll severely limit the range of our axial plasma gun.”

“Can we dial it back?” asks Tarlow.  “Reduce the speed of the rounds so they come out solid instead of plasma?”

Out of breath, from reloading the axial gun’s magazines, one of the techs comes on the line.  “That’s an enhancement they were working on back on Iapetus.  It’s harder than it sounds, synchronizing all the components to push projectiles at variable speeds.  Bottom line, we can’t.  Maybe future guns will.”

“What range can we expect to get out of our gun down in the atmosphere?” I ask.

“Depending on how deep we go,” the tech answers, “the composition of the atmosphere, other factors, humidity, wind, temp—maybe five or ten thousand meters.  It’s impossible to make an accurate guess.”

“Trial and error, then?” I tell Penny.  To the tech, I ask, “Are the magazines topped off?”

“Yes, sir,” she answers.  “That’s what we’ve been working on down here since we killed the cruiser.”

“Good job,” I respond.  “Keep ‘em full.  We may need the extra rounds.”

Lenox jumps up from her seat and heads toward the doorway.  “I’ll put Peterson and Silva to work hauling the rounds out of the storage bins to the magazines.”  She looks at me with a confident smile.  “You won’t run out until the whole ship runs dry.”

“This is still round one,” Tarlow reminds us.  “Trinity Base is still back there with a lot more bad boys aiming to do us harm.  These tankers are unarmed—”

“That’s an assumption,” Brice tells him.  “Just because we—”

“Okay, okay,” Tarlow concedes as he focuses on me.  “Just don’t blow everything on these tankers.  We may need our ammo.”

“Noted.”  But he’s wrong.  The tankers and the base all have to be destroyed for our mission to succeed.  If we burn up all of our plasma rounds taking out these tankers, then so be it.  We have the nukes for Trinity Base.  They’ll be enough.

“Second ship just came out of bubble,” Phil reports.

Chapter 48

Ships three and four come out of bubble less than a minute apart, just a few hundred klicks away from one another.

The first ship is slowing as it aims for a gentle drop down into Cygni Saturn’s atmosphere.  Tanker number two is following the same trajectory, giving us a strong hint about what’s to come.  Even number three seems to be doing the same.  Only ship number four is behaving oddly.  It didn’t engage its drive after popping out of bubble.  It’s hesitant.

I’m suspicious.  “Can they sense us here?”

Penny has the Rusty Turd partially obscured behind the biggest rock we could find in the rings without going too far from the dead cruiser.  Still, more than half our ship is visible—mostly visible—through the slurry.

“They’d have to be looking right at us,” says Phil.  “Nobody’s going to just happen to see us unless Penny flares the grav plates.”

“And the Trog cruiser?” I ask.

“Those cruisers are enormous,” answers Phil.  “They have to know it’s there.  In the thick cloud of asteroids where we left it, it’ll be hard to make out that it’s damaged, but the crews in those tankers have to be curious why no Gray onboard is talking to them.”

“Then let’s get busy.”

Chapter 49

The Rusty Turd bursts to blue, scintillating grav wash as my sense of balance spins, disagreeing with what I see through Penny’s monitors.  She slams every amp of spare power into the drive array, knowing that at the range between us and the tankers, there’ll see us.  There’ll be no sneaking up on them.

The ship spins and turns as it accelerates.  Our bow comes almost immediately in line with tanker number four, the last to arrive.  It’s maybe fifteen hundred klicks distant.

We don’t expect fire from the tankers, so our grav lens isn’t powered to full, yet it strobes brightly as Penny rips through her first shots.  At the range we’re at, with travel times of our plasma jets at nearly thirty seconds to target, we’ll be lucky to hit anything.  We’ve got little to lose in trying.

Five, maybe seven seconds pass before any of the tankers reacts.  As has worked to our advantage on nearly every fight with these collective decision makers, the Grays are slow to react.

It’s not tanker four that’s the first to respond, though I’d have expected that given their wariness.  It’s number three.  Their grav plates plume a bright, ragged field around the hull.

Phil says, “They’re trying to use their payload stabilization plates to create a defense.”

Even I can see how badly formed and weak it is.  It’s primitive compared to the Trog’s cruisers we’ve been fighting.  The tankers weren’t built for battle.

Penny shoots again.  Not a long burst.  She’s just rolling dice, because there’s no telling in which direction tanker four will turn.  She’s just scattering rounds in its area, looking for an intersection of steel on steel.

“Tanker four is turning,” says Phil.

Everyone on the bridge knows what that means.  Because of the planet, the rings, and the mountainous debris formations piled high to one side, tanker four only has a few choices on where to flee.  It can spin one hundred and eighty degrees and bubble out the way it came, or pour on the acceleration to dive through the rings to free it up to make a jump once through the other side, but given its current heading, that choice will take it closer to us.

“Tankers one and two are diving into the atmosphere,” Phil tells us, urgently, “hoping we can’t track them down in the turbulence.”

“Are they right?” I ask.

The Rusty turd is picking up speed at a frightening rate as the hull rumbles and strains under the stress of the power Penny is pushing through our computer-optimized drive array.  The first of our rounds are passing number four, and its broadside is exposed to us as it tries to make its turn.

Penny fires again.  Several long bursts, made more lethal by the ship’s speed added to the muzzle velocity of our gun.  The whole sky in front of us is filled with glowing plasma in long streaks, bearing down on the target.

Number three, realizing it’s not a target, has given up on defensive shielding and is rerouting its power to evasive maneuvers.  It’s going to try and get around the curve of Cygni Saturn before trying a jump in safety.  At least that’s what its course change looks like to me.  Too bad for them, they don’t yet believe what their grav sense is telling them, that the Rusty Turd is an ungodly fast beast that’ll catch ‘em no matter where they run.

Penny fires again, but stops as number four’s hull erupts.

One of her previous bursts found its target.

“Keep after it,” I tell her as the distance between us and the target as already shrunk by three quarters.

The Rusty Turd lurches like it just ran through a wall.

"Slowing down," Penny calls.  She’s fully focused on what she’s doing, and the excitement of the hunt is in her blood.

“Good move,” I tell her.  If we gather too much speed in our pursuit of number four, we’ll have to waste long seconds burning hard to get moving back in the direction of our next victim.

The steady blue grav plume from number four’s array splatters into chaos.

“That does it,” Phil tells us.  “Their array is down.  They won’t be able to jump.”

“Forget ‘em for now,” I tell Penny and the ship immediately pulls hard into a turn.

“Tanker number 3?” she guesses correctly.

“Before they get away,” I confirm.  Turning to Phil, I ask, “Can you still sense the first two down in the atmosphere?”

“I have them,” Tarlow assures me.  “They’ll have to go a long, long way down before I lose ‘em.”

I turn and give him a quick nod.  “Good job.”  When I look up, I see number three already in our sights.

Penny rips a long burst of plasma at them.

It looks to me like the rounds will miss.

Practically reading my mind, she says, “Shooting out ahead of them!”

The bridge crew on number three sees what Penny is up to and they veer right.  It’s then that the harshest truth finally sinks through to their cerebral goo.  They’re the slow turtle, and we’re the nimble-fast shark.  Running for the other side of the planet was a bad choice.  They angle for the atmosphere, hoping what seems to be working for the first two tankers will save them, too.

The distance closes way too fast.  For them.

Penny fires.

The rounds cross the vacuum in the space of a breath, tearing tanker steel.

It looks like we’re closing in fast enough to ram the tanker as Penny sprays a long burst that tears through amidships.  It’s splitting in two when the reactor explodes, sending hunks of its fiery carcass in every direction.

“Two down,” Penny tells us as we pull hard into a turn.

“Give us a course,” I tell Tarlow.

Chapter 50

Penny pilots the Turd across a low orbit, following the curve of the planet until Tarlow calls the mark.  “Now!”

Penny drops the ship straight into the thin atmosphere.  It’ll thicken up to crushing pressure soon enough.

Penny decelerates.

“Slow down,” Phil tells her, “or we’ll burn up.  This isn’t vacuum.”

The Turd shudders again, and I wonder how much abuse our iron crate can handle before its sloppy welds surrender to the wear and tear of battle abuse.

“I see it,” Phil tells, us as he shunts more power into the grav lens.  “I need to punch a hole through the atmosphere,” he explains, “until we lose some of this speed.”

“Good thinking,” I tell him.  To Penny, I ask, “Can you make out the target?”

“Barely.”

“Don’t waste any shots until we get closer,” I remind her.  “Just remember, no matter how slow we go, we can still move faster than they can in this soup.”

She nods and continues to decelerate.

“Tarlow?” I ask.  “Do you have a range?”

“Of course.”

“You know what I’m asking?”

“I do,” he answers.  “I’ll tell Penny when we’re within five thousand meters.  Maybe another forty seconds.”

“I’m losing ship number one,” Phil tells us, a touch of panic in his voice.

“I still have it,” says Tarlow, glued to his monitors.  “It’s diving straight down.  Accelerating.”

“How deep can it go?” I ask.

“Not as deep as we can,” answers Penny.

“How can you know that?” I don’t know what she knows that I don’t.

“Because if it goes deeper, we lose,” she answers.

“How fast can we catch up with number one after we finish number two?” I ask.

“Another six minutes if we disable number two quickly,” answers Tarlow.

“I’m lined up on that one now,” says Penny.

“Range?” I ask Tarlow.

“Too far,” he answers.  “Give it a few seconds.”

“The hull is getting hot,” says Phil.

I glance at him.  “I thought the grav lens—”

“Aerodynamics,” he snaps back.  “The ship is around one hundred and eighty feet long.  There’s only so much the grav lens can do for us.”

“Now!” Tarlow yells.

Penny fires.  The ship vibrates with the rounds going out.

She shoots again.

“Hit!” Phil shouts, just as Tarlow adds his voice.

Penny pulls us out of the dive, “I need a heading.”

Tarlow gives her one.

“Number two is spinning out of control.  All of its starboard grav fields are dead.”

“Can it recover?” I ask.

“Doubtful,” Phil answers.  We both know it’s little better than a guess.

“Tarlow,” I order, “don’t lose track of it.  Get us to number one.”

Penny accelerates the ship.

“No!” Phil shouts at her.  “We have to go slower.”

“I don’t want to lose him,” she snaps at Phil.

“Slower,” I order.  “We won’t lose him.”

“He’s going deep,” Tarlow tells us.

“Slower,” Phil  echoes, as his panel starts to sparkle with red warning lights.

“I’m already going slower,” Penny argues.

"We’re deeper in the atmosphere," Phil shoots back.  More air.  More friction.  If you don’t slow us down fast, we’re not going to be able to leave this planet."

“Do it!” I order.  “Penny, slow.”

She’s frustrated.

“Range?” I ask.

“Too far for a shot,” Tarlow tells us.  “Way too far.  They’re accelerating.”

“Are they going faster than us?” I ask.

He shakes his head.  “They’re deep.”

Out ahead of us, far ahead, I see a glow—not a grav glow, but a fiery red, like a meteor.  “Is that them?”

“That’ll be us in a minute.”  Phil glares at Penny, who slows the ship even more.

“It’s breaking up,” Tarlow tells us, leaning in close to his monitor, trying to make out the fuzzy image we’re chasing.

“I think so,” Phil agrees.

“Penny,” I tell her, “get us out of here.”  I turn to Tarlow.  “Are you sure?”

He nods.

Looking back to Phil.  “Grav?”

“Grav drives just cut to zero,” he tells me.  “They’re ballistic now.”

“Still accelerating?” I ask.

“No,” he answers.  “Terminal velocity.  The atmosphere is slowing them down as they burn up.”

Sounds like they’re dead to me.

Chapter 51

We make it out of the atmosphere in one piece.  Everybody is strung out from the excitement of our victory.  One Trog cruiser and four tankers destroyed—at lease presumably so—in the space of few hours.

“Bring us out to the rings,” I tell Penny.  I decide I like lurking within the cover of all those rocks and snowball chunks.  “Find us a place to park.”  Over the crew comm, I call to Lenox.  “I need a status on ammo.”  I turn to Brice.  “I think we need a visual inspection of the hull after Penny polished off the rust down in the atmosphere.”

He laughs.

Penny does too, once she sees I’m smiling.

“Will do.”  Brice heads forward.

“Phil,” I ask.  “What’s the status?”

He’s still working at his console.  “All systems seem to be functioning, yet I have warning lights that won’t go off.”

“Is the hull leaking?”

“Maybe.”

“Track it down,” I tell him.  “We need to know if we have a problem and if we fried a few sensors.  How’s the drive array?”

“Seems fine,” he tells me, turning the question over to Penny.  “Does it feel alright to you?”

“No problems I can feel.”  She’s looking at readings off her console gauges.  “I suppose we’ll know for sure when we jump back to Trinity Base.”

She’s right about that.  Imperfections in the drive array might produce nothing but a barely perceptible jitter when zipping around at max grav chasing enemy ships, but flaws could easily turn into disaster once we make a jump at 30c.

Tarlow says, “Maybe running those two tankers down through the atmosphere wasn’t the best idea.”

Ignoring his comment, I ask, “Are you still scanning? Do you see any movement?”

“The cruiser is where we left it,” he answers.  “Most of tanker number three is still skipping off the atmosphere.  Numbers one and two are too deep or they’ve broken up into pieces too small for me to see.  As for number four, it’s stuck in an orbit on the other side of the planet.”

Looking around the bridge or opinions, I ask, “Any reason we need to track it down and finish it off?”

Everyone agrees that though the crew might well be alive, the ship won’t ever be leaving Cygni Saturn’s orbit unless someone comes to rescue it.  Even then, salvage is questionable.

Chapter 52

Eleven percent.  That’s all we used of our ammo load in the battle.  All that extra space and weight dedicated to plasma gun slugs was worth it.  I don’t feel the least bit of anxiety at going into the next battle with an 89% load, and I run through an unrealistic extrapolation and decide we have enough slugs onboard to kill another forty-five Trog cruisers.

The assumptions to support that outcome break down at every turn.  Still, it’s entertaining to think about while I’m waiting for the crew to do their work.

“How do you want to handle the attack?” Phil asks.

I’ve already been pondering the question between reports on the status of the ship.  “We put our tech advantage to use.”

Penny swivels in her seat to face us and take full part in the conversation.

“I think,” I tell him, “we power out to a safe distance from Cygni Saturn and plan three fast, computer-controlled jumps.  One to get us from here to the area near Trinity Base, another to jump us close in, and a third dangerous jump to pop out right on top of them.”

“On top?” Phil asks.  “How far out?”

Turning to Penny, I ask, “At max acceleration, how much distance can we cover in three seconds?”

She hesitates, not sure that I’m asking a rhetorical question before she tells me, “I’ll need to calculate—”

“Not enough,” Tarlow tells us, spinning his chair to join the conversation.  “It’s physics at work.  No matter what your acceleration force, you’ll cover the least distance in the first seconds as you’re building up speed.”

“Not enough for what?” Penny asks.

Tarlow has already guessed the plan.  Cutting his eyes toward me as he answers.  “He wants to bubble in so close to the protoplanet’s surface that he can start our attack run and finish it before the Grays can react.  Foolproof.”  He smirks.  “Except we’re skipping some details.”

“We don’t want to be nearby when the nukes go off,” says Phil, not wanting Tarlow to garner all the intellectual glory.  “And they’re ballistic weapons.  No drive systems, no control systems.  Which means we have to accelerate toward our target, release them on that path, separate from them as they fall, and then accelerate away.”

"Only," Tarlow cuts back in, "once we let the weapons loose, we can’t decelerate too hard to achieve separation, or our grav field might knock the ballistic weapons off-course."

“Same happens when we try to escape," says Phil.  "If Penny accelerates too hard to our getaway speed and we’re too close to the falling nukes, our grav field will push them way off target.  Getting in too close means we have less time for our maneuvers, which means we have to push more g through our drive array, which means we miss our target.”

“Okay,” I surrender.  “The three of you get on the calculations.  With the computer control system, we’ll be able to bubble through our jumps so fast, the Grays won’t know what’s happening until we come out of our last one and we’re bearing down on them.  You three figure out the closest distance we can be and still make all this work.”

“Plus a few seconds for human reaction time,” says Phil.

“Maybe five,” adds Tarlow, ganging up with Phil.

I exaggerate a sigh as my brilliant plan suffers from the constraints of reality.  “What do you figure is the fastest a Gray bridge crew can react?”

“Based on what we’ve seen….”  Phil leans back and scratches his chin.  “We didn’t record any data on that during the battle.”

“We were preoccupied,” Penny tells us with a smart-ass smile.

And she’s right.

"Plus the time-dilating effects of being in battle," she adds.

“We don’t move fast enough at sub-light speeds to dilate time," Tarlow scoffs.

Phil glares at Tarlow.  “She’s talking about the psychological effects.”

I nod.  People can’t make accurate time judgments with so much excitement and terror running through their veins.  “When we ran that first attack over Arizona—”

"Not relevant," Tarlow tells us.  "Anything in that attack can’t be included in whatever argument you’re going to make, because in that case, the Trogs hadn’t seen these kinds of ships.  Nobody had ever rammed a cruiser before.  You’d have to give them time to deduce your intentions.  In the subsequent battles, they knew what these ships could do, so they could react faster."

“Only,” says Phil, “this is the first time these Trogs and Grays will see anything like us.”

“But…” Tarlow trails off.

“Speed of light and all,” says Penny.  “And the top speed of their cruisers in bubble jump.  Not one Gray in this system can possibly know anything that happened back on earth.  If the Trogs had sent a ship back along their supply route to inform their bosses on the home world, that first ship is still months from reaching this system.”

Tarlow nods slowly, accepting his mistake.  “Yeah.  You could be right.”

Of course, Penny is right, one-hundred-percent so.

“So,” I say, “maybe that first battle is our template.  Throw in some complacency, because I’ll bet no Trog expects an attack here.”

“Thirty seconds to a minute,” Phil concludes.  “Maybe several minutes.  I think there’s some arrogance wrapped into the equation.  After we rammed that first ship during the attack over Arizona, the other two ships in the bombardment didn’t react like they should have.  They didn’t run away, and they didn’t attack us.  To them, what we did was inconceivable.  They probably thought we were such stupid little humans we’d accidentally crashed into that first cruiser.”

“Yeah,” Penny agrees, “humans too stupid to fly an assault ship, right?” She smiles grimly, vindictively, some of her long, pent-up hatred coming through.

You can only keep your foot on a human’s neck for so long.  Eventually, we find our feet.  We take our revenge.

“So if we pop out of bubble,” I suggest, “and pour on the heavy…” I look around at the other three.

Phil picks up my thought.  “We’ll be blindingly bright.  At least to the Grays’ grav sense.  The intensity alone should stun them for a moment.”

Nodding, I say, "And they’ll be trying to figure out what we are.  Hell, for the first few moments, they might even think we’re another cruiser arriving late.  They’ll have to think we’re a lot bigger than we are, right?"

Shrugs and nods.

Doesn’t matter.  I go on.  “We race up to optimal speed for our nukes let them go, and then get out of there.  With any luck, all of it happens before the first Gray bridge crew can react.”

“Once we loose the nukes,” says Phil, “they become ballistic weapons.  That’s the kind of warfare Grays have been fighting for millennia.  They won’t know what the nukes are, but they’ll know we think they’re dangerous.  I think that’s the beginning of the decision window for them, one they’ve probably practiced for.  I think that’s our short timeframe.”

I agree.  “You guys get busy.”  I get out of my chair.  “I’m headed outside to see how things are going with the crew.”

Chapter 53

I stop on the way through and chat with the gun crew.  Everything with the prototype axial weapon has performed spectacularly.  In all the rounds we’ve fired so far, we haven’t experienced a single bug in the software, haven’t had a misfire.  The only troubles are in reloading the magazines.  The gun has a rate of fire that will empty them in a hurry when Penny gets trigger-happy—their words, not mine.  Loading the magazines from the storerooms down the hall gets hairy as the ship’s interior grav fluctuates during high-g maneuvers.  Hauling the weighty slugs is difficult under those circumstances.

All understandable.  All unavoidable consequences of what we do for a living.

I work my way up the length of the ship, through the airlock, past the partially empty nuke racks, and exit through the open assault door.

Three nukes are mounted.  Brice, Silva, Lenox, and Peterson are working a fourth into alignment with the bracket.

“The zero-g is deceptive,” Silva says to me as she catches a glance of me coming over the curve of the hull.

“Mass is still mass,” pontificates Lenox.  “Once you get seven hundred pounds moving, you still have to stop it.”

I hear them heaving to push the torpedo-shaped bomb into place.

Moving closer, I run a gloved hand over the hull and realize how hot it must have been down in Cygni Saturn’s atmosphere.  The rough rust is gone.  What’s left is steel, blued in the heat and chemicals, blacked with carbon deposits, and streaked as smooth as a shiny bullet.

“These mounts,” Brice tells me, “They’re a bit glazed.”

“Glazed?” I ask.

“The rough edges are worn smooth and shiny,” Lenox explains.  “The latch and release mechanisms have us worried.”

I float over for a closer look and illuminate a bracket with a suit-mounted light.  “Jeez.”

“Sticking out from the hull,” Brice explains, as he heaves the heavy nuke, “they got the worst of it.”

I run my hand over the bracket’s latching mechanism, pushing on the levered system, but I’m unable to move anything.

“You can’t,” Silva tells me, seeing what I’m doing.  “With the weight of the nuke pressing down on it, with a little momentum, it’ll lock into place.”

“Do they stay?” I ask the group.

The nuke they’re working with latches in and they all float back as they pull their hands free and examine their work.

"For now," Brice answers.  He looks at me, and I see his grim grin in reflected light as he drifts my way.  "The hydraulics all seem intact.  No reason to expect them to fail.”

“Except the metal is all a little thinner now,” adds Lenox.

Nobody mentions that these are the same brackets that hold the tank ring in place—the tank ring we’ll need for fuel if we ever expect to see earth again.

Chapter 54

The first jump is the longest.  Nearly eight minutes.

“Do you feel it?” Phil asks, staring at nothing I can discern.

Penny nods.  “Something isn’t right.”

“The nukes?” I ask.  “Are they throwing the ship off-balance?”

"The mounts?" suggests Penny.  She’s aware of the glazing they received down in Cygni Saturn’s atmosphere, and she feels some guilt over it.

“Whatever it is,” I say, “we’re in bubble.  We haven’t disintegrated yet.”  I look at the timer on my d-pad.  “We’ll be rid of the nukes in another seven minutes or so.”  I shrug to make the others on the bridge think that I think the tiny vibration is no big deal.

I’m not fooling anyone.

The comm goes quiet.

Chapter 55

We flash out of bubble and back in so fast, I almost miss it.

“This next jump will go quick,” says Phil, telling us what we already know.

It’s not the length of time that concerns me.  It was whether we’d pull it off without a hitch.  A hitch being something like light-speed disintegration, leaving my ship and everyone on my crew as a nebulous streak of glittery dust smeared across a few light minutes of space.

Penny is watching a timer on her console, one bolted on when the computerized nav system was installed back on Iapetus.  She’s preparing herself.  Her moment is coming.

The blue grav field inside flickers off and pulses bright again as our second jump ends and the third begins.

“Two million miles,” Phil warns us.  “Eleven seconds.”

Over the crew comm, I say words that for some reason I never thought to utter before, “Battle stations.”

Tarlow glances over his shoulder at me.  He thinks it was a stupid thing to say.

“Three,” says Phil.  “Two.  One.”

The jump bubble’s steady blue fizzles away in a silent puff of dead nothing.

The nav computer surrenders control.

Penny punches power into the drive array as Phil brings up the inertial system and grav lens.

I’m mashed into my seat as all the g’s blasting out of the drive array shove our ship through vacuum, and the inertial field tries to compensate.  As usual, the grav lens has washed out any detail I might hope to see in front with the bug in my head, but Trinity Base, the Trog fleet, or the protoplanet are nowhere to be seen

“Uhm,” says Tarlow, the one whiney syllable telling me something’s fucked.

“What?” I ask, ice calm riveted to my question.

“We’re not where we’re supposed to be,” says Phil.

Tarlow jumps straight to what he thinks is the cause.  “The nav computer—”

“How close are we?” I ask, cutting Tarlow off, getting right to the meat of the problem.

Phil is tapping on his console.  “Penny, that’s the heading.”

She’s scanning her screens as the ship veers.

“You’ll see it come in from the right,” says Phil.

The ship is still getting up to speed.

I feel the pull to my left as Penny brings us around to the right.

Phil glances my way, finally answering my question.  “Maybe twenty thousand klicks farther out than we expected to be.”

I ask, “How many extra seconds does that give them to prepare for us?”

“To shoot at us,” adds Tarlow.

“Do your job,” I tell him.  “Get the radar array focused on the target.”

Tarlow accepts the scolding without a word of rebuttal.  He hunches over his keyboard and taps furiously.

I ask, “Anything yet?”

Phil knows I’m talking to him.  From the distance we’re flying in from, he’s the only one who’s likely to make anything out.  “No reaction from the Trogs.”

I glance at my d-pad for the elapsed seconds.  “You are recording?” I ask Tarlow.

“Yes,” he grumbles as his center screen clarifies into an image of Trog cruisers lined up in formation over Trinity Base—ten rows of six, one row of two, four docked at the base, and three outliers.  “Jesus, sixty-nine fucking ships.”

“The biggest fleet yet,” observes Penny.

“Some of those live here,” I tell them.  “They’re guarding the base.  We killed one already.  I’ll bet it’s those three out of formation.”

As if to confirm my assertion, one of the ships bursts in red flares, only I know they aren’t flares, they’re red-hot railgun slugs, fired toward us.

“Penny?” I ask.

The ship surges as she tempts fate with five more g’s.  She lets off almost immediately and evades to the left before putting us back on course.  No point in soaring down our bomb run vector at a constant speed and direction.  We’d only need that at the very end, just before we let the bombs go.

“Another sentinel is firing,” says Tarlow.

“The third is accelerating,” Phil alerts us.

“Running away?” I ask, knowing how unlikely that is.

“Moving for a better shooting angle,” suggests Phil.

I glance over at Tarlow’s screen again.  On Penny’s, Trinity Base is still too far away to make out any detail.  "Have the rest moved?"

“Not yet,” Tarlow answers.

“They know we’re here?” I ask.

Phil says, “Some of the ships in the fleet are powering up.”

“Penny,” I say, “spray a few hundred rounds their way.  They need something to think about.”

“I can’t hit a ship from this far out,” she tells me.

“In that big formation,” I disagree, “I think you might land some rounds.  They might panic.  That could work to our advantage.”

Penny sends a short burst at the formation, followed by another, and another.

Chapter 56

We’re so far out that the first of the Trogs’ railgun rounds has not yet reached us.  Yet all three defenders are firing, throwing up a hail we’ll have to fly through.

Our rounds, traveling through space at two to three times faster than a Trog railgun slug, are raining down on the formation of waiting cruisers.  Most miss and impact the protoplanet below them.  Many hit hulls with enough force to send the Gray bridge crews into a tizzy.  Defensive grav fields bloom bright blue through the formation.  Ships start to flee with no order, no plan, just bridge crews collectively deciding to take measures to move their ships out of harm’s way without linking to the bridge crews in the other ships.

And maybe that’s another flaw of the Gray mindset.  The mental link they all hold so dear is strong when they’re close together, but weakens severely with distance.

Tarlow whoops, as Phil winces.

I glance over at Tarlow’s screen and see cruisers bump as the formation loses its order with ships trying to get away in every direction.

“It’s like the Spanish armada,” I say.

“What?” Tarlow doesn’t know what I’m talking about, which surprises me.

“When the Spanish armada came to invade England, they anchored one night in a bay, all packed in too close.  I don’t remember the details, but when the smaller English fleet attacked, setting them on fire, I think, the Spaniards tried to flee and wound up destroying themselves.”

Tarlow loses interest before I’m halfway through my little history lesson.  “Don’t get your hopes up about this bunch, Admiral Nelson.  They’re going to get away.”  Our ship shudders.

Phil tells us, “That was the first of the Trog railgun rounds deflecting off the grav lens field.”  Turning to Penny, he says, we need to start decelerating in about fifteen seconds.”

The ship’s inertial field surges as Penny pulls it into a turn and the familiar zipper bang of our axial gun rips out a long burst.  “I’m aiming for that cruiser,” she tells us, “the one that’s throwing up most of those slugs.”

"You’re driving," I say.  "Do what you like as long as we make our bombing run."

More Trog rounds deflect.

The hull rings twice with impacts.

“Damage?” I ask.

“Can’t say,” Phil tells me.  “Penny, decelerate!”

Chapter 57

I’m thrown against my seat harness, and I call over the open comm.  “Any decompression in the ship? Are all systems functional?”

Vague replies come back.  Everyone felt the impacts, yet no breach seems to have occurred.

“The angle,” Brice suggests as he checks the forward compartments, “might have saved us.  The rounds hit our hull and bounced away.”

And left gouges, I don’t mention, gouges deep enough we might need to repair them.  If we’re lucky.

Penny is shooting again.

“Line us up on the vector I just sent to your console,” Phil tells her.

“Got it,” the ship swerves up and to the right.  “I need some leeway.  Lots of metal in the air.”

“Take as much as you need,” says Phil.  “I’ll let you know when we’re crucial.”

Penny smiles.  “Yes, bombardier.”

“Holy shit,” hollers Tarlow.

We’re close enough now, I don’t need to look over at Tarlow’s monitor to know what’s going on, I see the visual version on Penny’s screens.  The defending Trog cruiser she fired upon is erupting as our rounds tear through its hull.  Steel and fiery gases blast into the vacuum.  Its grav fields go into chaos, mostly.  The ship pushes itself into a flat spin as it tries to lumber away.

Two ships below us bubble jump as we close in, sending grav pulses through the disintegrating formation, causing more cruisers to bump—if bump is the right word for megaton behemoths smashing their hulls into one another.  Rings splash the dust on the protoplanet’s surface, expanding with the grav pulses of the ships that just jumped.

Not even a full second later, Phil shouts, “They didn’t go far.  They don’t have enough fuel for a long jump!”

“I have them,” Tarlow says, his attention on another of his screens, “A hundred thousand miles out.  Another at two hundred.”

Good.  Confirmation that what we’re doing here will work.

“Four more are accelerating away at full power,” says Tarlow.

“Some already refueled.”  I was hoping the six docked at the base below us were the same six we spotted when we first arrived.

“Unless they’re trying to hide their destination,” says Tarlow, “they’re earthbound.”

They have to be, I realize.  The jump from 61 Cygni to earth is a long leg for a Trog cruiser, they don’t have fuel to spare for anything but a direct path.  “Let me know when they bubble.”

“Penny,” says Phil, “bring us down on the attack vector.”

I look up to see the protoplanet growing large in front of us, and the structures of the supply base coming into focus with the six docked cruisers looking huge, even compared to the immense base.

“Steady on that course,” says Penny.  “Do your work fast, I have railgun slugs coming at us from everywhere.”

Not exactly right—the everywhere bit—but it does feel like it, and the two cruisers firing on us have done nothing but increase their rate.  Only our speed and the grav lens has kept us alive, and with the angle between us and the defending cruisers changing, our grav lens is becoming less and less a factor.  Those rounds will be able to hit us broadside.  To make matters worse, we’ll have to zero out the grav lens power and defensive grav on our flank’s right before we release the nukes, to maintain their ballistic paths toward the target.

“Just a few more seconds,” says Phil.  “Keep us lined up.  There’s a gap coming in the incoming fire.”

Penny doesn’t respond.

Phil’s whole body tenses as he kills power to the drive array, the grav lens, and deflective fields.  He presses the bomb release.

We’re in free-fall.  No grav outside the ship, none inside, and no suit grav to compensate for anything.  The bomb release has to be smooth with no perturbations.

“Slow us down, Penny!” says Phil.  “Easy.”

Penny puts a deft touch on our drive, and I barely feel it.

With all of the ship’s grav systems momentarily off, I can see every mass in the space around us and all the way down to the planet.  I see our bombs falling in a perfect, circular formation.  Railgun slugs are tearing through space in a storm that makes it seem like there’s no safe place for us to be.  The cruisers below us are still trying to get out of our way.

Penny slows us even more, and the nukes accelerate under the pull of the protoplanet’s gravity.

She increases power to our drive array.

“Don’t steer away yet,” Phil warns.  “Twenty seconds to impact.”

Phil trickles power into the grav lens.

We take a solid railgun hit, and this time I don’t need a status report.  Air is rushing out through a new hole.

More rounds deflect off our glazed steel.

Penny drags our speed down even more.  “Phil, we can’t keep this up.”

“Just a few more seconds,” he says.  “We didn’t come all this way to lose our nerve.”

In that moment, I’m proud of Phil.  He’s standing strong in the face of the storm.

The hull rings again.

“Now!” he shouts, as the deflective grav fields power up.  “Turn us toward those cruisers so we can utilize the grav lens for defense.”

I feel the ship spin as bright blue at our bow washes out my view of the battle.  “The nukes?”

“On track,” Phil answers.  “Penny, step on it!”

Our internal inertial field kicks back on as Penny pours amps into our drive array.  The Turd accelerates toward our two attackers.

“Oh, no!” shouts Phil.

Chapter 58

Blue grav fields flash and buffet us.

With our grav plates fluxing chaotically and the lens pulsing hard, I can’t make out what’s happening.  Not exactly.

Another grav flash shoves our ship to the side as Penny struggles to keep us lined up on a target.  She curses loudly and sends a long stream of plasma-fied slugs at one of the cruisers shooting our way.

“They’re bubbling out!” Phil shouts.

“Who?” I ask.  “The fleet?” I’m asking about the scattered flock of ships that had been in neat rows when we started our attack run.

“The grav pulse knocked our nukes off their trajectory.”  Uncharacteristically, he curses.

“How far?”

Penny has moved on to the next thing.  She’s firing and accelerating, and turning into the direction of her prey, which has figured out that we’re a lot more lethal than our size would suggest.  On her monitor, I see a cruiser’s hull coming apart.

“They’ll miss the planet,” Phil says.

"Miss?" I turn to him, and then glance immediately over Tarlow’s shoulder to see his monitors—it’s the only way I can get a clear picture of all that’s happening through the 360-degree sphere of space around us.

Tarlow points a sickly finger at what looks like six little sticks tumbling across the blackness.

Another cruiser bubbles out.

Tarlow wails over the open comm, and questions flutter in from the crew asking anxiously what’s wrong.

Rage and despair compete for control in my head as I see all hope for our success recede into the void.

I can’t indulge either.

I can’t!

I clench my teeth, reach over and smack the back of Tarlow’s helmet.  “Get in the game!”

He’s mortified as he turns wide-eyed to look at me.

“Anyone else shooting at us?”

“I…I…”

“Dammit! Get me an answer.”

Penny is still zeroed in on a target as its defensive fields strobe into disarray.  She’s shredding it.

“Pull up,” I tell her.  “That one’s finished.”

She swerves hard to the right, she’s already guessed what I want, or read it from my mind, or maybe it’s just coincidence from our shared history and goals.  She knows what’s happening around her.  I can feel anger radiating through her suit.

And she has an outlet for it.

She brings our axial gun to bear on her next victim, a Trog cruiser making the mistake of maneuvering to keep its port side facing us to fire the maximum number of guns our way.

“That’s the last one shooting," Phil answers for  Tarlow, who’s letting his emotions run away with his composure.

“Kill it,” I tell Penny.

She needs no more direction than that, no inspirational words to keep her on task.  Phil tweaks our defensive fields, and keeps the grav lens optimized.  Up front, I hear the crew over the comm, working frantically to shuttle rounds into the magazines, feeding the beast its fire.

“Tarlow,” I say.

“What?”

“Are you tracking everything?”

“What?”

“Tell me your system is recording.  I want to know where every one of those ships goes.”  I’m trying to get him back in the game by focusing him on his work.

“I…I…the system maintains a log,” he says.

“You’ll be able—”

“I can’t,” he says, “tell you where those bubble jumping ships went.”

“You have the heading each jumped down? That’s enough.”  From the corner of my eye, I see Penny’s target ship starting to erupt.

“Yes,” answers Tarlow.

“Good.”  I spin to face him, and take a hard look at his monitors, seeing dozens of cruisers scurrying off, some skimming over the planet’s surface to get away.  Some are vectoring toward Cygni Saturn, they don’t know yet what we’ve done to their tanker fleet.  Others are maxing grav for deep space, though none of them will go far.  They can’t.  Their only source of H is on the protoplanet below.  They’ll be back.

“What?” asks Tarlow, feeling uncomfortable with my scrutiny.

“What are you looking for?” asks Phil.

“Stay on task,” I tell him.  “Kill that cruiser.

“Don’t you worry about this one,” says Penny.  “We’ll be done in a moment.”

Chapter 59

I reach over, put a finger on Tarlow’s screen, and tell him, “Get that one’s coordinates and vector.  Send it to Phil.”

“I already have it,” says Phil.

Damn mind readers.

“Be nice,” Phil tells me.

"Penny will need an intercept vector."

“Let me finish here,” she says.

I glance over at her bank of monitors.  The cruiser catching all our railgun slugs is coming apart under the onslaught of plasma and debris from its own exploding hull.

“Blow past,” I tell her.  “It’s finished.”

She stops firing and accelerates into a turn.

“I’m sending you a heading,” says Phil.

“Got it,” she answers.

“Why this one?” asks Phil, turning

“You’re not reading my mind?” I answer with a question.

“You’re getting better at hiding things,” he says.  “What are we doing?”

“How long until we catch it?” I ask.

“Less than seven minutes,” Penny informs me.

“You’re not answering me,” says Phil.

I stoke my courage with a deep breath, as though stating my intentions will solidify the choice into something unbreakable, something that maybe won’t doom us all.  “I’m putting the mission first.”

“In less cryptic language?” asks Phil.

“Why this one?” asks Tarlow, finding a new way to vent his anxiety.

“Penny,” I say, “I doubt that ship is armed.”  I turn to Phil.  “Keep our defenses up, just in case.”  Back to Penny, I say, “This ship doesn’t have enough H to jump.  It probably can’t even keep its pedal to the metal for much longer.”

“And,” she asks.

“Catch it, but don’t shred it,” I tell her.  “Take your time.  Blast the drive array.  You don’t have to destroy it.  Just disable it.”

“We’re going to board?” Tarlow is flirting with hysteria.

Brice comes onto the bridge just as Tarlow finishes.  He’s offended by Tarlow’s outburst.  "Keep your sissy shit to yourself, Tarlow.  If you’re going to whine, cut your out-comm.  Listen to the major.  Do what he tells you, and shut the fuck up.  This isn’t a goddamn democracy up here.”  Brice plants his feet in the center of the bridge’s only empty space, he grav locks them in place and reaches up to brace himself with a handhold on the ceiling.

Sergeant Enforcer.

I give him a nod of approval.

To Penny, I say, “Take out the bridge, and then if you can, kill the reactors.  We’ll need time to pull this off, so take what you need.”

Chapter 60

It takes nearly twenty minutes to catch the Trog cruiser and disable its vital organs.

Phil, having either pieced it together from wayward thoughts in my head, or having worked through the logic on his own, knows what I’m planning.  “We have three more nukes,” he says.  “We don’t have to do this.”

Tarlow starts to say something, but Brice shuts him down.

Penny looks over her shoulder at me.  “I’m with you, Boss.  Whatever you have in mind.”

“Tarlow,” I say, “zoom in on the base and give me a bird’s eye view.”

“Seventeen,” says Phil.  “That’s what you’re looking for, right? How many cruisers came back?”

I see them on Tarlow’s screen—not orderly like before—seventeen cruisers seemingly placed randomly in the space above Trinity Base, a few close in, most at a good distance.  Down at the docks, vast plumes of hydrogen are spraying into the vacuum and forming icy clouds that seem to cling to the protoplanet’s surface.

Two of the cruisers that were docked and refueling ripped the fueling lines away when they made panicked escapes during our first attack run.

That’s good.

“Why’s that good?” asks Phil.

“They weren’t finished,” I answer.  “They won’t have enough H to get to earth, and not enough to go back the way they came.”

“Probably.”

I shrug.  “Probably’s better than the alternatives.”

“We still have three nukes,” he says again.  “We have trajectories on the other six.  We can recapture them.”

“We can,” I agree, “after we finish here.”

“Then we don’t need to do this.”

"The nukes won’t work.”  I’ve already reasoned through to my conclusion.  "It may seem half the time like Grays and Trogs are stupid, but you know better than anyone they aren’t."

Phil looks at me without responding.  Like anyone, he doesn’t like to concede points in a debate.

“They know something is up with the nukes we dropped.  They may or may not know what they are, but they know we thought they were dangerous enough that we could just drop them on a ballistic path to kill the base.  They lucked out because those bubble-jumping cruisers knocked them off their trajectories.  If they see us come back and try the same thing again, and especially if they see us collect those six and bring them along, they’ll know exactly what we intend to do.  They’ll defend themselves by bubbling a few cruisers out again and who knows where the nukes will go after that? We need to try something different.”

“A suicide mission?” asks Phil.

“No.”

“If we can’t get home,” says Phil, “what’s the difference?”

“The mission,” I tell him.  “We fulfill the mission because earth needs it.”  I turn to Penny for confirmation now that some of the gory details are coming to light.

She nods.

“We’re all with you,” says Phil.  “However, I think we should find a better way.”

“Do you have a better way?” I ask.  “Because right now, this looks like the only way.  Sure, we could muddle around the system for a week or a month trying to work out something better, but we don’t know if or when the next Trog fleet is going to show up.  We just don’t.  What we know now is what we’re facing.  We have a way to win right now against these odds.  I say we take it.”

Phil glances over at Brice for his help.

Brice shrugs.  “Sometimes being a Marine is harder than being a whiney bitch.”  He laughs, because sometimes he’s just an asshole.

“Penny,” I say, “come around behind that cruiser and ram this ship up its aft drive array.”

Chapter 61

As I imagined it, the whole thing wouldn’t take more than ten or fifteen minutes—we’d do our crazy shit and skate our way to victory with little more than a few scratches and plenty of time to figure out our next move.

Not so.

At twenty minutes in, Penny tells me, “It won’t accelerate any faster.”

"Physics," Phil explains, like I don’t know what he’s going to say.  "Our reactor and drive array push g’s like nobody’s business, which works out just fine for making our relatively small ship zip through the galaxy.  In trying to push this megaton brick…"

He lets the words hang on the comm.

“I know,” I say, “all that momentum is hard to redirect.  Momentum is what we’re counting on.”  I turn to Penny.  “Get it going as fast as you can without blowing our reactor.”

Brice comms me from the front of the ship.  They’ve just closed the assault door up there.  “I need to know when they get close again.”  He’s talking about the Trog soldiers who’ve been trying—unsuccessfully so far—to mount an attack on our ship through the demolished passageways in the stern of their cruiser.  “We have charges placed in the debris and we—”

“Not too close to the grav lens,” Phil confirms.  “We can’t afford to damage it.”

“I thought it was indestructible,” says Brice.

“Nothing’s inde—”

“Don’t worry so much,” Brice tells him.  “They’re all placed a good bit away, with bulkheads between us and them.”

Phil’s not satisfied.  “C4 will—”

“Let me do my job,” snaps Brice.  “You do yours.  Warn me when the Trogs close in so we can detonate.”

Phil grumbles, but agrees.

“Major,” says Brice, “everything is a mess out there.  We were able to set up charges in a few halls on the starboard side of the ship, and in an engineering space below.  We can’t get to the other areas without detouring deep into the cruiser and working our way around.  Unfortunately, those areas are full of Trogs.”

“Too much to risk to in,” I tell him.

“Most of the ones we saw were dead,” says Brice.  “There seem to be plenty more getting suited up and organized.  I’d expect a coordinated attack soon.”

“Right now,” Phil cuts in, “they’re massing in the halls where they spotted you and the others.  I don’t think it’s occurred to them to attack our ship with their disruptors.”

“Phil,” I ask, “can you keep them at bay by pulsing the grav lens? You know, knocking the hell out of them when they try to come close?”

“Can do.”

“Penny,” I ask, “how’s our speed?”

“Good.”

“Heading?”

She shrugs.  “I’m flying blind.  This is Phil’s show now.”

With hundreds of tons of cruiser machinery and hull material packed around us, I can’t make out anything but mangled metal with the bug in my head.  With my eyes, I see the same thing Penny does.

Tarlow is out of the game.  The Rusty Turd isn’t buried so deep in the cruiser’s aft section that his radar dishes were scraped away, but several were damaged, and those that weren’t are blocked by the cone of the cruiser’s cavernous drive array.  Still, he moans, “Don’t run us into anything.”

Glancing over at Penny, Phil says, “Stay on the headings I send to your console.”  Over the comm, he calls to Brice.  “The attack is coming.”

“Roger,” answers Brice.  He alerts everyone onboard as an explosion rocks the ship—not close, but we feel tremors through the metal in which we’re lodged.

“The ship is coming loose,” says Penny.  “I feel it on the controls.”

I glance at Phil.

"Nothing we can do," he explains, and then he turns to Penny.  "We can push further in.  I’ll pulse the grav lens while you pulse the main drive."

“Let’s try it,” she says.

“Don’t get us stuck,” whines Tarlow.

Blue flashes bright through our ship as we lurch forward.

“Tight again,” says Penny.

Phil is shaking his head.

“What?” I ask.

Phil is anxious.  A lot is on his plate.  “We have a platoon, maybe more, coming up to the port side of the ship.”

“We can’t get to that side,” Brice reminds us.

“Grav pulse again?” I ask.

“When they get close,” says Phil.

I can sense the speed we’re building, and it seems like we’re headed back toward Trinity Base.  “Phil, how long until impact?”

“How close do you want to cut it?”

“So close we can’t be stopped,” I tell him.  We need all the momentum in this big cruiser we can manage so the Trogs below won’t be able to push it off course when they start bubble jumping to safety.  “Are they responding yet?”

“Yes,” says Phil.  “They’re clearing a path.  We need another ninety seconds.”

“We’re coming loose again,” says Penny.

“The cruiser isn’t designed for what we’re doing,” says Phil, losing patience with the stress of the entire situation being dumped on him and Nicky.  “The interior structures we’re pushing against can’t handle the loads we’re putting on them.”

I feel metal bending and grinding through the souls of my boots.  If we weren’t in vacuum, I know I’d hear it, too.

“How fast are we going?” asks Tarlow, doing all he can to find some calm.

“Fast enough,” says Phil.

“Jesus!” shouts Brice.  “One of them just jammed a disrupter through the hull.  Starboard side.”

I think the Trog must have slid the blade down between the railroad ties and found a spot where the steel was thin enough to go through.  Still, if one is doing that, others must be out there, hacking at the bent railroad ties with those damn lethal blades.  I shout, “Pulse the grav!”

“Can’t,” answers Phil.

“I’m barely holding straight now,” says Penny.

“We’ll lose hull integrity,” Brice calls.  We’ve already lost pressure.  It’s structural integrity he’s worried about.  “I’m blowing the rest of the C4.”

The charges aren’t on the side of the hull the attack is coming from, but—

A blast shakes everything.

Penny curses.

Grav fields push chaotically on me as I turn to Phil.  “Keep us straight.”

“Phil,” asks Penny, “when do I release?”

“Veer to port,” he answers.  “Hard, or we’ll miss.”

I sway with the ship.  It feels like we’re jamming it through a recycled tinfoil factory as metal all around the hull tears and bends.

“Now! Now! Now!” hollers Phil.

“Grav tight!” I call to everyone, as I glue my ass to my chair and amp up my suit’s compensating grav.

Penny reverses the field on the drive array as Phil maxes our remaining power into the grav lens.

The ship jerks free of the cruiser and its metal carcass freight-trains past us, leaving us, for the smallest moment, in silence.

Our hull strains under the load Penny and Phil are putting on it.  The inertial grav fails to compensate.

I try to see what’s happening outside with my grav sense and all I see is the intense blue of our fields.  Over Penny’s shoulder, her screens have flashed to life, and the Trog cruiser is racing ahead of us, a gaping hole in its stern, girders and plates flapping and falling away.  In front of the cruiser, I see the protoplanet mostly obscured by the cruiser’s bulk.

Far below, ships lumber out of the way.  A few are firing, but not much.  They barely have a defensive load of slugs.

Penny swerves hard to pull us off our collision course.

The cruiser recedes as it draws closer to the small planet’s surface.  I see the gridwork of Trinity Base, and I extrapolate a course in my head.  The rapidly changing parallax makes it look like the cruiser is going to miss.  "Phil?"

He’s focused on managing fields and doesn’t respond.

“Are we on target?” I ask, as inertia nearly crushes me.

Over the comm, everyone groans from the weight.

“Sorry,” Penny calls, as she flattens out our path, still running toward the planet.  I see the horizon ahead of us.

Penny flips the view of one of her screens to aft, and I see the cruiser getting visibly smaller due to the perspective of our distance and our rapidly increasing speed.

It looks to be on target.  And then it appears to fly past the planet.

Yet only for a microsecond.

A white flash washes our monitors in static.

When they come back, the base is erupting in a geyser of fire and stone tearing all the way up into the scattered cruisers in their cockeyed orbits above.

That, you fucking Trog Empire, is what it feels like to get a big human fist smashed in your face!

Chapter 62

Penny rides the protoplanet’s gravity to slingshot the Rusty Turd away from the battle at high speed.

“Direct hit?” I ask the bridge crew.

“No,” Phil answers.  “It came down near one edge of the base, but I think it won’t matter.”

“How long do we wait to recon?” I ask.

“We need to return to the tank ring to refuel.”  says Phil.

“How badly?” I ask.

“We might not make it.”

“What?” I try to hide my anger.

“Pushing that cruiser,” says Phil, “burned off a lot more H than I estimated it would.”

Nodding, I accept it’s my fault.  “When you say we might not make it, what does that mean?”

"I’m charting the most fuel-efficient return path now," he answers.  Glancing at Penny, Phil adds, "Her using the protoplanet’s gravity to accelerate the ship instead of burning our fuel will probably save us.”

“Good job.”  I reach forward and pat her on the back.

“I can read a fuel gauge and make coffee, too,” she answers.

“Get us back there,” I say.  “We’ll figure out our next step once we gas up and evaluate our damage.”

Chapter 63

The jump is quick—nine minutes.  We barely notice.

Finding the tank ring is easy.  It’s in the orbit where we left it.  Even parking the Rusty Turd in the ring and locking the fuel lines goes off without a hitch.  All is good until we start brainstorming the solution to our biggest problem.

“Seven of thirty-six mounting brackets are damaged or scraped entirely away,” says Brice, as we start the meeting.

“And the hull?” I ask.

“Seven holes,” he answers.  “Three the size of your fist, one a centimeter or two across, a few slashes from those disruptors.  The rest of the hull is nicked up, but we still have enough steel on our skin to make it through a few more battles.”

A lot more than that, I hope.  “Internal damage?”

“A bunch of railgun slugs fused together,” says one of the gun techs.  “The big rounds came through the hull into one of our magazines.”

“A small round tore a hole through the commode,” adds Lenox.

“All ship systems are operational,” says Phil.

“Our tanks are topped off,” adds Penny.  “We’re ready to fly.  Trying to bubble jump with the tank ring will be a mistake.  The ship is locked in, but I feel a little jiggle in the controls.”

“Bubble jumps are about precision,” says Phil, looking around for everyone’s attention.  “If we don’t—”

“We know,” Brice cuts him off.  “We don’t need that lecture again.”

It’s my turn to look around to make sure all eyes are on me.  "We can’t bubble jump back to earth.  It was my decision to ram that cruiser.  That’s when the brackets were damaged.”  I’m stuck on the next part.  Do I apologize for the choice to strand them all here? Or do I tell them to suck it up like soldiers do?

“Or,” says Brice, coming to my rescue.  “We don’t beat ourselves up about any of that.  This is war.  All of us knew what we were in for a long time before we got on this ship.”

Nods all around, some reluctant.

Silva is the next to speak up.  “Focusing on the decisions already made isn’t going to change our situation.”  She looks at me.  “You did what you did to accomplish the mission.”

“She’s right,” says Brice.  “Now, we need to figure out whether we can make it home.  If not, we need to get comfortable here.”

“We can’t bubble jump with the tank ring,” says Phil, making sure we all understand that.  “With seven mounting brackets gone, it’ll be suicide.”

“Can we repair the brackets?” asks Lenox.  I know she knows the answer.

“One of the sacrifices we made to save weight,” I tell the crew, for any who don’t know, “was on equipment to affect such a repair.  We have the basics—some electronic diagnostic meters, a few basic tools—but nothing like what we’d need to repair the brackets.”

“What about all those damaged cruisers?” asks Lenox.  “Our cruisers, when earth was building them, launched with shops and equipment to repair just about anything that could go wrong with a ship.”

“That’s an idea,” says Phil, “but we don’t know how far the Trogs stripped their ships down to make the long jumps to get here.”

“We know they fitted them out somewhere,” argues Lenox.  “Maybe at the last star along the way.”

“Maybe in earth’s system,” says Phil.

“Or here,” I add.  “Spitz’s people suspect the railguns are added at Trinity Base.  We just don’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Brice.

Tarlow laughs uncomfortably.  “I always knew I was going to die in space.”

Everybody ignores him.

“Brice,” I ask, “what do you mean, ‘it doesn’t matter’?”

“Boarding one of those Trog cruisers we shot up is a gamble,” he says.  “The repair shops might be functional.  They might be vaporized.  Any ship still intact enough for the shops to be online is probably half-full of Trogs who’d love to filet us with their disruptors.  There aren’t enough of us to take on ten thousand Trogs.  Or even a few hundred.”

“The way the cruisers are designed,” says Penny, “puts the maintenance shops in the aft section of the ships, adjacent to the barracks.”

“So if we go back and try to kill the Trogs still onboard a disabled cruiser,” concludes Lenox, “we probably destroy the fabrication shops.”

"Not that all the Trogs on those vessels are going to wait in the barracks for us to come and kill them," says Brice.  "Boarding a disabled ship is a gamble."

“It’s one we might have to take,” I say, “if we want to get home.”

Brice shakes his head, “There’s a better place we can go.”

Chapter 64

We pop out of our fourth hop, our shortest of the trip, less than three thousand klicks above and on the opposite side of the protoplanet that used to be the cozy home of Trinity Base.  Wasting not a second, Penny accelerates us down to the surface.

Tarlow, finally settled down, is scanning with his functional dishes.  Phil and the Gray are trying to get a picture of every gravitationally significant body within a quarter million miles—Trog cruisers are what they’re searching for.

Through Penny’s monitors, I see the protoplanet is engulfed in what seems to be a dust storm with thunderheads standing hundreds of miles above the surface.  Lightning flashes the brownish clouds and streaks of meteors burn long trails, disappearing into the thick haze below.

“I need to power up the grav lens,” says Phil.  “There’s too much debris to go through without it.”

Without looking over at him, I say, “As little as we can get away with.”

“I can’t even see the planet,” says Penny.

“It’s down there,” Phil assures her.  “We’ll need to be careful.”

“Anything out here?” I ask, as Tarlow seems to be spending too much time looking at Penny’s monitors, too.

Tarlow grunts and goes back to his work.  “Cruisers.  Some drifting.  Most under power.  Generally moving back toward Trinity base.  Nobody in a hurry.”

“All this mess,” I ask, pointing at Penny’s screens, yet wanting an answer from anybody.  “This is our handiwork?”

“Yes,” says Tarlow.

Phil agrees.  “The collision of the cruiser with Trinity base pulverized mountains of rock and threw it into the atmosphere and into orbit.  It’ll take years for it to settle back to the ground.”

I look over at Brice.

He shrugs.  “I didn’t say there were any guarantees.”

Chapter 65

Penny has the ship down close to the surface, at less than a hundred feet, flying through the haze, descending as we close in on our target.

“Can they make us out from above?” I ask.

Phil shakes his head.  “It’s all about mass.  With so much debris above us, the Grays won’t see us unless we start pushing a lot of grav.”

“Can you see them?” I ask.

"I can," he answers.  "A cruiser is a whale.  We’re a fish.  They’re far enough away and they aren’t enveloped like we are.  The advantage is to us.”

“Can you tell what they’re doing?” I ask.

“Besides coming together?” answers Phil.  “No.”

“Tarlow?”

“My images are fuzzy from all the crap in the air,” he says.  “I think they’re forming up again.”

“Strange.”  I look around.  “Brice, Lenox, any ideas?”

“Staying near the base,” suggests Lenox.  “Waiting for the next fleet to arrive? They can’t go anywhere, can they?”

“A few of the cruisers,” says Phil.  “Maybe.  We don’t know if any ever completely refueled before they took off.  Maybe they weren’t even refueling yet.  Maybe they were working on fitting the railgun slugs.  We don’t know.  As far as Nicky and I can tell, the ones who were docked when we arrived, were the same ones there when we attacked.”

“So maybe nobody has enough gas to get home.”  I know it’s wishful thinking.  We don’t have any evidence to the contrary yet.

“Have they landed to search for survivors?” asks Brice.

“There aren’t any,” says Phil.  “We can’t pick up the presence of any life forms, Gray or Trog.”

“Could they be here?” asks Brice.  “Out of range?”

Phil nods.  “No Trog cruiser is on the surface.  I can tell you that for sure.  If they dropped off a search party and went back up, that’s a possibility.  If so, they’re too far away for us to know they’re here.  There might be too much rock and whatnot between us and them.”

“So you don’t know?” asks Brice.

Phil shakes his head.

“So for the ones who weren’t vaporized,” I conclude, “the shockwave killed them.  Probably.  As far as we know, we’re here alone.”

“With forty or fifty Trog cruisers orbiting above.”  Brice smiles, because to him, that’s pretty funny.  He leaves the bridge and heads to the bow.  Lenox follows.

Phil directs Penny as we close in on the supply base.

We come upon the wreckage of a Trog cruiser, partially buried in rock and dirt.  It’s spewing gas into the thin atmosphere.  Power is trickling through its grav plates in weak pulses.  It looks like a great beast struggling through the final beats of its heart.

“Phil,” I ask, “can you tell if any of the base’s underground structures survived?”

“No,” he says.  “If you remember, the cruiser we crashed into the base didn’t make a direct hit, but the base is a hole in the ground now.  What wasn’t vaporized was pulverized and thrown out of the impact crater.  Some of that is covering this cruiser.”

“I’m bringing us down,” says Penny, as she guides the ship up close to the star cruiser.

“Anything alive inside?” I ask.

Phil doesn’t seem sure, but he says, “Nothing as far as we can tell.”

“Stay on your toes up here.”  I unbuckle to follow Brice and Lenox to the bow.  When I reach the forward compartment, both are there with Silva and Peterson, double-checking their equipment as Brice briefs them over a squad comm I haven’t been looped in on.

I connect with the group as I heft my railgun.  “What are we looking for, exactly?”

Brice turns to me and says, “I just described it to them.  A portable welding rig, the kind we used to use on station construction.  It’s a Gray design, so I figure the Trogs here have the same one.  Why are you here?”

I’m taken aback.  “Why?”

“Yeah,” says Brice.  “We got this.”

“I’m going with,” I tell him.

Brice shakes his head and waves a hand at the other three.  “We’ve been locked in this can for nearly six months, doing nothing.”

Silva smiles at that comment.

“You’ve had your fun up there playing Captain Kirk,” continues Brice.  “Let us earn our pay.”

“But—”

“Nothing’s alive down here,” says Brice, apparently having come to that rosy conclusion all on his own.  “We don’t need an extra gun hand.  This mission is a quick in and out.”

“Nothing’s ever quick,” I argue.

Brice puts a hand on my shoulder.  "Stay with the ship in case something happens, and you need to hightail it outta here."

“You know we’re—”

“If you need to go,” says Brice.  “You need to go.  You can come back and pick us up later.  We’ll wait.  We know how to hide.  If those cruisers decide to come down and join us, make sure none of them make it to the ground alive.”

Chapter 66

Back on the bridge, I’m stewing.

Brice’s squad is gone, inside the cruiser, out of comm range.

Phil says, “Silva will be fine.”

As usual, Phil gets right to the core of it, as I suddenly have to confront a problem I’d hoped to avoid entirely—me, as Silva’s commanding officer, putting her in harm’s way.  Shit.

“Can you sense them?” I ask.  “All four?”

“For the moment,” Phil nods.  “Nicky and I know where they are, and we know they’re not encountering any trouble.”

“How deep are they? Have they found it yet?”

Phil shakes his head.  “I told you, I don’t get that level of detail when—”

I wave a hand to quiet him down.  I’ve heard it.

Phil changes the subject.  “What about all those cruisers up there?”

“What about them?” Involuntarily, I look up, though I can make out nothing above me but the inside of our hull.

“Do we leave them all here and go home, or do we chase them down and destroy them?”

Both are options I’ve been rolling around in my thoughts in the downtime since we crashed the cruiser into Trinity Base.  This is the first the ideas have come into the light.  “Did you read those from my mind?”

Phil shakes his head.

“Be honest.”

“Why would he lie?” asks Tarlow, getting into the discussion.  “He can see the problem as easily as you can.”

I turn to Tarlow.  “And you’ve been wondering about the same question?”

He shrugs.  “It occurred to me, but I didn’t dwell on it.”

“Brice and I talked about it,” says Penny.  “Over a private comm channel when we were refueling the ship.”

Ugh.

“Don’t worry,” says Phil.  “This doesn’t mean you’re not still the smartest one here.”

I struggle to keep my voice calm.  “I don’t need you to patronize me.”

Phil laughs out loud.  Penny and Tarlow join in.

Penny spins her chair around to face me, putting a hand on my leg as she smiles.  “You need to unwind, Dylan.  It was a joke.”

I nod.  She’s right.  I force a smile.

“That’s a big boy,” she laughs and turns back to her console.

“Okay,” I say.  “Let’s discuss it.  Do we hunt them down or leave?”

“We’ll never find them all,” says Tarlow.  “As soon as they understand our intentions, they’ll run.”

“He’s right about that,” says Phil.

“They can’t go far,” I counter.  “They have limited fuel.”

“Still some will get away,” says Tarlow.

“Yeah.”  I know he’s right.  “What about the value of destroying as many as we can and leaving their broken carcasses in orbit around this station.  What kind of psychological affect would that have on the next Trog fleet to arrive?”

“The station won’t be operational,” says Phil.  “Arriving ships will die here.  The psychological effects on them are moot.”

“Unless the next fleet brings along factory ships and tankers.”

“The tankers can barely make light speed,” says Tarlow.  “We learned that at Cygni Saturn.  They can’t travel with a fleet.”

“Still,” I say, “they can be on the way.  New tankers might arrive tomorrow, on the way here or on the way to earth.”

“We don’t know what we don’t know,” says Phil.

I hide my disdain.  “Clichés won’t help.”

“All I’m saying,” says Phil, “is if we make our decision on what might be coming next, we’re making it based on a guess.  That’s all.  If we’re making it based on a guess, then we’re making it without taking into account the only things that truly matter.”

“And those things are?” I ask.

“What’s best for us,” says Phil, “based on what we know.”

Instead of jumping right into a counter-argument, I take a moment to think about Phil’s simplistic solution.  And it occurs to me, he’s right.  I glance over at Tarlow, who nods.

“What’s best for us?” asks Penny.

“We leave the fleet alone,” I tell them, working through the logic like I’m reading from a script.  “We have the fastest ship.  We have more just like this one back home in our fleet by now.  If we bounce back to earth as quick as we can and load up as many flight crews as possible, we might be able to come back here and steal all these cruisers.  We might be able to steal every one that shows up for the next decade if we play our cards right.  They’ll arrive low on fuel and supplies with no way to defend themselves, and with no way to know what’s waiting for them here.”

I know Phil agrees before he opens his mouth to say, “That’s what I think.”

I look at Penny and Tarlow.  “What about you two?”

“Not to ruin this perfect moment,” says Phil, “but something’s going on with the cruisers above us.”

Chapter 67

Three hours lying among the ruins of Trinity Base.

The planet’s gravity is holding the Rusty Turd to the ground.  We don’t have any grav system on the ship engaged.  The reactor is outputting minimum power, just enough to keep the computer systems up.  Ship-wide life support systems are offline.  With no atmosphere inside, what would be the point? We’re all depending on our suits, a state we’re comfortable with.

Well, except for Tarlow.  We’ve been in system for weeks, and I suspect this is the longest stretch he’s ever worn an orange suit.  He can’t get used to it.  I’m starting to think it might be the source of his perpetually foul mood.

“Can you make any of this out?” Phil asks.

Tarlow is playing with filters and dish output settings to clean the images fuzzing across his screens.

Little of it makes sense to me, so I turn back to Phil.  “Status on Brice?”

Phil makes a show of looking at his d-pad.  “Eight minutes since you last asked.”

“Three hours is too long.”  It’s a reasonable explanation for my impatience.  In fact, it’s the truth.

“We don’t know how long it should take,” says Phil.

“Yeah,” I say.  “All we know is they’re too deep for you to know where they are or if they’re alive.”

“We haven’t felt anything from inside the ship,” says Phil.  “There’s no reason to believe something happened.”

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” I tell them.  “I’m giving them until the four-hour mark.”  I look around the bridge to see everyone’s tense faces.  “Then I’m taking Clawson, and I’m going to find them.”

“You’re going to search for them,” Phil corrects.  “Futilely.”

“I disagree.”  And that settles it.  We’ve already been through it a few times.  I look at my d-pad to mark the time.  “What about these cruisers, then?”

“Another pair has pulled up beside that one,” says Phil.  “Dangerously close.  That makes four so far.”

“And?”

“Like the previous two,” says Phil, “they connected umbilicals as soon as they pulled within a few meters.”

I look at Tarlow.  “Your guess might be right.”

“Transferring hydrogen,” he says.  “That’s the only explanation.”

“Any more Trogs off-boarding?” I ask.

Phil shakes his head.  “I think all the Trogs got off on the first two cruisers.”

“Did the Grays from these two new ships get on the one they appear to be passing their fuel to?”

“We’re not sure,” says Phil, “but we think so.”

“They’re making a lifeboat?” I ask.  “Is that what it looks like to you?”

Penny nods.

Even though it was Tarlow’s theory, he’s still not sure.

“Phil?” I ask.

He nods slowly.  “I still can’t believe they’d doom the Trogs and run off.”

I ask, “Is that a figure of speech, or do you really not believe it?”

“Figure of speech.”

“They’re all going to die anyway,” says Penny, unusually callous.

“She has a point,” adds Tarlow.

I think she does, too.  “If that’s what they’re doing.  How long before they’re done cannibalizing the fuel from their fleet? Sometime tomorrow?”

“That’s what I’d extrapolate,” says Phil.

“Then we wait,” I decide.  “We’ll keep an eye on them, although I’d say this changes our immediate plans.”

Chapter 68

“There they are,” says Phil.

My only view aft is through Penny’s rear display monitors.  It’s good enough to see two people have climbed through a massive rent in the cruiser’s hull and are standing on the ground.  One is reaching back into the hole to take something being handed down.  With distance and dust in the air, I can’t make out what.

“Brice,” I call.  “Is that you?”

“Yep,” he answers through the static.

What I guess has to be the welding rig comes through the hole and into waiting hands.  Good thing the grav is on the light side here.  It looks heavy.

“Everybody okay?” I ask.

“Yep.”

“Did you get what you went in for?”

“Yep.”  One of the suited figures, I guess Brice, turns and pats the heavy welding rig, now sitting on the ground.

Hands pass pieces of metal out through the hole.

“Everything?” I ask.

With some effort, Brice raises one of the pieces of metal.  “Solid steel.  We’ll use the other brackets as templates to cut these into shape.  We brought extras so we can afford to make some mistakes.”

“Any trouble?” I ask.

Brice laughs.  “You’re asking about Trogs?”

“You know I am.”

Brice fakes a gag.  “They’re all in there.  It’s a mess.  Shockwave did a number on the bodies.  Overwhelmed the inertial grav.  Some look like water balloons filled with Trog jelly.  Others disintegrated.”

“With all that damage, do you think the welding rig will work?”

“Move Dylan Kane to the front of the class, kids!” Brice laughs as he gets to work helping unload the metal.  “We tested three others to see if they functioned before we found this one.  You should see the interior of the ship, though.  Just about everything is bent or broken.  This cruiser is scrap.  I’m amazed it held together.”

Chapter 69

The hours pass.

What seems to be the last two cruisers pull alongside the lifeboat ship.  As far as we can tell, the Trogs surrendered their fuel and accepted their fate without resistance.  In that act, I see a future so bleak it makes me ill.  What does it say of a species willing to surrender lives by the thousand so a handful of masters can live?

Whatever the Trogs were when they left earth all those millennia in the past, earth’s first species of advanced life, they’ve been bred backward into servile monkeys.  I wonder what else the Trogs lost in the deal.  Can they still love? Are there artists among them painting emotions to canvas? Do they have poets? Is mathematics and writing beyond their ability now? What about stories of their ancestors? Do they talk about their glorious legends and dream of freedom and a return to those days? Are they just biological automatons?

Do they have a God, or do the Grays fill that role for them?

As much as I despise the Trogs, as much as I know Brice hates them, I feel sorry for them.  As for the Grays, the depth of my loathing for them finds new lows.  I read through Phil’s brief history of the Grays—as all histories are, told by the victors, skewed to shine the light of righteousness upon themselves.  Every culture does it.

So as much as the Grays, and even Phil, believe the Grays bred the Trogs until they’d bent them away from their suicidal path, I can’t help but wonder at the long-term malice that must exist in the hearts of creatures who could so doggedly engage in a process to squeeze the souls out of another species.

Most hypocritical of all, the Grays behaved just as badly as the Trogs once they learned the art of war.  The Grays used their stolen killing tech to slaughter one another by the thousands and millions.  No limit exists to the Grays’ introspective blindness on this point.  They are every bit as bad as the Trogs were when it comes to industrial scale murder.

“I count eleven,” says Phil, interrupting my thoughts.

Tarlow agrees, mostly.  He says nine, but he’s inferring, where Phil can see the grav systems go offline as the ships run completely dry on fuel.

“Every one that docked and transferred their H to the Gray’s lifeboat cruiser will run dry by this time tomorrow,” I guess.  I turn to Penny.  “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Eager for the moment to arrive, Penny powers up the Turd’s grav systems and we lift off the ground, accelerating as we go.  She’s not putting much g into the drive array.  We don’t want to alert the Grays above.  We have time to put this ambush together.

We pick up speed.

Silva opens a private comm.  “Can we get them?”

“Yeah,” I answer.

“Why didn’t we just go straight up?”

“From a dead stop into space where they’re in a geosync orbit over Trinity Base, it would have taken too long.”

“This will take longer, right?”

“Yeah,” I agree, “but this way, we’ll be  using the protoplanet’s gravity to sling us around the backside while Penny is pouring on the speed.  By the time they notice us coming, we’ll be moving so fast they won’t have time to react.”

“They won’t be able to bubble out?” she asks.

“I hope not.”

The slingshot move is going to take a while.  The bridge crew is intent at their posts.  They know how important it is to get everything right on this maneuver, lest we alert that ship full of little gray bastards.

“Do you think Brice will be able to repair our ship?” asks Silva.

“I hope so.”

“But do you think he will?”

“He’s used this equipment before,” I tell her.  “When he was on a construction crew on the space station.  He said he worked with the same kind of welder and cutter we salvaged.”

“But a space station isn’t a high-tech 30c bubble-jump system,” says Silva.  “Do you think he can do it with the precision we need?”

She’s worried.  Uncharacteristic for her.  Maybe because the repair and the result will be out of her control.

“I hate to sound fatalistic,” I say, “but whatever Brice does, I think our odds of success will be better for us than they were when the Arizona yard first built this ship.”

Silva laughs at that.  She’s been infected with Brice’s darkness.  We’re all alike in that respect.

“We’re patching the holes in the hull before we jump, aren’t we?” she asks.

It’s my turn to laugh, because I see right through that question.  “You don’t want to make the trip all the way back to earth isolated in a stinky orange suit with a catheter stuck up your ass?”

Silva scolds me and says, “I’d like for you to do that naughty thing you did before we get back to the war.  I’d like to—”

“Dylan,” says Phil, “I hate to interrupt, but we’re behind the planet now.”

I open up the crew comm so all can hear.  “Everyone, use your suit g to compensate for the load.  Penny, amp up the grav.  Phil, make sure we stay in the envelope.  We don’t want to get going so fast we fling ourselves out on the wrong tangent.”

“No worries,” answers Phil.  “It’ll be right.”

“Good.  I don’t want these Grays going home and warning their brothers about the storm that’s waiting for them here.”

Penny burns for several long minutes before Phil gives her the mark.  With max-grav powering through the drive array, overdrive in fact.  We have to roll Spitz’s probability dice and push to near forty g’s to make the timing work.

It’s a risk, with odds in our favor, but a downside none of us can afford.  If the dice come up snake eyes, the Rusty Turd turns into a glittery vapor trail mingling with the dust over Trinity Base.

Phil powers up the grav lens.

The glowing specks of the Trog fleet are scattered through the sky a few thousand miles in front of us.

On Penny’s screen, I see her zero in on one particular speck, the Gray’s lifeboat.

Penny lets loose with the axial gun and rips through several hundred rounds.  I hear the squad working in the forward sections, loading the magazines even as Penny is emptying them.

The speck of the Gray ship is growing incredibly fast as our speed soars.

Penny keeps firing as we start to catch up with the first rounds she shot.

More shots, those carrying the momentum of the ship speed added to that of the axial gun, find their mark, easily piercing the Gray cruiser’s deflective fields, which aren’t set at combat levels, but kept low so as not to disrupt the docking and offloading of fuel.

Our plasma slugs shred the hull, making the attack look embarrassingly easy.

Penny finishes with a long burst and pulls into a turn, just enough to keep from ramming the Gray cruiser as it blasts to pieces.

Over the comm, Phil announces the success to cheers as Penny eases off the power.  No sense tempting fate when we don’t need to.

I congratulate the crew, and tell Phil to get Penny a bubble jump vector back to Cygni A and our tank ring.  It’s time to go home.

THE BATTLE CONTINUES…

Please report any corrections to http://www.bobbyadair.com/typos

The Last Word…

And here we are, another book out the door. Another rent check that won't bounce. Yippee!

Sometimes, writing is straight-up fun. Other times, it's work. Most days, it's both. I'm not sure why, but this book felt more like work. I think it's because I had a lot of things going on tugging me in a hundred directions,  keeping me from sitting down to scribble in peace.

As if to underscore that, I'm a long way from home as I write this. Kat and I are renting a room in Emeryville, basically Oakland, California, and I've been camped out in the Berkeley Public Library for four straight days trying to finish editing. We're here because Kat is doing an art thing in a studio next door to, but not affiliated with Pixar and will finish up tomorrow. We should have a few days to bounce around out here and be lazy before we head back to Austin.

I'm hoping to visit Alcatraz, and we want to drive down and spend some time at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And whichever novel things come up in between. Like spending $4.75 on a slice of toast this morning for breakfast. Seriously!

Now, I admit, it was a piece of homemade sourdough dripping with browned butter (whatever that is) and honey. It was pretty good. But on the menu, it did say "Toast - $4.75," and I still ordered it.

Okay, so I've rambled way off the point. Sorry about that. But I'm just getting in character for the next Dusty's Diary book which I need to have wrapped up and sent off to the publishers in the next few weeks. So, please forgive me.

I tried some different things in writing Freedom's Fist, mostly with process, some with story structure. I like experimenting with new things and trying to find the sacred path to the perfect novel. Mostly, it feels like I'm wandering in the woods, tripping over ant mounds, but sometimes, the words hit the page just right, and I feel like I've taken a step closer. Please let me know what you think after you've read this one. Leave a few words in a review, or visit my FB page and tell me there.

Being so deeply involved in the creation of a book, going through round after round of rewrites and edits, it always gets to a point where I don't know anymore if what I've written is good. So, I depend on you. Good or bad. Detailed or sparse. Your feedback truly does help.

Oh, one final note. Kat usually edits my stuff because one thing I'm certain I have a talent for is creating typos. She's in that art thing I  mentioned above, so she didn't read over this section. Please forgive me for my grammatical transgressions.

See you at the end of the next book.

Thank You!

Bobby

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Amazing people who made this book happen…

Cover Design

Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a.  187designz

Cover Illustration

Illustration © Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com

Editing, Proofreading, Book Formatting

Kat Kramer Adair

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A collaborative series with fellow zombie author T.W.  Piperbrook, this series has a little more of a Sci-Fi feel, popular with folks who like Game of Thrones.  It explores what happens 300 years in the future after the apocalypse, when man has rebuilt and gone back to an almost medieval society.

Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller (trilogy)

A really great terrorism thriller with awesome reviews.  It focuses on the devastating Ebola outbreak and the possibility of weaponized Ebola by terrorist organizations and nationalized resources like blood with Ebola antibodies.  A more in-depth and complex observation of the real world.  This series follows an American college student teaching in Uganda as the country comes under attack from the deadly virus as he tries to make his way back to the safety of his family back in the United States.

It’s also historically and medically accurate, so you’ll learn a little about the history of the disease as well…did you know that Ebola has been airborne in the US in the past?  Or that it can survive in semen for 90 days or more after a person is declared “Ebola-free?” (This is Kat’s favorite!)

Black Rust, Black Virus (first two in a series)

A newer series from Bobby that also deals with a different post-apocalyptic reality.  Christian Black is a bounty hunter charged with hunting down the infected…a “Regulator.”  When caught in an unsanctioned kill, Christian sets about to clear his name.  A fairly deep character, whose flaws are an important backstory to his adventurous life.

Dusty’s Diary: One Frustrated Man’s Zombie Apocalypse Story (first in a series)

Fun and crass…be careful if you’re easily offended!  Has some great advice about what to pack in your post-apocalyptic bunker (don’t forget the porn!).  Dusty’s Diary has an uncertain future…people like it, so I’ll probably write more in the future.  This is a short story, and the next in the series is coming soon (but Bobby keeps saying this so you never know!).

Text copyright © 2017, Bobby L.  Adair & Beezle Media, LLC

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties.  Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited.  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

This book is a work of fiction.  Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.  Well, maybe Tarlow…but the real Tarlow is way cooler than the character in the book.