Freedom's Fire Box Set: The Complete Military Space Opera Series
Author: Bobby Adair
Date: 2019-01-30 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: The Bestselling, Epic Space Adventure, Freedom's Fire - The complete series of 6 books, in one box set. It was never a question of if the aliens would come, it was only ever when. The first interstellar war, a generation ago, left humanity enslaved. Now humans fight in the armies of their masters to save themselves from annihilation. At least, that's what the propaganda insists is true. What the layers of lies keep hidden, is how badly the new war is going for the people of earth. Now it's Dylan Kane's turn to blast into the heavens and join the battle, but what his masters don't know, is that
Publisher: Beezle Media, LLC

FREEDOM’S FIRE

This Special Edition Contains All Six Books
in the

Freedom’s Fire Series

And the Prequel

by

Bobby Adair

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Text copyright © 2019, Bobby L. Adair

Chapter 1

It’s up there right now, slowly killing my wife.

I hate it.

I mouth the words in silent syllables. I think them loud and feel them hard.

In my mind, I’m wrapping my hands around that thing’s doll-sized ankles, swinging it like a bowling pin—bashing its head into the sidewalk, coconut skull cracking, splattering cerebral gel across the yard.

I savor the violence, like I’m doing it for real.

But I remain in my downstairs office, inert at my desk in the glow of a salvaged computer screen.

I want to stomp its spindly arms and grind them into the concrete. I imagine breaking its bones, though I know it has none to make the satisfying crack I yearn to hear. Its limbs are bendy-resilient like green twigs. They won’t snap.

At least it bleeds sticky amber sap when its gray, dolphin skin splits.

There’s that.

I hear a noise upstairs, small and shuffling.

I drive my criminal thoughts back to the dark place I keep in my soul, a hole so deep nothing can see inside. It’s where I veil my secrets, hide what I am.

The mask the gray things see when their big black eyes scan across my face is servile. I look away. I fake a tremble. I gasp when I need to. And when they probe with their alien minds, they feel my weakness. They think my charade is as real as the power they lord over every hostage human on this earth.

They see a cog in their machine. A slave in all but name.

My disguise runs deep.

I look at the clock. Half past one.

It shouldn’t be awake.

The things stay on a tight diurnal schedule set by the spin of the planet on which they evolved—three hours awake, three hours comatose. It’s rare for one to deviate from its sleeping pattern, especially one so young. Ours is three-and-a-half, still eighteen months from maturity.

Light feet are coming across the loft outside the room where I used to lie in bed with my wife, feeling her skin sticky against mine, hearing her breath hush across my ear.

Some memories sweeten with time.

Wood creaks.

A foot on the first stair.

Leech.

Tick.

Parasite.

I have more thoughts yet to hide.

When they awarded us the privilege of rearing one of their hatchlings, Claire was just as normal as the next wife down the block, but prettier—always catching the ire of those kinds of girls who like to envy. A wide smile and teeth so perfect you just knew they were fake. Corn silk hair flowed over her shoulders. A seductive curve traced from her waist down to her hip.

The way her breath would catch in her throat when I unbuttoned her jeans.

Memories I shouldn’t be indulging.

Instead, I recall her eyes—plastic ice, blue and false—showing me for a time that she and I were the same, two imposters, each behind a façade, each with an aspiration buried too deep to see.

The wood of another stair bends.

I cock my head.

Is it that thing?

Full-grown they only weigh about forty pounds. Ours is maybe twenty-five. It likes to creep through the house on fairy feet that grow more silent every day, trying to catch me unawares, suspecting my truth and wanting to get close enough to feel my deception.

I kill the contraband video I’m watching, eject the fingernail-sized memory card, and slip it beneath my keyboard. I alt-tab to a mindless game, focusing on colors of red and black while filling my head with hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs.

More squeaks on the steps.

Its pace quickens, caution gone.

I don’t look through the wide doorway between the first-floor office and the living room where the staircase stands in the night shadows. I don’t want it to know I’m aware. I know it thinks I’m a dexterous monkey with rudimentary mental capacities and a dependence on sound for communication—no better than an ant secreting hormones into the air for all to sniff—incapable of hiding my plots.

The most believable lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Still, it sneaks.

“You still up?”

Startled, I look, and instead of that thing, I see Claire, standing on the landing halfway up the stairs, her wrinkled skin drooping off sinewy arms, crackly gray hair, and eyelids hanging tiredly away, exposing pink flesh beneath. Surrounded by whites veined in red, her irises have turned to haze.

As I imagine cold air drying out those eyes and making them sting, I sympathetically blink.

She doesn’t.

It’s like she’s unaware, protected from the world’s rough touch by an opioid addiction that casts every day in a numb blur.

Naked and Holocaust-thin.

I’m thirty-three. Claire and I were born at the same hospital just a few months apart. Now, only the rows of faultless teeth assure me she’s the young woman I married just ten years ago, and I know there can’t be eighteen months of life left in her.

Worms of guilt burrow deep into my soul, biting and pissing, affirming the cost of my mistakes.

We all have sins to pay for.

“He’s asleep.” The girlish lilt of her voice has long since gone. Now it sounds like tearing paper modulated into words.

I look into the darkness above her, toward the bedroom. “You’re not supposed to be away from it while it’s asleep.”

“I need you.”

I hide my cringe. The thing upstairs has aged fifty extra years out of her.

She caresses one of her sagging breasts and licks her lips. She shows me those glistening teeth as she stretches a smile. “Don’t you think I’m still beautiful?”

I hide the NO in the dark part of my mind with the rest of my secrets. I can’t let her see my truth because if she comes to know my feelings, then that thing will know, too.

I stand and wheel my chair away from the desk as I reach up to loose the buttons on my shirt. “Come.”

She slinks down the remaining stairs and crosses the floor, closing on me in a sultry rush of grinding knees and wheezing breath. Her fingers find my skin, and I smell the odor of the thing upstairs seeped into her wrinkles, a urine-soaked diaper left to ferment for an August week in the back of a car.

She fumbles to get my pants down and pushes me onto the couch. She climbs on top of me, her body desperate for pleasure.

I don’t resist.

I participate—enough.

She puts my hands where she wants them.

She tells me to squeeze, to caress, to kiss. She always liked to be in control.

We wrestle rhythmically.

Thankfully, not for long.

She gets where she’s going and howls loud enough to wake the neighbors. Then stops, gasping.

I pretend to get there, too, get caught in the lie, tell her I’m tired.

Too much pressure at work.

Afraid for friends who’ve gone off to the war.

Last week’s shrinking rations.

Too many problems. Not enough room for all of them in my head.

She doesn’t care. She only wants a fiction she can pour into the void that grows inside her as her body wastes away.

Leaving me on the couch, she crosses the shadowy room, mounts the creaking stairs, and balances herself with the railing all the way up. She crosses the loft and goes back into the room we used to share, gently closing the door behind.

More soft steps.

The bedsprings meekly groan as they take her weight.

She’s under the covers, cuddling that thing warm again, content to let it leach the last of her life away.

I exhale my guilt into the cold house and peel myself off the couch, leaving my clothes on the floor. I cross to the kitchen, and open the fridge. I find a beer way in the back. I pop the cap and gulp it to wash the taste of her out of my mouth.

It’s all I can do.

I’d like to shower and soap the smell away, but I can’t. She’ll hear the water running, and the insecurity she fosters will make her ask why I had to clean myself so quickly after we’d made love. I’ll have no answer, and she’ll suspect the truth of me not wanting to feel her touch. That will lead to a more painful truth I have difficulty admitting. Disgust. And then she’ll churn the truth out of that feeling and she’ll see my hate.

I can’t afford hate—not from her and not from that gray thing upstairs.

I won’t waste my years of deception when finally I’ve reached the eve of the beginning.

Elfin monsters like the one wrapped in my wife’s arms don’t belong in my house, not in my town, in my country, or on my planet.

Before the sun sets tomorrow, I’ll cease being a disgruntled servant accepting those twiggy things as my overlords. I’ll stop researching, and learning, and practicing, and wishing. I’ll stop recruiting and scheming. My cocoon of lies will split open and I’ll emerge a man who’ll never have to face his masters again without a weapon in his hands and murder in his eyes.

I’ll live for the dream of freedom and I’ll fight for a single cause.

Revolution!

Chapter 2

The cold morning air bites my skin as I look up at the sky.

Fitting. It’s gray.

I check my bike’s tires for air. They’re worn smooth. Replacements are almost impossible to find. In the three decades of the Grays’ dominion over the earth, they’ve allowed very few resources and little manufacturing time to be set aside for products that only serve to make humans happy. Every item available on the black market is either salvaged from things built before the Grays arrived or is creatively surplused out of their supply chain.

With the new war in our solar system in its second year, those surpluses have dried up, and most of the salvagers have been drafted into the Solar Defense Force. The rest snuck away into the mountains with their families, hiding from a world that changed too fast, hoping to ride out the hostilities in safety.

Good thing the bike only needs to make one more trip.

I pull the garage door shut on a car built before I was born. It runs well for its age. I’ll leave it for Sydney, Claire’s sister, who lives in our basement. She won’t be able to barter for much gas, but I’ve left seventy gallons in cans lined along the back wall. My job at the grav factory affords me a fuel ration for my commute, but not much more. In the spring and summer, when there wasn’t snow piled on the roads, I biked to work and saved my ration. Some of that is in the cans. Some of it, I used to drive down to the illegal market on the south side of Denver and trade for things I wanted.

Back when everything was good with Claire, I’d occasionally burn some of my saved gasoline to cruise up one of the old mountain roads. She and I would find a place with nobody around for miles. We’d shuck off our clothes, lie in the grass, and revel in the pleasures of being young and wrapped in each other’s arms. Afterward, with the breeze blowing cool across our skin, we’d look out over the trees and watch the clouds float above peaks stretched to the horizon.

We didn’t care then that the earth was ruled by little gray creatures from a faraway star.

We were living what seemed like a romance story from the pre-siege videos.

We were in love.

At least, I thought so at the time.

Throwing a leg over the bike, I shrug my backpack into a comfortable position, slip my gloves on, and zip my jacket all the way up. Rotating my neck for a good fit, I can’t help but look at the gray ribbons tied into bows on the limbs of the fir tree in our front yard. Some of them are crisp and shiny. Most are dull and frayed, there since the day Claire brought the hatchling into our home.

The ribbons piss me off.

They’re pointless offerings of respect and solidarity. Tokens from neighbors to honor Claire’s sacrifice for the good of us all.

Residual sighs of relief—better your wife than mine!

The ribbons are wasted resources when everything is in short supply.

A reminder I’m the bastard to blame for her choice, although adopting the baby Gray was solely her decision.

“To hell with you people.” Nobody’s outside to hear me mutter.

I stand on the bike’s pedals and roll down the hill.

I ignore the guilt, and the wind numbs my face as I pick up speed.

The hill curves with the shape of the mountain. Tall pines line the road and fill the gaps between old ski condos. I make my way to the south end of town before turning north for a last trip past the nineteenth-century buildings on Main Street. Breckenridge is dead so early in the morning.

On the flat, empty boulevard, I pedal hard to get my blood flowing, and trace the center stripe on the road with my tires.

I’ll warm up soon.

The old-timers still talk of what a bustling town Breckenridge used to be back when it was a ski destination. Before the Grays.

I realize then, too many of my thoughts carry that before-after qualifier.

Before the Grays. After the Grays.

Before the siege. After.

Human history ended an era and spawned a new one three decades ago when those rubbery imps arrived to claim us as their property.

Before, tourists flew in on commercial jets from all over the country. Three hundred people at a time, coddled on cushioned comfort in aluminum tubes that guzzled jet fuel by the ton, burning more gas in a minute than I’m rationed for a month, just to tear across the high atmosphere and vacation far from home. I’ve never even seen an old gasoline-powered airplane fly, let alone one big enough to carry three hundred people across the continent.

It strains the imagination—so much wasted back then when we have so little now. If only we’d not lavished ourselves in frivolities but spent our efforts preparing for the inevitable.

And contact was inevitable.

Too many stars in the boundless void for it not to be.

The only thing in the sky these days are the gravity lifts hauling shipping container loads into orbit, and an occasional battle cruiser rising out of the shipyards down in Arizona for her maiden voyage around the moon.

Or rushing to the war.

The war is everything.

It’s bleeding our planet of people and resources. Hell, they’re even pulling up the rails the trains used to run on. One hundred and fifty thousand miles of tracks, sixteen million tons of steel, just lying on the ground. We don’t use the railroads anymore, but the fact we’ve become desperate enough to dismantle them frightens me.

A day will come when there’s nothing left.

A worse day will arrive when these new invaders set their Neanderthal feet on earth’s sacred soil and massacre us all.

It’s because of the Grays.

They’re the true bastards in every tragedy, intimate or grand, on this weary planet. They’re the ones my neighbors should point their accusing fingers at. But the ribbon-hanging bumpkins on my block, like most people I know, are too brainwashed by the Grays’ lies to see the truth.

Maybe they’re too lazy to look for it.

Maybe they’re just afraid.

I’m out of the city as I lose feeling in my ears. Downtown Breckenridge is only eight blocks long from end to end, and it’s colder this morning than it seemed when I got on the bike.

The road down the valley to Frisco won’t be busy. Still, I jump a crumbling curb and bounce down an embankment to access the old bike path close to the edge of the river. There’s no ice in the water this time of year, yet the peaks on both sides of the valley are tipped in snow left over from last year, and this season’s blanket is already starting to build.

Water gurgles over the rocks as I fly past. I feel like I’m racing it down to the reservoir, but mostly I’m listening. It’s my solace, and has been for all the years I’ve sweated through twelve-hour shifts in the grav factory.

Near the marshes at the shallow end of the lake, the bike path curves around the old high school. I reflexively gag. The whole building was converted into a hatchery for the Grays back when I was a kid, and stinks up this end of the valley. Like the grav factory, the hatchery runs twenty-four hours a day, six days a week.

Everybody is allowed one day off.

It’s an alien labor management protocol. As little as the Grays value humans, they don’t work us to death. They want us energetic enough in our free time to produce more little versions of ourselves that’ll grow up to serve their insignificant empire.

Insignificant?

Do I dare call it that?

Yes.

That’s been the rumor this past year with the war going so badly. The Grays are an insignificant life form in our end of the galaxy.

And whatever crumbs of pride we humans fostered in our hearts after the siege and before the new war started have now turned to self-loathing, because thirty years ago, the insignificant Grays conquered us.

Once past the hatchery, the bike path runs up a hill through the pines on the west side of the lake. Along the crest, a condo complex had been under construction back when the Grays laid their siege. It was never completed. Now it’s a maze of culverts, concrete walls, rusting rebar, and thin, white-trunked aspens covered in quaking golden leaves, ready to drop.

Between the trees, I see the little town of Frisco a few miles ahead, also on the west bank. Tiny Dillon is on the east. Silverthorne, not much bigger, spreads into the valley below the aging dam. Heading north, the spaceport’s warehouses, barracks, admin buildings, and launch pads fill every flat space between the mountains as far as I can see.

Grav lifts are setting down in the spaceport, loading and launching back into the air in quick turnarounds. Many more than usual. They climb in the shade between the summits. Through the low-hanging clouds they drag trails of mist, catching the sun shining over the peaks as they ascend. For a few moments, they glow like escaping stars. They accelerate at altitude and the sonic booms echo down as they blast past the speed of sound.

The Grays are moving two SDF divisions into space today, including the one I’ve been attached to.

I’m anxious to be fitted into an actual battle suit for the first time and to step onto a grav lift bound for the endless void.

Well, just the solar system, really.

It’ll be the beginning.

A war. A revolution.

And maybe my death added to a billion others. At least I’ll die a free man.

After a life of servitude, what price wouldn’t I pay for just one breath of freedom?

The bike is coasting.

I check my watch. I need to ride a little faster.

The Grays are not lenient masters. They don’t understand tardiness, which seems odd for a species that had no concept of measured time before they arrived on our planet.

They’re a telepathic race, always in communication with one another, living in the now, recalling their history from details parsed among them. When they’re ready to do something, they act by consensus, though there is a flexible hierarchy of dominance between them no human understands.

Their telepathy is the reason I hide my thoughts. The gel in their skulls—the goo which passes for a brain—functions so differently than our mass of neurons that making a telepathic link from one of them to one of us is laborious. The microelectrical activity their minds sense in our heads is mostly incomprehensible.

However, some of them learn, and some of them grow adept at reading humans.

Those are the dangerous ones.

Especially for people like me.

Chapter 3

Chafing inside my containment suit, I smell my sweat. Worse than usual. I drank too many beers in the wee hours and they’re now seeping through my pores.

For closure? For celebration? Regret?

There’s no answer to the why.

There’s only the future.

I’ve chosen my path. I harbor no uncertainty about where I’m going.

Unfortunately, at the moment, my headache is growing so intense it’s hard to focus. And at the gravity factory, focus is everything.

I’m nearly four hours into my shift, my final. A partial day.

From the speakers mounted on the ceiling, the shrill voice of a Korean woman bleats monotonic, rhythmic sounds into the sweltering air. The first break of the day is coming. She tells us to pull strong for a few more minutes. For the war effort. For the fate of our eternal brotherhood with the Grays.

Everything depends on the grav plates we produce.

Quality.

Quantity.

We have to do our share.

Every shift she goes on like that. The words stay mostly the same, yet they roll off her tongue a little differently each day. I can’t shut her up, and I can’t tune her out. Most of my adult life I’ve worked in the factory. I’ve had plenty of time to fantasize unusual and intricate pain for the woman behind that voice. At the moment, I only hope she hates the monotony of her job as much as I do in the swampy air on the production floor.

It’s fitting.

But distracting.

I’m counting the last minutes of my factory life, feeling them drip by while I’m surrounded by scores of people in bio-containment suits.

We’re all draped in drab blue, shapeless, with a filter apparatus over every face, clear goggles protecting every pair of eyes. We’re social animals who spend eighty-two sterile hours a week with only a single dimension through which to distinguish one another, to communicate, to form the intimate bonds every human needs.

Besides our eyes, we’re all the same, except for Phil.

I look down the line to see him, my estranged brother-in-law. With the extra weight he carries around his gut, he makes his bio-containment suit look overfilled. Everyone on our line is habitually checking on Phil. We can’t have his suit catching on something and tearing. That would shut down the line and maybe the whole factory. We don’t wear the suits for our safety—no, they protect the microbes we inlay on the plates.

At the moment, Phil is etching the last of the paper-thin, ceramic composite plates I’ll ever have to work.

After him, cleaners flow chemicals and distilled water over the rotating discs before warm, filtered air dries them. They ensure that no micro-particle remains on the surface, organic or otherwise. Inspectors follow, looking for flaws in the etch, for resilient contaminants.

Humans, trying to be perfect.

Our line crew rotates among the stations at every break, every shift. It helps keep us fresh. It reduces mistakes.

Right now, it’s my turn on the most challenging step in the process, the secret sauce that makes this alien tech the kind of invention we humans couldn’t possibly have stumbled across on our own.

And I realize immediately how wrong I am.

We humans have a long history of serendipitous breakthroughs. One of those breakthroughs is proving itself out in the factory right now.

The war is going so badly that the Grays have finally rescinded a cardinal rule and allowed their mechanically clever monkeys—us—to merge our computer tech with one of their most treasured technologies, gravity manipulation.

Using computers, two lines in the factory have been converted from manual processes to automated ones. Now, each of those lines produces more by itself than the whole factory did prior to the upgrade.

Nevertheless, I’m required to finish my shift.

I place a dinner plate-sized disc in the bottom of an open-ended leaden cylinder large enough to store a few basketballs within. I lean the faceplate of my suit onto the top of the tube, sealing it closed with a rubber ring around my visor. I tune out the noise and ignore the acrid fumes that find their way through my protective layers of Tyvec.

Sweat beads tickle my skin as they run down inside the suit.

Concentrate.

I open and then close each of three gas valves to send small clouds of minuscule organisms into the leaden cylinder. The microbes in the vapor are each married in symbiotic pairs. All of the Grays’ advancements over humans depend on biological technology, most of which utilizes organisms inextricably bound to others.

Even me.

As the newborn son of a woman working in the molybdenum mine a half hour west of Breck, my mother made the bold choice to give her son the only advantage she saw in a world run by Grays.

A choice she hoped would lead to a life of privilege, it carried an unquantifiable risk she was only able to ignore because she was making the decision in the shadow of my father’s death.

My mother didn’t want a laborer’s short life for me. In those days, there were only two ways out of hard labor in the service of the Grays. One of those was to be born a North Korean. They’d made their deal with the Grays and earned their special place while the rest of the world was foolishly trying to stand united against the alien invader during the siege. Since neither of my parents was Korean, that left my mother a single choice, to allow the Grays to implant a symbiont in my head. So few humans were chosen for the privilege, it must have felt like a lottery win to my mother.

Now I’m a member of the first generation of humans to have an alien bug implanted at birth. An avocado seed of a thing with a thousand hair-thin follicles rooted into my cortex.

And the privilege came.

I have an enviable house, a car, gasoline to run it, food at every meal, plenty to sate my hunger—mostly—and even meat on occasion.

However, I’m the Grays’ tool, bound to them by the bug.

They see the thoughts in my head—they believe they see them all.

The bug has rudimentary telepathic abilities, so by using it, I have the capacity to control the biological switches in the Grays’ machinery. That makes me useful in a Gray world.

The bug is able to see gravity, so in my mind I see it, too, a 3D picture of the world augmented in colors and intensities normal humans can’t perceive.

The alien symbiont made me into a lesser version of the Grays, more capable than normal humans, and more valuable. So it almost goes without saying every unenhanced person I’ve ever met resents me.

Especially the North Koreans.

In the grav factory with my face against the tube and my eyes closed, I use my bug—not even thinking of it as anything other than a natural part of me—to precipitate millions of symbiont pairs out of the gas, coaxing them to settle onto the etched disc in just the right orientation, in the perfect spots, touching one another just so.

An intricate lattice of life.

To lay all those microbes on a grav plate in the few minutes it takes requires all the attention I can bring to bear. Doing it as quickly and flawlessly as I do makes me the rarest of people. Even among those with bugs in their heads, I’m recognized as a talent, ripe for reward.

With the war having burned through a whole generation of North Koreans who’d been implanted with bugs and sent into space to navigate the Grays’ ships and aim their railguns, the Grays decided it was time to give their loyal servants from other countries a chance to sacrifice their lives for the cause. They allowed the lines in the grav plate factories to be automated so people like me could be spared to fly into space with the last of earth’s defenders.

Like most masters, the Grays have a peculiar sense of reward.

The thing they didn’t understand, though, was my officer’s commission and my attachment to an SDF division was exactly what I’d wanted from the day the war with the Trogs began, when I learned the Grays were putting weapons in the hands of humans.

A weapon in the hands of a man who grates at the manacles of his servitude is a dangerous thing.

Breathing slowly to take my mind off my plans and refocus on my job, I lay the last of the microbes in their nirvana spots. I remove the disk from the leaden cylinder and carefully pass it on to the next step in the process. Before any of the unsuspecting little creatures has an inkling of what’s coming, a blast of UV light kills them all.

The carcasses are then dehydrated where they lay. A protective film is spread over the cemetery disc to hold the special arrangement of their mineral remains in place.

The finished discs are stacked, all oriented in an exact direction, the edges lined up to form a solid contact for DC to flow in one of two directions. The whole pile is snugged into a titanium housing, and the grav plate is finished. Run a current through one way, and you get gravity. Reverse the current, and you have anti-gravity.

Combined with the Grays’ fusion reactor technology, it’s the power to travel the stars and to conquer backward apes like us.

That power, too, will soon be in my hands.

Chapter 4

I wear my stale odor like I wear the smudges on my knees, evidence of a life fading into the past.

Before being granted permission to leave, I had to kneel at the tiny feet of the factory’s six Gray overseers.

Please, foul little creatures, grant me permission to stand tall like a man.

It was foolish to think that heretical thought so strong, chomping at my reins, prematurely feeling my freedom.

Two of the factory’s Korean toughs looked on, or that’s to say, looked down on me as I bowed. Dead, coal eyes. Jet-black hair. They’re all fuckers.

To them, I’m subhuman.

And then my Gray masters dismissed me so I could bike the last few miles from Frisco down to the spaceport.

Each bug-headed line worker in the factory bowed the same as me, one at a time, asking permission to go and serve the next overlord in line. In doing so, the Grays, blinded by their pride, willfully sent a host of scheming insurgents into the midst of their last great effort to save themselves from the creatures invading the solar system.

Back in the moment, I breathe my last peace along the bike path, feeling the crisp, late-morning air. Around me, tall mountains are broken by jutting rocks, blanketed by the carcasses of long-dead evergreens, splashed yellow with autumn aspens.

I’ll never bow again.

Never again.

It’s as much a promise as a prayer.

I pedal past the reservoir, over the dam, and then back along the burbling river until I roll beneath the interstate highway. It’s clogged both east and west with buses and semis bringing in two SDF heavy assault divisions, their equipment, and support personnel. All virgins to war. It’ll take the rest of the day to have so many soldiers fitted into suits, ferried into space, and loaded onto the newly designed assault ships, the mysterious wonder-weapon that’s supposed to turn the tide of the war.

Not likely.

I come to a stop. The bicycle path is blocked by a fence. Like everything else on the north end of the valley, the recreational path has been subsumed by the spaceport. I hop off my bike and lay it in the grass by the river. No lock. No need. I open my bag and find a pen and notepad. I write out a message and tuck it into a gap in the headlamp bracket.

TAKE THE BIKE IF YOU WANT. I DON’T NEED IT ANYMORE.

Then I wait. I’m supposed to meet Vishnu, my contact with the Free Army, for any last-minute instructions he might have for me before I lead my ring of traitors into orbit.

Enough time passes to make me uncomfortable, and I decide there must be nothing new. Everything is going as planned.

I climb a steep bank to get up to road level.

Chaos.

Soldiers in uniform unload from their transports and try to figure out where to go. Boys just starting to shave. Middle-aged men with gray-flecked hair. Girls, not old enough for legal sex. And mothers wearing the scars of war’s intimate touch, wrinkles eroded deep by worry, loss in their eyes. Third and fourth choice demographics for the draft. Maybe fifth. Sixth, even. All the strong, the young, the fast, are in suits up there among the asteroids, already fighting, or drifting lifeless in the void as the moisture from their cells leaches into the vacuum.

Our history could be written in the tales of our armies, their glory and their victories, all forged in the fire of discipline, tradition, sacrifice, and maybe a thousand trivial rules and rituals that don’t make any damn sense to a civilian looking in from the outside. Those ingredients, when drilled into a recruit in the right proportions and reinforced through the camaraderie of soldiers who believe in a cause and know victory is their destiny, turn a regular person into a soldier.

Sadly, all of those ingredients were left out of this batch.

We’re soldiers in little more than name. We’re familiar with the words we’re supposed to have memorized and we’ve all passed our multiple-choice tests, yet we know nothing about marching, taking orders, sacrificing for our brothers and sisters, or any of the steps in-between.

We’re sandbags being thrown into the breach in the dike.

Most of us will wash away.

Others will sink under the weight of the dead, piling on top.

No, not soldiers, not us. We’re draftees sprinkled with a few volunteers.

At thirty, still young and strong, I am an oddity among these dregs.

As sure as I know I’ll never kiss my shriveling wife again, the Grays will bleed our planet to a husk. They tell us it’s the survival of our species we fight for, but I darkly suspect it’s only their pride we defend.

MSS men—Ministry of State Security—are in their gaudy uniforms everywhere. They’re all North Koreans, of course. It occurs to me that I refer to the Koreans the same way the old men in Breck do, as type ‘North.’ The NORTH is a moot distinction. Soon after Pyongyang made its traitorous deal back in the days of the siege, the Grays thanked them for their fidelity by obliterating South Korea. China also paid a price for having nudged too hard, too often, to keep their nasty little subdivided neighbor in line with global norms.

Now there’s only Korea, bordered on the south by a wasteland peninsula and a desert of destruction on the north.

I stand on a curb and look around to get my bearings.

The MSS autocrats are stopping every man and woman, affirming their authority by leaning in close to faces, yelling instructions, pointing, and keying in arm tattoos.

“You!”

“You!”

I realize one of the MSS men is pointing at me, mouth loud and arrogant. A lieutenant.

“Here!” He gestures at the fragmented asphalt where he expects me to come and plant my feet.

Normally, I’d hurry to act when ordered by an MSS man. Not today. I don’t feel the fetters of their authority so tight. In the midst of twenty thousand SDF wannabe killers, I don’t even fear the randomness of MSS violence.

I saunter toward him.

His face turns redder with each casual step I take. His accented words become harder to understand. He has one hand waving his data pad and one on the butt of his pistol.

I jog the last lazy steps.

“I could shoot you for delaying! Are you coward?” His accent gets stronger with emotion. “You deserter?”

“Clearly.” My tone sparkles with sarcasm. The idea of liberty has made me brave and a little foolish. A lifetime of pent-up scorn is trying to burst out. Still, I’m hours away from having a weapon in my hand.

Just that much longer.

Forcing myself to look at my feet instead of into the lieutenant’s eye, I wrap my next words in humility. It’s a trap I’m laying. “Clearly, I’m not a deserter, sir. I rode my bike down the path, sir. I just came up from the river, sir.” Holding out my forearm for him to see, I say, “I need my assignment, sir.”

My arm, from the crook of my elbow to my wrist, is tattooed with an alphanumeric code written in Korean letters two inches tall.

He reads.

He keys it into his data pad.

And then he freezes.

I look up at him. The trap has snapped.

He knows.

I try not to smile.

His world just took a turn into the surreal, and he’s confused, afraid. A Caucasian commissar outranking an MSS lieutenant, the Korean nightmare coming true.

Much more gently than the first time he did so, he takes my wrists.

Still, he doesn’t believe. I can see it in his body language.

His voice is syrup and sugar now. “May I read you again?”

I nod so he knows he’s not worth the effort it takes me to release a word into the air.

He looks at my tattooed skin. Carefully, he keys one symbol at a time into his device.

No mistake.

His face is animated with the thoughts running through his head. Meekly, he says, “Major Commissar Kane?”

Satisfaction.

Oh, glorious satisfaction.

For years, I worked hard to be the most productive bug-headed drone in the grav factory, and every time the Grays invasively probed my thoughts, I showed them the enthusiastic servility they hoped to see. I convinced them past any wisp of doubt I was just brimming with that one human characteristic they value above all others—loyalty.

So much loyalty, in fact, they believed I would be an efficient proxy for squeezing it out of other humans.

So, without one shred of military experience, they commissioned me Major Commissar Kane, an unflinching enforcer of the Grays’ will in their flawed military.

Now I’ll be expected to raise my weapon and gun down human cowards and mutineers.

Only I won’t need to.

As the highest-ranking officer on an assault ship, only the Korean captain and communications officers will be outside my direct authority, though not necessarily above it. Mortified with the way the war is going, the Grays, instead of blaming themselves for their feckless strategy and ruinous weapons prohibitions, put the fault for the mess on their Korean lapdogs. The shift in power away from the Koreans is their punishment.

As for the two American members of the bridge crew and every SDF soldier we’ll be hauling into battle, they’ll all have to answer to the officer above them in their chain of command. They will also have to answer to me. To make sure that authority is real, every battle suit worn by every one of them will be coded to special gravity switches embedded in my helmet. I’ll be able to magnetically freeze the metallic parts in their suits at will, rendering them immobile, and also be able to turn off the life support—in the worst cases, instantly kill any one of them or all of them with a high-voltage jolt from the micro-fusion reactor that drives their suits.

I’ll be the most powerful man on the ship.

Feared.

Hated behind my back.

Plotted against.

The system is designed for that eventuality as well. I can opt to link my gravity switches to a biosensor in my suit. If I stop breathing, they all do, too.

They can’t murder me.

When we go into battle, they’ll do everything they can to protect me even though I’m not expected to fight.

Regardless, I’m ready for war.

What no Gray is aware of, what none of the MSS men realize, what not one of the twenty thousand combat troops flowing into the spaceport knows, is that I’ve run through every simulator on every weapon. I learned about the tactical roles of each man in a squad and platoon in every situation the simulators had to offer. I’ve familiarized myself with every job of a naval ship’s small human crew. I think I understand space warfare in three dimensions with variable gravity.

Hopefully not false hopes from book-learnin’ bullshit.

The only thing I’ve actually done with my own real, live body in three dimensions was that I spent hundreds of hours in a zero-g training room put together by me and my grav factory coconspirators with reject plates in an unused theater. A friend let me onto the rifle range at the spaceport from time to time.

I’m a pretty good shot with a railgun.

My biggest concern? I’ve analyzed the rumors trickling back to earth so I can understand why—if the whispers are true—we’ve lost every major battle in this conflict so far.

Besides a fair number of the sergeants, men promoted from those few lucky enough to have survived a battle or two, I might be the most combat-ready soldier in the spaceport.

“Major Kane, sir.” The MSS lieutenant is pointing over the throng moving through the gates. He wants me away from him before I decide to do something about the disrespectful tone he took when he first addressed me. “Staging J-33. The hangar with the curved, red roof.”

I look at the vast rows of warehouses and buildings, spotting J-33 painted in tall letters on a wall a half-mile ahead. “I pick up my gear there?”

“Yes, sir. They’ll have your lift assignment, crew and platoon rosters, and assault ship designation.” He taps his data pad with a finger. “I have you checked in.” He cordially waves me to start moving. “This way, please.”

I nod. No more words for him.

It’s petty revenge.

Like every other human on the planet, I despise the Koreans, not only for the betrayal, not only for the collaboration, but for the way they relish the brutality they dole out to the rest of us.

Like the Grays, soon the Koreans will exist no more in earth’s solar system.

One more item of my list of gruesome to-dos.

Chapter 5

It’s been hours.

I worked through the crush of bodies moving toward their assigned armory buildings. At the door of Hangar J-33, I was scanned again and told to wait in one of eighteen lines.

Now, the toes of my shoes are touching a yellow stripe across the floor I’m not supposed to cross until I’m called.

Next in the queue to receive my equipment.

I’m hot, and I’m bored.

In the lines around me, I’ve spotted several of my coconspirators. Some are already through and on their way to their muster stations. Others, like me, are still waiting. We’ll all be commissars. J-33 is the commissar equipment building.

Vishnu’s promises, so far, have been kept.

Past a female commissar finishing up at the station with the techs just in front of me, past a staging area where workers in coveralls scurry, busy at tasks moving pieces of equipment needing to go here or there in a hurry, I see into the bowels of the warehouse.

Racks stand in rows forty feet tall. Technicians push ladders on wheels up and down the aisles. Near the front, they’re moving coffin-size lockers on and off the shelves. Each of the coffins is open on one side, and contains a full commissar kit—weapon, ammo, undergarments, and battle suit. A modified construction suit, really. Each is sized—height, weight, arm and leg length—for the soldier intended to wear it.

Further into the warehouse, people are working at putting the kits together from racks that contain the individual pieces.

Past them, rows and rows of technicians toil at stations, repairing damaged suits and testing the systems contained in the integrated backpacks.

At the far end of the warehouse, through the open doors, out in the sun, laborers are unloading dumpster-size containers. Scarred, limp battle suits tumble out onto expansive metal grates above drain culverts.

No bodies inside, just the suits.

Also guns, empty magazines, boots, and helmets.

People in coveralls rubberized up to the chest use pressure washers to clean the salvaged suits, inside and out. Water sprays in white and foamy, and drains down reddish-brown.

A tech stomps a lump to push it through the grate. It looks like the flesh of an animal killed on the road. Then it’s gone, washed away with swirling water.

I come to realize none of the equipment is new. The Grays don’t waste anything—anything except people.

“Step up, dumbass! How many times I gotta ask?”

The commissar who was being equipped ahead of me is gone. Moved out through a side door. In her place, one of the coffin-sized lockers is standing, full of my equipment.

“Waste of my time.” It’s the sergeant in charge of distributing my new equipment. His patience seems to have been used up years ago. “I’ll be fitting this suit on someone else tomorrow.” He goes on to mutter, “Might as well go up naked and save me the goddamn trouble.”

I step across the line and hold out my forearm for him to read as I take my place in the designated spot.

The guy glances at the tattoo and enters my info into his data pad. Without looking up, he says, “You saw what everybody else did, strip.” Again he rhetorically mutters. “Why do I gotta ask?”

I drop my bag, untie my shoes, and peel off my clothes.

“Jesus, you got a Gray stink on you.”

I ignore him.

He starts his interrogation.

“Any injuries?”

“No.”

“Open wounds?”

“No.”

An assistant bags my belongings and writes my name and ID on the plastic.

“Bad teeth?”

“No.”

“Venereal diseases?”

“No.”

The list of questions goes on. I drone the same answer over and over. I figure my responses are irrelevant. I’m a hot carcass on the cutting line. The war needs bodies to bleed. I can do plenty.

It’s not a hard quality to measure. Five quarts of corpuscles? I’ve got that.

Another tech comes up and fetches an apparatus of tubes and connectors from my kit box. I know what’s coming. I cringe.

The sergeant sees my reaction and glances at the tubes. He laughs.

“Ever had a catheter?” the second tech asks.

I shake my head, wishing he were female. Somehow, that seems like a better way to go. “Is that recycled too?”

“Waste no pennies, want no pennies?” The tech says it like it’s a question as he looks at the sergeant for confirmation. “How’s that phrase go?” His hand is already on my penis like it’s a piece of meat on a backyard grill. Nothing special. Not sexual. Not repulsive. Just plumbing.

Everybody gets used to their job, I guess.

“The suit is a self-contained life support system,” he tells me as he works. “You’ll be like a frog in your own personal terrarium.”

The catheter slides in. I tense, but it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be.

He says, “It’ll give you all the air, warmth, and water, you need for three months or three years without cracking open, as long as you change the calorie packs and hydrogen cells. Occasionally, the recycler unit in the backpack will eject a solid waste pellet. A little flat disk about an inch across. Don’t be alarmed when you see it.”

“How often?” I ask.

“Depends on the person. Your metabolism. Your activity. What residual solids are in your system when you start.”

I continue to wait for an answer.

He makes a guess. “Once a week? Once a month? It varies.”

“Three days out of a cal pack,” the sergeant tells me. “Your suit comes with one in the mount.” He points at my shoddily-repaired orange gear hanging in the coffin. A dented thermos—the calorie pack—is attached to the backpack integrated with the suit. It looks to hold a little more than a liter.

“Turn around,” the catheter tech tells me. “Gotta catch the outflow. All of it.”

I turn.

He roughly goes to work prepping me for the second tube. “The suit recycles just about everything. Hell, if you keep the hydrogen cell swapped, you could spend the rest of your life in this thing.”

The sergeant laughs and looks at me, taunting me with his aversion. “Don’t worry about how long the cal pack lasts, you won’t make it to your first change.”

I ignore him.

“You been on a liquid diet?” asks the guy handling my plumbing.

“Yes.”

“How many days?”

“Three.”

“Did you drink your prep kit liquids?”

“I did.”

“What did your last bowel movement look like?”

“Rocky Mountain spring water.”

“Hope you enjoyed the one before it. It’s the last real shit you’re gonna take until this suit comes off.”

The second catheter goes in.

Chapter 6

His work done, the catheter tech leaves.

Another technician arrives, a woman. She helps me into my suit’s undergarment, a skintight layer, thicker than a t-shirt, thinner than flannel. It’s translucent green and webbed with coppery filaments that’ll regulate my temperature, cold or hot, and wick away perspiration to the suit’s moisture recycler. It’ll self-seal over smaller wounds, retaining blood inside my veins to keep me in the fight a little bit longer. It even has a bio lab on a chip installed in a small module pressed against one of my thighs. The device can sample my blood and diagnose a range of conditions as well as administer coagulants, morphine, and the one everyone seems anxious to try—Suit Juice—an amphetamine cocktail created to keep a sleepy soldier’s eyes open and pump him or her full of confidence.

The micro-fusion reactor in the integrated backpack will power my new veneer. Once I’m encased in the ragged orange relic, the undergarment will keep my temperature in a normal range at any place I’m likely to end up in the solar system.

Of course, the sun’s corona is on the list of notable exceptions.

Time for the outer layer, a repurposed and reassigned space construction suit.

Through three decades of occupation, earthbound factories have produced these suits in the hundreds of millions to support the Grays’ ambitious lunar and orbital building projects. Like all of the suits, mine is orange, formerly bright, now dirty and scuffed. My name, rank, and an alphanumeric code in Korean are stenciled on the chest.

The remnants of a previous owner’s letters have left a ghostly haze.

The gruff sergeant hauls the suit out of the coffin on its hanger. He hefts it on his fingers as he shrugs. He wants me to know how light it is. Coin-sized patches mar the surface in seven or eight places, but the sergeant runs his fingers over a large repaired tear across the torso. It’s clear the suit was nearly ripped in half. “Wonder how that happened?” he muses.

“Don’t be an asshole,” the female tech tells him.

The sergeant’s disdain for me is starting to grate on my tired nerves. “Has the repair been tested?” I ask. “Will the suit function?”

The sergeant points vaguely toward the men and women working at the repair benches down at the far end of the hangar. “Those people slave around the clock for you spaghetti-heads, and that’s how you show your appreciation? Slagging the quality of—”

“Sarge,” says the female tech, getting his attention, “you’re talking too much.” She looks up at me and winks. “The major could slap an insubordination charge on you and hand you to one of the MSS dinks outside. It’s been a long day for all of us. Be smart. Clamp it.”

The sergeant huffs, thinks about things for a moment, then leans in close to my face. “Jokin’. Stress and all, you know, with the Trogs conquering the solar system and coming to cannibalize my kids for dinner. You understand.”

He sees only dead ice in my eyes. I know, because his expression changes. His breathing quickens. His posture droops, just a hair.

I don’t know if I’m as dangerous as I’m pretending to be at the moment. He knows I’m willing to find out.

And that’s enough.

“Cannibalize isn’t the right word.” The female tech smiles like she’s trying to hold in a laugh. “We’d have to be the same species as the Trogs for it to be cannibalization.”

“The suit’s been tested,” says the sergeant sheepishly, as he moves to help the female tech stuff me inside.

The explanations come now without any editorial inflection.

The suit will protect me from the vacuum of space and high pressure up to thirty-eight atmospheres. It was designed to shield the wearer from cosmic radiation, micrometeors, and other bits of high-velocity space trash, though the repaired holes attest to its limitations in that regard.

It’s a marriage of the Grays’ alien tech and human ingenuity. Far from a magical weapon of war, it’ll help keep me alive in an environment that would snuff me in seconds given half a chance. And with the suit’s tiny, built-in gravity plates, it might even sway the odds a bit in my favor.

It feels a little bulky now that it’s on, although not much more so than wearing a few layers of sweats. It’s completely flexible but can go rigid in small areas or wholly. It shouldn’t impair my movement once I’m used to wearing it.

“It’s getting warm in here,” I tell my dressers.

“Don’t worry.” The woman moves around behind me and seats the hydrogen cartridge into the backpack.

I feel a mild vibration.

“The micro-fusion reactor kicks on automatically as soon as you plug in the hydrogen fuel cartridge.” She picks up a second hydro cartridge and straps it into a place made for it on my thigh.

My skin starts to cool. “Feels fine,” I tell her, nodding. “Thanks.”

“If you’re out in the vacuum, I wouldn’t go more than five or ten minutes without a hydro pack. You’ll have time to swap it when this one runs out, but don’t lollygag.” She smiles again.

I like her. Working with her is how things should be.

Sarge stays quiet as he fetches my boots.

Together they help me push my feet in, and then they seal them to my suit. The gloves follow a similar procedure. Finally, the helmet engulfs my skull with the smart-glass out of its seal and slid up over the top.

The whole integrated ecosystem doesn’t weigh thirty pounds.

We run through a series of tests to make sure each subsystem works.

It feels rushed, like we’re bumping up against a time constraint nobody acknowledges.

I’m shown how to switch the calorie cartridge. It works just like the hydrogen cell. Calories on the left, hydro on the right. I try each once, burning the exercise into my memory as I go. My life depends on getting it right when the time comes to do it myself.

The woman mentions the suit’s gravity controls but figures since I’ve worked in the grav factory, I’m likely to know way more about it than she ever will.

They give me a pistol-shaped weapon. Being a commissar, I’m not assigned a rifle.

The female tech, not chiding, tells me I’m lucky to get the pistol. Shortages and all.

The pistol is a mini gravity-drive railgun. It runs on the exact technology behind all of the Grays’ and Trogs’ kinetic weapons.

My gun shoots tiny projectiles that look like short, headless nails. Each weighs a bit more than a gram, but at the velocities they travel, they’ll punch with the momentum of a .45 slug. My magazine holds nearly three hundred, alternating between titanium-tipped armor-piercing rounds and those of a softer lead alloy designed to flower out on impact and shred soft flesh.

Unlike the rounds for the rifles that had been the mainstay of terrestrial militaries for centuries, my projectiles aren’t powered by a chemical reaction. So I don’t need the extra weight and bulk of powder and brass in the magazine. I carry just the slugs.

The woman says, “You’re lucky, both divisions going up today will be carrying the new guns. Everything before was single-shot. These will go full-auto.”

“Gray rules,” grouses the sergeant. “They tie our hands. If they’d let us build the kind of weapons we used to make when I was a kid, this war would be going differently, I’ll tell you that.”

And that’s the thing about Grays, they’re a status quo, no-imagination bunch. They have scads of mandates designed to keep humans from creating new things and combining our technologies with theirs, especially when it comes to weapons and gravity tech. It’s only the war we’re losing that’s altered the policies.

Ignoring the sergeant, the woman says, “Your gun runs off the energy from the micro-fusion power plant in your suit. All the power you’ll ever need. But if you go full-auto, which you shouldn’t with your pistol because you won’t be able to control it, you’ll burn through hydrogen like nobody’s business. The three days you’re supposed to get out of a cartridge happens only if you’re doing a lot of nothing, like watching TV. If you’re using lots of grav and shooting, you might get three hours.” She slaps the spare hydro cartridge on my thigh. “Don’t lose track of how much H you’ve got. It’s your life.”

Nodding, and pointing to the empty magnetic mounts around my waist, on my thighs, and up my chest, I ask, “What about extra magazines?”

“Grab what you need off the dead troops,” Sarge tells me. He’s happy to say it, not because the other soldiers will be dead, but because it means I’ll soon be dead, too.

The female tech nods to confirm. She’s sad and serious. “We can’t build this stuff fast enough.”

Thinking of my long hours in the grav factory, forging and inlaying plate after endless plate, one of hundreds, maybe thousands of such factories across the globe, I can’t help but think other war industries must be producing just like we were. “How is that kind of shortage possible?”

“The Ticks don’t understand mass production,” says the woman, slipping into the derogatory slang for Grays. She probably didn’t even realize she’d done it. “They can’t manage a supply chain to save their life. And their concept of math…” she shakes her head and waves at the air.

“Fuckin’ Grays,” adds Sarge.

It surprises me, but it turns out he and I at least have something in common.

Chapter 7

An American woman in a Korean uniform with large gold and red epaulets walks up. She’s a colonel, and she’s stiffer than the starch in her clothes.

Sarge salutes her and sulks back a few steps, his posturing ended.

“Is he ready?” asks the colonel.

“Yes, ma’am.” Sarge hurries away with the female tech in tow.

The colonel lifts her data pad but focuses on me. “I’m Colonel Blair. Have you completed your online training?”

I nod.

“’Yes, ma’am’ is the proper response.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The reasons are different, but I decide I don’t like this woman any more than I liked the sergeant.

“This is your first day, but next time you come into the presence of an officer, salute.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You are Major Commissar Dylan Kane, Solar Defense Force Heavy Assault Division 743.” She looks down at her data pad, “3rd battalion, 6,736th Regiment, Charlie Company.”

Heavy Assault Division sounds badass to me. I like it. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You know what everybody calls the Heavy Assault Divisions?”

“Yes, ma’am. Grunts.”

“You know that’s not a sanctioned SDF term, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Do you know why they call themselves Grunts?”

“Are we making conversation?” I ask, “Or are you testing me?”

She doesn’t answer my question, but instead looks at her data pad. “You’re married?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And your wife is rearing a Gray hatchling?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You know that exempts you from the draft, don’t you?”

“I volunteered.”

“Volunteered?”

In a tone with a deniable level of sarcasm, I say, “Service to our brotherhood with the Grays is a human’s highest calling.”

“You believe that?”

I look down at the shitty orange spacesuit I’m wearing as if that’s a sufficient answer.

“Caring for the Gray hatchling should be your most important concern,” she tells me. “You know that?”

“My wife’s sister lives in our house and will care for my wife and the hatchling in my absence.”

A long pause follows while the colonel scrutinizes me. Finally, she says, “Show me your d-pad screen. Does it work?”

I lift my arm and turn my palm up, showing Blair the screen built onto the inner forearm of my suit. The LED panel flashes to life. It’s designed to activate whenever it’s in my line of sight.

“Half the damned things break on the first deployment.” She steps back and looks my suit up and down. “A wonder this thing still holds air.”

Nothing but sunshine here.

She nods at the d-pad on my arm. “Call up your ship assignment under the Priority Orders tab.”

I look at the screen. The software is not the version I trained with in the simulator.

“Flashing red,” she tells me as she reaches over and points. “That one.”

I tap it.

“Your ship assignment, Assault Ship Alpha Delta Kilo Seven Eight Nine Tango Three. You’ll go out with First Platoon. The company’s commander is a Captain Milliken. You’ll be on the same ship as him. The ship designations for the other three platoons are here. One platoon per ship.” She points again.

“Got it.”

Her finger hovers over another part of the screen. “For the company roster and ship’s officers, there. Muster station, here.”

I nod and then remember to add, “Yes, ma’am.”

“After we finish here, you’ll follow the map on your d-pad to your muster station where you’ll be loaded onto a transport and taken to an earth-side staging area. From there, you’ll board your ship. With any luck, in a couple of hours, we’ll be in space.”

“Earth-side, ma’am? We?” Two questions that are competing for answers.

“I’m your CO. I’m going up with division command.” She points at my d-pad again. “You’ll see me in the Chain of Command tab.”

I activate the touch screen and look. She reports directly to Lieutenant General Lee, I assume Korean. Seems like half the MSS are named Lee. I click on Lee and see that he is indeed MSS. MSS has control over every SDF unit through a political command structure that parallels the SDF chain of command. As a commissar, I’m part of the MSS hierarchy. So, in the eyes of the men and women in the platoons I’m responsible for, that’ll make me MSS, too.

Getting past that is going to be hard. The company’s trust will come at a steep price.

“Arizona is where we’re headed,” Blair tells me. “The yard there has built out eleven hundred of the new design assault ships. We’ll be taking almost half of them up.”

Security around the design has been unusually tight, and nothing I’d heard through the online rumor factories was verifiable. I’m curious. “Anything I need to know about these ships?”

“New ships,” she tells me, “new tactics.” Then, in a surprise I didn’t expect, her voice turns to a whisper just loud enough for me to hear. “‘Bout damn time, too. The Troglodytes have been handing us our asses in this war since day one.”

The official word on the ground has always been that we’re winning. Only the loyalists and people who like to keep their heads in their asses believe that, though.

Colonel Blair steps back and examines my face like she’s searching for something false concealed under my skin.

The things I’m hiding are buried too deep for her to even guess at.

She points to a side exit. “Walk with me.”

My suspicions tingle.

No officer came to escort the commissar who’d kitted up just ahead of me.

Blair turns to go, and I follow.

What choice do I have?

Chapter 8

Blair says nothing else. She just walks.

She leads me away from J-33 and down an old road turned to dirt that runs behind the warehouses. The path will take us to the muster stations near the lift pads a mile or so further on in the valley.

Around us, men and women in spacesuits are shuffling in the same direction. What passed for exuberant patriotism among many of them when they were coming in through the front gate earlier in the day is mostly gone. Now we all have plastic tubes stuck in places we once thought private, and we’re geared in battle suits still damp from the steam that cleaned out the remnants of the previous owners.

Feet autopilot their way forward.

Soldiers’ eyes search the snowy peaks above, looking for inspiration or God or who-knows-what to fortify their shivering souls.

Fingers tap frustration into d-pads, as men and women who scammed their way through their military courses try to figure out the software that runs their suits, maintains communication, and keeps them alive. Too many of them never expected to need their training. They never thought they’d wear the orange, let alone queue up in front of a grav lift designed to haul cargo into orbit.

Despite our new weapons, many of us will die soon, not just because we’re overmatched and outnumbered, but for those most rudimentary of reasons historians like to say should have been obvious at the time.

Number one on that list will be the Grays’ conceited disinterest toward their chattel—us. The telepathic little monsters can’t get past the human necessity to spend undue time learning. Grays easily share with one another what they need to know and believe we should do the same with our rudimentary substitutes for telepathy—the internet, telephones, and TV.

And fucking books, I guess.

To them, sending a productive worker away from a job for ten or twenty weeks to learn about weapons, tactics, and war is a colossal waste of time. It was only the reviled Koreans’ incessant arguments for training camps in the fashion of those utilized by earth’s pre-Gray militaries that we have anything at all.

The compromise the Grays allowed was better than nothing, but not by much.

Every able-bodied person sixteen and up is required to demonstrate proficiency on a battery of military simulators, some with goals as simple as learning military hierarchy so would-be soldiers will know who their boss is. Other sims teach about d-pads, weaponry, and zero-g maneuvering.

The simulator program is supplemented with privatized hands-on certification courses anybody can arrange to take in their time off from work. Few take advantage of these courses, because people just can’t resist the temptation to take the shortcut.

So comes the second guilty reason behind the coming slaughter.

Anybody with a measure of motivation to shirk the responsibility of military training can find a way out. Cheats for all of the sims are available in any black market for the price of a meal. Most of the private certification enterprises are rubber-stamp operations, designed to herd students through as fast as possible with no regard for the value of the outcome. They operate according to their incentives. Owners get sweatless work and full bellies. Students meet their training obligations with little effort.

Hence us, the planet’s home-schooled army.

The leftovers.

Gristle for the grinder.

I find sudden certainty in the thought that a battle-hardened Trog is going to shoot me, or hack me, or break my bones so violently their jagged shards will tear through my secondhand suit. My blood will boil into the vacuum as I try to bite back mouthfuls of air escaping my lungs, my breath abandoning me when I need it most, the last oxygen I’ll ever taste.

Some time later, my suit will be fished out of the void and recycled back to earth. After the remains of my body are washed out, it’ll be patched again, half-ass tested, and wrapped around the shivering body of another unprepared recruit.

Fly.

Die.

Repeat.

Until there aren’t any humans left on our pale blue planet to massacre in the heavens.

Revolution will be a moot idea, a wispy dream in the senile minds of those too old to raise a weapon.

The Trogs will come to harvest the Grays, rooting them out of their cold warrens on the moon. They’ll invade mother earth and find every wrinkled hag hiding a hatchling in a stinking bedroom, and then our parasitic overlords will meet their gruesome end.

Karma.

At least there’s that.

The colonel, unaware of the dark future my thoughts are wandering through, says, “You can gravity compensate by ten or twenty percent, so it’ll be easier for you to make the walk.”

“No thank you, ma’am,” I tell her. “This will be the last natural g I’m likely to feel for a while.” Maybe forever. “I’ll carry the load.”

“Drop the ma’am for now. That’s for when we’re in front of the non-coms and grunts.”

We’re not exactly in private, but I say, “Okay.”

Without any hint of what’s coming, she says, “Your contact was compromised.”

The phrase, sudden and shocking, means only one thing to me. I feel like ten pounds of ice just dropped into my stomach. She’s talking about Vishnu, my contact with the Free Army. I stumble.

Blair reaches out to steady me. “You all right?”

I smile my lie. “I should have g compensated.” I add the twenty percent and pretend to concentrate on my balance as I concoct an escape plan. I have a pistol. I could put a dozen rounds in Blair’s chest and hope she doesn’t have a kill switch linked to a biosensor under her uniform. Then I could max grav my ass the hell away from here.

The orange battle suits are built to handle enormous construction loads, but I’ve heard a brave—crazy—person could use the embedded gravity plates to accelerate the thing to Mach 1 in atmospheric flight. Of course, the suit, not being aerodynamic by any measure, would likely kill me at that speed.

Blair stops walking. “Go ahead, get yourself right.”

“I already have.” I prepare to yank my pistol off its magnetic mount.

“Now stop being coy, and let’s talk.”

“About?” I ask, not ready to give up on coy. I tell myself she can’t know everything about my contact or I’d already be in cuffs.

“The MSS picked up Vishnuvardhen this morning.”

They have his full name, but I don’t respond, deciding instead to let her keep fishing. I might learn enough to keep myself alive until I can warn the insurgents—my friends—I’ve recruited over the past several years.

“I know what you’re thinking. We don’t have time for it.” She lets that hang in the air, but if she truly had any idea what I was thinking she’d be running in the other direction.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The cliché is the best I can come up with at the moment. I need to calm myself. I need to think clearly.

Blair huffs, grabs me by the arm, and leads me away from the other soldiers on their long walks toward the lift pads. We crunch our way through brown grass between two hangars. No one else is between the buildings.

We’re as alone as we can be in the midst of two SDF divisions being processed through a spaceport.

I’m thinking it’ll be a good place to shred her with a burst of high-velocity metal.

Few eyes to see.

Better chance to get away.

Chapter 9

“Penny Reed and Phil Barber.” She looks at me to see if I recognize the names.

Of course I know the names. Phil’s my best friend, my brother-in-law. He works at the grav factory, as does Penny.

I show Blair nothing.

She proceeds down her list, naming a dozen more of my coconspirators from the factory. “Do you want me to go through all of it?”

Sure, if it’ll buy me time to make the necessary choice.

If I kill her, I give up on all I’ve worked for. My revolution ends here. Shortly after they catch me, my life will end in an MSS interrogation chamber with most of my favorite pieces missing.

I don’t think there’s another way.

I glance right and left and casually move my hand over my pistol grip.

“Listen to what I’m telling you, Kane. I know you’re suspicious. You should be. But if I already know everyone in your network, why wouldn’t they be under arrest already?”

“How do I know they’re not?”

“You’ll see Penny and Phil when you board your ship. You three are assigned together. That’s what you requested, right? And that SDF sergeant and the captain Vishnu asked for, I don’t see how you could have pulled them into your network, but they’re on your ship, too.”

I don’t know what sergeant and captain she’s talking about. I don’t have any contacts in the military, and everything about the Free Army is supposed to be compartmentalized for security reasons. There’s got to be a mountain of important things I don’t know. In fact, I’m counting on it. The revolution can’t be just Vishnu, me, and my friends.

Which, of course, means Vishnu had to have his contacts up the chain.

“Listen to what I’m telling you, Kane. Who do you think made the assignments you asked for? These are military ranks and positions on ships of war. Vishnu is a black-market salvager. He doesn’t have that kind of authority.”

By guessing my thoughts, she has me. I’m still having trouble with the fact she’s an MSS colonel.

Then again, I am an MSS major, and I’m a rebel.

“You made the assignments,” I conclude, glancing around for uniformed MSS goons, thinking they’ll be cockroaching out of their crevices to arrest me now that I’m incriminating myself.

“We don’t have time for your games, so I’ll just tell you what you need to hear. Vishnu was captured alive.” Blair’s disappointment looks real. It runs deep. “They’ll torture him. He’ll talk. Nobody holds out for long. You and I both better hope we’re off-planet by the time that happens.”

If Blair is telling the truth, then my friend is suffering, and soon he’ll be dead. I grimace. Too much is changing, and it’s changing faster than I’d like.

She goes on to say, “There’s a coded message on your pilot’s d-pad. There’s an encryption key on yours. Drop them both into the same folder. Among other things, they’ll give you a location for a rendezvous. We don’t know when each ship will be able to sneak away, probably in the chaos of the battle once we get up there.”

“This is really happening, then?” It’s a childish question, an incriminating question, a hopeful question. I’ve put years into this dream. I don’t want it to fail. I want to believe Blair.

“Yes,” she tells me, with a look in her eyes that tries to erase my doubts. “Get your ship to the…” she pauses and looks left and right, “to the Free Army’s base. However you need to do it. You understand?”

I nod. Mutiny is easy in the abstract, but by the end of the day, I’ll need to test my mettle and actually kill a North Korean officer.

“Once we have our forces at our bases, we can start running this war the way it needs to run. We can win it. And then we can win the revolution.”

I ask, “Where is the rendezvous?”

“Asteroid belt. A mining colony where the people are sympathetic to our cause.”

It sounds like a base to me. Good. There is more to this rebellion than my do-nothing conspiracy and a dodgy MSS colonel. I figure I’ll press her for information I know is secret, test her. “I’ve heard a lot of conflicting rumors about these assault ships we’re supposed to be taking up. I’ve heard they’re not built for deep space.” Meaning we won’t make it to the asteroid belt. “Do they have the power to make light speed?”

“1.2.” Blair shrugs. “On average. Some barely make it over the hump. Some’ll do 1.5.”

A range for the top speed? Not something specific? That worries me. And even worse, 1.5 is nothing close to the hyper-light velocities the big Trog cruisers do. They’ll blaze across the universe eight times faster than a photon in vacuum. “Are these assault ships another shitty Gray design?”

“I don’t think the Ticks are capable of creating anything new.” Blair looks around, worried. She’s just uttered a heresy, an illegality. Everybody on earth is habituated to take that cautionary glance when they voice the unspeakable. “I think everything the Grays make us build for them is based on designs they stole from wherever they came from. You’ve probably heard the Trogs use pretty much the same tech we—” Blair thinks for a moment. “Their cruisers are exactly like ours.”

“Exactly?”

“Exactly.”

I shake my head. I’d long ago stopped believing the news feeds, instead, trusting my instincts to ferret through old histories and current rumors to find my truth. The stories of Trog cruisers being exactly like ours, that one seemed beyond belief.

“These assault ships are all us, but with all the damned Gray laws about what we can and can’t do, humans don’t have enough people with the right kind of expertise anymore. Things aren’t like they were before the siege.” Blair sighs. “These ships were fast-tracked through design and rushed into production. You’ll see what I mean when you lay eyes on one. They look like something you’d find in a junkyard.”

“Great.” Full dose of sarcasm on that one.

“They will fly. They’ll do what they’re designed to do. But light speed…” Blair sighs again.

“What does that sigh mean?”

“You can ride a brick into space if you attach a few grav plates and a power source. No big deal. But generating a grav bubble robust enough to warp space into a localized wave you can surf past the speed of light…” Blair pauses and switches to a different subject. “You know how the Grays are, they don’t name their ships, their space stations, not even each other. So there wasn’t a name for this assault ship design. Once the engineers understood what they were creating and how it would be used, they started joking around about what to call it.”

I understand where she’s going, so I ask, “Which was?”

“Kamikaze.”

“Great.” It’s a good day for sarcasm.

Blair says, “The name stuck during testing when nearly one in twenty came apart trying to make it to light speed. The more you fly ‘em, the worse your odds. That’s why the SDF decided on an official designation for the type—Spitfire. They figured a name like kamikaze would be bad for morale.”

Skipping the sarcasm for a moment, I start running numbers in my head to calculate how many of my friends these ships will kill by day’s end. The result of my calculation is, surprisingly, more sarcasm. “These ships sound wonderful.”

“They’ve got their flaws, but they’ll do what they were built for. Human ingenuity.” Blair nods proudly.

Nobody says that kind of crap anymore. I wonder if it’s real or part of her act. “So what does an assault ship do, besides assault?” I’m thinking D-Day landing craft and high casualty rates.

“At sub-light speeds they’ll pull twelve g’s all day long.”

“All day?” I laugh a bit too derisively. I don’t need to do much math in my head to know it won’t take long at twelve g’s to start bumping up against light speed, and then infinities in the equations start making everything impossible.

“That’s not what I meant,” says Blair, “They’ll do twelve g’s when you need it. And they’re maneuverable because they’re small. Those big Trog cruisers max at four g’s.”

“So we can dodge their railgun fire and win with numbers?” I ask. I’m trying to guess the tactics and wondering why ships with such small crews have such a large contingent of grunts onboard. “What are the armaments?”

“None.”

Sometimes, even sarcasm isn’t enough. “Because?”

“Weight.”

“Please tell me you’re getting to the good part.”

She nods. “Our physicists have engineered a gravity lens.”

“What the hell is that?”

Chapter 10

“This is our best-kept secret,” says Blair. “A decisive weapon. Invented by humans, manufactured by humans.”

“With permission from the Grays,” I add, “because we’re losing the war so badly?”

“Exactly,” answers Blair. “If we were winning with their weapons, they wouldn’t give us permission to do any of this stuff. You’d still have a single-shot pistol, and you’d die trying to reload it while a thousand Trogs swarmed over you.”

Yeah, well, she’s mostly right there, but training draftees with the damned weapons would go a long way toward making them more than squishy speed bumps for the invading hordes. “What’s this gravity lens?”

“It’s built from specially shaped and configured grav plates controlled by computer.”

“Computers and grav tech?” I ask, shocked, but completely out of habit. Mixing the two technologies used to be a death penalty offense.

“The assault ships were built with special permission,” Blair tells me and then taps the underside of her left forearm. “Just like the computer enhancements to your suit.”

The computer-controlled features of the suits have been in existence so long they’ve become mundane. Proof that if the Grays would get out of the way, we could do so much more. “Tell me about this gravity lens.”

“It focuses an ultra-intense gravity field down to a narrow point.”

I’m thinking of a magnifying glass and cooking ants on the sidewalk with the sun’s rays.

“The lens forms a conical anti-grav field that narrows on a 3D parabolic arc toward the tip. It pushes matter away from it.”

I’m trying to imagine how such a thing could be used as a weapon.

“Think of it as a lance, like knights used to joust with in the Middle Ages. The lens is the handle, the anti-grav cone is the long pointy part.”

I’m stuck on the jousting image and can’t get past it. “What do we do with that?”

“These assault ships are built like battering rams,” she answers. “All steel, fusion reactors, and grav plates, with just enough room inside for a platoon of SDF troops.”

I get the picture, and I really don’t like it. “We’re going to ram Trog cruisers in space?” I’m recalculating the number of my friends I think will soon die, and the mortality rate is soaring. It’s odd how quickly math converts to sarcasm. “Why do they call them kamikazes?”

Blair contains her exasperation over my thinly veiled disdain, and says, “You’ll have some time at your muster station to gain an understanding of the technology and the tactics. The information is on your d-pad. Yes, these assault ships were built to ram Trog cruisers.”

I’d have preferred not to have that confirmed.

“It sounds bad,” admits Blair, reading the look on my face, “but if all goes well, your ship’s hull will never actually collide with the cruiser’s hull. The focused gravity cone is so intense that with the momentum of an assault ship, no material we know of can hold together against it. The gravity cone will pierce the target cruiser’s defensive fields and impale the hull, creating a hole large enough for the assault ship to slip right in. Of course, the whole process is extremely violent on the cruiser’s side of things.”

“And on the assault ship?” I ask. “Aren’t we going to be inside?”

“Like I said,” she answers, “the assault ship is made of steel, reactors, and grav plates. No comforts. They’re built for this, and this only. They have enough plates and they can generate enough reactor power to create an inertial bubble around the crew compartment. You won’t even feel the impact. The trick is coming in fast enough to punch through the defensive grav fields and the hull, but not so fast that you obliterate both ships in the collision.”

“In ships where one in twenty falls apart when you step on the gas?” I make it sound like a question, yet I’m just making a point. “So far, this revolution isn’t sounding anything like the one I envisioned.”

“We have to win this war,” says Blair, “or at least drive the Trogs out of our system. Without an end to hostilities, revolution is pointless. First one, then the other.”

I don’t need that point clarified for me. I understood it from the day the Trogs first set foot on the moon, blowing everything to hell and trying to kill everybody up there.

“If things go well after you ram the Trog cruiser, you capture it,” says Blair. “That’s the idea.”

“The hope,” I translate, for both our sakes.

Ignoring my comment, Blair says, “With these assault ships and our new tactics, we’ll destroy enough enemy cruisers and the Trogs will go back to where they came from. If we capture enough ships, we’ll make the Free Army the preeminent power in the solar system, and then we can rid ourselves of those little Gray miscreants and their Korean lapdogs.”

“All with a gravity lens.” I want to believe it, I really do.

“The Grays conquered us on the back of two technological advantages,” argues Blair, “fusion power and gravity manipulation. That’s all they had over us, and it was enough.”

I nod. I know that’s true, though the MSS propaganda machine would have us believe the Grays are our benevolent big brothers in the universe, and that our acceptance of their rule over us was voluntary because we sought a path to physical and spiritual transcendence through their guidance.

Total shit.

Chapter 11

Blair leaves me and heads back up the road to fetch another commissar like me in need of final instructions.

I walk on toward my muster station, thoughts swirling with what-ifs and feelings that don’t want to be ignored. Vishnu is as good as dead. I can’t indulge any emotions over it.

Around me, soldiers are stopping and looking at the sky.

At first, it’s just one or two, and I ignore them. I’ve got no time to stare at a cloud that looks like a bunny or a horse on a pogo stick. I’m thinking about the tactics of ramming another ship in space and how difficult it’s going to be to keep the assault ship moving in that window of relative velocities that’ll produce a successful attack and not kill us all.

The thought bothering me the most is that our commanders might not care much about our success in that regard. If one assault ship and its platoon are obliterated while taking a Trog cruiser out of action, it would be an easy trade to justify—forty or fifty soldiers for thousands of Trogs and a capital ship. Any admiral would make that choice.

I can’t help but consider the possibility that perhaps these assault ships aren’t meant to survive at all. Maybe the platoon rides along as a way to spoof the pilot into thinking he has a chance to survive the collision. And that’s how the SDF convinces the pilots to do it.

Suicide zealots are hard to come by.

I don’t want to believe I’m kamikaze bait, but it would account for the apparent quality of the troops the SDF is sending up today.

I bump into a man who’s stopped but barely takes notice when I excuse myself. It’s then I see everyone has stopped, not just some of them. They’re all looking at the sky.

I stop walking and look up, too.

Way above the clouds, a misshapen blob glows white like the daytime moon, but about half as big. It’s moving across the sky fast enough to make a full orbit in ninety minutes. Lights sparkle and flash around it. Sprays of fireworks’ explosions streak through the atmosphere, far away and silent.

Only they aren’t fireworks.

The blob is one of the twenty-six asteroids towed in from the belt over the years and placed in orbit around the earth two hundred miles up. Each is roughly a mile across. They’ve all been drilled, cut with tunnels, and honeycombed with dormitories, armories, cafeterias, and storerooms, everything an orbital fortress would need to survive a battle or a drawn-out siege.

I’ve watched enough vids on the Internet to know it’s an attack I’m seeing. The Trog cruisers are up there pounding the fortress with railgun fire, trying to destroy the defending guns buried inside. Hunks of stone are being blasted off the surface. Some of the rock is hitting the atmosphere as meteorites and burning up. Some of it, maybe lots, will impact the ground below.

“Is that where we’re going?” asks the corporal I’d bumped into moments before.

“I don’t know.” I hope it’s not. I pray command wouldn’t send us off the ground and straight into a firefight. No general could be that stupid—that wasteful—with the lives of the men and women in his command.

Unless we are just kamikazes.

The lights of the battle cross out of sight behind the mountains, and people scan the sky looking for more. Another asteroid comes into view, glowing white as it catches the sun high above. It’s on a different orbit, moving southwest, away from the battle that went east, maybe to swing around the backside of the planet and fire on the Trogs from a direction they aren’t expecting.

That’s the genius behind the orbital arrangement of the asteroids. None share an orbital plane. None share an orbital radius or an orbital period. They’re all around, two hundred miles up, crisscrossing the sky in no apparent pattern. When any of the asteroids are attacked, they receive defensive help from others that happen to be close. Attackers need to defend themselves from all sides, so they can never fully focus on the particular asteroid fortress they’re trying to destroy.

But the genius part of our orbital defense is also the most boring part. It’s all mathematics and orbital mechanics, and nobody likes to think about that. The flashes of light are gone. People start to walk again.

Most continue to glance at the sky, whether looking for more flashes or worrying about the same things as me, I can’t tell.

Chapter 12

No tarmac seals the ground, and no lights stand on poles along the perimeter. The spaceport’s landing pads are just squares and rectangles, hundreds of them, marked by pale-colored rocks in a pasture of beat-down grass, a new set of Nazca lines some far future generation might speculate about if the Trogs win this war and choose to annihilate mankind.

As I follow the directions on my d-pad, I walk past platoons scattered in many of the squares. Some are loading into grav lifts. Others are sitting, talking to pass the time, or staring at the sky, waiting for the next hint of war to slip by in an orbit way overhead.

I know I’m getting close when I start to see friends of mine from the grav factory, my insurgent recruits, standing in twos and threes among soldiers waiting to go up.

Apparently, none have been arrested by the MSS. One bucket of worries empties down the drain. That means Blair must have been telling me the truth about being my new contact with the Free Army.

I hope.

Yeah, I’m that much of an optimist.

A new worry bucket starts to fill with the possibility she could be playing a deeper game than I’ve guessed. That’s a symptom of growing up under the boot of an oppressive regime, never believing you’re winning, just knowing you’re too stupid to figure out how you’re losing.

Despite that, I move forward.

Freedom calls.

Station 13C suddenly presents itself in front of me.

Penny, my pilot, is standing by herself, looking away from me, down the valley. I don’t need to see her face or read the name stenciled across her chest to know it’s her. She has a shape to her, large-breasted, wide hips—voluptuous they might have called it in another time. She spends her free time in the gym, so she has an athletic build. In fact, she’s more muscular than most of the men I know.

She bleaches her hair and wears it short and spiked. We’ve even flirted over the years when one or both of us were going through a rough patch in our relationships at home. The timing never worked out, and our friendship remained flirtatious and frustrated.

Penny turns and spots me. She waves.

I cross the stone boundary to officially enter my muster station as I spot Phil talking to a sergeant.

It looks like the entire platoon has arrived ahead of me. The troopers are lined up sitting on the ground in squads. The sergeants are on their feet, walking among them and answering questions. A short distance away from the rows stand two officers, the platoon’s lieutenant and the company’s captain, talking with another two men I know immediately are Koreans. They’ve got Asian features and unblemished, crisp suits. The assault ship’s first officer and captain.

“Glad you made it,” says Penny, as I walk up.

“Been here long?” I ask.

“Half-hour.” She nods toward Phil. “Adverb got here first, a little bit before me.” ‘Adverb’ is her nickname for Phil because he never just does anything. When he walks, he does it tiredly, or slowly. When he worries, he does it loudly, pulling any passerby into his anxiety. When he sighs, it drips with boredom. He talks quickly, and sadly, and excitedly, always glazing his words in the emotion at the forefront of his troubles. When he despises the nickname Adverb, he despises it intensely. Lucky for him, everybody at the grav fab tired of the nickname years ago. Penny, though, finds her fun in his discomfort. Something inside her smiles whenever she prods his sensitivities and he reacts with a whine.

I notice neither Penny nor Phil is armed. The Koreans, the only other two who’ll be on the ship’s bridge, are. All the soldiers have rifle-sized railguns, and three pairs of them share the load of larger railguns, each with a mount. Those are the platoon’s only heavy weapons. I turn my d-pad up so I can see it, and I start tapping. “Do you know anything about these assault ships we’ll be flying?”

Penny purses her lips, and her eyebrows draw close to one another. She knows. “Got my briefing while they were suiting me up.” Penny puts her hands on her hips and snorts. “I thought all that simulator training about high-speed docking maneuvers didn’t make any sense when I was going through it. Now it does.”

I grimace. “What do you think? Can it be done?”

“Damn gravity lens better work, is all I can say.”

“Can you fly the ship?”

“If it works like the simulator.” Penny shrugs.

Of all the pilots-in-training in the web of my conspiracy, Penny did a little better than average in the flight simulators. I know she’s a quick learner and she’s fearless. At least she pretends to be.

“Did you hear anything about the light-speed capabilities on these ships?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer, but looks at me instead, scanning my face, looking for something. “You’re asking questions because you’re nervous.”

I shrug. I don’t feel nervous, not really. A lot is running through my mind. Troubles are piling up.

“We’ll make it up there, and we’ll be prepared or we won’t,” she says. “We’ll do what we need to do, or we won’t. Time for what-ifs is long gone.”

“I can always count on you for a dose of sunshine.”

“You can.”

“What about your…” Penny looks around, checking to make sure no one is close enough to overhear, “friend. What’s the word?”

She’s asking about Vishnu. I can’t tell her the news. Not right now.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Some hiccups. That’s all. We’re good to go.” It’s my turn to look around suspiciously. “We’ve each got half an encrypted file on our d-pads. We can merge them to find the coordinates for a secret Free Army base out in the asteroid belt. Our orders are to get the ship out there.”

Penny glances over at the officers. “What about them?”

It’s a question that’s always gone unanswered. Mutiny was easy when we were planning and plotting. “We do what we need to do.”

And just like that, I’ve failed to answer it again. I wonder whether I’ll have the balls to do what needs doing when the time comes.

“So this is for real?” asks Penny.

“We’re all here,” I answer, as I scan across the field, seeing more of my coconspirators from the grav factory, mixed with their SDF units. We’re all ready to turn on our masters and join the Free Army. How many of these soldiers will raise their weapons to kill us once they realize some of us are traitors?

Chapter 13

I don’t have much time to study the assault ship’s tactics. There isn’t much I need to know. Penny’s the pilot. She understands the ship’s flight capabilities. That much, if not the details about ramming other ships, was included in her simulator.

More technical aspects, such as grav controls, navigation, and ship fusion reactor systems, were included in Phil’s simulator courses. The only new parts for him are those covering the grav lens. It’s new for all of us, but only Phil needs to have an intimate understanding, since he’ll be in charge of that part of our ship.

Assault ship tactics aren’t hard. It’s all guesswork. Nobody on earth has engaged in this kind of warfare since ancient times when Rome and Carthage sent their navies out to ram and board enemy ships. Effective modes of attack may exist, but we’ll have to learn those by trial and error once we’re in outer space fighting the Trogs.

A flock of grav lifts descends on the regiment’s muster stations.

Watching them come down, I realize I’m out of time for prep. I’m as ready as I’m going to be.

The platoon’s senior sergeant—a lean, intimidating man named Brice—orders everyone to their feet.

Butterflies fill my guts as our assigned lift silently settles onto the short grass in front of us. Like all the other lifts, it looks better from a distance. Up close, I see it’s a forty-foot shipping container, older than any of us, rusted by age and pitted by countless trips through the atmosphere. Attached to the container is the actual lift, little more than a rigid frame for holding the container in place, embedded grav plates, and a small fusion reactor. The pilot sits in a half-bubble cockpit on one end.

Soldiers close their faceplates.

I take my last breath of earth air and do the same.

Penny nudges me and smiles. She’s more than ready, she’s anxious.

I wonder if her confidence is as fake as mine.

I’m listening in on the platoon comm. Brice’s orders are curt and clear. He’s a guy who’s used to having soldiers do what he says, like he’s used to being right.

Then again, maybe that’s me projecting hope.

The doors on the grav lift’s container swing open.

“Hazardous Mangos!” Brice’s strong voice addresses the troops in their brightly-colored suits. “Move your feet and stay in line. Pretend you’re real soldiers, or first graders. You pick. Move!”

Men and women are on their feet, jogging toward the vessel.

Moments later, I’m inside with all the others. There’s nowhere to sit—the container is just an empty metal box built to haul twenty-ton loads of equipment, workers, and raw materials into orbit. It was never meant to make anyone comfortable.

I look around for Phil. He’s near the door, one of the last to step inside. Through his glass faceplate, I see anxiety on his face, not unusual for Phil. I hope he’s ready for what’s coming.

Penny nudges me again, advertising her excitement. “It’s really happening!”

Is it the revolution or the flying she’s talking about?

“Grab a handhold on the wall,” the sergeant tells us from where he stands in the center of the container. He reaches up and clutches one of several thick wires strung across the box just overhead. “Or a cable.”

I grab a handhold that was welded to the wall so recently the raw metal hasn’t had time yet to rust.

The grav lift’s captain powers his plates, and the vessel starts to rise.

I feel the downward pull of the earth as we accelerate away with wide-open doors.

Plenty of troopers have something to say about that, mostly versions of “Holy shit!”

We’re a few hundred feet in the air already and starting to veer, when the ship’s single crewman swings the doors shut, leaving us in darkness.

My eyes adjust.

Spears of light shine in through gaps around the door and holes in the walls where the metal has corroded through.

A soldier falls to the floor and knocks another over.

“Grav compensate,” barks Sergeant Brice. “Or hold on.”

Suit lights mounted on helmets and left shoulders come on, casting beams at odd angles all through the crate.

Wind starts to howl through the gaps as the lift picks up speed.

The g’s start to weigh on me, and I feel like I’m being stepped on by a giant. My back strains and my knees hurt. My readout tells me we’re pulling two g’s.

Soldiers lean on one another. Good thing we’re packed in pretty snug.

A woman’s knees buckle.

Another trooper goes down.

“Auto-goddamn-compensate!” shouts Brice. “It’s the slider on the left end of your d-pad. Use your favorite nostril finger and move it up and down. Remember your training, people!”

The metal wall I’m standing next to starts to flex, buffeted by the wind outside.

The wind’s howl turns to a screaming whistle.

The container shudders like it’s going to fall apart.

I glance at Penny, letting the concern on my face ask my question.

“This is normal,” she tells me. She used to date a grav lift pilot who’d take her on occasional joyrides. “Only the old ones fall apart.”

I glance around at the oxidizing walls and look back at Penny.

She’s grinning, and I’m wondering which part of what she said was the joke.

The shaking gets worse.

People start talking, letting fright run away with their words.

A grav lift ride was never in any of the simulators. None of us but Penny knew what to expect.

I decide it’s time to stop with pointless machismo and set my suit to ninety percent auto-compensate for the extra g’s. My bones thank me by only hurting a little bit less.

Penny is looking at her d-pad, unconcerned about the grav lift. “The trip goes faster than you think.”

The whistle changes.

The ship’s shudder dissipates.

The push of the ships acceleration lessens.

I feel the lift lean.

The pilot is letting off.

Sound dies away. A moment later, all sense of weight disappears.

“We’re at the edge of space,” Penny tells me.

The troops around me notice, too. One of them whoops, and a few more copy. For most of them, this is the first time they’ve felt actual zero-g.

Feet come off the floor.

Hands grip everywhere.

A few steps in front of me, a man’s visor screen splatters yellow from the inside.

I’m thankful the smell of his vomitus is contained in his suit. Lucky for him we’re touching down in Arizona before boarding our ship. He’ll have a few minutes to open his faceplate and clean the mess out. Unfortunately, taking off his helmet or suit aren’t options, so whatever drips down inside, he’ll have to live with for days or weeks, maybe more.

He starts to complain loudly over the platoon channel.

“Suck it up,” Brice tells the whiner. “Maybe put that waggly tongue to work and lean forward and lick it off your glass. It all goes back inside anyway. Might as well get used to it.”

“He’s no Marine,” jabs a woman, like any of us have earned the right to label ourselves.

“None of us are,” says another, and more of them laugh.

That’s the joke, really. We’re part of a Heavy Assault Division, but all of us know—whatever a Marine was fifty years ago—it’s not us.

“Kill some Trogs,” says Sergeant Brice. “Live to tell about it, and I’ll call you whatever you want.”

That gets some nods from the platoon.

The lift executes a spin maneuver that throws everyone off-balance.

“At the top of a parabolic path,” Penny tells me. “Like a ballistic missile.”

“Are you trying to make me feel worse?” I ask.

Penny grins.

I guess that’s my answer.

“The pilot needed to reorient the ship for deceleration.” She reads the time off her d-pad. “We’ll be there in seven or eight minutes.”

The floor starts pushing up on us as we decelerate at the same rate we ascended.

We’re back in the atmosphere again, and the wind whistle starts. The container shudders.

The platoon settles down as we continue our descent. The soldiers know we’re coming to the end of this leg. Like me, they feel they’ve been through the worst of it. From here on out, we know what to expect.

Something buffets the lift, and a rumble rattles my teeth.

“What the hell was that?” I ask. A gust of wind? Thunder?

Everyone is alert.

Looking at silent Penny, I ask again, “What was—”

The lift bounces left on turbulence, and the unmistakable roar of an explosion stuns us.

Shit!

I think we’re crashing, but realize immediately I’m wrong. We’re still decelerating, not falling, but something’s not right.

“What do you think?” Penny asks over the comm.

“I was hoping you had the answer.”

A guy starts hollering panicked gibberish and falls to the floor. The first of us to crack and we haven’t even seen a Trog yet.

He crawls toward the doors we entered through, pushing and elbowing past boots and knees.

Brice orders him to stop.

Another explosion bounces the ship, but we still descend.

The company captain squawks some noise, and the lieutenant immediately parrots it.

I glance at Penny, and I can tell she’s concluded the same thing as me. If the panic spreads, we’re all screwed.

Sergeant Brice is moving toward the crawling man, but not getting there fast enough.

I identify the man by the gravity signature emitted by his suit. They’re all unique, and thanks to the spaghetti bug in my head, I can read it. I kill his outgoing comm link and reluctantly issue the command to paralyze his suit.

He freezes stiff.

The platoon channel goes silent as they all realize what just happened. Some of them look at me, relieved. Other eyes accuse.

The lieutenant shouts something pointless, but it sounds like a question.

Nobody pays attention.

“We’ll be down, soon,” booms Sergeant Brice’s voice. “Disembark like soldiers, and scurry your dainty butts to the assault ship. No time to sightsee once your feet are on the ground. No time for longing looks at the lovely sky. No time for goodbye kisses and happy wishes. It seems some Trogs are in the neighborhood and want to kill you. Don’t make it easy.”

Another explosion rocks us.

The press of deceleration disappears, and the ship starts to maneuver in fast jukes.

We’re all getting bounced around inside.

“A couple hundred feet up,” Penny tells me.

Another explosion rattles the shipping container—not close, but distinct—and if any in the platoon had any doubts, they’ve disappeared. We’re coming down in the midst of a battle.

Chapter 14

The shuttle pulls hard around a tight turn, grav plates stressing under the load. Thanks to the bug in my head, I see the grav fields glow brilliant blue. The cargo doors swing free and squeal on their hinges.

Hundreds of assault ships—maybe thousands—are lined in rows on the desert floor, all the way from the sprawling shipyard factories in the south to the foot of the mountains in the north.

Rusty and coarse. Brutal and hard.

Iron berserkers.

Enders of life.

They’re shaped like the Apollo rockets of the last century but only in the crudest way. Those ships were flimsy and clean, perfect and smooth, painted white and packed with the most ingenious devices of their day for keeping men alive on the first trip to a world beyond our own. Those ships were built for explorers.

These in the desert are machines of war.

We’ll ride the corroded brutes into the void to harpoon star-faring dreadnoughts a kilometer long. If the technology supposed to keep the vessels in one piece works, if the enemy ships don’t disintegrate, if we live through the collisions, we’ll pour out with weapons blazing.

Maybe we’ll capture our prey. Maybe, we’ll die.

Ifs and maybes.

Desperation and possibility.

I’m hoping again the mundane new wonder weapon lives up to expectations and does what our generals tell us it will do, praying my life isn’t part of a ploy to trick the pilot into a suicide run. We’re losing this war so badly. I don’t put anything past the North Korean epaulette-trolls in their buried bunkers planning our fate.

An explosion startles me and the shuttle lurches to the left.

I grip a handhold to keep my balance, as a thought about the randomness of death in war reminds me of how little control I have over my fate.

In the distance, a lance of perfectly straight lightning pierces the sky and pricks an assault ship. The vessel shatters in an eruption of smoke and fire.

A pressure wave dominoes down the line from the blast, blowing dust off each ship as it passes. The wave punches me, not hard enough to hurt, still intense enough to make it real. The sound rumbles through my helmet.

Our shuttle touches down, nobody jumps out. The platoon is paralyzed. None of us expected to descend into a bombardment. None of us was ready for the carnage to come so soon.

“Move it, move it, move it!” yells Brice. He’s the only sergeant in the platoon who’s seen war with his own eyes, fired his weapon at the enemy, and watched his friends die.

The rest of us are virgin shock troops, a new kind of soldier with new equipment and new tactics, tasked to storm the heavens and turn the tide of the war.

But we’re soft.

Another explosion rocks our shuttle, closer than the last, though out of sight behind us.

Wannabe killers are falling out the door, hitting the desert dirt and scrambling to get to the assault ship.

Brice is yelling. “I’ve never seen a bunch of fruit-flavored fuck-nut nitwits as disappointing as you. Don’t you know to hurry when a bunch of idiotic cavemen are shooting at you from space?”

Orange-clad soldiers are shaking off their paralysis and trudging toward the doors with the weight of death riding on their shoulders. White-helmeted heads sway, awkward and tentative. None of us is yet used to the suits we first donned just two hours ago.

I see panic in the eyes behind smart-glass faceplates. I hear rapid breathing over the platoon comm.

Sergeant Brice is at the door of the shuttle, pointing while waving the rest of them out. “That ship, right there. My God, it’s the closest one. It’s the easiest guess.”

I’m starting to think it won’t matter whether our assault ship was designed to be an elaborately disguised kamikaze or not. I’m a sim-trained novice in the company of amateurs already reeling from war’s brutality and we’re still only spectators.

We’ll all be dead five minutes after we face our first Trog horde.

A useless thought.

All I can do is move forward and try to survive.

I jump out of the battered metal freight box that brought our platoon to Arizona, and my boots hit the sun-bleached dirt.

Plumes of smoke rise in every direction. Dust wafts between the ships.

Bits of gravel rain around us.

Another hypersonic bolt lances down from above and hits the ground.

I feel it.

I hear it.

Instinctually, I avert my eyes to protect them.

I look back up to see where the bolt came from and I spot three slivers of frosted glass glued to the sky. They’re Trog battle cruisers, above the atmosphere, sun rays blazing against their hulls, so goddamn proud and invincible they can peg themselves to a geosynchronous spot right above Arizona and fire their railguns down like there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about it, but look and see and piss ourselves.

I guess leaving more than a thousand secret weapons standing in the desert is no way to keep them hidden.

It’s like the bunker troll generals want us to die.

No wonder we’re losing this war.

Frantic, the platoon’s lieutenant—Holt—is shouting, trying to follow Brice’s example and be a leader, only he’s failing. He’s unraveling already frayed nerves and confusing the platoon.

Milliken, the company captain was yappy enough when we were at our muster station in Colorado, now I don’t hear him on the comm and he’s disappeared from sight—I can’t imagine where he’s gone. His four platoons are on the verge of disintegrating under enemy fire as they disembark from their shuttles and scramble to their assault ships. I find myself hoping a lucky slug from one of the enemy’s railguns has vaporized him already.

Penny stumbles out of the shuttle.

Instinctively, I reach to grab her arm, asking, “You okay?”

Her feet somehow find their way beneath her, and she straightens up tall as if she meant to come out the way she did. “Fine.”

A soldier jumps to the ground beside us, glances at us standing there like we’re insane, and sprints for the assault ship.

“Go!” Lieutenant Holt shouts. “Go, go, go!” He’s out among them, and he’s not even pointing at the right ship.

“Somebody’s gonna frag him,” Penny tells me over a private comm connection like we’re talking about the length of the grass in his lawn.

I nod like I know, although I don’t. I’ve only heard what I’ve heard. Demoralized troops tired of watching each other die to support a strategy they don’t understand find it easy to blame their officers and rough out their justice with a grenade or hypervelocity slug. The practice has turned into an epidemic in the SDF, and it’s the reason my job exists.

Something flashes above us.

An explosion knocks most of the troops off their feet.

The pressure wave pushes me into Penny, who seems unaffected.

Looking up, I see a shuttle has been hit. It’s broken into pieces and its grav plates are driving the parts in cockeyed directions as soldiers in orange suits tumble out.

A thick dust cloud blows over us, obscuring everything more than a stone’s throw away.

“This whole thing’s a damn mess,” says Penny, before pointing at the sky. “At least the Trogs won’t be able to see us with all the dirt they’re kicking up. They’ll be shooting randomly now.”

I figure they already are. The Trogs don’t have the kind of accuracy to hit one of these ships from space with anything but luck. Nevertheless, they’re doing a pretty good job with that. “We need to fix this mess right now if any of us are going to make it off the surface.”

Penny looks at me. She knows what I’m saying, and she knows the risk of pushing my authority so soon.

Unfortunately, I don’t see a better way. “You find Phil and make sure he gets to the bridge. I’ll load the platoon onboard.”

Penny is already moving as she tells me, “Yes, sir.”

It’s weird, hearing her say it. Until we were officially inducted a few hours ago, we were equals, two worker bees doing the same job on the same production line. Now she’s a lieutenant. I’m a major.

I activate the grav plates built into my suit, and they push against earth’s gravity field, sending me sailing over the heads of the soldiers in my platoon. I aim for one of our assault ship’s open side doors.

A third of the length of the ship, maybe sixty feet off the ground, I grab onto an exterior beam and plant my feet on a steel shelf covered in new, orange rust. I don’t think once about the poor aerodynamics of our medieval battering ram of a ship. Once out of the atmosphere, it’ll spend its existence in space. There’s no friction out there between the planets. This machine doesn’t need to be sleek. It only needs to be sturdy and fast.

A woman is at the top of the ladder below me, just entering the door. “Hurry,” I tell her. And then over the platoon comm, I cast my first official order as I point at the other open doors on this side of the ship. “Don’t run, use your grav. Get in here.”

Sergeant Brice immediately shoots off the ground and perches himself outside a door twenty feet above me. “Do it, now!” he reiterates. I’m both pleased and apprehensive. I need Brice to follow my orders without question, however, if his fealty to the SDF is unbending, it’ll be a problem.

Lieutenant Holt isn’t as experienced as Brice, and Holt starts to squawk at me over the platoon comm about chain of command. I cut him off before he’s got a full sentence out. I’m not going to let him get my company killed.

My company?

Not yet, but I’m going to make it so.

Soldiers start to float. Several soar smoothly toward the open doors.

One activates his suit’s gravity drive and shoots off the ground at rocket speed.

Before I can do anything to stop him, the streaking soldier slams headfirst into the top edge of the doorframe Brice is perched beside. I hear the crunch of bone over the comm as his helmet splits. Blood and gore rain down in bits as his suit’s gravity drive continues to push, jerking his body in spasms and mashing his head into the steel.

A few screams echo over the platoon comm.

Over the noisy channel, Brice announces, “That’s what a dumbass who scammed his way through his sims looks like.”

I realize the suit’s grav controls were damaged in the collision.

One of the younger soldiers starts to sob. I identify him and kill his comm.

Thinking quickly, Brice reaches around to the dead soldier’s integrated backpack and deftly removes the hydrogen pack that powers the suit’s micro-fusion reactor. That cuts the suit’s power, and the body falls to the ground as his comrades dodge out of the way.

“Careful,” Brice tells them all. “If you can’t fly the suit, climb one of the ladders.”

Novices and amateurs.

Every gap in training is going to be deadly.

The three other platoons in our company are disembarking from their shuttles and loading into nearby ships. I comm connect to the lieutenants of those platoons and loop in the absent company captain. “We don’t have time here. Tell the ones who can use their grav to fly to the upper doors. Put the rest on the ladders through the doors near the ground. Do it!” I don’t wait for a reply.

I switch my comm to link the small bridge crews of the four ships. I leave out the ships’ captains and first officers, the North Koreans. “Everybody answers to Penny,” I tell them. I don’t need to be overly formal with this group. Like Penny, they all worked with me at the grav factory. We know each other well. “Penny, get those reactors powered up. If the ships’ captains gives you any crap, loop me in.”

We can fly the ships without them—the North Koreans, that is. They’re here for political reasons only. Still, overriding their authority will put me in a world of shit if the plan doesn’t work out. “Leave laggards on the ground. Launch at your discretion, but the longer we stay here, the more likely we’ll be hit. Penny, let me know as soon as our ship is ready.”

Looking down, I see her and Phil moving through the thick door just above the reactors and the aft drive array. They’ll be on the bridge in the pressurized portion of the ship in thirty seconds.

Our platoon’s lieutenant is in a tizzy. He’s gesturing, yelling silently inside his helmet, and pushing his way up the ladder to get near me.

I don’t have time to finesse my way through his offended feelings. I decide to take a step I’d hoped to avoid altogether. I override his suit’s control system and lock it, freezing him in his pose.

Looking down the length of the ladder, I see his face go red as he understands what I’ve just done.

I laugh a little because I know he’s going to hate the next part even more. I take control of his gravity functions and I remote-fly him off the ladder and through the open door beside me. I deposit his stiff body against the back wall of the platoon compartment. I leave his comm cut. I’ll deal with him later.

Penny comms me in. “I’m in the pilot seat. The captain is shouting crazy Korean jabber at me, however, he’s got the reactor already purring. I’m goosing the hydrogen flow so we’ll be at max output before you can piss off another officer.”

“Let me know if the captain becomes a problem. Give me a grav bubble in the forward compartment as soon as you have the power.”

“And just so you know,” Penny adds, “The company’s captain, Milliken, is strapped into a jump seat on the bridge, staring at the wall.”

Another problem to deal with later. At least he’s staying quiet.

Lights come on inside the platoon compartment. The doors we’re not using on the other side of the ship grind closed. I feel momentarily disoriented as Phil activates the gravity field inside, canceling out the earth’s pull and making the interior a weightless environment.

I comm the platoon and tell them to expect zero-g.

A narrow flame cuts the air nearby as a sonic boom pounds my ears.

A flash blinds me for an instant, and a nearby ship explodes. Fire and huge shreds of iron soar into the air. The blast throws me against the hull.

Most of the soldiers still outside are knocked down.

Our ship leans and I fear it might fall. Penny is already compensating.

“I got it! I got it!” She yells.

Everyone is hollering on the platoon channel. Some are hurt. Others are panicking.

Brice is trying to get them refocused.

The troopers already inside are drifting in the weightlessness, holding on, or strapping themselves into seats. One of them pops open his faceplate and pukes. It floats there, an amorphous blob, as I wonder why the anti-nausea drug laced into the suit’s water supply isn’t working.

Another explosion’s shockwave ripples over us.

It’s time for desperate measures.

I freeze the suits of everyone in the platoon except for the bridge crew.

Brice curses and I realize I should have left him active and autonomous. He’s the only reason the platoon didn’t fall to pieces the moment the shuttle sat down.

I unlock his suit while I shut down the platoon comm so only he and I will be heard. I quickly apologize to Brice, and say, “They’re coming your way.”

“No sweat,” he answers. “None of you new officers learns shit from those computer games, but you’ll pick it up.” He laughs. “Who the hell am I kidding? You know the attrition rate for officers?”

Brice doesn’t bother to tell me any number, so I figure the question was rhetorical, and that’s worrisome.

My experience in the factory makes the next part easy. I take grav control of a corporal’s suit and fly her up to Brice’s door at a speed that would frighten anyone. “Dunk her.”

Brice pushes the frozen woman into the zero-g compartment behind him just as another stiff-suited soldier arrives.

“You ignorant, mutinous pig!” It’s the ship’s captain over the bridge comm. He’s talking to me, of course. “My ship. My command. When I report the—”

I shut down his comm and freeze his suit. I tell Penny, “If that first officer starts in, let me know and I’ll lock him out, too.”

Everyone on board is going to hate me, still, at least they’ll be alive.

More fire lances down from the sky.

“We gotta go,” Penny tells me. “The reactor is at full power.”

“Thirty seconds,” I respond. “How are the other three ships doing?”

She gives me a quick report as I move soldiers.

One more to go.

I send him up.

Brice pushes him through the door into a 3D jigsaw puzzle of floating soldiers.

I scan the area around the ship as I realize I don’t have time to search for anyone who might be missing.

“Get inside, Brice.” I look up to see him jump inside. On the bridge comm, I tell Phil, “Close the doors, and give me radial grav at point-two-g inside the bubble.”

I unfreeze the platoon’s suits.

The last open doors start to grind on sturdy gears. The radial grav nudges the drifting soldiers toward the walls where they start to strap into empty seats.

“Done,” Phil tells me.

“Go, go, go!” I shout, “Penny, get us off the ground.”

Chapter 15

The ship shudders and the steel walls glow blue with bands of energy that resemble propane flames dancing over the rust. The glow is a visible artifact of imperfections in the grav field surging off the plates under a heavy load.

Welded joints groan and metal flexes. It doesn’t seem possible so much steel wrapped around the long tube that carries the platoon can bend.

But it is bending!

And shrieking.

Soldiers are busy trying to strap themselves into the rows of seats lined along the walls of the tube. That’s really all it is—a metal tube, formerly a tanker car, part of a train that hauled oil across the country, repurposed surplus from an obsolete industrial age, like the ransacked steel tracks bent in a crisscross pattern, embedded with grav plates, and welded five deep around the tank.

Steel, thirty inches thick, squealing as it’s pushed between the power coming out of the drive array behind us through the back half of the ship, and the weight of the gravity lens up front—a conical hunk of solid steel, titanium, and specialized grav plates, the mojo in our wonder weapon that’s supposed to make this whole quixotic dream real.

God help us, we’re flying into space, encased in junkyard surplus to ram starships with an invention never tested in battle.

More in the platoon are panicking as the contagious thought of the ship coming apart spreads.

“Sergeant Brice,” I order, “get the stragglers in their seats and under control.”

“Yes, sir.” He firmly starts in on the soldiers, many of whom are having trouble with the radial gravity because it’s not consistent. The field is flexing with the ship and pulsing with the electrical current flowing from the reactor.

I link a private comm to Lieutenant Holt. “I need you to help Sergeant Brice situate the troops. Provide me a status report on the platoon—how many can fight, and a no-bullshit assessment of what they can do. I’m guessing we’ll see action before we’re ready for it.”

Completely ignoring my request, the lieutenant starts in on me about how I’m overstepping my authority.

“Dammit!” I yell at him. “Do your job now, and bitch later. We don’t have time for this shit.” Some people only respond to the harshest of words. “I’m opening your comm to the platoon. Grow the hell up and get me that status report.”

It works.

The lieutenant busies himself, following my orders.

I’m a little bit surprised.

I don’t know that I’m a natural leader, but I believe in my cause with all my heart, and I hate watching knuckleheads sit on their thumbs while complaining about sore asses. Maybe the mix of those two is enough.

I aim myself down the center of the tube where the radial g in the platoon compartment cancels to zero. I push off.

Another soldier opens his faceplate and wretches into the air outside his suit. I point at the troop as I drift by and call Brice’s attention. “This compartment isn’t pressurized. In three more minutes, that’ll be suicide.”

“Yes, sir.” To the platoon, he orders, “Lock visors closed.” He proceeds to remind them of what they should have learned from their simulators about the effects of a vacuum on a human body.

Brice is still scolding the troops when I tune out of the platoon comm channel.

Wind is whistling through the gaps in the doors along the sides of the tube, and I still see daylight leaking in around the edges. The doors weren’t built to hold in atmosphere. They were built to bear a structural load and to not jam shut. Considering what the ship is designed to do, the not-jamming part is important.

I reach the airlock door separating the platoon compartment from the aft half of the ship where we have a rudimentary sickbay, supply rooms, and the bridge.

A sonic boom rattles the ship as we blast past the speed of sound.

My God, this thing can push the g’s.

I’m glad to have the inertial bubble protecting me.

I push the palm-sized button to cycle the airlock.

Nothing happens.

The blue glow in the grav field intensifies around the ship’s structure.

I link into the bridge comm. “Phil, the airlock won’t open.”

“Give me a minute,” he answers.

“I’ll take it,” says Penny.

“No,” I tell her. “You’ve got to fly this thing.” Taking up Phil’s slack is a habit from our grav factory days I need to break her of. “Phil, tell the first officer to get busy on the comm panel and find our rally point. My guess is we’ll be attacking those Trog cruisers as soon as we’re up there. I need those details. And get me the status of the rest of the company.”

“I just remembered,” says Phil, “the airlock won’t cycle because we’re still in atmosphere. It locks. It’s a bug. That’s one we know about. How many bugs do you think this rusty piece of shit has that we don’t—”

“Adverb!” Penny’s had her fill of Phil.

“Got it.” I turn my back to the bulkhead and grab the handles on the wall—handles are everywhere inside the tube. Other than the two rows of facing seats, and the thick supports running through at regular intervals, the handles are the only interior feature. They’ll come in handy when we’re in zero-g.

With nothing to do for a second, I take a deep breath to clear my head. I can’t let my nerves frazzle with everything moving so fast. Besides Brice, it’s looking like there isn’t a decent officer or non-comm on the ship. I hope the other three platoons are better off than we are.

As my gaze drifts over the compartment, I notice most of the troops are locked into their seats. Many of them are looking down the length of the tube, staring at me. Glaring is more accurate. I froze their suits and for a few minutes, they were powerless dolls. I can see some of them won’t forgive me for doing that. Humans don’t like losing control.

Don’t they understand they’ve spent their whole existence with no say in their lives? Half of us were born slaves to a race of big-headed alien twig-runts who conquered our planet in the briefest of wars some thirty years ago. The other half suffered the more difficult pain of living life with no master and then having their freedom taken away.

I want to shout—what’s a few more minutes of no control?

I don’t.

There’s something more important they need to know.

I open the platoon comm and mute all of them. “For any of you who didn’t take the time at the muster station to view the company’s command structure on your d-pads, I’m Major Commissar Dylan Kane.” I hold up my arm and tap the d-pad. “You know why I’m here, so I’ll be frank. Nobody gets fragged in this company, officer or otherwise. And just to keep you honest, I’ve initiated the kill switch, so behave, kids.”

I cut the comm and hit the airlock button again.

The Solar Defense Force is serious about curbing the practice of troops killing their officers.

Now, the platoon knows I’m serious, too.

Chapter 16

The airlock’s outer door seals shut with me inside.

I wonder for a moment who I am.

This morning, I was working a half-shift at the grav factory, and now I’ve just stared down thirty armed heavy assault soldiers—or however many are left after that fiasco at the shipyard—and told them if they didn’t behave I’d kill every one of them.

Has my rank made me stupidly brave? Has it turned me so quickly into a tyrant?

I tell myself it’s neither. I’m only working through unforeseen minutiae in a plan that’s been growing in my head since I was still figuring out no Easter Bunny was ever going to leave colored eggs in the spring snow and no Santa Claus was going to bring good-behavior bribes down our chimney at Christmas.

I wonder sometimes if my childhood had been different, would I have grown up to want to change the world so badly?

My father was a hoist operator who suffocated under a cave-in at the molybdenum mine two weeks before I was born.

My mother worked twelve-hour night shifts in the molly mine over by Leadville, hauling ore over the same ground where my father died with eighty-two others. She came home each morning, dirty and tired, and made me breakfast with what little food we had in the house. While I ate, she read me stories from our history—human history—and I learned about a time from before the siege, back when humans arrogantly thought we were the only thinking beings in the whole endless universe.

What a painful punchline that joke turned out to have.

Before I learned to read for myself, I was familiar with stories about presidents, generals, dictators, and kings. She and I talked about the choices those men made and the consequences of their actions, and she asked me questions that forced me to think. They were all simple stories and basic questions at first—they became more complex as I grew older.

Together, she and I learned about the different ways political power shapes the world and the lives of the people in it.

She wanted me to know what military might could do in the hands of geniuses, fools, and mediocre officers trying to keep their soldiers alive, or in the hands of men willing to trade those lives for glory.

She didn’t talk much about the leaders who embarrassed our species when the Grays arrived in our solar system just before I was born.

In fact, for an event so momentous in the evolution of a species, for a war so pivotal in the history of humanity, there isn’t much to tell. The contact and the subsequent war were devastating, decisive, and anticlimactic all at the same time.

We weren’t a spacefaring species then, not in any real sense. We’d landed some men on the moon, left people in earth’s orbit for long periods of time, and shot fragile little probes into the solar system to gather bits of data about the infinite black void and its hunks of orbiting rock. We had tens of thousands of ballistic missiles we could pop into low-earth orbit in the blink of an eye so we could obliterate each other on some future day when that perfect mix of nationalism, enmity, and stupidity convinced our kleptocrats that a dead planet was preferable to living under the yoke of some other culture’s facade of good governance.

And that’s one of the defining aspects of human DNA. Something unique in our double-helix of proteins makes abhorrent the idea of kneeling to someone who doesn’t look like us, sound like us, or hate like us.

Maybe for that reason, the war with the Grays eventually turned me into what I became.

The siege started a year or two before I was born, when the Grays’ single kilometer-long ship blipped out of hyper-light travel one day and floated into an orbit some twenty thousand miles above the earth’s surface.

Of course, it was a surprise, and based on the videos I’ve seen from that time, hope and fear were palpable in the air. Everyone had a theory about the contents of the craft—if anything—and what it had come to our solar system to do.

Every attempt was made to communicate with the ship’s occupants, but as far as anyone could tell, the ship held no living creatures. It responded to nothing.

After a few weeks of earthly governments making their plans on how to send a vessel out to the interstellar cruiser, it suddenly zipped off to land on the bright side of the moon, right where any knucklehead with a telescope could see it.

Still, the ship did not respond to any messages from earth, no matter what medium was contrived to send them.

Eventually, the ship’s occupants started building subterranean structures of all different sizes with strange little holes on top. That’s to say, it was deduced the aliens were building the structures, as no one on earth ever got a glimpse of one of them outside the ship.

A cottage industry grew up fanning the speculation of why the aliens had come and what they were up to with all their activity on the moon.

Nothing more of consequence happened.

The aliens’ odd little farm continued to grow.

Time passed.

Most of the people on earth eventually grew bored with guessing about a construction project two-hundred thousand miles away that didn’t have any impact on whether they could pay the rent, buy a shinier car, or get laid on the weekend. Our governments didn’t lose interest, though.

Earth’s technologically advanced countries chose to collaborate on the design of a rocket to ferry a pilot, copilot, a few military men, and a half-dozen scientists to the moon.

We needed to find out what was up there.

An astronaut selection process turned into an international drama, re-captivating the world’s entertainment-hungry masses. Construction began on a ship that would take the crew to the moon, not an easy feat in those days since no country on earth had landed a manned mission on the moon in half a century.

Eventually, they finished building the ship, and they scheduled a launch.

Chapter 17

Not since the days of the Apollo missions had so many people been glued to a television to watch a rocket ascend into the heavens.

The cameras were all turned on.

The signal was broadcast across the globe.

The countdown ran its course.

As expected, the engines roared and mountains of clouds flooded over the launch facility.

Up the rocket went.

Three days passed while nearly everyone on earth sat riveted to a television screen or computer monitor watching what might as well have been ten people on an RV trip from New York to Los Angeles, all taking turns peeking through a few tiny windows, without ever stopping to go outside for a walk.

At the end of it, the ship went into orbit around the moon and made five or six circuits before the final decision came to land. People cheered. There was a certain giddiness to it. Earth’s cultures had finally come together around a common goal.

By itself, that would have been a significant step forward.

Without incident, the ship touched down on the moon within a quarter mile of the alien vessel.

The engines cooled. The crew prepared themselves to exit the lander. And then, without warning, a small projectile fired from the alien ship. It blasted right through the lander’s engines, disabling, but not destroying them.

The world erupted in crazy talk and unhinged behavior.

Some thought we’d offended the aliens.

Others believed our ship had tripped an automated self-defense system set up to protect the empty vessel.

Still more accurately guessed that the earth had just witnessed the first shot in an interstellar war.

Amidst the furor, nobody seemed to notice that no attack followed. However, a door opened on the side of the trespassing ship.

An invitation?

More speculation.

The astronauts lingered in their lander for two weeks, confirming and reconfirming they had no way to repair their ship and return from the moon. The mission wasn’t designed to last more than three weeks, and the astronauts ran low on food, water, and oxygen.

Finally, accepting they were in a position where they had no other choice, they all left the ship together, crossed the moon’s barren surface, and disappeared through the alien craft’s open door. The door closed behind the astronauts and then not much happened on the moon for about a year, except the subterranean construction continued, and the aliens put the astronauts to work slowly disassembling their spacecraft and hauling pieces inside the vessel.

On earth, the public went back to theorizing and making bad choices.

During this time it was leaked that most of the governments on earth had agreed the planet was under attack and they were actively working together on a countermeasure. The hush-hush version had the governments of earth building fleets of ships and training soldiers to fly to the moon for an assault.

Something else odd happened while the world was in limbo about our new neighbors on the moon. Ever the international pariah, the North Koreans launched a rocket that appeared to be a copy of the one the rest of the world cooperated to build. It also orbited the moon a handful of times and landed near the spot where the other ship had sat down. Only instead of lingering inside, three astronauts immediately exited the vehicle and walked right up to the alien vessel.

To everyone’s surprise, the aliens let them in.

That didn’t sit well with the rest of the nations on earth. North Korea was pressured for information. Sanctions were stiffened. War was threatened.

Before that situation got out of hand, the calendar flipped to the anniversary of the first lander’s arrival on the moon and a video signal was broadcast from the alien vessel using the lander’s equipment. It showed one of the world’s chosen scientists standing alone in front of eighteen little Gray aliens arrayed in a semi-circle behind him.

The short version of what he told the world was that the Grays were a telepathic species with a history stretching back a million years. They were learned and wise, and they had declared themselves humanity’s guardians. In that role, they would shepherd our species through the next ten or twenty thousand years of evolution and help us ascend to our full potential. The small price they required for this benevolent tutelage was our complete obedience. In fact, by their plan, we’d be little more than a slave species.

Earth’s choice in the matter was to accept their authority without reservation or to submit to them by right of conquest.

Just to make the whole thing a little bit more like a bad joke, they told us there were just eighteen of them. On their ship, they’d brought with them a few thousand members of another lesser species—slaves. During a question and answer session, the scientist ventured a guess that the Grays’ humanoid slaves were descendants of Neanderthals taken from earth sometime in the distant past.

And yes, he told the world at least a dozen times, it truly was just eighteen Grays.

As anyone who knows anything about human behavior might guess, there was no submission. The aliens were told how quickly they could go to hell, and were given the ultimatum to return our astronauts and to get off our fucking moon or suffer the kind of full-scale, pain-soaked annihilation humans had been dishing out since we first fell from the tree branches a few million years ago and started beating each other to death with rocks and brittle bones.

That’s when the war started in earnest.

Earth launched its quaint fleet of chemical rockets stuffed with as many spacesuit-clad soldiers as could be crammed inside.

Like nearly every case in human history, when a technologically backward army attacked an advanced one, slaughter ensued. Not one of the hastily constructed spacefaring warships came close to landing on the moon. The alien vessel’s railguns shredded them en route.

Thus began the final phase of the war.

Humiliation turned to devastation.

The alien ship lifted off the moon and spent two days destroying every human-made satellite in earth or lunar orbit. It then went back to its previous resting place. To earth’s chagrin, nothing could be done to stop them.

The Grays decided then it was time to show earth what they’d been constructing on the moon the whole time—huge railguns, driven by gravity, powered by fusion reactors. Those two technologies turned out to be a decisive combination.

While the Grays had the slaves building their battery of weapons, they’d also had them smelting the moon’s ore into metal casings around slugs made of solid moon rock. The slugs weighed anywhere from a few hundred pounds to a few hundred tons. Fired by those railguns, the projectiles hurtled toward earth at speeds as high as sixty thousand miles an hour.

When the kinetic energy of the heavier projectiles converted to heat on impact, they produced blasts on par with small nuclear devices. No fissile material and no chemical reaction required, just simple physics producing the kind of violence that’s been shaping the universe for fourteen billion years.

On the first day of the bombardment, a dozen small towns sprinkled across the globe were obliterated.

Earth’s leaders made speeches about putting on a brave face and preparing for an invasion. They told the people that humanity would never submit to a gaggle of effete gray monkeys no matter what technological advantages they possessed.

As was the usual case in matters of war, defiance was paid for with the blood of people not involved in making the decision.

The Grays set about raining their meteoric projectiles down on military installations and nuclear missile sites the world over. In the process, they worked their way through a list of the earth’s largest non-capital cities. Shanghai, Karachi, São Paulo were destroyed. St. Petersburg, Munich, Los Angeles and a dozen others went the next day.

After working through a list of cities, the aliens contacted earth again, only this time it was one of the North Koreans speaking. He told us the Grays didn’t mind destroying all of earth’s population centers except those within the borders of North Korea, home of their newly converted acolytes on earth.

He said the Grays were gods who lived lives spanning thousands of years and they were a patient species. They didn’t mind devastating the planet and then waiting while their North Korean friends repopulated and redeveloped it to their liking.

Earth’s revised set of choices—let seven billion people die, or accept the absolute authority of the Grays over every living thing on earth to be administered humanely by the North Koreans.

That’s the day the world’s leaders set my fate. I was born a slave.

Chapter 18

We’ve reached the edge of space and the platoon compartment has emptied of air.

Sensing the external vacuum, the airlock door opens.

I slip into the airlock and turn away from the door’s small window as I seal it closed. I don’t need to see those soldiers’ eyes drilling me with contempt.

Air hisses to fill a space large enough to hold a handful of soldiers in full gear.

I wait.

A tremor runs through the steel beneath my feet, and I hear the sound of a hammer striking an anvil.

More gravity stress on the hull?

The ship shudders as three more hammers pound in rapid succession.

I open a comm link to the bridge just as a hole punches through the hull in front of me. A sizzling beam of plasma cuts a diagonal line through the airlock, blasting another hole near my foot. The air flashes to fire, completely engulfing me, but instantly dissipating as it howls into space.

Before I know I’ve been knocked down, I find myself on my ass, pushed against the door.

Even as I’m trying to figure out if I can breathe, if my bones are broken, if my suit is punctured, I think of the ship, and I understand what’s going on. A railgun slug punched a hole through the airlock and burned the atmosphere as it tore straight through the ship.

The sarcastic genius who lives in my head tells me we’re under attack.

I shout into the command comm. “Defensive grav!”

Another round hits the hull as Phil says something I don’t understand.

The ship’s interior grav bubble flexes, and disappears without warning as I’m smashed flat against a side wall under five or six g’s.

The ship maneuvers and I’m thrown against the airlock door and the g’s push so hard my vision tunnels down to a small pool of light in the center of engulfing black.

I realize I need to grav compensate with my suit just as my vision turns swimmy and reality skews off-kilter.

I’m not unconscious, though I’m not right. In truth, I’m not sure what I am. I’m on a sidewalk of dreams with memories parading past.

We met at a required-attendance social function, Claire and me. It was one of those monthly MSS things for all the singles in Summit County. Every locality has them. The Grays want fertile humans to pair up, spawn, and to push offspring into the pipeline that feeds the labor pool.

Under the Grays’ management of earth, humans are little better than off-brand ketchup packets, out of which every drop of utility must be squeezed.

Phil was with me that night, as usual. We were making our perfunctory appearance—sign in at the desk inside the front door, stay past the first name check, get a free plate of actual barbecued beef, duck out the back. That was our play. Summit County in those days wasn’t heavily populated with the unattached, and most of us singles knew each other already. Any sparks that were going to fly had already flown. Any carnal play that was going to lead to love, already had.

Twenty minutes into the event, as our stomachs were starting to grumble, Phil and I were near a window and bitching about the new North Korean overseer at the grav plant. That’s when Phil spotted two girls signing in at the front door, Claire and her twin sister, Sydney. We’d never seen them before.

I’ve never been comfortable meeting new people, so Phil took the lead. He wasn’t much to look at, but that never detoured him from giving a girl a go. Phil had an edge. He could do so much more with that bug in his head than the rest of us who’d been implanted at birth.

After introducing us, Phil bet the girls he could guess their names.

Everybody takes that bet. Why not? It’s nearly impossible to lose.

They did lose, however, and that obligated them to be our dates for the evening.

It turned out Claire and Sydney were both born in Breckenridge and lived there until they were in grade school. As the Grays slowly appropriated the whole valley for their growing spaceport, supporting facilities, and factories, the girls’ family relocated to Denver. That’s where Claire worked in a sweatshop assembling wire harnesses for grav lift control panels, among other things. Sydney wasn’t MSS but she worked for them as an auditor, employed by the Front Range Farm Bureau. Her job was to catch farmers cheating on their production quotas by skimming extra food for the black markets.

Both girls had come up to Summit County because—like Phil and me—they were bored with the prospects at their local social function.

What followed was an evening of laughs, dances, bellies full of food, and inhibitions dulled by beer.

By night’s end, the pairing-off worked by some social magic I had no hope of understanding. I was in bed with Claire, naked, ready to unleash months of pent-up sexual frustration and she was greedy to accept it.

We were breaking the law.

That’s not to say any rules existed against intercourse. The Grays, through their MSS mouthpieces, encouraged women to get on their backs and invite men in—to hell with human moralizing over which pairs of people could and couldn’t procreate. Rituals be damned, they just wanted more human babies.

It wasn’t the fornication that was illegal—it was, and still is, the contraceptives.

I explained to her that I had no condom. Prices on them had been going up at the black market down in Denver. Most times, you couldn’t even find one for purchase. And packaging? Forget it. If you wanted one in a little foil pack printed with a brand name in full, shiny color, a well-preserved, sanitary relic from thirty years ago, those were pricier than a five-gallon can of gasoline.

Most guys settled for loose condoms sold out of a plastic bag slipped surreptitiously from another guy’s pocket. Probably used before and rinsed clean-ish. It was often the best available.

Though I always aspired to own two condoms, one primary, and one backup, frequency of opportunity never proved out the necessity. Worse yet, in a desperate moment on a recent trip to the black market, I traded my condom for a computer network card after mine crapped out.

So, I would have happily been the lawbreaker, if I’d had the means to do so.

Claire told me not to worry. She was on the pill, making her the criminal.

I was mortified.

An odd emotion to have with an erection raging between my legs.

At the time, I still believed some of the MSS propaganda. I didn’t realize until later that it was one-hundred-percent shit. I was under the impression that contraceptive pills slowly ate away a woman’s uterus, and eventually filled the empty space with pus-dripping tumors that became infected and killed her. In fact, I believed that line of shit so deeply, I was afraid to enter Claire for fear that I might contract a contagious penis tumor that would eventually kill me off through pus leakage.

The MSS are a bunch of violent cretins, but their propaganda wing can spin some compelling shit.

As it turned out, Claire found a way to persuade me to ignore what I’d been told about the pill. She’d been on it for years, she claimed, without the slightest negative effect. She was healthy and raring to go.

In some ways, that was the beginning of my intellectual rebirth. I’d grown up a doubter and a rebel at heart, but society grinds that out of a boy with an endless, slow flood of peer pressure and propaganda. Claire’s healthy, enthusiastic genitalia served as a glaring contradiction that exposed a huge MSS lie. It sparked my quest to see through the rest of their deceptions.

Just one more boy suffering a vagina-centric epiphany. A born-again minion for the golden beaver of truth.

A month after our first night together, Claire and I were married.

Three weeks later, Sydney and Phil tied the knot.

For a long time, a few years maybe, I thought I was in love. No, I knew it. I just didn’t understand what my relationship was.

I’d seen love stories and romantic comedies in the pre-siege vids. I’d watched other people meet, mate, marry, move-in, and manufacture babies. Lots of them seemed happy, or at least comfortable with each other. I felt like I knew how love and marriage added up to something they were convinced was special.

I wanted that, too, probably because I believed it was the only way a twelve-hour-a-day drudge slave could find happiness in a Gray-ruled world.

What I never comprehended at the time, maybe the kind of thing no slave understands when he’s in the sort of position I was, is that to most people I was affluent, or at least I was what passed for rich among the lowly hierarchies stacked beneath the MSS boot. I had a bug in my head, a big house, and more food than most. I was privileged. More than that, being a human capable of carrying on a productive life with an alien implant symbiotically living in my brain, the Grays wanted me to procreate, and procreate a lot, to make more little humans whose bodies wouldn’t reject the bug.

By their laws, any woman I married would no longer have to work. Her sole responsibility under the MSS was to reproduce.

Phil and I both thought we were marrying for love. Claire and her sister were simply earning food enough to keep away the hunger pangs, and shucking off the requirement to toil twelve-hour days for the Grays.

They made their trade.

Over the years, both grew bitter about the choice.

Sydney’s dissatisfaction with her deal turned into sharp words and cruel insults that she’d heap on Phil in front of anyone unlucky enough to hear. Toward me, Sydney was always sweet and flirtatious. More punishment for Phil.

Claire just turned cold.

And colder.

Any effort she put into acting the part of loving wife was transparently false by the time we’d been together two years. By five, it was absent. We became two mute automatons, sharing a house, and a bed, a place where we serviced the only apparent need Claire had, her still healthy and active genitalia, protected from pregnancy by her continued use of contraband pills.

We talked and touched enough to negotiate the coupling. She mounted me like I was a mechanical device and rode until she was satisfied. After she was done, at least she was considerate enough to let me fondle and pump until I reached my biological endpoint as well. No intimacy existed in the act, neither before, nor after.

Chapter 19

“Kane! Dylan Kane!”

“Kane!”

My eyes pop open.

My thoughts are treading through mushy neurons.

I’m piecing together I’m awake. “Penny?”

“Kane,” she asks, “are you okay? Were you hit?”

I’m breathing. That’s ultimately important. My arms and legs are still attached. No breach of my suit.

“Kane,” Penny asks again, “are you okay?”

“I’m good.” Though I’m not entirely sure. I glance at the two holes in the airlock. I see a spot of blackness through the one above, and I see vibrant blue ocean down below. Far below. We’re still in space. “Status?”

“I hit full accel,” Penny tells me, kind of apologetic, but not really, “at the same time Phil maxed the grav field on the hull plates to deflect incoming fire. You guys probably felt it inside.”

No kidding.

“I spun the ship,” she adds, “so the grav lens is facing the Trog cruiser firing on us.”

“Great move.” It’s an offensive weapon, yet there’s no reason it shouldn’t deflect incoming fire, it just didn’t occur to me to use it that way. Good thing it occurred to Penny. She was a good choice for pilot. “Are we clear now?”

“No,” answers Phil, jumping on the line. At least I think he says that. The North Korean first officer is prattling through his bad accent and muddling the comm. Easy enough to fix. I drop him from the command link I share with Phil and Penny.

“There’s a squadron of Trog ships attacking one of the orbital battle stations,” says Phil, his voice barely containing his anxiety. “One of them is redirecting fire at us now. The shots that already hit us came from one of the three ships bombing the shipyard. We’ll be getting it from two sides.”

The grav lens won’t be able to keep us safe, I deduce.

Penny calmly adds, “We’ll be around the curve of the earth in about ten seconds. Safe from enemy fire.”

“Unless there are more Trog ships waiting for us over there,” says Phil. “Or they slow down the speed of their railgun rounds, so they’ll follow our orbit.”

“Kill the drama, Adverb!” Penny scolds, to end Phil’s negative speculation.

“Can’t we grow up?” mutters Phil. He really does hate it when Penny calls him Adverb.

Unfortunately, Phil’s right. Mostly. We don’t know how many Trog ships are attacking which stations around the earth. But the idea of one of them hitting us with a lucky shot around an orbital curve when they can’t see us—not likely. They’d need a badass targeting computer to instantly work out the orbital mechanics and relative ship velocities for that kind of shot, and if the rumors are true, Trogs don’t have computer technology of any kind. “Phil, how bad is the ship damaged?”

“Cosmetic,” he tells me. “We got raked pretty good, but all the systems seem to be working. We’ve lost pressurization in the crew compartments. One of the hydrogen tanks is venting, and so are two of the water reservoirs.” Phil pauses.

I think something ominous is coming next.

Penny finishes out the status report. “Captain took one through the chest just below the neck.”

“Ship’s captain or platoon captain?” I ask.

“Ship,” answers Penny. “Most of him is still inside the suit. If it weren’t for the first officer still being alive, you’d be in charge.”

Command of the ship is a necessity for the plan. Ships are weapons and weapons turn subversive dreams into revolutionary reality. The captain being hit was unfortunate for him but a piece of luck for me. The first officer is a problem with no good solution. I need to deal with him, except I’m not looking forward to what I’ll have to do. I shift gears. “Any word on the fleet?”

“It’s chaos out there,” Phil answers. “The first officer is talking on the ship-to-ship comm and switching from Korean to English and back again. He’s freaking out. I can’t say how many ships were too damaged to make it off the ground at the shipyard but—most of them, maybe. With the Trogs targeting the airborne ones just as they leave the atmosphere…” Phil has a hard time saying the next part. “It looks like they’re destroying most of them.”

Is it bad luck that our new ships were slated to launch on a day when a Trog fleet happened to be in low-earth orbit attacking the space stations? Or is this another betrayal by those damned North Koreans?

“Phil,” I say, “I need a bead on the nearest enemy vessel—velocity, flight path, profile of their defensive grav field. Penny needs an attack vector if we’re going to be alive after we ram that damn thing. Too fast, too slow, neither works, get us those Goldilocks numbers.”

“And the Free Army?” Penny asks. She knows our instructions are to go there with the company’s four ships at the first opportunity. “No one will notice if we go now. The MSS will think we’re dead with all the others.”

But soldiers are dying, and Trogs are killing them.

As much as my humanity is going to be tested by the things I’ll have to do to birth this revolution, I won’t surrender it to what feels like cowardice. “We’ve stepped into a pile of dog shit up here. If something’s not done about those three cruisers bombing the shipyard, there’ll be nothing left of the two divisions.” I pause as I start to rethink, but I know it’s the right thing to do. “We’re attacking.”

Chapter 20

Still stuck in the airlock, I’m hitting the door release so I can make it through to the ship’s pressurized half. The door won’t respond. “Phil, I’m stuck.”

Phil comes on the line. “We’ve got some holes in this end of the ship. Now the airlock’s sensors don’t detect atmosphere inside but aren’t smart enough to know the pressurized compartments in the rest of the ship are no longer airtight.”

What were the designers of this ship thinking?

“Can you override?” I ask.

“On it,” he tells me.

While I’m waiting, I connect with the company captain. “Milliken, any contact with the other three platoons?”

“Uhhh.”

One syllable?

Are you kidding me?

“Milliken!” I shout. “Get on your tactical comm and find those other platoons!” I’m hoping he’ll be able to find some information the First Officer isn’t receiving or isn’t sharing. “I need to know if they’ve made it up. I need to know what their operational status is.”

He says, “I’m coming down there.”

Christ! The guy is useless.

I switch to the platoon command channel—me, the three sergeants, and the lieutenant. “Lieutenant Holt, what’s the situation? I need that status.” I tap my d-pad, and it shows everyone in the platoon is still alive and uninjured. I know that’s not true. I saw one of them die before liftoff and I know others are injured. I’m tempted to pound the d-pad with my fist, but I don’t. I can’t indulge the luxury of throwing a tantrum.

I hear a gurgling pant on the platoon command channel.

Brice comes on. “Sergeant Drake caught a piece of metal through the chest.”

“Status doesn’t show it,” I say, regretting the pointless utterance even as the syllables form in my mouth.

The sergeant curses the d-pad.

I curse too. Most of our tech is nearly useless, worn out, damaged, and pieced together.

Brice says, “The corpsman put a patch on Drake’s suit but he’ll be dead before we can get him back to sickbay.”

“Holt,” I call again, looking for him to say anything at this point.

“He’s not responding,” says Brice. “Is his comm disabled?”

Brice is asking if it was me who disabled the lieutenant’s comm and left it that way. That would be an embarrassing screw-up that wouldn’t help with my endeavor to gain the platoon’s respect. I double check. According to my d-pad, Holt’s comm should be working.

“No,” I answer. “My d-pad shows his comm is active.” It also displays a bar graph giving me an idea of how much time everyone in the platoon is spending on their comm links. The Lieutenant and Captain Milliken are chatting non-stop. Being the company commissar, assuming that feature of my d-pad isn’t on the fritz, I can listen in or hear recordings of all the conversations they’ve had. They’re supposed to be stored on my device, though none of them know it. I hope.

Nevertheless, I don’t have time to listen. I assume they’re bitching about me. That’s expected, but they’ve got more important things to do. Me too. I tell Brice, “His comm must be malfunctioning. How many casualties?”

“One dead before we took off. Three more missing. Whether they just didn’t board, or were injured down on the surface, I don’t know. Sergeant Drake was the only enlisted man in the platoon besides me with combat experience.”

I gulp. That’s going to hurt.

“A round came through one of the doors and ricocheted around inside the platoon compartment. Not counting Drake, four soldiers are dead, and two are injured. We have suit patches over the wounds, although we need to get them into the sickbay so the corpsman can peel off the suits and treat them.”

Twenty-seven percent casualties and we haven’t been on the ship ten minutes. I tell Brice, “We lost pressure in the back half of the ship when they hit us.”

“When will we be able to re-pressurize?”

I look at the fist-sized holes above and below me in the airlock. I know there’s at least one hole in the bridge, and I don’t know where else. “Can’t say. It doesn’t look good. The airlock is damaged. Get your corpsman to haul the wounded into the infirmary. Maybe we can seal that room and pressurize it, however, they’ll all be locked inside, with no way to move them out until we land or fix the holes in the hull.”

“That takes our corpsman out of the fight.” It’s a crap choice, but Brice is decisive. “I say we do it. At least that way the wounded we have now will have a chance. The rest of us will just have to not get hurt.”

“Agreed.” Time for more drastic measures. “Sergeant, have one of your people recycle me a kit off one of the dead soldiers.” Commissars like me are only armed with a pistol. Infantry have a pistol as well, a rifle-sized railgun, grenades, and ammunition for it all. “I’m coming with the platoon when we raid the Trog ship.”

“Sir?” he asks. “You’re not trained for—”

“Let’s be honest,” I tell him. “Except for you, none of us have seen anything but a simulator. I’m not sending the troops out short on noncoms with a lieutenant who won’t communicate, and a company captain whose suit seems to have boarded without him in it. We go in together.”

“Yes, sir,” answers Brice.

I think I’ve scored some points with him. “Get my kit together. I need to move up to the bridge and resolve a situation. I’ll be right back down. Make sure the platoon is ready to roll.”

Chapter 21

Finally, I’m through the airlock’s interior door and into the central hallway that runs down the axis of the ship. Phil has restored radial grav at point-two-g, so I close the door and shove off to float toward the bridge.

In here, where the ship was designed to hold air, the metal surfaces are painted, though the paint is already flaking, evidence of how hastily the vessel was thrown together. If the Trogs don’t kill us, we’ll be lucky to live through the day in our iron coffin.

The rear half of the ship is much wider than the front, so it has enough interior space on each side of the hall for the infirmary, a few storerooms, and the captain’s quarters. The door at the far end of the corridor leads to the bridge. As I reach it, a Korean-accented voice blares over my comm. “Captain dead. I charge ship.” It’s the first officer. I’ve read his name off the crew roster, except I know I’ll screw up the pronunciation, so I don’t use it to address him. “We need to talk.”

“You charge grunts,” he tells me. “I charge ship. Go. Ready boots.”

Boots?

I bite my lip to funnel my anger. It’s insulting the first officer’s English is so bad. It tells me exactly how little respect the North Koreans and their Gray masters have for the rest of us. That’s nothing new. I try the handle on the bridge door. It doesn’t budge. I try to unlock the mechanism through my link to the ship. Rejected. I don’t bother to soften the edge on my annoyance when I say, “Unlock the door, lieutenant.”

“You charge grunts,” he shoots back.

“You get us in communication with our chain of command!” I yell in chopped, precise words. “That’s your job. Do it now!”

“You charge grunts. Go.”

Over the bridge comm, I say “Phil, unlock the bridge door.” I don’t want him to have to execute the first prosecutable act in our mutiny, but there’s no choice.

The Korean officer hears my instructions to Phil and blows a tirade of half-intelligible orders over the command comm.

I try the handle on the bridge door again. It’s free.

I slip through and lightly bounce up the six steps to reach the bridge floor level.

The Korean officer is yelling and facing Phil where he sits at a console for monitoring and controlling ship systems. He doesn’t realize Phil has already done the thing he’s trying to prevent. The officer doesn’t know I’m on the bridge.

In the light-g, I shove off the floor to float toward them, pulling my pistol from its magnetic belt mount as I go.

If I can maneuver close enough and get the angle right, I can send a round through the circuitry embedded in a node on the backside of his helmet. It’ll kill the helmet’s communication systems, and consequently ruin the suit’s life support system control computer. It won’t be a death sentence. It’ll just mean the first officer will need a replacement helmet off one of the dead soldiers. He’ll have to suffer a few moments of vacuum while he makes the switch. Then again, the list of unpleasant inconveniences anyone will suffer to avoid dying is nearly endless.

Once the first officer is wearing a soldier’s helmet encoded to my command authority under the company hierarchy, I’ll have control over his suit and he’ll be a manageable problem. What I’ll do with him then, I don’t know—probably freeze his suit and store him in the captain’s quarters until I come up with a permanent solution.

Unfortunately, the first officer senses something just as I come within arm’s reach.

He spins as fast as he can in light-g with only a grip on a wall handle.

His eyes narrow and he starts yelling at me, thinking he’s putting me in my place, telling me what a stupid grunt I am. He’s riled because I’m a political officer and my existence is an affront to the natural authority of Koreans over the lower forms of humanity, the rest of the humans on earth.

In truth, that’s all in my head. It’s what I imagine his rapid string of babble means, at least until I see in his eyes he understands I’m not here for a tongue-lashing. My pistol is in hand.

I reach out to throw an arm around his helmet so I can leverage him into place.

He’s quick, and he manages to clasp both his small hands on my weapon, trying with all his effort to wrench it away, to point it at me.

It happens fast, two men grappling in light-g, with little leverage. I’m faster than him, not physically, but mentally. Or maybe I’m just better trained from all those hours in the simulator and zero-g room back on earth. I activate my suit’s gravity and use my momentum to slam him into a bulkhead, thinking I’ll knock the wind out of him and earn a few seconds to do what I need to do.

In the collision, my gun fires a burst of four shots.

The slugs rip into his chest and tear a path up his throat.

High-velocity metal bits ricochet inside his helmet and jerk it back and forth on his shoulders. Through his faceplate, I see his head disintegrate like a frog in a blender.

It’s over as soon as it starts.

His grip loosens, and his body spasms.

Then he’s still.

I let go of the corpse, and without taking my eyes off the unintended consequence of my mutinous act, I comm the remains of the bridge crew. “Penny, Phil, you good?”

“Yes,” answers Penny, unfazed.

Phil’s response is not intelligible.

“Revolution?” I ask, without looking at them, as I convince myself what I just did wasn’t murder.

“Revolution,” they each answer in varying degrees of enthusiasm.

It’s the first time any of us have said the word louder than a whisper.

Oh, Christ!

I spin around, suddenly realizing I may have just made a fatal mistake.

The bridge isn’t that large, and I’m confused.

I see the ship captain’s body collaged in a mess of gore on one wall, held tenuously there by the micro-g. I don’t see Captain Milliken. “Where is he?”

Guessing who I’m talking about, Phil asks, “You didn’t see him? Milliken went forward before you came in.”

I deduce the only possibility outside of Milliken being a magician able to materialize anywhere he likes, he must be in one of the rooms off the main corridor, having gone inside before I came out of the airlock at the other end of the hall.

Why would he be in there?

“How’d you know he didn’t have a kill switch wired?” Penny asks me, motioning her head at the dead first officer.

I didn’t. I guessed not. I hoped not. Being the company commissar, I was the only one onboard who was supposed to be able to set a kill switch. However, with the MSS so infiltrated into everything, such a duplicitous proxy of the Grays’ authority over earth, anything is possible.

I decide to comfort my crew with something that sounds certain. “Nobody’s life support turned off when the captain was hit.” I let them finish the logical deduction that if the captain had no kill switch, then his lieutenant, of course, didn’t either.

Pragmatic, Penny asks, “What next, Captain?”

“Like I said, we’re attacking.” I hand my pistol to Phil, and take the first officer’s weapon off his belt and pass it to Penny. I like the idea we three rebels will have weapons, though for the moment, I have nothing.

Phil, looking emphatically at the dead first officer, says, “I can handle ship systems and gravity just fine. I can’t do ship-to-ship comm, and my Korean is terrible.”

That’s one of the flaws in our plan. Everybody on earth who’s not Korean hates them so much, few sully their tongues with the language. “I’ll see if Brice has a Korean speaker he can send up to help.”

“Is that wise?” Phil nods a few times at the dead first officer, evidence of the crime I just committed.

I shrug like it doesn’t bother me. “The captain and first officer were killed when the railgun slugs hit the ship.” It’s the easiest lie to tell. “Just be careful what you say around the soldier until we know whether he’s with us or not.” I comm-link to Sergeant Brice. “The first officer and captain are dead.”

“Both the Koreans?” he asks, his voice ripe with hidden meaning. He suspects I fragged them. How could he not?

Or is it paranoia—or guilt—putting on a new mask?

“Do you have anyone who can work the comm panel who speaks Korean?” I ask.

“Give me ten seconds.”

I click back to the bridge comm. “Penny, you have the ship. I need the soldiers to see me among them.”

“You should stay on the bridge,” Penny argues. “Captain the ship. That’s what we planned.”

“Milliken is an idiot,” I tell her. “Lieutenant Holt isn’t any better. I need to be with the troops when they go in.” I hadn’t expected anything to happen so fast, and not in this way. I’d figured I’d have a chance to bring the platoon, and then the company, to our side, maybe with a speech that ended in cheers. Silver-screen fantasies always look good when they roll through your imagination.

Now that I’ve seen the way the soldiers look at me, I know none of them like me, and many of them hate me. If I don’t wade into the battle and shed blood with them, I won’t gain their respect.

“Phil,” I say, “Penny’s in charge when I’m not on the bridge.”

I see in his face he’s not happy about it, but he nods.

Brice pings me. “I’ve found a competent Korean speaker. Almost no American accent.”

“Send him to the bridge,” I tell the sergeant. “I’ll be forward momentarily. Is my kit ready?”

“Ready.”

I cut back to the bridge comm. “Penny, we’re going on the attack. I’d prefer not to go in alone. As soon as that soldier makes it up here, situate him with the ship’s comm panel and tell him to find out if there’s anyone out there who can attack with us.”

With my business on the bridge done much more permanently than I’d planned, I head forward.

Chapter 22

A female soldier—a short woman with a serious face and kind eyes—is in the airlock when I step through the inner door. In her arms, she’s holding an extra set of weapons. Another soldier, Jablonsky, shoves by me on his way to the bridge. He doesn’t say, “sir.” He doesn’t apologize for bumping into me as he passes.

Jablonsky doesn’t have the balls to say what’s on his mind, but still wants me to notice his disrespect. He thinks I’m just a commissar, a stooge bureaucrat for the MSS, not a real grunt. It rubs me the wrong way because I know he’s not a grunt either. He’s not even competent with his equipment.

Back at the depot when we were trying to load into the ship, after he activated his suit’s g, he was drifting in the air ten feet off the ground, struggling against the buffeting from the explosions when I remotely took control of his suit and moved him inside.

It’s my bet Jablonsky’s never spent any time in a zero-g room.

I stop.

I realize I’m indulging vindictive little emotions affordable to a line worker at the grav factory, but not to a major leading his troops into war. It’s my job to win the men’s respect, not simply to expect it. Getting used to my new job won’t be as easy as it seemed back when I was sitting in dark rooms, plotting my treason.

“Sir, I’m Sergeant Lenox, sir.” The soldier with my inherited kit is still in the airlock with me.

“Good to meet you, Lenox.” I recall she was one of the first to board back at the shipyard. She was competent with her grav controls.

Lenox unloads the equipment by simply letting it go and allowing it to drift toward the walls.

Blood stains are on the gun, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s the blood of one of my soldiers or if the stains were left by a previous owner.

Lieutenant Holt opens the outer airlock door in front of me and steps inside.

The airlock isn’t small, but I’m not comfortable with the unexpected proximity. Over a private comm, I ask, “What do you need, Holt?”

On the platoon channel for all ears to hear, he says, “We need to talk.”

“We can talk over the private channel.” I say it in a scolding tone, though I silently admonish myself for doing so. I shouldn’t disrespect my officers in front of their subordinates.

Damn, being the officer in charge is going to be harder than I thought.

Holt doesn’t respond. He shuffles his feet and glances around. His mouth moves, so I see he’s talking again, but not to me.

Over the private comm, I try to get his attention. “Lieutenant?”

He ignores me.

He’s going to be a problem. Yeah, I’m a deductive genius sometimes.

I tap my d-pad to see who he’s conversing with. No surprise. It’s Captain Useless.

Worrisome.

But enough of this. I break into the comm link to see what they’re talking about and hear half a word before the line goes silent.

Holt looks up at me.

I start to tell him to get his shit together and act like an officer when something hard clinks against the top of my helmet. Instinctively, I jerk, and bump a body behind me. A localized gravity field centered on the crown of my head is suddenly pulling so hard it feels like my skin is going to peel off my face.

I try to shout at the pain but the g force notches up, overwhelming my resistance and slamming my head against the inside of my helmet.

I see stars.

More sensitive to gravity than me, my implant spasms, sending lightning bolts of pain through my skull.

Whoever is holding the small grav plate to the back of my helmet knows that. It’s no secret what I am. My commissar status guarantees the truth of it.

My vision collapses to a dark tunnel.

I’m having trouble drawing breath and I realize my throat is being pressed closed by the g.

I try to squeeze out an order but only garbled syllables choke through.

That’s when it hits me what’s happening. They’re trying to kill me.

I trigger the freeze switches in everyone’s suits.

Nothing happens.

Shit.

Lenox is raising her rifle and looking past me. “You’ll get us all killed. What are you doing?”

“Stop,” Lieutenant Holt tells her. “Everything’s okay.”

With her weapon halfway up, Lenox stops moving while still looking at the anonymous person behind me. “What did you do to the major? What is that?”

Holt says, “Lower your weapon, Sergeant Lenox. That’s an order.”

Lenox balks.

Soldiers start to crowd the door outside the airlock, trying to get a peek inside.

Captain Milliken comes on the line. “It’s a grav plate.”

That’s when I get it. That’s who’s behind me. Milliken must have been hiding in one of the side rooms, hoping to ambush me when I passed through the hall.

“It’s pulling nine g’s on the back of his helmet!” says Milliken. He shouts into the comm to make sure the whole platoon hears. “The remote control he has on all our suits, the kill switch he has on every one of us, it’s a gravity switch mounted in this module on the back of his helmet. As long as this grav plate is here, he can’t do anything to us.”

Lenox glances between Holt and Milliken. “We’re in the middle of a battle.”

“He’s a Trog spy,” says Holt.

“What?” I manage to say through my constricting throat.

“Explain it,” says Brice, suddenly squeezing past the soldiers and stepping into the airlock. He shoves Holt against a wall and holds him there with a hand pressed in the center of his chest. In his other hand, his rifle is raised and pointed at my face. He says, “Explain that, Lieutenant. Do it fast.”

Shakily, Holt says, “I have a special comm signal tracer built into my suit.”

I can see he’s lying just by the look on his face.

God, I hope he’s lying.

“And?” Brice asks.

“There’s a reason we lose every battle with the Trogs,” says Captain Milliken. “They have moles in our ranks who communicate our every move. That’s why they’re always ready for us. That’s why we just got shot to shit.”

“You’re gonna say that to me?” Brice asks, glaring fiery eyes at Milliken. “You?”

“That business on Ceres?” Milliken asks as I feel him trying to get more of himself hidden behind me. “You’re still carrying that cross? Put your weapon down, Sergeant!”

Genius deduction time: These two knew each other before our platoon mustered at the spaceport.

“Sergeant!” Holt reiterates. “Follow your orders.”

I’m hoping Brice’s rifle is pointed at Milliken, not me. But from my perspective, all I see is the end of a railgun barrel that looks the size of a cannon.

Brice’s brows grow heavy and his voice rasps like acid. “Captain Milliken, you’re engaged in an illegal activity. Cut power to that grav plate. Step away from the Major Kane.”

Milliken huffs and says, “You’ll do as you’re—”

Brice pulls the trigger.

Chapter 23

I’m on the floor and looking up at red mist dissipating to nothingness. Small hunks of gray-red meat are drifting. Bits of shrapnel and glass are bouncing off metal walls.

Brice, Lenox, and Holt are looking down at me as I realize I’m not the one Brice shot.

Lenox leans down and disengages the grav plate stuck to my helmet.

Instantly, I can breathe. I can think. I can focus.

I hop to my feet, lose my balance, and have to catch myself with a hand against the wall as Lenox steadies me. I say, “I’m okay.”

She doesn’t let go.

I glance down to see Milliken’s ruptured helmet, his head a mess, blood bubbling out of the gore and boiling into the vacuum. I turn back to Brice who’s still got Lieutenant Holt pinned to the wall.

Holt looks like he’s peeing himself. Lucky for him, his catheter is recycling the urine into his suit’s bio-support system.

Focusing on Brice with a humble expression on my face, I say, “Thanks.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” he spits, and cocks his head toward the soldiers crowding the door. “Milliken gave me a legit reason, so I did it for them.” He glances down at Milliken’s corpse and then his hard eyes settle back on me. “Don’t get them killed for nothing.”

The message is clear. Brice won’t mind fragging me, too, if he feels it’s deserved. All he’ll need is half an excuse to legitimize it.

Humility time is over. I return Brice’s stare. “I won’t.” I override Lieutenant Holt’s suit and lock it. “You can let go of the lieutenant now. I’ve paralyzed his suit.”

Brice glances at Holt like he wouldn’t mind shooting him, too. “What do I do with the lieutenant?”

I answer, “We’ll figure it out after the battle. Or maybe the Trogs will blow us out of the sky and we won’t have to worry about it.”

Brice laughs at that. Too many months spent in space fighting the Trogs have left him with a bleak sense of humor.

I laugh, too. Maybe I’m tweaked out on the giddy emotions of getting brushed by death. Maybe all this freedom has filled me with a heady rush. All I really know is I haven’t seen a Trog with my own eyes, and this war business is already nastier than I’d have ever guessed.

Brice leaves Lieutenant Holt’s stiff body against the wall in the airlock, gives me one final glance, and marches into the platoon compartment.

I think he and I have a bond now.

Phil opens the airlock’s inner door and steps halfway in with his pistol unsteady in his hand. He spots Milliken on the floor and comms my private line. “I sensed a gravitation anomaly up here. Everything cool?”

“Is now,” I tell him. “I’m thinking we should probably watch each other’s backs until we figure out where the crew stands.”

He nods. “I’ll head back to the bridge.”

“Will that communications guy work out?” I ask, referring to the rude soldier Brice sent back that way.

“I’m not sure yet, but I think he’ll do okay.”

“Any word yet on other ships?” I ask.

“Other assault ships made it up, so it’s not just us,” answers Phil. “Some Korean colonel is making noise about leading a charge. Nothing clear yet.”

Chapter 24

Tendrils of blue gravity ionization stream along the walls and the grav field inside the ship turns uneven.

Into the command comm, I ask, “What’s happening?”

Phil is immediately on the line. “One of the cruisers attacking that battle station broke off and is firing at us long-range. I’m pulsing the defensive grav to deflect the rounds. We’ve got to get moving. We’re not safe.”

The ship accelerates, and both Lenox and I lean to compensate. Lieutenant Holt slowly slides down the wall. The inertial bubble isn’t keeping up.

As if reading my mind, Phil comms in again, “I’m pulling power away from the interior grav bubble. You may feel some discomfort.”

“Juji Station is coming up off our port side,” says Penny. All of the battle stations are named after Korean mythological figures. “I’m going to fly beneath it. The grav lens deflects everything they shoot at us from the front, but our flanks are vulnerable.”

“Get us there,” I confirm, as though she’d asked me for permission.

Seeing I’m busy, Lenox starts placing magazines on my belt magnets. “Two hundred and eighty rounds each,” she says.

I nod as I keep tabs on the command comm.

She shoves the rifle into my hands. “You use one of these in the simulator?”

“Of course.”

“You any good?”

“Expert Marksman,” I answer with a grin, because it’s ironic. “Like everybody else.” It seems to me that much of the simulator training was geared to make us think we were much better than we were.

A confidence booster?

So we’ll rush headlong into a fight with a false sense of competence?

I don’t know if I’m that cynical, but then again, those fears disguised as questions did just cross my mind.

Gravity tugs to my left, and I shift my feet to maintain balance.

“Lots of debris out here,” Penny tells me.

“I’ve got two assault ships behind Juji Station,” says Phil.

“What’s the word from your comm boy?”

“Jablonsky?” asks Phil.

“If you say so.”

“He speaks Korean just like one of them,” Phil tells me in a rush.

“What’s he saying?” I ask.

“Don’t know.”

“Well, find out,” I tell him.

Lenox points to the rifle, “You shoot one for real?”

I nod. “I had access to the firing range down by the spaceport.”

“You go a lot?” she asks.

I nod. “Expert Marksman rating with an actual gun.”

“You know the rounds behave differently in atmosphere than in vacuum?”

“I do.”

“This is the new model,” she tells me. “You shoot one of these yet?”

Shaking my head, this time, I tell her, “Only the old single-shot models.”

She taps the electrodes on her palm. “Electricity from your suit’s micro-reactor powers the gun through the leads in your palm, just like the single-shot models.”

I look the gun over. Except for the magazine and an extra bulge at the rear of the barrel, it’s pretty much the same as the old model.

“Just like the single-shot, this is a grav drive gun,” she tells me. “It’ll send a slug downrange at near six k.”

“Six thousand miles per hour,” I confirm, “two thousand faster than the single-shot model.”

“But this one has a reverse-grav recoil compensator built in, so it won’t kick the hell out of you every time you pull the trigger. Matter-of-fact, you’ll barely feel it. The most important feature of this weapon and your pistol is that they’re both grav-integrated.”

“They didn’t mention that back on earth.”

“Most people don’t appreciate the significance of it.” Lenox’s serious eyes underscore the importance. “What that means is when your suit’s defensive gravity field is turned on, it treats the weapon like a part of you. If it didn’t, the field would be continually working to shove it away from your body, making it hard to aim.”

“Good to know.” That never crossed my mind.

“One other thing about defensive grav,” Lenox’s seriousness doesn’t let up. “If you have it set too high, it will affect the slugs leaving the end of your barrel and ruin your aim.”

“You know this stuff,” I observe.

“Before they called my number, I was a certification proctor at the Omaha induction center for three years.”

That piques my interest. “You know anybody else in the platoon?” It’s a valid question. The way the draft works, inductees are pooled by an automated process that’s not finalized until induction day—this morning for most of us. None of us met until we came together at the muster station.

“I talked to nearly everybody while we were waiting for our ride.”

“Anybody else in the platoon any good?” I ask.

“Sergeant Brice is a pretty good shot,” she smiles. The off-color humor is subtle and contagious. “Peters and Silva seem to know what they’re talking about. No way to know until you see what they do with their equipment.”

I nod knowingly as I realize at this point, all I’m getting from Lenox is talk. Maybe she knows her stuff academically, and that’s the end of it. But then, she did handle her grav better than most back in the shipyard fiasco.

“Two things you should know,” she says, patting the rifle in my hands, “because of that recoil compensator you’ll suck down power twice as fast as with a single-shot model. You’ll be more accurate, because it doesn’t kick. If you go to full-auto mode, you’ll burn through your suit’s hydro cell pretty quick.”

“How long if I’m firing auto?” I’m not happy with the info I got back at the induction center, and I’m hoping for better news.

“In battle, using your suit grav to power around, shooting a lot, maybe three or four hours—then you better start looking for a new H pack to plug into your reactor. If you need to conserve power and you’ve still got Trogs to put out of their misery, you can switch off the recoil compensator.” She shows me a small lever above the trigger guard. “You’ll save half your energy on each shot.”

“Gotcha.”

The walls sizzle bright blue radiance. The grav bubble is straining. I brace myself. Holt, unable to do anything but be victimized by the tug of fluctuating gravity, flips to the other side of the airlock and slams against a bulkhead.

I don’t say anything about it. I’m hoping he earned a few bruises.

Lenox apparently reads my thoughts through the look on my face, and in a low voice says, “He was a wormy prick, anyway.”

“Sharp corner there,” says Penny over the command comm. “We’re coming in below Juji.”

“Nobody can hit us here,” Phil tells me.

Soldiers are coming into the airlock, hauling the wounded through.

“Anything else I need to know right now?” I ask.

“Final exam is coming up in a few minutes,” Lenox smiles. “Let’s hope you pass.”

I force out a laugh, because it eases the tension kicking me in the gut, and it’ll keep me from crapping a pharmaceutically-softened load into my suit’s rectal catheter. And I laugh at that, too, because in this vacuum-packed, orange-suited army of sim-trained novices, anybody can get away with shitting their pants in the face of the enemy. What a brave bunch of heroes we are with the product of raving fear sucked away by our suits’ recyclers so no one will ever see.

Chapter 25

Phil loops Jablonsky onto the comm line. “It’ll be easier than me relaying,” he says.

I don’t want to talk to Jablonsky, but nobody ever said being an adult was easy. “Tell me what you know, Jablonsky.”

“Juji and two other stations are dead.”

Three of the twenty-six? Not good. “Where’s the fleet?”

“They’re gone.”

“Where?” I ask. I need to know how far out they are, when they’ll be arriving.

“Gone,” reiterates Jablonsky. “Destroyed. Captured.”

The command comm goes silent. Nothing but background static as me, Penny, and Phil try to fully grasp what that means for us. When the war started two years ago, our Gray masters commanded a fleet of sixty-two kilometer-long cruisers, all just like the one they used to conquer earth thirty years ago. Each one built by human hands. Each captained by a Gray and run by Gray and Korean officers, every single one with a human crew and SDF contingent totaling ten thousand, at least.

Penny breaks the silence first, “But the news—”

“Propaganda.” Jablonsky doesn’t leave any room for disagreement. “Lies. Everybody knows that.”

Suddenly, I like Jablonsky a little more, though his assessment is wrong. Half the people I know back home gobble up every ladleful of lies the MSS defecates through their media outlets. Not only are we a race of conquered serfs, we crave self-deception because that wonderfully warped mirror helps us suffer the shame of our choice not to trudge the hard road to freedom.

And that’s the thing that makes the road so steep—not the bullets in the air, not the blood-slick path, not even the bodies of our dead friends filling the ditches—it’s those first ego-deflating strides into seeing the shiny, multicolor, self-confirming delusion for what it is, and understanding truth isn’t what you believed.

“I heard from dependable sources,” says Penny, defending herself, “not that MSS disinformation. We’re still supposed to have seven ships.”

“Can’t say for sure,” says Jablonsky. “Lots of chatter going on about another invasion attempt on the moon that started two days ago. The North Korean captains on the line are talking openly about things they shouldn’t be, and I’m piecing it together, so I could be wrong. It seems the remains of the fleet were sent to the moon to repel the Trogs and the whole thing turned into a trap. All seven ships were destroyed with maybe twice that many Trog ships taken out.”

“The lunar orbits are full of new wreckage,” adds Phil, for confirmation.

“The Trogs can afford the loss,” says Penny, zeroing in on the heart of the matter. “We can’t.”

“Two squadrons appeared out of nowhere to spring the trap,” says Jablonsky. “Twenty-four brand new Trog cruisers straight from their home world. Nobody expected them to show up.”

“So the only navy we have left are the assault ships on the ground at the Arizona shipyard.” I say it because somebody needs to. “And they’re getting shredded.”

“It’s a shit show up here,” confirms Jablonsky. “Nobody’s sure what things are like down there right now. All I can tell you for sure is casualties are… it’s… a slaughter.”

That silences the line again.

Phil’s turn to break the hush with his despondence. “We’ve lost. The Grays should have surrendered to the Trogs a year ago.”

“Adverb!” Penny uses the name the way a mother uses a child’s name to let him know when he’s stepping out of line.

Ignoring her, Phil’s voice finds its familiar frantic edge. “I don’t care who we lose to. One master is as good as the next. The goddamn Grays don’t care if the war drags on to the last man, it’s not Gray lives they’re wasting, it’s human lives.”

True, mostly, but the Grays have been hatching little Graylettes by the tens of thousands on earth since they solidified their control of our planet. Plenty of them are being killed in this war, but nothing like the hundreds of millions of humans who’ve been fed into the grinder.

“When things get bad enough,” Phil continues, “All those Grays running this show from their cozy ship on the moon will bug out to some other unsuspecting planetary system on the other side of the galaxy with a technologically backward race of dumbasses just like us they can enslave.” Phil deflates as he reaches his conclusion. “Then the Trogs will exterminate the rest of us and take our planet.”

I don’t know how much of that I agree with.

Something more important occurs to me, we’re letting news of our defeat demoralize us into lethargy.

No, I’m in charge, I’m letting it demoralize us.

It’s a sin strangers are paying for with their lives right now.

I have to get our ship into the war.

At the risk of hearing a number that’ll worsen the mood, I ask, “Do we have a count of assault ships that made it up?”

Phil switches gears and offers his opinion. “There’s so much debris from the space stations and so many wrecks, I can’t tell.” Like me, like Penny, Phil has an alien implant in his head. He’s more sensitive to gravity than the rest of us—not as good as a Gray, but better than anyone from the grav factory. That’s how he knows what’s out there—everything with mass exerts a gravitational pull on everything else.

“I think forty or so are on the fleet channel,” says Jablonsky. “The number keeps changing. Some take a hit and disappear. More hail the command frequency as they come up from the surface. I can’t guess at the number of mayday calls.”

“You said there was a North Korean officer making noise about being in command.” I just know it’s going to be that North Korean prick of an admiral in charge of the fleet. Trouble never seems to stick to guys like that.

“No flag officers are out here that I can tell,” answers Jablonsky. “Mostly ships are asking who’s in charge. I’m getting a periodic message from Pyongyang. It says the admiralty is ordering a withdrawal, telling all ships to take up positions around Imugi.”

“I got a big Imugi in my ass.” It’s unusual for Phil to make a joke when he’s stressed.

I don’t tell him an Imugi is a big snake, that according to Korean mythology, might turn into a dragon one day. Instead I ask a question to confirm what I’m not sure of. “Is that the big battle station over North Korea?”

“It is,” Penny tells me.

“Yeah,” Phil confirms. “It’s the only one in a geosynchronous orbit. Tells you something, doesn’t it?”

Apparently, our great leaders on the Korean Peninsula went through their own analysis of the situation and decided earth needed to spend the rest of its military resources saving their asses, probably so they’d have time to cut a deal with the Trogs just like the one they made when the Grays came in and took control. “Fucking North Koreans.”

Chapter 26

“You need to decide,” Penny tells me. “Now that we know the situation, do we bubble jump the hell out of here, make our way to the asteroid belt like we’re supposed to, or attack those cruisers on our own—”

“Suicide,” mutters Phil, letting us know exactly what he thinks of the attack idea.

“—or follow orders and go to Imugi Station?”

“I hate the North Koreans as much as any of you,” says Phil, talking in slow, wooden words, like he always does when he’s starting a new argument. “We need to remember they managed to make a deal with the Grays when the rest of the world was being bombarded in the siege. This war with the Trogs is lost, just like our war with the Grays. Maybe the North Koreans are the bet.”

“Phil,” says Penny, “I like you, but sometimes your limp dick routine rubs me raw.”

“Just because I use my brains,” Phil shoots back in soft words, like he expects to be punched, “instead of hiking fourteeners every weekend looking for a mountain goat with an attractive sphincter?”

“We’re not going to bicker,” I tell them, dead serious. “There’s a reason we’re all up here. All of us chose this.”

“Not me,” says Jablonsky, still on the command comm.

Shit.

Penny said too much.

Now Jablonsky knows desertion is an option. And if he doesn’t know it, he’ll certainly guess when he’s trying to figure out what Penny meant about bubble jumping to the asteroid belt. Once he figures that out, it’ll only be a matter of time before the other soldiers know, too. Not that he’s a snitch, that’s just human nature at work.

Now what to do about Jablonsky.

Pending decisions are piling up—big ones—and I need to figure out pretty quickly if I’ve got the mettle to make them.

If not, I need to step out of the way and put someone else in charge.

I flex my fists around my railgun as I think.

I’ve never had a real weapon in my hands, especially not a military-grade tool designed and built for wholesale murder.

I’m in command of a platoon of inexperienced soldiers I think want to fight.

I’ve got a bullet-shaped ramrod of a ship slapped together from two helpings of desperation and a trainload of steel smelted so long ago human flight was only a dream in a few crazy men’s heads. Still, the rusty thing is a powerful beast wrought for killing graceful, star-faring leviathans full of Neanderthal-looking wankers who want to make my people slaves.

I have more power than I’ve ever had, or ever will again.

I’ve sniveled and sucked up to my Gray masters and their North Korean lapdogs my entire life, pretending in every moment I was the most loyal, diligent cog in their war machine, building grav plates, sweating twelve-hour shifts, keeping my insurgent thoughts buried too deep for them to see.

I did it all on the chance that one day I’d have an opportunity just like the one I have right in this moment.

Do I have doubts?

Yes.

Am I afraid I’ll get all of my friends killed?

You bet your fuzzy ‘nads.

From the moment our ship lifted off from the Arizona desert I’ve been free, and only one question matters now that I’ve had that small taste on my tongue.

Really, just one question.

Will I ever be able to kneel again?

Hell, fucking no!

And that’s my choice.

I’ll die a fat old man, standing on a beach, with a beer in my hand and warm ocean washing over my feet, while three kinds of ass cancer eat away at my lymph nodes, but I’ll be free, or I’ll die fighting.

First order of business: Gamble.

Because my goal is bigger than just my pride.

I open a comm link to everyone on the ship. “Our North Korean slave masters are calling for a retreat. They want us to take up an orbit a thousand clicks over Pyongyang.” I know we can’t geosynchronously orbit at a thousand clicks, but we can easily grav stabilize there just like Imugi station. “They think we’ve lost this war. And they might be right.”

“What you saw in that Arizona shipyard when we were loading into this rusty beast, that’s it. That’s earth’s navy as far as I can tell, and most of them have probably already been blasted into space junk. The last of our battle cruisers was destroyed or captured in a battle near the moon yesterday. Three of earth’s battle stations are slag, and the Trogs are out there pounding a fourth. Maybe that’s the worst of it, maybe the truth isn’t that bad, but you know how our North Korean masters like to keep us in the dark.”

A few of the soldiers gasp. Masters is a word that would get me thrown in jail back on earth. Everybody knows what we are, yet we’re not allowed to say.

I exit the airlock so I’m standing in the platoon compartment.

The soldiers strapped into their seats and the ones on their feet all look at me.

I let everything I’ve told them sink in for a moment.

I continue. “I’ll tell you what I think. You all saw each other back at the muster station. You know what we are—pimply kids, fathers, mothers, and daughters. We’re not the cream of the crop. You’ve seen the ship. It looks like a rusty piece of shit, some kind of kamikaze torpedo thing with an untested gravity lens welded on the front. The MSS news vids tell us the war is going well, they even imply we’re winning. That’s bullshit. Look around.” I point at them. “We are not what winners in war look like.” I wave a hand at the ship. “This isn’t what a victor sends to mop up their beaten enemies.

“We’re losing badly.”

Mouths are agape. Eyes wide.

I’m spouting firing squad-worthy truths, the kind your drunk uncle babbles about when he’s sprawled on the couch, half-delirious from alcohol poisoning and carb-loading after a Thanksgiving Day binge.

Before I reach full evangelist mode, I tone down to a rational level. “Captain Milliken is dead. All of you know that. Our Korean ship’s captain and first officer are dead. It’s just us on this ship—just us Americans. That’s the situation. Now it’s time for each of you to decide what you believe. And it’s time to decide what you want to do about it. I’m disabling the automatic kill switch on your suits.” Using my implant, I toggle the gravity switches. “I’ve been a slave all my life. I’ll not be a new master’s slave, and I won’t kneel again for my old one. Right now, in this moment, for the first time in our lives, we’re all free.”

I pause again, hoping I won’t have to jump back through the airlock door to avoid the hostile fire.

Nobody moves.

I think they’re all in shock.

“We’re floating just below Juji Station. It’s been slagged, but I’m sure rescue parties will be up from the surface just as soon as the Trog ships bugger off to wherever in the solar system their supply base is. Anyone who wants off this ship can hop through a door and go. Use your suit’s grav to fly down to the surface. You’ll be able to find a way inside. There are plenty of extra holes now, thanks to the Trogs. Your suit’s hydro pack and calorie pack will last three days. That’s only three days of power and food. There’ll be plenty of suits on the surface with corpses in them, and all the half-full power and calorie packs you need to last a lifetime if that’s what you want.”

“Or,” I tell them, coming to my closing pitch, “you can stay on the ship and follow me. I’m a rebel major in the Free Army, and I’m taking this ship to one of our bases out in the asteroid belt.” God, I hope that part is true. All I have are Vishnu’s and Blair’s credibility on that. “I’m not going to take up an orbital station over North-fucking-Korea, and I don’t intend to follow another MSS order as long as I live. I’m going to find a way to live through this war, do my part to win it, and then I’m going to kill every Gray bastard I can get in my sights, and murder every North Korean stooge who gets in the way.”

The speech wasn’t planned, but when I imagined how it would look in all those years I fantasized about this moment, it looked a lot like a Roman victory parade.

All of the soldiers are silent. Not one is moving.

Not one of the bridge crew adds a word.

“Talk among yourselves,” I tell them. “You’ve got a couple minutes. Maybe. Phil, open some of the assault doors so whoever wants to go can get out. On second thought, Penny, drop us down to the surface real quick. I’ve seen these knuckleheads try to use their suit’s grav controls.” I look back at the soldiers. “You can step out onto solid ground. No hard feelings. Just don’t come with me unless you’re ready for revolution and ready to die for it.”

Over a private comm connection, Penny tells me, “Ignoring orders from the admiralty is one thing, but you shouldn’t have told the platoon about the revolution. You’re endangering us all.”

On the open line, I say, “Get us down to the surface, Penny.”

Several of the assault doors slide open, giving everyone in the platoon compartment a dizzying view of the earth and the orbiting wreckage of ships and busted battle stations. It looks like interstellar defeat.

We close in on Juji.

Through faceplates I see lips move. Men and women are talking to each other over private comm links.

God, I hope there’s not an eloquent loyalist among them.

I watch, hoping no one raises a rifle.

The ship jolts as we hit Juji’s surface.

“Now’s the time,” I tell them.

Down at the far end of the platoon compartment, Sergeant Brice pushes past a few soldiers and somehow, without a single word, commands everyone’s attention. He drills me hard with those war-weary eyes of his. “I’m in.”

Chapter 27

Penny tells me I’ve pushed too far, too fast.

Phil curses at me on a private comm link.

I ignore it. That’s just Phil. He and I have a steamer trunk full of baggage in our relationship, and his whining is, at times, insufferable. Nonetheless, he’s dependable and talented. And sometimes, he’s right. Just not now.

Lenox privately connects with me. “I’ll roll the dice with you, sir.”

I thank her and step back into the airlock. It’ll be easier for the draftees in the platoon compartment to make an honest choice if I’m not staring them down. On the bridge comm, I say, “If you’re all staying, we need to get in the game.”

“Of course, we’re all staying,” Penny tells me. “What about you, Whit-shit?”

“Name’s Jablonsky, skank.”

Penny shoots back, “You’re name’s what I say it is until I know whether you’re staying to fight or getting off the ship with the other pussies.”

“I’ve got nothing to lose back home,” says Jablonsky. “I’ll fight.”

“Phil,” I ask. “I need to hear you say it.”

We’ve talked about this for years, but late night bullshit between half-drunk friends is one thing. Making plans and asking for support from people who don’t think they’ll ever have to follow through is another sort of thing, and they both add up to squat.

We’re at the moment where words are tested.

“Well?” I ask again.

Phil says, “If you get me killed—”

“Quit suckin’ your momma’s titty and grow up,” Penny tells him. “We’re probably all gonna get killed. Do your job or let Jablonsky do it.”

Jablonsky can’t do Phil’s job. He doesn’t have an alien bug in his head, so he can’t see gravity fields.

Penny says, “Phil, quit playing for attention and answer.”

“You know you can depend on me.” It’s perfunctory when it comes out of Phil’s mouth. However, it’s the final commitment.

Good.

Time to do something for real. “Jablonsky, broadcast on the ship-to-ship frequency that we’re rallying at Juji Station. As soon as we have five more ships, we’re leading a full-bore attack on the nearest Trog cruiser. Be clear about this next part, don’t ask them, tell them. If no one answers the call, we’re doing it alone. Shame them. Phil, calculate an attack vector for Penny on the nearest Trog cruiser bombing the Arizona shipyard. Do it now.”

Acknowledgements.

Double good.

I flip to the platoon command comm, now just me, Brice, and Lenox. “What’s the status of the platoon?”

Brice links to the whole ship. “Close the assault doors. Everyone’s staying on board. Grunts were born to kill, not kneel.” I know among the SDF troops, the label ‘grunt’ is an honorific between comrades. From Brice, it’s a compliment.

I don’t know if it’s worth anything, but I tell the platoon how proud I am. I step back out of the airlock and look at my soldiers while I address them. “Sergeant, the three machine gun teams will stay on board. After we ram that Trog cruiser they’ll defend the ship. Take the rest and balance them into two squads—one yours, one for Lenox.” None of us have fought together. In fact, the grunts barely know each other. Shifting the squad lineup now won’t have any harmful effects on combat effectiveness. God, I sound like a real officer, at least in my head.

“We should separate them by ability,” says Brice. “Put those who can take advantage of the gravity mobility and fly in one squad, the rest in the other.”

That makes perfect sense. At least we’ll have one squad that’s fully capable. “Good thinking,” I tell him. “As soon as we ram that Trog ship I want each squad to egress through separate assault doors, killing every Trog bastard we can while they’re still too stunned to know what happened. As soon as we find our bearings, we’ll make our way to the bridge and take control of the ship.”

All of the soldiers are tense now that we’re talking about fighting actual Trogs and pulling triggers. “One more thing,” I tell them, “There are two kinds of grunts.” I pause for effect. “The kind who piss their suits before they go into battle and the kind who lie about it.”

They laugh.

I laugh.

Hell, even Brice laughs like it’s a real joke.

Chapter 28

I comm link to the bridge crew. “Status?”

“I’ve made contact with third platoon’s ship,” answers Jablonsky.

“Jill Rafferty?” I ask, hopeful. She’s one of my commissar subordinates, a lieutenant, a coworker from the grav factory, and a coconspirator in our plot to mutiny and defect with our ships to join the Free Army.

“Yes,” answers Jablonsky. “Both Koreans onboard her ship are casualties. She’s captain now.”

Casualties? I know exactly what that means. Jill’s a silver-haired, blue-eyed mother left childless by this war, and she’s tougher than any of us bug-headed freaks who came out of that factory. She harbors no illusions about who is to blame for the death of her sons. If anything, those North Korean officers on her ship were casualties to her vengeance.

“Two assault ships with crews from our factory,” says Penny, relieved, at least a little.

Nobody mentions we’re still missing two of our company’s ships and six more of our friends, yet we all know it. Extrapolating that casualty rate to the rest of the people I recruited from the grav factory, half of my friends are dead already.

“She’s about half a klick aft of us,” says Phil, “in the shadow of Juji Station.”

So she’s using the derelict station for cover from the Trog cruisers higher in orbit. Just like us. “What’s the status of her ship?”

Jablonsky answers, “She says one-hundred percent.”

“There’s a formation of three more ships coming in,” says Phil.

With the mess of so many pieces of so many broken ships orbiting the earth, with my ship’s grav field pulsing through plates bent or destroyed by Trog fire, I’m not able to clearly sense the gravity fields of those vessels.

“They’ve all got Korean captains,” says Jablonsky. “One with a Korean MSS colonel. He’s the one who’s making noise about being in charge.”

“What do they want?” I ask.

“They’re joining us,” answers Jablonsky.

No shit?

“Brave,” mutters Phil. “They’re disobeying an order from Pyongyang. They’ll be executed when they get back on the ground.”

Penny laughs. “Don’t be such an optimist, Adverb. They’re gonna die up here like the rest of us.”

“Five ships is enough,” I tell them. “Phil, do you have my vector?” No more time to screw around.

“Yep,” he answers.

“The Korean colonel says he’s in command,” says Jablonsky, apparently unsure of how to reply to him.

“Phil,” I say, “send our attack path to the other ships. Jablonsky, patch me through to the other captains.”

He complies.

“Captains, my grav officer has sent you our attack path. Form up on me.” I’m telling, not asking. The Koreans will bristle, but I hope it works. Like every uniformed functionary in a totalitarian system, following orders comes so naturally to them, I might get away with it. “Come in tight in two formations—three in front, two following. Max grav in ten seconds.”

“Wait!” I hear a Korean accent in that one syllable.

Dammit! So much for the stereotype in my mind about their degree of subservience.

“Koreans first,” he tells me. “Americans second.”

I want to curse, but I’ve already decided it doesn’t matter. Whoever goes in first, it’ll be American grunts that’ll do the bleeding once we board that Trog cruiser.

Still, he hasn’t objected to my plan.

“Of course,” I tell him in quick words. By disobeying his orders, his day can only end with dying. The least I can do is allow him to save face. “You have the attack path. You lead. We follow. Cluster tight on impact, so our soldiers can support each other when they leave the ship. Hit as close to the bridge as you can. We’re taking that cruiser.”

The colonel shouts something in Korean I don’t understand, maybe a war cry, maybe the name of his own dead son for whom he needs vengeance.

As much as I despise the North Korean-uniformed mannequins, I know the Grays, with no regard for our artificial nationalities, have sacrificed a whole generation of their young as well to feed the war’s boundless appetite.

“Max grav on my count!” I shout. “Five. Four. Three. Two.”

Our ship hums and creaks under the strain of acceleration. My battle suit squeaks as it compensates for the fluctuation in our internal grav bubble. The walls and floor glow blue and brilliant. Field lines scintillate as they crawl across every surface.

“Coming around Juji!” shouts Penny.

And we all feel the ship make the turn.

“Lenox,” I call, “strap in.”

I find myself an empty seat as well.

The g’s inside the cabin are starting to build.

The ship was designed to make 1.5 light speed, but in order to do that, most of the power needs to be fed into a set of plates in the drive array that creates a bubble of warped space. The drive array pushes that wave, and the ship surfs it to reach translational speeds exceeding the speed of light while never breaking Einstein’s equations within our localized bubble.

Theoretical physics—nobody gives a shit about it as long as the ship goes fast.

For sub-light acceleration, every grav-drive ship—the ones the Grays use, hence the ones humans use, and the ones the Trogs fly—needs massive objects like planets and moons to push and pull against. The push-and-pull is determined by the reversible polarity of the ship’s grav fields. The stronger the ambient field, the faster a ship can accelerate.

In a way, gravity for these vessels works like the wind did for sailing ships back when those wooden hulks were the height of man’s technological ability to slaughter one another. However, where sailing across a wind was the best way to reach the highest speed in a sailing ship, running directly into or out of a gravity well is the best way to maximize acceleration with grav-drive technology.

Bottom line on all this crap, Phil calculated the best attack path is not one where we shoot straight across space, curve around earth, and hit the Trog cruisers broadside. Instead, we’re following a parabolic arc away from the earth. Once we come over the top of the arc several thousand miles up, we’ll be on a collision path with our prey coming down from above.

Raptors diving on a pigeon.

I like that image.

“We’re burning twelve g’s!” shouts Penny over the comm, theoretically our max sub-light acceleration.

The ship is straining, but in seconds, we’ll be going so fast any shots from the Trog cruisers in the area will hit us only through luck.

Brice is shouting into the platoon comm.

The platoon joins in a chant, loud and strong.

I can’t make out what they’re saying. Did I miss some kind of morale module in all that simulator training?

Brice is psyching them up, girding their strength for what’s to come.

“Forming up,” Penny tells me over the bridge comm. “Three Koreans in front. Our two about a klick behind.”

With grav plates pushing so much g, I sense the other four careening ships. All other grav fields are a dim blur.

We’re climbing the up-bound leg of our parabolic attack arc and it’ll look to all of those Trogs onboard every ship in the area like we’re maxing acceleration for escape velocity, running for the safety of the moon.

Like he’s reading my mind, Phil says, “They’re ignoring us. No one’s shooting.”

“Parabolic peak in twenty seconds,” Penny tells us.

It’s going to be a short, hard trip, thankfully. No time for skittishness.

Between the chanted words, Sergeant Brice tells the troops to ready their weapons and hold on tight, just in case the bridge dumbasses fuck up the grav bubble inside the platoon compartment.

Everybody laughs—the kind of laugh that sounds forced through a torrent of other emotions. Yet Brice isn’t making a joke for humor’s sake, he’s bonding the platoon, gluing them with the cement of shared emotion.

I need to pay more attention to him if I want to learn how to lead soldiers.

The blue grav fields flash a blinding intensity, the ship shakes violently, and we all grumble as the internal bubble fails to fully compensate.

An instant later, things stabilize again.

“On the way down,” Penny yells at us. “Impact in fifty seconds!”

Chapter 29

The ship is hurtling toward the earth.

The current is reversed in our drive array’s grav plates, and so is the polarity of the fields. The earth is pulling the ship closer, and the planet is moving in the most imperceptibly minuscule smidgen of a degree toward us.

The mutually attractive hug of gravity. Physics again.

Far below us, I see our targets in my mind, glowing fiery-brilliant grav signatures from their megaton masses. Multiple fusion reactors pump gigawatts of current through their drive arrays, sending blue field lines pulsing over their hulls like giant jellyfish tentacles.

Each of the kilometer-long ships is shaped like a sleek leopard shark without fins, with a crest of bristling railguns down the back, and two more along the lower edge on port and starboard. It has a roughly triangular cross-section so the three rows of guns can shoot at the three hundred and sixty degrees of space surrounding the ship. Each crest is lined on both sides by rows of grav plates huge enough to handle the load of maneuvering the megaton monster through the solar system.

Despite all that power, like our cruisers, those Trog ships max at four g’s acceleration.

They can’t escape.

At least not at sub-light speeds.

We’re halfway down the descent leg of our parabolic arc when the Trogs realize what’s happening. It’s not something they expected.

Some of their dorsal guns start to fire.

The three Trog ships are cruising in a line with ten-kilometer gaps between them, yet their order is dissolving as each maneuvers tentatively.

Nothing they can do will make a difference now.

No ship in existence has the power to move a megaton mass out of our way in the short seconds left.

“Slowing to ramming speed!” Penny shouts over the comm.

God she’s got to be the bravest of us, flying headlong into a collision we’ll only survive if our secret weapon works as planned.

“Redirecting all power to the grav lens,” Phil tells us.

The sky fills with railgun slugs from all three ships.

The Trogs’ squirmy brains have deduced all the doubt out of their guess as to the flavor of shit that’s screaming in their direction. Their fears have awakened.

I see their grav fields as clear as the sun.

All five of our ships are heading toward one of theirs, and it’s maxing its starboard grav plates to get out of our way.

“Ten seconds,” Phil warns.

All of the grunts tense.

Then the grav picture unexpectedly shifts.

“Shit!” shouts Phil.

Chapter 30

Ramming anything at the speeds we’re moving would be suicide if it weren’t for gravity technology.

As it is, even nestled in the grav bubble protecting the crew, if our ship collided with an alien vessel at several thousand miles per hour, both ships would be obliterated, and there’d be nothing left of our bodies but a haze of complex molecules.

The ramming tactic depends on something besides speed, and that’s the strength and polarity of the target ship’s gravity defense. The plates in their hull that help it maneuver and create artificial gravity inside—just like ours—serve double duty to create a repulsive exterior field that can deflect kinetic weaponry: bullets, railgun slugs, meteors, shit like that. That’s the primary means of defense these ships have.

It sounds simple but it’s not.

Too much incoming fire will overwhelm the deflective field. A poorly shaped field will repulse less efficiently than an optimally shaped one. Fire from multiple directions makes effective field shaping nearly impossible. At least with standard brainpower.

A big enough computer might work such a problem out in real time with a thousand tons of hyper-velocity steel bearing down from three directions, but there’s nearly no computing power in our ships. Wherever the hell the Grays came from they never invented computers, and they don’t trust ours.

All that aside, nobody’s ever taken three hundred tons of steel momentum, used a grav lens to focus it down to the diameter of a pencil, and speared it through the defensive fields on one of these cruisers. Because the genius human engineers conceived, lab-tested, designed, and built these ships so quickly—no sarcasm intended—there was no time to field test or calibrate any of it.

That’s just the way things are when you’re losing a war. You do what you can with what you’ve got.

So, we have to depend on the pilot and the gravity officer in each ship to get the collision speed and angle right, first time, and every time.

Makes you wonder if the Wright brother who stayed on the ground was the one who won the coin toss.

“They’re changing the grav field intensity!” shouts Phil, talking about the Trog ship.

“Goddammit!” shouts Penny. “The Koreans are slamming the brakes too hard.”

“Blow by!” I order. “Pass them! Ram that fat pigeon!”

Did I say I liked that image?

We don’t pass the Korean ships. They’re too far ahead.

And too slow.

The Trogs’ defensive grav deflects them in quick succession, sending each careening toward the ground.

All three reverse polarity on their drive arrays and max grav to avoid burning through earth’s atmosphere and burrowing into the Arizona desert.

“Reverse our drive array polarity!” I shout.

“But—” Phil protests.

“Do it now, dammit!”

He does.

Now, the Trog ship’s gravitational mass and all of the power it’s pouring into its deflection field suck us in, instead of pushing us away.

We can’t miss.

“Max grav bubble!” shouts Phil on the ship comm.

The cabin burns bright blue like it did at the top of the arc. I feel squeezed from every direction.

“Ramming!”

A flash of blue nearly blinds me as the power sent to the grav lens surges.

Through my seat, I feel metal break, screech, and bend. We’re in vacuum, so the collision happens in silence.

One of the assault doors blows in and smashes two grunts to mush. Flaming atmosphere from the Trog ship flashes through the platoon compartment.

Our battle suits protect us.

The blue disappears with the fire and the sound of metal turning to wreckage rips through the air.

And stops.

Everything goes silent for half a second.

We lived through it.

The ship quakes again under the sound of wrenching metal, different this time. Not close.

I hope it’s the impact of Jill’s ship.

“Go!” Sergeant Brice shouts. He’s already unstrapped and out of his seat. “Get out there and kill ‘em while they’re stunned.”

Grunts are slow to move. Most are shaken, or busy thanking God for the breath they just inhaled.

I’m on my feet, wobbly but moving to an exit. Lenox is beside me, and together we pull on the thick iron handles of a door. It grinds on rusty gears.

“Up, up, up!” Brice shouts. “Go, go!”

“Careful when you egress,” I announce to the platoon. “You’ll need your suit grav.”

The door I’m working on with Lenox rolls fully open. Outside, across the opening, is a girder as thick as a man’s torso. Cables, bent steel, and shredded composite debris make it seem like we’re blocked in.

We’re not.

Through gaps in the wreckage, I see the Trog ship’s cavernous interior, all the way to the stern.

“Set up a machine gun here,” I order. It’ll give the grunts inside good cover with a wide field of fire.

Taking a quick glance around the platoon compartment, I see four assault doors are open. Grunts are lining up, but no one is yet out the door.

Brice is readying his squad, and he’s not too happy about how slowly they’re doing it.

I rush toward an open door with no debris blocking it from the outside.

I try to get a picture of what’s surrounding the ship using my perception of gravity, but all I see is psychedelic noise. Too many grav plates shifting fields in too many directions, too much mass bent every which way.

I shout into the bridge comm, “Penny keep the ship safe. Phil, keep me apprised.”

Feeling like we’ve wasted too many seconds of our surprise, I push past a soldier hesitating at an open door. I take a fast glance at the situation outside and jump as I holler, “Follow me!”

Chapter 31

I’m in a howling wind carrying me toward a crack in the cruiser’s hull.

Our ship smashed its way into the cruiser’s central hangar bay, a warehouse space a hundred meters wide, and more than half a kilometer long. All the air in the void is being sucked into space, and I’m caught in it.

“Wait! Don’t go!” I shout over the comm. Barely anyone in my platoon can control their suit well enough to be out here. “Stay inside!”

I’m maxing power to my suit grav to fight the gusts rushing past me.

Plumes of fire ghost into existence where hydrogen and oxygen from ruptured tanks mix in the presence of sparking metal. Fortunately, space’s vacuum kills the flames as soon as they form.

“Close the assault doors,” I shout. The air that rushed into the ship when we collided might now drag my troops back out again.

A tornado starts to form in the vast hangar as air swirls out through the holes in the hull.

I fly away from the vortex.

Debris, railgun slugs—the size of a fist, thousands of them—are in the air. More slugs, the size of cars, bounce and roll in the fluctuating grav and high winds.

Trogs, some stripped of their clothing by the powerful gusts, are bouncing off the floors and beams as shards of steel tear through them.

The tornado is writhing and jumping in the turbulence.

Feeling unsafe, I grav drive deeper into the Trog cruiser.

And then I realize I’m the first soldier ever to see the inside of one of these monsters. At least no other human has lived to tell about it. I spin in the air to get the lay of the land. Indeed it does look just like one of ours.

I see Jill’s ship is protruding through the hull, about two-thirds deep, just like mine. None of her assault doors are open.

“Situation?” Brice calls to me over the comm.

“The Trog’s internal air supply,” I tell him. “Give it another minute to blow into space, or we’ll lose half our platoon when they exit.”

The tornado is already dying. The gaps in the hull are huge, and there’s only so much air inside.

Within the hangar space, the gravity is axial, the same way we set it inside our assault ship. However, this cruiser is so huge, Trogs can walk normally on any of the exterior walls as if they were floors. Right now, none of them are walking. Some are still tumbling in the wind. The rest are holding onto anything they can get their arms around.

Futile.

They’re all going to suffocate when the last of the air is sucked into space.

The ship shudders and the gravity fields jiggle.

We destroyed hundreds of the big ship’s grav plates during the collision, and the Trogs on the bridge can’t get the internal field stabilized. Thanks to the alien bug, I see the gravity shifts in stunning visual clarity, and it makes everything I see seem momentarily under the surface of a wavy pool.

I look toward the bow. The first tenth of the ship in that direction is walled off from the hangar bay. In our fleet’s cruisers, that’s the Gray zone. Only those pencil-necked little bastards and their North Korean toadies are up there, segregated from the lowly humans who do the sweating and the bleeding.

In the Gray zone, they’ve got communal rooms, cafeterias, pods where the Grays sleep, and dorms for the North Koreans, everything they need to live life separately from the grunts in the rest of the ship. The bridge is that way, right at the bow. The railgun targeting centers are also located up there, remotely aiming each of the gun emplacements along the ship’s three spines. A Gray or a Korean with a bug in his head does that work.

You’ve got to have an intimate relationship with gravity if you want to aim a long-range railgun with any accuracy.

The expansive central hangar section houses giant hoppers, magazines for the slugs that feed the railguns, storage racks for the projectiles, and crane mechanisms for moving them from rack to hopper. The guns appear to be loaded manually, one shot at a time—both labor-intensive and slow. There are so many railguns down each spine, however, that collectively this ship can pour out tons of projectiles every second.

All of the facilities for housing the Trogs’ gun crews are in a gridwork of structures built in a layer along the three flat sides of the ship.

Suspended on the ship’s long axis, connected to the sides by a web of thick supports and conduit, are a trio of fusion reactors, each separated by a hundred meters. They’re the three beating hearts of this monster.

The aft quarter of the ship is walled off, just like the bow section. In our ships, that’s the barracks. Ten thousand SDF soldiers are bunked back there in cubbyholes for sleeping quarters. There are also gyms, storerooms, infirmaries, latrines, and ready-rooms, each adjacent to a large door that opens to the outside. I guess there has to be ten thousand Trog soldiers in those quarters, recovering from the surprise of the impact and putting on their space suits so they can come and kill us.

This cruiser is the apparent galactic standard in ship design. It’s made to bombard its targets from orbit, then land to let a contingent of soldiers mop up any who resist.

Everything about this ship is built for the kind of war the Grays fight—giant capital ships, pounding one another with railguns, fluctuating their grav fields for defense. It’s like a game of chess where a punch in the face hides behind every bad move.

An unlikely form of war, evolved through a long history where the Grays and their adversaries have the same goals, because they value the same things.

They want to control solar systems with planets like earth, with hospitable atmospheres, non-toxic chemical compositions, and tolerable gravity. They like moderate temperatures with liquid water and not too many voracious microbes.

Most of all, they want to possess planets with large populations of technologically backward creatures that can be put to use constructing navies to fight their inevitable wars, building orbital battle stations to defend habitable planets, and to provide muscle and sweat for thousand-year projects building donut-shaped space stations ten thousand miles across, artificial ring-worlds, Eden bliss for a billion of their kind.

And why stop at one?

Earth’s solar system is full of raw materials, and breathing human bodies are cheap—we just can’t stop making more of ourselves.

Earth is a prize worth fighting for.

The gravity in the hangar bay is stabilizing.

Trogs are scattered like goldfish out of water on the decks above and below, and half a kilometer aft to the barracks. Their mouths are opening and closing, gulping for breath in air too thin to sustain life.

Thousands of them dying, and I don’t feel an iota of pity because of why they’re here—to enslave me and every generation of humans from now until God gets tired of playing dollhouse with his shitty little universe and flushes it down a black hole.

It’s time to do some killing.

Chapter 32

We’re close enough now for suit-to-suit comm with the other assault ship, so I open a connection with Jill Rafferty. “Status?”

“Bumpy ride,” she answers immediately. “We’re all good. Glad you made it, cowboy.”

Like our platoon, hers has three crew-served railguns that fire slugs the size of fifty-caliber machine gun rounds at speeds near 7k. “Leave three fire teams on board or near your ship. They need to be in a spot where they can fire on the barracks at the aft end of the cruiser. Start shooting as soon as they’re set up. Punch holes in the barracks wall in the back of the ship until the Trogs start to come out, then pin them in the doorways if you can.

“But,” Jill pauses, “why shoot the walls?”

“Vacuum,” I remind her. “Any Trogs not suited up inside will suffocate when the air goes.”

“Shoulder-fired rockets would sure come in handy for that.”

“I’ll file a complaint with the MSS,” I tell her, a grim smile on my face, because she’s right. With a half-dozen decent anti-tank rockets from any old rotting warehouse on a military base left over from before the siege, we could punch enough big holes in the forward and aft sections that most of the Trogs on the ship would die before we had to deal with them head on. “Hold another squad back for reserve and send the other two forward.”

“Send?” she asks me. “I’m leading them.”

I’d prefer she stayed with her ship to manage our rear defense, however, I’ve known her long enough to know there’s nothing I can talk her out of once she sets her mind. “Leave a good sergeant then.”

“Will do.”

“We took nearly thirty percent casualties coming up, including noncoms and officers,” I tell her.

“Legit casualties?” She’s asking if it was enemy fire or the mutiny that killed them.

“Legit plus a few,” I tell her. “I’ve got two sergeants, and me. I’ll take two squads forward and leave three fire teams on my ship for defense. Tell your sergeant guarding our rear to keep tabs on them.”

I switch to my platoon’s command comm. “Brice, Lenox, it’s time to go.”

A blistering red trail of machine gun fire traces a line from Jill’s ship down the length of the Trog cruiser. Rounds pierce the barracks wall with so much energy metal explodes.

Another machine gun joins the first. A third opens up.

Maybe rockets aren’t needed, after all.

I set my comm to loop in with Jill, Brice, and Lenox. I add in the grunts in Brice’s squad since I’ll be going in with them. It’s not the optimal command solution for the battle, but I’ve got to earn respect from the grunt level on up, which means I need to do grunt work with a gun in my hand and dead Trogs under my feet.

“Jill, we’re moving now.”

“I’ll race you to the bridge.”

Soldiers in their dirty orange suits bounce out of Jill’s ship and start running across the cluttered deck.

I hit my grav and fly toward the bow. “You better hurry.”

Chapter 33

I accelerate as I fly, aiming toward one of the three closed doorways that’ll allow us access to the Trog cruiser’s forward command section. “Brice, bring the squad to me.”

“Yes, sir.” I hear him and the others over the comm as they make their leaps from the open assault doors into emptiness in the Trog ship’s main hangar. They’re flying for real, and doing so in a surreal environment as different from anything they’re likely ever to see or feel.

Lenox’s squad is jumping down to the decks, running, bouncing, or falling depending on their skills. They’re using their suits’ auto-grav full time, so their suits will always orient gravity toward whatever the feet are standing on.

Halfway to my target door and just beginning my deceleration, I see a pair of odd shadows in the jumble of strewn railgun slugs on the deck below. The shadows move enough like humans, so I don’t need a full view to know they’re Trogs—the jet-black concerns me. Trogs always wear suits that were once white when manufactured, but now are weathered, gray, and finger-painted in primitive symbols and designs.

Ghosts. The Trog elite.

The ones who wear black are their generals and captains. At least when they’re among the Trog hordes.

The Trogs clad in crisp ebony who move about on their own, are the killers. The best of the Trogs.

They need to be dealt with. “Brice,” I say, “I’ve got ghosts up here.”

“Trogs in black?” He asks without hesitation.

“Roger that,” I tell him as I glance back at our ship and see him standing in an assault door hustling the last member of our squad out.

“Location?”

I point.

Lenox says, “My squad can take ‘em.”

“Be careful,” Brice tells her. “You’ve got the numbers, use that to your advantage.”

“Will do.” Flying above her troops, Lenox divides her squad into fire teams, guiding them into deadly crossfire positions as they move toward the pair of ghosts. Some of the troops move like soldiers. Others straggle, just trying to maintain pace and direction.

They dying will start soon.

I hope some of us will live to leave this ship.

Taking a glance toward Jill’s ship, I see her two squads running across the deck, bouncing, and some flying. She’s apparently left her squads mixed.

I make a note to tell her about the way we’ve separated ours. Experience with grav control is the major factor in troop mobility, and maybe combat effectiveness. Units of mixed skill level only serve to drag the entire squad down. At least that’s the assumption we’re working under in my platoon.

However, the middle of a battle is not the time for those kinds of instructions, so I keep them to myself, and turn to see how close—

I slam into the wall and bounce off.

I hit the floor and rebound, going high and into a slow roll.

Dammit!

I’d stopped paying attention to where I was.

Good thing I’d engaged my suit’s automatic defense. It creates an anti-grav field around my body to deflect incoming fire. Fortunately, it also works like an invisible fat suit to soften the impact of collisions, like the one I just had with the wall.

Just as I start to hope the mistake went unnoticed, a few women in my squad giggle.

“Silva? Mostyn?” I ask, and the giggling stops. “If you’ll forget you saw that, we can negotiate a bribe later.”

They laugh some more.

Clearly, they don’t agree.

I switch my suit to auto-grav and orient my feet beneath me. All the time I spent in the zero-g room back home in Breck is paying off. Using the suit’s controls is second nature to me.

I take one of the two C4 charges off my utility belt, attach it to the door, and tell my squad, “Explosive set!” Translation: hurry the hell up.

The door is inset into the wall by eighteen inches, which works out perfectly for what’s about to happen. I jump away from the door and take six quick steps before stopping to put my back against the steel.

I won’t catch any shrapnel, and I should be far enough away not to be hurt by the blast. I amp up my defensive grav just in case, and take a few more steps.

Brice hits the wall beside me, followed quickly by Silva, Mostyn, Bautista, Mendez, and Hastings. All are women except Mendez.

It’s an unexpected mix of genders that makes me wonder about the procrastination habits of the two. Maybe when the girls were hard at work with their sims, the boys distracted themselves with salacious videos. A thought for another time.

What really distracts me at a moment when I have a hundred more important things on my mind is Silva’s smile. I can’t put into words what it is about a woman’s smile when it’s just right, only that it opens a trap I happily fall into.

The smile wisps away in an instant.

Silva is back to business. I am too.

My squad arranges itself flat against the wall.

I raise my arm so I can see my d-pad. There’s nothing on the touchscreen but one big red dot. I push it to detonate the C4.

I feel the shock through my back and hear it through my helmet because it’s pressed against the wall.

Over the command comm, I tell them, “Going in.”

Chapter 34

Like me, Mostyn has only seen simulated battle, but she’s already pulling an explosive charge off her belt and jumping around me for a peek past the doors we just destroyed. “It’s an airlock,” she tells us. “Inner doors intact.”

“Blow ‘em,” I say.

She disappears through the outer doors’ splinters.

Silva bounces around me, weapon up. “I’ll cover.”

I see Lenox’s squad firing into a sunken walkway sixty or seventy meters away.

A ghost in black jumps out of another walkway. Scarily fast, he comes up behind a grunt on the flank of the formation.

Lenox yells a warning.

It’s not enough.

The ghost swings a blade-shaped weapon with blue parallel lines glowing down its length. The blade cuts through the soldier’s ribcage all the way to the spine, and then, as if the movement was planned, the ghost spins with his momentum and hops back into another walkway.

“Lenox?” I call.

“We got this,” she tells me. “Keep your squad alive.”

She’s right. It’ll be my grunts dying if I try to micromanage the other squads.

“Trogs coming out of the barracks!” Jill calls over the command comm.

“Does Sergeant Bruckert have it under control?” I ask. Bruckert is the man she left in charge of our rear defense.

“I’ll tell you when he doesn’t.”

Silva and Mostyn come bouncing back out of the damaged airlock. “Ready?” Silva asks.

I give her the nod.

She winks at me and pushes the glowing red dot on her d-pad.

The charge blows.

Again, the wall and floor shudder.

A spray of metal shards rides a blast of wind out of the airlock as the ship’s forward section depressurizes.

Pieces of one or two Trogs in black suits blow past us. It’s hard to guess the count when the parts aren’t sinewed together anymore.

A Gray flies by, missing an arm, head split, amber blood spraying out.

A Gray?

My squad congratulates themselves.

“Bow section breached,” I call over the comm for Jill and my other squad leaders.

My grunts have their weapons up, and they’re off the wall, forming up to move inside once the depressurization finishes, and I’m thinking we’ve not proven ourselves yet, but so far the simulator training hasn’t produced a bad result.

I take point, knowing it’s a terrible place for a commander.

Brice grabs my shoulder to stop me and shakes his head.

I can’t get past the respect necessity even if it is all in my mind. “I need to. At least for today.”

The wall and floor shudder again, and I glance toward Jill’s squad. They’ve just blown their airlock’s outer door.

The howl of wind out of our doors diminishes.

Any second now.

Lenox comms in. “Ghosts down. We’re on the way.”

Good news.

I step through broken metal doors and lead my squad inside.

Most of the lights down the hall are working. Most of those nearby are broken.

The white walls and floor are scorched by the blast, however, anything not built in is gone, blown out in the decompression blast.

Except—

I kneel quickly and grab the handle of a sword-like Trog weapon stuck in a crag of door metal. The parallel rows of blue light activate as soon as my palm wraps around the handle.

“How ‘bout that?” utters Silva.

“Yeah.” I’m thinking, how about that? Trog weapons are powered just like ours.

“You hold onto that,” says Brice. “Damn things are deadly as hell.”

“I got Trogs!” calls Lenox. “Coming out of the third set of bow doors.”

The only door of the three we’re not assaulting. “Ghosts or regular?” I ask.

“Regular,” she tells me. “We’ll take ‘em.”

Brice says, “Send a fire team in to cover our rear as soon as you can spare them.”

“Will do,” answers Lenox. Whereas our squad has five soldiers—not counting Brice and me—Lenox’s squad has fourteen. The downside of separating them by skill level.

The walls and floor shudder again.

“Breach!” calls Jill.

I reach my ghost Trog weapon over my back and feel it clink against one of the magnet mounts on my integrated backpack. It sticks.

In we go, four of us on one wall, three on the opposite side.

It’s easy to hurry. We have no obstacles.

At twenty meters, we pause as we arrive at a wide cross-hall.

So far everything in the Trog ship’s layout has been an exact match with our cruisers. That means to the left, at the end of that hall, are the residential quarters for the forward crew. To the right, down a short corridor, stands a pair of doors that lead to a long bay running parallel to one of the gun spines. It’s where all of the weapons-targeting personnel sit, aiming the railguns.

“On the corners,” Brice orders the squad. “Cover both doors. Let’s blow them simultaneously.”

Silva runs toward the barracks door. Mendez sprints toward the other, each readying a C4 charge.

The rest of the squad aims their weapons down the halls.

I keep an eye up the main corridor in front of us, but glance back to see a fire team from Lenox’s squad just outside the doors we blew to get in.

A blast of wind explodes from the main corridor.

The wind tunnel force nearly knocks me off my feet, but I increase auto grav to keep my boots stuck to the floor.

Two of my squad slide down the hall, dragged by the wind.

“Increase grav!” I holler at them as I ready my weapon to shoot.

Everything is happening fast, and something I’m seeing down the hall doesn’t make sense. It takes a frantic fraction of a second for me to understand. Two black shadows are riding the wind, coming impossibly fast. “Ghosts!”

Panic trips my trigger finger, and I fire on full auto.

My rounds spread spears of red all through the hall.

The ghosts are bouncing off the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Brice is shooting, too.

The rounds whiz past the ghosts or deflect off their blue pulsing anti-grav fields. Suddenly, my brand new superior firepower 6k, two-hundred-rounds-a-minute, recoil-compensated, state-of-the-art, grav-drive Trog-killing rifle doesn’t seem like it’s worth its own weight in dog shit.

It’s clear to me, the single-shot weapons our troops have been using so far in this war against Trog armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands is one of the big reasons we’re losing.

Only a heartbeat or two has passed.

Still, I fire.

As the Trog in front moves closer, more of my rounds find their mark, and the blue anti-grav deflection field shimmers non-stop, overloads, and lets some slugs through.

The Trog’s body takes a shot through the shoulder and he tumbles in the wind, still swinging his blue-lined blade.

Blood is spewing from his wound.

And he’s on us.

He slashes his blade.

Bautista’s head spins away from her body as her neck still squirts blood to feed a brain no longer integrated into the system.

The wounded ghost Trog is past us in a flash and slams into Lenox’s grunts back at the blasted door.

Somebody shouts.

There’s still one coming.

Chapter 35

I’m not sure how frustration turned to inspiration and then to action so fast, but it’s clear to me these ghost Trogs’ black suits have an extra helping of defensive magic built in.

I let go of my rifle to dangle from its harness and I reach back for the ghost Trog blade I just acquired. Its pattern of lines glow blue with the power from my suit’s fusion reactor.

The theory that only has microseconds to gel in my mind tells me these ghost Trogs in their special suits must think they’re the most badass killers in this part of the galaxy and they’d likely want to carry weapons they could use to kill the meanest, deadliest bullies on the block—each other.

I step to a good spot just off center in the hall so I can put some power into my swing as the second Trog bounces off the wall, off the ceiling, and heads right toward me.

Brice and a few others are still shooting at the Trog.

At the very last moment, I kneel as I swing, and max the auto-grav in my suit to hold my boots against the floor.

The Trog didn’t expect that move, and his blade cuts a path through the air where my neck was just a moment before.

My blade comes up with all my strength at his torso.

The blade’s blue lines pulse intensely, and the Trog’s defensive grav field flashes bright, but doesn’t deflect.

The blade cuts through black suit, bone, and muscle, cleaving the Trog’s body in two, sending a spray of blood and split organs into the wind blasting at Lenox’s troops down the hall.

I understand immediately what the blue lines on the blade are for, and I know instantly that our scientists on earth haven’t invented anything new with the gravity lens on my assault ship. They simply came up with a new application for a technology that already existed in these Trog blades, a grav field focused to a fine edge, capable of cutting through deflective fields and enemy bodies.

“You all right, sir?” Brice is at my side, tugging at my arm.

I look at him through my red-spattered faceplate and realize I’m covered in blood that’s just starting to boil as the air thins to vacuum. Not bothering to answer his question, I say. “Bautista bought it. Anybody else?”

“Mostyn and Hastings are banged up,” he answers. “They’ll live.”

Outside in the hangar, two ghost Trogs are dead, at the cost of at least one grunt’s life.

We killed two more in the hall at the cost of another.

We can’t afford two for one. That angers me.

My desire to kill is giving me visions of genocidal slaughter.

Dammit, I barely knew Bautista’s name and face, but being in my squad, her loss feels acutely personal. “Blow those damn doors and get this fuckin’ show on the road.”

“Mendez, Silva,” Brice calls over the comm, “set those charges. Move it! We got killin’ to do.”

Good. We’re all on the same page.

Chapter 36

“We’ve got Trogs in the hall,” says Jill over a crackly comm channel. Now that we’re in the bowels of the ship with lots of walls and whatnot between us, the signal is having trouble getting through. “Thirty, maybe forty.”

“Stay safe,” I tell her. “And keep them busy. Our path to the bridge is clear for the moment.” I hail Lenox. “How are things out there?”

“Holding our own,” she answers. “God, there’s a lot of them.”

“Kane,” Jill calls, “Bruckert is under pressure back at the assault ships. He won’t be able to hold them for long.”

“Retreat to the airlock,” I tell her. “Keep those Trogs in your access hall pinned, and send a squad back to help Bruckert.” Taking one of the two bridge assault teams off the table is a risk to our objective, but I need to make sure my platoons have a way to escape once this mess starts to go south. And it will go south. Though we killed several thousand Trogs when we rammed the cruiser, it’s looking like there are plenty enough left to overwhelm us once they’re organized. “Lenox,” I call again, “be prepared to go where you’re needed.”

“Roger dodger, General.”

Where did that come from?

“Ready to blow the doors!” Brice tells me.

I put my back to a wall. “Do it.”

“Grav tight!” Brice tells the squad. He wants boots on high-g holding us to the floor when the doors go. We don’t need to have more troops tumbling down the hall in the depressurization blast. “Three. Two. One!”

The ship shudders again.

The wind comes, carrying metal fragments and spindly gray bodies, broken and whole, dozens of them, eyes wide and black, showing no expression at all. Waving arms and grasping hands belie their desperation.

Everything alive fears death.

“Where the hell did all the Grays come from?” Brice spits as the bodies fly past.

“Kill any that are alive.” It’s no answer, just pragmatism. I point down the main corridor. “We need to move. We’re running out of time.”

Brice wrangles the squad. “Let’s go.”

We’re running fast, weapons ready.

As I sprint, I wonder about those Grays. It doesn’t make sense they’d be on the ship, unless they’re Trog prisoners. But then, why have them targeting the cruiser’s railguns? Could they be Trog slaves?

We reach the end of the corridor.

Four conduits, wide enough for a Trog or a human to stand inside, run toward the central axis of the cruiser, passing each level on the way to the bridge. They’re the in-ship version of elevators, with grav plates set to keep each tube in zero-g. All one need do is step inside and push off, and then step out at the destination floor.

I peek inside and look up past exits to three levels to see the top of the tube sealed shut. “They’ve closed the hatch to the bridge.”

Grunts in the squad confirm the other three are closed as well.

No problem.

“Silva,” I point up my tube. “Get up there as quick as you can, plant your last C4 charge on that door and then hustle back down here.”

“Gimme two seconds.” Silva jumps in, and she’s gone.

My thoughts wander. Why did I select Silva? Why is her pretty face stuck in my thoughts?

Brice tells the others, “Grenades up the other tubes as soon as Silva is out!”

Three soldiers pull pins and reach their grenades into each of the empty tubes.

Just as promised, Silva is back.

“Damn, that was quick.” I give her a nod of approval, then glance at the others.

Brice says, “Grenades first. As soon as they detonate and discourage Trogs on the other levels—Silva, you blow the charge on the bridge hatch. Once it goes, follow me up. I’ll lead.”

“Follow us up,” I tell her, nodding at Brice. “You behind me.”

He shrugs.

The grenades go.

We all step away to a safe distance.

As I wait the two seconds for the explosions, I feel vibrations through the floor. The fighting elsewhere is growing intense. I hear Jill talking to Sergeant Bruckert. I hear Lenox ordering a fire team to support the rear defense. I’ve committed nearly half our strength to the defense of the assault ships. Jill’s squad is fully engaged with a platoon-sized bunch of regular Trogs and Lenox is weakening her position to support the rest of us.

If the Trogs attack our little squad from the rear, we’ll be in trouble.

Or if more of the black-suited ghost Trogs come at us…

The grenades detonate.

Silva sets off her C4 in a bigger explosion.

With the shock of the blast still tingling my senses, and with no rush of released atmosphere from above, I hop into the lift tube and take off. “Max grav!”

Brice is literally on my heels.

Chapter 37

The trip up passes in an eye blink, and I’m decelerating desperately to avoid breaking my neck in a collision when I reach the top.

I twist and crouch just before my shoulder impacts the ceiling through the cushion of my deflective grav. On the rebound, I luck my way into landing on my feet beside the blown hatch.

I’m all adrenaline and wide eyes, scanning for threats.

It looks like three pods of Grays, eighteen of them, manning the bridge. Most have been knocked to the floor by the explosion. Others are looking at me, and I read surprise into their expressionless, flat faces.

Parts of a ghost Trog are scattered outward from the tube entrance.

Wrong place, wrong time for you, buddy.

An ebony Trog is slinking along the back wall of the bridge, thinking I don’t see him there. Another ghost already has his attack planned, and he’s sprinting toward me from the far end of the bridge.

Disruptor time.

And my pistol.

I don’t expect pistol slugs to penetrate ghost Trog shields, but each of those bullets packs a punch of momentum, and Newton’s third law guarantees energy will impart a hard enough thump to throw a Trog off-balance long enough for me to kill him.

In theory.

I jump to my right, hoping to put a waist-high instrument console between me and the sprinting Trog, a little defense to help offset its power.

Then it occurs to me—I’m alone.

Brice, Silva, or one of the others should already be on the bridge with me. Nobody’s popped out of the damaged grav tube.

Shit!

No time to ask questions, no time to wonder what happened. I don’t have backup. I’m on my own.

New plan!

I skirt the instrument console and rush the Trog coming at me.

Its boots skid on the deck, and it waves an arm to catch its balance. It didn’t expect me to attack.

I’m firing my pistol at its chest to press my tenuous advantage to gain another critical half-second.

The Trog’s grav field sizzles blue from my pistol slug’s impacts.

And then I’m close enough.

I swing the disruptor down and hack off his arm.

Bright-red blood and suit-air explode out of the wound, shooting the arm across the bridge in one direction and knocking the Trog to the deck in the other.

I leap over him and move out of range of his disruptor in case he’s able to muster a few more seconds of fight before the vacuum sucks out the rest of his life’s blood.

I scan the bridge for the other Trog.

Where the hell is he?

And where’s my damn squad?

I don’t see the Trog.

I spin around, swinging my disruptor blade as I go, and I spot it. He’s trying to come around behind me.

I realize, almost fatally late, these ghost Trogs are a lot faster than I ever suspected. Where Trogs in general like to keep their feet on the ground using auto-grav, these ghost Trogs use suit grav in three dimensions like they were born to it. And they probably were.

I pelt the Trog with a stream of pistol fire, aiming at his legs, hoping to trip him up as I run at him.

It works, almost.

I swing my disruptor down at his head to split his helmet. In quick defense, he moves his disruptor up to block me. For the first time since I picked up the alien weapon, I find something that can stop it—another disruptor.

I push down.

He pushes up.

Two soldiers, fighting face-to-face to kill one another, the age-old story.

Through his faceplate I see him looking at me from under thick, boney brows beneath a severely sloping forehead. He has a wide, flat nose, with a mouth full of broad, yellow teeth that look like they were built to grind through coconut husks. And he’s smiling, like he thinks he’s got me, like he’s full of Neanderthal smugness from having killed a dozen—maybe a hundred—frail humans just like me.

And that pisses me off.

“Fuck you, Trog!” I shove my pistol up under the neck ring of his suit, inside deflective grav range, and I fire.

Just like the North Korean officer I killed when my mutiny started, the Trog’s thick-boned head comes to pieces inside his helmet. A spray of blood vaporizes as the vacuum sucks it out the holes my slugs left in his suit’s neck.

The Trog drops.

I slap my disruptor onto my back, attach my pistol to a magnetic mount, and raise my rifle. I pull the trigger and spin as I spray the whole bridge. Grays’ heads explode. Others duck as rounds ricochet. I focus most of my fire on the giant wall of windows, giving the bridge a view out the front of the ship, the earth, a busted battle station, and the debris from countless other vessels.

There’s plenty of blackness out there in space, and I want to make sure there’s no ebony-clad ghost Trog standing in front of the glass, using that sky for camouflage.

I find none.

I take a breath and—

An explosion shakes the deck and sends hunks of shrapnel clattering in every direction. Some of it impacts my defensive grav field and the momentum sends me flying across the bridge to bounce off a waist-high console.

Damn Newton again with his fucking laws.

Luckily, my suit’s defensive field saves me from injury.

I’m back on my feet in two seconds, shaking stars out of my vision and pointing my rifle at a bank of grav tubes on the far side of the bridge.

A grunt pops out, ready to shoot.

Another comes through, a second later.

They’re not mine.

“Jill?” I ask. “Is this your squad?”

A third soldier pops onto the bridge. It turns out to be Jill. “We cleaned up those Trogs in the hall,” she says. “Just the regular kind. Not those ghost Trogs you dealt with.” She’s looking around and sees the bodies of the two I just killed. “Where’s the rest of your squad?”

“Don’t know.” But I’ve got a chance now to find out. I comm back to my people. “Brice? Status?”

“Dammit,” he curses. “I was ambushed by a Trog a level down from the bridge.”

“You okay?” I ask.

“It’s dead,” he answers. “But Hastings came up the tube after us, max gravved, got herself cockeyed somehow, and jammed her body in there. Clogged the tube.”

“Body?” I ask. That’s ominous.

“She’s dead.”

Another casualty. Something I need to get used to but can’t imagine what that state of mind even feels like.

“Check those Grays,” Jill tells her squad. “Kill them, or make sure they’re dead.” She’s coming my way and gives one of the dead ghost Trogs a kick. “You’re a badass grunt now?”

We’re all bloodied. We’re victorious. “Now we’re all badass grunts.”

Chapter 38

Brice pops out of the grav tube I came through. In a series as steady as metronome clicks, Silva, Mostyn, and Mendez emerge, my squad of six turned to four.

“What now, Chief?” asks Brice.

Jill looks at me with the same question on her face.

We have our objective, but I know our victory won’t last. Talking to Jill, I ask, “How long can Bruckert hold?”

“Minutes.”

We don’t even know how many more Trogs are in the stern barracks, or in the forward section for that matter. There might be hundreds massing on the other floors we didn’t check. An attack could be coming. If that happens, we won’t be able to hold the bridge.

We needed a lot more than two ships to ram the Trog cruiser for capture to be a realistic outcome.

Even though we have control of the ship for the moment, we need another way to capitalize on our victory. I hurry over to the helm and give it a quick glance. It’s familiar to me. It’s the same Gray design we use in our cruisers, with the same controls used on our assault ships. Only scaled up. A lot.

I know I’m no expert, but I’ve been through the basic flight simulators. I think I can fly this thing.

Jill cuts her eyes toward me. “What are you thinking?”

“It’s time we give these dumbass Trogs a hard lesson in what war with unchained humans is like.”

“What’s that mean?” asks Brice.

“We don’t need to control the whole ship,” I tell him. “We just need the bridge. Jill, move your platoon back to your assault ship, dislodge it, and move it out of here. Brice, same for our squad. Lenox, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” answers Lenox.

“Don’t take any more casualties. Load everybody back on board the assault ships. Do it fast.”

“We’re retreating?” asks Brice. He’s mortified.

“You’re not coming with us?” Jill asks, having guessed my intentions.

“No,” I tell her. “I’m staying on the bridge.”

She’s not pleased. “Whatever suicidal—”

“I’m staying here,” I snap, “but I’m not suicidal. Get your platoon moving. You’ve got two minutes. That’s it.” I lay my hands on the ship’s helm and open a line to Penny. “Once you’re away from this cruiser, don’t go far. I’ll grav my ass the hell out of here, but I’ll need you to pick me up outside.”

“Yes, sir.” She’s not happy, either.

Jill starts to move away as she orders her squad back into the grav tube.

I point to the bank of windows. “Anybody know if our C4 charges can break that glass?”

Brice shakes his head. “That glass is built to withstand railgun fire from other cruisers. C4 won’t even scratch it.”

“Then I’ll have to do this the hard way.” I look at him and put on a comforting little smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll get out. Just make sure Penny doesn’t leave me. Now, get moving!”

Brice doesn’t. “You don’t still have the kill switch set, do you?”

I shake my head as I laugh.

He laughs in that dark way he does. “I’m moving the squad out. We’ll look for you outside. Good luck.”

Chapter 39

Alone on the bridge, the moments are ticking down.

I’m monitoring the comm links as I familiarize myself with the Trog cruiser’s internal grav controls. I don’t want to do anything with interior grav until my people are loaded up. I do, however, try to set up a repulsive grav field in the tubes leading to the bridge. It won’t lock Trogs out, but it’ll slow down those that decide they need to stop in for a visit.

At least that’s the idea. Unlike my assault ship, with one console to control the ship’s grav functions, the cruiser has a bank of consoles and was manned by a dozen Grays. And the longer I stare at the panels, the more certain I am that I’m not going to be able to do anything.

I check the time on my d-pad, and then gaze out through the windows at a view the likes of which I’ve only ever seen in fictional movies and old space documentaries.

The world is spinning slowly below me as I look down on swirls of cloud, patterns of snow-capped mountains, evergreen forest, and gray cities.

Earth’s massive battle stations, each constructed in hollowed-out asteroids towed in from the belt, orbit on their basket weave of paths. As I watch, one station seems to come toward me, but I know it’ll pass overhead. I hope. I have no way of telling what my altitude is. Two stations closer to my course are way out in front.

Juji Station, dead and venting gasses, is far ahead, slowly receding as it moves farther and farther away.

South of me, at the edge of the planet’s curve, I see Trog cruisers, twelve or fourteen of them, hammering another station that’s sending a storm of fire back. Railgun slugs, hot from the compression of gravity pushing them from standstill speeds up to six or seven thousand miles an hour glow bright yellow and red as they cut paths through the vacuum.

Assault ships, broken in pieces and shattered into bits, are floating in every direction.

Pieces of metal and the bodies of SDF soldiers flame bright as they streak into the atmosphere.

A cruiser, terribly damaged, jetting flame from a dozen fires, is sliding sideways far below me. It’s starting to glow hot as earth’s thick atmosphere drags across its hull.

I check the time on my d-pad again. Thirty seconds.

The two-minute mark was arbitrary. However, I had to draw the line somewhere. My plan will disintegrate the more time it takes to develop. I just have no way of knowing how long that time will be.

Penny comms in. “Where the hell are you?”

“I told you, I’d meet you outside.”

“That’s stupid,” she tells me. “Get to the ship.”

“Is everyone on board?” I ask.

“Everyone but you.”

“Don’t wait,” I tell her.

Penny and I have been friends for a very long time. She’s getting angry. “Don’t go hero on me.”

“Don’t go Adverb on me,” I shoot back. “This isn’t a suicide mission. Seriously, look for me outside. I’ll come out of the hole the ship’s going to leave once you back it out.”

“And you really think we’ll find you in all the debris out there?” she argues.

“I’ll max my suit’s deflective grav once I’m outside. Phil sees gravity better than he sees internet porn. To him, I’ll be glowing like a supernova.”

Phil cuts in. “You wish.”

Penny adds, “You know Phil’s still mad at you about—”

I laugh, if for no other reason than to get back on topic. “I trust you, all of you. Now don’t fuck it up. I don’t want to be orbiting the planet forever.” If I live through what I’ve planned, if I make it out of the ship, orbiting forever will be my only choice if they don’t find me. My suit can generate a grav field, but there’s no way its micro-fusion reactor can sustain enough power to de-orbit me in any survivable way. “Now, move it, and stay focused. Things are going to get messy.”

“Suit yourself. Penny out.”

Jill comms in. “We’re pulling out now. It was nice knowing you, Dylan Kane. I’d say more, but my mom always told me, never get in a man’s way when he’s got stupid on his mind.”

“See you outside, Jill.” I check my watch. Time’s up.

I feel the Trog cruiser lurch as the two assault ships power up grav fields strong enough to disengage.

I drop into the tiny pilot’s seat, made for Gray butts, not humans.

Is this a Trog ship then? A Gray ship?

I focus on the gravity fields of all the massive objects around me and see the other two Trog cruisers still raining railgun slugs down on Arizona and still shooting at assault ships lucky enough to make it up through the atmosphere. The three cruisers are in a line as we follow the spin of the planet below. Mine is first, the second follows me ten klicks back, and the third is another ten further.

They’re holding their position against earth’s pull.

Neither is doing anything to change that. Neither is reacting to the ship I control. Whether they don’t know or won’t accept that a stupid human monkey just captured one of their beautiful mechanical leviathans is irrelevant to me, as long as they don’t change their minds for another minute or two. Then, the unmerciful and unchangeable laws of physics will be in control of their fates.

I attempt to kill power to all my ship’s interior systems, and screw something up. Internal gravity starts to fluctuate.

Nonetheless, something worked right.

My console tells me I’ve got more power available I can direct to the propulsion and maneuver plates, more power than those grav plates can sustain, actually. In short bursts, a grav plate can consume more electricity than it’s rated for. It generates a stronger field for a short time—maybe seconds, maybe minutes—and then the plate’s titanium housing superheats, frying its innards and rupturing. Then the unit turns to junk.

That’s okay with me. I’m not interested in the resale value of this heap. I only want minutes.

I push the power flow and over-grav every plate in the ship as I jam it into reverse.

Blue grav fields glow, and field lines spray in every direction.

Every piece of metal framework in the ship strains as two million tons of composite and steel try to change direction. The deck rumbles.

Interior grav disappears completely and alarms sound on one of the consoles. Now every Trog on board, every personal item in every berth, and the loose tonnage of railgun slugs and wreckage in the main hangar tumble forward, smashing interior walls and crushing bulkheads.

A smile slowly creeps across my face. It strikes me as bizarrely funny that four or five years of labor by thousands of Trogs went into constructing this cruiser and it won’t last ten more minutes under the abuse I’m heaping on it.

It won’t have to.

The bridge crews piloting the other two ships—I guess now not Trogs but Grays—with their hypersensitivity to gravity, have to be stunned by the intensity of what just happened inside my ship. I hope they’re speculating and making bad guesses, like maybe a catastrophic reactor failure, or perhaps an impact by another of the humans’ tiny assault ships.

All I need is another thirty or forty seconds of dithering conjecture from them.

Once megaton masses start lumbering on a collision course, there reaches a point where nothing can be done to tease the physics of the situation toward any outcome but disaster.

The seconds tick.

Grav plates rupture and pop in my hull, shaking the entire ship with each burst.

The distance between my cruiser’s stern and the bridge of the following ship has halved, and that ship responds.

Its grav plates plume blue energy as it veers. Railguns still firing at distant targets start sending slugs skipping across the atmosphere and off into space.

Now I know for sure, the Grays driving the other ship reacted too late and didn’t respond drastically enough. At this point they couldn’t, not without making the hard choice to over-grav their plates and ruin their ship in order to save it.

Tough shit for them.

The last satisfying seconds pass.

My cruiser’s stern smashes into the second cruiser’s bridge, and I steer away just as the collision starts. I don’t want a direct hit, but a glancing blow, just enough to destroy the other ship’s bridge, kill the command crew, and rip away enough of the forward section to expose its expansive hanger bay to the deadly vacuum of space.

My ship is shuddering around me. Every piece of metal feels like it’s going to break welds and shear rivets as four million tons of reinforced hull and payload in the two giant ships deform and break.

Still, I pour every amp of power my redlining reactors generate to over-grav my plates.

My ship is accelerating as my hull rips along the other cruiser’s side.

A huge rocket of air is blasting out of the tear in my victim’s main hangar bay, pushing it to list hard to starboard and roll onto its back. Its grav plates—those with power—are thrusting the ship with nothing controlling them.

Our ships separate.

I’m still flying.

The other is lurching toward the atmosphere and a fiery death for every murderous Trog onboard.

“Ha!” I shout. “That’s what war feels like, bitches!”

I turn my attention to the last of the three cruisers.

I already know I’m going to succeed in killing it.

It’s slowing cautiously, trying to process what just happened. Maybe the Grays think it’s an accident—one damaged ship losing guidance and colliding unfortunately with a second. Maybe they’re trying to hang close to pick up survivors.

Maybe the little Gray masters of our universe are indecisive.

Perhaps that’s the flaw of the hive mind. All those big heads filled with orange brain-goo, arguing telepathically while their placid black eyes cast dirty looks at one another, are unable to reach a decision as fast as a stupid human monkey like me. It might be the key to their downfall.

It certainly is working today.

The last cruiser casually veers.

It chooses left.

Any direction besides left would have increased its odds of survival. However, at this point, over-grav acceleration is the only tiny chance it has.

They do me the favor of not selecting that option.

Still moving faster, I take aim with my smashed stern, my ram.

Expectedly, they finally get it, and their grav fields erupt in brilliant blue.

Unfortunately for them, it’s one-hundred-percent too late.

I laugh.

I brace myself.

My stern smashes into the other ship’s flank, just aft of the command section. Steel framework drives through composite hull as both ships start to disintegrate.

It’s time for me to go.

I jump out of my seat and fly using my suit’s grav.

I’m across the bridge and into a clear grav tube in seconds, blazing at a dangerous speed, curving hard in a burst of blue as I make the turn out the bottom of the tube and move into the main corridor back to the hangar bay.

I see Trogs ahead—three of them—using auto-grav to stick to the buckling floor. They have to know catastrophe is unfolding around them, but they’re unsure how to react.

My rifle is in my hands, and I trigger a long burst of full-auto slugs as I max power to my deflective field and put the rest into acceleration. I drive right at them.

Hoping.

Praying.

I don’t care if I hit them. I just need a gap.

No collision.

I flash past the Trogs, out of the hall and into the hangar bay, wondering how I managed to miss them.

The stern of my ship is a half-kilometer down from me, collapsing in slow destruction, with geysers of flame searing through the vacuum and disappearing as soon as they form. Explosions of sparks burst in sprays a hundred meters across.

Cracks run all up and down my hull.

Giant support ribs buckle.

I have to find a hole in the hull big enough to use for escape.

I’m all eyes and panic, knowing the heartbeats left in my life are small in number.

And there it is, the ragged hole left by Jill’s ship after it wrenched free.

I adjust my grav field and push toward the opening, but it’s deforming as the hull bends.

A gravity pulse pushes me off course.

Grav plates on two massive ships are maxing current and bending space—one to avert, one to cause the disaster already destroying them—and the chaos of attraction and repulsion is making it damn hard to stay on a straight line.

A metal support the size of a railroad car rips loose and spins through the hangar bay, tearing up every structure in its way.

I swerve and push.

I see empty space through the collapsing hole and play the only card I have. I over-grav my suit plates for a punch of acceleration.

Suddenly, unbelievably, I’m out.

The earth’s daylight surface is below me, a million scraps of metal are careening in every direction, and the black void of space stretches out to forever above me.

“Hell, yeah!”

I back off my suit grav to save my plates.

I need to get away from the cruisers, while avoiding any hunk of metal big enough to kill me.

I scan around for my assault ship’s gravity signature. Instead, I see in the distance my first victim starting to break up in the atmosphere.

The two ships above me are still merging, as blue snakes of grav field lines swim all over the crunching wreckage.

“Penny!” I call into my comm. “Penny!”

“Searching,” Phil answers.

As promised, I max power to my suit’s deflective field. “I’m about a half a klick below the bow, earth side.”

“Dammit!” yells Phil. “You’re gonna hit atmosphere if you keep going!”

“Well, then come save me, goddammit.” I’m giddy as I speak, because I just avoided a brush with death that should have killed me. “Wasn’t I clear on that part of the plan?”

“I see you,” says Phil.

“Headed your way,” Penny tells me.

I veer left, bursting blue with grav wash to avoid a huge section of ship’s hull that just blew off.

Out of the blackness, growing impossibly fast, I see my assault ship coming right at me.

The grav field dissipates suddenly, and the ship matches my vector. It effortlessly maneuvers up beside me.

I’m impressed. “Good driving, Penny.”

Brice opens one of the assault doors, reaches out, and drags me inside. “He’s in!”

“Hold tight,” Penny calls back. “Max grav!”

I grab a handhold and put my butt in a seat.

The platoon compartment is full of battered grunts looking at me in awe. Actually, full is the wrong word. Half the seats are empty now. Half my platoon is already dead. That puts a hollow in my gut I think I might fall into.

Penny pours on the speed.

Space flexes for a microsecond as one of the colliding cruiser’s fusion reactors loses containment and blows both ships apart in a nuclear blast.

Chapter 40

I’m on the bridge with Brice, Lenox, and the rest of the bridge crew.

Phil is jabbering on because he can’t contain his excitement. “That’s not the kind of thing that happens, not in a fusion reactor. The old fission ones might melt down, but to see a runaway cascade? No, that’s fission. But fusion? That collision had to do something just right. Know what I mean? Just right. Or maybe it is a fission reactor. Do Trogs use fission?”

“Why don’t you be quiet,” asks Penny “and let me drive?”

Phil huffs. He likes to pout. He usually wallows in it until somebody caves in and comforts him.

“While you boys were out having your fun,” says Penny, “I talked with Jill’s pilot. We’re going back to Juji Station to see if anyone else from our company made it.”

“Anything on the ship-to-ship from them?” I ask.

“Nothing,” answers Jablonsky.

“They might be there,” says Phil, finding his voice earlier than expected, making it clear his feelings are still bruised.

“Yeah.” I don’t agree. I think they’re dead. Dying’s apparently an easy thing to do up here. “Phil, what’s the status of our ship?”

“A few more dings,” he tells me, losing a little of his act, now that he has something else to think about. “Nothing major since the first salvo when we were coming up.”

“Systems are stable?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“How are we set for fuel?”

“Including what we burned off and what leaked out from punctured tanks, we have about sixty percent of our hydrogen left.”

“Grav plates?” I ask.

“Seven percent compromised or dead,” he answers. “All of those are hull plates we use for our defensive field and the inertial bubble. The drive array is fine.”

“Can we bubble jump?” I ask.

In one of the more advanced training modules, I learned that jumping to light speed and beyond is mostly about generating a sufficiently enormous power surge and dumping it through a specially configured plate array in the rear of the ship constructed around the reactor. The surge spikes an intense and localized grav field that punches the space-time fabric so forcefully it produces a circular three-dimensional wave.

Did I say I love this kind of techno-shit?

A simplistic, but illustrative way to picture it is like a wave on the ocean.

The counterintuitive, but important point is though a powerful wave, a tsunami, might travel across the ocean at four or five hundred miles an hour, it’s not the water flowing, it’s the wave that’s moving through the water.

Just as a submarine could never hope to generate enough power to move at several hundred miles an hour underwater, a surfer on a board could theoretically ride the wave at full speed across the ocean. Of course, the analogy breaks down on so many technical levels it’s useless from an engineering perspective.

The major difference is that the space-time wave would dissipate almost instantly if not sustained by a power source in the spacecraft that first generated it. By using the grav array to create the wave, a ship can then feed the warp with a lower energy output to create a standing wave that exists within a three-dimensional space around the ship. A bubble.

The size of the bubble and the amplitude of the wave are determined mostly by the power the ship can generate to sustain it. The taller the wave, the bigger the bubble, the faster the wave moves through space. The faster the ship moves surfing it.

Theoretically, there’s no limit to how fast the wave can move, so likewise, there’s no limit to how fast the ship can travel. From outside the bubble, the ship seems to move faster than the speed of light. However, Einstein’s equations aren’t violated, because inside the bubble, the ship isn’t exceeding the universal speed limit, it’s stationary relative to the wave of warped space.

It all sounds easy, but it’s not.

The first big obstacle to going any distance is power—a lot of it—and power ain’t free.

Fusion-drive ships turn pairs of hydrogen atoms into helium, and because the curve of binding energy has an advantageous shape with respect to that type of atomic reaction, scads of energy is thrown off, snorted up by the mechanical systems of the fusion reactor. The smaller reactors, at least with the designs we’ve inherited from the Grays, are less efficient at converting hydrogen to usable power. Little ships like ours have to bring along a crap-load of hydrogen to get where they’re going and have enough to bubble jump back again.

Run out of hydrogen somewhere along the way, and the bubble disappears, the wave dissipates, and the ship falls below light speed. If that happens on a jump between planets, maybe you get lucky, and you fly along at five or ten thousand miles an hour until the gravity of some planet catches you and hauls you in. Maybe you are picked up by a salvage crew, and you have a great story to tell your friends at the bar about how your ship went ballistic in deep space and yet here you are, still alive.

Run out of hydro on an interstellar trip ten trillion miles from nowhere, and you might as well just shoot yourself, because eventually, you’ll run out of food, water, or air, and die. That’s it. You’ll never reach a planet, and no one will ever find you. The void is just too damn big.

The other critical aspect of bubbling is navigation. Thanks to our friendly Gray masters, there’s precious little computer power built into our ships. Those little Gray fuckers, with their naturally evolved gravity-tuned sensory systems in their funky-big heads, can stand on the bridge of a cruiser, look at a star twenty light years away, eyeball a vector, and bubble jump right to it.

It’s one of a thousand reasons Grays are easy to hate. They’re naturally better at something than we are.

Any human endeavor to jump from star to star or even planet to planet would need to run on the precision of a computerized navigation system. What we have instead is Phil with an alien bug in his head and grav skills honed from working twelve years on the line at the factory.

Penny and me are the backup systems.

So we’ll be making our jumps in hops—a few long ones, and some short ones. It’s like playing croquet and trying to knock your ball closer and closer to a wicket, hoping to get through before something bad happens, like running out of hydrogen because you keep missing the mark.

Oh, and if there’s even the tiniest imperfection in the alignment of the grav drive array relative the ship’s central axis, forget about it. You might as well email your mother one last time and fly into the sun, because your life will end badly.

And they say bubble jumping isn’t fun.

Chapter 41

“How fast will this thing go?” asks Phil. “Rumor I heard from one of the pilots in the fitting hangar was 1.5c.”

“C?” asks Lenox.

“Engineer slang for the speed of light?” answers Penny.

I know the answer, and it’s not as rosy as any of them would like to hear. Unfortunately, they need to be told. “If we can make the jump to light speed the ship might do 1.5c.”

“If?” asks Phil, pumping about ten groans of trepidation into that one syllable.

“This ship is new.” I drag my hand across the wall to help with my point. Paint flakes off. Flecks swirl in the light-g and turbulence left by the passing of my hand. “I think they skipped some quality steps when they rushed these things through production.”

“Quality?” Phil asks, as his voice finds one of its emphatic, higher octaves. “Quality? This ship is a rusty piece of shit!”

“It flies,” Penny tells him. “It’ll pull twelve g’s.” She glances quickly at me and the others who rode in the platoon compartment through the roughest parts of the battle. “Without too much discomfort.”

“We’re not talking about bull-dyke gas-peddle pushing through low earth orbits,” Phil argues.

“Hey,” says Brice, giving Phil a stern look.

I didn’t expect Brice to stand up for Penny. I wonder what that’s about.

“Jumping to light speed,” Phil continues, as though Brice has said nothing, “isn’t about pulling g’s, it’s about precision—super precision. Every plate in your drive array has to be perfectly configured. Perfectly. Do you know what that means? In a ship this size, the geometrical position of every plate has to be relatively aligned exactly with the axis of the ship.”

Penny says, “They’ve been building drive arrays at the Arizona shipyard since you were still wishing you’d grow up to be a man.”

Phil’s on his stump, and when he’s up there, everybody gets ignored. “The capacitors storing the power that produces the electrical surge have to be exactly timed to fire—not just at the same time, but the electricity also has to arrive at the grav plates at the simultaneously. If any moron in the factory mis-measured the wire length, put in a dead capacitor, ran out of shielded wire and threw in a length of some crap they found at an old, abandoned Home Depot, then we won’t hit light speed. Worse, we will, but our grav wave won’t be perpendicular to the axis of the ship, and instead of flying in the direction the ship is pointed, we’ll skew off one way or the other and smash into the moon.”

“The grav wave will flow around the moon,” says Penny, and then in a spiteful tone, she says, “Basic grav dynamics. Even us bull dykes know that.”

Phil slumps in his chair. He’s out of steam for the moment. “If our ship flies a tight turn around a gravitational mass when we’re moving at light speed, our inertial bubble won’t save us. We’ll all be mashed to jelly inside these shitty secondhand suits.”

Everyone’s awkwardly silent for a minute. Penny and I have all seen Phil ride the wave of his little tantrums on countless occasions, over anything from the watery gruel served at the factory cafeteria to the inherent injustice of North Korea’s favored status with the Grays.

“You’re a moody bitch sometimes,” observes Brice. He’s talking to Phil.

Phil stares sheepishly at his hands in his lap. “I know.” He turns to Penny and says, “Sorry about the dyke remark.”

“You know I love you, Adverb.” Penny smiles sweetly. “But don’t hate me because I like real men.”

Everybody laughs.

Everybody but Phil. He brings it on himself.

It’s time to refocus. I say, “Now that you kids are through, Phil’s not entirely wrong. The SDF has been hush-hush about everything having to do with these ships.” I pause because I’m reluctant to tell them the truth of the situation we’re in. Still, if it were me, I’d want to know. “My contact with the Free Army says one in twenty of these ships disintegrates the first time they make the jump to light speed.”

That stuns everyone on the bridge.

“Can you trust this guy?” asks Brice.

“I already bet my life on it.” That’s a true, and hopefully sufficient, answer. “Some of these ships barely made light speed when they tested them. Some of them will do the full 1.5.”

“So they’ve all been tested?” asks Penny. “You mean the ones that blew up already blew up, and we’re good, right?”

I shake my head. “They tested the first ships off the line. There’s no way they could have tested them all without attracting Trog attention.”

“Oh, holy shit!” Phil gets it. “This is absolutely the first time this ship has ever flown—now, today.”

“You got it.” It’s a crappy truth, but it needs to be out there.

“If we don’t blow up,” Phil is putting sarcasm to use, “that’ll make navigation a breeze.”

“You’ll figure it out,” I tell him. “You’re good at that sort of thing.” I make it sound sarcastic, but it’s true.

He mutters a response only he can understand.

“Phil, Jablonsky,” I say, “I need to know what’s going on out there. Penny, get us to Juji Station if that’s where we’re going. Brice, Lenox, get me a casualty count. My damn d-pad still tells me everyone’s fine.”

Chapter 42

Penny is steering the ship through the debris field surrounding Juji Station.

“Jesus, they beat the hell out of this place,” says Phil.

“Any radio traffic from Juji?” I ask.

“No,” says Jablonsky. “I’ve hailed them, asking for anyone. I receive no response on any channel.”

“That’s the way they do it,” says Brice. He’s talking about the Trogs. “If they don’t land an army to take it, they keep pounding long after defensive fire ceases. They want to kill everything, reduce the base to rubble.”

“Why?” asks Phil. He can’t believe the brutality of it.

“So they won’t have to fight the same battle again when they come back,” answers Brice.

“It might get bumpy,” says Penny. “Gases are venting through the fissures. You want me to pull farther away?”

“No,” I answer. “Down here in the debris no one is likely to think we’re a target worth wasting fire on.”

“That’s not a problem,” says Jablonsky. “The Trogs are withdrawing. I’m picking up chatter about it now.”

Phil stares off at seemingly nothing for a moment. “I see them.” He’s using his finely tuned sense of gravity. “They’re all bubble jumping out.”

“Going back to reload,” says Brice. “It takes the Trogs about a week to fill one of those cruisers with a full supply of railgun slugs. They have bases scattered in the asteroid belt and out in the Kuiper Belt.”

“They’re not going to different bases,” says Phil. “They’re all hopping down the same vector.”

“They don’t even respect us enough to hide it,” mutters Penny.

“Arrogant bastards,” agrees Brice.

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe not. Nothing’s to say they’re not hopping a billion miles out of the orbital plane and redirecting from there.”

“Only they’re not,” says Phil. He plays around with the computer on his console for a minute. “They’re headed out to Ceres.”

Brice shakes his head.

“What?” I ask.

“Trogs took Ceres about six months ago.” Brice looks angry, like there’s something he’s not saying.

“I thought we still had Ceres,” says Lenox. Everybody knows it’s the largest object in the asteroid belt, nearly half the size of Pluto. We have a huge base there. “I saw the video of—”

“I saw that video, too,” Brice tells her. “They made it look like some kind of San-Juan-Hill-Remember the-Alamo-hero-gasm. Pretty good video if it wasn’t ninety-proof Hollywood bullshit. We were slaughtered there. I lost a lot of guys that should have lived.” Brice looks around the bridge like he’s wrestling with what to say next. “Command bugged out. Left us there.”

“What do you mean, command bugged out?” I ask.

“Exactly what it sounds like,” says Brice. “Morale was bad. We were short on everything because the Trogs had been blockading us for months. Everybody figured we’d already lost the war. Once the assault started, most of the field grade officers jumped in a ship and bubble jumped the fuck out of there.”

“You’re kidding?” Mostly, I just don’t want to believe it.

“MSS went first,” says Brice. “One minute, North Koreans are around every corner, sneaking and trying to catch you doing something wrong—you know how they are.” Brice looks at each of us. We all know exactly what he means. “Then they were gone. The rumor spread over the base they were ‘called back to the moon.’ Yeah, fuckin’ right.”

Knowing nods. The MSS doesn’t play by the same rules as the rest of us. It doesn’t need to be said.

“Two or three hours later,” says Brice, “you’d be lucky if you could find a lieutenant. By then, the Trog cruisers were pounding the hell out of us, and half our railguns were unmanned because crews were busy making their way to the hangars to catch a ride on the last ship out. That sealed it.”

“How’d you get out?” asks Phil, it comes out like an accusation, but he probably didn’t mean it that way. That’s just Phil.

Brice bristles and gives Phil a look like he’s thinking about unloading a magazine into his pudgy gut. And then his tone comes out icy and dark. “I don’t answer to you, donut-junky.”

“Be cool,” I tell, Brice. “Phil’s a harmless idiot. You’ll figure that out soon enough.” But that doesn’t seem like enough to defuse the situation.

Brice is still glaring.

Phil is squirming in his seat and probably pissing in his suit.

I need them both. Phil is talented with gravity like nobody I’ve ever met. I don’t know how Brice got off Ceres, and I don’t care. Everything I’ve learned about him in a single day tells me he’s exactly what he seems to be—a good soldier. And then, intuition comes to my aid. “Was Milliken there?” I ask. “On Ceres?”

That takes Brice off-guard. He redirects his attention from Phil and looks at me. “How’d you know?”

It was a guess, but I say, “Is that the beef you had with him?”

“He was never a good officer,” says Brice, “but he had a goddamn duty.”

“Did you file a complaint when you got back to earth?” asks Lenox. “Charges? Those officers were guilty of desertion, right?”

Brice shakes his head. “You’ve got a lot to learn about the world, honey.”

“The SDF couldn’t file charges against its officers,” I deduce, “because the MSS deserted first. If the officers were guilty, then so was the MSS.”

“If I’d have made a peep about it,” says Brice, “it would have been me they hanged.” He takes a long slow breath. “So I end up back with my unit on earth—the officers and just a few of us enlisted men—only a handful out of a whole company. Over a hundred are dead up there on Ceres.”

“Jesus,” says Phil.

“So I didn’t say anything,” says Brice. “I waited because I knew they’d send us up again.”

“And today was your chance?” I ask, as though the answer isn’t obvious.

Brice nods again, and in his eyes, despite his seeming certainty, I can see he’s conflicted about what he did.

I say, “Duty is more about following your heart than following the rules.”

Chapter 43

“How organized is the SDF right now?” I ask.

Jablonsky looks at me, wide-eyed. “You asking me?”

“You’re on the ship-to-ship radio. You hear what’s going on. You’d know better than anyone.”

“Sounds like a mess,” he guesses. “Nobody knows who’s in charge. We’re hearing conflicting orders from a division commander still on the ground in Arizona, different instructions from some North Korean Colonel up here—I think the same one we went on our attack run with—and Pyongyang is still squawking.”

“Confusion?” I ask, summing the situation up to a single word.

“Yes,” Jablonsky answers definitively.

“Okay.” I turn to Penny. “Get us down on the surface close to the deepest hole you can find.”

“What’s with the change of plan?” asks Brice.

“Our supply rooms are empty,” I tell him, as I look around the bridge. I’m not yet sure everyone’s aware. “The generals sent us up here with what we have on our backs—three days’ power, three days’ rations.” I glance down at my d-pad and see that I have barely enough hydrogen to power my suit for six more hours. “They didn’t expect any of us to live long enough for resupply.”

Brice guesses first where I’m going. “I can take a squad inside, and see what we can find.”

“Lenox,” I say. “You take one, too.”

“Can do,” she answers.

“Don’t wander too far,” I tell them. “Scrounge what you can, as quick as you can. “My guess is we’ll have twenty or thirty minutes. We don’t want to push it. I want to be away from earth before anybody downstairs has time to figure out we’re not one of the derelicts out here junking up the orbits.

“Okay,” says Penny. “I think I’ve got one.” She confers on a private comm link with Phil to coordinate.

Brice and Lenox exit the bridge and head for the platoon compartment.

“And medical supplies,” I call after them. “Whatever we need for the wounded.”

Brice stops and turns back to face me. “None of the wounded made it.”

“What?”

He guesses I’m still running on earth intuition. “Most of the time the wounded don’t make it. Sealing the suit after a wound only buys you some time. The only way you have a chance is to move them into a pressurized environment.”

I feel a little bit like a scolded schoolboy for having Brice remind me of our earlier conversation. “If you happen across a portable welding rig we can use to patch the holes in the hull, pick it up.”

“That reminds me.” Brice looks up the length of the hall. “Lieutenant Holt is stowed in the supply room.”

I’d forgotten about Holt. I nearly laugh at the callousness of it, but excuse myself. I’ve been busy. “I don’t know what to do with him.” I make the first guess that comes to mine. “Prisoner of war?”

Brice shakes his head. “In my experience, we always run short on H or calories, something. Keeping useless bodies alive is expensive.”

Many have died at my hands, yet none were murdered in cold blood. I don’t feel a thing one way or another about those deaths. The thought of killing Holt bothers me. It would be murder. Murder in the in service of the revolution, but still murder.

Brice, reading my face, comes to my rescue. “I can’t murder him either.”

I purse my lips and draw a sharp breath. I’m the commander. I can’t ask Brice to do what I’m not willing to do myself.

“I don’t think we should kill him.”

My jaw drops. “Honestly, the idea of a dead Lieutenant Holt doesn’t bother me. The thought of killing him for the crime of being a moronic asshole doesn’t appeal to me. What do you have in mind?”

“Something stupid.”

“We’ve been through some shit today.” I think Brice is wary because he’s still not sure what to think of me. “You had my back. I’ve got yours. You don’t need to worry about me putting a knife in it. Just say what’s on your mind.”

Shaking his head, because he can’t come up with a decent solution, Brice says, “We leave him on Juji. He’ll get picked up by a rescue party in a few days and put back into circulation.” Brice chuckles. “He’ll be dead five minutes into his next deployment anyway.”

Brice’s solution is a relief, also a new burden. It worries me. “He’s a witness to what we did.”

“If the MSSW gets their hands on us,” concludes Brice, “we’ll hang for what we’re doing whether we kill him or not.”

“Leave him here, then. I’ll unlock his suit when we take off.”

With a relieved smile, Brice nods and heads up the hall.

Chapter 44

Looking out through one of the small, thick windows, I see an assault ship slowly weaving its way through the debris field. “Is that Jill?”

“Yes,” Phil answers.

Having expected Jablonsky to respond, I turn toward them with the question apparent on my face.

“Gravity signature,” says Phil.

I look back through the window and see gravity fields fluxing off the plates of Jill’s ship. Nothing appears unique to me. “Hmm.”

Phil says, “Maybe now you can apologize for calling me an idiot.”

“Phil,” I resist, as I watch Jill’s ship come in, “you were doing that thing you do. You’re going to get yourself in trouble one day and I won’t be there to pull you out.”

“I don’t need you to help me out of trouble.”

“I know, Phil.” Sarcasm is such a wonderful thing. “Any word from the platoon?” Brice and Lenox have been down inside the station for ten minutes and tons of metallic asteroid ore lay between us. My suit comm isn’t powerful enough to send or receive with them.

“A lot of static in the line,” says Jablonsky, “but they’ve found something.”

“Ammo? Hydro?” I ask. “Cal packs?”

“Can’t say,” answers Jablonsky. “I relayed the information on to Lieutenant Rafferty, though.”

“Jill’s coming to resupply, too?” I ask.

“Yes,” Jablonsky confirms.

“Thanks for passing our plan along to them,” I tell him. “Let her know we’re on a short deadline here. Our top priority needs to be getting these ships to the Free Army’s base.”

“Are you ready to share that location with us, yet?” asks Phil.

“Location?” I shake my head. “Nothing against you, Jablonsky, but I’ll keep that info to myself until we’re well away from the earth. Phil, you two coordinate a rendezvous point with Jill somewhere a long way from here. Once we bubble out, we’ll meet up there, and I’ll pass along the coordinates.”

“Yes, sir,” answers Phil, just like any snotty junior high kid would say it.

“Is there really a Free Army base?” asks Jablonsky.

“Yes,” I tell him. “Don’t worry, this rebellion is bigger than just two ships.”

“Honestly?”

“Of course.” Honestly, that’s my worry, too, and it’ll stay that way until I see the base with my own eyes. “You two get to work.”

“A word?” asks Penny.

“You don’t need to ask permission to talk,” I say.

Andrea shrugs. “I wasn’t sure how military we were going to be with Phil calling you ‘sir’ and all.”

“Do you have a question, Penny?”

“Grays,” she says simply.

“Yes?” I prompt for more.

“Why were there Grays on the bridge of that other ship?” asks Phil, turning away from his task.

“Are you done finding us a rendezvous?” I ask.

“Sure,” he answers. “I just gave the coordinates to Jablonsky. He’s radioing them to Jill’s ship.”

I roll my eyes.

“It doesn’t take that long to pick a random point in space,” says Phil. “Most of it’s empty.”

“Why were the Grays there?” asks Penny.

“Not just there on the bridge,” clarifies Phil, “but commanding the ship and targeting the weapons, just like they do on our cruisers.”

“Not exactly,” I answer. “On our ships, the Grays are mostly on the bridge, and Korean bug-heads handle the targeting.”

“That’s not the point,” argues Phil. “We’re supposed to be at war with the Trogs. Why are we fighting Grays?”

That’s the question that’s been nagging me since I stormed the bridge of the Trog cruiser and saw all those Grays there.

“Maybe we’ve been fighting them all along?” suggests Phil.

Penny says, “Despite what the news tells us, people say the SDF has never captured a single Trog cruiser. They could have been there all along and we wouldn’t know it. Phil might be right.”

“Maybe the Trogs are just like us,” says Phil. “Gray slaves.”

“You think this is a war between two Gray factions?” I ask. It’s a plausible theory. More than plausible.

“Why not?” asks Phil. “Humans fight each other all the time. Why wouldn’t Grays do the same?”

“What if the Grays are Trog slaves?” asks Penny.

That brings the conversation to a halt. Something neither Phil nor I have considered.

Is that possible?

“There wasn’t a Trog—” I drop the thought before I finish it.

“What?” asks Phil.

“I was going to say there weren’t any Trogs on the bridge when I got there, but of course there were. Three ghost Trogs were up there, and more were in the halls.”

“Lenox told me you guys came across five or six of them in the forward section,” says Penny.

I nod.

“That’s a lot, if they’re just some kind of ninja assassins,” says Phil. “You never hear about more than one or two. I mean, when you hear stories about them at all.”

“Or maybe they’re allies,” I guess. “Trogs and Grays. We don’t know anything about their relationship, right?”

“Except the regular Trogs do the fighting and dying,” says Phil.

“Just like us,” I conclude the comparison.

“By the millions,” finishes Penny. “You’ve never seen a video with a thousand Gray bodies laying on the ground. Only humans and Trogs.”

Chapter 45

It’s been a long day of pitfalls and fuckups, so when we get the platoon back on board and blast far enough away from earth’s gravity well to make our bubble jump and it all goes as planned, I’m surprised.

I’m sitting at the front of the platoon compartment in the blue glow of our ship’s inertial bubble, looking down the tube between two rows of facing seats. Brice is on one side of me. Lenox is on the other. I’m wrestling with how I should feel about the empties.

The empties!

I realize immediately my mind is trying to dehumanize the loss of half my platoon, protecting itself from indulging too much pain for the casualties of my choices. I tell myself I shouldn’t grieve over people whose names I don’t know, whose faces I can’t pick out of a lineup.

I was their commander.

I have to feel something. However, at the same time, I know I can’t let their deaths paralyze me into impotence. What kind of officer would I be, then? Definitely the kind that would get the rest of the platoon killed.

I turn to analytics, a path to rationalizations I can depend on.

Most of our losses for the day were suffered while taking the Trog cruiser we rammed. That was an expensive venture, but my God, the payoff. What general wouldn’t trade a handful of lives for so many of his enemy’s?

How many could it have been?

Thirty thousand?

Forty thousand?

Grays and ghost Trogs among them.

Three cruisers.

Hell, they were killing my SDF comrades every moment they floated there in space over the Arizona shipyard, taking potshots at the grunts trying to board ships far below.

Whatever guilt I have for the mistakes I made—

No, not guilt.

I’ve got nothing to feel guilty for.

Interrupting my thoughts, Brice asks, “Are you worrying over whether I’m going to frag you?”

I don’t know how to answer, because in fact, it is a lingering worry.

Brice laughs. He finds humor in other people’s discomfort. But who doesn’t?

“Sir?” Lenox nudges me. “You okay?”

I glance at Lenox and smile, then turn to look at Brice. “Are you thinking about fragging me?”

He gives it some thought. “Probably not.”

I cock my head toward the partially empty platoon compartment. “A lot of casualties.”

Brice shakes his head. “This is nothing.” His face turns pained. “SDF troops get mauled every time we face the Trogs. This is the norm.”

Lenox says, “Makes me think my odds of seeing my next birthday aren’t very good.”

“Shitty,” Brice tells her. “Look at me, I’ve lost count of how many actions I’ve seen. At least a couple dozen. Some, like the battle for the moon, went on for nearly a month. That was the only one we won, and I’m still here.”

“Are you that lucky?” I ask. “Or that good?”

Brice shrugs. “At first, mostly lucky.” His voice sounds a bit melancholy when he adds, “We’re all alive by the grace of luck, no matter how good we are.”

Lenox leans forward to look past me and finds a direct line of sight to Brice. “Do you really believe that? Can’t a well-trained, disciplined grunt make good choices and live?”

“There’s always an element of luck,” says Brice. He looks up at the glow of our inertial bubble. “This ship could have broken up when we went to light speed. We all talked about that on the bridge. Nothing you could have done about it. Bad luck.”

Lenox leans back in her seat.

“You can swing the odds in your favor,” says Brice, “but there’ll always be things beyond your control. Hell, this day’s been full of ‘em.”

“That’s the truth.” It sounds like a nothing phrase, however, it’s a truth sinking in with me as I realize how many times I tempted fate and won.

The pleasant glow of the inertial bubble flickers out, and the platoon compartment turns back to dim, yellow light splattered over steel and rust. We’ve just finished another jump—our fourth, though we’d only planned for one.

Phil links through the comm to tell me something I already know. “Kane, we’re coming out of jump, and we’re finally where we’re supposed to be.”

“Is Jill here?” I ask, hoping her ship wasn’t one of the unlucky ones that fell apart while powering up for light speed.

“She’s been here three or four minutes,” says Phil. “Quick guess is her ship will do the full 1.5. We barely made it over the hump. That screwed up our navigation.”

“As long as we can make light speed,” I tell him. “It’s not like we’re flying out to another star. Everything else okay?”

“The ship handled the jumps fine,” says Penny. “It looks like she doesn’t fly straight, though. Maybe a degree or two off.”

“So Jill’s ship works just fine, and she made it to the right place in one jump?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Phil. “That’s about the size of it.”

“I see.” I’m a tad jealous. “Penny, can you correct for the imperfection on future jumps?”

“Mostly,” she answers. “Probably. On a long jump, I can’t make any promises.”

“Noted,” I tell her. “Phil, I assume we’re alone out here?”

“Nobody but us, and Jill,” he answers. “Everything going as planned.”

I hate that he said that. Maybe down deep, I’m a superstitious believer in bad luck. Maybe it’s the weight of all those empty seats. I key in the orbital coordinates of the Free Army’s base and send them to Penny. “After it decrypts, share it with Phil.”

“Asteroid belt.” A moment later, Phil says it like he knew it all along.

Maybe he did. With the asteroids in that belt traveling a solar orbit one and a half billion miles around, and with one or two million of the rocks big enough to build a base on, Phil’s guess is still pretty worthless. I keep that to myself, though. “Forward those coordinates over to Jill’s bridge crew. Sounds like she’ll be there ahead of us. Tell her to save me a place at the bar.”

“You think they have a bar?”

“I hope so.” In truth, I don’t care. Mostly, I want to hook up with the Free Army so I can feel the security of knowing I didn’t drag two platoons of grunts into a rebellion that’s already fizzled out.

Chapter 46

Brice opens a private comm between us. Everyone else in the platoon compartment is asleep or trying to. “Penny tells me you slept with Phil’s wife.”

I didn’t expect that to come up, especially not from Brice. I deflect. “You and Penny getting pretty chummy over the comm?”

“We hit it off,” he admits. “Nice girl.”

I feel a twinge of jealousy. Still, I’ve got no claim on Penny. She’s got none on me. No matter what carnal thoughts she and I have teased through our imaginations over the years, we never moved past friendship. “That’s not an answer.”

“More than you gave me,” Brice chides.

“Yeah.”

Brice waits a moment and says, “If it’s something you don’t want to talk about.”

Yes, it’s not something I want to talk about.

I start to explain, but stop myself. What does it matter? “Yes, I did sleep with Phil’s wife.”

Brice nods slowly as he takes that in. “You and Phil, you’ve been friends a long time, right?”

I rise to my defense. “Don’t make it sleazier than it already sounds. Sometimes fucked-up things just happen.”

Brice’s dark laugh taunts me with how much it shames me. “You ever wonder if that’s a common thing, coming up with tidy excuses so you don’t have to feel guilty?”

“You think that’s what it is?”

“I don’t know, Kane.” Brice reaches his hand up clumsily and hits his faceplate. He chuckles. “You’d think after all the time I’ve spent in one of these suits, I’d remember I can’t scratch my nose.”

I chuckle. “I miss scratching.”

“Not as much as you’re gonna,” says Brice. “Seems it peaks around day three. After that, you lose the urge. You get used to it. Go back to Earth, though, take off the suit, and the next time you’re in it, it starts all over again.” He looks at me, truly curious. “I wonder why that is.”

The urge to rub my eyes suddenly seems too much to bear.

“Do you feel guilty about what you did?”

Ugh. I hoped we were off that subject. “I suppose.”

“You and Phil,” says Brice. “Seems like he hasn’t gotten past it.”

“Probably not.” I nod my head aft, toward the bridge where Phil is working his navigation magic with Penny at the helm to bounce us all over the solar system. “Phil doesn’t let go of things. He carries shit around a long time.”

“How long?” asks Brice. “Years?”

“Maybe forever,” I laugh. “I’m trying to think of the last thing I know of that Phil actually stopped whining about.”

“Stopped whining?” asks Brice. “Over infidelity? Kinda cheapens it, right? No big deal?”

“You’re judging me,” I suggest. “Maybe I’m too harsh on Phil.”

“Is that why you did it?”

I laugh some more. “Are you trying to be a dick?”

“Maybe a little bit.” Brice smiles. “Comes natural sometimes.” He sighs. “I can’t count the number of times I told a soldier to do a thing and do it now, only to have him choose something stupid, like ask why, or wait and think about it, or choose to do something else. Then they die. Makes you wonder if being nice is worth it.”

“Nice?” I’m not sure ‘nice’ is the right word.

Seemingly resigned to it, Brice says, “It wears a man down.”

We let that sit for a moment. I don’t have anything to add, no advice to give. I’m still the novice leading people into war.

When Brice becomes bored again, he looks at me with an obvious question.

I know which one, so I tell him. “Phil and me go way back. We grew up together. And no, that’s not why I did what I did.” I rearrange myself in my seat, turning to face Brice. “You want to hear this story?”

“There’s no inflight movie. How else am I going to pass the time? Everybody else is asleep.”

“You need to lay off the stimulants,” I tell him. “Too much of that shit will fuck up your head.”

“Suit Juice?” asks Brice. “It’s not addictive.”

“You know the fact that the MSS tells us Suit Juice isn’t addicting pretty much guarantees it is, right?”

Despite the artificial stimulants in his blood, Brice suddenly seems a little worn down. “I’ve been doing this a long time, Kane. I know what I’m doing. I know what I need. Suit Juice sharpens my focus when I’m in the shit. Might be the reason I’m still alive.” His laugh comes back. “I’d rather be a live addict than a clean corpse.”

I don’t know if that’s funny, but I laugh anyway.

“What about you?” he asks. “You juice much, yet?”

“A little,” I tell him. “I don’t think I get any focus out of it. Focus is something that comes naturally to me—hyper-focus, almost.”

“When the slugs were flying and Trogs were dying,” Brice flattens a hand and gestures down an imaginary straight line in front of him, “you were 110% in the game. It’s like you turned into a war machine back on that Trog ship. You don’t see many guys who can do that.”

“Thanks?” I think it’s a compliment.

He reaches over and raps his knuckles on my helmet. “I read an old news article once from before the siege.”

“You’re a history buff?” That surprises me.

“After I joined the SDF,” says Brice, “I started reading any old military literature I could get my hands on. Figured I could learn something that might keep me alive.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, some stuff,” says Brice. “This particular article I read, it was about this helmet they developed at some warfare science lab they had back then. I don’t remember what it was called.” Brice spreads his fingers and drags them down over his head. “This helmet was full of wires and little magnetic electrodes or whatever the right word is.”

“What did it do?” I ask, as I try to envision what Brice is describing.

“This whole research program was about trying to understand the human brain to make better soldiers.”

“And?” I ask again, prodding Brice toward the point.

“This woman goes into a battle simulator. A big thing, it filled a whole room.” Brice spreads his hands in a wide gesture. “Video screens on all the walls. Big enough to make you think you’re really in the situation.”

“Sounds like a pretty cool simulator.” I wish the ones we’d trained on had been something along that scale.

“The woman had never fired a rifle before and had never been in a simulator before,” says Brice. “The simulator starts running, sending dozens of enemy soldiers to kill her, shooting and such. She’s overwhelmed. There are so many and she can’t kill them all. She’s frustrated. She fails.”

“It happens.” I’m thinking, that’s why we train.

“The point is,” says Brice, “it was her first time. Nobody expected her to do well. The second time through, they put the helmet on her. They turn it on and run her through the simulator again. Same simulator. Same situation. Same overwhelming number of attackers.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“She kills all of the bad guys,” says Brice. “Every single one. Afterward, she can’t believe it was the same simulation. She thought they’d made it easier. They didn’t. It only seemed easier because the thing on her head sharpened her focus, made all her mental distractions go away. Made her a killer. A damned efficient one.”

Interesting story. I put my hands on my helmet as I imagine having such a device. “You think they have that kind of technology built into these?”

Shaking his head and pointing at our sleeping troops, Brice says, “You saw how they behaved in combat. Some of them did well. Most are lucky to be alive. No, I think that bug in your head does that the same thing to your brain that the helmet did to that woman. It makes you into a stone-cold killer when you need to be one.”

I wonder if Brice is right about that.

Chapter 47

“You still didn’t tell me about this thing with Phil’s wife,” says Brice.

“You’re the one who got off on the subject of brainwave helmets.”

“Why don’t you stop evading and just get it off your chest.”

I huff. “I don’t need to get it off my chest. It was a mistake. I made my peace with it. Besides, it’s not as interesting as you seem to think it’s going to be.”

“Try me.”

Where to start? “They’re twins, Claire and Sydney, his wife and mine. Back when Phil and I met them, you could barely tell them apart.”

“This has the makings of a good comedy,” says Brice.

“Are you going to heckle me?”

“A little.” Brice gestures at the rusty tube we’re riding. “Entertainment on these long flights is hard to come by. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

“It’s not a comedy.”

“Drama is fine. I like those, too.”

I refocus on my story and say, “I think somewhere back when Sydney and Claire were still sipping make-believe tea and mashing mud pies, Claire lost one too many games of checkers and Sydney decided she was maybe a little better than Claire.”

“It’s going to be a psychological drama,” guesses Brice.

“Are you going to let me tell it?”

“Please do,” says Brice. “I’m riveted already. But first, which one were you married to?”

“Claire?”

“And Sydney, she’s the one you… you know.” Brice makes a rude gesture.

“Sydney was Phil’s wife.” Steering the conversation back toward Brice, I say, “I thought you were Mister All-Business. What’s with the teenager routine all of a sudden?”

“I am who I need to be,” says Brice. “Right now, I’m just a passenger on a ship. My platoon is asleep. This is my off-time. Get on with the story.”

“I think Claire developed some kind of complex about Sydney being better than her. The two competed at everything. Eventually, Claire was tired of losing, and gave up on most things. That made Sydney push harder.”

“You’re talking about more important stuff than checkers,” deduced Brice.

“Sydney made good enough grades to go to high school,” I tell him. “She eventually became an accountant. Not a bad job. Like most folks, Claire went into the labor pool after sixth grade. She worked on a factory line.”

“That is big stuff,” concludes Brice.

“Yeah,” I agree, already knowing where the story is going, “the big stuff.” I pick up my place in the story. “Phil and me met Claire and Sydney at an MSS social function.”

“Never went to one of those,” says Brice. “By the time I was old enough, I’d signed up for space construction and I was off-world when my first required function came up on the calendar.”

“Free food and free beer,” I tell him. “Besides that, a waste of time.”

“Except you met your wife there.”

“By accident, really, but that’s outside the scope of this story.”

“Getting technical?” laughs Brice.

I nod. “Me and Claire got married. I was happy on that day, maybe the happiest I’ve ever been. Claire glowed like an angel, prettier than I’d ever seen her before or since. The memory still shines in my mind. I can’t reconcile that memory with the one of the shrew who eventually got out of bed one morning and never moved out.

“Phil and Sydney married soon after we did. I didn’t question it at the time. It didn’t seem unusual, just a bit lucky, two best friends marrying twin sisters. It wasn’t until months, maybe years later when I was trying to figure out why the glue that held Claire and me together didn’t feel like love, I realized I was only a mark on the scoreboard between her and Sydney. I worked at the grav fab, a good job that afforded me a lot of privilege. Because of the bug in my head, but you know that.”

“You’re saying Claire married you to one-up her sister?”

“I think so,” I answer. “I think Claire was trying to beat Sydney in the game they’d been playing their whole lives. I think after we met, she played the role of best girlfriend ever, being everything I wanted her to be so she could cross the matrimonial line first. I think when the sun came up the morning after our honeymoon, it occurred to her that winning had a price.”

“She was stuck with you,” says Brice, “because to back out, to divorce you, would invalidate the win?”

“That’s right,” I confirm. “We rung up a few years of pretending we were happy. Even smiling for real sometimes. Eventually, I realized she had no love for me.” I look at Brice when I say it, because it’s embarrassing. “I loved her. It broke my heart.”

Brice reaches around and pats my back. “Everyone deals with it, eventually.”

“To her credit, Claire tried,” I say. “She was dutiful. Committed. We even had that us against the world thing from time to time. Maybe most of the time. One of the sad aspects of her personality that grew out of all those years of losing to Sydney was an unrealistic idea she was always being cheated by everyone.

“I fell in with it. Not wittingly, not at first. Hell, back in the early days, I did anything to earn love that was never going to come. I was her champion. I got into fights. I cursed my neighbors. I berated people at the commissary. I went after anyone who pissed-off my sweet Claire.”

“Sour,” comments Brice.

Again, I nod. “Funny thing is, I saw Sydney treating Phil the same way as Claire treated me. Actually, worse. But I never saw the mirror of it. Claire saw plenty there, though. In the privacy of our house, she always talked about what an ugly man Phil was. He was a slob. He smelled bad. He’d never make Sydney happy. Divorce was in their future. They’d never have kids. None of us ever did, by the way.

“That was all just Claire telling herself that her grav fab bug-head was a better catch that Sydney’s. She was looking for the decisive win.” I shake my head and laugh. “I can only imagine the conversations Claire and Sydney must have had about me and Phil when we weren’t around.”

“I don’t think you’d want to hear any of that,” suggests Brice.

“As the years passed,” I say, “Phil put on more weight, spent more time with his hobbies, and talked incessantly about Sydney, whom he worshipped, though she seemed to ignore him more and more as she spent all of her time hiking in the mountains and going to an old gym that for some reason was still open in Breck. It’s like she was trying to work the imperfections out of her body. Or trying to punish herself for marrying Phil. I don’t know.

“Claire didn’t have any remarkable habits, except that she was slowly morphing into a brittle, flavorless reflection of the girl I married. Her anger was always lurking behind a veil, unashamed when anyone saw it. She started to overeat, something hardly possible for regular people these days.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” agrees Brice.

“In the bug-head community,” I say, “we had privileges, and one of those was plenty to eat. I don’t know if the eating was the competition again, or a symptom of Claire giving up. She got a little doughy, not so much that she couldn’t cover it up with a slack dress or baggy shirt. She was still pretty and when she turned on that pearly smile, it didn’t matter, I was still her stupid puppy.

“For my part, it’s hard to say how I passed the years. In a way they were a blur of things I wanted to forget. I felt trapped in a marriage I was afraid to get out of. I was stuck at the grav factory because that’s where the Grays put me. I used to read a lot of history with my mom when I was a kid. I started doing that again. I watched a ton of old videos from when the ticks arrived and conquered the earth. I longed for those older days. It was a romantic view of humanity’s past. Not to say it was all roses and sunshine, I hid all the dirty parts of our history from myself because I think I needed to love something.

“Everybody does that kind of shit,” says Brice. “Healthy self-deception. It’s a good thing.”

I go on, “The precarious mess of our lives finally collapsed on my birthday a few years back. Sydney and Phil came over to our house. Phil brought buffalo steaks, a rare treat, expensive as hell. I grilled them in the backyard while we drank on the deck. Phil and I talked about work. Claire and Sydney traded barbs.

“We had dinner, drank, played cards, and drank some more. We were all a little drunk, at least. Phil checked out early and went home. We had work the next day and he’d had too many tardies at work already and couldn’t risk another. Sydney and Claire found a weird place in their inebriation where they were able to get past their animosity and share nostalgic stories of their childhood.

“It was weird. They were sitting on the couch looking at old pictures, closer than I’d ever seen them before, smiling, and even crying. I trundled myself upstairs to go to bed. I was drunk enough that I knew when I got up in the morning for my shift, I’d still be buzzed.

“I don’t remember actually settling into bed but I remember waking up in the dark with a woman’s hands on my skin and a pair of lips breathing alcohol breath into my mouth. She smelled like Claire. Tasted like Claire. In the dark, she even looked like Claire. But she didn’t feel like Claire. She was lean and tight, not soft and comfortable.

“With alcohol excuses all queued up and impaired logic brushing right past any question of getting caught, I let myself go with it. The blankets were kicked off the bed with the last of our clothes, and we went at it like a couple of teenagers discovering sex for the first time.

“When the bedroom light blinked on, Sydney was on top of me, facing the bedroom door and making enough noise to wake the neighbors, enough to wake Claire from her stupor.

“Sydney stopped what she was doing and sat up straight, showing off the perfect sculpture of her body and blocking my view of the bedroom door.

“I prayed and panicked, hoping I’d been so drunk that I hadn’t noticed the light was on when I got in bed, or maybe it was morning and I’d just lost track of time, or maybe I was so drunk any behavior was excusable, even mistaking my wife for her sister. Anything that would save me from the wrath I knew was only a heartbeat away.

“Claire called Sydney a slutty bitch. Shouted it through angry tears. She told Sydney to finish getting me off, and flicked out the light. I was seeing spots in my vision when Claire slammed the door and wailed as she ran down the stairs, stomping each one so hard I caught myself wishing she’d break one, fall, and die of a broken neck as she rolled to the bottom. Anything so I wouldn’t have to face my shame.

“Sydney lifted a leg high in the air to get off me, so high it seemed awkward, rude even, like she was trying to avoid stepping in something she didn’t want on her feet, like something about me was so disgusting she couldn’t bear to have me touch her skin.

“She deftly rolled off the bed and scooped her clothes off the floor. Covering her breasts with her shirt, I saw only a shadow over her pubic region and a line of moonlight cutting across her face. Everything sweet and flirtatious was gone. She’d turned just as icy cold as Claire. She said, ‘Proud of yourself?’ She wasn’t asking a question. She was stapling the blame to my forehead.

“She left the room and closed the door casually behind.

“I waited to hear her feet going down the stairs, to hear the detonation when she made it to the bottom. I listened for Claire to tear into her, to hear the front door slamming, or maybe the police coming because I knew it could get that bad.

“There was nothing.

“Only Claire’s sobs drifted up through the dark house.

“It was as if Sydney dissolved into the night, a succubus, pleased her carnage was sewn, flitting into the void.”

“What happened after that?” asks Brice.

“I admit,” I say, “I was a pussy. I was afraid to go downstairs and face Claire.

“I told myself I’d let her cry herself out and then I’d go down. I spun up a hundred different excuses that all blamed the alcohol. Hell, I even figured I could play dumb, pretend I had no recollection of it. An alcoholic blackout. How could I be blamed for something I didn’t know I’d done? Hell, how could I even be sure her accusation was real and not just a drunken dream in her own head?

“I dozed off, and slept hard.

“I woke the next morning feeling like a smashed bug, still afraid to go downstairs.

“I was late for work before I’d even looked at the clock for the first time.

“Regardless, I needed to get my ass to the plant. The ticks weren’t forgiving when it came to slowing their production.

“I showered, brushed my teeth, got dressed, and rushed downstairs, with a promise on my lips ready to tell Claire I loved her, and we’d have to talk about it when I got home from work.

“She was gone already.

“Everything downstairs was clean. It was as if there had been no party the night before.

“I took a perfunctory look around the house, hoping I wouldn’t find her, then I rushed off to work.

“It was when I got home that evening I found her sitting at the dining room table. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t yell. She simply said she’d told Phil about it and she’d volunteered us to host a Gray hatchling.”

“Shit,” says Brice. “You’re kidding. She took on a hatchling?”

I nod. “A five-year commitment to raise a tick from hatching to maturity, a commitment to give herself to it. Everybody knows what that means. She knew it would age an extra twenty or thirty years out of her and likely as not leave her dead. She knew the surviving family would get a big enough stack of money to leave them well-fed for a generation.

“Claire got her revenge for what I’d done and she’d committed herself to something that would make me feel shitty every day for the rest of my life.

“Later that night, Phil kicked Sydney out of his house and she came to live in our basement, making it easier for Claire to shove her revenge in the face of the two people she hated most.

“Two weeks after that, the tick moved in and Claire started to shrivel away.”

“Goddamn,” says Brice. “That’s some shit.”

Chapter 48

Seven jumps, and we’re out again. I’ve dozed through three.

Most of the grunts are asleep. I’ve lost track of how many hours we’ve been trying to reach a destination we should theoretically have made in about forty-five minutes.

“Lived through another one,” announces Phil over the bridge comm.

At least there’s that. Our ship hasn’t blown up, yet. I ask, “Are we any closer this time?”

“Don’t be an ass,” Penny tells me.

I didn’t think my tone carried any inflection of hidden meaning, but I suppose she’s getting as frustrated as the rest of us.

“There’s a wonkiness to the drive array that’s—”

“It’s okay, Penny,” I tell her. She’s explained it to us a few times already.

“throwing us off course by—what, Phil—as much as thirty degrees in each jump?”

“Thirty-two’s the most so far,” he clarifies.

“And we don’t know which direction we’re going to go.”

Phil says, “At least the hyper-light speed is consistent on each jump, so we’re developing a cone of probability on our calculations as to where we’ll end up.”

Lenox shakes her head and pretends to punch herself in the face and looks at me with a silent question, “How many times do we need to hear this?”

“We understand,” I tell them. “When we get to the base, maybe we can fix the ship. They have to have maintenance guys there, right?” That’s only a hope. I know nothing about where we’re going except it’s an asteroid.

“We’re three thousand miles out,” Phil tells us. “The asteroid at the orbital coordinates looks to be a little more than two kilometers long.”

“That’s pretty close,” says Brice. “Too close to be coming out of bubble jump, right?”

Crap. I don’t need Penny and Phil more defensive about this than they already are, but Brice is right. Coming in or out of jump near a massive object can lead to trouble, the Russian-roulette kind. Maybe you come out just fine and laugh your good fortune in fate’s face, or maybe you’re atomized so quickly you don’t even have a millisecond to think “Oh, shit!” right before you die.

“Yeah,” Phil agrees, flatly. “Looks like that consistent speed thing I just mentioned is off the table, too.”

Brice pats the bulkhead beside his seat. “Fantastic!” Then he leans over and catches Lenox’s attention. “Luck.”

She chooses not to respond.

“Two assault ships are already here,” Phil tells us. “They’re not directly on the other side of the asteroid. I can see them above the horizon. And Jupiter is huge. I can tell you one thing, we’re a lot closer to Jupiter out here than to the asteroid belt.”

“Jablonsky,” I call, “find out which ships those are.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Really?

Brice laughs.

I decide Phil must be infecting the bridge crew with his pushy cynicism.

“How fast do you want to get there?” asks Penny. “We could pull some g’s and arrive in five minutes if you want. If there’s no hurry, we can take it slow and cruise on over in an hour or two.”

“Hydrogen?” I ask. That’s the variable on which the question depends. Heavy g acceleration and deceleration will burn through more of our H than if we take it slow. In fact, if we had a day to spare, we could give the grav plates a tiny bump and then frictionlessly coast the distance.

“We’re down to just over half in our tanks,” answers Penny. “Depending on where we go after this, we need to start thinking about getting a refill.”

“We need it either way,” I tell her. “That’s the standing order. Wherever we go from here, make sure our flight plan includes enough hydrogen to make it back to earth.”

“The standing order?” asks Phil, in a vague tone. He doesn’t have that much overt aggression in him. He likes to chip away with snide comments. “Are we still in the SDF?”

“Adverb,” says Penny, “don’t start.”

“He already started,” says Brice.

It seems Brice is starting to feel comfortable with the social dynamic of our grav factory clique.

“Phil,” I take a breath, “this isn’t the—”

“Oh, crap!” he shouts.

“What?” I ask.

“They’re under attack!” he shouts back. “Someone’s shooting at them!”

Chapter 49

Minutes burn away along with our diminishing hydrogen stocks. We pick up speed and the platoon compartment flutters blue. Our inertial bubble is earning its pay today.

Rather then driving right at the asteroid, Penny has us riding an arc on a path that’ll curve us around to the other side of the asteroid at high speed.

“Both ships are dead,” Phil tells us, petulant inflections absent from his voice now that the war has fallen back into our laps. “They concentrated fire on the reactors in the stern of each one.”

“Are the ships damaged otherwise?” I ask.

“No grav field emanates from either ship,” Phil answers. “Otherwise, the forward sections are intact.”

“Are the Trogs still shooting at them?” I ask.

“No,” says Phil. “They’ve stopped.”

“Prisoners?” speculates Penny. “The Trogs want to take them prisoner.”

I’m willing to go with that guess, however, there’s another possibility I want to keep to myself. What if it’s not Trogs on that asteroid? What if we’ve been set up by the MSS in a sting operation to weed out disloyal bug-heads just like us? What if the MSS wants to collect live traitors to feed into their interrogation system so they can find more of us?

Granted, I can’t think of a reason why we wouldn’t have been arrested before we ever had a chance to board our ship. A lifetime under Gray rule has left me with a healthy sense of paranoia.

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Phil tells us.

“You want to leave your fellow grunts out there to die?” Brice spits into the comm.

“We don’t have any armaments,” Phil shoots back. “In case you haven’t noticed, this rusty turd was built to harpoon those big Trog cruisers. How are we supposed to attack an asteroid base?”

“Phil,” I tell him, “cut the chatter. Keep an eye on what’s happening. I need to know everything I can about this place.”

Jablonsky says, “I can set the computer up to record the feed from the exterior cameras.”

“How quickly?” I ask.

“Doing it now.”

That makes my next choice for me. “Penny, when you swing around that asteroid don’t slow down. Bring us in close and fast. I want a good picture of what’s on the ground. As soon as we’re past, I want to jump.”

“Bubble jump?” Brice asks. “That’s dangerously close to the asteroid.”

“Where to?” asks Phil. “I need a vector.”

“The asteroid’s gravity field will affect us,” argues Brice, his voice calm and slow. He wants to make sure I understand what I’m asking.

I don’t need the reminder of the danger, but I don’t have time to weigh the pros and cons. “We’re not going anywhere,” I tell them all. “I just want the Trogs on the surface to see us make the jump. They need to think we’re bubbling out to save our asses. I want them to believe we’re not coming back.” Same thing if it’s the MSS down there.

“Gotcha,” says Brice. Back to business. He understands. Whoever has control of the base on the other side of the asteroid, our one dinky ship and half-strength platoon can’t take them in a frontal assault.

“Five or six seconds at light speed is all we need,” I tell them. “That’ll put us a million miles away, far enough they might not notice us pop back out again.”

“Hey,” says Phil, getting a little excited. “Two ships are coming up off the surface.”

I try to see the gravity picture in my mind. I see a blurry image of the asteroid, a halo of smaller rocks randomly floating nearby, and the Rusty Turd’s grav plates distorting everything.

Damn, Phil is good.

I admit, “I can’t make them out.”

“Give it a sec,” says Phil. “Another second.”

“Grav lifts,” Penny tells us. “Just like the ones we rode to the shipyard.”

“They’re definitely going for the ships,” I deduce out loud. “Penny—”

“Got it,” she says.

I feel the ship’s course alter slightly, and I know she understands what I want her to do.

We’re accelerating again. I only have one suggestion. “If you can nail them both.”

Blue waves burst over the bulkheads. Our inertial bubble strains and we all feel gravity buffet us with pulsing fluxes.

Phil is jabbering, trying to help Penny line up on our targets.

“I got it, Phil. I got it,” she tells him.

Phil powers up the grav lens and brilliant blue fills the platoon compartment.

The ship shudders.

“They’re lined up!” shouts Phil.

“Everybody hold on,” Penny tells us. “Shifting power.”

“Hold tight,” Brice tells the grunts.

They’re already tense in their seats.

“They see us!” shouts Phil.

“Nowhere to run, now.” I hear a vicious smile in Penny’s voice.

The ship lurches to a blinding flash of blue.

We’ve shattered the first shuttle.

Another flash follows as our grav lens obliterates the second vessel.

Bent steel and broken Trogs are thrown into space. The gravity field around our ship is in chaos.

“Got ‘em!” shouts Penny.

“Jump!” I order.

“They’re shooting,” shouts Phil.

The ground guns are trying to hit us.

The ship shudders so hard I think it’s going to come apart.

Electric blue light strobes through the cabin in waves as bright as when we hit the Trog cruiser in the battle over earth.

Voices are screaming over the comm, and the grav in the cabin is ratcheting up past two g’s, then five.

Oh, no.

Without warning, the blue blinks away and we’re suddenly surrounded by nothing but dead rust and the sick yellow glow of the cabin’s weak bulbs.

The Rusty Turd is quiet, seemingly motionless.

We’re in zero-g.

“We’re out of bubble jump,” says Penny.

Damn, that was quick.

“Nearly a million miles,” confirms Phil, sounding proud. “Nine hundred and seventy-three thousand.”

“And we’re alive,” says Brice, because he wants to make the point it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

He’s right, but we did what we had to do. I glance right and left, and say, “To the bridge. We have an assault to plan.”

Chapter 50

I’m starting to feel like I’m stuck in a déjà vu cycle: go to the bridge and make a plan, strap into a seat, ram something, go to the bridge and make a plan, strap into a seat…

Ugh.

Is this what glorious revolution really is? Repetitive tedium punctuated by frenetic moments of fighting to stay alive?

I kick things off. “Jablonsky, tell me we got good pics on our flyby.”

He’s looking at his monitor, scrolling frame by frame through a video of the asteroid’s surface. “Once we hit the lifts, debris flew everywhere.”

“Can you composite the good frames to give us a complete picture?” I ask.

“That’s what I’m working on.”

“We should wait a few minutes and then go back,” suggests Phil. “If they send up more lifts, we can take those out, too.”

“No,” says Brice, as he comes through the doorway to the bridge. He glances at me. “No, sir. I disagree.”

“So do I,” I tell him.

“Why?” asks Phil.

Phil is great with gravity, but he doesn’t have a good mind for war. Brice knows the answer, so I give him the nod.

“If we go back and attack,” says Brice, “in the same way we just did, maybe we’ll succeed. Maybe there’s nothing they can do about it. However, if they can do something about it, they will. They won’t be surprised like that again.”

“So,” I tell them all, “we need to surprise them a different way.” I look at Brice for the next part because I suspect he won’t like it. “We have to wait long enough they’ll think we’re gone for good.”

“That’s okay,” says Brice. “I know why you’re looking at me.”

“Then you know if we go back too soon,” I say, “they’ll be waiting for us.”

“Who’s to say they won’t be waiting for us anyway?” argues Phil.

“They will,” Brice tells him. “The longer we wait, the more complacent they’ll become.”

“Or they’ll kill more assault ships that come to the base and fall into their trap,” says Phil.

“Unfortunately, that’s right,” I tell him. I look around at the others. “Those two ships they were firing on weren’t burning hard to escape. They were hovering over the base, probably looking for a spot to land, and the Trogs on the ground opened up on them. Unfortunately, we can’t just rush in. We’re probably outnumbered. We know we’re outgunned.”

“So what, then?” asks Phil.

“That’s what we need to figure out,” says Brice.

“First things first,” I turn to Phil. “There are plenty of smaller asteroids in the space near that big one.”

“It had to be a mining operation,” Brice tells us. “That’s what they do. They put a base on some big rock and while they work on mining it for ore, they send out a tug or two to bring smaller asteroids and claim them for later.”

“I don’t understand,” says Lenox. “I thought the base was in the asteroid belt. Aren’t asteroids everywhere?”

“It’s not like the movies,” I tell her. “Asteroids out here are something like a half-million miles apart.”

“The bigger ones,” says Phil. “You could fly through the belt a thousand times looking out the window and never even know you were in it.”

“Really?” she asks.

“Yeah,” answers Phil.

“Around some of the bigger mining colonies,” says Brice, “they might have a few hundred smaller asteroids corralled. Those places are like the asteroid belts you see in the movies with big hunks of rock everywhere you look.”

I turn to Phil. “I want you to pick one of the bigger asteroids and plot a course for Penny to bring us around so we’ll be flying in behind the smaller adjacent one. If we do it right, the Grays in that mining colony on the bigger rock won’t be able to see us coming.”

“They’ll detect our grav signature,” says Phil as he shakes his head.

He’s almost right about that. Grays see gravity—hence mass—better then humans see light. “If we bubble jump, the grav shadow of that small asteroid won’t hide us. However, like we already agreed, we have time. We’ll come in at sub-light speeds, starting with an acceleration way out here where they’re not likely to notice, and then slide in, decelerating very slowly when we get close.”

“Okay, okay,” says Phil, looking toward Penny. “We can do that.”

“No problem,” she agrees, “we’ll use more hydrogen than you’ll want to. I think it will work.”

“Hydrogen’s not a problem,” I tell her. “Attacking this base will either get us all killed, or we’ll find some miraculous way to succeed. Either we won’t need the hydrogen because we’ll all be dead, or there’ll be plenty available from the colony’s stores.”

“That’s my kind of optimism,” says Brice.

Chapter 51

“I’ve pieced together a map,” says Jablonsky. “If we were back on earth, and I had my computer, I could have put together a 3D rendering, but with what I have here…”

The ship is rife with shortcomings. I say, “We’re lucky the Rusty Turd has any onboard computer systems at all.”

“They spared every expense,” agrees Brice.

Jablonsky says, “I’m sending a copy to each of your d-pads.”

“Wait,” Penny stops us as she laughs and pats the console. “The Rusty Turd. That’s the name you’re giving this beauty?”

“Fits,” Phil mutters.

And that settles it.

Aside from the smallish monitors on the control consoles, the ship has no large screen we can all stand around and gawk at. Certainly no spiffy, three-dimensional, animated, full-color hologram like spaceships have in some of the old movies. I guess back in those days, with no constraint but the imagination, the realm of the future’s possibilities was as expansive as the universe itself. Unfortunately, the future we wound up with gave us hyper-light travel, yet did so in a Spartan iron tube.

But I exaggerate.

It’s salvaged steel and titanium. Iron would be too brittle.

Looking at his d-pad, Brice says, “I see lots of blurry spots on my map.”

“I had to extrapolate,” explains Jablonsky. “We were ramming through two lifts when we made our pass.”

“Got it,” answers Brice.

Pointing at the map, Jablonsky says, “The asteroid is oblong, around two kilometers in length, and three quarters of a kilometer at its widest. It’s shaped like a big gnarly potato.”

I’m examining the photo on my d-pad, as is everyone on the bridge. The first thing I notice is a canyon gouged erratically down the asteroid’s long axis.

“They must have hauled out a shit-ton of this rock’s ore already,” mutters Phil, as he scrutinizes the image.

I notice the canyon’s walls are too neatly cut for it to be natural. Then I spot mining equipment in the hole, and try to make a guess as to how many people it took to keep the mine producing. I don’t have any idea.

Down at one end of the canyon, I see most of the colony’s permanent structures. Dozens of habitat domes and industrial buildings rooted into the asteroid, no telling how deep. A couple of large hangar-style structures stand among the others, I guess housing equipment for separating the ore from the tailings, or whatever it is mining operations on asteroids do with the material they dig up before sending it back to earth.

The roofs of the hangars look sturdy and need to be so. They’re piled with layers of crumbled stone a few meters thick. The roofs out here in the belt aren’t like those back on earth, protecting from rain and hail, instead providing protection from gamma rays, micrometeors, and high-velocity space trash. Nobody wants to get a sub-light screwdriver through their skull while topping off the hydraulic fluid on a surface excavator.

A single mining tug is parked in a well-worn area near the center of the community. I can’t tell whether it’s operational. I have no reason to suspect it’s not. With a drive array a quarter the size of the ones they put on the big Trog cruisers, it looks strong enough to push a good size asteroid at light speed, but not nearly big enough to move the rock it’s parked on anywhere fast.

I spot three more grav lifts that I guess are functional. They’ve all been beat to hell. I’ve never seen one that wasn’t. Workhorses of the human space industry, used for moving anything and everything from the surface up into space and back again, they’ve been produced on earth by the millions and they never seem to wear out.

I notice rows of equipment lined up in the bottom of the mining pit. Zooming in, I’m surprised. “In the floor of the pit, just where it starts to angle away from the colony, do you guys see what I see?”

“Ships?” says Brice, fingers scrolling on the screen on his arm.

Inside her helmet, Penny is nodding. “Look closely.”

I’m looking at that part of the image, too. “They look like assault ships. Kind of like ours, but smaller.”

“First-generation vessels?” suggests Brice. “Prototypes?”

“Fuck me,” Phil nearly shouts. “There’s got to be…” he’s tapping the space above his screen as he counts, “fourteen ships?”

“That’s what I see,” Penny confirms.

“Keep zooming,” says Brice. “See that one on the bottom of the image, closest to the wall? It’s on its side. Look at what’s painted by the airlock door.”

Phil’s fingering his d-pad and then freezes. He gasps.

I see it, too, a red flag with a big gold star in the corner and four smaller ones bordering it. The People’s Republic of China.

“What the hell?” whines Phil.

What the hell, indeed.

Chapter 52

“They’re all damaged,” says Penny.

“This doesn’t make sense,” says Brice.

Phil takes a closer look. “Why are these ships here? I thought we were getting the first assault ships.”

“Looks like maybe China got the first ones,” I conclude. “Whatever else you’re thinkin’, that much is obvious.”

“This is all bullshit,” whines Phil. He stands up. “You all see that, don’t you?”

Nobody responds.

Phil focuses on me. “This whole conspiracy thing, it’s a trap. This whole thing about getting us out here to the asteroid belt, they’re going to destroy us just like they did these other ships. It stinks so much I can’t believe we fell for it.” Phil is right in front of me. “Your contact with the Free Army was a spy. This whole thing is a ruse to weed out dissidents. That’s what this is. I’ll bet this whole war is some kind of bullshit scheme the Grays are using to manipulate their slaves to kill each other.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” argues Penny.

“Sure it does!” shouts Phil. “Don’t you see? The Grays are trying to kill off the parts of the population that are a danger to them. Hell, maybe they think there are enough of them now that they don’t need us, and they’re using us to exterminate each other.”

That theory shuts everybody up.

Could that be true?

Lenox is shaking her head and backing away. Whether it is true or not, the idea frightens her.

“I can’t accept that,” says Brice, though it’s the weakest I’ve heard his voice yet.

“Think about it.” Phil taps a finger on his helmet. “It makes sense, right?”

“It’s a guess,” I say. “A theory.” I don’t want to believe it, and I see Brice’s expression through his faceplate and I can see the idea is slowly pushing him to rage. He’s lost a lot of friends. He’s seen them fight for the survival of the earth and he’s seen them die.

Could it all be a waste?

“You’ve never told us who your contact with the Free Army is,” says Phil. “All of us at the grav factory trusted you on that. You said it had to stay secret. I think it’s time you tell us.”

“Why?” asks Penny. “We’re a half-billion miles from earth. What good will the information do you?”

“Maybe we know him,” Phil pushes.

“You don’t,” I tell him.

“Maybe we can contact him. Beam a message back. Get some answers.”

“You can’t.” I try to make it sound final.

“Our communication equipment’s not that good,” says Penny.

“Then we should go back!” shouts Phil. “We’ve been gone a long time, and that battle was a nightmare. We can show back up and tell them some bullshit about chasing a Trog cruiser. Hell, we took out those other three—”

“We?” asks Brice. “I don’t remember a lot of you in that ‘we’.”

“We,” I tell him. “We all had our part to play.”

“Who the hell cares?” Phil’s escalating. “If we go back, we’ll be heroes. Nobody’s going to question us if we say we went chasing Trogs across the solar system.” He looks around to gauge our mood, but doesn’t realize that in typical Phil fashion, he’s incapable of reading other people. “We find your contact with the Free Army and get some answers, or kill him, because it looks to me like he fucked us.”

“You can’t kill him.” I see where this is going.

“Don’t tell me he’s not real,” says Phil.

“Is he real?” asks Brice, looking for a place to focus a rage building inside.

“He was real,” I tell them. “Now he’s dead.”

“Dead?” Phil nearly explodes.

“How?” shouts Penny, matching Phil’s volume.

Lenox drops into a seat. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“The MSS arrested him this morning,” I pause. Was it this morning? “Yesterday morning? I don’t even know what day it is. I do know they arrested him, and you can be sure they’ve beaten every bit of information out he can give, and you can be sure he’s dead.”

Brice is nodding silently because he knows it’s true.

“And you led us into this shit anyway?” shouts Phil. “Even though you knew the MSS would be after us.”

“We all committed,” I tell them. “We all agreed. No turning back.”

“That’s when I thought we’d still have a chance,” yells Phil. “That’s before I knew we’d be stepping into a trap, a trap we were doomed to fall into before we even left earth.” Tears are brimming around Phil’s eyes in the light-g, not rolling down his cheeks like they would be on earth. He’s past anger and moving into despair. “I’ve known you my whole life and all you ever talked about was one day being a free man, like that’s something—something better than the life we had. Well I followed you and I went along and I let you have your secrets and now I’ve let you drag me into this, to get me killed. Dylan Kane, you fucked my wife and you fucked up my life. You toxic prick, you’ve murdered us all!”

“Phil,” I say as he seats himself back in his chair and stares at the floor. “I don’t know if any of that is true. Maybe some of it is. Maybe all of it. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the Grays’ reasons for doing what they’re doing, they’re sending us to the slaughter—not just us, but millions of us, maybe more than a billion.” I point to Brice. “He’s seen it firsthand.” I look around at the rest of those on bridge. “We’ve all seen the pirated videos. We’ve watched our towns empty out—first, all the twenty-year-olds, then most of those in their thirties, then the teenaged boys and girls. They’re all being murdered by this war. And before that, in space, killed in zero-g construction accidents or brain cancer from too much time out in the vacuum with nothing but these shitty orange suits to protect them from solar radiation. We’re being used up.”

I stop for a breather and try to put my rising anger aside. “That asteroid base with those Chinese ships, those other two ships we saw shot out of the sky, it doesn’t change anything. If this is an ambush, I don’t care. It doesn’t change my mind one single bit. I put on this fucking shitty suit today and climbed into this rusty turd of an assault ship because I chose a long time ago I wasn’t going to be a slave, and decided I’m not going to die for a bunch of Grays no matter what reason they have for it. I’ll die for you, Phil. I’ll die for Penny, and Brice and Lenox. I’ll die for every grunt on this ship and I’ll die for every human scattered on every asteroid and broken spaceship from here to earth and back again. I’ll die if I have to, because goddammit, if nothing else, we’re going to die anyway. Why do it for those little gray fucks? Let’s die for each other, for our children, and for humanity.”

I look around.

They’re all speechless.

Still no standing ovation, though.

“The way I see it,” I tell them, “is if we can figure some way to take that asteroid base, and there are more ships coming this way, we might not save the first few to arrive, but we can save the rest. And if we do that, then we have our Free Army. We all saw what we did today with our small army of two assault ships. If we can get six or ten or twenty, we can win this war. If we can win this war, we go back to earth and deal with our Gray masters.”

Brice is the first one to speak. “I’ll sign up for that.”

“I’ve always been with you,” says Penny, though she sounds like she’s reading it from a script.

“I’m in,” says Jablonsky.

I look at Lenox. She nods.

And, of course, Phil is last. He despondently nods.

“Phil,” I say, “I’m proud of you.”

He says, “That makes me feel wonderful.”

It’s a great day for sarcasm.

Chapter 53

We’re all looking at the images on our d-pads again.

“On the edge of the pit,” says Brice. “Right where it bends. Zoom in and tell me what you see.”

“I noticed those, too,” says Penny. “The dust on the surface around each of them has been disturbed.”

I’m zooming and scrolling to get a look at the top edge of the canyon wall. I see it almost immediately. A perfect circle, roughly the color of the asteroid, but with an odd texture. Easily missed at a glance. It clearly doesn’t belong. In the center of the circle is a small dark-colored hole. I’ve seen these before. This one looks like the railgun emplacements the Grays built on the moon all those years ago.

Brice concludes the same thing. “Railguns.”

“Easy to miss if you’re not looking for them,” says Penny.

“Seven,” counts Lenox. “That’s how many I see. Some along the edge of the mine pit. Others among the colony buildings.”

“I saw those when I was stitching the pictures together.” Jablonsky apologizes, “I thought they were part of the mining operation.”

Brice glances at Jablonsky. “Don’t sweat it, that’s why we’re planning this together.”

I zoom out to get a bird’s-eye view, and the gun emplacements turn almost invisible. “Jill never had a chance.”

“Anybody have any suggestions?” asks Penny.

I start. “Phil, given we want to return to the base without being seen and without bubbling all the way there, how long until we get back?”

“Twenty, maybe twenty-two hours,” he answers. “Any faster and I think we’ll create too big of a gravity flare and any Grays looking our way will spot us.”

“Twenty-two it is.” I look around at the others again. “That gives us plenty of time to put together our plan, rest up, and top off our hydro and cal packs.”

“And load up our magazines,” adds Lenox. “We found plenty of ammo on Juji. It’s all for the single-shot rifles. We need to stuff our magazines with those slugs so we can fire on automatic.”

“Get everyone to work on that,” I tell her. “Let’s all get some rest for a few hours and meet back here. We’ll figure something out, then take that asteroid.”

Chapter 54

Scooping up dark gray dust by the handful, I powder myself, working it into the composite fabric. Probably not good for the longevity of the suit, but what the hell do I care? Like the sarge who gave it to me said, I probably won’t live long.

Especially with what I’m about to do.

The Rusty Turd is lying on the surface of the small asteroid, just behind me. We came in on the dark side of a stadium-sized hunk of rock, keeping the mass of oxidized nickel and iron ore between us and the potato-shaped asteroid on which the mining colony sits.

Now only a few miles of vacuum stands between us and our objective, and surprise is still with us.

As far as we can tell.

My squad of fliers is out here with me—Brice, of course, Silva, Mostyn, and Hastings—the only four left after we commandeered the Trog cruiser. Each of us is dusting ourselves in the asteroid’s gray-brown powder, camouflaging our orange suits.

Hopefully, it’s enough.

“What you’ve need to remember,” says Brice, talking to the squad, “is Trog suits aren’t that different. They’ve got a defensive grav field like ours. If you don’t shoot them from the side or behind, your round will deflect.” He pats the center of his chest. “They’ve got a big grav plate right here. Our suits don’t have those. When they power it up, nearly any shot aimed right at their chest won’t make it through.”

“What about those ghost Trogs?” asks Silva. “Seems like you couldn’t hit ‘em anywhere.”

“They have more grav plates in their suits,” guesses Brice. “Or they’re more powerful. Nobody’s ever gotten their hands on a dead ghost Trog to find out. Once that happens, we can cut the suit open and see what the defensive plate configuration is. Until then,” Brice pats his weapon, “overwhelming fire is all you’ve got.”

Silva pulls a Trog blade off her back and the intricate lines on its face glow blue. “These do the trick.”

Brice looks at me, like it’s my fault Silva is carrying a Trog disruptor, yet he’s got one, too. “Don’t depend on that thing. One-on-one, sure, why not? If you like even odds. What we saw on that ship—that was unusual. When they attack, they always come in big numbers.”

“Maybe we need to stop waiting to be attacked,” argues Silva.

That quiets everyone down for a second.

Brice takes it to heart. “Maybe. Maybe you’re right.”

“When we get over there,” I tell them, “use your grenades when you can. We need to catch them in a crossfire when we can, so at least some of us are shooting at their flanks. Then we can kill them.”

“If everything goes to shit,” says Brice, “we meet back here and wait for pickup.”

Nods all around.

“Everybody ready?” I ask.

Nods again.

“Let’s go.”

Using auto-grav set just strong enough to keep us on the surface, we skip away from our ship and slowly work across the asteroid.

Everyone’s quiet while we move. We’ll be fighting the Trogs again, and as a platoon, we lost half our number last time out. Like me, they’re probably thinking about the randomness of war and hoping a railgun slug or a Trog blade doesn’t come their way.

We make our way over the curve of the asteroid’s horizon and stay between rocky protrusions twenty and thirty feet tall, giving us good cover.

Finally, Brice says, “I think this is as good a spot as any.”

I look up. The potato-shaped asteroid is above us, with its narrowest end pointing toward the spot where we stand.

“When you kick off,” I say, “be gentle with the grav. We don’t want to arouse any Grays up there.”

“Turn off your auto-grav before you go,” says Brice, with a chuckle. “Or you’ll fall back down.”

A few of them laugh, imagining the embarrassment.

“On me.” I jump, and I’m suddenly moving at escape velocity for the asteroid’s micro-gravity. At least I hope so. Going into orbit around the rock isn’t in my plan.

Brice, Mostyn, Hastings, and Silva follow.

It’s hard to gauge my speed, though we’re moving slowly.

I look around and feel a twinge of panic. The sun is several hundred million miles away and is bright, but tiny. Jupiter is ahead and off to the left, a three-quarter crescent of orange, tan, and gray stripes filling a large swath of sky. Many of its moons are easy to spot. Twinkles from the sun glinting off other asteroids spread into the distance, almost like the faint bones of a rainbow.

Everywhere else I see black, and billions of pinpricks of light, stars, and galaxies, all so far away—too far away.

Never have I felt so small, so unmoored.

“This isn’t fun,” says Hastings, I guess feeling it, too.

“Keep your eyes on the Potato,” says Brice.

Good advice. I look forward.

We’re on course toward the tip of the asteroid far from the mining colony. I’m hoping the massive rock’s gravity will help pull us toward it, so if our aim is off a bit, it should self-correct.

I take a quick glance to make sure the others are coming along behind me.

Mostyn appears to be drifting off, separating.

“Mostyn,” I say, “are you okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Outer space can be disorienting.” Yeah, sage advice I’m just figuring out for myself.

“I’m fine,” she says, “I pushed off a little too hard with my left foot, I think.”

“Don’t use your gravity to correct, yet,” I tell her. “Wait until we’re closer. Heck, it might be the rest of us who are off course.”

They laugh.

Good.

We’re loosening up. I think we’re ready for the fight to come but we’re not obsessing about it.

“Look at Jupiter,” says Silva. “My god, there’s so much out here and we’re fighting over one planet.”

Despite Phil’s theory about extermination, I say, “It’s not the real estate, it’s the slave labor they want—us.”

“Most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” says Mostyn. She’s still gazing at Jupiter.

Turning back toward the asteroid we left, and then looking at the Potato, I guess we’re halfway across. “I think we all need to adjust a little.”

The women each take their looks and make their estimates.

“I think we’ll all overshoot,” says Mostyn.

“Very small grav corrections only,” says Brice. “We don’t want to alert them to our presence.”

I nudge my suit with a tiny push, then look forward and back again. I think I’m on course.

A quick glance at the others tells me we’re all moving in the same direction.

The potato is starting to loom large above, and I feel like I’m falling headfirst. “Don’t panic,” I tell my grunts as much as I tell myself. “Don’t hit your grav to decelerate yet. Remember, we’re coming in with the same velocity we kicked off the other asteroid with. When we get close, use your suit’s grav to get yourselves oriented feet-down. It shouldn’t hurt.”

“Unless you land face-first,” laughs Silva.

“I’ll land better than you,” says Hastings, and I guess the two of them must have some private joke about it.

Within fifty yards of the surface, we’re not in a direct line of sight to anywhere along the top or bottom of the Potato. With all the stone and metal ores between us and our enemies, we’re at a point where we can do pretty much anything with our suit grav and it won’t be seen by Trogs or Grays.

Over the command comm, I notify the ship. “We’re coming in on the surface. Give us five or ten and—”

“Jesus!” shouts Phil into the comm. “You see that?”

I look around and see nothing except black and stars. I spin myself around.

“I see it,” says Penny.

I’m getting anxious. I still don’t see it. I’m coming down on what looks like rough ground, and I need to keep an eye out where I land so I don’t twist an ankle.

I hit, bend my knees, lose my balance, and fall.

My suit’s deflective grav cushions my landing, and I bounce right back up.

“Nicely done,” laughs Silva, just ten feet away, on her feet, rifle at the ready.

Brice is on the ground, looking at the sky. He heard Phil’s warning, too. “Into that crater over there.” He’s directing the squad to a hole the size of a basement, and motioning them to take up positions facing outward to cover every direction.

“Phil,” I’m still looking while I head toward the impact crater. “Tell me what’s up.”

“About twenty thousand clicks out,” he says, barely able to contain himself. “On the other side of the Potato. Coming this way.”

I try to get a sense of what’s on the other side. It’s like looking at the ground and trying to see into it. I’m good at working with g up close, but distant stuff is not my forte.

“It’s a cruiser,” Phil tells us. “It just phased out of bubble jump and it’s burning heavy g’s this way.”

Chapter 55

Losers die when plans go awry.

I’m not going to be a dead loser.

I evaluate my choices, and select my path while my four Grunts in the impact crater cast anxious glances at me, talk among themselves, and keep an eye on their sectors.

They all know what’s on the table.

Our lives.

But that’s the way of it. I’m the officer.

Desertion has been an option for disheartened soldiers all through earth’s history. Out here in space, it’s not a choice. As enlisted personnel, their choices boil down to trust me and follow, or frag me.

Over the command comm, I tell Phil, Penny, Brice, and Lenox the plan. I don’t ask for objections. This isn’t a situation where time for debate exists. If we want to live, we need to move.

I switch to my squad’s comm. I inform them of how we’re going to handle it. We’ll use surprise and our technological advantage to face our foes.

They’re enthusiastic, having killed three Trog cruisers already. I think they believe in me, and they believe in each other. I hope that’s enough.

We set out across the asteroid’s surface, taking turns to move quickly from cover to cover.

Almost immediately, we divide into smaller fire teams. I take Silva to head up one side of the pit mine. Brice takes Mostyn and Hastings up the other.

Silva and I are leapfrogging, and moving too quickly for stealth. Time isn’t a luxury we have.

“Maybe two more minutes,” Penny tells me over the command comm.

I look into the black space overhead. I see the cruiser up there, a pale blur, small but growing as it races toward the asteroid colony. Glancing back down to my d-pad, I check our position against the map Jablonsky shared. I look for landmarks along the edge of the mine, and then look forward to gauge my location. “We’re on schedule here. Alert me when you’re ready to go.”

“Will do. Penny out.”

I tell my grunts, “We need to move this along.”

With Silva close by, I point along the ragged curve of the mine pit. “The first emplacement should be two or three hundred yards ahead. Keep your eyes open for anything else out there.”

We move over the landscape like we were born to it, tuned to the asteroid’s gravity, amplifying it enough for us to run and leap over obstacles, yet not enough to hinder mobility.

We cover the ground and move into position with twenty seconds to go.

Brice comms me. “We’re ready.”

“We just arrived,” I answer. I’m maybe twenty feet from an emplacement. A quarter way around the pit’s perimeter, Silva is positioned behind a pile of mining debris.

Chunks of rock are piled in a circle about fifteen feet across to mark the hole. A canopy the color of the asteroid is stretched in a frame over the top, leaving a gap of a few feet around the edge. Through the gap, standing in the center of the pit, I see the barrel of a railgun, and I know down inside, Trogs are at the ready, or maybe lounging and waiting for orders.

Either way, I know they’re down there.

“Are we on time?” I ask Penny.

“Ready,” she tells me.

“On my mark.” I look at my watch and count the seconds. We don’t want to start our attack early and give the incoming cruiser any warning of what’s coming, because the cruiser is the biggest danger.

I pull the pin on a hand grenade, one of the old-fashioned kind, chemical explosives and steel. “Five. Four. Three. Two. Go!”

Even through the small asteroid’s dense mass, I sense my ship’s gravity flare.

Penny just poured the ship’s max reactor output through the plates.

I throw my grenade into the gap between the canopy and the edge of the short, rubble rampart, and roll behind a mound of stone. I hear Silva grunt as her rifle kicks. She’s shooting. A Trog must have looked out of the hole when my grenade flew in.

The ground below me shudders a little as my grenade detonates. No sound, of course.

That’s one of the dangers of using grenades in space. There isn’t an audible explosion to let you know it’s gone off. That, and the shrapnel has effectively infinite range.

I raise my rifle and leap out from behind my stone to see Silva coming to the ground near the far edge of the gun pit at the end of her own leap.

She’s aiming into the hole through the torn canopy and firing.

By the time my feet hit the ground again, she tells me, “Clear!”

I train my weapon at the Trogs inside anyway, scanning from one to the next, looking for signs of life. All I see are eleven motionless bodies with gases and blood spewing from holes in their suits.

“Pit one, neutralized,” I say into the comm, trying to keep the rush of excitement out of my voice.

“Pit two, down,” says Brice. “On to three.”

I hear the squad breathing hard as they take up a run to cross several hundred yards.

“We should go,” Silva tells me.

I point into the pit. Worst case scenario. “Door.”

Silva glances inside. She doesn’t see it.

“Come around to this side. There, along the bottom edge.” I’m pointing for her benefit, while looking above us to see how the plan is proceeding.

Streaking across the spangled black, my ship is engulfed in blue jellyfish tentacles produced by grav plates straining to push it at max acceleration.

Farther away but still visible is the cruiser, just starting to respond.

It shimmers in blue, and bursts star-bright as I watch.

“They’re trying to get away.”

If Penny’s course is true, if Phil can puzzle through the complexities of the cruiser’s defensive gravity pattern and its evasive maneuvers, the Trogs won’t make it.

Railgun slugs glow bright as they shoot up from the surface. The gunners in the five remaining pits are quicker to react than I anticipated.

No time to worry about the door at the bottom of the gun pit. I unload a dozen rounds into the weapon’s dedicated control mechanisms to disable it, and turn to Silva. “Fly with me.” I adjust my suit grav and jump.

Chapter 56

I’m flying over the pit mine, taking a shortcut across a bend, pushing myself fast.

Silva is behind me, moving slower, struggling to keep the line. She’s not doing too badly considering she can’t see gravity fields the way I can.

I’m heading for the second gun pit. It’s hurling slugs into space at an alarming rate considering the manual load technology of the Trog’s guns.

I glance up as I near the wall of the canyon, just to check, and I see my ship’s grav lens field blazing brilliant as it pierces the Trog cruiser’s innermost gravity defenses, tearing a hole through the bridge and burying itself in steel as huge geysers of gas burst outward, exploding debris in every direction.

“They got it!” I shout over my squad comm.

I’m elated.

I need to focus.

That’s only half the battle.

I aim my weapon at the pit and fire, trying to grav compensate for instability generated by my weapon’s rounds as I send them into the Trog hole.

Hypervelocity projectiles hit the stony walls and smash into the railguns’ sturdy tube, vaporizing into pure energy and exploding in a hail of glowing shrapnel into the pit and out through the canopy.

“Kane!” Silva shouts, zipping past below me.

I stop shooting as I see her make a landing forty meters from the pit, hitting the ground running, grenade in hand.

I’m several hundred meters off the surface of the asteroid, and I reverse my gravity field to drift back down, keeping my weapon trained on the gun emplacement. I decide I’m not going to land.

“Pit two neutralized,” comes Brice’s voice. “On to number three.”

Damn, his team is quick.

Silva’s grenade explodes in the gun pit and in a flash she’s on the edge, firing down. “Two down on our side!” she tells me. “This one’s got a door at the bottom, too.”

Without a doubt, they’re all connected by tunnels. Into the squad channel, I tell them, “Keep an eye out, they may come at us from behind!”

Changing course, I keep an altitude of a hundred meters above the asteroid, speeding toward a spot I’ve picked well above the next gun pit, which has stopped firing now that its target is buried in the bow of the cruiser.

“Look out!” Silva screams.

A blinding streak of lightning flashes my vision. I feel heat through my suit. I blink.

“Railgun!” Silva continues, “Shooting at you. Get down to the surface!”

I don’t even look around to see which gun is trained on me, I juke hard in the first direction I can make my suit’s grav take me, then I dive into the canyon.

Another searing round streaks through the vacuum near where I was just a second before.

Missed. Ha!

I’m between the walls of the mine pit and I’m reversing my grav again to keep from splattering myself into goo when I hit the bottom.

“On the way to that gun shooting at you,” Brice tells me. “You okay?”

“They missed,” I answer.

“We’re taking Trog fire,” Mostyn tells us calmly.

“I’m going wide,” Hastings tells her.

“From the Trogs in the pit?” I ask, as I maneuver toward the canyon wall.

“Yes,” answers Brice.

Good.

I think.

It’s gunners defending themselves, not the garrison.

I glance again at the cruiser. Our ship is still locked in the hole it tore through the bridge. Blue gravity waves are pulsing wildly. Penny accomplished her mission and disabled the cruiser—it won’t be flying again. The things are all built to Gray specifications, and that means no backup control system. It’s all right there on the bridge.

However the little gray trolls evolved, they just never got that good at war.

“Trying to break free,” Penny tells me. “Could use a little help with the grav, Phil.”

“I’m trying!” Phil sounds frantic.

I dial back the command comm.

“Suppressing fire!” orders Brice.

“Got it,” answers Mostyn.

They’re coordinating an assault on their gun pit. With our automatic weapons, any two of us can maintain fire superiority over a few dozen Trogs. And that’s if they all carried railguns, which they don’t. Most prefer disruptors.

“I’m almost there,” Silva tells me.

“I’m coming up over the edge of the canyon.” I land my feet on the ground and sync my grav with the asteroid. My weapon is at my shoulder and I’m shooting at the pit as I take my first steps. A Trog too slow to react to my appearance is pierced by several hypervelocity slugs, and he’s thrown back into the pit through an expanding haze of his own blood.

Half a second later, he’s flying out of the hole again, as the air in his suit rockets through the punctures, propelling him away from the asteroid.

I don’t pay him any attention. He’s dead.

“I need a sec,” Silva tells me as she runs up a small rise to find a better angle on the gun pit we’re attacking.

I come to a stop as I listen to Brice, Mostyn, and Hastings coordinating their fight.

Glowing hot rounds spear bright across the asteroid’s gray surface from Silva’s position. They spall shards of hot metal off the gun’s barrel, flying into space, and into the pit. “Go now,” Silva tells me.

I jump up and run. When I’m a dozen long strides closer, she stops shooting.

In seconds, I’m at the edge of the pit, looking down through the shredded tarp, raking my rifle across the moving Trogs inside, not taking the time to decide whether they were busy dying or not. It’s quicker to put enough slugs through their bodies to make double sure.

“Next one,” I tell Silva.

“We’re tied down here,” says Brice. “We’ve got ten or twenty Trogs trying to flank us.”

The colony’s garrison is joining the fight.

“Can you handle them?” I ask. In the first version of the plan, we’d be calling in the ship to disembark the rest of the platoon by now. Unfortunately, they’re stuck up there in the Trog cruiser.

“Got it so far,” Brice answers.

“If you get in trouble, retreat.”

“I’m not still alive because I’m a hero,” he laughs.

I think that’s a lie, but I laugh, too.

Chapter 57

The last gun emplacement is among the colony’s surface buildings.

As I hurry toward it, I see it’s directing fire toward the space in front of the crippled cruiser. They’re not shooting close enough to hit anything, but I’m guessing they’ve already deduced our ship is trying to power itself free and back out.

If Penny gets the ship moving and that gun is still firing, they’ll take a hit.

I yell, “Silva, we gotta do this fast!”

I comm Penny to warn her about the gun firing at them. I receive no response, only the crackle of static, interference from wrecked metal, chaotic grav fields, and electrical cables shorting out and sending currents in every direction.

I can only hope Phil senses the gravity of the rounds blazing past their stern before Penny wrestles the assault ship free.

Silva is moving at a run in bounding leaps past a big boxy tug that looks like it’s spent a few rough decades moving asteroid-size hunks of rock around the solar system. She’s heading toward the nearest building in the colony, some kind of structure housing mining machinery is my guess. It’s a shed, a big one, not airtight. I see flashes from the rounds leaving the railgun emplacement through the gaps in the sheets of metal on the walls.

Past that, to the right, deeper into the village, I see a dimly glowing dome. It’s made of smart glass. No other transparent material could hold up to the vacuum in pieces that large. Nothing else could stand the continual rain of micrometeors and solar radiation.

Out of an airlock on the side of the dome, five Trogs emerge, railguns in hand, looking for targets.

“Silva,” I call, “you’ve got Trogs to your right, just past the tall shed you’re running toward.” Seeing the odds of the fight changing, I decide I don’t have time to wait for the airlock to cycle again and burp another handful of Trogs onto the surface. And then another. There’s no telling how many are down there. There’s no guessing how many airlock exits the Trogs will be coming out of.

Things are going to turn a whole new flavor of shitty if we can’t take that last anti-ship railgun out and transfer the rest of our platoon down here.

Time for bold moves.

I let go of my gun, yank two frag grenades, and pull the pins as I launch myself—Superman style—toward the collection of surface buildings.

Not risking altitude and the fire I’ll take from Trogs with railguns on the other side of town, I take just as big a risk and skim the surface, seven or eight feet up, pushing my suit to accelerate between two buildings, setting myself on a course for that gun. I call to Silva. “Keep those Trogs busy for a moment.”

She’s nearing the shed as I whiz by.

I feel my speed as I pass the hangar and see a pair of mining vehicles, giant and spidery, parked in my path.

I swerve hard to avoid impaling myself, and cut back onto my course as I pass them. I see the gun emplacement just ahead.

A Trog spots me, too, and I see his eyes widen through the tint of his faceplate as I aim right for him.

Like any thinking animal with a survival instinct, with a high-velocity something coming at him, he ducks into the hole where he’s standing, instinctively dodging out of harm’s way.

In the half-second he spends figuring out what the thing is speeding toward him, I reach the edge of gun pit and throw the two frag grenades into the lookout hole where the Trog guard just disappeared.

I brake hard, with blue grav lines enveloping me as I spin to get my feet beneath me. A heartbeat later, I skid on the asteroid’s gritty surface, coming down on my belly, pointing my rifle back toward the railgun hole, and I stop.

Thirty meters from the emplacement, I’m ready to fire.

The Trogs in the pit are probably just now realizing what fell in with them.

Another second is all I have to wait. I see a flash as the camo canopy shreds. Fragments of steel shoot into space.

I’m up and on my feet, rushing the hole.

Once at the edge, I fire even as I look, only caring to hit the bodies with blood already foaming out of the tears and wounds.

I stop. Evaluate.

Nothing alive.

“Silva, this one’s done.”

“I could use some help here!” she shouts back.

I fire a few dozen rounds into the railgun’s targeting mechanisms and blast off again, taking the risk to fly low across the surface, knowing in the stark shadows and shades of gray and black, I might come upon a squat object and not identify it until it’s too late to turn. “Silva, stop shooting. Take cover!”

I zip around the curve of the glass dome, tight and fast, seeing the handful of Trogs spreading out and moving toward Silva’s position behind the shed. On full auto, I spray them from the back as I fly by, and don’t see the Trogs just exiting the airlock until I’m on them.

We collide.

Suit to suit, body to body.

Everything is spinning, and I’m rolling across the surface, being pushed by my suit’s grav fields that are compensating too late and too wrong.

I slam something hard that knocks the air out of my lungs, rattles my brain, and sends my eyes spinning in their sockets.

Chapter 58

My senses come back slowly, but when they do, I see Silva staring through my faceplate. She’s panicky, yelling. “You okay? You okay?”

Seems like the kind of question that answers itself to the negative when there’s no response.

She shakes me. “You okay?”

“Yeah?” I’m not sure. I feel like an elephant stepped on me. “Sure.”

“Can you walk?”

How the hell would I know? I’m not entirely sure I’m even breathing.

Wait. Of course I am.

I know because it hurts when my chest expands.

“The Trogs,” I remember. I turn my head to look around.

Oh, good. My neck works.

I move my fingers and toes.

Thank God. Not paralyzed.

“Can you walk?”

Silva turns her attention to my d-pad. She keys the medical alert button and my screen flashes to a diagnostic menu. I feel the suit’s inner liner contract in places, testing resistance while biosensors measure pain. I know it’s sampling my urine, checking my heart rate and blood pressure.

“You’re not bleeding,” she tells me. “The inner suit’s intact.”

“Really?”

Her expression turns to anger and she pounds the d-pad.

“Ouch.”

“Sorry.” She looks at me, frustration on her face. “Damn things says you’re in perfect health for a twenty-two-year-old woman on her period.”

I laugh. How could I not? Some things are just too funny. “At least I’m not pregnant.”

Silva laughs, too.

I sit up. “Where are the Trogs?”

“You may have a concussion.”

I shake my head. I don’t feel concussed.

She’s back to querying my d-pad. “The suit says you took an impact that could have caused a concussion.”

“Just rattled my brains,” I tell her, as I start to get to my feet.

“Don’t.” Her hand presses down on my shoulder to keep me in place.

“We need to get back in the fight.” It hurts to breathe, but all my body parts seem to be working, my brain seems to be coming back online.

“You need a medic.”

“I don’t.” I push past her restraint and stand up, shaky in the knees and feeling lightheaded. It’s the adrenaline I tell myself. It’s got to be just that. I reach down and take up my rifle.

“You’re wobbling.”

“Gravity.”

Silva frowns.

It sounded like bullshit to me, too. I tell her, “It’s passing. Where are the Trogs?”

Silva keys out of my medical evaluation screen. “I guess if you can stand, you’re not going to die, at least not right now. You might have internal injuries.”

“Then I’ll die in a few hours,” I tell her, looking around. “Nothing we can do about that unless we take this mining colony and they have a pressurized medical facility with a real live doctor.”

“Or you’ll injure yourself worse and bleed out through your ass.”

“I’ll just max power to my suit’s recycler and I’ll be fine.”

“I didn’t realize you were so full of shit.” Silva’s being very protective, and I can’t figure out why.

I respond by being stubborn. “Let’s get this done.”

“Yes, sir.” Full dose of sarcasm.

My kind of girl. Too bad I have a wife.

Silva turns and points to the airlock where the Trogs were coming out of the glass dome. “Mostyn tossed a grenade in. Maybe it’ll discourage them from using that exit.”

Glancing around, I see the bodies of ten Trogs scattered about. “How long was I dazed?”

“Unconscious.”

“Whatever,” I tell her. “How long?”

“A minute? Two? Three, maybe.”

“Damn, you ladies work fast.”

“Well, Mr. I’m Fine, if you had the sense to turn your comms back on, you’d know what the hell was going on.”

I accept the rebuke without protest. “That gun Brice’s team was attacking?”

“Out of action.” She shakes her head. “That’s why Mostyn was here to help with the airlock.”

I smile and nod. Good job. I toggle on the squad comm and listen.

Brice’s team has just killed another handful of Trogs outside a surface-level storage building. Looking at Silva, I say, “Lead the way.”

With a sigh, she starts.

“Faster,” I tell her. “I’m not that injured.”

She picks up the pace, bounding across the rock, not as quickly as I saw her moving when she was on the attack, but not so fast as to leave me behind.

I’m slow. My head is swimming. A handful of aspirin and a few days on my back might be what I need. That’ll only happen if we take this mining colony.

We round an outcrop of jagged rock and come upon the other three. They’re arrayed outside a warehouse airlock. Trog bodies are on the ground around them. Helmets are scattered everywhere—not the misshapen Trog ones—but high-forehead human helmets.

Worse, down one side of the building, stacked like chopped wood and frozen in their death poses, are humans in militarized versions of orange construction suits.

I decide in that moment I don’t care if the Trogs own the Grays, are their allies, or are slaves just like us. They’re murderous pigs.

Chapter 59

I notice as I hurry toward the building’s airlock, letting my anger run away with my judgment, the corpses piled against the wall are in their full suits, helmets included.

It doesn’t make sense.

Where did the scattered helmets come from, then?

When I get close to the other three, I ask, “What’s the plan?”

Brice is surprised I’m still alive. “What’s your plan?”

I glance at the helmets on the ground. I’m hoping they came from prisoners and I’m guessing bodies are all we’ll find. “We need to see what’s inside.”

Silva laughs, and so do Mostyn and Hastings. Silva says, “That’s why he’s the major.”

“Let me finish,” I tell them. “Brice, you wait out here with Mostyn and Hastings and keep guard. Me and Silva will go in.”

Silva starts in, “You’re in no shape—”

“No,” Brice tells me. “You two stay out here.” He turns to Hastings. “Stay with them. I’ll take Mostyn. “ Looking at me, he says, “If things get dicey inside, we need to be at one-hundred-percent.”

“Fine.” I turn to face the other buildings in the compound and raise my rifle as I drop to a knee among the field of helmets. More Trogs will be coming. “Make it quick.”

Brice and Mostyn hurry to the door.

Silva takes the right flank. Hastings takes up a defensive position to my left. Each of us has a wide field of fire.

Brice is already opening the outer airlock door.

I drop down to my belly. When the Trogs come, I hope I’ll look like a discarded helmet or a wayward corpse, until I surprise them with a hail of hypervelocity titanium-wrapped lead.

“I’ve got movement,” says Silva.

That was quick. But then again, we are invading their little asteroid fortress.

I look. I don’t see anything.

Silva is down on her belly as well. “Coming up past that outcrop.”

Still looking. The rocks are blocking my view.

“We’re inside the airlock,” says Brice, “waiting for it to cycle.”

“Tell me when you have them in sight,” says Silva, talking to me. “Thirty, maybe a few more. Packed close like they do. A few are stalking along close to the rock.”

“I see one peeking this way,” I tell her. “We’ll open fire when we can both target them.”

I scan across what I can see of the compound, looking for other movement, knowing once the shooting starts, I’ll likely not think to look for flanking Trogs, I’ll be too busy trying to stay alive. “Hastings, anything?”

“Nothing on this side,” she answers.

“Airlock at pressure,” Brice tells us. “I’m ready to open the inner door. Ready, Mostyn?”

“Ready,” she answers.

“You see the Trogs, yet?” asks Silva.

“Got ‘em,” I answer, and the abstraction of the number turns concrete and deadly. Odd, how the two things can feel so different. “Brice, Mostyn, keep your ears open. We might get into trouble out here.”

Might? Inside my head, I’m laughing.

There’s no might. Things are going to become interesting.

“Full auto, pray and spray,” says Silva. “We’ll start on the right, shoot down my line.”

Good thinking.

If we double up our fire on the same targets, we can overwhelm their suits’ grav deflectors. “I’m game. On three?”

“Three,” she says, “two, one.”

A light show of glowing metal flares out from our positions, sweeping back and forth across the line of Trogs, deflecting in every direction.

The Trogs have no time to react. They’re falling and exploding—literally exploding—as suits and chests decompress through holes just torn. Arms are ripped away and more than one head spins off into space.

They’re all down in moments.

Many are squirming.

Dying or knocked over?

I don’t know.

Silva targets and fires single shots at those still moving.

I scan around for more Trogs, and catch one gawking from the edge of the rocky outcrop. I fire just a second too late. He’s back behind cover. “At least one more behind the rocks.”

“Many of these are still alive,” says Silva.

I roll to my left, three or four times to shift my position. I’m still in the garden of white helmets. “Shift,” I call to Silva as I move.

A second later, the Trog behind the outcrop pops out, aims his gun, and sends a hunk of metal right at the spot I just left. Shards of rock explode when the round hits, and the helmets tumble around.

“I thought they were all terrible shots,” I tell the others.

“Most are,” someone responds.

The Trog is working the bolt on his rifle to load another round as three more Trogs come running out from that side of the rock.

Moving targets are harder to hit, and I ignore them for a second—it’s the one with the gun I want. “I’ve got four charging me!” I call into the comm. I fire.

The Trog with the railgun takes a glancing shot on his shoulder and spins away out of sight. A wound, but only for a moment. He’ll decompress and die.

Silva is firing at the other three Trogs when I adjust my aim and help her finish them off.

Our automatic weapons make all the difference.

And just as that happy thought crosses my mind, the price for automatic fire comes due.

A beep sounds inside my helmet and a small red warning light flashes.

“What the hell?”

“What?” asks Silva, alarmed.

“Warning.” I’m looking down at my suit, feeling around for holes, taking deep breaths, thinking I might be decompressing. “A beep. A red light.”

“On the left edge of the faceplate?” asks Silva.

“Yeah.”

“Hydrogen pack,” she tells me. “You’ve burned through yours.”

“What the hell? It’s a fresh pack.” And the damn yellow warning light never came on to tell me it was low.

“Brice told me the hydro level indicators don’t work on half of them.”

No wonder we’re losing this fucking war!

I reach down for my backup pack strapped to my thigh.

Gone.

Shit!

Must have been knocked off in…

Oh hell, it doesn’t matter where I lost it.

“Here,” says Silva, “take mine.” She’s already removed it from its mount. She tosses it over.

Halfway across, it explodes as it’s hit by a red-hot railgun round.

I can’t believe it!

“That’s the luckiest shot I’ve ever seen,” says Silva.

Lucky because they were probably aiming at one of us.

Still, bad luck for me.

Chapter 60

Silva fires three more bursts. “Let me do the shooting unless there’s a Trog on you.”

That’s not a solution.

“Hastings,” she calls, “you got an extra hydro pack?”

“I only brought one with me,” she answers. “I picked up a cal pack by mistake. Brice and Mostyn will be out soon. One of them might have some H.”

Ugh.

“I can’t raise them,” says Silva.

“Me neither,” says Hastings.

“It’s probably the building that’s interfering,” I tell them, hoping they’re not both already dead inside.

“It’s okay,” says Silva. “You’ve still got a few minutes.”

The ubiquitous hum from my backpack suddenly stops. I notice it for its absence.

Now I know I have maybe five minutes.

“I’ve got Trogs!” says Silva. She fires.

“Some here, too,” says Hastings. “I’ve got ‘em!”

With no power, it’s not just air I’ll run out of. My suit will lose heat, and my weapon won’t fire. I’m useless.

I look over my shoulder at the warehouse, willing the airlock door to swing open.

Is there atmosphere inside?

Are there Trogs in there?

I spot the feet of the bodies stacked along the outer wall—dead soldiers, all in their suits.

Glowing rounds streak past us, past the warehouse, and into space. They’re not even close to hitting anything.

“I can’t see where that fire is coming from,” I say.

“Back toward the center of town,” answers Silva.

That’s too far away for most Trogs to hit a target.

I have to make a choice.

I slowly stand, careful not to push too hard. An excited jump might send me into orbit. Now, with no suit grav, I have to control my movements manually. I low-g skip to the side of the warehouse, round the corner, and I scoot back along the stacks of corpses, moving far from the line of fire. “I’m checking these bodies for a hydro cell,” I tell Silva and Hastings, so they won’t think I ran away.

Selecting one of the many suits, I stop and grab its hydro pack. I twist and tug until it’s free. Two seconds later, I’ve popped off my empty and put the new cell in its place.

I wait.

Nothing happens.

No reactor hum.

No breath of fresh air.

Damn.

I try another pack, switch it out, same result.

I try a third and realize the mistake I’m making—all of these packs would have continued to burn through hydrogen until they ran out of juice. They wouldn’t have stopped when the person in the suit died.

Two hundred bodies, and not one of them has a good hydro cell.

Think.

How many minutes before my suit’s atmosphere turns bad. Will it be suffocation or hypothermia that kills me?

The suit already feels cool on my skin.

I call to Brice and Mostyn.

Still no answer.

At some point, I need to risk the airlock.

I scan up and down the pile of bodies. They’re all Chinese SDF recruits from those older ships shot down and dumped in the mine pit. I don’t see extra hydropacks strapped to their thighs, which means they didn’t have the automatic weapons we did.

Still, there had to be a heavy weapon of some sort in each platoon—larger caliber, higher muzzle velocity, more energy to run. All of our SDF railguns are powered off our packs, and a heavy weapon would require extra hydro cells. I drop to my knees and start sorting through the maze of frozen legs.

Searching.

Scooting.

Searching.

Success.

I see a hydro pack wedged between two frozen legs and I start prying it out. “How’s it going out there, Silva?”

No answer. Of course not, no power. Dead radio.

I seat my hydrogen pack in its cradle, and instantly feel the micro-reactor’s familiar buzz.

Air flows in my suit.

“I’m good to go,” I call over the comm.” I’m already running. “I’ve got a full cell. How’s it going out there, Silva?”

“Holding my own,” she tells me. “They’re massing back toward the town center. I’ll be in trouble in a minute.”

“How many?” I ask.

“One or two hundred?” she’s guessing. That’s the Trog’s favorite tactic. Mass their troops—everyone they’ve got—and then bonsai charge.

“Brice! Mostyn!” I call into the comm. “I need you out here.” Just in case they can hear.

No response.

Not good.

Not good at all.

“I can’t raise them, either,” says Silva, staying surprisingly calm, considering what she’s facing.

“Hastings,” I ask. “Can you help her?”

“I have a dozen at least,” she answers, “among all those pieces of equipment over there.”

She needs to protect our flank.

I try to raise the ship on the command comm. Static.

Partially exposed, I stop at the corner of the building and see the mass of Trogs back toward town.

They spot me, too.

Rounds fly in my direction.

I kneel and do a quick check for ammunition. One magazine in my rifle, nearly empty, and two more full mags to spare. One full magazine in my pistol. “How are you set for ammo?” I ask Silva.

“Enough,” she answers.

“Brice? Mostyn?” I check again.

“Here,” Brice answers.

“Where are you?”

“In the airlock,” he answers. “Coming out. No signal inside the building.”

“Careful,” I tell him. “Trogs are massing a few hundred meters back toward the center of the base. They’re shooting and they’ll be coming this way.”

“Are you up for this?” Brice asks. “You okay?”

“Bruised is all,” I reply. “I’m good to go.”

“The airlock is finished cycling,” says Brice. “Let me know when it’s safe to exit.”

“Now’s good!” shouts Silva.

I peek around the corner and see Brice and Mostyn run out of the airlock door. They take up prone positions among the empty helmets.

“This isn’t a defensible spot,” says Silva.

“That’s okay,” I tell her. “I know it. Hopefully, the Trogs know it, too. I have a plan.”

I explain quickly.

Moments later, Brice and Mostyn start firing a slow, steady stream of rounds in the direction of the mob.

I’m running away and Silva is beside me.

We’re in danger of being shot in the back, but the Trogs need to see us flee.

Chapter 61

“Don’t be long,” says Brice.

“Don’t shoot us,” I say, grinning as I leap and push power to my grav plates, flying off the asteroid’s surface with Silva right behind me.

“It’s time to see what this suit can do,” I tell her as I accelerate and turn to follow the curve of the Potato.

Silva is straining to keep up, so I slow down. We don’t have a lot of time to pull this together but we need to arrive at the same time. Probably.

In seconds, the mining colony is out of sight. The asteroid’s surface is a few hundred feet below us and it feels like we’re rocketing into the void with nothing but stars shining a hundred trillion miles away. We’re aiming to power through a tight orbit around the narrow trunk of the asteroid.

“Holy Jesus!” shouts Silva.

“Thank God for catheters,” I tell her as we pick up speed. “No wet pants!”

We’re beneath the Potato, I think, on the opposite side of the asteroid from the mining colony.

“ETA?” asks Brice, barely audible over the crackling connection.

“Almost there.” I call back.

Silva and I are burning hard. We come over the horizon to see the mining colony’s building from the opposite side relative to where we left Brice, Mostyn, and Hastings.

“They’ve split and are attacking us from two directions,” Brice tells me.

“We’ll be behind them in ten seconds.”

“I don’t see you!” shouts Mostyn.

“I see your rounds,” I call back. “We’ll stay out of your line of fire.”

Silva veers to the right and I swerve left. She’s going to take one of the groups from the rear flank and I’m taking the other.

I keep my altitude, about a hundred meters up.

Silva heads for the ground. She doesn’t feel comfortable enough yet with her suit’s gravity to maintain stability while shooting her weapons.

I can fire from above with no problems, until the Trogs spot me. Then I’ll be in trouble. There’s nothing to hide behind up in the sky.

Below and ahead of me, Brice, Mostyn, and Hastings are still prone among the helmets. Hastings is covering the left flank, but Trogs are starting to gather in numbers among the pieces of equipment over there. She’s picking them off, one by one. Soon they’ll have enough numbers to feel confident, and they’ll charge.

Silva is nearly in position.

I’m where I want to be. I say, “I’m going hot.” I open fire on the Trogs from behind, where they’re weak. I burn quickly through the partial magazine in my gun, while keeping myself stable enough for my slugs to land mostly among the Trogs below.

At least two dozen of them go down.

Mostyn is firing at the same group. She’s switched to auto and is spraying them in quick bursts.

As I’m trading my magazines, the Trogs have stopped creeping forward and they’re looking behind them and to the sides. I make the guess that these basic infantry types aren’t as bright as the ones who’d manned the anti-ship emplacements. They’re all thinking two-dimensionally and none—at least not one with a rifle—has thought to look up to see me.

That’ll change as soon as I start firing again. A spray of glowing rounds leaving the barrel of my weapon will show them all exactly where I am.

I fire again.

They fall. Some of them come apart. Most of them don’t look dead because of the air escaping through the holes in their suits, jerking their bodies back and forth.

The ones that turn to face me get it in the back from Mostyn—the ones that keep moving toward her get it in the back from me.

When I stop firing, some of the Trogs are running away. Most are dead or writhing.

“I’ve got this now,” Mostyn tells me.

No doubt. Only mop-up work left on this flank.

“We could use some help,” says Silva, coming back onto the comm.

I’m already zooming in her direction, and see the other half of the mob was mauled just as badly as the first half and Silva is gone.

“I’ve got these,” Brice tells me, as I fly past.

A flash of red over by the equipment yard catches my eye and I see Silva standing atop a bulldozer, shooting into the gap beside it.

Before I arrive, she leaps and lands on a stack of conveyor sections.

She fires into another gap as railgun rounds sail past her from another direction. She doesn’t see them.

“Behind you!” I yell.

She leaps again.

I come down on another stack of conveyor sections and point my rifle into the gap where the shots aimed at Silva just emerged. A handful of Trogs are down there, still looking in the other direction. Four are carrying disruptors. One has a rifle and I cut him in half with a burst through the back. His innards explode into the vacuum and splatter his comrades, who barely have time to react before I shred them, too.

It takes us several minutes to clean them up, at least all we can find, leaping from one piece of equipment to the next, and shooting down on the Trogs from above.

“Any more?” Brice asks.

Everyone responds to the negative.

“Everybody all right?” I ask.

“Good,” answers Silva, though I can see her twenty meters from me, looking around for targets.

“I’m good,” replies Mostyn.

“Bueno.” says Brice.

“Me, too,” adds Penny.

Penny?

“What?” I look up, finally having a second to take my mind off the battle on the asteroid’s surface.

The Trog cruiser is drifting past the end of the Potato and smashing into one of the huge asteroids as atmosphere spews through the breaks in the hull and random blue grav fields slide across its surface.

Looking higher, I see our ship coming down toward us. I tell Penny, “We could use some reinforcements.”

Chapter 62

We’re standing in front of the warehouse looking at Hastings’s body. A huge gash is cut down into her chest, starting where the shoulder meets the neck. Her heart stopped beating minutes ago, but the vacuum of space is still sucking blood out of the wound.

Mostyn sounds like she’s choking back tears as she walks around in the garden of loose helmets, inexplicably collecting an armload of them.

“What gives?” asks Silva.

Brice provides the answer. “All these helmets out here on the ground, they belong to people inside.”

“Alive?” Silva is shocked. “Inside?”

Brice answers with a nod.

“Wait,” I tell Mostyn.

She immediately stops and turns to me for more instructions.

“More people?” I ask.

“SDF,” answers Brice. “A hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty.”

“Rebels, like us?” I push. “Or loyal SDF soldiers?”

He shrugs. “This is a Free Army base, right?”

I nod. I don’t know why SDF troops would be here unless they were mutineers, like us.

Glowing blue and coming in fast, our ship arcs down toward a flat patch of rock behind the warehouse. I flinch back a step and everyone turns to see what I’m looking at. Dust and small rocks fly away, pushed by the ship’s blue grav waves as it settles onto the asteroid’s surface.

“Penny’s getting a real feel for driving that ship,” admires Brice.

“Yeah,” I agree. “She’s a real hotrod.” Back to business. “Mostyn, come over here.”

She does.

I raise my wrist and show her my d-pad. “Does yours function?”

“Yes,” she answers, confused. She doesn’t know what I’m driving at.

Brice looks at his.

I ask, “Can you pull up the regiment hierarchy?”

She shows me her load of helmets, as if to point out how silly my request is.

Brice taps his d-pad and brings up the screen I’m looking for.

I reach over and start pointing at the names of pilots, nav officers, and commissars. “These are the ones I know I can trust. If any of them are in there, give them helmets and bring them out first. The rest stay, for now.”

Brice takes a moment to consider my request. “I understand.”

To Mostyn he says, “Wait for me out here.” Looking at me, he continues, “If none of them are in there, it’ll be easier if I don’t bring any helmets in with me.” He heads toward the airlock.

Lenox and her squad, disembarked from the ship, come bounding around the corner of the warehouse.

“Sir?” she asks as she comes up.

“At the moment, we’re clear up top,” I tell her. I look around. “Or we’re between attacks. Deploy your troops in a defensive perimeter around this warehouse. Make sure the machine guns have good fields of fire. This building is full of human prisoners.”

Lenox looks at the helmets scattered everywhere. “Pretty ingenious way to keep them in, take their helmets and leave them inside. You don’t even need to lock the door.”

“Yeah.” I point at Silva and Mostyn. “You two mind doing recon?”

Mostyn drops his load and nods. In the light-g, the helmets don’t fall. Instead, they start to sink very slowly.

“Will do,” says Silva. “Where do you want us?”

I look at the black sky. “A few hundred feet up, where you can see the whole colony. If Trogs pop out anywhere, don’t shoot and give your position away, call in the troops.”

“I’ll go up, too,” says Lenox. “It worked well back on the Trog cruiser we captured, with me controlling my squad from up there.”

“Okay.”

She turns to Mostyn and Silva. “I’ll watch the area around my squad. You two keep an eye on the rest.”

Moments later, they’re all three off the ground and taking up positions overhead.

Brice emerges from the airlock. By the expression on his face, I can see he’s pleased. “Jill Rafferty is in there.”

“No shit!” That is good news.

“And some pushy MSS Colonel named Blair. She wants out first.”

Chapter 63

Brice is back inside the warehouse, having gone in with two spare helmets—one for Jill, one for Blair.

I’m waiting for him to come back out, while formulating plans about what to do next as I make guesses about our enemies. I know there have to be more Trogs on this asteroid.

“Grays,” says Phil, over the comm, tossing the comment into the silence on our link like it’s barely worth a remark.

“Here?” I ask, surprised.

“Yeah,” he tells me. “I can sense them.”

“Do you know where?” I’m already spinning through guesses as to what the presence of Grays implies.

“Hard to tell, exactly,” he answers. “Somewhere down inside the asteroid. If I got out of the ship and walked around—”

“No,” I tell him. “You need to stay on the ship. Penny, you should probably get the ship off the ground, but stay close. If Grays are present, there are probably a lot more Trogs down in the subterranean levels.”

“Will do,” Penny tells me, and I see the ship lift off immediately.

“How many Grays are below?” I ask.

“A pod,” answers Phil. “I don’t think more than that.”

Six Grays would be enough to target those defensive railguns we had to take out. That would explain the accuracy of the fire coming from those weapons.

The warehouse airlock opens and Brice comes out with Blair and Jill in tow.

“Kane?” says Blair, like she can’t read the name off my chest.

I give her a nod and then turn to Jill. “Your crew? Your platoon?”

“Most of them are inside,” she tells me.

“Your pilot?” I ask.

“He made it,” she answers, uncertain why I’m asking.

Blair starts to say something, and I silence her with a raised hand. To Jill, I say, “Grab the helmets you need. Round up your crew and troops and free them as quickly as you can.” I point to the mine operation’s big tug. “See if your pilot can fly that thing. I need it in the air as soon as possible.”

“What do you need him to do?” she questions.

I point toward the giant Trog cruiser shrinking in the distance as it drifts toward Jupiter. “Penny and Phil destroyed the bridge on that thing. It’s not going to fly again. However, it’s probably full of Trogs who are going to figure out soon enough their best chance of staying alive is to put on their suits and grav-drive themselves back here.”

“We don’t need it to be raining Trogs,” Jill tells me. “You want us to ram it with the tug?” She grimaces. She knows the tug wasn’t built for that kind of work.

“No.” Pointing toward the gas giant so prominent in the sky, I explain, “If the tug has enough fuel, push the cruiser into orbit around Jupiter.”

“We can shove it out of the orbital plane and accelerate fast enough so it’ll never be a problem,” suggests Jill, “and we’ll be back here in an hour, instead.”

“Not a bad idea.” I look at the cruiser, weighing the pros and cons. “I hate to waste the ship. I’m hoping we can one day salvage it, if we leave it in orbit long enough for the Trogs onboard to die.”

Nodding, Jill says, “Okay, I’m with you. I’ll make it happen.” She turns and scoops up an armful of helmets and heads for the airlock.

“I’ll give her a hand,” says Brice, turning to follow.

I finally give my attention to Blair.

“Good job,” she tells me. “Mission accomplished. You made it here. You saved us.”

I don’t know what to say to any of that. I’m half-believing that this Free Army base was a trap all along and she’s the one who put my neck in it. But I have no way of proving that one way or another. “How many of those inside are Free Army?”

“Most of them.”

“How’d you get here?” I ask.

“I brought my assault ship.”

“I thought you were on the command ship.”

“I was.”

“Division command is in there?” I can’t help but glance at the airlock door. “This revolution goes that high up?”

Blair shakes her head. “Division command is dead.”

“Dead?” I reply.

“All of them,” she tells me.

“How?” I ask. “Did your ship take fire on the way up?”

“Kill switch.” She’s proud of her answer.

“The MSS gave you kill-switch authority over the division’s top officers?” That’s beyond belief.

“We have people in places where they need to be,” says Blair. “I wasn’t supposed to have kill-switch access over anybody but my commissars.”

“When did you do it?” I ask.

“As soon as we took off.” She doesn’t seem to have any emotion attached to the murder.

Murder? Why does that unvoiced word seem to be the right one?

I don’t know whether to admire her coldness or be afraid of it. Either way, I know now she’s a lot more dangerous than I initially thought. “So, who was left on your ship?”

“Me,” she answers. “The pilot, and the grav officer.”

“Comm?” I ask.

“He was North Korean.”

Dead, of course.

“We came straight here,” she continues. “We were the first to arrive, the first to be ambushed.” She nods at the warehouse. “In there ever since.”

“So those really are our people in there?” I ask.

“As soon as we get them armed again,” she tells me, “they’re our army.”

“Is this it?” I’m disappointed. “All of us?” God I hope not. A few hundred against an endless flow of Trogs, not to mention what’s left of earth’s armies who are loyal enough to the Grays to fight against us.

Blair shakes her head. “We have other bases, too.”

“How many?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You better.” A threat is veiled behind my words. “I’m not playing the secrecy games anymore. This isn’t spy bullshit now. This is war. The Grays and North Koreans back home will figure out eventually what we’ve done and they’re going to come after us. I’m okay with that. I’ve been planning for this a long time, but I’ve got men and women who are fighting and dying for me, for this rebellion. I need to be able to look them in the eye and tell them it’s real, tell them there are enough of us that we have a chance to actually win.”

“Let’s move all these troops out of the warehouse,” Blair tells me. “Put weapons in their hands and kill the rest of the Trogs on this base. We’ll have plenty of time to talk afterwards. For now, I swear to you, this rebellion is real. It’s bigger than just us on this little rock. We’re not throwing our lives away on nothing. We can win this. We can free our people.”

Free our people?

She’s talking my language like she’s reading my thoughts and using them to convince me. I can’t argue, can’t resist. That is my dream, to free my people.

Our war has begun.

Freedom!

FREEDOM’S FURY

Book 2 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

Chapter 1

Who risks death when a half-assed lie is enough to guarantee life?

Pretty much nobody.

Orange-suited SDF troopers are cycling out through the warehouse’s airlock, stepping into the bleak vacuum over the asteroid’s surface, empty-handed and angry-eyed.

Is it the loss of their ships and the death of their comrades that’s left them bitter? Is it their short imprisonment?

Or is it the charade they play?

How many of these mutineers are liars who were afraid to lose their lives when others in their platoons chose rebellion? Did they each raise a hand and say ‘Me too’ for fear of being executed and ejected into space? How many made that choice in hopes of finding a chance to getaway later?

With each burp of the airlock, more empty helmets go in, and more SDF mutineers come out.

Blair is trying to organize them into their platoons without much help. We’re short on officers, and the sergeants are showing the inexperience of their fresh stripes and simulator training. None has seen as much war as Brice.

The only organizing most of the sergeants have engaged in was lining their squads up for orderly loading into the grav lifts back at the Silverthorne spaceport. The only leading they did was through the chaos of the bombardment in Arizona, herding their troops into the assault ships. “Run that way and get on that ship or die!” Probably the only order most of these sergeants has ever barked.

My god, the non-coms are little better than hall monitors.

Blair directs the loitering troops to scavenge weapons from the dead Trogs. She’s taking charge, and is obviously comfortable with it. Everybody seems perfectly satisfied to act on her commands. She’s now a colonel—her SDF rank has translated seamlessly into the same rank in our tiny insurgent army.

My major rank did, too.

Do we humans so desperately hunger for structure that we’ll accept any, even if the legitimacy is nothing more than a shoulder decoration left over from a previous job?

I guess.

So, I listen for instructions. Why not?

I’ve already done all I knew to do, or guessed to do on my own, following my steps as one led to another. I brought two of my company’s ships to the Free Army’s asteroid base. I led a commando-style raid to take out the Trogs defending the surface and manning the anti-ship guns. With the help of my squad, I freed the prisoners, sent Jill and her platoon away in the mining tug to dispose of the damaged Trog cruiser, and directed our only functioning assault ship off the surface in case the battle for the mining colony isn’t over.

Now, nothing is happening except organizational bullshit. I’m awaiting instructions, and Blair is in her element, providing them to everyone her eye falls upon.

I’m starting to think maybe my place in the world—my natural element—is in combat. Weird to imagine that for a guy who’s spent his whole life constructing an elaborate lie to live behind, while pushing plate after plate after plate down the grav fab line.

My life has been nothing but lies and fantasies.

And a nagging, yet distant danger.

People in charge of the world like to hang spies and rebels who don’t appreciate the status quo. That’s one thing the siege didn’t change.

Still, when the Trogs were swinging their blue disruptor blades and coming to kill me, you know, for being on their ship and trying to destroy it, I was just as frightened as the next grunts in the platoon, yet didn’t succumb to it. I didn’t think about dying. I didn’t dwell on it, anyway.

I just did what needed doing.

Maybe that was luck, one fortunate event on top of another. If I’d cowered, if I’d doubted, or overthought everything trying to find the safest approach, I think I’d be dead right now and so would every man and woman on my ship. Well, if not dead, then consigned to a serf’s future, not any different from the past we’re all trying to escape.

At the moment though, I’m bored.

I’m staring at the black sky, watching Jill’s mining tug slowly shrink to a pinprick of reflected light as it races through space to catch the damaged Trog cruiser and push it so far away that it’s ten thousand Trog legionnaires won’t be a danger to us.

I wonder, does the boredom make me normal or something else?

Does it matter?

Is it just that some people are cut out for the logistical side of war, and some aren’t?

And is it not just that I have an aptitude for fighting, now that I’ve glimpsed at the clarity of life through the lens of mortal struggle, tasted deathly fear as it courses through my veins and dribbles onto my taste buds, and rode the wave of victorious elation with my enemy’s blood on my blade and his body under my boots, I have to ask, am I an addict?

I do crave another helping.

“Are you as surprised as I am?” asks Sergeant Brice.

I turn to see him walking up beside me while ejecting the magazine from his railgun and checking to see how many rounds are left.

“What are we talking about?” I ask.

“That we lived through that.”

I shrug. Twenty-four hours ago I was on earth and had never seen a Trog in real life. “I don’t have a frame of reference.” But in my heart, I think I know. “I take it this isn’t a typical day for SDF troopers.”

Brice laughs. It’s that dark laugh of his, not mean, but twisted black by too many days dodging the reaper’s scythe. “Mostly we just die.”

“Maybe I’m surprised.”

“That we’re not dead?”

“I guess,” I admit. “Truth is, I was just thinking about that. I want to stay alive as much as the next guy. I just don’t expect I’ll be the one who catches a bullet or who’s cleaved by a Trog. Maybe that’s conceit, or it might be delusion.” I shrug. “I don’t care which.”

“You shouldn’t,” says Brice. “You don’t want to question things too much. Questions turn to doubts, and doubts undermine a soldier’s confidence. Call it conceit. Call it whatever, but sometimes, it’s all you’ve got.”

“Maybe all you need?” I ask.

“All you needed when you told us we were ramming those Trog cruisers,” confirms Brice. “All you needed when you stormed that bridge all by yourself.”

I laugh. “That wasn’t the plan, exactly.”

“Just turned out that way?” Brice chuckles.

“And maybe imagination,” I add. “Maybe it’s the intangible mix of both. You think of something crazy, and then believe you’re indestructible enough to pull it off. Maybe that surprised the Trogs as much as anything.”

Nodding, Brice concludes and affirms, “They’re dead. We’re not.”

“They never imagined a handful of humans could attack them like we did,” I say. “So of course they never expected it, never dreamed to look for it, and that was a huge part of our success. It’s easier to shoot a Trog not shooting back because he’s busy eating his lunch and not imagining you’re behind him.”

“So that’s it, Napoleon?” Brice laughs, “Surprise, conceit, and imagination, the ingredients of victory?”

I don’t say anything. I’m not sure if Brice is laughing at me or if he’s giddy on a post-battle high. Instead, I start thinking about the cost of the victory. Half of my squad died, half of my platoon is gone. Half of my company was blown to bits while their ships were rocketing into space from the Arizona shipyard. They never even tasted war.

In total, the company is nearing seventy-percent casualties in the first twenty-four hours.

Holy Christ!

“What’s the matter,” Brice asks. “Your face just changed.” He looks me up and down. “Your catheter slip out? You got shit dripping down your leg?”

“Casualties,” I tell him.

He stops his train of thought, probably runs a quick estimate on the numbers and morosely says, “Get used to it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“That’s admirable,” he tells me, as his gaze wanders over to Hastings’ body, and it seems suddenly inappropriate that she’s still there on the ground, slowly freezing solid.

I look around. Trog dead are scattered everywhere. Some are on the ground. Some are floating, waiting for the asteroid’s micro-g to finally pull them down. One body is at knee-height, stiff, but spinning in the vacuum as its suit vents gas through a small hole under the arm. Morbidly hypnotic. All those Chinese SDF corpses are stacked like firewood along the warehouse’s exterior wall. Hundreds of them.

I think about all those Trogs I saw in the hangar of the cruiser we rammed, grasping onto anything to keep from being sucked into space as they slowly suffocated. How many were in there, dying as I watched, dying because I killed them? They seemed like humans—ugly humans—live, thinking beings.

But God, I hate them.

“The thought you need to take to heart,” says Brice, punching me in my sternum, “is that we’re in the army.” He emphasizes the next part. “This is war.” He lets that hang on the comm between us for a moment. “It’s a shitty war, that we’re losing, and that doesn’t matter, because you know what? Even if we were winning, people would still die.”

I take a half-step back out of fist range.

“I hate to see it when that happens,” he says. “I hate it more than you know.” Brice stares for a few long, uncomfortable moments into my eyes, drilling me aggressively, rudely, like he’s caught me washing my dick in the shower a little too long, like he’s looking for things that are none of his business, and he’s finding them.

I find something to glance at over the horizon. Anything to turn away from his interrogating eyes.

“You’ll know,” he tells me. “You have an inkling. I see it in you. It hurts you to lose people.” He nods slowly. “It’s like they’re your kids, almost. You’re responsible for them.” He steps close, balls his fist, and taps his knuckles roughly against my sternum again. “You feel it here every time one dies. They’ll haunt your memories. You’ll see their faces when you close your eyes, and you’ll hear them scream when you’re trying to be alone with your thoughts.” He shakes his head as his lips curl up around an unpleasant taste. “You’ll never be alone again, never. They’ll always be there with you.”

He steps away from me, turns, and scans the horizon, collecting his thoughts for another moment before he goes on. “I think you need to feel that to be a good officer, or sergeant, or whatever you are when you’re responsible for someone else’s life. Just as importantly, you have to be able to trade those lives away when you need to. Maybe that’s what makes a good officer, knowing what it costs to swap lives for objectives, but being able to do it just the same.”

I start running through numbers in my head again. Three Trog cruisers. No, four now. At least ten thousand Trogs on each, and that’s just in the battle legions they keep in the barracks in the back. What, another four or five thousand Trogs and Grays to fly the ship and keep the railgun hoppers full of slugs? Four ships, and sixty thousand Trogs? Holy shit. Sixty thousand. The rough math churns out the result, though I can’t say the number with any pride. There’s too much weird emotion stuck all over it. In an assault ship with forty troops ready to die—ready to do what I tell them, I’m a Hiroshima bomb. “The objective has to be worth it.”

“Damn well better be,” says Brice. “And you need to be willing to die right along with them. The objective has to be worth your life, too. Your troops need to see that in you if you want their loyalty.”

Sixty fucking thousand?

How goddamn deep is my hate?

Or is that just war?

I fear I’m so far out of my depth that my fake leadership is apparent to everyone who sees me, and my insecurity comes to the surface. “Am I doing that, winning their loyalty? Their respect?”

“Yeah, you are,” says Brice, nodding. “I don’t know how long any of us in this company are going to live with you in charge. You’re dragging us into some crazy shit. We’re all behind you, because we’re winning. That’s better than what we were doing before, dying for nothing.”

Chapter 2

“Kane,” calls Silva over the comm, “Kane?”

I look up. Silva and Mostyn are up there in the sky with gray asteroid dust clinging to their orange suits. They’re hard to make out against the black of space. Lenox, not yet coated with dust, is easier to spot. “What do you have?” I’m looping Brice and Blair into the conversation as I look at my d-pad to see who’s on.

“A dozen Trogs are filing out of one of the railgun pits.”

She’s talking about the railguns we disabled when we first attacked the mining colony. Each had a door down at the bottom, undoubtedly connecting them to a tunnel system.

“Why am I just now hearing about this?” snaps Blair.

“I just looped you in,” I tell her, not understanding her anger.

“If we’ve got Trogs coming,” she clucks, “I need to know right away, because I’m in charge. I need to—”

“Chill, bitch,” says Silva, cutting her off. “Who are you again?”

“I’m your commanding officer,” Blair points out, her voice seething. “If you don’t like it, I can kill switch you and your whole platoon.”

Kill switch?

“Listen,” I nearly shout. “Blair—”

“Colonel Blair,” she clarifies.

“Colonel Blair,” I acquiesce, “let’s talk about all this bullshit after we figure out what the Trog situation is. I looped you in as soon as Silva called with the report.”

Brice is looking over at Blair, standing a good twenty meters away, and I can tell by the expression on his face, he’s contemplating giving her the Milliken treatment—a railgun round right through the faceplate.

I shake my head, just enough for him to see. If Blair is serious about her kill-switch authority, it may be that she’s got all of us tied to her biosensor, so if she dies, every rebel on the asteroid does, too.

Brice understands, and instead of ventilating Blair with a burst of railgun slugs, he says, “Trogs don’t do anything with just a hundred or two hundred soldiers.” He looks at me to confirm that his subversive thoughts are set aside for later. “I think a thousand Trogs is the basic unit.”

“Basic unit?” asks Blair.

“Like a platoon for us,” he answers. “We break down to fireteams of two or three, and squads of five to ten, but the platoon is the basic building block of the SDF. When we send troops into battle, they go as a platoon. Forty is the SDF standard.”

“So you think there might be eight or nine hundred below the surface?” asks Blair, doing the math. She sounds like she’s afraid.

“That’s what I’m saying,” answers Brice. “One thing you need to understand. For an enemy we’ve been at war with for two years, we know pitifully little about them. So don’t take my word as gospel.”

“I’ve got at least fifty out of that hole,” says Silva, “and they’re still coming.”

“Toward us?” Brice asks.

“Just exiting and loitering,” says Silva. “Not coming this way, yet.”

“Lenox,” I call.

She answers the question I’m going to ask. “I’m already deploying my squad in positions to defend the warehouse.”

I’m guessing there are still a hundred prisoners inside.

“That’s fine,” says Blair, like she was the one Lenox was talking to.

Mostyn says, “Kane, I see them coming out of another gun pit on the other side of the mine. Both emplacements on the far end, the first two we took out.”

It crosses my mind that Mostyn is skipping right past Blair to piss her off.

Brice smirks for me to see, points in the direction of the strip mine, then toward the railgun emplacements a kilometer away. “They’re massing. There must be a few dozen airlocks in this complex they can exit from—maybe twice that many. They know we’re slaughtering them when they attack in small numbers. The Trogs are falling back on a tactic they know works. They’re going to gather their force and overwhelm us.”

“Is that gospel?” asks Blair, harshly.

Unprofessional, I’m thinking. She needs to learn how to lead, not just lurk in the shadows like an MSS officer, pouncing on mistakes.

“As gospel as it gets,” Brice tells her, ignoring her tone.

“We’ve got some time, then,” I announce. “Silva, Mostyn, keep a close watch. Let me know as soon as the Trogs start moving. Lenox, I want you up here near the colony where you can see your squad and keep an eye on surface installations.”

“Already here,” she answers.

I look up to see her orange suit moving across the sky, headed exactly where I would have put her. I decide she’s more than competent. Maybe I’m not the only one born for this shit.

“We need more people up there,” says Blair, past her tantrum and back to pragmatic bureaucrat.

Surprised, both Brice and I are stunned by the quick switch in tone.

“Okay,” I answer. “Brice, get with the other sergeants who are out of the warehouse and find us three or four more lookouts who have good grav control and can fly in low g.”

Blair is walking toward us, giving me a nod like I’ve done a good job at conveying her orders, and I’m more than a little put off by it. Still talking to Brice, I say, “Make it six for lookouts. And find us a handful of volunteers who can fly. We need to reconstitute our squad.”

“Will do.” Brice turns and hurries out among the troops who’d been prisoners and still look like a disorganized mob of protesters.

Blair tells me, “I need to approve unit transfers.”

“Fine,” I’m not at all liking the way this relationship with her is turning out. “What’s our status? How many armed soldiers do we have?”

“What’s our status, ma’am?” she clarifies for me.

My God, back to this shit?

Standing by me now, she looks up at our three lookouts overhead, to remind me they’re on the comm line.

I try not to sound like an angry seventh grader when I ask, “What’s our status, Ma’am?”

“In addition to your platoon,” she tells me, “we’ve moved nearly sixty out. Half of those are armed with single-shot Trog weapons. Most of the others have Trog swords.”

“Disruptors.” I’d hoped for better. Only the members of my platoon who are still alive are armed with automatic railguns, the only advantage we have over the Trogs so far. “We can’t win if we fight them with their weapons.”

“I know.” She’s looking around nervously.

“Any idea where the Trogs stashed the soldiers’ guns after they captured the assault ships, Ma’am?”

Blair shakes her head. “I’ve got Sergeant Billings on it. He’s asking around, and he’s organizing a squad to search.”

“That’ll be dangerous, Ma’am.”

“We have to have those weapons,” she tells me like I don’t know it.

“Might I suggest, Ma’am,” God this suck-up, military-discipline shit is a pain in the ass, “to make sure Billings and his squad go out armed. That’s all I’m saying. They’ll have to enter airlocks not knowing what’s on the other side—probably Trogs. The only question is how many.”

“Or it could be more prisoners,” she counters.

“Do we have a map of the underground structure of this base, Ma’am?” I ask. “Anything?”

“Nothing,” she tells me. “It’s all top secret. All I knew about this place was the location I passed to you back on earth.”

I tell Silva, Mostyn, and Lenox, I’m dropping them from the conversation and leave them instructions to keep me updated when things change with our growing Trog infestation.

“What about the miners?” I ask Blair, skipping the Ma’am now that it’s just us. “What about Free Army personnel? They must have been here before, right? We didn’t just plan to show up here and invade, did we?”

“Of course not,” she snaps, taking my question as an accusation, just like it was meant. “This is our base.”

“Was,” I correct her.

“Is,” she insists. “And we need to take it back. That’s our number one priority, the only goal we can afford.” She looks around. “What alternative do we have? We have one operational ship, and one tug chasing a crippled Trog cruiser toward Jupiter.”

I don’t comment on that, though I know she means it as an insult. I ordered Jill Rafferty off in the tug. It was the right decision considering the risk of all those live Trogs still aboard the cruiser.

“None of our assault ships can fly without extensive repairs,” she concludes. “We can’t leave.”

She’s 100% right about that. The best we can do is prepare for the coming attack. No, not the best. “Might I suggest we send out a second recon squad, not just Sergeant Billings. It’ll be dangerous, but we need to find those automatic weapons. We need to know how many Trogs are on this base. We need to know what the subterranean levels look like. We won’t win if we react out of ignorance. If we’re going to take this base from however many Trogs are here, we need to be proactive.”

Chapter 3

Blair takes a moment to tap on her d-pad and double-check that she and I are on a private comm link. She doesn’t want any other ears listening in by accident. Standing in front of me now, she looks at me with an impassive face, yet her words come out dripping in acid. “We need to get a few things straight.”

I try to keep all inflection out of my voice, while knowing that we’re preparing for an attack we’re not likely to survive. We need to move this thing, whatever it is, along. “I’m listening.”

“I’m a colonel. You’re a major. I outrank you. We need to maintain the chain of command.”

“Is this about the ‘yes, ma’am’ thing again, ma’am?” Maybe throwing the ma’am on the end was a bit childish. I’m already irritated with the conversation.

“The troops need to see me in charge. The orders need to pass from me to you, from there to the captains and lieutenants—”

I interrupt. “We don’t have any captains, and only a few lieutenants.”

“—and from them to the sergeants and enlisted personnel.”

“Enlisted?” I ask, slipping into the trap of the argument. “Hardly anyone here is enlisted. These are all draftees. And that doesn’t matter anyway, does it? We’re all rebels now, right? We’re mutineers and murderers. We’re volunteers in the Free Army.” I wave a dismissive hand at the mining colony on our potato-shaped asteroid. “Free Army? With one shitty base so far from the middle of nowhere that nowhere doesn’t even know we’re here?” I’m sprinting into rant mode. “You tell me there’s more to this fucking fiasco—and by God, I hope so—yet you still haven’t told me or anyone else about what other shit we’ve got. The worst part is we don’t even own this asteroid. We’re not armed, and we’re about to be attacked, and you want to talk about chain of command protocol like it’s the most important goddamn thing we have to do right now, like your rank and your ego are paramount. Well, I’ve got news for you, ma’am, they’re not. I don’t care what you did back in the MSS to put all this together. I don’t care what you think you’re doing now. We need to figure out how to survive this attack. If too many Trogs come to the surface, we’re in big trouble.”

“You listen to me, you little upstart, nobody officer,” her voice is rich with righteous venom.

And with all the surprise anybody would feel who’s just spun off the kind of grandiose argument I just slapped her with, I realize my rebuttal-turned-tirade did nothing to win her over to my side.

She goes on to say, “I’m the only reason this revolution is anything right now besides a basement jerk-off fantasy for you and your spaghetti-headed friends. I’m the only reason you’re alive, and I’ll always be the only reason you stay that way.” She reaches out and taps the side of my helmet.

Damn, everybody wants physical contact to make their points today.

“You need to get this through your tantrum-addled brain. It doesn’t matter what you think of the Free Army, you’re in it now, and we’ll maintain our ranks just like the in the SDF. You’ll do exactly what the hell I order you to do, or I’ll kill switch you and not bat an eye about it. The world is full of starry-eyed revolutionaries who only need to be fostered with half of a freedom dream and a shiny gun. You’re nothing special.” And to make sure I understand this part, she closes the last centimeters between our faceplates. “You’re replaceable.”

That confirms it beyond a doubt. Suddenly I’m in the same position I put my platoon in back when we were lifting off from earth and I stood at the end of the compartment and told them I’d kill switch every single one of them if they so much as raised a hand at me.

Goddamn, it makes me feel powerless.

I hate the feeling every bit as much as I’ve hated my life under the Grays.

“Run out of self-righteous speeches?” sneers Blair.

Yes, however, I’m not a quitter. So, I have more to say. “Whatever you think I am is irrelevant.” I nod at some of the troops nearby, steeling themselves for the coming attack. “Their thoughts are important. I wasn’t in that prison warehouse with all of you, but I’ll bet I know what you talked about. Jill’s platoon was with mine when we destroyed those three Trog cruisers over Arizona. That’s one hell of a victory, probably the biggest the SDF ever had. It’s certainly the biggest thing our paltry rebellion has done in this war. I’ll bet all of those soldiers were talking about it and you were egging them on because you had to make them all believe we have a chance to win this.”

I see from the look on Blair’s face I’ve hit pay dirt.

“You had to do it, because you couldn’t have them thinking this whole thing you led us into was a clusterfuck, or worse, an ambush you baited them into. If they’d started believing that while imprisoned in a Trog warehouse on an asteroid a billion miles from earth with no hope of escape, then they’d have probably had a contest to see who could kill you with their bare hands.”

Blair’s brain is squirming in a trap of her own making, and she can’t find a magic string of bullshit to break herself free. She’s not used to being on the losing end of anything. She steps away from me.

It’s funny, but I’m too riled up to rudely laugh at her. “The crunchy, nutty icing on your shit cake is this: all those people inside and the ones coming out know it’s me and my crew that rescued them. The best part is, because humans are humans, they unfairly ascribe life’s complicated achievements to single heroes no matter how many were involved. That’s especially true in military matters. Read any history book and you’ll know it. The prisoners will say it was me who saved them. Not my platoon. Not what’s left of my company. They’ll believe it was me who unclustered this fuck-pit you put them in. So, threaten your kill switch all you want. Your hands are tied. If you do it me, these grunts will frag your arrogant ass so fast you’ll never see it coming.”

Having had plenty of moments now to come up with her rebuttal, Blair snaps back, “Nothing’s to stop me from freezing the whole lot of you, and starting from scratch with a new batch.”

“Except the only chance you have to not end up as Trog bait is me and these soldiers.” Blair is off-balance, and I can see that I’ve won. “Without me, you have no chance, because whether you like it or not, these soldiers will fight for me and they’ll have a chance to win because they believe I can lead them to victory. Nobody believes in you. You’re just a bossy MSS cunt that not one of them trusts.”

It’s my turn to be aggressive. I step up close to Blair so that our faceplates are nearly touching. “So now I’m telling you, ma’am, work with me. Stop pretending this schoolyard posturing is important. You do what you do and be the queen bitch of this whole outfit, and let me do what I need to do—fight these goddamn Trogs and kill ‘em.”

Chapter 4

Détente.

“I’ll work on the defense,” I tell Blair. “You get those scout squads out. We won’t be staying out here in front of this warehouse any longer than is absolutely necessary.”

“What are you going to do to defend it?” asks Blair, looking around at the nooks troops are finding among the rock outcrops and the machinery maze.

“Let’s not pretend we’re going to get along,” I tell her. “Trust me to handle my business. And I’ll let you handle your shit.”

“Let me?”

I ignore the pettiness. “We’ll have plenty of time to bicker when all this is over.”

“Ma’am,” she spits at me to enforce her authority one more time.

“Fuck you with that shit.” I turn and head toward a platoon reconstituting just outside the warehouse door. “Work on assembling the units. And find us a better place than this to defend. We’ll all die out here if the Trogs attack in force.” I cut my comm link with Blair.

“You,” I point, as I walk toward a sergeant who can’t hear me. Coming up in front of him, I check his identity and connect with him over the comm while finding his info on my d-pad. I slip his name under my ad hoc unit hierarchy. He looks like he’s old enough to be my dad. And now I’m mentally on the other side of the chain of command argument. Ugh, karma. “Around the side of this building, you’ll find at least a hundred frozen corpses, all Chinese SDF. Bring them to the front of the warehouse and stack them into ramparts.”

“What?” The sergeant is horrified.

“Do it!” Sometimes people need a jolt even if it is rude.

He’s looking at my name stencil, and he glances at his d-pad. “Major Kane?”

“That’s me.”

His attitude changes instantly. He starts to thank me.

“There’s a horde of Trogs,” I point down the long axis of the Potato. “About a kilometer that way. They’re gathering strength for an attack. We need to ready the forces.”

“We have no guns,” he pleads.

“Work on the ramparts.” I look around and spot a handful of soldiers scavenging through one of the mobs of dead Trogs. “I’ll have those troops find what weapons they can and bring them to you.”

The sergeant looks at the men among the enemy corpses. He scans what he can see of the colony and spots more dead Trogs. His eyes fall on Hastings’ body, still lying in the open. He stops there.

With no more command edge in my tone, I tell him, “Do something with her. She’s one of us.”

He nods, turns to his troops, and starts passing out orders.

I walk toward the scavenging troops, moving a bit slower than I could, and I open a private comm with Phil. “Got a minute?”

“No,” he answers.

“You’re not doing anything,” I tell him, guessing—more than guessing. What could he be up to?

“You don’t know that.”

“Jesus, Phil. Do you have to make everything difficult?”

“Simple pleasures,” he answers.

I sigh. If Phil wasn’t so valuable…

“Here’s what I need,” I tell him. “I need a way to circumvent a kill switch, permanently.”

“I don’t understand. You’ve got the kill-switch capability built into your helmet. All you have to do is choose not to activate it.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m afraid Blair and I are heading for a major confrontation, and she’s already threatened to kill switch me if I don’t behave.”

“She’s a bitch,” says Phil, but he’s nearly laughing when he says it. He only knows her by name. “That must suck for you, not being in charge.”

“Dammit, Phil. This is serious. She can take out everyone in the division, and she thinks we’re disposable.”

“Disposable?” Now it’s Phil’s turn to be horrified.

“She thinks she can make her way back to earth for a refill of people just like us, but who are more pliable.”

“She can’t,” argues Phil. “How dumb is she? We’ve got a bunch of teenagers and middle-aged parents in the ranks now. What comes after that? Geriatrics? Earth is running out of disposable people.”

“Exactly.” Finally, Phil is engaged in the problem. “What can we do?”

“Switching helmets is the natural solution,” he says. “All of the kill switches are coded to the chain-of-command hierarchy. If she has kill-switch authority over the whole division, it won’t matter whose helmet you take.”

“What about all the Chinese bodies laying stacked beside the warehouse?” I ask. “What are your thoughts?”

“Some of us could swap for those helmets,” says Phil, “but are there enough for everyone? Then, whose kill-switch authority are you under? You don’t know, do you?”

He’s right.

“Maybe she’s bluffing,” offers Phil. “Have you thought about that?”

Of course, it’s possible, but that’s an expensive bluff to call.

“If she has a kill switch, then she can listen in on our conversations, too,” realizes Phil. “She’s probably listening right now.”

More Phil drama. Ugh.

Still, he has a point.

I turn and spot Blair in the company of a few sergeants over near the equipment yard, only she isn’t looking at them, she’s cutting glances at me, and she turns away just as I catch her eye.

Bitch!

I say, “I know you can hear me, Blair.”

“What?” cries Phil. “She’s actually on the line?”

“Yes,” I answer. “Chime in if you want, Blair. I don’t care if you know or if you don’t. I will find a way to disable your kill switch.”

“There isn’t a way,” she tells me, confidently.

“There isn’t a pleasant way,” I answer, thinking back to the small grav plate Captain Milliken placed on my helmet when he was trying to kill me back when this all started. “I’m not interested in harming you. I just want to make sure you don’t kill my troops.” Or me.

Phil mutters something I can’t understand, yet I can tell he’s frightened.

“Or,” I say, “You could trade out your helmet with another, and we’ll destroy that one.”

“Not on your life,” she laughs. The laugh is mean and victorious. She thinks she’s got me worried and she thinks she’s regaining the upper hand.

“It puts us all on a level playing field,” I make my argument, like logic will magically work, “like real soldiers, depending on each other and trusting each other because we share the same values, we fight for the same things. That’s how armies succeed, not by threat of death.”

“Signing off,” says Blair. “I have more important things to do than listening to you two children plot.”

“God,” says Phil. “She’s a bitch.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “See what you can figure out, okay? In the meantime, I need you and Penny—”

The ground shakes violently as everything flashes bright blue in a grav wash.

I’m knocked onto my back as the comm erupts in shouts.

Chapter 5

The pinprick gleam of a trillion stars hanging in the endless black void is obscured with a giant dirty smudge wrapped in ephemeral blue tentacles.

Jupiter, so prominent in the sky a moment before, is a sideshow of funky rust and dull, gray stripes ornamented with sixty-three moons. The herd of smaller asteroids, stable in their positions relative to the Potato a moment earlier, are all on the move. Some are drifting away. A few inch forward. More are spinning, displaying sharp sparkles as light from our faraway sun catches and reflects away.

A Trog cruiser has inexplicably appeared a kilometer above us. A moment ago there was nothing overhead except vacuum. Now it’s there, with plates sucking fusion-drive power and thrashing out repressive grav fields as it stabilizes its two million tons of mass right above us.

The asteroid quakes beneath me.

Every piece of matter within a hundred klicks is reacting to the gravitational perturbations of the cruiser’s sudden arrival.

The troops around me see what I’m seeing, and whatever they felt when gravity fluxed and knocked us all off our feet, it’s now turning to dread.

How the hell did that Trog cruiser get there?

“It just blipped out of nothing,” somebody shouts.

“Oh, Christ,” wails another.

Surprising me by how quickly she’s collected her wits to rejoin the game, Blair shouts over the comm, “Stand up. Get ready!” They’re the right words. Unfortunately, the way she says them, they sound like accusations of cowardice.

“Fucking get ready for what?” somebody mutters.

Still, that cruiser is right there.

It must have come out of bubble jump at that spot, an insanely close place to something as massive as the Potato, an occurrence that shouldn’t have been possible, at least not based on what humans understand about grav manipulation.

It’s those big-headed gray shits utilizing another talent we humans have no hope of mastering even with a bug in the head.

Then I realize something horrific, my ship is gone.

It was floating in space, just there, near where the bow of the cruiser now occupies the vacuum.

I see some hunks of debris glinting in the sparse light, spinning away from the cruiser’s hull.

Oh, my god!

Penny, Phil, and Jablonsky were on the ship.

It’s been obliterated by the instantaneous arrival of the Trogs.

I search for my three lookouts that had been a hundred meters above the surface. Lenox in her orange suit should have been easy to spot, yet she’s gone. I scan the sky for Silva and Mostyn. They’ve disappeared as well.

I bounce to my feet as the bug in my head swims through the syrup of so much grav flux. It’s disoriented and taking a moment to catch up with the rest of my brain.

I’m looking around, expecting the Trogs from inside the asteroid to be mounting their attack. They’re not, not yet. I shore up my guess: They don’t have the means to coordinate the arrival of a faster-than-light ship with a ground attack. They have no clocks and no radios—what the hell would they need radios for? Trogs are telepathic like the Grays. At least that’s what everyone believes because no one’s ever found a radio built into the suit of a dead one.

Nevertheless, we humans only have guesses about the limitations and capabilities of telepathy.

It’s time for me to take my cue from Blair’s example and get in the game, too. Over the comm link to Blair, I say, “Listen to me. There’s no time to muck around. We need to set aside our shit for a minute and get this right. Prep time is done. The battle is here.”

Already, I’m too fucking late.

The unmistakable glow of railgun slugs erupts from the tubes along one of the cruiser’s spines.

I stop breathing as I watch them come, not even a second passes, because the things fly so damn fast.

The ground around our position explodes with the impact of high-energy metal. Shattered rock spews into the void and tears its way across the asteroid’s surface. Orange suits with soldiers inside are punctured and ripped into grotesque shreds of bloody meat frothing blood instantly into the vacuum.

The comm erupts in screams and the rattle of ribs cracking through wrecked chests. It’s the sound of hyper-velocity fury finding fragile human bodies. Death in space.

“Max defensive grav!” I shout over the comm. “Max defense!”

The space around us is filling with dust and body parts suspended, drifting, or shooting violently through the chaos.

Dozens are hollering—some orders, some hysterics—sounds obscured by crackling kaleidoscopes of noise from granules of asteroid rock blown off the surface containing the ore of some conductive metal.

“Blair!” I shout, “Blair!” I run through a cloud of gray dust in the direction I last saw her standing. “Blair!” I trip, bounce against a squat stone the size of a couch, and somersault. My defensive grav cushions everything against the asteroid’s weak gravity, and I’m back on my feet in a few heartbeats, running, unable to see more than a meter or two ahead.

I leap over a small crater where a railgun round impacted the surface, and I come down on the other side, running until a kneeling figure resolves in the dust storm.

Another salvo pounds the asteroid, and I fall over as hunks of stone pummel me from my left.

I look up and see Blair, still on her knees, hands on the ground, shaking her head, trying to regain her senses.

I jump down in front of her, grab her helmet, and press our faceplates together. “Blair, can you hear me?”

She blinks, and nods.

“Kill all the comms except you, me, and Brice.” I can only control my own company’s comm links. That’s the way our systems come preprogrammed. With my rank and MSS position, I could take control of the equipment of just about any SDF troop in the division, but each control request through my d-pad’s interface would have to be done one at a time. Even with my implant, it would take more time than we have.

The comm link is turning into a morale-crushing chaos of sonic horror and preventing every attempt to organize a response.

“Do it!” I shout at Blair.

She reaches slowly to her d-pad.

Dammit!

If only she had a bug in her head like me.

Her fingers tap.

The comm goes dead. It’s just me and the static now. “Everyone, listen!”

Listen to what?

What am I going to tell them?

There’s only one choice. “We need to retreat underground. We need to do it now. Run to the nearest airlock. Pack yourselves inside, and as soon at it cycles, find your way to the deepest hole in this mining colony.”

Blair looks at me with the eyes of a child. Whatever resolve she had a few moments ago, the impacting slugs have shattered it. She’s not cut out for war. “It’ll cave in,” she whines. “We’ll be trapped.”

“In this g?” I argue. “A cave-in would take a week to seal a tunnel.” I hope. Yelling across the deteriorating comm I tell them all, “Head for the lowest subterranean levels, and we’ll figure out what to do from there. Go! Go! Go!”

Chapter 6

Gray dust particles, pebbles, and hunks of rock move up, down, sideways, toward me, and away. My eyes try to focus on the bigger pieces, but the crap isn’t of a uniform density. Things ghost out of sight and then back in again. The dusky, dim light darkens by the moment. The asteroid’s micro-gravity tugs every bit back in the direction of its rocky center, but that’ll take days.

If the cruiser keeps up the relentless pounding, they won’t have to kill us, we won’t be able to see a thing. We won’t be a threat.

“Blair.” I reach out and grab under the arm and pull her to her feet. “Open up the comm so everyone can talk again. They’ll need to work together to follow our orders.”

Blair fumbles with her d-pad.

I start dragging her toward the location of the last airlock I saw. It was back near the center of the colony, right where I flew superhero-style into that handful of Trogs that just came out. I guess there has to be a closer airlock. However, with visibility nearing zero, I don’t have time for an Easter egg hunt.

Before we’ve advanced a dozen steps, Blair shakes her arm loose from my grip.

I glance at her. She’s straightening her spine, a defiant veneer on her face. Back to boss mode—unlikable, and just the Blair we need.

“Brice,” I call over a private comm, hoping there’s not so much crap floating between us it’ll block the signal. “Are you alright?”

“Trog shit can’t kill me,” he laughs.

Damn, he’s the most twisted man I’ve ever met. “I’m heading for that dome in the center of the colony.”

Another volley of railgun fire slams the asteroid, and I’m back off my feet again.

Blair is down.

A new round of screams tears across the comm.

Slaughter.

“Move as fast as you can away from the warehouse,” I tell the troops. “With all the dust, they can’t see us, they can only target our last positions.” Hopes.

“Was the warehouse hit?” Blair asks me over a private comm.

“Don’t know.” I can only pray it wasn’t—it’s a huge target. If the Trogs in that cruiser wanted to destroy the building, nothing would stop them. “How many were still in there?”

“Fifty?” she guesses. “Sixty? A hundred?” Her tone of voice is riding a rollercoaster of emotion she’s not used to feeling. “Dammit, I don’t know.”

I keep her moving. While I think an auto-grav sprint across the asteroid’s surface would be the fastest way to get to the airlock, with visibility down to a meter or two, it would be dangerous.

No doubt, the Trogs massing down at the other end of the mining pit are chomping at the bit for the bombardment to stop so they can rush this way and wipe us out while the advantage of our automatic weapons is completely negated.

Over the comm link, I urge everyone to hurry. All I hear in response is unbroken static. Everyone must be too far away.

I trip, yet I don’t fall. In asteroid g, falling takes so long I’m only reoriented, looking down at a ground I’ll hit in a few days if I let nature take its course, although the ground is not what I see below me. Trog bodies carpet the ground.

“You alright?” Blair asks, whispering unnecessarily. In the silence of space with the eerie fog of rock dust everywhere, a million years of evolution is telling her to be sneaky, and she’s doing it in the way a lifetime of earth-borne intuition has taught her.

Reorienting my body with my feet beneath me, I spot the handle of a Trog disruptor blade sticking out from beneath a body. I lean over and pull it by the pommel. Straightening back up, I show it to Blair as I say, “These are the Trogs we killed in the battle before we freed you.” Lifting the blade, I reach it out toward her. “Take it. It might come in handy. These things will cut through defensive grav fields like they aren’t there.”

She accepts it like I’ve handed her a baggy of warm dog shit, but once her palm wraps around the handle, the disruptor’s field lines illuminate in a blue glow—like neon through the dust. She’s mesmerized. “Beautiful.”

I didn’t think she knew any pleasant words. She must be in shock.

I point to the blade attached to one of the magnets on my back. “It’s a handy place to keep it.”

I nod forward. We need to move.

I make my way through the bodies.

She follows, and mounts her blade across her back, clearly more comfortable to have the single-shot Trog railgun in her hands instead.

Another salvo of slugs quake the asteroid.

No screams sound over the comm. It’s just me and Blair. She stops walking, taps the side of her helmet, and tries to connect with someone. Anyone but me.

“It’s the dust,” I tell her. “It’s metallic and probably static-charged. It’s killing the comm links.”

Her grimace pulls tight across her face as she looks at the slow-motion maelstrom around us. I think some of the natural vitriol in her nature is redirecting off of me and into it.

“We need to keep moving,” I urge.

She’s stopped again, looking back in the direction of the mayhem’s epicenter.

Why?

Hell, I don’t know.

At first, I think her brain was bounced a little too vigorously inside her skull.

I nudge her. “C’mon.”

She doesn’t move, except to lean slightly toward the mayhem, like she wants to start walking that way but isn’t sure.

I make a new guess, one I can’t believe I’m making because it doesn’t fit with the black-and-white picture I’ve painted of her in my mind. There are no hints of empathy and nothing else to make me believe she gave two frog turds about the troops that might still be back by the warehouse.

Is it truly possible she cares about somebody but herself?

I say, “You can’t.”

She turns and glares some of her silent acid at me.

“There’s a fine line between heroism and stupidity,” I tell her.

“I’m not—”

“Use your head,” I go on, half torn between doing exactly what I’m advising her not to do. “We can’t know how many are moving toward the airlocks now, but we know some of them are headed that way—probably most, maybe all.” If ever there was a hope turned into words on nothing but a handful of vacuum, that’s it. “We made a plan.” Not exactly we. “We announced it to everybody. We need to stick with it.”

I turn and trudge forward, hoping she follows. Well, half-hoping.

As the gray dust flows past my glass faceplate, I wonder, how many more of my platoon are dead? What do those stats look like now?

Chapter 7

I don’t know how long we’ve been walking, except ‘too long’ is a phrase echoing in my head.

The bombardment seems to have ceased.

The dust around us is thinning the further our feet churn us away from the target zone. I can make out shapes as far as ten feet away. Nothing to brag about, but better than arm’s length.

Puffs of dust, thicker than the surrounding murk, move through the gray haze like ghosts, putting me on edge. I keep my railgun at my shoulder while I’m looking down the barrel, ready to destroy anything that might be a Trog.

“Do you know where we are?” asks Blair.

We passed the stocky stone spire not long after finding Blair’s salvaged disruptor, and we haven’t come across anything in what seems like too long of a time. Just dust. It’s easy to imagine we’re lost in an endless fog.

I should have checked the time on my d-pad before we started. With adrenaline flooding my circulatory system, with near-complete sensory deprivation, low g, little light, and no sound but Blair’s angry wheeze, I feel decoupled from reality. We may have been walking a minute or twenty. I honestly don’t know.

“Are you going to answer?” Blair pushes.

“Can’t say.” We should have arrived at the circular structure in the center of the colony already. It seems like we should have. If not that, then something. Hell, we could be moving in circles for all I know. I chuckle. At least we won’t walk off the edge of the Potato, though we might circumnavigate it.

Magellan Kane and The Sourpuss Queen, explorers extraordinaire!

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing.” I glance at the ground, looking for footprints and shuffle marks. My footprints. Blair’s shuffle. She’s more careful about foot placement than me.

Blair calls over the open comm again, searching for anyone who might hear.

A voice tries to respond, sounding like sixty-percent static and thirty-percent gargle spit.

Ten percent more of whatever.

“You make any of that out?” she asks.

“No.”

“It sounded like two or three different people to me.” It could have been a recording of crunching tinfoil for all I could distinguish.

“We should try another direction.” Like most of the things Blair says, her suggestion carries too much certainty.

“Take the lead,” I tell her. “I’ll admit. I’m lost.” It’s easier than igniting another argument. I stop walking and look back at her.

She’s hesitating.

“What?” I ask.

“I don’t know which direction,” she spits it like I’ve accused her of misdirecting us. “There doesn’t seem to be anything this way.”

“There should be,” I tell her, some of my frustration escaping through my words. “There’s a whole damn mining colony here, twenty or thirty structures. We should have run into a wall or something.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she mutters.

“Most problems don’t,” I explain, “until they’re solved.”

“Did you get that from a fortune cookie?”

Sarcastic enthusiasm seems like the right choice. “No fortune cookie ever lied to me.” I start walking again. “Keep an eye on the ground. Look for our tracks in the dust.”

“Our tracks?” She doesn’t immediately guess why.

I decide not to fill her in. She’ll conclude soon enough that I’m a circle-walking idiot.

Thankfully, for whatever reason, she keeps them to herself.

We trudge.

Frustration builds.

Minutes pass, and I stop to look up, hoping to see something to help me figure out where I am. I see more dark dust with the black of space behind it, and I see the rough glow of the Trog ship transforming the haze into a brighter color. At least we’re still on the same side of the asteroid as the colony, unless the cruiser has moved into orbit around the Potato.

“What are you thinking?” asks Blair.

“Maybe taking off and flying above this shit to see where we are.”

“We’re lost then?”

Like it was a mystery. Still, I don’t jump.

She doesn’t take the opportunity to pounce on me to vent her frustration over our situation.

I don’t thank her for making the effort to keep her vitriolic shit to herself. In the few dozen hours since she and I first met, we already have too much history between us to make kindness easy.

After a patient moment, she asks, “What’s the hesitation?”

“Variables. Too many.”

“Like?”

“What if the Trogs in that cruiser spot me and decide we’re all still alive down here and start firing again?”

Blair groans. “Look at me.”

I do. Her face shows a lot more frustration than she’s voicing.

“Not at my face.” She spreads her arms and steps back.

I can’t guess where she’s going with this. I look at her chest. Pointless. Through the suit, I can’t make out anything of her femininity.

“Not my tits, you dumbass. I’m covered in this damn dust. So are you. If you fly up there to get above it, nobody on that ship will see you, you’ll be the same color as this cloud.

I shake my head. If she had a bug in her head, she’d know. “It’s not the Trogs I’m worried about. They have Grays on that ship.”

“Why them?” she asks.

I give her the briefest rundown of what I saw on the cruiser my platoon commandeered, emphasizing the number of Grays we saw in the command section. I remind her that Phil sensed more of them on the Potato, somewhere down in the tunnels. I finally tell her, “I don’t know if the Trogs and Ticks are allies or what, but if I grav up there, to one of those big-headed gargoyles I’ll glow like a Roman candle. The dust won’t hide my grav signature.”

Blair’s shoulders slump. She understands. “Let’s walk, then. We’re bound to find something. This rock isn’t that big.”

I press on.

She follows.

She tries to raise the others on the comm again. Louder bursts of static are the only thing we hear.

I scan the moving slurry around us for any hint of a structure.

More minutes pass, I guess. I still didn’t check the time on my d-pad. “How long have we bee—”

I freeze.

“What?” asks Blair, concerned, and rightly so.

“Shhh.” Pointless. I remind myself again, sound doesn’t carry in a vacuum.

I watch as the dust ahead of me takes on a different texture—puffs with sharp edges, dark clouds.

Blair nudges me and whispers over the comm, “What?”

A few meters ahead, shapes are moving, left to right, and the bug in my head helps me see the dense mass of each. It’s not dust.

“Trogs,” I tell her, still stuck on the unnecessary whisper. “Back up.”

Instead, Blair leans to look past me, and I bump her as I step back.

She’s not moving. “I can’t see them.”

Scooting around beside her, I grab her arm and pull her down to her knees, pointing with my rifle. “You can barely make them out. They’re filing by. Watch. You can see faint shapes.”

Leaning forward, Blair says, “Kind of. I think I can see them. God, you have good eyes.”

Mostly it’s my sense of gravity. “Don’t move.”

“We could have run right into them.”

“Yeah.” I’m trying to detect the end of the line, hoping it’s not that whole Trog horde coming this way.

“What next?” Blair asks, softly, humbly, as hard as it is for her to step off her ego pedestal for a moment.

I think.

Retreat?

Find another way in?

Oh, fuck it!

It’s been a day of insane risks. I spot what looks like the last in the line of them, although for all I know it might be just a gap. Frustration over our current mess reinvigorates the anger I have toward the Trogs for the bombardment, and it’s time to vent it. “I’m going to fucking kill them.”

Blair shrieks, “What?”

It always amuses me how much meaning can be packaged around a simple syllable. Human language is so interesting.

I’m up and on my feet, letting go of my rifle and drawing my pistol as I move toward the last Trog in line. “Stay right behind, Blair. If I lose you out here, I won’t find you again.”

“This is a bad idea.” She’s angry. “You’ll get us killed!”

“Unless we can figure out a way to turn this shit sandwich into a Salisbury steak, we’re dead anyway.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Just be ready with that rifle if this goes south.”

“If?” She scoffs. “If?”

She says more, however, I’m ignoring her. I’m straining to feel the grav of any humanoid masses moving nearby. All I see is the line of Trogs stretching out in front of me as I fall into step.

They’re walking close, just far enough away from one another so the one behind won’t kick the heels of the one in front when they step.

Second thoughts and pictures of all that could go wrong start to spin in a flurry of nerves as my mouth goes dry, but I can’t pay attention to any of that. All the best shit only works if you jump right in.

I shuffle my feet to match the rhythm of their march. In long strides, I close in on my target.

As I get in range, he senses something and turns to glance over his shoulder.

Dammit!

The telepathic fucker probably caught a sniff of my bug.

I reach out and grab his integrated backpack with one hand while I jam my pistol just under the metal ring attaching his helmet to his suit. I pull the trigger and send a slug up through the base of his big bony skull.

He stiffens and pitches forward from the momentum of the projectile smashing inside his helmet. My grip is tight on his backpack, and he doesn’t fall. In the micro-g, I hold him up in front of me, and pray the next Trog in line is feeling just as much sensory overload as I am, and doesn’t sense his buddy’s demise.

Nothing happens further ahead that I can make out.

I fling the dead Trog’s body to the side, and tell Blair, “Make sure he doesn’t bounce.” In the light-g, it will happen, and the last thing I want is the Grays on that cruiser to start seeing Trog bodies springing into orbit. No doubt, that would prompt them to start pounding us again with their railguns.

I grab the pack on the back of the next Trog in line, place my pistol, pull my trigger, and toss his body to the side for Blair to handle.

It can’t be this easy.

Chapter 8

Eight down, and even Blair is impressed.

It’s a great system. I ambush and shoot. She handles the corpses. What’s not to love?

I’m starting to think we should forget about finding an airlock and just stay out here in the gray slurry, hunting and killing.

I skip my feet to get in step with the leader of a line that doesn’t exist anymore, except for him and me, and as I adjust my stride to catch up, I’m in a rhythm.

He stops.

Shit!

Panicking, thinking my system just fell apart in a puddle of hubris and that I should move my pistol back up into firing position, I plow into him from behind, and it feels like I’ve bumped into a tree.

The Trog half turns and elbows me hard on the side of the helmet.

My defensive grav absorbs the shock, yet the momentum nearly knocks me off my feet.

Blair is shouting and bringing her rifle to bear.

The Trog doesn’t turn all the way around. He focuses forward again, not realizing the frail dust-covered moron behind wasn’t one of his comrades.

Confused about that for a half-second as I regain my balance, I realize the Trog has just pressed his palm into the center of a backlit pad with only one big button.

An airlock door slides open.

“Blair, don’t shoot yet!”

“Why?”

Lights flicker on inside. I shout, “Airlock!” and rush in after the Trog.

I’m too slow.

As I’m getting close enough to put the barrel of my pistol in the best spot to kill him, he reaches the inner door and turns to check that the rest of the squad has followed. His oversized eyes betray his surprise, whether because he sees only two dust-covered suits instead of eight, or because he recognizes me as human, I don’t know.

I’m already pushing forward and trying to shove the barrel of my pistol up under his chin.

He blocks me with a forearm that’s longer and more muscular than mine.

Before I can adjust and pull my pistol free, he’s wrapping a powerful ape hand around my wrist and squeezing so hard I lose control of my fingers.

Through his faceplate, I see his surprise is gone, replaced by bared teeth.

He pushes me to my knees.

My God, he’s strong.

I’m struggling with all my might and way overmatched. I figure in a few moments, I’ll be dead.

I amp up my suit grav to push him away and find some leverage. He instantly responds.

“Double shit!”

A railgun barrel slides unexpectedly over my shoulder and past my helmet, stopping when it pokes the Trog in the chest. It fires as soon as the barrel makes contact.

Too close for the Trog’s suit grav to protect him, the dinner-plate-sized deflector over his sternum explodes in a burst of shrapnel and hits my faceplate as all the air from his lungs bursts free. For the briefest of seconds, I see a hole form straight through him as Blair’s round sparks against the airlock’s interior door.

The grip on my wrist relaxes, and a bubbly fountain of bloody air sprays out.

I push the Trog away, and he floats up toward the ceiling.

Blair is punching the button to close the outer door. “You alright?”

“Yeah.” I rub my forearm and flex my fingers. Nothing broken. “Damn, he was strong.”

“First time one got his hands on you?”

I look at her like it’s a stupid question.

The outer door seals.

She shrugs. “How am I supposed to know what happened when you went all Blackbeard on those Trog cruisers. You could have arm-wrestled them for control.”

Attempted humor? From Blair?

“No hand-to-hand.” Standing up, I scan the airlock’s inner door for a hole left by Blair’s shot. “If I have anything to say about it in the future, it won’t happen again.”

“That strong?” Blair walks the length of the airlock to punch the button by the inner door to cycle the atmosphere back inside.

I’m still examining the door for a hole as I hear a high-pitched hiss. Air is filling in around me.

“Don’t worry.” More of her irritating certainty. “The round didn’t go through.”

Chapter 9

The airlock stops hissing. A light above the door turns green. We’re matched for the pressure inside.

Blair has a palm on the door handle. She looks at me for confirmation.

Who am I kidding? She wants me to know she’s going to open and it and I better be ready.

With my rifle set to full auto, I’m prepared to kill however many of whatever is behind door number one. I nod my response.

The inner door swings open and I take a quick step forward for a full view.

I scan left to right.

Upturned and scattered are lounge chairs, the kind you might find by a pool back on earth—not now, but the kind in old movies when people with enough meat on their bones to look alluring in a swimsuit would sun themselves by the blue water and demurely try to get laid.

Clearly, the Trogs didn’t appreciate the arrangement of the chairs and tables.

We’re under the big smart-glass dome at the center of the colony, right where we intended to be. The main floor is down a short flight of wide stairs coming out of the airlock. Along the top edge of the circular wall supporting the dome’s glass, dim lights glow in a ring broken by dead and flickering sections. Doorways are set at irregular intervals around the perimeter, each opening to downward stairs and obscured hallways.

In the center of the circular room rises a fountain of the same shape. At first, I think it’s filled with an unfamiliar super-viscous liquid. That damned earth-borne intuition again. The goo is actually water flowing in the micro-g, with droplets falling so slowly they seem to be suspended in the air. Vertical waves, several feet tall and narrow, crawl around the fountain’s inside edge, not collapsing, but standing and morphing ever so slowly into mesmerizing, impossible shapes.

Impossible back on earth.

“There!” Blair points.

I swing my rifle and find a target.

I don’t pull the trigger.

The suit is orange, not white. The helmet is normal, human with a high forehead. His uniform, as grimy as any of the worn-out suits most of us wear, isn’t layered in the asteroid’s dust. That means he wasn’t outside when the bombardment started.

But there’s no Korean name and rank stenciled on his chest. He’s not military.

“Who are you?” I demand, sending a signal across all the standard comm channels, and looping Blair in. I step down the stairs. Blair follows.

“SDF?” he lies.

“Who are you?” I demand, taking a step forward and jabbing the barrel of my railgun in his direction, even while I’m thinking what a stupid gesture it is—Oh, looky, in case you didn’t notice, here’s my big fucking gun.

“Tarlow,” he answers. He’s cagey. Just a pinch shorter than me. Not at all intimidating. He reminds me of a real live Teddy Bear. I have an inexplicable urge to hug him. He glances at the airlock up the stairs behind us like maybe he thinks if he makes a dash for the door, he’ll move so fast all my shots will miss.

I don’t need hugs today. I’m ready to play.

Maybe he guessed at the thoughts behind my eyes. He doesn’t run. Instead, he asks, “The Trogs?”

“Still out there,” Blair tells him. “Who are you? Are you one of the miners?”

He glances down at his suit and then back to us as if that’s a sufficient answer.

I’m thinking maybe I’ll just shoot him. Something’s not right about him, and the more I get comfortable with the act of ending lives, the less it seems like it’ll be a burden on my conscience to erase this cuddly irritant.

Blair hops off the final stair and stomps across the big circular rec area like maybe she’s about to slap some MSS-super-interrogation-shit on him. Clearly, she has no patience for Mr. Cuddles, either.

It’s surprising how little crap you’ll put up with when sixty seconds ago you were fighting for your life.

I ease to the side, so Blair isn’t in my line of fire.

As she closes in, I see Tarlow’s smirk slip into something a little less confident. I figure he’s reading the hostility on her face, and filling his suit’s recycler. His hands fly up with open palms and his scruffy beard parts wide to reveal a glowing, toothy smile.

I wonder how long it’s been since he was last out of his suit.

I shudder over the idea of my future spending every day in a flexible orange coffin.

“I’m not one of the miners,” he says. “I’m a tech. A jack-of-all-trades. A gopher. I fix things.”

“Like what?” Blair demands, from just a step out of fist-punching range.

“Everything.” With Blair stationary, some of Tarlow’s new-found deference disappears and he looks at Blair like the question is nearly too stupid to expound on. His eyes drift down to the single-shot rifle still in her hands. He doesn’t know she failed to chamber another round after she killed the Trog manhandling me in the airlock.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure Blair knows either.

Maybe she had time to work the bolt action, but I didn’t see her do it.

“We’re on a rock a billion miles past bumfuck-nowhere,” snorts Tarlow. “We’re running an illegal mining operation. We can’t exactly call back to earth for a repairman when something breaks. I fix everything.”

“Nobody fixes everything,” I retort. I decide he’s lying.

He looks past Blair, and sees me sighting my rifle at the center of his chest. Whatever the stabbing thing I did with the railgun a moment before didn’t convey, apparently my demeanor does now. He gulps. “I don’t fix the mining machinery, not much of it. Well, the kilns sometimes, and the small-scale smelters. I support other systems, air purifiers, electrical lines, radio repeaters, networking, lights.” He gestures at the malfunctioning illumination along the edges of the glass dome, just in case we don’t know what a fucking light is. “Oh yeah, explosives, you know, for blasting rock. I mix the chemicals and set up the charges before they drop them down into the drill holes.”

Blair relaxes. She seems to have gleaned an answer she deems sufficient. “What happened here?”

I keep my rifle up. I’m not that trusting.

“Trogs.” With Blair’s aggression dialed back a notch, Tarlow cranks an extra helping of disdain back into his answer. “You said they were outside.”

“They attacked the base?” Blair asks.

“Base?” Tarlow shuffles back a step as he glances at the SDF stencils on Blair’s chest. “Who said base?”

Blair exaggerates a sigh and glares back at me. She’s out of patience.

“Stop being evasive!” I order. What the heck? Blair was going to say it anyway.

“I know this is a Free Army base,” she tells him. “That’s why we’re here. You know it’s a Free Army base or you wouldn’t be here. Can we please skip the secret handshake game? Tell me what the hell happened and tell me why you’re freely wandering around with Trogs everywhere, because I have to tell you Mr. Fix-it, with every stupid answer you give me, you’re convincing me you’re a collaborator who needs to have a round punched through his chest.” Blair lunges forward and jams the barrel of her empty railgun between Tarlow’s ribs. “Answers. Fast.”

Chapter 10

“I… I…” Tarlow is looking at me, eyes pleading. The bitch is crazy!

Duh!

Maybe it’s a mistake, but I now feel sorry for him. I transition from orders to advice. “Really, stop being evasive.” He’s rattled, and I’m guessing the answers will come slower. That’s probably rationalization.

“I’m not being evasive.” He’s stumbling over his words. “They’ve got everyone locked up—the ones they didn’t kill.”

“Where?” asks Blair.

“Level nine?” Tarlow points down. “In some of the empty reservoirs.”

“Reservoirs?” I ask. That word doesn’t seem to fit with our current environment.

Tarlow looks at me like I should know the answer to that question already. “It’s why the Trogs came here.”

“Because of reservoirs?” Blair doesn’t understand, either. She thinks Tarlow is spinning up some bullshit.

“Water,” Tarlow pronounces. “The rock in this asteroid is hydrous, thirty-nine billion tons of stone soaked with a billion tons of H_20.”

Blair is taken aback. “Water?”

The water comment throws me off too.

“Frozen,” Tarlow tells us. “We mine it out of the core, extract it from the rock, and store it in subterranean reservoirs—big tanks down on level nine until we ship it out to the other mining colonies. It’s the main thing we dig for out here. I think that’s why the Trogs came. There aren’t that many water mines in the asteroid belt.”

“Or they happened upon a colony and decided to attack.” Blair is being argumentative. She’s probably wired that way, someone who disagrees when progress is as easy as shutting up and listening.

“None of that matters,” I tell them both, comprehending what I see is the real news. “The Trogs didn’t destroy the base. They captured it. They took prisoners. Blair, the assault ship crews weren’t the only ones.” Refocusing on Tarlow, I ask, “How many are down there?”

“No.” Blair disagrees, of course. “What’s important is how Tarlow got out when it seems nobody else did.”

“I wasn’t locked up,” he argues, hurrying to the next part. “I was never captured. I know all the nooks and crannies. How to override the systems. I knew where to hide when the Trogs occupied the base.”

“And why are you wandering around, now?” asks Blair.

“The Trogs all of a sudden hurried away.” He points to the far end of the Potato. “Down the halls leading to the gun emplacements. I figured it was my chance to make my way to the surface and steal the tug.”

“That’s why you’re wearing the suit,” I deduce.

“I’ve been in the suit for two months.”

“To abandon your friends.” Blair doesn’t try to hide her disgust for his behavior.

“No.” Tarlow shakes his head vigorously. “No.”

That answer’s clearly not true, and I have the urge to tell him he should think through his lies before he starts to spout them, but where would the fun be in that?

Blair pokes him hard in the ribs a few more times. “You’re a coward, Tarlow. You were planning to run off, weren’t you?”

Shaking his head, Tarlow says, “I…I… maybe. I don’t know. I had to get away. I’d have sent back help. I would have.” He’s convincing himself now. Trying to, anyway.

“The tug is gone,” says Blair. “Even if it wasn’t, there’s a Trog cruiser parked about a klick up. It would’ve blasted the tug into junk before you made it ten meters off the ground.”

“Just one?” asks Tarlow. “Two attacked us.”

“We destroyed one,” I tell him.

He looks at me, wide-eyed, a hopeful smile starting to form. “You brought the fleet?” And then he looks sick. “I thought you weren’t SDF.”

“No,” I tell him, “there’s no fleet. Let’s get back to the important stuff. How many Trogs were down here? Where are the Grays? How many of you are locked up on level nine? Where did the Trogs put the weapons they took from you when you surrendered?”

Tarlow gawks at me. “How do you know about the Grays?”

“I got a postcard about it.” My impatience for answers I’m not getting is starting to irritate me.

“From who?”

“Kane’s being an ass,” Blair tells him. “How many Trogs?”

Tarlow reaches up to scratch his beard, remembers his helmet is there, and instead stares at the glass dome above us. After a moment, he says, “A thousand, maybe.”

“Weapons?” she asks. “Where are they?”

“Weapons?”

“The ones they took from my troops?”

“In one of the surface buildings, I think.” Tarlow looks up and to his left. “I haven’t found them, and I’ve looked. Unfortunately, with a thousand Trogs, it’s hard to sneak around.”

“How many of you are there?” asks Blair, finally getting back around to my question.

“Four hundred and sixty-nine,” he answers, “In three reservoirs.”

“That’s pretty exact.” Blair is skeptical. “How’d you manage to count them if they were all locked up and you weren’t?”

It’s Tarlow’s turn to be taken aback by her stupidity.

I figure it’s best not to say anything at this point, lest I suffer a withering glance as well.

Tarlow points to a small round module mounted on one of the walls. A green LED glows near one edge. “Signal relays. We’ve got them all through the tunnels. They carry the standard bands supported by the comm systems in the helmets. We need the relays because of the metals in the ore screwing up the signals. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to communicate down here.”

“How many of the four-sixty-nine are military, and how many are miners?” I ask.

“Mostly miners and support personnel,” answers Tarlow. “The garrison went out to fight the Trogs on the surface when they arrived. They were wiped out. The survivors surrendered.”

“Trogs don’t usually take prisoners,” says Blair. “How’d that work?”

“We were all underground when the fighting ended,” continues Tarlow. “The Grays found a way to telepathically link to one of the control room spaghetti-heads. They forced her to tell the commander to surrender, or they’d bomb us to dust. What else could we do?”

“Do you know why they took you prisoner?” asks Blair.

Of course, she and the other SDF mutineers were taken prisoner as well. Maybe that’s the question she’s really getting at.

Tarlow shrugs. “I don’t know if they were going to make us work the mine for them or take us back to Troglandia—”

I laugh.

Blair glares at me. “What?”

“That’s what I call it in my inner voice, Troglandia. Seriously.” I stop laughing, because Blair is looking at me as if she wants to come over and poke me with her empty railgun. “It’s funny, right?”

She clearly doesn’t appreciate my humor.

She turns back to Tarlow.

He straightens up and glances at us both, like he’s going to make an important announcement. “If Grays are in charge of the Trogs, like they’re in charge of the earth, maybe the Trogs’ Grays decided to acquire some human breeding stock to supplement their slave pool. Maybe that’s why they changed their policy on taking prisoners.”

Chapter 11

Behind me, the airlock door clinks against its frame.

I jump.

The light mounted above it flashes red.

Tarlow’s eyes go wide, and he starts backing toward one of the doorways to the lower levels.

“Don’t move,” Blair orders.

“But…” Tarlow points at the airlock, ignoring Blair’s admonition not to move.

I’m already against the wall, pulling one of the upturned lounge chairs in front of me.

“Railgun slugs will go right through that,” Tarlow bawls.

“I don’t want it to protect me.” Why am I explaining myself to Tarlow? “I just want it to hide me long enough for them to make it inside so I can take ‘em out all at once.”

“We should go down to level three,” Tarlow tells us. “I have a place down there—”

Blair pushes him through one of the doors and Tarlow stumbles on the stairs. “Get down,” she tells him, “and stay.” She kneels, using a wall for cover, and levels her weapon at the airlock door.

“You might want to chamber a round,” I suggest. “You’re too used to the automatic you had.”

“Shit.” She fumbles with the railgun made for larger Trog hands.

“Not loaded?” Tarlow groans as he steps back.

I swing the barrel of my gun around to put him in my sights. “Don’t.”

“We’re on the same side,” Blair tells him. “Stop being such a chicken-shit.”

“I don’t have a gun.”

The light above the door turns to yellow.

“Air’s going back in,” whines Tarlow. “We can still run.”

Full of confidence from the nine Trogs I killed—well, maybe eight—on the way here, I think I’m good. “How many will fit in there? Eight? Ten if they pack tight?”

“Yes,” Tarlow answers, “but they usually go in six at a time. They have a fetish for that number, just like the Grays.”

“You know a lot about them,” Blair observes.

“I’ve been watching them for two months,” replies Tarlow.

“Two months?” It doesn’t seem possible. Pointing out the hole in his story, I say, “How could you keep watch on them for two months and not get caught?”

“The camera system, of course.”

I glance at Tarlow.

He’s pointing again.

I follow the line of his finger and see a small, unobtrusive lens attached above one of the exit doors.

“They’re all over the complex,” he says.

Blair asks, “How do you—”

The light above the airlock turns green. The door unseals and swings open.

I press against the wall, thankfully cut from asteroid stone, exactly the color I’m coated in. With the lights flickering dim to add to my advantage, I doubt I’ll be spotted. I brace myself to pull the trigger.

Gray-dusted figures enter—one, and two more.

They stop on the stairs, glancing around as the airlock seals behind them.

They’re carrying rifles. Their bodies aren’t thick like Trogs. Their helmets are shaped and sized for human heads.

I don’t fire.

The one in front turns and looks right at me. “If you’re trying to ambush a Trog, do it from the right.” It’s Brice. “Nearly all of them are left-handed.”

“What?” How the hell did he spot me so easily?

“And the lights,” says Brice. “The dimness doesn’t do you any good. Ever notice how Trogs have those big puppy dog eyes? Well, it means they see pretty damn good in the dark. You’re better off turning the light all the way up and making them squint.”

“How the hell come nobody ever told us this shit in training?” I stand up and smile, despite feeling somewhat humiliated for my failed ambush.

Walking down the stairs and into the room, Brice ignores the question. He doesn’t have the answer. It’s those damn North Koreans who write the SDF curriculum.

He and the other two are near the center of the room when I join them. Blair is dragging Tarlow out of his hiding place to come toward us.

“Took forever to get here,” says Brice. “Dust and rocks floating everywhere and Trogs all over the place. Hell, I even tripped on a few.”

Blair glances at me like it’s my fault and I’m thinking she should be singing my praises, not assigning blame for someone tripping.

Brice catches the glance and looks at me, too.

I shrug. “I’ve whacked eight outside. Blair killed one in the airlock.”

“You’re full of surprises, Kane. I’ll give you that.” Brice turns to Tarlow. “Who’s this?”

“A local,” I answer, before giving Brice and the two soldiers with him the quickest rundown I can manage.

“What’s the plan, then?” asks Brice. “With all the debris in the air, I think the Trogs will be out there a while trying to find us.” He looks around. “It’s not a huge asteroid, but it’ll take a couple of hours at least.”

Tarlow steps forward, stammers, and then says, “When the Trogs attacked last time, they pounded us with railguns before disembarking their horde. It took a week for decent visibility to return up top and another few weeks for most of the broken rock to settle back down to the surface.”

“Well they won’t be out there for three weeks, that’s for sure.” Brice glances at Blair, then his eyes settle on me.

I start to speak, and Blair, suddenly back in MSS Colonel mode, talks right over me. “The group we killed was heading into the airlock. So no guarantees they’ll be out there a long time. Not all of them, anyway.”

Into her pause, I blurt, “We need to get this show on the road.” They all look at me, and why not? I said it with the confidence of someone who has a plan. After a quick spin on my brain’s imagination wheel, I come up with one. “Tarlow, can we access that video feed for all the internal cameras? How do we connect our SDF suit comms to the internal relay system?”

“Passcode for the comm,” says Tarlow, again like it was a question so stupid it was barely worth his breath to answer. After some pained sighs, he provides it.

Like the others, I power up my d-pad to enter the code. Thankfully, the temperamental little device decides it’s abused our relationship enough for one day, and accepts the numerals without error.

Looking up, Blair has hers ready to go.

Brice is pissed. His d-pad is on the fritz.

Turning to Tarlow and tapping my d-pad, I ask, “Can you fix these things, too? Mine doesn’t work half the time.”

He nods. “It takes a while,” he says. “There are plenty up top on those dead Chinese. Theirs always work.”

I doubt the Chinese have any better equipment than we do, but I don’t say anything about it.

Tarlow continues, “Your best bet is to switch yours out for one of theirs.”

“Only it’s integrated with the suit,” I argue. “How do you switch it?”

“I could do it,” he answers. “But it would take a while. And then you’d have to reprogram it and it—”

“Takes a while?” I guess, with a big eye roll.

Neither of the troops who came in with Brice can get their equipment to respond to the passcode.

“What about camera access?” asks Blair.

“The room I’ve been hiding out in is on sublevel three,” says Tarlow, “I tapped into the camera feed and set up some monitors to watch.”

“That’s it, then,” I announce. I point to the two soldiers who came in with Brice. “You two, go with Blair and Tarlow and get down to that room. Keep on eye on Tarlow.” I turn to Brice. “We’ll hit the other airlocks and collect any survivors who make it inside.” Looking back to Blair, I see she’s pissed again, now that I’m passing out orders. “We’ll send them your way.

Thankfully, she doesn’t pick a new fight.

“Tarlow,” I ask, “how do I find my way around this complex?”

“I’ve been taking all the maps off the walls,” he says sheepishly. “The Trogs understand the pictures. They’re not stupid.” He shrugs. “I left the written signs up. They can’t read.”

“Not our language, anyway.”

“They can’t read at all,” he argues.

Jesus! Some people have to be obstinate about everything.

“So airlock signs?” asks Brice. “On the walls?”

“Hanging from the ceiling at hallway intersections.” Tarlow cocks his head toward one of the interior doors. “Each has an arrow showing the way.”

I tell Brice, “That’ll be good enough to start with.” Turning back to Tarlow, I ask, “Which way to the nearest airlock?”

He points through one of the doorways. “Down that way, third left. About a hundred meters. There’s no sign marking that one.”

“Great.” Brice starts to go.

“When I get down to my computer,” says Tarlow, “I can send a map to your d-pad. Look for the message to come through.”

“Good.” Looking back to Blair as I follow Brice, I say, “Once you’re in front of the monitors, you’ll need to direct us to whichever airlock our troops come through.”

“I know how to do my job, Major.” She raises her voice for the next part, so it’s clear to all of us it’s an order. “Get moving.”

Chapter 12

Brice and I are in a featureless hall cut through the asteroid’s stone. Technically, it’s a tunnel, but not what I’d imagine a mining tunnel to look like. Each wall is flat and straight, set at right angles with the ceiling and floor. The long corridor we ran down to get here, this hall, and the one we saw on the way, look pretty much like any hall in a large building back on earth. Like a hospital, in fact, with floors ground smooth and colored a light gray. Only the rough texture and pale whitewash inadequately masking the natural color of the stone walls give away the secret that you’re underground.

We’ve come to a stop in a twenty-meter-long stub of a passage branched off the main corridor. All it contains is an airlock door, right at the end. The door isn’t open. No light is on above to indicate it’s being used. None of our troops is standing in the hall, uninjured and happy to see us.

I stare at the door as I shuffle closer to it, willing it to open, wanting to see someone from my platoon come through.

“My dog used to do that,” says Brice. “Stare at his food bowl when he was hungry, like maybe looking at it would magically fill it up.”

Unable to come up with a clever retort, I look back down the way we came.

“Not a speck of anything to hide behind,” says Brice.

“Back to the main hall?” I’m not sure what to do. My hopes were pinned too tightly to the prospect of our troops being here, awaiting direction.

He shrugs. “No cover there, either.”

I start walking back. “We’ll keep an eye on the light over the airlock door. From the corner, we can watch the main hall, too.”

“Good enough.” Brice follows along, glancing over his shoulder in case the airlock light should change color.

The floor shakes and I hear a rumble through the air in the hall.

I look up. “Still bombing us?”

“Or our troops setting off charges,” says Brice. “Those explosions are too big for them to be hand grenades.”

Two more explosions quake through the floor.

I call over the comm. “Blair, progress?”

“On level three,” she tells me. “Trogs are down here, however, they haven’t seen us.”

“Can you get to Tarlow’s video room?”

“He says yes.”

“You need our help with those Trogs?” Still disappointed about not finding any of our soldiers, I’m considering abandoning my plan to sweep the airlocks.

“Too many,” she tells me. “Two guns won’t make a difference.”

I don’t agree. Brice and I have automatic weapons. She and the two troops with her are carrying ill-fitting Trog antiques.

Antiques? I suppress a laugh at that thought. Our forces were using pretty much the same railguns until our two heavy assault divisions launched with the new weaponry yesterday morning.

Brice takes up a position at the corner where the two halls meet. He’s in the branch hall and scanning back and forth down the main corridor.

I stand at the opposite corner, keeping an eye on the airlock. “How long should we wait?”

“As long as it takes.”

Disappointed with his answer, I tell him, “You’ve been in this shit before. Is that all you’ve got—vague bullshit?”

“Get used to it. This isn’t a training sim with multiple choice answers anymore.” His dismissiveness seems a little harsh. Drilling his hard eyes through my faceplate, he says, “I’ll apologize if you want me to.”

I roll my eyes and look down his hall. “Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of camaraderie between men who’ve gone to war together?”

Brice rolls out another of his bleak chuckles. “Maybe I’m out of practice. Maybe I’m not in the mood.” He rescans his hall and glances back toward the airlock door. “Everybody dies.”

I nod, conversationally, out of habit, polite agreement, I don’t know. I stop, and I start ticking through the numbers in my head again. Holy mother of flaming dog shit! I don’t know if anybody in my company is still alive.

Maybe everybody does die.

Phil and Penny, my two best friends are dead.

Wait.

There’s Jill. Perhaps she’s it. The portion of her platoon not killed in the cruiser assault is all that’s left of my command.

“See,” says Brice.

I look up from wherever my eyes had wandered. Brice is scrutinizing me.

“See?” he repeats. “Something in your brain triggers when they start dying by the dozen. Like the emotion meter redlines and blows a fuse, so you forget to feel it. That’s how you keep moving.”

I’m not sure that’s true. It keeps coming up and bothering me. I thought the numbers were a refuge from the emotion, but I find the dismal death counts turning on me.

“When you stop and breathe,” he says. “When you take a minute to stare at a door that doesn’t open, when you have time to sleep, when you’re in a platoon compartment looking at forty faces that will all soon be dead, those are the times when it comes back, the memories, the emotions. They’ll ruin you as a soldier if you let them. In the quiet times, you have to deal with that shit in your head. When you do, it hurts. Blown fuses are easier.”

Brice looks up and down each of the halls again.

“How many have died under your command?” I regret asking even as the last syllable crosses the comm link between us.

For the tiniest of moments, his eyes look glassed with tears—that passes with a blink, and a face turned hard. “I stopped counting when I stopped sleeping.”

“How do you deal with it?” I’m still trying to tally the number of dead who followed my orders to their end.

“I don’t have any Freudian hoodoo, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I glance away. It was what I was asking.

“I’m wired for it,” says Brice, “I guess, as much as anybody who’s not a sociopath. I handle it. Yeah, I lose sleep. I’m angry sometimes for no good reason.” And then his laugh flows out, black as tar, sticky and hot. “And fragging a shitbird officer without a blink of remorse. There’s no justice in this war, on our planet, perhaps not anywhere in the whole damn universe. Maybe justice is a fantasy backward civilizations like ours think is real, like sun gods and fairies. I don’t know.” He takes a deep breath. “When I pulled that trigger and plugged Captain Milliken, for just a second there, justice existed. It made some of the shit better.”

I nod, not out of courtesy, because I wonder if he’s right. I wonder more if I’ll become as jaded when I’ve been in the war as long as he has. Like I’m going to live that long. That seems funny to me. So I laugh, echoing Brice.

The humor of it is contagious, and Brice joins back in. “I think you’re wired like me. When the metal is in the air, and the Troglodytes are coming to kill you, you keep a level head, and you don’t dwell on the death. You’re not squeamish when the blood is boiling off in the vacuum. You’re a natural. My advice, don’t let your head get in the way too much. Right now, you react well, with good instincts. Unfortunately, one thing you need to accept from the get-go, everybody dies. They were dead the moment they put on that shitty orange suit. That will be the truth, until we run out of people on earth or we kill every damn last one of these apes and all their little gray popsicle-dick bosses. You and me, we’ll die along the way. Accept that, and you’ll be fine. We knocked out four Trog ships today, and for a moment, we’d conquered a Trog base. Yet there are nearly a thousand Trogs running around this rock looking for us, and another ten thousand up on that ship. I’d be surprised if we don’t die fighting in these caves today. Too bad we don’t have one of those MSS propaganda crews on hand to record it all. At least we’d be heroes back on earth.”

Chapter 13

My d-pad signals something incoming. I tap it, open the message, click the attachment, and see it’s a map.

Blair’s on the comm. “We’re in Tarlow’s control room.”

I inform Brice.

He smiles. “Now you know how long we wait, if you’re still interested in the answer.”

“Tarlow just sent you a map,” says Blair.

“I got it,” I tell her, “but it looks like only one level.”

“He’s sending maps of the others.”

My d-pad chimes, and I download each image. Not exactly the 3-D interactive, full-color, hologram style I was hoping for. Then again, I wasn’t expecting to actually get the maps, either.

“Each level is different,” says Tarlow over the comm. “Slightly in some cases, a lot in others, depending on how deep you are. You’ll have to open the map for whichever level you find yourself on. Right now you’re on sublevel one. The first image I sent.”

“Got it,” I tell him. “Blair, what’s the story with the cameras? There’s nobody at this airlock.”

“Checking now,” she answers with no hint at the friction between us.

That worries me.

She replies, “Tarlow says there are nearly three hundred cameras mounted around the complex. Nearly half are functioning. To make matters worse, there are only six monitors down here, and it’s a pain to scroll through.”

“Let me control it,” says Tarlow, apparently trying to push one of the troops off the computer. “You’ll break it.”

“Sounds like fun,” I tell her. “We’ll wait here until you give us an airlock to head to.” Better than wandering around and praying. “How many lead to the surface?”

“Seventeen,” she answers.

I tell Brice.

To Blair, I say, “Try and keep an eye out for the Trogs coming our way, if you don’t mind.”

“Working on—” she stops.

“What?” Something is wrong. It’s an easy guess.

Brice notices the look on my face. He’s patient. He doesn’t press. He raises his weapon to his shoulder and points it in one direction down the corridor, and then the other.

“Trogs, coming your way,” says Blair, urgently.

The light above the airlock door at the end of the short hall flashes red.

Brice sees it and steps into the main corridor. He wants to use the wall as cover from any fire that might come from that direction.

Eyes still on the airlock door, expecting Trogs to come out, I step around the corner.

Before I can tell Brice it’s Trogs, not troops, in the airlock, Brice’s railgun bursts a fast series of dull pops—high-velocity rounds tearing through the air.

The sound startles me. They don’t make any sound in the vacuum we’ve been fighting in.

“Trogs!” Brice shouts. “Down the corridor!”

“Blair!” I call. “Who’s in the airlock?”

“Trogs. I told you.”

Shit.

She doesn’t even know about the ones in the main corridor.

I flip my weapon to full auto and leap across the corridor so I can see down to the end without Brice in the way. Even as I’m trying to make out my targets in the distance, I pull the trigger.

The hall fills with tracer-like streaks. Air sizzles and pops. Rounds hit the rock walls and explode in shards of sharp stone.

“What’s happening?” Blair asks, as she starts shouting orders to Tarlow.

I can’t make out how many Trogs are down there. I see bodies falling, and others jumping into side passages or through doorways. Some are turning their backs and running, exposing their vulnerable side.

“Make ‘em pay,” Brice tells me.

“How many do you see?” I pull the trigger, noticing most of Brice’s shots are hitting the walls up and down the hall. “Dammit, you’re wasting ammo! What’s wrong?”

“Not wasting!” he shouts.

Shots are coming back at us—I can’t see the shooters through all the dust and debris blown off the wall.

And they can’t see me!

Then I understand. Brice created a smokescreen for us.

“Kane! Kane!” Blair’s worried, but I’m kinda busy.

I pull back into the side hall, take out one of my two remaining C4 blocks and stick it to the wall at shoulder height next to a sign that indicates the cafeteria is to the left.

“Time to go!” shouts Brice.

“One sec.”

He glances over, clearly irritated, then sees what I’m doing. “Hurry.”

I take a quick look at the airlock door. The light flashes yellow. Using my d-pad, I set the charge for a timed detonation of forty seconds, enough time for the Trogs to come out of the airlock, head toward the main hall, and pause as they figure out something is going on.

God, I hope the timing works out.

“Ready!”

Brice glances at me, turns, and runs.

I max my defensive grav and follow him at full speed in the direction of the cafeteria.

Chapter 14

“Blair,” I shout as I run, “if Tarlow has cameras in this part of sub one, we could use some intel.”

Brice rounds a corner, sliding as he goes, and hits the wall.

Right behind him and running just as fast, I hit the wall, too. My defensive grav bounces me down to the floor and then up off the opposite wall.

“Turn that shit down,” Brice yells as he runs on ahead.

I’m spinning head over heels, and it takes a moment to get my feet back under me.

Brice is well ahead by the time I’m running again.

I crank down my defensive grav though I’m agonizing over whether it’s the right thing to do. The field probably already saved me from a shot in the back. Brice is twenty meters ahead now, and the chasing Trogs are twenty meters closer.

An explosion thunders and a shockwave hits me, knocking me down face-first. The grav bounces me right back up, and I impact the wall again.

“Goddammit!” I adjust the deflective grav even further, find my feet, lose some time to the pursuing Trogs, and start running again. I don’t see Brice. The passage is empty ahead of me. I hit the comm. “Brice, can you hear me?” No immediate response. “Blair, where’d Brice go?”

“We’re trying,” she calls, caught up in the excitement as if she were in the hall with us. “I had a camera. Two of them in the main corridor, and they just went black.”

Ahead, far down the hall, I see a helmet poke out of a doorway. I skid to a halt as I bring my rifle up.

“It’s me!” Brice shouts, raising a palm. Now that we’re in line-of-sight, his signal reaches me again.

I lower my railgun and run.

“Where are you?” Blair asks. “All I see are dead Trogs and debris in the air.”

“Off the main corridor,” I pant. “Last sign I saw said ‘cafeteria this way’.”

I hear Tarlow rattling off something as he works. “There!”

“Got you,” Blair tells me, suddenly calm.

Brice ducks in through the doorway and I see there’s a sign attached to the wall by the door.

“Definitely the cafeteria,” I tell Blair. “We’re going in. Please tell me there’s a back way out.”

“Yes, yes!” Tarlow shouts at me. “The other side of the cafeteria exits to a parallel hall, and through the back of the kitchen there’s a doorway leading to a service lift.”

“Trogs?” I ask. I already know there aren’t any inside, or Brice wouldn’t have waved me to follow. “Which way to safety?”

“Looking,” Blair tells me, and then to Tarlow she yells, “You need to be faster at changing cameras.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, you hemorrhoidal shrew!” Apparently, Tarlow has a short fuse. “This system… it’s just pieces, scraps.”

Good God, I was hoping for a tactical advantage with the cameras, and all I’m seeing is another layer of clusterfuck. I hit the double swinging doors, and I’m in the cafeteria. The bulbs in the ceiling are burning daylight bright. I spot Brice across the basketball court-sized space, fingering a control panel on the wall.

He glances back and me and jogs my way. “How close are they?

I’m out of breath and adrenaline is beating me up from the inside. “I didn’t look.”

“Well, dammit, do!”

I unfreeze my feet, step back to the door, and peek out. Down at the turn in the hall, a few Trogs are tentatively coming around the corner, scanning the walls for booby traps.

“At the corner.” I smile wickedly, because I know my bomb did more than kill some. “Slow. They’re expecting another trap.”

Brice laughs, “That was good thinking, fast thinking, planting that charge. How many are left?”

“Blair,” I call, “I need a Trog count. How many are out there?”

“The hall on the other side of the cafeteria is clear.” Blair is rattling out the words fast and accurate. “The camera in the service lift is out. In the hall you and Brice used to access the cafeteria, the camera is mounted down at the end. I can see what you saw when you peeked out a second ago, only my view is worse.”

“How many are coming?” I ask.

“Maybe ten so far. Fifteen now.”

“Fifteen plus,” I tell Brice.

He’s kicking chairs, and realizes almost immediately their magnetized feet are holding them to the floor. He starts jerking them up and setting them adrift in the light-g. “Three days?” he asks. “They’ll hang in the air for three days?”

I shrug and nod. I don’t understand what he’s doing. “Something like that.”

“Help me, man.”

I reach for the nearest chair, three or four meters inside the door.

“Not that one.”

It’s alone, just sitting there. “What?”

“All that bouncing off the walls rattled your brains, Kane. Take a deep breath, get in the game. I set a charge under that one.”

Duh!

“Leave some of the other chairs on the floor, so they don’t seem out of place. The rest in the air.”

I run through the cafeteria, picking up tables and chairs, sending them off in different directions. It’s 3D billiards with utilitarian furniture.

“Blair,” I call, “I need a status.”

“Maybe twenty in the hall,” she tells me. “Pretty brave. Walking fast. You’ve got maybe thirty seconds. What the hell are you doing in the cafeteria?”

“Thirty seconds,” I tell Brice.

He points to the door across the room, the one exiting to the other hallway. “Move over there. Stand in the open doors. Wait for the Trogs to come through. Make sure they see. Shoot a few if you have to, but miss. Then duck.”

“Where are you—”

“Do it,” he tells me. “Wait for the blast, then hurry your ass back in here and be ready to shoot. Oh, and max your deflective grav once you’re in the hall, just in case. Don’t forget to jack it back down before you return.”

I’m thinking that’ll be the best time to have it maxed—well maybe the second-best. I see his point. Poor suit control isn’t worth the added defense. He’s lived through two years of this war. I’ve barely lived through two days. I need to listen to him. I run to the far doors.

Chapter 15

I pull both doors open and push the handles into magnet catches on the walls to keep them there. I peek into the narrow corridor, just in case. It’s empty. All the Trogs are in the other hall.

“Don’t trust me?” Blair asks, actual humor in her voice, except definitely no laugh.

“Of course I do.” Empty words, but my adrenaline is still coursing, my brain is on full alert, multi-tasking my way through everything now, max computational speed. For an organic brain anyway.

I turn back toward the cafeteria.

Where the hell did Brice go?

“In the kitchen,” he comms. “Behind the buffet counter.”

In hushed tones, Blair tells me, “The Trogs will be at the door on the other side of the cafeteria in a moment.”

I don’t say anything about the unnecessary whisper. All of us humans suffer from our upbringing. “How many?”

“Just the twenty-five or so.”

Just.

I laugh. Oh, why the hell not?

I step into the corridor and put my back to a wall beside the open door. The Trogs coming into the cafeteria won’t be able to see me.

“What are you doing?” Brice is pissed.

“This’ll work better,” I say. “Trust me.”

“Yes, Major.”

I’m guessing that’ll be the way he addresses me from now on when he’s not happy. If we live through this. “Blair, tell me when they’re inside.”

“Looking through the doors now,” she tells me. “They’re confused about the floating chairs. They’re conferring in the hall.”

Waiting.

“They’ve pulled the doors open,” she says. “Several are looking inside again.”

That’ll have to be my cue.

I jump across the open doorway like I was running up the corridor and stop as if I’m surprised to see the Trogs across the cafeteria. I bring my railgun to my hip and fire a spray of slugs into the wall above their heads as I fake a stumble and fall out of their view.

At least that’s what they see.

Once out of sight, I throw my back against the wall and raise my rifle, ready to ambush any Trogs who come through. “Brice! Brice! They’re yours.”

I hear his voice, but there’s too much static to understand.

“They’re all coming inside now,” says Blair. “Not running. Not hurrying. No, not all. Half of them. Most of them.”

Thunder rocks sublevel one. The air feels like it’s exploding again. I’m knocked over on my side as pieces of furniture and bodies fly through the doors I’d propped open.

“Lost my cafeteria cam!” shouts Blair.

Doesn’t matter. Not to me. Not right this second. I have my assignment. I reduce my defensive grav as I jump back up and plant myself at the corner. I peek inside. Magically clear.

Well, not magic, chemistry and physics did their work. The blast blew everything away from the center of the room. Much of the furniture and Trog debris is either stuck to or bouncing back off the walls.

Some of the Trogs are moving fast, rebounding on too much defensive grav, beach balls with no control, arms and legs swinging, alive but dazed. Others are shooting through the room, balloons rocketing red plumes of blood vapor, parts of furniture lethally protruding from their bodies.

I shout, “Blair, did we get them all?”

“No!” she warns. “Seven or eight are still in the other hall. They’re coming!”

I look to the other side of the cafeteria just in time to see them crowding through the door.

I drop to a knee and fire.

The Trogs are ready for my assault with chest plates set to max deflect. My rounds arc into the floor, walls, and ceiling.

They’re coming quick, not full-speed, but fast enough to make me plan my retreat. The Trogs seem to understand that the grav from their frontal plates is more effective when combined, when they’re packed tightly together.

“Goddamn!” I shout. “These things aren’t supposed to be smart.”

“Don’t believe everything you see on TV,” Brice tells me. “Don’t get up and run, Kane. Draw them closer.”

I know what he has in mind, but it’s my life he’s gambling with.

I scoot back, just a bit, enough to let the Trogs know I’m scared. I flip from auto back to single-shot. No sense wasting ammo.

They’ve crossed half the cafeteria, and they’re picking up speed as their confidence builds. They know they have me.

Fortunately, not all things we know as fact turn out to be true.

A stream of hypervelocity slugs traces out from the far corner of the cafeteria, raking across the Trogs’ exposed backs.

Blood sprays into the air. Limbs fly away. Torsos rip. Troglodytes fall.

Seemingly, before the slugs have all found their marks, Brice is on his feet, stalking through the chaotic space, tapping out the remaining Trogs who aren’t dead yet.

“What’s happening?” Blair asks. “What’s going on? Did it work?”

“Clear,” I tell her. “We’re both good.”

Brice moves toward me, a grim smile on his face.

I give him a nod.

He nods back. No, ‘Yes, Major’ bullshit.

We’re comrades again.

And fuck, we’re good at this shit.

Chapter 16

Blair is shouting, “Kane! Kane!”

A distant explosion rumbles through the stone in the walls. There’s another fight somewhere. I hope our troops are getting the best of it.

I look around as Brice and I run through a passageway, not going anywhere in particular, just getting away from the scene of noisy mayhem we just sewed. More Trogs are sure to be on their way to investigate.

“Kane!”

“Yeah?” I pant. “Are we back in trouble?”

“I don’t know where you are.”

That explains her yelling. She felt like she was losing control.

“Stop for a sec,” I tell Brice, as I look around for pursuers.

Brice is uncomfortable. We’re midway between two intersections, easy targets for Trogs coming from either end. He points to a cross hall ahead. “We’ll stop up there.”

He’s already running.

“We’re looking for you.” Blair’s voice sounds anxious through the crackle on the comm.

“Here,” says Tarlow. “I think they went this way.”

At the intersection, Brice peeks around the corners, readies his weapon, and says, “Okay.”

I come to a stop beside him and glance at the signs on the wall. I comm Blair, “Intersection of halls Q and J. There’s an airlock door to a machine shop or something just down from us. Can’t tell for sure—the sign is all scratched up.”

“I know where that is,” comms Tarlow.

“Call up the camera,” Blair tells him. To me, she says, “We have eleven of our people in a repair hangar that—”

“Ships?” I interrupt, too excited. Hangars imply flight, which means we have a chance to rocket the hell out of here. “Are there ships in there?”

“Not really,” she counters, seeming to take some satisfaction from correcting me. “Big pieces of equipment. Mining…things. It’s a huge place, open to the vacuum. There’s an airlock they can use to access sub one.”

Probably no ships, but survivors of the bombardment. I nudge Brice and smile. Good news coming over the comm. I ask Blair, “How do I get there?”

“Ask her about the Trogs.” Brice has his priorities in order. “Where are they?”

“Most of them are on the surface,” Tarlow informs us.

“Most?” Derision wrapped up in a one-syllable question. We have no room for ambiguity.

Tarlow hears every drip of meaning in my response. “Don’t get your knickers in a knot. I’m trying to help.”

“Blair,” I ask, “do we know how many Trogs are down here? Do we know where they are?”

“We’ve spotted two squads,” she answers. “Six in one, a dozen in the other. The six are in the cafeteria. They went in a few minutes ago, but now I can’t see them. The cameras in that room aren’t working, so we don’t know what they’re doing.”

Like I give a shit what they’re up to inside. I don’t say that, of course. “Let me know if they come this way. The other squad?”

“Headed in your direction,” she tells me. “They’re cautious. They have a ghost Trog leading them. He seems smart. Checking rooms as they go, methodically and slowly. As long as you don’t make any noise and stay away from them, you don’t have to worry.”

I ask again. “Where are they?”

“Near the corner of Oscar and Frieda One,” Tarlow explains.

“Oscar and Frieda?” I roll my eyes and Brice sees. “Fucking hallway names.” Back to Tarlow, I ask, “You mean halls O and F?”

“It’s what they call them up here.” Tarlow is defensive again. “I don’t—”

“Look,” I cut him off. “Nobody’s blaming you. We’re just trying to live through this. The signs are labeled in letters. Talk to me in letters. I don’t have time to learn your naming system.” I’m scrolling around on the map image on my d-pad, trying to find the intersection where we’re standing.

Brice leans over for a peek. He points. “Is that the cafeteria there?”

I stop scrolling for a moment. “Yeah.”

He looks back up the corridor.

A quick series of explosions shakes the walls.

“Is that coming from down there?” I ask over the comm.

“On the surface?” replies Tarlow.

“Railguns or C4?” I hope the bombardment hasn’t restarted.

“Can’t say.” Tarlow sounds sheepish. “No camera up there can see through the dust.”

I put the explosions out of my mind. We took several turns and ran down through a few long passages to get here. I glance around. “We’re safe for the moment.” Then back to Blair. “That group is still in the cafeteria, right?”

“Right.”

I finally find O and F on the map. “Here,” I tell Brice as I point. “A dozen here with a ghost Trog in the lead. They’re searching for us room by room.” I scroll the map to our position. “This is where we are. I think.”

“I’ve found you on camera,” says Blair.

“I feel all warm and fuzzy.” It’s a dickish response, but the least offensive of the two I was contemplating. “Where do we need to go?”

“Airlock thirteen,” Tarlow instructs. “Thirteen.”

I’m scrolling my map image again, looking for the number. “I only see hallway labels.”

“The image doesn’t have any airlock numbers on it?”

I locate what looks like the airlock we entered the subterranean level through. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”

“I must have sent you the wrong file.”

Brice isn’t hearing Tarlow and Blair, but my side of it is telling him enough. “Cluster?”

I nod.

“Thirteen is at the end of Oscar One.”

“Oscar One?” I make it sound like an insult. “The hallway the ghost Trog and his squad are in, that’s Oscar One?”

“Yes,” answers Tarlow like he doesn’t understand the connection.

“It sounds bad,” Blair tells us, I guess trying to offer comfort with her bureaucratic coldness. “I think we can pull it off. There’s a cross hall, Einstein One,” she pauses and corrects herself, “E-1. If you can get there, it intersects with O near the airlock.”

“How near?” I ask.

“Near enough.”

That’s a lie. I have no doubt. “Which way do we need to go?”

Chapter 17

I peek around the corner. O-1 is wide, maybe four meters, one of the main corridors on this level, running three hundred meters across the complex. Way down at the far end, I think I see a green light above an airlock door. Just over halfway, Trogs are in the hall, some are loitering. Others are filing into a room through its double airlock doors. Nearly every room on this level has an airlock in case of a depressurization accident somewhere else on the base.

On the comm link with Brice, I share a realization, “This place is huge.”

“Nine levels, the size of this maze,” Brice leans for a quick look around the corner, “I’d say you’re right.”

“It must have been a profitable venture before it turned to the rebel cause and became a Free Army base.”

“Probably still is,” suggests Brice. “Unless the Free Army built it out this way.”

Recalling the wide variety of shops and storage rooms we passed as we were finding our way here, I deduce, “There’s a lot of infrastructure here. Seems like overkill for a few hundred people running an ice mining operation.”

Brice peeks down the hall at the Trogs again, then takes a look in the other direction. “What do you think? Thirty meters of straight hall with not an iota of cover between here and the door?”

The door at this end of the corridor is the one we’re supposed to bring our eleven soldiers through. I look at a thirty-meter kill zone—one that over Blair’s camera looked ‘close enough.’ I sigh. “This blows.”

“Before you give yourself an aneurism,” says Brice. “Is this the right airlock?”

“Not that it matters much.” I point a thumb in the other direction. “The Trogs are about halfway up the hall. The same distance from each airlock.”

“Check with Blair.”

I comm her and Tarlow in. “Are we at the right end of O-1?”

“Yes, the airlock should be just to your right,” answers Tarlow.

“Just?”

Brice hears my side of the conversation again, and his dark laugh suggests maybe he’s thinking of heading down to level three and punching his fist through Tarlow’s faceplate.

I say to them, “I’m hoping while we were on the way over here you came up with a plan to make this work. Do you know how long we’ll be exposed out there? The Trogs will see us. I’d prefer not to be shot making this happen.”

“Don’t get whiney on me now.” Blair’s mean inner core is shining through.

“I’m just saying, if the plan is to shoot it out in front of the airlock, then me and Brice are ditching it. We’ll find another route through this maze so we can flank those Trogs and ambush them when they’re coming out of a room. We can deal with getting our troops inside later.”

“There’s no later,” Blair triumphantly tells me. “One of the troops up top found the airlock door, and they’re divvying up in groups to come through.”

“Great.” I check my ammo, and heave a weary sigh.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” Tarlow offers. “I’ve tapped into the lighting control systems on sub one.”

“The whole floor?” I ask, perking up.

“Yes. Give it about thirty seconds.”

“Give what?”

Red and white emergency lights start flashing down the hall, casting splashes of color in our direction.

Brice looks at me with a question on his face.

I shrug, and peek around the corner. “I think this is Tarlow’s doing.”

The lights in the hundred meters of hall closest to our airlock turn off.

Those flashing are down at the other end.

Trogs down that way have their weapons up, and they’re looking around, confused.

“This is it,” says Blair. “It’s what we can do.”

Brice looks me up and down.

I glance down to check my color. In some places, my worn orange suits shows through. Mostly I’m still coated in asteroid dust.

“We’ll look like shadows against these stone walls,” says Brice. “Pretty good camouflage for this environment. With the light show, I think we’re safe to go.” He doesn’t wait for me to agree. He jogs into the hall and heads for the airlock door.

I follow, casting worried glances back down toward the Trogs.

Near them, lights are shining brightly down from the ceiling. With me and Brice in darkness, I’m hoping they can’t see us.

Ahead of me, Brice hits the airlock door release and it immediately swings open. The interior light blinks on as he jumps inside and it bathes him in a bright white. The same glow silhouettes me.

“Shit!” The words escape even as I’m diving inside to hide behind a bulkhead and press myself against an interior wall. “The lights in the airlock, Tarlow! Kill the lights in the airlock!”

Blair spews a fast tirade at him.

“I, I… they weren’t reading on, when I started,” babbles Tarlow.

Brice punches the button to swing the airlock door shut.

“I would have…” Tarlow’s words get lost in Blair’s ridicule.

The door, slowly, way too slowly, comes to a close.

The comm line goes silent for several painfully slow seconds, and then Blair passes us the news. “They’re coming your way.”

“Disappointing.” It seems like a good time to switch from sarcasm to understatement, a subtle form of sarcasm, in truth.

Turning anxiously to Brice, I ask, “How long did it take for the airlock to cycle last time?” I don’t ask ‘how long before the Trogs get here?’ ‘What do you think they’ll do when they run up and peek through the small glass viewport in the door and see two humans inside?’ ‘Will they shoot through the door?’ ‘Will those disruptor blades cut steel?’ All valid questions.

Air is hissing out of the airlock.

The sound is changing with the lowering pressure.

Brice is patient and prepared. His back is against the opposite door, and his rifle is ready.

“Four,” says Blair. “The rest are staying behind. Four are coming to investigate?”

“Running?” I ask.

“Jogging,” she tells me. “Not fast. Cautious.”

The air inside is almost gone.

Just a few more seconds.

Brice takes a glance through the exterior glass.

“What do you see?” I ask him.

“Stairs,” he answers. “Dust. Not as thick as outside, but it’s pretty murky out there.

A light above the exterior door flashes to green.

Brice pops the door open, and I nearly bowl him over to get through.

In a rush, we push the door closed behind us.

The light inside goes out.

“Made it,” I comm Blair, as Brice mounts the stairs.

He’s calling to the troops in the hanger. The metallic ore in the dust is crackling the link with static, but I hear other voices.

“Don’t shoot,” Brice orders. “We’re coming up.”

“Contact,” I tell Blair. “Keep me posted on those Trogs. Also, we’ll need directions to another airlock so we can come back inside.”

Chapter 18

Blair tells me. “One of the Trogs hit the button to cycle the airlock.”

“Brice,” I call as I reach the top of the stairs beside him. We’re at ground level. “Four Trogs will be in the airlock in a minute.”

He looks down into the stairwell, twenty steps deep with the airlock exit at the end. His grim smile tells me all I need to know. Best odds we’ve had all day.

Dust hanging in the vacuum casts a ghostly gray over a digging machine as big as a bus, roughly stacked parts for a disassembled conveyor, drilling rigs of various sizes, a grav lift, and several oddly configured spaceships. I can make out the webbing of metal joists spanning a ceiling nearly lost in the haze above us. Several large holes are cut through the roof, each looking large enough to fly a small ship through. The hangar’s walls are far enough away from us to be obscured by the dust.

“At least this gray crap isn’t as thick in here as it was outside,” I mutter.

Human figures solidify out of the haze and come toward us.

“We have thirty seconds to set up an ambush,” Brice tells them as he nods his head down the stairs. “Four Trogs will be cycling out. They’re following us.” He starts to point at soldiers, directing them where to go. “We want the Trogs well away from the airlock stairs before we pull the triggers. I don’t want one getting back down and punching the button. If that happens, and one gets in, we’ll have another twenty coming to the party. And that’s just from the inside. There are more out there. The faster we kill these, the more likely our presence here will remain a secret.”

“We know,” says one of the soldiers, a sergeant Kendrick. It’s clear she’s put herself in charge of the unit, though I can’t tell whether the rest of the grunts are from one platoon or several.

Turns out, it doesn’t matter.

Brice and Kendrick quickly divide the soldiers into crossfire positions, leaving each one kneeling or standing behind a piece of metal equipment for cover.

I find myself beside Brice, pointing my rifle over the top of a small survey car parked directly above the airlock chamber in the ground below. When the Trogs come out, they’ll be walking up the stairs with their backs to us.

Brice points at the dust in the stairwell as he nudges me with his elbow. “Watch the light reflecting on that gray shit. When it changes color, they’ll be coming.”

Good warning system, I think.

A moment later, the hue reflected from the dust particles switches from green to white.

Brice warns everyone.

“All four are exiting the airlock,” Blair confirms over my comm.

Thirteen of us are arrayed to fire. Half behind, half from their right flank.

They don’t need my rifle, and they don’t need my full attention. The Trogs won’t last two seconds after Brice gives the word to fire. I kill my outbound comm to the platoon so my voice won’t distract them. “Blair, any word on other survivors?”

“We have three at airlock twelve,” she tells me. “Maybe five or so in a tunnel coming from one of the Trog’s gun pits.”

“You’re not sure on the count?” I ask.

“No cameras that way,” says Tarlow, making sure we all know it’s not his fault. “The airlock they came through was in the gun pit the Trogs constructed in the center of the colony. We caught a glimpse of them by sheer luck from a camera down a passageway they crossed in front of.”

“Where are they headed?”

“I’m leading them with the lights.” Tarlow is proud of the solution. “I’m darkening the halls they should avoid, and lighting the ones I want them to take.”

“Are they?” I ask. “Following?”

“They’re wary,” answers Blair, “but they’re taking direction, so far.”

A Trog is looking out of the stairwell thirty feet in front of my position, scanning for human forms, looking for movement, just like any good soldier would.

Another Trog comes up beside him.

They’re not in a hurry.

One points a finger at something it deems significant.

“Everyone wait,” Brice declares. “This will be easy if we snap the trap at the right time.”

“Where’s the nearest airlock to us,” I ask Blair, “if we go over the surface?”

“Far,” answers Tarlow. “At least a hundred meters and there’s no straight-line path.”

Straight line? What the hell does that matter? Nobody can walk a straight line out there. “Landmarks along the way?” I ask. “Buildings, communication dishes, anything?

“Yes, a building in your way,” answers Tarlow. “I need to call up the surface map to provide you the shape.”

Ugh.

The first two Trogs are on the ground ten paces from the stairs, waiting, looking for danger. Two take the final steps to the surface in unison and crouch.

They’re hunting, a behavior I’ve not seen from them yet. At least not from their low-level grunts.

One of the two Trogs behind turns to scan the area around the stairwell, the area where I’m hiding with Brice.

“Trogs don’t usually do that,” Brice tells me to confirm my observations. “The way they fight, in massive formations and frontal charges, they’re not used to having to worry about flanking attacks.”

I barely nod. I don’t want to give away our position.

The boldest one, the leader, moves forward. He has one of their single-shot rifles. The other three are carrying disruptors.

They’re all well away from the stairwell, moving cautiously toward a pathway past the bus-size digger.

“Fire!” Brice orders.

A glowing gridwork of railgun slugs tears through the dingy slurry, leaving trails devoid of dust particles, and etching bright lines on my retinas. Many of the trails bend as they encounter the Trog’s defensive fields. Most of the shots from behind burn straight through their backs, some punching holes, others fragmenting inside and shredding flesh in chunks huge enough to tear away arms and legs.

They look like marionettes, disintegrating and jerking, directionless and gory as the micro-g tugs gently to pull them down.

I guess instantly they’re all dead, but they don’t fall.

“Cease fire,” orders Brice.

A Trog spasms.

Three more rounds rip through its back. It stops moving.

The bodies drift in clouds of dust that swirl with their passing.

Blood sprays from suit tears, mingling with the gray, turning it red.

A string of intestine swirls out of a Trog’s shredded torso, hosing its digestive liquids into the evaporating vacuum.

“They’re all coming.” Blair is disappointed but not alarmed.

All?

“The ghost Trog?” I ask. “And his squad.”

“The ones from the cafeteria, too,” she answers. “They’re not wasting any time.”

I convey the information to Brice.

“Everybody, hold your positions.” He points to several soldiers. “Move those bodies out of sight. Do it quick.”

Four grunts jump up, hustling like real-live soldiers.

Over the comm, I ask, “Blair, how close?”

“They’ll be outside the airlock in twenty seconds.”

The bodies are easy to move in the low g, easy to hide. The haze of blood, and the red-stained dust, isn’t going anywhere. It’ll be readily seen by any wary Trog coming up the airlock stairs.

I nudge Brice. “What do you think?”

“We need to be ready just in case, but this won’t work twice,” he tells me. “Telepathy and all. If those downstairs are coming this way, it’s because they know something happened up here. It’s exactly why ambush doesn’t work on Trogs.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “It’s been working all day.”

“Trogs have all got the bug in their heads.”

“I thought they were naturally telepathic?” I realize immediately I’m repeating crap I learned from MSS newsfeeds.

Damn! How much of the shit I’ve always accepted as true comes from them?

I know lots of things. I don’t tend to remember where I learned each bit of information. That’s going to be a problem.

“Next time you have a chance to look inside one’s skull,” says Brice—because in war, that’s the kind of thing that could come up any day—”look for the spaghetti bug. Just like the pictures of the ones you see back on earth. A Trog brain looks like a human one. Their skull bones are exactly like ours, only thicker, more bulbous. I always wondered about that, the similarities. Makes sense, I guess. Now that we know Grays are running the Trog show, too.”

That’s all interesting stuff, but it’s not what I’m asking. “What do you mean about the ambushes working and not working?”

“These Trogs have some kind of militaristic culture,” says Brice. “At least it looks that way to me, but hey, I’ve only seen their armies. It skews my perceptions. Know what I mean?”

I do. I nod.

“I think they’ve warred with each other in the past, maybe they still do,” he muses. “Who knows? The universe is a big place. The thing that won’t work if they’re all telepathic, is ambush. They’d never walk into one when fighting other Trogs because they’d always sense the Trogs hiding to shoot them in the back. Now, coming to fight us, ambush isn’t a tactic they know exists, so they walk right into the traps when we set them.”

“But,” I add, because I know that’s what’s coming next.

“But,” he continues, “not all of these Trogs died instantly when we shot them. However Trogs do it, one of them let his buddies downstairs in on our secret. Maybe not the details, but enough to let the others know if they come charging up here, we’ll fuck ‘em up.

I’m trying to reconcile this with the behavior of the Trogs in that line I killed when Blair and I were following those nine through the dust storm earlier. I wonder, did the instant death simply end communication? No SOS went out?

“If other Trogs are close enough,” Brice deduces, “the ones up here on the surface will be closing in to kill us while we’re waiting to spring an ambush that will never happen.”

“We can’t stay,” I realize. It’s the logical conclusion.

Blair chimes in. “Kane, you need to know, you’ve got about twenty Trogs down in the tunnel outside the airlock, waiting for you to come out. They’re setting an ambush.”

I look at Brice. “For stupid cavemen, they sure do learn quick.”

Chapter 19

“Blair,” I ask, “are all of the Trogs on sublevel one in the hall waiting to ambush us when we come out of the airlock?”

“All we know of,” she replies, clearly wondering what I’m getting at.

“That’s not the answer I want.” I’m slipping into the realm of unrealistic expectations. I know half the cameras in the complex don’t function. “Kick Tarlow in the nuts if you have to. I need a one-hundred-percent accurate answer.”

“I will, but—”

“No buts. No time,” I tell her. “Tarlow, are you on the line? Get me that answer. You’ve got sixty seconds, maybe less.”

Tarlow squeaks a response through a throat clenched in fright.

I’m tempted to add another threat but I know I’m asking for a degree of certainty he probably can’t provide. Still, he needs to try.

“What’s up?” asks Brice. “What do you have in mind?”

“All the Trogs on sub one are waiting inside to attack us.” I glance at the soldiers around us. “As long as they stay there, all of the other airlocks are open. All of sublevel one is safe.”

Blair reaches the same conclusion, and immediately sees the pitfall. “With no lucky run-in with Tarlow, they’ll be lost once they’re inside. With the limited number of monitors we have down here, we can’t use the hallway lights to lead them.”

I comm to Brice. “You still have the network access code?” I’m working the next steps in the problem.

He nods. “The Brice-meister doesn’t delete important information.”

Brice-meister?

Sometimes he’s a very odd man. I tell him, “Share it with Sergeant Kendrick and the others.” Switching back to Blair, I tell her, “I don’t know yet how many of these eleven will be able to set up their d-pads to communicate on the base network—some of them, no doubt. As soon as they’re on, provide them with surface and sublevel maps. Blair, you and Tarlow need to guide them to the nearest airlock and then disperse them on sub one so they can reach all the inner airlocks quickly and intercept survivors who make it through. Make sure they stay away from the Trogs outside the airlock below. Rally them all down on sublevel three where your team is holed up.”

Blair huffs.

I realize I’ve dumped too many imperatives on her and offended her sense of in-charge-liness.

“They won’t fit in here,” insists Tarlow.

“If you’re talking,” I tell him, “it better be because you’re done with your survey of sub one. Is sub one clear?”

No answer.

“Blair,” I catch myself before I proceed. I need to ask, or she and I are going to descend into another useless argument. “I don’t know how to deal with Tarlow’s concern about the size of his hidey-hole. Is this something you can resolve?” Jesus, the seconds on that long request feel wasted.

“I’ll take care of things down here?” she declares. “What’s your plan up there?”

Looking at Brice, hoping he agrees to stick with me, I say, “I’m staying in the hangar outside the airlock. As long as we’re present here keeping the attention of the Trogs below, they’ll continue to wait. Sub one will stay clear.” That’s a logical leap based on a guess and a handful of static dependencies changing with each passing second.

“Keeping their attention?” Brice laughs grimly.

“You in?” I ask him.

“Somebody once told me I was fucking good at this shit.” His quick nod follows. He’s in. No doubt.

“Find us some volunteers to stay,” I tell him.

“Volunteers?” he asks.

“Gotta be.” I look at him with the seriousness of the degrading situation clearly visible on my face. Hundreds of Trogs will be closing in on us through the slurry of dust and rock outside. The situation could be deadly for those who remain.

At least the ones who make their way down to hook up with Blair will have a chance. They can fight in the tunnels if Blair can find a competent tactician hidden inside her dunghill of self-importance. Or they can surrender and ride a slave ship back to Troglandia—or whatever the hell the Trogs call their home planet—to spend the rest of their natural lives studding out generations of serfs for the Grays there.

Better than dying, I guess.

Well, not if it were me. I’ll die before I kneel again.

Brice is talking to the troops. Passing out the info. Finding the volunteers.

“Tarlow.” I have no more patience and no more time. “Give me that answer.

“Clear,” he tells me.

“You’ll bet your life on it?” That’s what I’ll be doing, and what I’ll be asking my grunts to do.

He gulps audibly. “I can’t say more Trogs won’t come and—”

“I’m not asking you to predict the future,” I hiss. “My people need to reach your location safely. Make your shitty surveillance system do its job and make this happen.”

“I think you’ve got his attention,” says Blair. “You do what you need to do. We’ll do our part.”

“Good luck,” I tell her. It comes out harsh, but it’s sincere.

“Good luck to you, too, Kane.” She starts to say something else, pauses, and fumbles through a few starts. Nothing else comes over the comm.

“Don’t you worry about us,” I tell them, as I glance at Brice. Three soldiers are with him. The rest are heading toward the far end of the hangar. “People coming your way.”

Chapter 20

Do-nothing time starts in earnest.

The twenty-two Trogs inside the airlock stay where they are, waiting us out. Of course, if Brice is right, and he likely is, they have another plan in the works.

On our side, eight of our soldiers made for the next closest airlock, leaving three with us. Brice directed the grunts to take up positions watching from the hangar’s corners. One corner goes unguarded, leaving us to play the odds.

All told, we have a handful of C4 charges between us. Brice plants them where he believes they’ll kill the most Trogs when the attack comes.

We wait.

And wait.

Blair stays in contact.

With all the Trogs on sub one tied down, things settle down in the station’s subterranean levels. Survivors of the bombardment trickle in through unguarded airlocks.

I listen at quarter-volume while Blair organizes and directs them safely down to sublevel three.

Both sides in our asteroid battle are moving their pieces around the board, preparing.

Becoming bored with the wait, yet feeling some optimism at our progress, I say to Brice, “If this keeps up for another—I don’t know, twenty or thirty minutes—we can bail out of this hangar, find a nearby airlock and head downstairs. We might avoid a fight for now.”

“No.”

No? That’s it? One syllable.

“Why do you say that?”

He takes his eyes off our surroundings and settles them on me long enough for me to understand that my question was stupid.

“Seriously, why?” I peer into the dusty shadows, looking for movement as I start imagining every puff of cloud is a Trog materializing out of the dark.

“Because The Brice is right,” he tells me. “I’m in constant contact with our lookouts. Nobody’s in here but us.”

I point to the corner of the building where I know no guard is watching. I know with the debris in the air as thick as it is outside, no one on any corner of the hangar can see down to another corner. “We’re vulnerable, from that direction.”

Brice shakes his head. “You’re thinking like a human.”

“How’s that?”

“Bugs in their heads,” He taps the side of his helmet. “Deadly if you forget it.”

“Help me with the logic here.”

“It’s telepathy,” says Brice, “like we talked about. Same reason ambush doesn’t work. Sneaky stealth is pointless. You can’t surprise an enemy you can’t hide from. Battlefield tactics are a waste of time. You can’t outmaneuver an enemy who reads your plans right out of your own mind. There’s no chess aspect to their war. For them, it comes down to a simple thing—one-on-one, warrior domination.”

I don’t admit it, but it makes perfect sense.

“I think they’ve got a big macho culture about it,” says Brice, “which is why they prefer the disruptor blades over the railguns. Maybe it’s an honor thing, a way to prove themselves.”

“They don’t fight us one-on-one,” I argue.

“War is still war,” he counters. “They need to win, just like we do. Slaughtering your enemies and filling mass graves with their bodies is the best way to do that. Probably the Grays have crammed whatever passes for media in their culture with loads of bullshit about what kind of gnarly little monsters we are. The same as our media tells us about them. It’s easy for soldiers to massacre vile beasts. If the Trog grunts believed we were thinking, feeling beings just like them, but prettier, they’d probably feel obligated to fight us one-on-one according to whatever passes for honor among them.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this,” I observe.

“War is a lot about waiting,” he says. “Lots of time to ruminate.”

“Do you suppose they’re like us—thinking, feeling, with families?”

Brice answers with a shrug, and adds, “War is a like a fire. You light it with some hate, and once your loved ones start dying, emotion fans the flame. It grows until everybody wants to slaughter the monsters killing their friends. Doesn’t matter what the enemy looks like, whether they’re loving fathers or devoted daughters, priests or artists, saints or sinners, they are all monsters.”

“But?” I ask, looking for some hope in what seems to be the story of all humankind, a story with no room for a happy ending.

He shrugs again. “No buts. Just shit the way it is.”

Bleak.

Probably true.

Maybe the best we can hope for are respites where we can pretend the current peace will last forever.

We wait in silence, watching the gray slurry drift between machines in various states of repair.

Finally, I ask, “What’s going to happen?”

“You should know.”

Trying to defer, I say, “You’re the experienced one.”

“You’ve got the bug in your head,” Brice argues. “It’s pretty much the same thing they’ve got. Can’t you sense them? Can’t you read their minds?”

I laugh.

“Why’s that funny?” He’s put off. He thinks I’m holding out on him. “Is there some spaghetti-head secret that I should know?”

I shake my head. “You know, if Phil were here—”

“Phil?” Brice scoffs. Phil has a way of turning people against him, whether acquaintances or those he’s known for years.

I tap my head. “The implant, you know, the Grays don’t give us an owner’s manual with this thing when they put it in. They don’t even know how to instruct us in its use. When I was a kid, my teachers all had implants, bugs installed when they were adults.” I snort when I think of how ridiculous the whole thing was. “Even as first- and second-graders, having had bugs in our heads since a few weeks after birth, we were doing things our teachers could only wish they had the abilities to do. Didn’t matter, though.”

“How’s that?” asks Brice.

“None of us uses the bug up to its potential, not like in the rumors you hear.”

“People say it makes you just like a Gray,” says Brice. “You can see gravity, talk telepathically. You stop being a me and start being an us.”

“It’s not like that.” It’s nothing like that for me. “Most of us develop one or two bug-related talents. As for me, I became really good at manipulating the Grays’ tech, because all of their control systems use grav switches and organic grav-sensitive circuits. I won most of the games in school where manipulation of the real world was the goal.”

“You can just move stuff around?” I can’t tell whether Brice is awed or vindicated. “Like telekinesis?”

“No,” I answer. “Nothing like that. I can’t pick up a rock with my mind. If it’s built on Gray technology—grav lifts, these suits, our ships—then yes. They all run on circuits that can be manipulated by grav fields. On the micro level, I can influence a grav field, that’s how grav switches work. I guess that’s kinda like telekinesis.”

“Sounds exactly like it,” argues Brice. “They say Grays can do that with anything.”

“I’ve heard that, too, yet I’ve never seen it for real. So I don’t know. On the other hand, if you slap enough grav plates and organic control circuits on something, I can control it, no matter what it is.”

Brice turns curious. “Is that what you had in the bug-head school, special toys or something? Balls with grav plates and grav switches built in?”

“Yeah. All kinds of stuff like that.”

“Learn something new every day,” muses Brice. “What about telepathy? The Trogs use their bugs for that. Why can’t you?”

“Probably because I’ve spent all of my life trying to hide what I’m thinking from the Grays. I repress it.”

“Secrets?” asks Brice. “So much masturbating you were embarrassed?

We both laugh.

“Hate,” I tell him. “I’ve always wanted to kill them.”

“Don’t we all.” Brice deduces something. “So that’s how it is with you spaghetti-heads, then? You’re all so busy trying to hide your contempt for the Grays, the telepathic part of your abilities never fully develops.”

“I think you’re right,” I answer. “Except for Phil.”

“Phil?” Brice can’t believe it. Doesn’t want to.

“Not only can he read grav fields better than anybody I’ve ever met, he reads other people’s thoughts better than anyone.”

“Everybody’s thoughts?” asks Brice.

I guess maybe Brice has entertained some violent images concerning Phil’s corpse. Then, the question makes me wonder. I honestly don’t know. “I’m pretty sure just other bug-heads and Grays. Though, not really Grays, they’re hard to read. It takes a lot of effort, even for Phil. However, for us other kids in school,” I shake my head, “we used to play cards with him, and he always won. Always. You couldn’t play chess with him, because he always knew what you were up to.”

“Just like the Trogs,” says Brice. “When they go to war.”

“Yeah.”

“What I don’t get then,” says Brice, “is Phil. Does he like the Grays? Did his telepathic abilities grow because he didn’t have anything to hide?”

“I haven’t thought about these kinds of questions in a long time,” I admit. “I don’t know about the development of his powers, but I can tell you for sure, he doesn’t like Grays.”

“So as obnoxious as he is,” this thought saddens Brice, “he’s talented.”

“That’s why I picked him for my crew. That, and he and I have been friends since we started school.”

“Well, too bad Phil isn’t here now.” Brice takes a long scan around us. “He’d probably sense those Trogs out there. He could tell us when they’re coming.”

I agree. “Getting back to what the Trogs are up to, what should we expect?”

“They’re out there concentrating their forces. “ Brice points in several directions, like he knows exactly where they are. “It’s hard with all the shit in the air. It’ll take them a while. When they finally get it together, they’ll swarm us in overwhelming numbers, from all directions at once. That’s pretty much the tactic.”

“If they’re coming from all directions, then why guard three? Why not just watch one corner of the hangar?”

“I get things wrong just like anybody else. Why not be careful if you can afford it?”

Chapter 21

Blair raises me on the comm, “Kane, are you there?”

Waiting by the phone. “Yup.”

“We have seventeen soldiers down in the control center and—”

“The control center?” It sounds like a pretentious name to me. “Tarlow’s closet?”

“No. We moved to the station’s main control center?”

I don’t know what to say. I think Blair has made a fatal mistake. But it’s Blair, so I can’t just tell her that bluntly. “Do you think you’ll be discovered?”

Blair responds to my hesitation with an explanation instead of anger. “Tarlow says the Trogs never come in here. Radios, computers, video screens, Trogs and Grays don’t have this kind of tech. They don’t know how to use it, and don’t have any interest in learning about it.”

I don’t agree. My bet is there’s an educated class of Trog scientists somewhere that would love to get their big clumsy hands on our technology. Or the Grays truly are running this intra-galactic sideshow—big assumptions on them not having come from too far away. Which means they’ll steal for themselves any tech they can develop an understanding of and can use to repress their lessers. Just because the current Gray management of earth doesn’t appreciate our electronic toys doesn’t mean this new bunch won’t see the potential. I sum all that mental jabber up with, “I don’t think their disinterest will last.”

“It’ll last for as long as we need.” Blair finds it easy to be certain.

There’s no point in arguing. “What level is the command center on?”

“Three,” she says, “Same level as Tarlow’s closet.”

“How are you set for Trogs down there?”

“The sublevels are mostly empty.” She sounds like she’s distracted by something else. “Eighteen appear to be stationed on sub nine guarding the reservoir pens.”

“Where the prisoners are being held?” I confirm.

“Yes,” she tells me. “Nearly a hundred Trogs are on sub seven.”

“Over hundred down in the sublevels with us?” I was becoming spoiled by numbers that measured only by the dozen. “Is that where the Grays are, down on sub seven?”

“Yes. That’s right,” Blair confirms. “Tarlow tells me there’s a rec room down there with enough sunlamps in the ceiling to make it feel like a Saharan summer, earth g, and a lap pool. If you haven’t seen it on the map, it’s huge. From the glare on the cameras, it looks like the Grays set the lamps’ intensity to match wherever they came from. Bright as hell. They like to bask. You know that, right?”

“That they like to sunbathe?” How could I not know that? On clear days back home, the Gray-stink-twig killing my wife pesters her to take him out on the back porch to lie in the sun. The high elevation and intense sunshine are reasons the Grays chose Breck when they first arrived on earth. “Do they stay in there all the time?”

“Tarlow says they haven’t left since they took over the station. They run this place from there.”

Still an assumption, a likely assumption, yet maybe I’m being silently argumentative. “And the Trogs who guard them.”

“They stay mostly in a lobby area open to the hall with the lights turned dim.”

I realize I’m gathering info for an assault my troops will have to make. The Grays are the key to controlling this asteroid. They’ll need to die. I suspect the Trogs will fall into disarray with their Gray leadership dead. I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Some,” says Blair. “The number varies. They come in and out of the lobby on no particular schedule.”

“Ghost Trogs?” I need to know if any are down there. They’re the most dangerous kind.

“Six inside,” she answers. “They go in with the Grays from time to time. None outside. What are you thinking?”

“Nothing yet.” I peer into the hangar’s obscuring dust, looking for Trogs. “I’m learning what I can. We’re in a waiting game up here. Brice is sure the Trogs are massing for an assault outside. Are the twenty-two still waiting for us inside the airlock?”

“They haven’t left.”

“So, seventeen.” I’m talking about our troops down in the control center. I’d hoped for more.

Blair hears the disappointment in my voice. “Another twenty, at least, are in the halls on their way here. I have a handful in airlock six, and it looks like two more at airlock three.”

“Oh, that is good.”

“It’s better than good.”

“How so?”

“The warehouse where the prisoners were held wasn’t damaged during the raid.”

“How do you know?” I ask. “Did Tarlow tap into the cameras?”

“No cameras in the warehouse are active.” Blair sounds a little smug about it, which makes no sense to me. “A few of the soldiers down here didn’t come out of the warehouse until after the bombardment finished. They said somebody was ferrying helmets in and telling them to find their way to airlocks leading to the subterranean levels.”

Brice elbows me. “Gossip time is over, buddy.”

“Gotta go, Blair. The show is starting.” I reset my comm. Now I’m only listening on the channel with Brice and my new squad. It’s all I’m going to have attention for.

Chapter 22

“The Trogs are here,” it’s one of our female volunteers, Graham.

“Same on this side,” says a guy named Marshall.

“Circle the wagons,” Brice tells them all.

My railgun is up, pointed at the stairwell. I expect the Trogs from sub one will be coming out to join the attacking horde, unless they’re only down there to block our escape.

One of the troops comes flying through the hangar two meters off the ground, rounding a corner and zipping toward us.

“Slow down,” Brice advises.

She manipulates the grav control on her d-pad and clumsily reduces her speed as she collides with a hoist framework.

I hear her grunt over the comm, and it sounds like she’s hurt.

“Graham,” Brice asks, wearing his battle calm now, “you okay?”

“Bruises. That’s it.” She’s embarrassed.

The other two troops fly toward our position.

“Fliers?” I ask, cutting a glance at Brice. “Is it luck that our volunteers have grav skills good enough to get off the ground?”

He shakes his head as he scans for targets with his weapon. “You ask the right questions, you get the right answers. Then you volun-tell ‘em what they’re going to do.” He glances at me to gauge my reaction.

I focus down my barrel. I’m not judging.

“I gave them a chance to back out.” He chuckles. “You earned a reputation for what you did on those Trog cruisers. They’d all have stayed if I’d let them.”

I guess my reputation doesn’t carry with it the mortality rate of the people who’ve followed me into battle.

I see a haze of blue, coloring the dust in the distance, between two machines.

Brice aims his weapon at the blue glow and fires a burst of red-hot rounds that deflect and ricochet. “They’re maxing power to their chest plates.”

That shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s fired more than a few rounds at a Trog.

Brice shoots again and then thumbs behind him. “You, Graham, and Marshall take that half of the warehouse. Wilkes, you’re with me.”

I spin around and look past a disassembled grav lift, searching for the blue glow that’ll mark the presence of the horde.

Graham fires first, working the bolt-action to chamber another round so quickly her hands are a blur. She sends three more rounds downrange in as many seconds. They all deflect.

Marshall fires in another direction, sporadic and slow.

“We just want to delay them,” Brice reminds us. “Don’t waste too much A and H.” He’s talking about ammunition and hydrogen in our reactors’ fuel cells.

I fire full-auto, not a short burst, and not a sweep across the diffused glow of blue disruptors—at a single point. Rounds skew away from my target in every direction until my deadly red streaks overwhelm a Trog I still can’t see. I’m rewarded as my rounds stop flying wildly away and disappear into the mass. The slugs are deflecting into the torsos, arms, and legs as the Trogs’ combined field falls into disarray.

As quickly as I can, I trade out an empty magazine and start to fire in short bursts. No more full-auto. We can’t kill all of these Trogs, even if we did have an unlimited supply of ammo and H. We need to drag this battle out for as many seconds as we can.

Chapter 23

Every dusty gap is glowing a blue that’s increasingly brighter, closer.

The ill-defined profiles of Trogs are visible, shaking their weapons, shoving and inching toward us.

“They’re going to charge,” explains Brice. “Everybody down. It’s time to blow the C4.”

I duck behind a pile of looped steel tracks that look like they came off a giant earthmoving machine.

“Fire in the hole!” shouts Brice.

I can’t help but think, “There’s no hole.”

The ground shakes.

No sound, of course.

Waves of shrapnel from every direction tear through the hangar above us, each pushing a hazy blast wave of dust particles, gravel, and the expanding gases from the C4’s detonation. I feel hundreds of impacts hammer the stack of heavy tracks I’m leaning against.

Trogs’ body parts spin through the slurry.

Gales of red gas—vaporized blood—diffuse through the dust, staining it in shades of brown.

“Max grav!” yells Brice. “On me!” He flies off the hangar floor and zips toward the hole in the ceiling we’ve designated as our escape route.

Wilkes and Graham are instantly in the air, tentatively following Brice’s path.

I lift off slowly, looking to make sure Marshall is coming. He’s not in the spot where he was concealed as the shooting started. I know he didn’t take off with the others. I can’t delay. I’m in danger with each second I drift slowly upward. A Trog with his senses not diminished by the blasts could be sighting a railgun on me.

I cast my eyes about, searching.

I spot orange below, drifting. It’s Marshall. His body is bent unnaturally, faceplate cracked. His suit is outgassing through a handful of holes, and his body is off the floor, twisting from the jets of escaping air.

His face looks surprised, insulted, uncertain. Not dead.

I stop my ascent.

Do I help?

I diagnose from a distance of four meters.

Marshall’s eyes catch mine, pleading for a hand.

If I try to help, at best, I’ll prolong his suffering, and I might spend my life for the effort.

Callous and quick, I run the math. It adds up to ‘Sorry, brother. You’re dead.’

Trogs are starting to move on the ground in every direction. Many wounded. Plenty are shell-shocked. The distraction the C4 charges earned us is evaporating quickly.

I glance toward the hole through the roof. Brice, Wilkes, and Graham are out of sight. I amp up my grav and arc after them as red-hot railgun slugs tear through the suspended dust around me.

I misjudge my speed and bounce into the side of the tunnel through the slag piled on the roof. I pinball into open space over the hangar, spinning and fighting to orient myself upright. My concentration is on Marshall and his wounds, rather than flying.

“Kane,” calls Brice. “Over here.”

Like that expression means anything over the radio. I look around.

“Other way,” Graham shouts.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” demands Brice.

I spot them, through the haze of dust and blast particles. If they’d gone another ten meters farther from the hole, they’d be invisible to me.

“Hurry,” Brice orders, his voice turning to concern. “Marshall?”

“Hit.” I accelerate toward them.

Wilkes is calling to Marshall over the comm.

In a flash, I’m among the three of them, setting my feet on the roof. “Marshall won’t make it.” I shake my head. “Not more than a few moments.”

Wilkes looks at me, defiant. He glances at Brice. “I’m going back in.”

Brice tells him to stay, but Wilkes is already flying toward the hole through the hangar roof and doing it badly.

“Stop!” I yell.

Wilkes ignores us both and veers down into the hangar.

Graham looks at me and then Brice, not knowing how to react.

I don’t know either.

Brice grits his teeth and grabs Graham’s arm. “Stay here.”

“Are you going?” she asks.

“No,” he tells her before glancing at me.

“He’s fucked up.” I’m talking about Marshall, but I don’t know if Brice’s glance is a question about Marshall’s condition or an accusation for leaving him down there. “Lots of holes in his suit. He’s probably already dead.”

“Wilkes,” Brice calls over the comm.

No answer.

“Wilkes.”

Railgun rounds shoot out of the tunnel.

“Wilkes!”

Brice shakes his head and turns his attention back to Graham and me.

Just like that, we’ve put two-thirds of our small volunteer squad into the casualty column.

“Stay close.” Brice starts to rise.

I reach out to grab him. “Let’s auto grav and stay on the asteroid’s surface. We should run.”

He stops.

Graham is still looking toward the hole we came through. She hasn’t accepted the certainty that Wilkes and Marshall are dead.

“If we get too far out of this shit,” I tell them, as I wave a hand at the dust and rocks in the air, “if the Grays in that cruiser see us flying around, they might start shooting again. We have no defense against a bombardment.”

“There’s no reason they won’t fire on us anyway,” Brice spits, as his feet come back down on the roof.

I end the discussion by taking off at a sprint.

They both follow.

Chapter 24

We lose our way.

At least it seems we do.

We’ve been moving a long while. More dumbass déjà vu.

Why did I think running through this gray shit would work out better than walking?

Still, I run.

Floating rocks and pebbles bounce off my faceplate, granular gray in every shape and size. I plow into a stone the size of an end table. Its ragged surface jabs me in the gut, and I double over and tumble with it as I silently curse the advice Brice gave me to reduce my suit’s defensive grav.

I disengage from the rock, come to a stop with my ass on the ground, gasping for breath, looking around.

I’m alone.

How the hell did that happen? They were right with me two seconds ago.

The big rock that assaulted me with its inconvenient stagnancy slowly drifts.

Light-g is one thing, but mass and relative velocity still add up to ouch. How long has it been since I last cursed Newton and his goddamn Three Laws of Motion?

Damn, he’s a fucker.

I adjust my defensive grav for what seems like the tenth time in the last two hours and try to find my bearings. Still not enough air in my lungs.

I realize I don’t know which direction is which. My ass is on solid asteroid rock, so I know which way is down.

A sharp pain near my sternum makes me guess I have broken a rib. Or a developing hypochondriac tendency.

Two figures materialize out of the slurry, Brice and Graham.

Brice drops to a knee beside me, weapon at his shoulder, scanning. “Did you see where it came from?”

Graham is down by me, clutching at my arm, and turning my helmet to face hers. “Are you okay?”

I’m still catching my breath, I guess, because I can’t push out a whole word yet. I point at the damned aggressive boulder. It’s a full meter beyond my reach.

“It was the rock?” she asks, surprised, not quite believing me.

I nod, and draw a deep breath to reset my respiratory system.

“He ran into a rock, Sergeant.”

“A rock?” Brice has a hand on my shoulder, checking to see if I’m in one piece. Still looking for Trogs, he spots the stone I collided with, and then he chuckles. “That one?”

I nod.

“We need to slow down,” he tells me. “I’ll lead. You behind me. Graham, in the rear. Stay close.”

I brush away their caregiver hands and stand myself up, thankful for the minimal g.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” He’s concerned.

It was just a damn rock.

“We can haul you,” offers Graham.

I look down at myself. “You see any holes? Air leaking out?”

“No.” Graham is shaking her head as she gives me a quick exam. “Broken ribs? Can you breathe okay? You sound like you’re having trouble.”

“The wind was knocked out of me, is all.” I draw another deep breath.

“Let’s go,” says Brice.

No time to wallow in my bruises. It’s my turn to follow.

Brice sets out at a fast walk, scanning from side to side, weapon ready to kill anything that’s not a rock.

I’m looking, watching for gravity flux—indications of moving masses—things I know Brice can’t see. How I missed that damned floating boulder, though, I can’t say. Maybe I invested too much focus ten or twenty yards ahead, hoping to catch sight of Trogs before they spotted me. They have to be hunting us. They have to know we got away.

Phil comes to mind. So does Penny.

The math calculator in my head, the one quantifying a non-numerical world into digits that add up to shitty conclusions, tells me Phil and Penny are dead. It’s all about odds and evidence. However, my heart doesn’t agree. It says, ‘No sweat, don’t give up hope.’

It’s not hope.

There’s something more.

“I think I’m having motion sickness,” says Graham.

Brice stops and turns.

Suddenly, we’re in a huddle, looking at one another.

Graham is keying her d-pad. “I can’t get the medical screen to activate. I’d suck a dick for a dose of Dramamine right now.”

I take her hand and pull her arm over to look. I try to navigate to the medical screen. It won’t come up.

Fucking shit equipment.

“It’s the dust and the rocks,” Brice says to Graham. “It’s all flowing, throwing off your sense of equilibrium. Don’t look around while you walk. Keep close to Kane. Focus on his feet, or his back. You’ll be fine.”

Graham takes a deep breath. “Seems like we’ve come a long way.”

Brice glances around. “Yeah.”

“Probably wandered right past the Trogs,” she speculates, “and past the rest of the colony’s surface buildings.”

“Maybe.” Brice looks at me. I was in the lead. I fucked it up. He doesn’t say anything about that, but I know he’s thinking Graham is right.

I close my eyes, and focus on the gravity.

“Are you okay?” asks Graham.

“Bug-head,” Brice informs her.

I tell them, “With all this shit in the air, it’s hard for me. I’m straining to see the geography through the gravity of its mass.”

“Can’t you just see it?” she asks. “Isn’t that how it works for you people?”

I feel like I should come up with a clarifying analogy to help her understand. I can’t afford to burn the mental bandwidth on that right now. Maybe later. I point to our left. “Over there. Something that way.”

“Something isn’t necessarily a good thing.” Brice stares warily into the haze. “How far? What is it?”

“Sixty meters,” I tell him. “It could be a hunk of rock, a crashed ship, or a pile of bodies.” I glance at them both. “It’s something too big to be a Trog, too stationary to be a formation of them out looking for us.”

Brice shrugs and walks in the direction I indicated.

I follow with Graham on my heels, wondering if we’ve walked ourselves out of the battle and right into uselessness.

My thoughts wander back to Phil again. He’d see through this shit. No doubt.

With all the death I’ve seen since I stepped off that grav lift in Arizona, it seems foolish to believe he’s still alive. Death up here in the void is easy. Every misstep is fatal, every wound catastrophic. We’re all walking a decision tree of terminal outcomes. Some branches are short. Hell, who am I kidding? It’s a goddamn drought-stunted shrub. Only luck’s unfair relationship with the bold has kept any of us alive so far.

We’ve covered maybe half the distance to the mass.

“Can you make it out yet?” asks Brice.

“Definitely not organic,” I answer, though I’ve already assured them no Trogs were ahead.

“That’s something.” Brice doesn’t slow. He trudges forward.

Peering forward with my implant, I make a further deduction. “I think it’s not a rock, either.”

“One of the buildings?” asks Graham, hopeful.

I nod, though Brice doesn’t see, and probably Graham doesn’t either. Unfortunately, a lifetime of earthly communication habits don’t die easy.

Halfway closer again, and Brice asks, “Do you see any other buildings?”

I stop, close my eyes and look into the distance, trying to piece together shapes out of the mess of grav fields. “Nothing.”

Brice looks around, like he might see something with his naked eyes. “This building is out here by itself?”

“Seems that way.”

“Let’s go see what it is,” says Graham, advising us to bypass Brice’s growing caution. Her motion sickness is influencing her choice.

Brice looks at me, silently asking my opinion on the matter. I nod toward the building. What other choices do we have?

He’s wary, but it’s the best option. He turns and leads us on.

Chapter 25

Trudging through the endless dusty crud reveals only that the building has a relatively intense gravity signature. Like most of the roofs on the surface structures, this one is layered deep with two meters of mining slag. The walls are unusual. They’re thick, way too thick, if their only purpose is to support the roof in the asteroid’s merciful gravity.

The building itself seems to be thirty meters square with a single floor and no tunnel beneath connecting it to the mining operation’s sublevels. I have no guesses for what’s inside.

I keep all that to myself. We’re close enough that speculation time is over. We need to see what this place is.

One corner of the building comes into sight first—a tall, vertical line, out of place in the chaotic flow of asteroid debris. The walls resolve as we step closer. We veer left, following Brice’s guess as to which wall has a door.

“Correct,” I tell him as I sense the break in the wall where the squat structure’s thick metal door stands closed.

A few moments after walking down the front of the building, Brice sees the entrance. He steps away from it, pointing his weapon at the crudely cast obstruction. Graham and I fan out beside him, ready to shoot.

“No airlock,” I tell them, in case they haven’t guessed already. The door looks more like one of the assault doors on our ships than a precisely sized hatch to an airlock. A triangular graphic, scratched and discolored, marks the door at face level. I can’t tell what it is, except maybe a representation of a giant asteroid colliding with a planet as it explodes into space.

It makes no sense.

Brice giggles.

I turn to see an expression of genuine happiness on his face.

“Explosives?” speculates Graham.

“Looks that way to me,” agrees Brice.

I guess I’m the only one who didn’t pick up on it.

Brice steps back, keeping his rifle aimed at the door. He glances at me, instructing me to do the same. To Graham, he says, “Open it.”

We step into position.

As I stand, waiting for what’s coming, I find myself contemplating the wisdom of pointing my railgun at a cache of explosives.

The door swings open.

Lights inside flicker on, casting everything in a uniform, daylight glow.

Nothing moves.

Brice is already stepping forward, sweeping his gun’s barrel in wider and wider arcs as he passes through the open entrance.

Right behind him, I step in, too.

The interior is neatly arranged with rows of pallets, most piled chest-high with five-gallon buckets, strapped together to keep them secure. Shelves line three walls, containing buckets, boxes, and odd pieces of equipment designed for purposes for which I can only guess.

Brice and I make a quick circuit of the building and find no Trogs. No miners. No grunts.

“Is there an airlock in here?” Brice asks.

I think I already know the answer. Still, I lower my rifle and examine the map of sublevel one.

Graham closes the door behind us. “No sense letting too much of that dust in here.”

“Good thinking.” I try to place where we are on the surface relative to the subterranean levels. “I’m pretty sure none of the tunnels come anywhere near here.”

Brice is walking the interior perimeter, scanning up and down the rows, taking moments to scrutinize individual buckets and drums. “Industrial blasting chemicals,” he muses. “There’s a shit-ton of it here.”

“Maybe a depot for the other colonies?” I guess. And why not, the place seems to have been built as much as a service base for nearby colonies as a mine. Which is probably why the Free Army chose it for their base—infrastructure that could easily be converted to support a small fleet of warships.

Brice finishes his survey of the building and marches back to stand in front of me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Weapons?” I guess. I hadn’t been thinking anything, not until he mentioned it.

“Are you okay?” he asks. “You seem kind of out of it.”

My shoulders slump at the acknowledgment. I’m tired, as tired as I’ve ever been.

Brice grabs my left arm and pulls it out while twisting so that my d-pad faces up. He points to a little green button built into one corner of the bezel. “Suit Juice. You used any yet?”

I know what some of the drugs in the cocktail are. I know how addictive they can be. “I don’t need—”

Brice pushes the button.

I feel a prick on my thigh where the suit’s inner liner houses a series of injectors, with one specifically for this purpose.

Almost immediately, I feel my fatigue melt away, and a burst of confidence radiates through every cell in my body.

I’m a god.

I’m a fucking god of war!

Bow before me lowly creatures in my universe before I smite you and your progeny to Hell!

“Stop grinning.” Brice laughs. “You look like an idiot.”

I don’t stop. I don’t care.

“First few times, you get high,” he says. “After a while, you just get a few more miles out of the tank.”

Too bad. I’m looking across the piles of buckets and barrels on the pallets, and nothing about it is familiar, no sticks of red dynamite, no Play-Doh slabs of C4. In fact, the building looks to be filled with ingredients more than finished products. “Any idea how this stuff works?”

Brice shakes his head. “I know military stuff. Not this shit.”

We both look at Graham.

Her eyes go wide. “I worked on a chicken farm before my number came up.”

Turning back to Brice. The next step is obvious, at least to me. “Tarlow. He was an explosives guy, right?”

“I think that’s what he said.”

I comm link to Blair. “Can you hear me? Do we have a signal?”

“I’ve got you in—” Blair seems lost.

Tarlow picks up for her. “The explosives bunker.”

“Is that what this is?” Blair doesn’t seem to believe him.

“It is,” he confirms. “We keep it far from the colony in case it all blows. That’s just administrator paranoia. They don’t understand the components or the chemical processes involved. It can’t spontaneously detonate. Not in a vacuum. Impossible. You can’t tell—”

“Put a plug in it,” I order Tarlow. Time to put my divine energy to work for the good of mankind before the drug wears off. “Blair, can you do without Tarlow down there?”

“Why?” She’s not pleased, not at all.

“I need him. He’s the explosives guy, right?” I scan across the trove of combustibles. “We’ve got a warehouse of goodies here, and Tarlow can make them useful.”

Chapter 26

We’re waiting again.

There’s a lot of boredom in war.

Blair is sending some of our soldiers from the control center to bring Tarlow to the explosives shed.

Graham is still lying on her back, trying to control her nausea, or napping. She hasn’t said anything in a while. It could be either.

Brice is fumbling through what I guess are blasting caps, a variety of types, in a series of translucent bins. He cocks his head toward Graham. “She gonna be alright?”

“I suppose.” I’m looking at the bin he has a hand in, realizing I have no guesses about the functions of these odd doodads, no idea how they puzzle together to form something lethal. “You know how this stuff works?”

“In theory.”

I laugh. “You mean you’d blow us all up if you tried to rig a bomb?”

“More like I’d build a dud.” Brice is one-hundred-percent serious again. “Wouldn’t matter. Failure is death out here in the ‘stroids. No room to fuck up. If your booby trap doesn’t blow, the Trogs swarm you. Death. See what I mean?”

Booby traps sound appealing, however, I’m cultivating my ideal fantasy outcomes into something that’ll pass for a plan.

Brice seems suddenly bored, impatient, as he empties his hands. “We should wait on Tarlow.”

I agree, look around at the contents of the explosives hut, and start a slow walk along the shelf-covered wall, taking in what I can see, looking for anything I might learn while killing time, and trying not to think about other soldiers out there on the surface, still dying.

“A lot of waiting,” says Brice, coming along beside me.

“What do you do to kill the time?” I ask, not wanting to spend too much time with my thoughts, afraid of what I might find in my heart if I dwell on the echoes of last gasps over the comm and vivid memories of dying faces, watching the vacuum suck blood through gaping tears in suits.

“Tell me about Phil,” says Brice.

That’s a surprising twist.

I hesitate.

I guess at a motive and realize I’ve spent too much time looking for hidden agendas throughout my life. Too many years in a Gray-ruled world. It’s shaped me in a way I didn’t realize had bent towards paranoia until just now. “The Phil thing is complicated.”

“It always is for people who think too much.” Brice smiles after setting the barb. He slaps me on the back to let me know it’s just good fun.

I smile, too. No big deal. He’s right. I don’t want to talk about Phil. “What about you? What’s your story?”

“So that’s how it works?” he asks. “You won’t tell me yours unless I tell you mine?”

“You know a lot more about me than I know about you.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” says Brice. “You already know my dirty laundry. I fragged a captain. You saw me do it.”

“So what else have you got?”

“Two years of watching people die in this war.” He tries to be hard when he says it, attempting to cover his sadness with a cavalier smile. “Three years of cush garrison duty on the moon after I joined the SDF and before the war started. Four years in construction before that.”

“Nine years in space?” It doesn’t seem possible anyone could live up here that long.

“I’ve been wearing an orange suit for a third of my life,” he answers.

“Why go that way in the first place? Everybody knows the dangers of wearing orange.”

“Same reason you got a bug in your head,” he tells me.

“My mom agreed to that before I was a week old,” I laugh. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Still, your mom had a reason for doing it, right?”

I nod.

“She ever tell you what that was? Or did she think you might grow up to be one of them?”

“That’s kind of it,” I answer. “The same for both questions. My mom was a laborer, and she wasn’t stupid. She knew I wouldn’t turn into a Gray if they put a bug in my head, but she saw the writing on the wall. With the Grays in charge of the earth, my mom figured out pretty early that humans were going to become draft horses bridled to the Grays’ ambitions. Human life was going to become short and sweaty.”

“She was right about that,” observes Brice.”

“My mom didn’t want that for me.”

“You grew up and went to work in a grav factory,” Brice counters. “Still a slave, right? Roomy house? Plenty to eat?”

I pat my flat belly. “More food than most, I suppose, not as much as you’d think.”

“Phil looked like he never missed a meal,” argues Brice. “He worked in that grav factory with you, right?”

Looked? Worked?

Both past tense.

Brice rightly thinks Phil is dead.

Could he have survived that collision? Is he out there, adrift? Injured?

Lies I’m telling myself to pretend he’s not gone.

“We had privileges.” I don’t feel ashamed admitting it. The advantaged life of the bug-heads on earth isn’t a secret. “We had things to trade on the black market. Phil… I don’t know. It’s hard to blame Phil for being heavier.” I laugh, and I realize it sounds like Brice’s dark laugh. Am I picking up the habit from him, or is it something about being in the company of death that makes humor so black?

“How’s that?”

“You know, you’ve seen the old videos, right?”

“From before the siege?” Brice asks. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“People back then, in western countries especially, so many of them were overweight.”

“What?” Brice shakes his head. “I don’t know what shows you watched but I always imagined before the siege, everybody was perfect. I didn’t see many old vids, but in the ones I saw, that’s what was there. Perfect hair. Perfect teeth. Perfect clothes. Everybody drove a shiny car.”

“Not the movies and TV shows,” I clarify. “The news. Documentaries. Stuff that showed real life.”

Brice shrugs.

“America used to be the most powerful nation on the planet. Back then the people had everything they ever wanted. Their biggest problems were overeating, drinking too much, and spending all their savings.”

Brice appears perplexed.

“You never watched the old news vids?” I can’t believe it. “Never had an interest in history?”

“Never had a TV,” says Brice. “Wouldn’t matter if we did. I worked when I got home from school. I worked from sunup to sundown when they cut me loose after sixth grade.”

“No TVs in your school?”

“Some,” he answers. “We never saw anything about history. The TVs were for the kids on the high school prep track. Most of us were bound for the farms. You don’t need a TV to teach kids how to spell and count, add and subtract. Mostly school was a babysitting service, a place to keep us while our parents worked in the fields, at least until we were big enough to work ourselves. So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I suppose I’ve seen some pictures here and there, heard stories about how things used to be, but you know, I never believed half of them, just old-timers pining for the old days. They always make things seem better than they were.”

“They were probably telling the truth.”

Brice sighs. “I suppose. All that perfect hair and those perfect teeth must have meant something. What’s that got to do with Phil?”

“I guess I don’t want you to think Phil’s problems are all his.”

“Whatever you say.”

I lean on a pallet of explosives, maybe enough to blow all of Breckenridge into orbit. I comm link to Blair. “Is Tarlow coming?”

“Not yet,” she tells me. “We’re trying to coordinate down here.”

“People are dying,” I remind her. Even I feel like an asshole for saying it.

Her response is testy. “I’m not sending my people headlong into an ambush. We’ll do this right or not at all.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Blair huffs. “We have another two dozen or so down here. More on the way. Not nearly as many died in the bombardment as we thought.”

“Are they armed?”

“Mostly,” she tells me, “with disruptors and single-shot railguns.”

“Okay.” I figure it’s best not to push any harder. “Let me know when Tarlow leaves.”

Brice is looking at me with an odd expression on his face.

“What?”

“I’m riveted by this story of Phil’s weight problem.” He sounds vaguely sarcastic, but I’m not sure. “It might be the most interesting story I’ll hear all day.”

I’m not sure I want to say anything more about it. I sit on a pallet of large metal buckets. They all sport labels covered with warnings and directions, fine print—thousands of words no one will ever read. Looking around inside the bunker for any distraction, I realize for the tenth time, there isn’t much to do while waiting. So, I talk. “He had a brother.”

“Lots of people do.”

“They were both bug-heads,” I tell Brice.

“How long have you known him?”

“We were in school together, all of the “special” kids. Pre-school, I guess. They started us young. I’ve always known Phil.”

“What’s this brother got to do with anything?” Brice wickedly smiles. “Did Phil eat him?”

I shake my head. “He died when he was six.”

Brice feels bad about his off-color joke, but I don’t make a thing of it. We don’t have vaccinations like they did before the siege. We don’t have antibiotics, not in a large enough supply for everyone. We don’t have much in the way of medicines, not for anybody who’s not Korean. Lots of babies die. Lots of kids don’t make it adulthood. Death is always around. You get used to it.

Chapter 27

“They told us the news over at the hospital.” I start, thinking of the smells in that place, like a closed-up house with no breeze where rats have been trapped with mounds of their shit and only an acrid hint of antiseptic to make it seem like the air is safe to breathe. I can taste it. I remember how the funk clung to my clothes and followed me through the rest of the day. “The doctors told his parents it was an immune reaction to the bug in his head. Like with me and Phil, they put the bug in his brother’s head when he was a baby, but it never took. His body never accepted it. Then, when his lymphocytes couldn’t kill it—got tired of trying I guess—they went insane and turned on him.”

Brice grimaces.

“The doctors had big words for it all. I’m not going to claim I understood everything.” I don’t know why the disclaimers are important, they just seem like they are. “Phil’s brother was sick all the time, as his body was eating itself up from the inside. It took years for him to die, while his organs struggled to develop into a regular person. It just failed. He grew up disproportionally. He was always small and skinny compared to other kids his age, but his head kept growing. Just the bones, not the skin. It looked like one day his face might stretch so tight it would split open when he laughed or coughed.” I take a breath, even though I’m feeling the amphetamine cocktail still coursing through my blood, the story is bringing me back to that time, unreeling like a poorly edited movie in my head, full of abstract emotions.

“I went with them to the doctor many times. I don’t know why. I was a kid. I went along because an adult brought me. It never seemed weird until the thought came back to me as a grownup.” I glance up at Brice and see he’s paying attention because this next part is important, at least to me. “I know Phil’s mom wanted to believe the doctors were trying to help his little brother but they weren’t. They were taking measurements and running tests. They wanted to understand everything about their little patient, to know what was making him tick. To them, he was nothing more than an experiment, and they weren’t going to give him any drug that might harm the bug or kill it.”

“How do you know that?” asks Brice. “Did they tell you?”

The question takes me off guard, because I realize I don’t know the answer. I never heard a doctor say those things. No one in Phil’s family ever offered up any evidence for their suspicions, yet Phil believed it strongly, and so did his dad. The old man went on about it with tinfoil hat tenacity, at least when Phil’s little brother and mother weren’t around. I answer Brice with something vague. “Things I heard.”

Brice accepts my answer and nods to prompt me on.

“The kid died. It was the flu that finally finished him off one winter. I remember Phil crying a lot. His mom tumbled into a black mood she never recovered from. His dad took to working more, or finding ways to avoid coming home. I almost never saw the old man after that.”

“I’ve been to funerals for kids,” says Brice. “They’re never easy.”

“There wasn’t a funeral.” Even as a kid, that seemed unusual to me. “The doctors bagged up Phil’s brother and took him away, telling Phil’s parents he was the property of the MSS. Just like that. No grave. No service. Nothing.”

“Damn shame,” says Brice.

He’s right.

“An unusual thing happened after that,” I say. “The food ration for Phil’s brother never stopped coming. I know I’m exaggerating when I say it, but to me, it seemed like Phil’s mother made Phil eat every bite of it. After watching one child waste away, a skinny kid was the most horrid thing she could imagine. She blamed herself, ultimately she had to, I guess. She chose to let the Grays put the bug in her kids’ heads. She turned into love-overkill mom, stuffing Phil with every crumb she could find, protecting him from skinned knees, other kids’ meanness, bug bites, you name it. If she could have wrapped him in a papoose and carried him around on her back, I think she would have.”

“And he got bigger?” asks Brice, trying to be unusually polite.

“Chubbier with each passing year. At school, kids teased him.” I look at Brice, because I know he knows this. “You never see fat kids anywhere, anymore. You rarely see obese adults. Not enough food left on earth after we ship everything to the moon colony or orbital battle stations, or the mines in the asteroid belt, or the SDF, or the construction crews, or fucking North Korea. Not enough people left on earth to grow what’s needed.” I shrug. “People, not just kids, resented Phil for his weight. It changed him. Made him—”

“Prickly?” Brice suggests.

“Yeah.” It’s a fitting word.

At a stopping point in Phil’s history, we don’t say anything for a while.

I call Blair again for an update on Tarlow’s progress, and she promises me he’s on the way.

Still, nothing more to say.

We stare and wait, until another of my memories comes up that I haven’t thought about for a long time. “You know, I saw one die once.”

Chapter 28

“You saw a Gray die?” Brice is skeptical. It’s something every human dreams about seeing, however, the layers of elegant sincerity wrapped around most stories of dead Grays fall away under questioning, exposing the wistful rumor beneath.

My story is real, though, not something I heard about, something I saw.

The incident is clear in my mind like it just happened. “I was thirteen then. I lived down near Silverthorne before the spaceport grew up to take over the whole valley. In those days, every mine with a kilo or two of ore still in the ground was being worked to support the grav factories and shipyards. Trailers to house the miners were spread over every flat meadow and muddy riverbank through the mountains.

“My mom and me lived in a row of identical trailers, two-room boxes on wheels packed tightly on three acres of bare dirt a few blocks uphill from the Blue River. She slept in the bedroom. I used the couch in the other room, which doubled as our living room and kitchen. Phil lived two houses down with his parents and brother, four of them in a place identical to ours.

I half chuckle. “It seems shitty now to live in such cramped squalor.” I look at Brice. He knows the privileges bug-heads get, so I don’t feel like I’m bragging. I don’t know what I feel about it. “Now I have a house with an upstairs and a basement with a grassy lawn and trees. Three people on three floors, each twice the size of those trailers we lived in.”

“Your mom made the right choice putting a bug in your head,” says Brice. “The house I grew up in sounds a bit like your trailer, but no wheels. It was rotting right out from underneath us. My dad was always scrounging wood and scrap sheet metal to fix holes in the roof and floor.”

For a moment, it seems Brice is nostalgic for it. Maybe I am, too. Squalor isn’t bad when it’s all you know. At least life had a simplicity to it then, the only worry was constant hunger. Even the MSS seemed like a problem for parents to deal with, not kids.

“I didn’t realize it until I was in fourth or fifth grade—everybody who lived on the three-acre dirt plot had bug-headed kids—the MSS had long since relocated the miners who lived there before us. The Grays wanted us kids to play together, to form pods or whatever. We were an experiment, members of the first generation of implanted humans with a bug since birth. There were a dozen colonies of us around the valley, yet all of us kids attended the same school. We didn’t have any normal friends. They kept those kids separate from us, at least until they moved them all out of the Gray Zone.”

“A Gray Zone?” Brice asks. “I haven’t heard that phrase since I was a kid. What is a Gray Zone?”

“That’s what they called it in those days, Breckenridge and places like it,” I answer. “It was supposed to be an area safe for the Grays.” I laugh at the bleak reality of earth’s situation. “Now the whole planet is a Gray Zone. It didn’t take long for that to happen—a single generation.”

“Safe for Grays.” Brice is just as disgusted by the state of the world. “Not so much for people.”

“It was summer,” I continue, getting back on track with my story. “Me and Phil were riding our bikes up to Frisco. We were headed toward town to meet up with a couple kids we knew from school, and the three of us wanted to hike up the mountain and follow the ridges south down Tenmile Range, hitting all the peaks along the way until we reached Hoosier Pass. We were stupid enough to think we could do the whole hike by midday and make it back home in time for dinner.” I laugh, genuinely. “Probably a good thing we never got up the mountain that day.”

“How’s that?” asks Brice.

“No way we could made it back. We’d have ended up missing days of school. The MSS would have punished our parents.”

Brice grimaces. Everybody knows about the MSS’s brutal discipline.

“It was still early.” I remember the way the sun felt hot on my face even though the air was still cool. It had been a dry summer. There wasn’t any moisture in the air to take the edge off the sun’s harsh glare. “Me and Phil had just rolled down the dirt road, not pedaling more than a few times on the downhill zigzag to the bridge across the river.

“The spaceport wasn’t as busy then as it is today. Earth’s industry was only a dozen years past the siege and was still ramping up to meet the Grays’ needs. Still, big semis hauled shipments along Highway 9 in what seemed like an unending slow line on the rough road. All that cargo was destined for the grav lifts to be shot into orbit for construction of the space station.

“We stopped at the corner of the two-lane highway, in the parking lot of the ration distribution center. The trucks were loud and slow, with one rolling by every thirty or forty seconds. Dust was in the air so thick it got in your eyes, and you could taste the grit in your mouth. Half the asphalt on the road had crumbled away because the Grays had no interest in fixing it. We were waiting for a gap between the trucks so we could cross. Mostly, we were just watching the semis, because the truth was, there was enough space between them we could have crossed any time. Phil saw it first, and pointed it out to me. He always had a good sense for when Grays were around.”

“He saw the dead Gray?” Brice asks.

“No,” I answer. “Not dead yet.”

Chapter 29

“To me,” I tell Brice, “Grays seem fragile when they walk, like really old women, feeble and slow, like they might fall over and die at any moment. Except Grays don’t fall over, they just keep on moving, like ants that don’t give up. Have you ever seen one run?”

Brice nods.

I go on to describe it. “Grays don’t run like anything on earth, not any animal or even any bug that I’ve seen. They stiffen like boards and they kind of bounce from foot to foot with their legs spread wide. They remind me of a kid I saw in an old movie with braces on his legs. So, when Phil pointed out the pod of Grays and said one of them was acting strange, I turned to look, but I figured I’d see a Gray acting like they always do.”

“But that’s not what you saw,” guesses Brice.

Shaking my head, I tell him, “One of them was walking in circles and swatting at the air. Its head rolled around on its thin neck. I thought at first its neck was broken. Then it would stiffen for no reason at all and run. Directionless. Phil was starting to freak out about it, which I thought was weird, like he felt sorry for it.” I shake my head again. “I didn’t know at the time how strongly he could connect to them, or to any of us for that matter.”

That’s when I realize why I keep entertaining the notion that Phil isn’t dead. He doesn’t feel absent like his brother did the day he died.

I wonder again if I’m telling myself lies.

“It was disturbing,” I tell Brice. “In that moment, I felt sorry for it. The other Grays were pogoing on their spindly legs and trying to corral the crazy one to catch it—I’m not sure—to help it, I guess?

“I learned later, they evolved from plants. They don’t eat the way we do. They absorb various wavelengths of electromagnetic energy from their surroundings. They suck nutrients through their skin when they touch things. They never had an evolutionary imperative to catch their dinner. Seeing them trying to catch the sick one was like watching blind people trying to capture fireflies.”

“Doomed to fail,” adds Brice.

“After watching for a few minutes, Phil told me the sick one had Crazy Stick.”

“I’ve seen some contraband vids,” says Brice. “That’s what it sounds like to me.”

I silently confirm and go on to say, “Some bacteria infects their system. Nobody knows if the bacteria is terrestrial in origin or if the Grays brought it with them. It might not be bacteria at all, just that really ancient Grays act like that right before they die.”

“I’ve never heard of anybody doing an autopsy on one.” Brice is disappointed over what seems like a wish he’d enjoy fulfilling. “I’ve only heard rumors about what’s inside those little bastards.”

I figure Brice is going to like this next part. “Phil and I were still right there in the parking lot when the crazy one made for the road. He ran most of the way across. He wasn’t fifteen feet in front of us when one of those big semis locked its rear wheels. The trailer skidded toward where we were standing, not very far, but close enough to scare us. The truck’s front bumper knocked the Gray down, and it fell badly, right in front of the front tire.

“It seemed like slow motion, and in a way it was, with the truck finally stopping. The tire caught the Gray’s feet and rolled up its legs. The thing’s arms went crazy, beating the road and flapping. Phil cried out like he felt every bit of it. I didn’t, but I felt something.”

“Empathy?” asks Brice.

I shake my head. “Something more elemental than that. Almost like the truck was crushing my legs.” I shiver as I recall the sensation. “The tire just kept rolling. I guess the truck had too much momentum to come to a stop. The Gray’s head was bouncing up and down on the road like it was trying to beat its own brains out to stop the agony. The tire rolled over the Gray’s torso, getting close to the neck, then the top of the Gray’s head burst open, exploding orangish-yellow jelly onto the road. It was disgusting. It smelled like an outhouse.

“While the Gray’s arms were still twitching, Phil elbowed me and pointed at the other five. They’d all fallen over as if they were dying, too.”

Brice is incredulous. “They all died?”

Shaking my head, I answer, “When the squashed Gray stopped convulsing, they started to recover.”

“So flattening it with the truck tire,” says Brice, “and popping its head like a zit didn’t kill it?”

“That orange jelly inside its head is a separate organism living in a symbiotic relationship with the Gray’s body. The body died, but the jelly thing lying there on the road in the sun didn’t, at least not for a while.

“That made me think about the symbiont in my head. It made me wonder what’s going to happen to me when it dies.”

“How long will the bug in your head live?” asks Brice.

“Nobody has an answer for that question. At least not one they’re willing to share with any of us bug-heads.” I sigh. “I suppose Phil and me should have run out of there after what we saw, yet we didn’t. After a while, the Grays gathered themselves and walked over to stare at their dead buddy. They stayed at a distance. As if they were all afraid of catching Crazy Stick. I don’t know.

“Before I realized what was happening, more Grays were there, and the MSS was with them, strutting around in their uniforms with guns on their hips. One was shouting in my face, demanding to know what had happened.

“Phil started answering his questions.

“I kept staring at the dead Gray and its orange marmalade brains on the road, knowing although the Gray was dead, the jelly symbiont wasn’t. I felt it there, suffering, rolling in the dust.

“Another Gray, an important one, was suddenly on the scene. It was clear he was important because he had a human interpreter with him, a kid not much older than me and Phil. The kid had been raised with the important Gray since both were babies. The interpreter was able to speak the Gray’s thoughts in words we humans were capable of hearing. It was the only way we were truly able to communicate with them.

“The interpreter, ‘the mouthpiece’, we called him, ordered the MSS officers to take the driver out of the truck.

“The driver hadn’t moved from the driver’s seat. He was too afraid to come out and see what he’d done even though it wasn’t his fault. It was clear to anybody who’d witnessed what had happened, but that didn’t matter. A Gray was dead. A human was involved. Case closed.

“The man begged and pointed to Phil and me, saying he could have swerved off the road—to the left, he’d have run over more Grays, to the right, he’d have run over us, waiting on our bikes for our chance to cross.

“The MSS officer glared at us, but ordered his men to drag the driver in front of the truck and hold him down on the ground. Another MSS man climbed into the truck and started it up. They rolled the front tire over the driver. They did it slow. He screamed while the tire flattened his legs. Blood gushed out his mouth when the tire rolled up over his stomach and smashed his chest.”

Brice shakes his head. It’s an appalling end to the story, but not unexpected.

“We didn’t hike that day,” I tell him. “Phil and me rode our bikes home, not saying anything along the way.

“Up until then, the occupation had been an abstract thing for us. We lived in the Gray Zone, neither of us had ever seen the destruction out in the rest of the world. We never personally knew anyone who’d died, besides Phil’s brother. Our parents worked at low-level jobs at the spaceport or the mines. We usually had food to eat.

“We didn’t know injustice and brutality.

“Phil remembered the brutality the most, and he changed after that. It was like something inside him chose to hide itself away and never come out again. We seldom rode much after that, and we never hiked the high mountains. He was afraid of what might be lurking in the woods. He was afraid of the steep drops. He was afraid when the storms came, and he looked at the mountains like the snow might avalanche down at any minute and kill everyone he’d ever met.

“The brutality gave me nightmares that haunted me for years, but where Phil grew scared, I turned reckless, ready to take any dare, because I knew as long as Grays ruled my life, it was worth nothing. And I hated that idea.”

The door opens and in walks three orange-clad rebels with Tarlow in tow.

“‘Bout time,” says Brice.

Chapter 30

Standing by a pallet of stacked buckets, laying his hands on them like they’re his special pets, Tarlow says, “This is TX. It’s a ternary compound of inert liquids that doesn’t turn volatile until mixed.”

“Ternary?” Graham asks. “What does that mean?”

“It’s got three parts,” I answer. “Tarlow’s trying to sound smart.”

“How volatile?” asks Brice.

“Not like nitroglycerine,” answers Tarlow, “but you want to be careful with it.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything,” Brice persists. “Can you drop it? Bump it?”

“Drop it?” Tarlow laughs as he shoves a bucket off the top of the pile. It moves slug-slow toward the floor.

“If you kick it?” I urge. “You know what he’s asking. How much abuse can it take?”

“Once mixed,” says Tarlow, “any good-sized electrical charge and it will detonate. A static charge might do the trick. So be careful about that, especially with all this dust in the air. You can collect a charge just walking through it, like crossing a carpet in an arid environment back on earth.”

“What about concussions?” I ask. “More specific, please.”

“You can kick a bucket of it, and nothing happens.” Tarlow looks down his nose at each of us. “But put a hot railgun round through it, or land a grav lift on it and you better hope you’re nowhere near.”

“Okay,” says Brice. “That’s all sweet and special. How quickly can you mix some of this stuff up and code the detonators to our d-pads?”

Tarlow points to three pallets of buckets that appear to be disorganized. “Those are already mixed.” He smiles guiltily. “I’m not supposed to blend this stuff except on demand—it takes a while. In this gravity, you can’t pour the buckets out, you have to pump them and,” he points at a washing machine-sized piece of equipment that looks like it belongs in a bakery back on earth, “mix them in that before pumping the final product back into the containers.”

“Does it separate?” asks Brice.

“Good question.” Tarlow grins. “In earth gravity, yes. Four to five days on the shelf is all it takes to make it nearly ineffective. Two weeks after mixing and it won’t even burn. Up here, I could let it sit for months before enough separation occurs for the difference to be measurable.”

“And you said you blended this when?” I ask.

“Right before the Trogs arrived.”

“We’re good, then?” confirms Brice.

“Should be,” answers Tarlow.

“What do you use all this for?” asks Graham.

Tarlow points up through the roof. “You saw those big asteroids out there? They’re all too massive for our tug to push to light speed. We have to make them smaller. We’ve drilled most of them. What we do is set the explosives in the holes and detonate them simultaneously to split them into transportable chunks.”

Which leads to my next question. “How much of this stuff do you think it would take to split that Trog cruiser down the seams?”

Chapter 31

The buckets are satisfactory for my purpose, maybe perfect, a metaphor for the measure of my intent and malice.

Either way, the buckets of TX are what Brice and I have to work with—twenty in all, strapped together in two bundles of ten, three hundred and fifty pounds each, a load that would be impossible for us to manually transport back on earth. However, on the Potato, weight is no problem. The momentum is, and needs to be managed.

Three hundred and fifty pounds represents enough mass to crush a human body if it’s moving at a decent clip. A little faster, and it might spontaneously detonate on impact. The asteroid is covered with plenty of stone outcroppings, opportunities for such a collision to occur.

After forty-five minutes of carefully handling our loads through the irritating slurry of dust and rock, Brice and I are resting beside a chubby stone mesa near the wide end of the Potato.

“The haze isn’t too thick down here,” pants Brice.

I’m looking at the sky, able to make out the nearby asteroids, able to see the stern of the Trog vessel still laying claim to its spot of empty space above us.

In five separate liter-sized containers, blasting bottles Tarlow called them, we have TX set to detonate. The bottles are sized to fit down holes drilled deep into asteroids. Each will produce a powerful charge. Brice and I have jammed bottles into the crevices between the pipes and hoses on a drilling rig formerly used for creating holes for the bottles. The rig is standing on the Potato’s surface, sixty meters on the other side of the rocky wart keeping Brice and I hidden.

Brice has the detonators on the blasting bottles connected to his d-pad, and he’s looking at me now, silently asking if I’m ready.

I notice the elapsed time. “You think the others have had time to get their TX charges down to the sublevels?”

Trying to address my hesitation, he says, “With all the shit in the air fouling the radio links, we knew we’d lose comms when we made it this far out.” Still, he waits for an answer. “Does it matter?”

In truth? No.

We have no way of knowing whether the explosion we’re about to detonate will trigger a reaction from the Trogs. We don’t know the state of the rest of our forces. We’ve chosen a self-assigned mission that needs to be carried to success if any of us wants to leave this rock alive and free. The only thing I know for a fact.

My eyes settle on Brice, yet my thoughts are focused inward as I reach my decision. “Fuck it.”

Brice’s smile belies a pyromaniac tendency as he taps the button on his d-pad. A timer starts to tick down through ten seconds. He pats his bundle of buckets. “All we have to hope now is the concussion from the explosion doesn’t set this shit off.”

Both our bundles are off the ground by a meter or so, not touching anything. They’re shielded from blast shrapnel by the rock we’re hiding behind. Still, my earthbound intuition of explosions makes me fret.

“Five seconds.”

I grav myself into position beneath my bundle and flip around to put my feet on the ground, knees bent, ready to push.

Brice slips beneath his load, just as the timer expires.

The rock beneath us shakes sharply.

Jagged hunks of metal and fragments of stone rip through the dust on both sides of us.

Time to fly.

I push off and assist the strength in my legs with a forceful nudge from my suit’s grav plates.

Brice grunts under the strain of pushing the stationary momentum of his load into motion.

We’re both off the surface.

In seconds we’re above the thickest of the gray slurry, hunks of pollen nestled in the core of the expanding bloom of twisted metal from the explosion we just detonated, hoping the Trogs believe we’re part of the debris.

I adjust my grav to aim at the asteroid I think will put us in the best position for our plan, and push my load on the same trajectory. I kill my grav, and relax with legs askew and my arms out to the sides, going ballistic, one more hunk of crap in the solar sphere at the mercy of the gravitational pull of the masses around me.

“You all right?” Brice asks.

“Thanks,” I chuckle.

“What?” He has no clue why I’m amused.

“You complimented me,” I tell him. “I’m trying to look dead.”

“Maybe you should have pursued acting instead of volunteering for this shit.”

“They don’t have actors anymore.”

“In the propaganda films they do,” he argues.

“Yeah,” I laugh, “if I wanted to spend my life pretending to be a dumbass in the films where North Koreans are always doing the smart thing. Not for me.”

I realize I’m slowly rotating as the explosion’s debris cloud thins. However, I’m past the point where I can risk a grav adjustment or movement. Out here with nothing to shield me from the penetrating eyes of little Gray fucks on that Trog cruiser, I need to maintain the charade. If I don’t sell my dead routine, they’ll no doubt send a volley of railgun rounds to ensure my demise.

Of course, they might do that anyway.

I lose sight of Brice as I spin, instead satisfying myself with a view of the sparkly diamond of our sun blazing far away at the center of the solar system. It makes me feel so, so far removed from everything. Even the word, ‘everything’, takes on a different proportion out here with a billion miles of hostile vacuum stretched between me and my home.

Inexplicably, I think of Claire, that smile the first time I saw her, the softness of her skin, the taste of her mouth on mine. The loss of her false love still clenches a brawny fist around my heart and glasses tears over my eyes. No matter how much our marriage was an expedient lie for her, to me, it was the most real thing I ever lived. The death of it still aches. The loneliness from three years of watching her give her entire being to that reeking stick-thing living in my bedroom puts a sharp point on my isolation.

The debris around me starts to thin. My gravitational sensitivities, no longer muffled by the cloud of debris cloying the Potato, feel clear. I no longer need my eyes to picture the three dimensions of space surrounding me.

Brice is there behind me, stiff and playing his own corpse role. Out here with so little mass to skew my senses, I feel his heart beating and see his chest expand with each breath. I can even detect his muscle movements, and see the flow of blood through his veins.

It makes me wonder—how much more clearly than me a Gray can perceive the world? The potential frightens me with its implications.

Pointed in the other direction, the Trog cruiser dominates the sky behind me. Far past, I feel massive Jupiter, slowly spinning inside the halo of its moons.

“That ship is massive,” utters Brice.

“Standard size, though, right?” Of course it is.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” he counters.

“You think we might not have enough to blow it open?” I ask, as I come to accept Brice’s worry.

“You know that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Tarlow said—”

“That’s what worries me.” Brice makes an exasperated sound. “I know he said we’ve got plenty to blow the hull open, but you know as well as I do, he’s guessing. All his knowledge about the structure and materials in these ships would fit into a Gray’s asshole.”

Everybody knows Grays don’t have sphincters, so I guess that makes Brice’s point.

I don’t agree, so I wonder whether my acceptance of Tarlow’s certainty was a case of me hearing what I wanted to hear.

“I don’t like trusting him,” says Brice. “He’s not dependable.”

“He’s just different.” I slip into Dr. Psychologist mode. “You’re projecting other unpalatable traits on him because of one or two characteristics you don’t like.”

Brice chuckles through a series of joyless noises. “So long as you don’t mind me fragging him when this goes to shit. I don’t care what you think the reasons are.”

That’s funny, although not in the way Brice thinks. “If this fails, the Trogs will blow every one of these asteroids to rubble, and we won’t have to worry about who’s alive when it’s over.”

We float for a bit in silence, Brice watching the Trog ship, me lazily spinning with a fantastic view of the whole universe.

Brice makes a few attempts to contact Blair by radio, with no response. Neither of us is surprised. That statically charged dust is doing its work.

“‘Bout halfway,” he informs me.

Our destination asteroid is coming into my view. We’re on course to impact it near where we’d planned—on the far side, out of the cruiser’s view, and hopefully with enough of the asteroid’s mass between us and the ship that the Grays up there won’t detect the grav Brice and I use to maneuver our explosives to a soft landing.

“Major?” It’s a woman’s voice, not Blair.

Startled, I ask, “Who’s this?”

“Silva, sir.”

“Silva?” I grin through a sense of relief I hadn’t expected to feel.

“Where?” asks Brice.

“You’re headed toward us,” she answers.

“Us?” I ask.

“Lenox and Mostyn are here with me.”

“You made it?” It’s a stupid thing to say, but sometimes stupid is the best I can come up with when I’m surprised.

“We went for cover when the shooting started.”

“Injuries?” I ask.

“None,” she tells me. “We’re holed up in a mining shack over here near a piece of drilling equipment.”

“I see it,” says Brice.

The asteroid is slipping out of my line of sight as I spin, but through my grav sense, I can make it out.

“How are you set for A and H?” Brice asks.

“Ammo’s fine,” answers Silva. “We’re topped off on hydro. There’s a stock of H packs and C packs in the shed.”

“We’ll come to you,” Brice tells them.

Chapter 32

I baby my load down to the surface. With the bulk of the Trog cruiser, an array of defensive grav fields surrounding it, and a few million tons of asteroid rock between us, I doubt the Grays in the bow will detect the grav I’m using to maneuver my suit.

My main concern is after using the mass of an asteroid as cover to sneak up on the Trogs twice, will the Grays be focusing their super sharp grav sense at every nearby asteroid to see what’s hiding behind it?

Brice nurses his bundle of TX buckets down to the surface beside me.

Lenox, Mostyn, and Silva are out of the mining shack and coming toward us.

“It’s good to see you guys,” says Lenox.

I smile, but I find myself staring at Silva, trying to see the shape of a woman inside her bulky orange gear.

She catches me looking at her, and I turn away, busying my hands at uselessly checking the tension on the straps around the buckets.

“We made it this far.” Brice punches me in the arm. “Right?”

I look up, and he’s smiling. Apparently, he didn’t expect this much success. “Yeah,” I answer, confidently.

“Hey, boss.” Silva punches me in the other arm, and I turn to see she’s smiling too, eyes trying to catch mine in a lingering gaze.

Just a moment past the end of my melancholy drift across the void, and I find it’s easy to look at her and entertain a thought about what a future might look like with another woman in it. “It’s good to see you.”

She wraps me in a hug. Lenox and Mostyn embrace us both as much as that can be done in the gear we’re all cocooned in.

“I thought we were alone,” Lenox admits as she pulls away from me.

“That’s okay,” offers Brice, as he leans over. “We thought the three of you were blasted off into space.”

“We were,” Lenox tells him, “but not so far we couldn’t recover.”

“What about the Rusty Turd?” asks Silva. She’s talking about our assault ship. “I can’t raise them on the comm.”

I shrug and shake my head.

“Destroyed?” asks Lenox.

“Don’t know,” Brice tells her, glancing at me because he believes there’s no open question on the matter.

Lenox follows Brice’s look in my direction and guesses wrong on its intent. “Are we stuck here, sir?”

“No.” I shake my head to emphasize my certainty on that point. “There are a lot of damaged ships over there on the surface of the Potato, and there are repair shops and parts. And people. We found the station’s crew, a few hundred of them in holding pens down on sublevel nine. Once we take care of our Trog infestation, we can probably repair as many of those ships as we want.”

Mostyn sighs. She wasn’t expecting anything so rosy. Likely, the three of them had concluded they’d be stuck on the small asteroid until they found a way to sneak back to the Potato and hijack something capable of making light speed.

Silva glances at the two erstwhile castaways with her, and then her eyes settle on me. She’s investing her hopes. She wants to believe in a happy outcome to all this shit. “What do we need to do?”

Brice points at his feet, down through the asteroid’s core, and out the other side, right up through the Trog cruiser’s curved aft drive array. “We need to knock that scag out of the sky and neutralize all the Trogs on the surface.” He catches himself as he’s finishing up. “And the ones underground.”

“Do we know how many yet?” asks Lenox, not an ounce of apprehension in her. She’s ready, and no doubt understands the risks.

“No. Not a clue.” I pat a TX bucket in my bundle. “We have our part of the mission. We’ll do it, and then we’ll worry about the Trogs on the surface. Once step at a time.”

“One step at a time,” confirms Brice.

“What’s this, then?” asks Silva, squatting down to examine the label on one of the buckets. “Doesn’t look promising.”

“Industrial explosives,” I answer. “They drop it into the bore holes they drill in these asteroids to split them in half.” I throw in the last part to emphasize the power of the syrupy-thick liquid in the buckets.

“Powerful,” figures Lenox, glancing past us, taking measure of the rock we’re standing on.

“They’ll do the job.” I share a look of what I hope is certainty with Mostyn, and then Silva. I pause when I see doubt in Silva’s eyes, probably because she sees the truth of the doubt in mine. “I don’t know how strong this stuff is.” I acknowledge Brice with a quick look, letting him know I’ve come around to his way of thinking. “The tech who set all this up for us is in the business of breaking rocks, not star cruisers.” I finish with a shrug. Not a great leadership moment, but I’m going to ask these three women to come along on a mission that’ll only reduce their already dismal odds of long-term survival.

“Doesn’t matter.” Brice is certain. “We’re going up there, down there, whatever. We’ll split that cruiser open and kill all the Trogs in it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try the next thing, and the next, and the next.”

That’s the kind of certainty I can get behind—the certainty of persistence. “We have seven hundred pounds of this stuff.” I pat one of the buckets again. “We put it in the right place on that ship, and we’ll take it out of action.”

Lenox steps up close, and starts to read the label on one of the buckets. “It’s a ternary explosive.”

I nod.

“Did you mix it?” she asks.

“Do you know about explosives?” asks Brice.

“Only what I’ve read.” She looks at each of us as she straightens back up. “And I know a little bit about bubble jump arrays.”

I’m curious. “Go on.”

Lenox smiles devilishly. “Knock some of those plates out of alignment and either the ship won’t create a well-formed wave and won’t be able to bubble jump, or maybe it’ll end up on a skewed course and stuck in the interstellar void.”

“What are you thinking?” I ask. “Plant these in the drive array?”

“No,” she answers. “One, maybe two. Just enough to damage the array in case your plan to destroy the ship doesn’t work out. If we can’t kill ‘em, then fuck them up the ass with a pinecone for coming to our neighborhood and acting like assholes.”

I smile my enthusiasm. Nothing wrong with a good backup plan.

Chapter 33

Since keeping our feet on the surface of the asteroid is achieved primarily through suit grav to enhance the effect of the local g, I realize walking around to the other side of our small asteroid isn’t any stealthier than amping up the g and blazing through the sky. Either way, an attentive Gray worried about the cruiser’s rear flank will spot us.

So, we’re off the ground again, curving over the horizon as we separate from our big rock. We’re all in a line, heading straight toward the Trog cruiser’s stern drive array.

I’m in the lead, eyes wide open, grav senses stretched to their limit, trying to see any change as soon as it occurs, believing fluctuations in the cruiser’s defensive fields are my proxy warning system for impending danger. Right behind me, Silva is flying with nothing but a weapon in her hands. Mostyn is a few meters back, guiding my bundle of TX buckets. Brice follows her with his bundle. Lenox has the rear with one bucket in hand.

“Stay close,” I tell them. “There’s a surge in the field coming up. Follow my path exactly, or it’ll bounce you out.” Deflect them actually, just like a railgun round bending its path away from a Trog’s chest plate.

I see a series of donut-shaped fields stacked off the stern of the ship, and I can’t help but wonder at the grav talent of some of these Grays for the complexity of the field shapes they’re able to coax out of their defensive hull arrays.

I bear left to slip through a gap where two of the donut-shaped fields are neutralized because the polarities flip directions.

Silva grunts like she’s been slugged, and I know she’s drifted off my course.

“Exact,” I remind them. It comes out more angry than urgent. A mistake I don’t have time to apologize for. “There’s not a lot of room.” I slip into a neutral zone in the hole of a donut, come to a stop, and spin around to watch the others follow my path.

Silva floats to a stop beside me with a nod and a smile. Harsh words forgiven. Effortlessly so. Draftees resent officers as part of the natural order of the universe. I decide my easy absolution is due to another reason, one skewed strongly by what I want it to be. I decide she likes me as much as I think I like her.

Christ, do men ever mature past the sweet temptation of pubescent puppy love?

What would be the fun in that?

I need to focus on the mayhem ahead.

Mostyn is slowing and delicately maneuvering her load.

“Another meter forward,” I direct her. “Then cut hard toward us.”

She listens and moves as told.

Her buckets are buffeted on one side. She squeezes through the gap between the grav fields, and her bundle starts to spin.

Silva accelerates over to help Mostyn bring the load back under control.

Brice squeezes perfectly through the gap—surprising, considering he’s unable to see the static grav fields. They’re invisible to the normal human, but glow like neon signs to a bug-head like me.

Lenox, with only the single bucket in tow, has little trouble following Brice through.

We’re a hundred meters astern of the Trog cruiser, in the neutral hole at the center of a toroidal grav field, the first of a dozen donut-shaped fields stacked smallest to largest from where we are, up to the stern of the vessel.

I point through the series of donut holes toward the cruiser’s dormant drive array. In everything but size, it looks like the array on the aft end of the Rusty Turd. Either could be mistaken for the dish of a radio telescope back on earth. “We head right up the axis of the ship now. There’s no grav to repel us unless we drift off the centerline. Once we arrive at the ship, we slip over the lip of the array, move onto the outer hull and grav compensate. The whole ship, bridge to stern, is wrapped in bands of grav alternating in polarity. One will pull you down. The other will push you away. You should be alright to walk down the length of the hull as long as you don’t move too fast across the field boundaries.”

Acknowledgments all around.

I turn to Lenox. “Place your bucket wherever you think best between the drive plates and then catch up.”

“Yes, sir.” She’s enthusiastic for getting to work.

“Let’s go.” I spin and lead the way again.

In the null g tunnel through the donuts, it takes just a few moments of effort before we’re at the gaping mouth of the vessel’s drive array. I fly over the lip, earning a close-up look at the thick layers of steel and composite materials that make up the hull. It’s the material I’m hoping to breach with nearly a half-ton of TX.

I plant my feet on the hull’s curve and turn just in time to see Silva alight right beside me with seemingly no effort at all.

“You’re good at this.”

“Of course.” She’s not bragging, just convinced.

Mostyn pushes her load up toward us. Below her, Lenox drifts out of sight into the concave array. As she disappears from view, she calls, “See you in a few, boss.”

Mostyn’s bundle rises above the edge, and Silva grabs a strap to pull it closer and settle it in beside us. Just as the bundle of metal buckets comes over the edge, it jerks out of her hands and shoots away like a balloon. “Dammit!” she curses.

I rocket off the surface as Mostyn apologizes over the comm for letting the explosives get away. It’s my fuckup. I knew. I saw, but my variable-g intuition isn’t plugged into all of my brain’s circuits yet. Every time I hit my suit’s auto-grav, my frontal cortex is tempted into laziness and wants to pretend it’s back in earth’s familiar constant field.

Graving way too hard for comfort, I reach the bundle when it’s nearly thirty meters up. I grip the straps and pull hard to arrest its momentum. The buckets shift and the straps hum under the strain. I can barely hold the weight. I call to Brice. “Careful! We grav compensate our suits for the shift in field polarity and strength. These damn buckets aren’t g-compensated at all.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Brice answers, his voice straining as he wrestles with seven hundred pounds of TX trying to get away from him.

“Help him,” I tell the others, as I try to control my load. It’s harder than I guessed, and I’m not winning.

Over the comm, I hear the others grunting and pushing.

Realizing I don’t have the strength in my hands to pull so much weight, I monkey climb around to the other side of the bundle, flatten my body, stiffen my suit, and use my suit’s grav to drive and steer it.

“Back over the lip,” Brice orders the other two.

“Inside the array?” pants Silva.

“Yes,” Brice answers. “We need to handle this differently.”

He’s right. Crossing the hull in a two-g reversing field, each three-hundred-and-fifty-pound bundle with flip back and forth from seven hundred pounds down to seven hundred up. Not only will it be near impossible to move them, we’ll be lucky if the buckets don’t crush us in the attempt.

I push my load back toward the null field inside the drive array’s concave expanse.

Chapter 34

One bucket at a time, nineteen buckets, five people, that’s only four trips down the length of the hull. Simple math. Simple solutions when brute force isn’t an option.

Walking up the cruiser’s outer hull, I’m passing through an outward-pushing field, and my bucket’s handle pulls me up with seventy pounds of pressure—a rigid balloon that after another ten steps will turn back into a heavy weight my tired fingers can barely carry.

The others are following me along the ship’s dorsal crest, passing a row of railgun barrels, some with large diameters, some smaller, some long, others short.

“Where are we putting these?” asks Brice. He knows where, in the barrels of the guns. He’s asking which ones we want to spike.

I point to a place I think is halfway down the length of the hull, slightly up the curve from where we are. “The ship’s three fusion reactors are mounted inside the main hanger there.”

“You want to take out the reactors?” asks Brice.

“Sounds good to me,” adds Lenox, having placed her solitary bucket where she figured it would do the right kind of damage, grabbed another from our cache, and caught up with our line.

The field I’m walking through reverses, and the bucket swings down from above, nearly jerking my arm out of socket as it’s pulled back toward the hull.

“God,” says Silva. “This is tiring.”

“It’ll be worth it.” I hope.

Mostyn, her voice taut from the strain, says, “These railguns, just ahead. Their barrels look wide enough.”

“Yeah.” No regular pattern exists in the distribution of gun barrel sizes protruding along the crest. Nevertheless, I’ve counted as we’ve been walking to gain an objective idea of how many barrels will suit our purpose, and to help me make the choice of where to start planting our bombs. It looks like we’ll be able to place one bucket snugly inside a railgun once or twice every thirty feet. “We’ll start with those, just ahead.”

“Won’t they just blow out through the barrel?” Mostyn’s question is timid, but valid. “Will the explosions damage anything?”

“Of course,” I tell her, going on to explain my hope, based on no engineering experience at all. “These barrels aren’t built out of thick steel like the ones you see on the seagoing battleships in the old movies. They’re designed to use gravity to push slugs down the long axis. All the support is in the rear.” At least that’s how I remember them from my look at the structures inside when we commandeered the Trog cruiser earlier. “The barrel isn’t designed to contain the lateral pressures of a chemical explosion. Especially not this much chemical.”

“So the gun breaches explode down inside the ship when the TX detonates?” asks Mostyn.

“Yes.” I make it sound certain, although I don’t know I’m right. Nevertheless, I’ve already figured out people like certainty when they’re risking their lives. In fact, I suspect they prefer flawed certainty to faultless ambivalence. They might not admit to it in a discussion of hypotheticals over beers and brats in the backyard, but out in the shit with red-hot railgun slugs tearing through the air at six thousand miles an hour, they’d choose certainty every time.

“Twenty of these charges going off at the same time along this row of guns will do the trick.” I scan back and forth, as I once more evaluate the layout. “The explosions will destroy the breaches on these guns and send a hail of shrapnel through the reactors inside. That’ll kill the ship. With a bit of engineering luck, the detonation will blow this seam wide open. Either way, the ship is dead, no longer a threat to us.”

“Except it’s still full of Trogs,” says Brice, pointing out the flaw in the plan. He’s being a dick, because sometimes, I think it amuses him.

“Maybe we’ll catch them with their pants down again.” Another hope. Whether or not we kill any of their battle legions, we’ll definitely kill all the Trogs unlucky enough to be in the ship’s main hangar at boom time. The air inside will escape. They’ll all suffocate.”

Mostly I’m thinking, ‘One step at a time. Let’s kill the ship, and figure out how to deal with surviving Trogs afterward.’

I stop walking. I’m at the right place, I’m pretty sure, although with the curve of the hull, and me being so small and standing on such a large ship, I realize my perspective might be inaccurate. I don’t say that out loud.

Brice, guessing my dilemma, points up. “You could take off and get a better view.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He grins. “Of course.”

Halfway down the ship’s length, so close to the bow, to flex my suit’s grav muscles and go zipping through space would surely catch the attention of the Grays on the bridge.

“Find a place for your charges,” I tell them, as I step up next to a railgun barrel and slip my bucket inside. Not a perfect fit, but as close as I’m likely to get. I give the top of my bucket a nudge to slide it down to the bottom of the tube, and watch as it recedes into the darkness inside.

A little to my left, Silva is doing the same.

Brice, Lenox, and Mostyn are piling their buckets together into a large-caliber, ship-killing weapon pretty close to the one Silva is loading.

“That’s a good idea,” I tell them. “Concentrating our explosives over a smaller area will probably work better than spreading them out.”

“Yeah,” says Brice. “I know.” As his tone conveys, I should have understood that he already knew that.

I think maybe he needs a shot of Suit Juice to take the grumpy edge off his fatigue.

Partially down the barrel, my bucket seems to be stuck. I have to use my rifle to tamp it in further. It doesn’t go all the way to the bottom, I don’t think, but there’s no way to push any more. I sigh. Nothing goes as planned, even the little things.

Brice and the others, their explosives planted, are hustling toward the stern. Silva is standing by the railgun tube she loaded, and she’s waiting on me.

I hurry along.

“Five down,” she comms me over a private link, making it pretty obvious she was looking for any way to start a conversation.

“Yeah,” I agree, suddenly at a loss for words that want to come so badly they burst full of nothing syllables. I’ve got nothing to fill a conversation with besides guilt, because the wife I promised myself to, a woman I loathe more than love, is shriveling away in my house back on earth. Worse yet, I’m not even sure how I short-circuited myself away from Silva’s smile and down to the hag wrapped around my wife’s sour soul.

The others are at least a hundred meters ahead of us and moving quickly.

I glance at Silva. “We should run.”

She nods and sprints ahead, tumbles at the grav change, and catches her balance.

“I’ll lead,” I say, “I can see the gravity fluctuations.”

Chapter 35

The distance from the aft drive array to the ship’s midsection, crossing through dozens of polarity changes, and being jerked both up and down by the heavy buckets of TX has taken its toll. We’ve planted fifteen bombs. Four remain and we carry those with us. We’re all bruised and tired, trudging forward to drop off our last load.

We’re silent as we walk, nothing but labored breathing over the comm.

I wonder how Blair and her rebels are faring against the Trogs on the subterranean levels, and I entertain the foundationless hope that Blair has helped the rest of the troops from inside the warehouse to escape. I hope they’re armed. I fantasize they’ve discovered the location where the Trogs have cached their automatic weapons. And I toss in the dream that Blair has organized them into units, eager for the coming fight.

Sadly, daydreams evaporate when luck in the real world changes polarity as quickly as a grav field.

“Trouble!” Lenox shouts over the comm.

I pull my eyes off my shuffling feet, scolding myself for inattentiveness as I scan for the source of the trouble, and I find it. A mob of Trogs is walking up the cruiser’s curved hull from the starboard side. We’re the reason they’re coming.

Brice immediately drops to a knee, levels his weapon, and starts shooting. He’s the only one who can fire his railgun, the only one not carrying a bucket.

Rounds veer up and down through the bands of gravity. Most hit the hull or fly off into space. The few that reach the widening wall of Trogs seem to be absorbed by the mass.

“This is shit!” curses Brice. “All these damn variable fields.”

“We gotta get out of here,” suggests Mostyn, not panicking. She’s run her evaluation of the situation, come to a conclusion, and she wants it heard.

“We have to plant the rest of the TX,” says Lenox, calmly.

All of those thoughts are running through my head already. I have to make a quick choice. Premiere on the list is whether Lenox is wrong, right, or committed blindly to my plan. Will that last hundred and fifty pounds of TX make the difference?

“Lenox, Silva, Mostyn,” I say. “Plant those last buckets. Brice—”

He laughs because he knows what’s coming, if not exactly, then he already has the idea. Brice stops his futile firing and taps furiously on his d-pad. “I’m transferring control of all the detonators to Lenox.”

She’s on her d-pad. “Got it.”

“Plant those explosives,” I command her. “Make your way clear of the ship and then blow ‘em all.”

I set my bucket on the hull. It’s one that’ll go unutilized.

“Move!” Lenox orders the girls.

Turning to Brice, I say, “Stay on my six. These grav fields will get pretty fucked up once the Grays see we’re airborne.”

I jump into the air and max grav right toward the center of the Trog line, weapon on full auto, a fiery stream of deadly metal blasting out in front of me.

Chapter 36

“Jesus!” shouts Brice. “There must be a thousand of ‘em.”

Seeing the immensity of the mob coming over the curve of the hull, I know Brice is right.

Spears of red sear past us as we fly. Trogs are shooting back. Most of them aren’t, as I realize one of the reasons their preferred weapon is the disruptor. In variable-g, you never know where your railgun slugs will end up.

I veer to the right and claw for altitude, firing down on the Trogs from above, pulling their attention away from Lenox, Silva, and Mostyn, who are trudging along the cruiser’s spine to make it to the location where they’ll put these last bombs.

“Not too much altitude,” Brice admonishes, as we pick up speed. “Or they’ll fire the ship’s guns at us.”

The cruiser’s gunners have no chance of hitting us at this range with the speed we’re moving, yet he’s right. If the gunners open their breeches to load their weapons, they’ll find the explosives. I angle back toward the mob and see several black forms spring out of the mass and fly toward us. “Ghost Trogs!”

“Shit.” Brice is looking. “Where?”

I point.

I cut a hard turn and angle for an empty swath of hull, well behind the advancing horde.

We cross a grav boundary, and I feel a punch that knocks the breath out of me. The grav is suddenly intense. I compensate as I shout a warning to Brice.

He hits the boundary and tumbles out of control.

It has to be four g’s, at least.

Below me, as I careen toward the hull, I see Trogs falling over. The ratcheting grav field is fucking with them, too. At least there’s that.

I hit the hull and roll. Trogs are all around me, on their knees and on their backs, reeling from the g.

Brice smashes down on a Trog, rolls, and springs up on wobbly knees, weapon firing.

The grav starts to ease and I bounce to my feet, leveling my weapon, pulling the trigger to clear a path in front of me. “This way,” I shout, as I do my best to run.

The Trogs outside the field, ten meters away, are rushing toward us, stumbling as they encounter the change.

I amp up my grav again and take off. Good damn thing for us most Trogs like to keep their feet on the ground.

“Where’d those ghost Trogs go?” asks Brice urgently.

I glance at the black above us and see nothing. My bug can’t find their mass. My grav sense is overwhelmed by the rapidly changing fields. I feel like I’m in a dark room with somebody strobing a flashlight into my eyes.

I spin to aim my weapon at the Trogs closing in around Brice, and fire at a handful from the side. “Get off the ground, Brice!”

He jumps as he works the grav control on his data pad. He’s mobility-handicapped relative to me because he doesn’t have a bug.

“This way!” I shout.

Brice flies toward me, and I’m heading for another empty space on the hull.

“Ghost!” he warns.

Instinctively, I tuck my head and roll as I go into a dive. A black blur with a bright blue blade soars past me, scaring a load into my suit’s recycler.

“I never saw him.” My mouth is on autopilot with out-loud thoughts.

“We need to get down,” shouts Brice.

Looking back at the mob of Trogs, I see we’re at least thirty meters past them and they’re turning to come our way. Safe enough.

Brice is already angling for the hull, and his legs are starting to run even though he’s not down yet.

I’m scanning and flying backwards, looking for the second ghost.

My feet touch down, and I spray a wide arc of slugs that veer toward the deck as the g fluxes again.

“Damn those Grays!” grunts Brice, as he flips his suit back to auto grav so he can concentrate on defending himself rather than managing grav changes.

His railgun spews out a stream of hot slugs.

To my right, I see the ghost Trog who’d just missed me with his blade. He’s charging on foot.

I jump to my feet and sprint toward him, railgun blazing as I close the gap.

My rounds go up, down, and wide, but they pound his deflectors and knock him off balance. He falls as I cross the last few meters.

While he’s trying to bring his disruptor around to cut through my neck, I push the barrel of my railgun under his outstretched arm, well inside his defensive grav, and send a handful of rounds through his suit, exploding out his back in a puff of shattered bone and blood.

No time to revel in my ghost Trog kill, I spin to see Brice swinging his disruptor in a fight with the other ghost, a towering, thick one, a giant among Trogs. “Get out!” I shout. “Get out of there!”

Brice ducks under the ghost Trog’s blade, and jumps as his free hand moves to his d-pad’s grav controls.

I jump too, and max grav directly at the ghost whose attention follows Brice into the air above his head.

At the last breath, I switch my power to defensive grav and smash bodily into the Trog.

He flies into a line of his simpleton brothers, and I angle up, slowing and spinning as I bring my weapon to bear, spraying the whole mess of them from above with un-aimed rounds, hoping for a hit.

“This way,” shouts Brice.

“We can’t hold this many,” I tell him.

My God, I’m a deductive genius when it comes to the obvious!

“Of course we can’t!” He angles toward the hull again, trying to move us another forty meters farther from the disorganized mob of Trogs.

He touches down, spins, and raises his rifle, ready to fight.

A second later, I plant my feet on the hull beside him, and start shooting as I comm the squad. “Lenox, we’re pushing our luck here.”

“Thirty more seconds,” she tells me, “then get your ass out of there.”

Chapter 37

The sky fills with fireflies of red zipping past us, some near, most far, railgun slugs fired by Trogs angry for having missed their chance to kill us when we were down among them.

Thirty seconds?

I didn’t count the ticks.

Brice and me both empty our magazines and take off. With only disruptors left and no explosives, we have no defense against so many Trogs and only our lives to trade for a delay.

All we can do is try to keep their attention and hope a ghost Trog doesn’t catch us. We’re heading away from the Trog cruiser, back toward the asteroid where we picked up Lenox and the others.

“Silva, Mostyn, Lenox,” I call. I hear only static.

“Lenox,” calls Brice as the grav fields shrink to null around us.

No response for him either.

The mob of Trogs runs across the hull, looking every bit like an aquatic invertebrate preying on a fish.

I accelerate toward the asteroid’s horizon, searching the surface as I fly, hoping to see the others.

“The ship’s turning,” says Brice.

I glance back to see the massive cruiser slowly rotate, bringing one of its spines of railguns to bear, but not the one we planted our explosives in. “Follow me!” I veer hard to the right.

Brice is close behind.

A volley of huge railgun slugs streaks past us and explodes on the asteroid’s surface.

“That’s overkill!” shouts Brice, like he’s being treated unfairly. A bit uncharacteristic for him.

“I’d say they were pretty pissed about us being on their ship.” I turn again, going up this time.

Railgun rounds start to pour out of the ship.

“Over the horizon!” shouts Brice. “We need the asteroid between us and them.”

“Max grav!” I shout back. “As fast as you can go.”

“I hope you’re off the ship!” That catches my attention. It’s Lenox on the comm.

I look back at the cruiser as I accelerate, not an entirely smart thing given how fast I’m moving with the asteroid below me and debris in the sky everywhere. I’m rewarded for my carelessness. The upper spine of the ship erupts in fire and shrapnel as railguns mounted there fly apart.

“Our TX!” I shout at Brice.

He turns to see.

All along the gun spine, the cruiser splits open, and the rent in the hull stretches wide as hunks of bent metal small and large blast into the vacuum. For a second, I can see clearly into the giant ship. Trogs inside are looking up at empty, black space, their death.

The cruiser lurches.

Another explosion rocks it.

Bodies and railgun slugs pour out through the gaping wound.

The grav fields flicker on and off, overlap, and stress the hull in places where it’s now weak.

A huge section along one side of the tear caves in and is then pushed back out by escaping gases.

The ship starts to spin and bend.

Trogs that had been on the surface of the hull, the ones trying to kill us, are running in every direction. Some are making the most uncomfortable choice for a Trog and going airborne, leaping for the nearest asteroids.

Cracks spider-web across the hull and spread wide. Lights flicker. The grav fields go from chaotic to frenetic.

“This is going to get fucked up out here!” shouts Brice. The sky is filling with high-speed jetsam. It’s impacting the asteroid below us, and flying past into deep space.

The grav fields near the center of the cruiser, where our bombs did the most damage, flash brilliant blue. I feel the sting all through the bug’s tentacles in my brain as the ship rips apart—half rocketing away from us, two other massive hunks coming our way.

“Shit!” I over-grav my plates and burn for the asteroid’s far side.

Brice sees the same situation as I do and does his best to keep up.

In moments, I’m down close to the surface on the backside, and I’m reversing my field to avoid a crushing impact. Thankfully, the familiar pop of frying plates doesn’t sound. I’ve gambled again with my personal orange terrarium, and I’m alive.

My feet find dirt, and I switch to auto grav and start to run.

Brice touches down ahead of me, and I point to a ravine between two ragged ridges of stone.

“Catch me if you can!” he shouts as he finds his feet, switches to auto grav, and sprints.

The asteroid rumbles as part of the cruiser impacts on the other side. The ground beneath us shifts suddenly to the left and both Brice and I tumble down.

He’s quicker to recover, and he’s moving again.

I’m crawling and pushing with my grav and running as the star field above us races across the sky. Grav around us fluctuates wildly and the stone below us shakes like it’s going to disintegrate.

Brice finds his way into the fissure first and turns to see me tumble over on top of him. We bounce off each other, and off the stone walls, as our mutual defensive grav fights with the asteroid’s ambient field and wild fields flaring through everything around us.

I’m on my back, lying on jagged rock when I stop moving. Looking up, seeing the tiny sparkle of our sun slide across the sky, I know the asteroid is spinning. That thought barely has a moment to gel when the Trog cruiser’s grav array fills the sky above and crashes into the rocks protecting us.

Chapter 38

I’m the first to poke my head through the gap of twisted steel and shredded hull composite, and notice the sky above is still moving. “I’m through.”

Brice sighs his relief.

We’ve been working our way through the wreckage trapping us in the shallow canyon for nearly two hours.

“That was a hell of an impact,” I tell Brice. “The asteroid is spinning pretty quickly.”

“Can you make it all the way out?”

“I think.” I wriggle myself through the hole, careful not to move too fast or push too hard. Plenty of sharp edges around me could tear a fatal hole in my thin orange sanctuary. If I get too anxious for freedom, it could be my death.

“I’ll admit it,” says Brice. “I wasn’t a believer.” He’s talking about our plan to use Tarlow’s TX to destroy the Trog cruiser.

I laugh. “Me neither. I was just placing a bet.”

“Same here,” Brice laughs, too.

Plenty of new metal meteors are in the sky racing away from us, remnants of the star-faring leviathan we killed.

I pull my legs up, turn, and sit on the edge of the hole. “I’m out.”

I can’t help but notice Jupiter’s ragged stripes of rust and gray coming up over the horizon, engulfing our eastern sky. Pulling my boots free, I turn to reach a hand in to help Brice.

“Jesus,” he says, as he pokes his head through the hole. “That’s a sight.” Then he grins because we’re out of immediate danger. “I can’t believe that worked.”

I’ve had a lot of time to think about it while we were exploring the wreckage to find a way through. “Those ships are built for a specific kind of warfare, big ship-to-ship engagements. It’s the kind of fight they expect to be in. The unofficial rules of their warfare. Doing things the way they’ve always done.” I look down at Brice. “They’re going to be rethinking a lot of that now that we’ve destroyed five.”

“That worries me.” Brice settles in for a moment, resting in the hole, the urgency gone now that he can see the sky. “We’re winning because we keep surprising them. What happens when we run out of surprises?”

I laugh.

“What?”

“We’re humans,” I tell him. “We’ve been killing each other since the dawn of time, and coming up with new ways to do it at every turn. We’ll never run out of fresh ideas. It’s the genius of our species.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Damn right, I’m right.” I grin.

Brice laughs.

“The Grays and the Trogs and any other imperial dipshits in this galaxy better figure it out because they’re dealing with humans now. We might not have the tech, but we have an irrepressible hankering to slaughter.”

I guess, tired of my pontifications on warfare, Brice heaves himself out of the hole and looks up to see Jupiter reach its zenith, high-noon, filling half the sky above.

I realize, we can’t be in the asteroid belt. In fact, the Potato never was. We’re way too close to Jupiter.

I stand and straighten up to look around. “I’ll bet we make a full day in ten minutes. Maybe forty-five.”

“A day.” Brice laughs as he sits on the edge of the hole with his feet dangling inside. “It’s weird to think of it that way. A day is twenty-four hours on earth’s rotation.” He watches Jupiter barrel across our sky. “We’re moving, too, right?”

He’s right. We’re not only spinning, but flying through space.

Brice scans the sky.

“You can’t see it until the sun comes up.”

“The Potato?” He asks.

“That’s what you were looking for, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Give it a minute.”

“Are we pretty far?”

I nod.

“Really far?” he asks.

I nod again. “I saw it when I was still in the hole and first spotted the sky. It was a smudgy brown spot up above us then.”

“Shit,” he says. “A big, brown spot?” He’s hopeful for the word, ‘big.’

I shake my head, straighten my arm, and hold a finger against the sky. “The size of a penny maybe. A dime.”

“How far do you reckon the asteroid is?”

I’m scrutinizing the tip of my finger. “Maybe it wasn’t that big.”

“You’re not making me feel better.”

I turn to look at him as Jupiter slides toward our horizon. “Is that what you wanted, me to make you feel better? Despite your off-color humor, I had you pegged for a no-bullshit kinda dude.”

He sighs. “Sometimes the burden of the straight scoop wears me down. Maybe a little sugar-coating now and again wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

“I think they’re sending a grav lift out to pick us up right now.” I grin.

Brice grimaces. “Too much sugar.”

“I know.”

“What do you propose?”

I take a moment to examine my d-pad, looking for info on how much H I might still have in the tank. As usual. It tells me just about nothing.

“Looking to see if anyone is in comm range?” Brice looks at his d-pad.

“H,” I tell him. “My suit burns it like it has a leak or something.”

“It’s these micro-reactors,” Brice tells me. “The smaller they are, the less efficient.”

“How are you set?” I reach around to my back and tap mine as if that’s going to give me any information.

“That’s pointless,” Brice tells me.

“I know. My indicator doesn’t work.”

“There’s a warning light built into your helmet display.”

“The light doesn’t do anything until I run completely out.”

“That’s not very convenient.”

I reach down and check for the spare canister on my leg, only to realize I never obtained a spare after the last one ran dry. “That mining hut. The one Lenox said had all the spare canisters in it. We need to find it.”

“This asteroid isn’t that big.” Brice looks back and forth across the rough landscape, then points. “They were drilling those cores down through the centerline. If we follow the line of holes, we’ll come to that shack.”

Brice is already out of our gopher hole and walking across the broken section of cruiser hull. He’s not one to dick around once he makes up his mind. I follow, letting my suit’s auto grav keep my feet oriented toward the asteroid’s center of mass.

“So we stock up on H and cal packs,” he says, “then what?”

Calories. I forgot about those. I can’t remember the last time I ate something. I take a sip through my calorie tube, and nothing comes out. “Crap. I think my cal pack is dry, too.”

“Should be plenty of both in that shack.”

“Yeah.”

We make our way slowly down to the surface, and I wonder as I plant my feet on the ground why we didn’t just hop off and float down.

Jupiter is just starting to slip below the horizon when I say, “I think if we put on fresh H packs, we each load on a spare, and then grab a few more,” I tap a few of the empty magnet mounts on my belt, “We should be able to fly back to the Potato on suit grav alone. I don’t know. It can’t be more than a few thousand miles.”

Brice climbs over a tumble of rough stone and starts down the other side. “Back when I was working construction, there was this story about a guy whose lift went haywire or something. He’d just dropped his load on one of the rings.” He’s talking about the giant, ring-shaped station the crews were working to construct for the Grays. “This was back before my time, so who knows how much is true. You know how stories go over time. They get better.”

I agree.

“They said the ring was already spinning then.” Brice focuses forward as he talks. “Nobody’s sure what happened to cause the accident. Maybe he didn’t account for the spin. Maybe he was a new guy making new-guy mistakes. Long story short, the ring’s billion tons of mass collides with his lift and mashes something in his grav accelerator mechanism. His ship shoots out of there like he’s just floored it. I mean he took off faster than anybody had ever seen one of those lifts move.”

“Yeah?” I make it over the tumble of stones and follow Brice as he seems to have a good bead on where we’re headed.

“In no time, the grav lift shoots out of the orbital plain and disappears from view. Everybody figures the guy died in the collision.”

I make the brilliant deduction the story has a kicker, so I keep my mouth quiet and wait for Brice to surprise me with it. I’m polite that way.

“What they learned later was this guy was knocked unconscious by the collision. He wakes up seven or eight hours into his flight. His ship is still accelerating away from earth, and he has no way to slow it down. So his choice is to sit there and wait to die, or do something.”

That’s my prompt. “What did he do?”

“He jumped out of the ship.”

“He used suit grav to get himself back?” I ask.

“Yeah,” answers Brice. “That’s it exactly. Only he was smart enough to know he couldn’t do a max grav burn or he’d use up all of his H and then suffocate. So he did a slow burn—a real slow burn—just enough to reverse his speed. Because he was in the ship, he was already moving away from the earth at twenty or thirty thousand miles an hour. He had to burn through all of that negative speed, get up a little forward speed, and then kill it. Then he had to hope he was going fast enough to make it back to earth before he ran out of H to sustain the suit. Go too fast, you burn too much H on acceleration. Go too slow, and you burn all your H on life support during the long trip back. He prayed he made the right guess on how long and how hard to burn. All he had then was hope.”

“I take it the d-pads weren’t sophisticated enough back in those days to make the calculations for him.”

Brice shrugs. “Same d-pads we have now. Probably an older version of the software. It didn’t matter. Half the time, his was on the fritz. He had to eyeball the whole thing. Course, acceleration, everything. Then he had to rest calmly in his suit using minimum energy so he could max his time to stay alive.”

“I take it there’s a happy ending.”

“No.” Brice shakes his head like that much was obvious from the start. “He died and froze to death on the way. Solid chunk of ice when they intercepted his body floating in earth orbit one day.”

“How long was he out there?” I ask.

“Nearly two months before they found him,” says Brice. “He recorded a diary on the d-pad. One of the only features still working. That’s how they knew what happened to him.”

“Why did you tell me this story?”

“Because if you’re thinking, we’re going to suit grav back to the Potato, I don’t want to end up like a popsicle. Let’s take plenty of H and plenty of C. Like all we can haul with us.”

“Sounds like good advice.”

Chapter 39

We arrive at the shack, the remains of it, anyway. It’s been smashed. A gouge a hundred meters long runs across the ground and through its remains. Half the shack is just gone, ripped away, and who the hell knows where any of it is? The half still on the ground is crumpled flat.

Equipment that had been inside is broken and scattered, some on the surface, some floating. Other pieces drift slowly into space.

Brice, not fazed by the destruction, drops to his knees, and starts rifling through the debris. “Let’s hope the Potato didn’t take it this bad.” He glances up at me with a silent request to affirm or rebut his hope for our soldiers back there.

I’m at a loss. If thoughts of the Potato’s destruction have been bubbling through Brice’s gray matter during our hike around this little rock, he’s way ahead of me. I was too focused on our problems to think of them. Now, newbie to this set of fears, that they all might be dead, that the station might be destroyed, that the smudge of brownish-gray I saw in the distance might have suffered its own collision and might be careening so fast away from us we’ll never catch it…

Oh, fuck it!

Any combination of a thousand terrible outcomes might have befallen bitchy Blair and the soldiers we left at the mining colony, and I don’t know what to feel about any of that.

“You gonna help me?” Brice asks. “Or watch?”

“Watching is good.”

“Yes, Major.” Brice tugs at a sheet of metal once part of a flimsy wall.

I step over to help while I piece my composure together with the glue of our desperate situation. By all rights, we shouldn’t have lived this long, and we shouldn’t have any long-term aspirations in the realm of continued existence. Death is sure to wrap its bony fingers around our necks soon.

“Just kidding, man.” I bend over and grab the piece of metal Brice is tugging at. Our combined strength is enough to yank it free.

Brice crawls inside the wreckage, and I heave the sheet of metal into space, sending it into orbit around the asteroid. When I turn back toward Brice, he’s working through the jumbled mess, busy and quick, thankfully not desperate.

“H packs?” I ask, still working through my sudden dance with distress. “Any luck?”

“Looking.” He shoves junked equipment and digs through the smaller pieces, creating a cloud of metal and other materials—all sizes, all weights.

I scan the area, looking for cartridges. Could they have all been blown off into space? I look across our rugged, curving landscape. I look in the sky. How far away could those little white bottles go and still be visible? Would a hundred meters be too far? Two hundred? And what about our rotation and translational velocity?

Deep breath.

I’m not prone to panic, yet I feel like I slipped on some kind of mental banana and I’m having trouble finding my feet.

“Jackpot!” Brice could have said ‘hemorrhoid,’ and if he’d said it with that much excitement, the syllables wouldn’t have mattered. His tone told me what I needed so desperately to hear. He’s found H.

“A lot of them?”

“A collapsed cabinet.” He’s up on his feet, legs bent, straining to drag something free. “A wire cage thing.” He gasps with the effort. “Fifty, sixty bottles in here.”

“H?” I ask, “Or C?”

“Both, looks like.”

I’m beside him in a heartbeat, helping pull the deformed wire box free, looking at it with a love only someone who has starved or thirsted can understand.

“Looks like Trog stuff.”

“H is H,” I tell him. “Hydrogen has the same recipe everywhere.”

Brice doesn’t laugh.

I thought it was funny.

“Trog cal packs.” Brice isn’t happy about that. He steps backward, dragging the metal cage free.

“Can we use their cal packs?” I ask, concerned maybe their food might be poisonous to humans.

“Can.” Brice straightens up and admires his work. “Tastes like grapefruit rind purée. Disgusting stuff. It’ll keep you alive, though.”

“Wonderful.”

“And once you plug one into your suit,” Brice grimaces, “that shit stays in your system and makes all your cal packs taste like shit for two or three months. The only way to get it out is to have the techs do an overhaul.”

“I take it you’ve had it before.”

Brice nods. “Back on Ceres. At the end, we were scavenging them off dead Trogs.” Brice drops to his knees, then bends the cage’s doorframe to open it up.

“You’ve had some experiences out here, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

I sit down on a hunk of stone and stare up at Jupiter rising again over the asteroid’s horizon. “When you came up, is any of this what you expected? I mean, I’ve seen some crazy shit, and it’s only been a few days for me. I can’t start to guess all you’ve been through.”

Brice laughs with the giddiness of a man who just earned a long extension on life. “I gotta be honest, things are more interesting since you arrived.”

“You mean space was just another boring version of earth?”

“No, nothing like that.” Brice seats himself cross-legged beside his prize. “If you think these past few days are par for the course, they aren’t. I think guys with lives this interesting don’t tend to live long enough to tell their friends about it.”

Still staring at Jupiter’s red spot with fascination, I ask, “You were in construction at first, right? Why’d you come up? You had to know back then that life expectancy was short for construction workers up here.”

“I did,” says Brice as he pulls an H pack out of the crunched cabinet. He shakes it and listens, definitely a habit left over from his life back on earth. There’s no way he can hear the liquid hydrogen splashing inside the bottle. That’s when I get it. He can feel the hydrogen moving inside. He tosses the H to me.

I press a small button along the top edge of the bottle, and a band of green lights flashes bright to tell me it’s full. That’s a relief. I wrap the bottle in the Velcro straps on my right thigh and breathe a well-deserved sigh.

Brice is putting a full bottle on his thigh as well. “Feels good knowing you’re going to live three more days. Right?”

I agree, of course. “It’s a funny thing knowing your life expires as soon as that little bottle runs dry. I never thought about it when I was back on earth. I never thought about the details of life out here, how it was so different.”

“You mean the null g?”

“No,” I say, “everybody thinks about that. You know, when you’re a kid and dreaming of coming into space, it’s all about zero-g, and rockets blasting, and space battles with aliens. Stupid shit like that. No, I mean the details.”

Brice laughs loudly. “We’ve done some of that, right? So you’re not far off. But you’re right, life out here isn’t what you think it’s going to be when you’re sitting on the farm dreaming about rocketing into the void.”

“Is that why you came up?” I dig. “To escape the farm?”

“Of course,” says Brice. “Some people were made for Nebraska life, living in an endless sea of wheat, rolling hills to the horizon, peace and quiet under blue skies. My parents loved it. They were the right people for that kind of living. I hated it. At least I thought I did.”

“So you weren’t drafted into the construction crews, you volunteered?”

“I’m a genius like that.”

Chapter 40

The mangled shelf containing the H and C packs turns out to be the best container we have available. With one of several carabiners attached to my suit’s belt, I connect to one end of the shelf. Brice connects to the other. It’ll make for awkward going, however, staying connected once we’re out in the void will be worth any imposition.

We talk. We weigh the pros and cons. We do it quickly. We’re both pragmatic. We both know the longer we stay on our spinning rock, the more likely we’ll die.

And then we wait.

Jupiter sinks below the horizon, and the sun’s tiny bright sparkle rises above the other.

“I don’t see the Potato,” says Brice, peering into the blackness.

“Give it a minute.” I’m looking toward the horizon as well, trying to remember where we last saw the asteroid colony with respect to the position of the sun. I point to a spot in the sky. “Maybe around ten o’clock asteroid time.” I’m so clever. “I think that’s when we’ll see it come up.”

Brice looks. “When was the last time you did see it?”

“Before we started digging this shelf out of the collapsed shack.”

“An hour?” Brice asks.

“Sure, I guess.”

“How much farther away are we, do you think?”

I shrug. “I don’t have any clue how fast we’re moving.”

We watch and wait as the sun climbs in our sky. I begin to think maybe I was wrong, and begin to wonder about other possibilities. Taking all I don’t know about orbital mechanics into consideration, the possibilities of where my thinking and planning went wrong are too far beyond my educational level to even guess at.

Still, I scan the sky, trying to find that grayish-brown smudge of hope. “You know there’s something I always wondered about?”

“What’s that?” asks Brice, his eyes riveted to the sky.

“The people in Breckenridge, up near the spaceport—we had this image of farmers, like they always had plenty to eat because they had farms.”

“Like Phil had plenty to eat?”

“We talked about Phil’s problem.”

“Sorry,” says Brice. “I couldn’t help myself.”

“That’s okay. I know you don’t like him.”

Brice takes a moment before putting together a real response. “You know the MSS has an office in every farm county, right?”

“I didn’t know that, exactly.” It makes sense, though. “Phil’s wife, remember her?”

Brice’s smile looks a little too lascivious.

I’m pretty sure it’s a dig at me for my indiscretions. “Sydney, she worked as an auditor for the Farm Bureau. MSS, right?”

“They have to be in charge of every detail.” Brice scans the heavens for a few more silent moments. “When I was a kid, there was this family that lived out east of town. I didn’t know them well. I saw the kid in school. He was a few grades ahead of me and kind of a bully. A chunky kid. Phil reminds me of him a little bit.”

“Because he was chunky?” I guess.

“Maybe,” admits Brice. “Not a lot of people around who can afford the luxury of a few extra pounds.”

Truer by the day on an earth ruled by twiggy Gray bastards.

“What happened to the kid?” I ask.

“I was pretty young. Maybe second grade, so I didn’t really understand it. The MSS arrested the kid’s family, him, his two sisters, and the parents. Hung them all from some gallows they had the farmers build on the lawn in front of the courthouse. Said they were hoarders.”

“Food hoarders?” I’m angered, but not surprised. It’s a common story. It seems anytime the MSS is too lazy to beat the hell out of someone, they have them hanged instead.

“I didn’t understand what that meant,” says Brice. “‘Hoarders’ is all everyone called them after that. The MSS officer stood them on dining room chairs under a beam with nooses on their necks. He screamed at them for a long time, you know the way they do, all red-faced and spit dribbling. When he ran out of breath, another one walked down the line and knocked the chairs out from under their feet. They kicked and wiggled while their faces twisted and turned purple and their eyes bulged out. It gave me nightmares.”

“Why do you think your parents made you watch?”

“Everybody in town had to be there,” answers Brice. “That’s the way the MSS wanted it. You know how they are.”

“Yeah.” I’ve got nothing but dark thoughts for those fuckers.

Brice looks up at the sun and then scans across the horizon again. “Should we see it by now?”

I nod, but don’t say anything.

“After that,” says Brice. “No more chunky kids in school. As a matter of fact, I never saw another overweight person who wasn’t MSS until I met Phil.”

“Yeah, the MSS is never short on food.”

Brice points at the sky. “I think we waited too long.” He turns to look at the H and C packs in the deformed cage linking us together.

I extend an arm and point it at the sun. I jab another downward, in the direction I think Jupiter is currently orbiting. Rotating one arm around to point at nothing apparent, I say, “The Potato should be that way. We can’t see it because it’s small and doesn’t reflect any light.”

“What does your bug say?”

“I wish something more. I’m sensing masses all through the darkness out there. Probably pieces of the ship. Maybe other asteroids.”

Brice laughs. “Are you saying we head out in that direction and pray we run into it?”

I pat the wire cage holding our provisions. “We have enough hydro to last us for months, so we can stay here and hope somebody happens upon us, or we can go. The longer we wait, the less likely we are to find the Potato.”

“I’m not sure we’re at all likely to find it now.”

Looking into the blackness for any hint as to the location of the asteroid, I admit, “You’re right, but we both know that staying is choosing to die.” I look around. “Though we will miss out on all the modern conveniences and great views.”

“I’m not arguing.” Brice sighs. “I don’t want to spend the last weeks of my life picking out the best hole for you to bury me in. Better to take our chances out there.”

I look up at the stars to find my bearings. “I think I know the direction. If you want to relax, I’ll handle the grav in both suits.”

“Fine by me. Just say the word.”

“Hold onto the cage,” I tell him. “For stability. No point in putting all of our trust in me or that carabiner.” I gently apply the grav, and we lift off the asteroid’s surface. “I’ll accelerate for thirty minutes or so, and then we’ll coast and see what we see.”

“You’re the pilot.”

Chapter 41

The only gauge I have for our speed is the rapidity with which the asteroid we left shrinks behind us, and that tells me just about nothing. We might be moving at two hundred miles an hour or five thousand.

And direction?

What the hell was I even thinking when I jumped off our rocky little home trying to eyeball-navigate across the solar system? The smaller that asteroid shrinks, the more folly this seems.

Sure, Jupiter is behind me. The sun is to my left. Brice and I are streaking toward the asteroid belt, going pretty much in the direction of the Potato, but I know that if the asteroid is a little farther away than I hoped, if we’re a few degrees off, we might zip on past it, missing it by fifty or a hundred thousand miles and never know.

Maybe that’s the worst part, I don’t know how far away we were when we started, and I don’t know how close we need to be to see it. Maybe every part is the worst part, right down to staying put on the asteroid and waiting to die.

“They left them there,” says Brice.

I look back at him. “What are we talking about?”

“Those people they hanged.”

I chuckle, and then apologize. “I’m not laughing about the hoarders. I just didn’t know we were still having that conversation.”

“Better than staring at the black and thinking about what dying out here will feel like. Nothing to touch. No grav. No heat or cold. Nothing to feel at all. How long before you think a person would go insane out here?”

I don’t want to talk about any of that, so I change back to the subject Brice was hoping to keep his mind busy with. “How long did the MSS leave them hanging in front of the courthouse?”

“Months,” he answers. “Birds would sit on them and pick at their skin. Coyotes came around at night and chewed at their feet. We didn’t come into town but maybe once a week, sometimes twice a month. There was less and less of them each trip. Then they just disappeared. Nothing left but ragged ropes and dark spots in the grass. At least the spots went away in the spring when the green grass grew in.”

“The MSS left the ropes and the gallows there?”

“Might still be there,” says Brice. “They wanted the farmers to know they were serious about food theft.”

“Did it work?” I ask. “Or did people just hide it better?”

“That’s an odd question.”

“How so?” It doesn’t seem odd to me. “We’ve all lived under the North Korean tyranny. We’ve all broken the law. Everybody becomes good at it, right? At least the ones of us who stayed alive.”

“You sound like my dad.”

“I think you and I are about the same age.” I look him up and down. “Don’t pull that dad shit with me.” I smile.

“The summer after the hanging,” says Brice, sounding particularly guilty, “I pilfered some corn from the harvest. I stashed it in the barn, back in the loft, a couple of bushels. It was enough so I’d be able to sneak in every day or so and eat some. I was always hungry.”

“You got away with it.” An easy deduction since I see Brice has lived to experience the good fortune of our current situation. “No big deal, right?”

Brice disagrees.

I decide at that moment all of his stories must have shitty endings.

“My dad followed me into the barn one day and caught me.”

“What’d he do?”

“He beat the hell out of me.”

Trying for some happiness in it, I say, “He was looking out for you.”

“Not in the way you think,” says Brice. “When he was done, he didn’t take the corn. He didn’t tell me to turn it in. He told me to get better at hiding it. If he could find it, so could the MSS. Then he went back to the house and left me in the barn.”

“What’d you do?”

“I didn’t know where to put it. I thought I’d already found the best place. So I fed it to the pigs.”

“And you went hungry?”

“Nothing new for us,” says Brice. “I didn’t want my parents hanged in the square. So, like everybody I knew, I grew up starving surrounded by piles of food. I was kicked out of school after sixth grade like everybody else, and I went to work on the farm, twelve hours a day. By the time I turned seventeen, the Grays were siphoning every able body they could fit into an orange suit, and sending them to build that goddamn stupid giant wheel in space, floating forever at LaGrange Point One. When finished, it would have been a thousand miles across, three hundred wide. There were supposed to be two million square miles of happy Gray habitat inside when we were done. After that, the Grays were supposed to leave us alone on earth. They’d have their place, and we’d have ours. All that work for all those years. All those lives. You can’t even measure it. And it was the first goddamn thing the Trogs destroyed when they attacked.”

“Second.” That just slipped out.

“Yeah,” admits Brice. “They did attack the moon colonies first, yet the moon survived. We still own that.”

Feeling my political hackles rise, I ask, “Nobody really believed the Grays would stop at one ring, did they? If we’d ever finished that one, they’d have made us build another and another and another. We’re their slaves, and as long as they’re alive in this solar system, it’s always going to be that way.”

“I don’t need to hear your rebel recruitment pitch,” Brice grouses. “Look at me, I’m already sold. I fragged my company captain. I’m complicit in a mutiny. I’m a rebel, and now I’ll always be, whether I like it or not. I’m committed.”

“Sorry.” Not about Brice’s choice to come to my side, but for me slipping a foot onto my favorite soapbox. “Sometimes it just happens. I hate the Grays even more than I hate the Trogs.”

“Turns out they’re the same people,” laughs Brice. “Same management, anyway.”

“Yeah.” Looking for something else to talk about, I try another subject. “Did you like working in space?”

“At first, yeah, of course.” Brice sounds suddenly nostalgic. “There’s the novelty of it. Who wouldn’t love it? Working construction in space is a lot harder than you think it should be. You still sweat. Sometimes so much you think you’re going to die of heat stroke, or you freeze for days on end because you’re suit’s thermostat won’t calibrate right. Or it gets the O_2 mix wrong, and you run around high as a kite, or your cal mix runs lean, and you lose twenty pounds over your three-week in-suit rotation, and you don’t even know it because you never see yourself in the mirror, never step on a scale. You never even put on pants and figure out they’re loose, because you’re in the suit for the weeks-long stretch.”

“Was that the deal?” I ask. “Three weeks in, and what, three days off?”

“Five off,” says Brice. “The Grays were generous with us up there. You could get to the moon a couple of times a year, back to earth once every twelve months or so. If you were lucky. Mostly we spent our time off in the dorms on the site. Slums really, with stacks of bunks ten tall in warehouses for a thousand off-duty slugs just like you. Sounds shitty, and it was, but it was something. You were out of your suit. You could eat real food, for a couple of days anyway, before you were back on the colon cleanse to empty your system and prep for being back in the suit. At least you had artificial gravity and had a chance to feel another human’s touch.”

“Sounds like there’s more to it than just that,” I observe.

“There was a girl,” admits Brice. “I was young. She was, too.” He laughs. “Of course, there was a girl.”

I chuckle because I’m a guy and I know, the girl always comes up. “Pretty?”

“You bet,” says Brice. He laughs some more. “With every day that goes by, the girls in your memory grow prettier, or they turn meaner.”

“Or both.”

Brice finds that exceptionally funny.

I think of how Claire’s flaws seemed to have evaporated in the years after she took in the hatchling, not in real life, but in my memory. In my mind, the real Claire died the day she embraced that Gray, and the woman I married was replaced by a withering facsimile.

I wonder whether she’s still alive.

I feel suddenly like I’ve been away from the earth for months, yet I know it’s only been days.

Chapter 42

“They organize the work crews into pods of six,” says Brice. “Like the Grays do with things, everything is six-this and six-that. Six pods of six workers made up a crew. She was in another pod in my crew, all on the same rotation. I don’t even remember how we met. I think we bumped into each other in a chow line on one of our five-day breaks. She talked about going to the moon because she’d never been. Neither had I. We were both new then. She started sending me messages when we were out in the void, and we started hooking up during our downtime. We explored the ring we were building. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of it were finished by then. Lots more were in some state of completion. We used to sit out on the framework of an unfinished section and look at all the orange suits crawling over the structure, millions of ants busy at work with countless shuttles coming and going, dumping materials brought up from earth. It was mesmerizing. Eventually, we grew comfortable with silence. We often sat with our legs dangling over a trillion miles of nothing, thinking what-if thoughts, and watching the universe slide by.

“We messaged a lot when we were on duty. We slept together during our rotations back to the slum. Funny thing is, by that time, I’d had my fill of space and so had she. We dreamed about going back to earth when our ten-year term was up. We talked about maybe getting a farm, can you believe it? At the time, we still believed once the stations were finished, life would be better on earth. We’d raise some kids, listen to the birds tweet, sit in the shade of a tree—a tree—you wouldn’t believe how much you miss trees once the shine wears off the whole space thing.

“Maybe we’d go rogue, run up to Canada, hide in the mountains off the grid, and wait for all the shit to blow over.” Brice’s unexpected laugh comes out mean and hard, and I can feel he’s carrying a lot of bitterness. I dread where the story is heading.

“We just wanted to be together in love,” he continues, “and not have to hide in silence between the blankets of a single bunk with a hundred other workers in earshot, half of them knowing what you’re up to and wanking to the sounds they can hear. It’s perverse, but it’s life up there. You get three weeks of isolation in your suit with only the sound of each other’s voices to make you feel human, or you get five days of zero privacy.

“It’s easy to get used to it because you realize every day you have less value than you thought you had the day before. You’re a commodity, one of a billion copies from a planet that keeps making more just like you. The lifts keep bringing new ones up from the surface and hauling empty suits back down.”

“The dead?” I guess.

“People die all the time,” confirms Brice. “Anything will do it—space trash, accident, inadequate shielding. If you get lucky, if you get good, and you spend enough time out there, the solar radiation eats you up. You’re brain goes first. You make mistakes. You get stupid. Your coordination goes to shit.

“The trick to staying alive is being picky about where you work. I learned that early on. If they were sending rivet teams inside or outside, you always took inside. You didn’t have much shielding there, but you got a little, and over time, it makes a difference. Think of it like being an albino on earth and always avoiding the sun. It was kinda like that. You always wanted the thickest walls of whatever between you and the void. However, you can’t do it forever. Hell, we were building a giant fucking donut in space. You couldn’t avoid the outside.

“Worse thing, solar radiation is insidious. You don’t know which are your high-risk days. It doesn’t care, it kills you just the same.”

Brice stops talking, and we float along in silence for ten, maybe twenty minutes before he picks the story up again. “I first noticed she developed a stutter. It happened occasionally, but enough. I tried to do what I could to have her rotated back to earth, inside workstations, something. She wouldn’t have it. She was a real daredevil. She came to space for the thrill. She always took the most dangerous jobs.

“Maybe six months after the stutter became worse, she was in the wrong place when a newbie lift driver was bringing in a load of fill-dirt from moon-side. She saw it at the last moment. Well, maybe she missed the last moment by two or three. By the time she did see it coming, it was too late for her to dodge out of the way.”

The next part is hard for Brice to say. I think he still loves her. “It was the kind of crash that looked like it should have killed her. That would have been a mercy on all of us.” Brice pauses again. I’m not sure if he’s silently crying or suffering while trying not to. “What we did to that driver... We didn’t kill him. Maybe. I don’t know. We beat the fuck out of him three times over. When we stopped, you couldn’t see anything but blood inside his faceplate. He wasn’t responding, but his d-pad said he was alive. Somebody gave him a shove and sent him off into space. Last we saw of him.

“My girl, she had one leg crushed halfway up the thigh, the other halfway down the shin. Her suit never punctured, so she avoided the mercy of a quick death. Her legs though, were beyond repair. Everybody saw that. They were like jelly inside her suit. We knew death would come for her, if not in a few minutes, then by the end of the day, whatever the hell that means in space where the sun shines all the fucking unmerciful time. Our MSS supervisor had her put in the discard bin.”

“Discard bin?” I’ve never heard of that before.

Brice’s mean laugh comes back, and I realize it’s a kind of protection he armors his heart with when the shit of life weighs too heavy on his memories. “It’s a warehouse, a garbage bin, literally, for people who are expected to die. The MSS doesn’t waste infirmary beds on the terminal cases, and they don’t want them taking up a bunk in the slum, sucking up real food and bringing down morale. Morale? What a fucking joke.

“Problem is, she didn’t die. She suffered in the discard bin for weeks, stealing cal packs and H from others the MSS tossed in who eventually died. Why gangrene or blood loss or shock didn’t kill her, no one knows.

“The MSS finally fished her out of the discard bin, sent her back to earth, and paraded her as a hero in the propaganda vids to demonstrate the courage of the orange suits serving humanity’s partnership with our Gray brothers.

“It twisted her rotten inside.

“Our relationship didn’t end, so much as sublimate into the vacuum, until one day it didn’t bother me at all that I hadn’t heard from her in weeks, and in fact dreaded the next message. It never came.

“We, us, whatever mythical thing people conjure in their minds to make themselves believe the bond of their infatuation is more than just chemical needs and engorged erections, that died. It suffered long and slow, just like her. In the end, it was a relief.

“Some time later, I earned a favor from an MSS supervisor with a kink for strapping young Americans. She took a liking too me.” Brice laughs again, and this time it’s the familiar voice of his dark soul I hear. “She rode me like a man-whore and I didn’t care. She eventually grew tired of me, and called in a favor to have me invited to join the SDF. I ended up in the moon garrison, which was great—fucking great—until the war started.”

Chapter 43

Two days zipping through the void, though for all I can tell, we might as well have been drifting in the same spot. The sun still shines harsh and unforgiving, anchored to its throne at the center of the solar system. Jupiter still dominates the sky behind us. Our position relative to both of them seems not to have changed. Only the absence of the little asteroid we escaped from gives us any hint that we moved.

Or did our acceleration away from the asteroid only serve to negate the speed we’d built up moving in the other direction? We have no navigational equipment, no way to gauge our speed against any of a dozen easily visible objects in the sky, all of which are so far from us and so large we’ll never know whether we’re moving or not.

“I’ve accepted it,” says Brice after hours of silence.

“What’s that?” I ask as I scan the sky in front of us, confounded by the disappearance of our gray-brown smudge.

“Death.”

“You’re giving up?” I ask curiously.

“No.”

I turn to look at him. It’s a nice change for my straining eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not okay with it,” he tells me. “I’m not quitting. I’m not going to cry and whine. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’m not sure I see the difference.”

“Sure you do,” he argues. “It’s how I face every fight with those Neanderthal Trog bastards, I accept I’m already dead. It makes the rest easy. You don’t panic. You don’t try to save your ass at the expense of anyone’s life. You do your job. This ridiculous flying field trip through the solar system is like that. I just had to accept it.”

“Huh.” I laugh as I try to figure out my thinking on the subject. “I’m not sure I do the same. I think I wear a cloak of invincibility. It’s a lie. I know it is. A useful lie.”

“I’m going to make you an offer,” says Brice, deeply serious.

“This already sounds bad.”

He hesitates, and then starts. “We may have enough H here to last a month, maybe two. Hell, maybe a year. I don’t know. What I do know is it’ll last one of us twice as long as both of us.”

“Hero suicide shit?” I don’t believe it, and my surprise is obvious in my tone.

“No,” Brice tells me. “I think finding a safe place for us to land our feet is a one-in-a-billion shot. I’m offering to give you my lottery ticket and double your chances. All I have to do is disconnect from this beat-up wire cage and zip off toward Jupiter. All the hydro is yours.”

“Two times zero is still zero,” I argue. “If I’m going to die, then I’d rather spend the rest of my time with someone to talk to. Twice as much time by myself sounds like a shitty trade.” I catch myself. “Wait, you’re not expecting me to make the same offer, are you?”

“No,” Brice laughs. “You’re the invincible one, right? I’m the dead one.”

I laugh, too, and decide staring at the black sky is something I need a break from. I reorient myself so I can watch Jupiter imperceptibly recede behind us. “It’s a beautiful view when you look this way.”

Brice turns himself around. “I’m tired of looking at fucking stars anyway.”

“I wonder how far we are.”

“Maybe ask somebody when we get back to the Potato.”

“Yeah,” I chuckle. “I’ll do that.” I spot one of Jupiter’s moons, tiny and crisp, a perfect sphere hanging in the sky as it slowly spins through its orbit. “Look, you can see Ganymede, I think.” I point. “Right there.”

“Yeah,” says Brice, a smile in his voice. “I see it.” He points, too. “Look, down there. Another one.”

“Yeah.” I see it, different in color, a bit smaller in diameter.

“How many moons does Jupiter have?”

“Sixty some, I think.”

“That many?” Brice muses. “Almost hard to believe.”

We both watch the Jovian giant for a while, pointing out moons as we find them orbiting slowly over the swirling surface.

“Look at that one,” says Brice, pointing. “Just above that rusty band, in the gray.”

“Where?”

“See the big spot?”

“Yeah.”

“Follow the rusty stripe below it to the left, back, almost to the horizon.”

I see it, but it’s not well-defined. “I don’t think that’s—”

I can’t believe it.

“What?” Not understanding the cause for my surprise, Brice is ready to pounce.

“I think that’s the Potato.”

“No.” Brice is leaning forward. Habit.

I am too. I’m squinting. Anything to help. “It’s got to be. We must have passed it. Shit. We must have missed it yesterday, or a few hours after we left.”

“If that’s it,” says Brice, “I think we didn’t start off on the right vector.”

He might be right. He might not be. He might be accusing me. He might not. I don’t care. “We have a bunch of H here. I say we burn through some bottles and speed this kiddy ride up. I’m tired of drifting.”

“Spark it, buddy. Let’s go home.”

Chapter 44

Eight hours. Six canisters of H burned dry. I accelerated hard, guessed at a midpoint, and decelerated just as hard. We were nearly obliterated a dozen times by high-speed collisions with bits of stone and metal expanding in a deadly plume out from battles around the Potato’s dirty smudge.

As harrowing as those close calls were, Brice and I are in good spirits, the best since we first rocketed away from the small asteroid we were marooned on. The Potato, still engulfed in a haze of dust with untold numbers of Trogs on the surface and in the subterranean complex, looks like an oasis to us.

I make a guess. “Less than a hundred miles, I’ll bet.”

“Do we have a plan?” asks Brice.

I chuckle, maybe from fatigue. I know I’ve slept in the past few days of our journey. I’m not sure how much. It’s easy to lose track of your anchors in time and place when you’re drifting in the void. “Since we started our burn, I’ve been pretty focused on driving.” Translated as ‘avoiding skewering space trash.’

Misunderstanding my weariness for irritation, Brice apologizes.

Our relationship is evolving. We’re learning how to bicker our way around our moods.

“Sorry,” I tell him. “I’m just tired.”

“Might be a good time for a shot.”

“Suit Juice?”

“Gift of the gods.” Brice laughs lazily. “I don’t know what’s down there,” he points at the Potato. “My bet is we’ll wish we still had some ammo for these guns when we arrive.”

“Shit. I forgot I was empty.”

“There was that thing on the cruiser we blew up,” says Brice. “Remember all the Trogs chasing us?” He laughs because I think he’s tired, and in his exhausted brain, that seems like genuine hilarity.

Brice exhales loudly like he’s just had a very satisfying orgasm.

I glance over at him. “What are you doing?”

He smiles and shows me his d-pad. “I just juiced.”

“I thought you said the high dissipates the more you do it.”

“I don’t do it that often. Just enough.” He nods toward my d-pad. “Give yourself a kick. You’re gonna need it, and you know I’m right.”

Yes, I’m sure he is. I hit the button on my wrist and feel the instant chemical love of lying molecules telling my senses I’m not a beat-down, butt-dragging draftee, but a born-again, electric-fueled, fusion-drive, ready-to-rock motherfucking killer.

Brice laughs at me.

I bust a belly laugh, too. “I love this shit.”

“Love what shit?”

I laugh even harder. “You sound just like Penny when you do that.”

“That wasn’t me.” Brice is serious. He’s looking around.

“That’s because it was me,” says Penny.

I can’t believe it. I’m scanning the sky, too. Is Suit Juice a hallucinogen? “You’re alive?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” asks Penny.

“And Phil?” If she’s alive, then his irritating, stupid ass must be, too. “The ship?”

“We’re maybe ten klicks behind you,” says Phil.

“Phil?” Brice’s rapid improvement in fortune makes him sound happy even with Phil’s name on his lips.

I spin around, and though I can just make out the Rusty Turd against the darkness, my bug sees its mass as clear as day. “I don’t understand.” Stuck somewhere in the purgatory of not being sure Phil was dead, I suddenly feel overwhelmed with relief he’s not. Despite all the shit between us, all of his annoying foibles and his disgustingly enviable talents, he’s the friend who’s been beside me my whole life, my brother in every way except for the difference in birth-parents.

Phil says, “Gravitationally speaking, you’ve been glowing like a comet out here all day. I’d have to be blind not to see you. We’ll pick you up. Once you’re onboard, we’ll talk.”

Chapter 45

I’m not good with reunions and gushing emotions, but we hug—me and Penny, me and Phil, even Brice who’s been burdened with my non-stop company for the past three days can’t help but squeeze me like he never wants to let me go. Jablonsky smiles and gives me a perfunctory squeeze, which is satisfactory for both of us.

Lenox, Silva, and Mostyn, inexplicably on board all share in the warmth, Silva in particular. Our embrace followed by a lingering look into one another’s eyes feels like something that should be shared by two people way more intimate than us. Nevertheless, it’s not awkward, not one second of it.

It all lasts too long. Emotions bubble all over the comm, leaving smiles behind faceplates, and real human touch behind layers of worn orange composite and grav plates.

It’ll do.

With our commando squad listening in, Brice shares our story with the bridge crew, the only three people on the Rusty Turd when the Trog cruiser popped out of bubble jump nearly on top of them. They listen, ask questions, and then explain to us how the cruiser’s grav field bumped our ship like a billiard ball with such sudden force all three were knocked unconscious, and like Brice and I, they woke up shooting through space, thirty thousand miles from nowhere trying to understand what happened.

The ship suffered some damage they had to repair before they could get underway again. When they were finished and found their way back to the Potato, they saw the remnants my commando club left in their wake. Not knowing what had happened, not knowing the situation down on the surface, except that Phil sensed the presence of thousands of Trogs down there, they surveyed the outer asteroids while hailing on all the SDF frequencies. That’s how they found Lenox, Silva, and Mostyn.

After that, they waited.

“We’ve been out here in space, a few thousand miles off the surface,” says Phil, glancing at Jablonsky. “We’re able to communicate with Blair, though we lose the signal at least half the time.”

Jablonsky adds, “It’s improving as the dust settles. Better by the hour, almost.”

“We were trying to decide what to do,” says Penny. “Unfortunately, Blair’s not as forthcoming with information as she could be and she’s not open to suggestions.” Her eyes fall on Phil. “He has an idea.”

I turn to Phil. “Which is?”

“Oh,” interrupts Penny, needing to get one more word in, “Jill is back.”

More good news? It’s like real Christmas, the kind in the old vids where the kids receive so many great gifts they lose themselves in the wrapping paper pile. She says, “They shoved the other Trog cruiser into orbit around Jupiter and right now they’re eight or nine thousand klicks away on the other side of the Potato.”

“Her ship?” I ask, meaning the mining tug she and her platoon flew out with. “Her crew?”

“Fine and fine,” Penny answers. “All safe. No casualties. Nothing happened along the way. Pretty boring trip.”

Nodding, I’m mentally cataloging the pieces of my tiny military force. Where twenty minutes ago, it was Brice and me with no ammo deorbiting blindly onto a rock full of hostile Neanderthals, now I have a battle-tested fighting force, small, but effective.

“What’s the story down on the Potato?” I’m already guessing it’s not good, an easy leap given neither of my ships has chosen to land. Clever General Kane rides again!

“It’s that insufferable Blair making a mess of everything,” Phil blurts. “If she’d stop being so controlling—”

“This is not news,” I tell Phil, slipping right into the snippy tone I generally take with him, one made comfortable out of habit.

Phil follows the pattern of our well-rehearsed behavior and starts to sulk.

Penny kicks me.

I feel like an asshole. “Sorry, Phil. You know I don’t mean anything by it.”

“Maybe if you treat me like you respected me,” he responds, “it would be easier than apologizing after Penny forces you to.”

“Phil,” I’m trying for max sincerity. “I’m sorry. And thank you for saving our lives. In case that didn’t come across earlier.”

“Well not exactly,” Brice corrects. “We mostly saved ourselves. The Potato is right over there.”

Eye rolls. It’s like we’re a family.

I ask, “What’s going on with Blair and our people down there?”

Phil turns to Penny. “I’ll let her tell it. She’s good with the succinct summaries you like.”

I nod a thank you to Phil.

“Blair has nearly a hundred soldiers on sublevel three,” Penny tells me. “They have some automatic weapons, and a cache of industrial explosives.”

“Tarlow,” mutters Brice. “He must have hauled some back down to the control center.”

“That’s where they are,” says Penny, “in some control center, they have the whole level, mostly. It’s contested. The Trogs keep attacking. Our troops push them back but don’t have the strength to press a counter attack. The Trogs aren’t able to make gains, the soldiers can’t escape.”

“The prisoners down on sub nine?” I ask.

“Still there.”

“Trogs?” That’s the unanswered question that’ll have the biggest impact on how I choose to proceed. “Do we have a solid estimate of how many Trogs made it down to the Potato?”

“Altogether,” Penny pauses, because she sees the importance I’m attaching to the number. “Nearly six thousand.”

“Shit.” Brice beats me to the exclamation.

“Shit.” I can’t help but agree with him.

Chapter 46

Time for a poor leadership move. “I’ll be honest with you.” I look around at each of them on the bridge. “I don’t know what to do here.”

“I have an idea for a way to attack,” says Phil.

Being careful with my tone, I raise an open hand to silence him first. “Before we talk about how we’ll fight those Trogs, we need to decide if we should attack at all.”

“If we should?” Phil isn’t sure how to feel about that.

Penny leans back in her chair. “I just assumed.”

“Six thousand,” mutters Brice. He knows what hordes of Trogs can do. “It may be a stalemate down on sub three right now—it won’t last. The Trogs have done this before, pretty much on every installation they’ve taken. If they can overwhelm with numbers, they do. In the narrow halls, like down in the sublevels, they can’t mass and surround our smaller units. The battles drag out, for weeks or months. Attrition is a decisive factor. Supply is, too. Both of those are in the Trogs’ favor. Eventually, Blair will have to watch all hundred of her troops die, or pray the Trogs decide to start taking prisoners again.”

“We have to do something.” Penny straightens up in her chair. “If we don’t, if Blair dies, then we all do, too, right? Her kill switch will trip when her coal-clod heart stops beating, and then we’re all gone.” Penny tries to snap her fingers through her suit. It looks awkward, and if it made a sound, it wouldn’t carry in the vacuum anyway.

“Not necessarily.” Phil slips right into his knowledge-authority voice. He’s about to enlighten us all, and he looks at me to make sure I’m paying close attention. “If we’re out of range of her tactical comm when she dies, the kill switch won’t affect us.”

Penny runs a fast deduction. “So as long as we make a point never to come back here—”

“No,” Phil interrupts. “Once her hydro pack runs dry, and her micro-reactor shuts down, her suit won’t send the signal, ever. The kill-switch problem is solved for all of us.”

I’m tempted by Phil’s suggestion for solving the Blair problem. Luckily my mouth follows my heart more than the logic centers in my brain. “Condemning a hundred soldiers to die is something I can’t do, not on the basis of this one factor. We need to set this idea aside for a moment.”

“How can we set it aside?” asks Brice.

“Not possible,” agrees Penny. “We’re human.”

“Fine.” I sigh. “Do we have a moral obligation to try and save those people down there? Do we have a higher obligation to not throw our lives away on a lost cause? I think those are the most important questions we need to answer. And even if we choose to go in, can it be done? How do we have a chance against six thousand Trogs?”

“Phil has an idea,” Penny reminds me, sounding irritated because I haven’t yet let him air it. “You should listen.”

I turn to Phil. We all do.

Phil smiles, because he has our attention. “We don’t need to kill six thousand Trogs to win. If we’re going with the theory the Grays are in charge and from everything I’ve heard from Blair, from everything we’ve learned so far, that’s what it looks like to me. So, it’s those six Grays we go after. If we capture them, we can make those legions of Trogs do anything we want.”

“How sure are you about that?” asks Brice.

“Mostly.”

“Brice.” Penny puts a hand on his arm. “You know that’s a crappy question. Phil will never be as sure as you’ll want him to be. You two are both too different to ever come to common ground on that question, whether it’s choosing to attack those Trogs or deciding how much cream to put in your coffee. So don’t be an ass.” She smiles sugar all over the medicine she just fed him.

Brice hushes right up.

I ask, “How certain, then?”

“Mostly,” answers Phil. “More than that. Dylan, we grew up with Grays. I know how they think, at least as much as any human can. I think I understand this thing they have with the Trogs. I believe if we capture those Grays, we’ll win control.”

“Are you willing to bet your life on it?”

“If you choose to believe me,” says Phil, “that’s exactly what I’m doing, right? We’re all in this together.”

I give the information a minute to sink in. I look around at the faces of my bridge crew, of my commandos who’ve been happy to sit silently and spectate. I need to make my choice first. “Those Grays are holed up in a rec room down on sub seven. Does your plan include a way to reach them?”

Phil grins. “It does.”

Chapter 47

We’re strapped into the platoon compartment—me, Brice, Silva, Lenox, and Mostyn—my commando team. Our magazines are full, topped off from the supplies we had the foresight to pilfer from Juji Station before we left earth’s orbit. I’m carrying four grenades and three C4 charges. Each of us is.

Jill’s mining tug is moving into position to support our assault. Her people know the situation. They know their part in the plan. We’re all clear on the objective.

Penny is on the bridge, pushing the ship to a speed Phil guesses will make this whole thing work just right. Jablonsky is on the radio, coordinating with Blair and making sure everything happens by the deadline.

The inertial bubble is glowing blue around us. I can sense the grav field pulse strong in the Rusty Turd’s aft drive array. In a few short minutes, Phil will power up the grav lens, and the main cabin will blaze bright.

“Major Kane,” Jablonsky calls to me.

“Yes?”

“Colonel Blair wants to postpone.”

My God, that woman is going to be the source of all my future stress-induced diseases. “Why?”

“She doesn’t have confidence.”

“In?”

“All of it.”

“Radio her back,” I tell Jablonsky, “and tell her I need some hard specifics and I need them now because we’re on our attack run and we’re not deviating without something more solid then watery bowels.”

A moment passes.

Brice elbows me. “What?”

I roll my eyes. “Fucking Blair.”

He nods. I’ve explained enough. Looking at the glowing blue waves crawling over the walls he asks, “We still going in?”

I nod.

“Good.”

Jablonsky is back on the comm. “She doesn’t believe we’ll impact in the right place. She doesn’t think we can break through.”

Exasperating. Still, I have time before we ram our target. “Does she know Phil has super-genius grav sense? He’s been out here in the ship scanning the Potato’s interior for two solid days. It’s like he’s been taking an MRI of the colony’s interior structures. He knows that rock better than she knows her face in the mirror. He knows the point on the surface we need to ram. He knows the angle we need to hit to end up where we want to be. Tell her that. Tell her quick.”

I wait.

Thirty seconds pass.

Jablonsky informs me, “She wants Tarlow to consult. He knows the geology of these asteroids. He understands the size of the force it will take to shatter them.”

“Valid point.” Mostly. “Phil can see interior structures in the rock Tarlow can only guess at. It’s a toss-up.”

Jablonsky passes that message along, and comes back with, “She can’t accept that Penny can drive the ship through a hundred and fifty feet of rock to get down to level seven, and even if she could, the energy of the collision would probably kill everybody on the Potato.”

Dammit!

I’m done. “Tell her she should have listened more carefully when we brought her into the plan. We’re ramming the asteroid from the side. We only have to break through eleven feet of stone to bust into the main corridor running across sub seven. Lastly, tell her it’s too late to back out. Phil is already burning the g’s. The Grays inside the Potato see us coming. Right now they’re surprised and trying to figure out what we’re up to. If we back out, we’ll never have surprise on our side again.” I look at the time on my d-pad. “Impact in thirty seconds. Tell her to prepare her people.”

I comm the bridge crew. “Are we on track?”

“Impact in twenty-five seconds,” Penny assures me.

I pass it along to my squad, and brace in my seat.

Phil powers up the grav lens. The bug in my head protests to the intense field forming up behind my seat.

If the Grays didn’t see us coming before, they do now.

“Ten seconds!” shouts Penny.

Everyone is tense.

I take one more breath.

The cabin bursts in a flash of blinding blue. The ship shudders. My head swims.

Sound!

I hear wind rushing as the blue light fizzles away.

“In!” Penny shouts. “We’re in!”

“On target!” Phil confirms. “Through sub seven, through three—no four—rooms.”

I pop my seat harness free, jump to my feet, and comm the squad, “Time to pay the rent!”

Chapter 48

The outer wall of the main corridor on sub seven is broken open to space, and all the air in the station is flowing through vertical passageways and horizontal halls and decompressing out into the void. Airlock doors on every room are closing automatically. Alarms are blaring over the blast of the wind.

Having broken through eleven feet of outer shell as well as the thick stone walls separating four more rooms before coming to a stop, the ship is lying in a torrential eddy as the station’s atmosphere rushes past the holes behind us. Its backwash is howling like a deep-throated ghost, enormous and wicked.

“Careful,” Phil calls over the comm.

“Are you coded into the local network?” I ask, as I jump through an assault door down to a cracked floor just a few feet below me. My auto grav pulls my feet down and holds me in place against the buffeting wind.

“We’re logged on to the network,” Jablonsky tells me.

I’m glad it still functions.

“That wall to your left,” says Phil. “That’s the one you want.”

“How so?” asks Brice. The plan was to bust in and then rush down the hallway to attack the defending Trogs before they could recover from the impact of the collision and the tornado of decompressing gases.

“We’re a lot farther inside than we planned to be,” Phil rushes through the words. “There’s a dorm on the other side of that wall. On the other side of the dorm is the rec room. Blow two walls, and you’ve found the Grays without having to go through the hall and the bulk of the defending Trogs.”

Assuming the decompression hasn’t blown them all into space.

“You’re a godsend,” Brice tells him.

Aw, the kids are playing nice. I’m all teary-eyed. Not.

Brice is at the wall in two seconds placing a C4 charge, and I’m rushing everyone back into the ship, explaining as we go.

Once inside, I comm Phil, “Can you sense the Grays? Are they still in the rec room?”

“Yes.” He’s certain. “They’re confused. Dazed is a better word. Being so close to a grav lens collision has left them stunned.”

“The ghost Trogs?” I ask. I know there are six in there with the Grays.

“Everyone is down. The only Trogs on this level who are moving are the ones in the hall being blown out into space.”

Brice jumps in through the open assault door, glancing hurriedly at me. “Ready?”

“Everybody brace.” I give Brice a nod.

I hear the explosion and feel the blast through the ship. The wind changes as the dorm decompresses.

“Wait a few seconds,” I tell my squad as they rush for the opening.

Brice is in the assault door, nodding his head with each silent beat he counts. Outside the ship, every manner of furniture, whole and shattered, is furiously blowing past.

As soon as it settles to the floor, Brice is out again.

“Go!” I shout at my team.

We’re all out in a flash.

I point to the wall Brice just blasted a hole in. “Here, line up here. Backs to the wall. Remember your assignment.”

Brice is already through the hole, running to the next wall, and placing a charge. That’s the wall between the dorm and the main rec room.

Silva, Lenox, Mostyn and me throw our backs against the already-breached wall and grav tight.

“As soon as the decompression wave settles,” I tell them. “Rush in. Kill the Trogs. Capture the Grays.”

“Placing the charge,” Brice tells us, panting from the sprint. “You can feel the grav all the way in here.” He’s talking about the rec room gravity. According to Tarlow, it’s the only room in the station with full-time, simulated earth g.

We wait.

Seconds pass. They feel like minutes.

Brice pops out through the breach and takes his spot against the wall beside me. “Ready?”

It’s a warning, not a question. He pushes the big red dot.

The explosion rocks us again.

Pieces of rock come through the breach first, followed by pool furniture and truckloads of water from the pool, turning into mist as it converts from liquid to gas in near-zero pressure. All of it washes past us, spreading into our room, flowing over the Rusty Turd, and blasting out through the fractured walls behind.

A ghost Trog sails past us, unconscious, and smashes against the bow of our ship. Lenox fires a dozen rounds into him before his body is carried by the wind into the next room.

The howl settles down.

Decompression complete.

I jump through the breach, Brice on my heels, racing across the chaotic dorm, toward the hole in the far wall. Silva and Lenox start the search of the jumbled dorm. Mostyn stands in the breach, defensive grav set at the max, making sure no Gray escapes past her. Everybody following the plan.

Chapter 49

“Ghost down,” calls Silva. She’s the first to score a kill, not counting the Trog who flew out with the decompressing air and pool water.

“Gray!” shouts Lenox. “Two! I have them.”

The rec room is impossibly huge with an empty swimming pool taking up nearly half the floor space and sport courts taking up the rest. The light glowing down from above looks like sunlight. The gravity feels like home. It seems impossible, given that it’s been burrowed from the heart of an asteroid a billion miles from earth.

I’m scanning the pool area doing the quick, simple math—four Grays and four ghost Trogs unaccounted for.

“The rest are in the rec room,” Phil assures over the comm.

“Alive?” I ask.

“The Grays are,” he answers.

Brice finds a ghost Trog on its hands and knees near a wall in a jumble of deck chairs. A long burst from his railgun kills it.

Three Trogs left. “Can you tell where the others are?” I ask Phil, as I run to the edge of the pool and see two Grays and a ghost Trog lying in the bottom near the drain. The Grays are moving like they’re sick. The Trog is sitting up and raising his head to look at me. I jump into the pool, grabbing my disruptor off my back as I fly. I can’t risk killing the Grays with deflected railgun slugs.

The Trog tenses at the last second as his senses clarify enough for him to understand what’s happening. Too late, though. My disruptor splits his helmet. Into the comm, I announce, “Two Grays in the bottom of the pool.” I kill my auto grav and go airborne, shooting up near the thirty-foot ceiling.

Railgun rounds spray across the width of the rec room, coming from the hole we just blew in the wall, all the way to the far corner. It’s Silva shooting.

She’s peppering an ebony Trog who’s raising his railgun as Silva’s rounds deflect in every direction. Brice fires diagonally across the room, and I add my gun to the onslaught. The Trog falls as the rounds penetrate and then shred him in a puff of red and gore.

I’m scanning.

“Another Gray,” calls Brice, pulling one by the foot out from beneath a large upturned shelf.

“The last one is heading for the door!” shouts Phil.

God, I envy his grav sense.

I turn toward the main door and spot the Gray, immediately pouring on the g to accelerate after him and catch him before he pogos his way through.

A blur materializes from my right.

“Trog!” shouts Silva, and the air lights up with red railgun rounds.

I dive for the floor, just to change my course, and the Trog zips past above me.

Silva’s rounds follow it.

“I got it,” Brice shouts. “You get that Gray.”

I trust them and max grav to close the gap, grabbing the Gray by his neck as his hand grasps the doorknob.

Spinning around with a one-handed grip on my railgun I bring it to bear on the last Trog, but see him hitting the far wall and falling limply toward the floor.

“That’s it for the Trogs,” I tell them, dropping my gun to dangle on its harness. I spin and go to work placing a C4 charge on the door, look at the Gray in my hand and smile. “You’re going to tell those fuckers in the hall aren’t you?” I laugh, knowing I don’t have to booby trap them. They know they can’t come through without dying. It’s better than a booby trap.

I laugh. It probably doesn’t matter, at least not for a little bit. Any Trogs who were out there have to be flailing in the void right now.

“Grab ‘em up,” says Brice. “Let’s go.”

We have all six Grays.

Now for the hard part. Or easy part. I can only guess which. As far as I know, nothing like this has ever been tried before.

Chapter 50

We’ve consolidated our position.

The Grays are all sitting at the bottom of the empty pool. I’m standing in front of them with Phil at my side. Brice and Silva are behind them, guns unnecessarily ready.

Jill is perched on the edge of the pool with Lenox and Mostyn beside her. Jill’s platoon is securing sublevel seven. They didn’t have to fight for it, all of the Trogs in the hall, the lobby, or in front of the rec room were blown out into space when the station decompressed.

The asteroid is still crawling with Trogs, and they’ll be coming to rescue their masters.

Blair is clucking away on the comm, although I’ve tuned her out, instead instructing Jablonsky to listen in and warn me if the Trogs attack that level.

“Phil,” I ask, looking at the six Grays. “Which one is in charge?”

Phil points to the second one from the end, the one I caught trying to escape through the door.

“Can you communicate with it?”

Phil nods.

“Are you communicating with it now?”

Phil nods again.

“Tell it we want the Trogs to surrender.”

“I did,” Phil tells me. “It’s arguing with me.”

“How so?”

Phil turns to me. “You know. Hairy monkey this, ignorant beast that. Insulting things. It doesn’t recognize us as worthy of having a conversation with.”

“So it won’t tell its Trogs to surrender.”

Phil shakes his head. “It’s confident in the next hour or so, we’ll all be dead. It keeps telling me to leave it alone so it can rest and I can prepare to die with dignity.”

“Uh, huh.” I need to make a decision, and as is not uncommon, I have too many variables and too many choices.

I step over to the Grays and tap the leader on the head with my knuckles. It glares at me and shakes its head to knock my hand away. “This one?” I ask. “This one is the leader?”

“Yes,” Phil answers.

I nod as I think through what I want to do. Maybe it’ll work. Maybe not. What do I have to lose by trying? My humanity? I don’t think so. Grays aren’t humans. Like Trogs, they’re monsters. It should be easy to do what I have in mind.

I reach down, snap the Gray up by his neck, and throw him. He flies three meters and hits the wall of the pool.

Phil grunts like he’s been punched.

Others gasp.

Nobody expected that.

The Gray is on the floor of the pool, rolling over and picking himself up. I pounce on him, kicking him in the head and sending his spindly body spinning again. I have to jump over to where he lands and catch him. He’s moving all jerky and quick, quick for a Gray. He’s afraid. I can feel the emotion flowing out of him as palpable as Gray stink back in my house.

Phil is babbling something, but he doesn’t understand what I need to do. He’s too humane in his heart, that’s why I didn’t consult him before I started.

I grab one of the Gray’s spindly arms, lift him and carry him until I’m standing a pace in front of the other five. I throw him to the ground and smash my boot onto his leg, and increase the downward grav in my suit while I twist and grind. The leg starts to come apart beneath my foot. I feel the pulpy tissue separate and ooze.

Phil’s crying out. He’s horrified. I turn down his comm so I won’t have to listen at full volume.

When I lift my foot, the Gray twig is flattened, mush.

It’s terrified. I can feel it, though at the same time, can’t comprehend it.

“It’s asking you to stop,” Phil shouts, his voice cracking with distress.

I know, or hope he’s not empathizing too much with the little beast, and I know the Gray is forcing Phil to share its suffering. It’s like a broadcast, and I’m only getting part of the signal.

Stomping on the Gray’s undamaged leg, I ask, “Is it begging?”

“What?” Phil’s mortified.

I grind and the thing’s agony creeps through me almost like I’m feeling it myself, so I fight it with my rage. I won’t allow this grotesque little monster to rule my thoughts, and with that, I make my final choice. I stomp its skull.

My head pounds with sudden migraine force.

I stomp again, and it feels like I’m bashing my skull.

I stomp and kick, feeling all of it, going dizzy with pain, until the Gray’s head splits open. I smash it one more time to open it up, and I stagger back from the intensity of searing agony, tearing my brain.

Gasping, I catch my balance, and go back for more.

The Gray’s body is twitching, the orange symbiont is squirming, trying to burrow deeper inside the tick’s split skull. I see its skin bubbling and peeling. It can’t take the harsh vacuum like its Gray host can.

Dropping to a knee, I reach into the open skull, grab the orange mass and pull it out.

Pain fries my every nerve as I rip the last shred of its connection to the Gray body and throw it down on the pool floor. With nothing but blinding torment and aching rage, I go to work again with my boot, grinding the symbiont into goop.

The Gray’s body goes still.

My agony disappears like it was never there.

I can breathe again.

Suddenly, I’m aware of everything around me, the universe isn’t just me and orange torment. Five Grays are still lying on the floor, waving their arms like they’re sick. Silva is down on her back. Phil is on his hands and knees bawling. Lenox, Mostyn, and Jill are off their feet.

They all felt it, at least some of it.

Only Brice is still standing, and I can see from the look on his face he’s experienced his share of what that Gray just did to us. He stood hard through it, ready to back me up.

“Phil.” I walk over to him and help him to his feet.

All of the others are moving, trying to regain their wits. I know they’re alive, I know the suffering was imaginary. They have to be okay.

“Phil.” I put an arm around him and hug him tight, probably the first time we’ve had contact that intimate and sincere since his brother died all those years ago. No, twice now in as many hours. Our relationship is changing. “Phil, I’m sorry about that. It had to be done.” I rap the side of his helmet with my knuckles. “Phil, do you hear me?”

He nods. His blubbering is subsiding. “That was the most horrible thing I’ve ever felt.”

“Yeah.” I’m already making a new rule for dealing with Grays—don’t make them suffer. Kill them quickly, or they’ll fuck you.

With the memory of all that hurt suddenly refreshed, I’m suddenly inspired to find some retribution.

I leap away from Phil, draw my disruptor off my back and as the blade comes alive in blue, I swing it through the heads of two Grays. Their skulls come apart, sending orange symbiont goo in a spray across the pool.

The pain is sharp and quick, like a jab from a needle poking a thousand times, all at once, all over your skin.

It goes as quickly as it comes.

I draw a deep breath. “Phil, talk to those other Grays. Ask them if they’re ready to surrender.”

“I—”

“Phil,” I remind him. “Lots of lives depend on this. Ask them.”

Phil sniffles up as many tears as he can, and concentrates on the Grays.

“Can they understand you?” I ask.

He nods.

“Are you telling them?”

He nods again.

I walk over among them and start looking for the next one I’ll have to convince. “Which one is in charge now.”

“No!” Phil shouts, “You can’t.”

“I can!” God, I hope I can. “Which one?”

Others on the comm agree with Phil. The assault is on all of us.

“Wait,” he pleads. “Wait.”

I reach down and pick one up by the neck.

“Stop, stop,” Phil tells me. “Stop. They can’t choose that fast.”

I hold the Gray out at shoulder level where I can look into his eyes and he can see my face. I give them some time to vote telepathically or whatever they do.

Phil closes his eyes and stands for a moment, motionless except for his breathing.

I look around at the others. Silva is on her feet, hate in her eyes. She has her weapon up, ready to kill the Grays now that she knows what they can do. Jill is looking down on us with a face I can’t read. Lenox is holding Mostyn in her arms.

I turn back to Phil. “Well?”

“They surrender.”

“And the Trogs?”

“They can’t surrender,” says Phil. “They’re property. They do what they’re told.”

“And what’s that?”

“Whatever you want.”

Victory!

“Tell them all to go to the surface. They need to pile their weapons on the ground in front of the warehouse where they held the prisoners, then they all have to hike down to the bottom of the mine pit and sit in rows. If they do it fast enough, I won’t kill any more of these Grays. Be sure everybody understands that last part.”

Chapter 51

“Congratulations.” Blair sounds like she has a cocklebur stuck in her throat.

Tarlow is bubbling with gratitude. “You saved us.”

“It wasn’t me.” I look around at Phil, Brice, Silva, Jill, Lenox, and Mostyn. Penny and Jablonsky are close by, and so is the rest of Jill’s platoon. “We did it together.” We truly did. I start spinning up a pontification on leadership and teamwork to share, and I’m trying to come up with a clever opening line.

“The Trogs are doing what you told them,” bubbles Tarlow. “The ones on the surface have already laid down their arms and are running toward the mine. All of them are doing exactly what you told them.”

Blair finds her voice. “We own this base again. We’ve fulfilled our mission and we all did this together.”

“Yes, ma’am.” It’s the best response for the moment. “Yes, we did.” And there is plenty of truth in that, too.

“Before you get all full of yourself,” Blair sounds satisfied, like maybe she’s turned the tide of the game I keep hoping we’ve matured past playing, “you need to know that when the dust thinned, we were able to send a distress call.”

Tarlow interrupts without apology, seeming eager to please me. “The connection between the control room and the radio dish array was damaged in the original attack a few months ago. It took me awhile, circumstances and all. I finished fixing it right before your ships arrived.”

Not sure if I’m supposed to say something, I go with the generic. “Good work.”

“Eight assault ships are on their way here,” says Blair. “We would have been fine without you half-destroying the base.”

“No doubt.” I’m bored with this conversation. I drag my boot across the bottom of the pool, trying to rub the orange brain goo out of the tread.

“They’ll be here in a few days,” Blair assures me. “We would have held out that long on level three.”

Why does she feel like this is important? I make a guess. “You did a good job, Blair. I’m proud of you.”

“I don’t need you to patronize me, Major.”

Oops. Wrong guess.

I don’t rise to it, though. In fact, I try not to laugh. With the artificial pain the murdered Grays hotwired into my nervous system rapidly turning into a repressed memory, I want to revel in thrill of victory. It’s time to talk about something productive. “I’m sure we can squeeze a lot more info out of these Grays down here.”

“With torture?” spits Blair.

With fuck you! But I don’t say that. “If we can find the location of a Trog base or two, we’ll have enough assault ships to do some damage. No, more than that. We’ve proven the effectiveness of these weapons. We can win this war. We can clear the Trogs out of the solar system. Are those eight all we have? Is that the whole Free Army fleet?”

“We have more.”

“A lot more?” I push. “Some more? Isn’t it about time we embrace one another in a circle of trust.” I nearly laugh at that, too, because I think it’s funny.

“I’m afraid you’ve pushed yourself right out of that circle, Major.”

I exaggerate a sigh. Blair can’t get past the games. “Look, you can stay here and be Queen of the Potato if you want. I’m going to steal Tarlow from you and maybe some of his buddies from downstairs and have them fix my ship. Then I’m going out with our little fleet to attack the Trogs. With any luck, you’ll never have to see me again. So can we play nice until then? A few days, please?”

“Do you know a Lieutenant Holt?”

That stops me cold. When I recover, I say, “He was the platoon commander on my assault ship. We decided not to kill him. We put him off on Juji Station before we came here.”

Blair laughs. Maybe cackle is a better word. And better than that, maybe chortle like a witch watching her favorite newt drown in a boiling cauldron.

I decide I really, really despise her, but I need to know what has her so tickled. “What?”

“The MSS is broadcasting a news vid where—”

“Propaganda vid,” I correct.

“—Lieutenant Holt presents evidence that you’re a Trog mole and you’re responsible for the Arizona Massacre.”

“The Arizona Massacre?” It has a name? That angers me. I can’t believe it. “They’re pinning that fiasco on me?”

“They claim you’ve been in league with the Trogs for years. You’re the reason we’re losing this war.”

“Everybody knows the MSS is full of shit.” Dismissiveness. I tell myself, that’s the best play here. No point in getting wrapped up in MSS lies, even if they are personal.

“Nobody in the fleet will trust you,” says Blair. “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done. Nobody will believe those stories either. They’ll assume all of your heroic exploits are lies.”

“All bullshit. Total crap.” This all goes back to that argument she and I had in front of the warehouse after I freed her. This is a power play. I know she’s behind it, somehow. “We’re all out here because we know what the MSS is. These soldiers will fight beside me. I’m not worried.”

Blair isn’t done. “What about Holt?”

“What about him?”

“He’s SDF, maybe MSS. You were supposed to kill him, and you didn’t. Even if everyone out here decides the MSS story is made up of lies, then what are they to think of Holt? Are you an SDF sympathizer? Are you going to betray us to them? Are these heroics your ruse to put all of our necks in a noose?”

“Fuck you.” I close the connection. I’m steamed. I stomp around inside the pool, thinking about killing something else, maybe a Gray, maybe a Trog. I stop myself. It’s Blair who deserves my anger.

God, I despise that woman.

Everyone around me is asking questions. None of them were on the comm with Blair and me. They don’t know what’s transpired.

I push through the effort to calm myself, and decide I’m not going to listen to Blair’s shit. I’m going to do what I do.

I open a comm to my soldiers. “We’ve won. The asteroid is ours. The Trogs have surrendered. They’re all marching toward the mine. Let’s secure these prisoners. The Free Army fleet is coming. It’s time to prepare the Rusty Turd for the battle with the Trogs’ armada.”

FREEDOM’S FRAY

Book 3 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

Chapter 1

Level nine is a warren. Dark and depressing.

It’s an industrial space with tunnels rough-cut through the asteroid’s stone, gritty and wet, with ruts ground into the floor from the passing of heavy machines. Vast caverns are burrowed out of the rock and packed densely with low-g foundries and high-temp kilns, ultrasonic rock smashers, and ionic particle separators, everything the human mind can contrive for extracting incremental ounces of elemental value and complex compounds from metric-ton loads of raw ore.

At least it holds atmosphere tight against the vacuum outside.

The whole subterranean installation is now sealed, except for half of level seven where I crashed my ship through the asteroid’s surface rock during the battle several days ago. In an astonishingly quick repair, work crews sealed off that part from the rest of the complex. Now, the machinery down here burns hot again, warming the air and heating the asteroid’s glacial core that for billions of years waited in stasis for the fervid breath of humankind’s industrial exhaust.

The rugged walls in the tunnel aren’t colored a pleasant pale gray, and they aren’t polymer-sealed. They’re abrasive and wet, sweating out H_2O and humidifying the air. With my helmet off and gloves dangling from a clip on my belt, I feel the dampness on the little bit of skin left exposed by my suit’s translucent, thermal undergarment. It coats my hair in gritty wet. It runs down my forehead and stings my eyes.

Feeling like a cloudy summer day when the air is so thick with promises of rain, you just want the thunder to crash and get on with soaking you to the bone. Instead, it holds you hostage halfway there. As earth days go, it’s one of those where it feels gross to be outside, wearing a stink of perspiration that won’t evaporate away, causing your underwear to chafe and sweat to dribble off your nose.

I keep my gripes to myself, though.

For something like a week, I’ve been cocooned in my suit, pampered at a perfect temperature, caressed in comfortable humidity, nearly losing track of the sensation of having skin. Now the air feels real, like something from earth, so I breathe it in. I feel it, because icky something is better than the deprivation of absence.

Having spent most of my time away from earth so far in light, asteroid gravity or zero-g, my muscles are already atrophying. I feel it in my legs. They’re not quite tired, but they don’t like the exertion of walking. Just walking! My back aches, and my heartbeat keeps pounding inside my head like maybe on one of the upcoming beats the pressure will surpass the burst strength of my skull bones and explode all over any passersby. My brain spins dizzily from standing up too quickly or walking too fast. I’m placing bets with myself as to whether I’m going to stroke out and die, or faint and crack my head on a jagged stone.

What’s earth-g going to feel like when I’ve been out here for a month or a year?

Despite the discomfort of my exertions and the compilation of my fears, I’d love to be out of my suit. Unfortunately, the Potato is in a war zone. Being technically accurate about it, earth’s solar system—every inch of every rock, and every cubic meter of nothingness in between—is in the theater of war. No place is safe. And having killed countless Trogs by doing little more than exposing a safe interior to the cold vacuum of space, I won’t fall victim to that same mistake.

Ahead in the long, wide corridor, a few miners are bouncing toward me in a low-g skip. Neither is wearing a suit. They both have breathing masks attached to the emergency safety packs on their belts. Both are wearing thick pants and carrying heavy coats, too thick to wear in this environment. They’ve been working in one of the frigid mine shafts burrowed deep into the rock, chasing a vein of mineral that’s in acute demand by whatever exchange of goods passes for an economy out here in the asteroid belt.

When the two miners draw close, they swerve to give me a wide berth—not out of respect, certainly not out of fear. The story the MSS made up of my collusion with the Trogs has spread throughout the colony, along with a few dozen versions of what I did during the space battle over Arizona. Some accounts have the events close to correct. Others place the credit all in Blair’s intricate planning, describing me as a cancerous cog in her perfect machine.

She’s successfully fooled so many.

The two miners have chosen to believe one of the stories where I’m the villain. Their glowering eyes tell me that much, and their receding mutters leave me to imagine the words they share as a plot to steal my helmet and toss me into the vacuum.

Nevertheless, I don’t turn to keep an eye on them. I listen, and I focus on the mass of their bodies walking away. My bug senses the full three-dimensional space around me, them included. I don’t see anything as clearly as Phil would be able to. I’m a long way from matching his skill, yet one thing is for sure, out here in the war with my life becoming more and more dependent on my ability to perceive gravity, my sense is sharpening.

Further ahead, a trio of orange-suited soldiers walks with their suit gravity turned on. It’s easy to tell by their gait and the glow of their grav through my bug’s eye. They’re looking around, checking out the industrial spaces, not guarding or searching. With no military imperative for them to be down here, they’re off duty, spending their free time exploring the colony. They want to know the terrain if we have to fight for it again.

Like me, all are armed. Like me, their helmets are off, clipped to carabiners on their belts. Soldiers who want to demonstrate their loyalty follow my example and wear their suits like me. They’ve all been through the shit, and they know the price of being out of your suit when the vacuum comes to take your life.

Unfortunately, we’re in the minority on the base.

Eight assault ships with nearly full crews and platoons arrived the day after our victory over the Trogs. Not one of those ships bears a scratch or ding. On the morning of the battle over Arizona, they were among the first to rise out of the desert and fly into space. The eight ships were already above the atmosphere and well away from the coming carnage when those three Trog cruisers peeled off from their attack on earth’s orbital battle stations and started bombing.

I’ve learned that much is true.

However, every question I ask about when those ships bubble jumped out of earth orbit and high-tailed it to the asteroid belt is met with harrumphs, vague hand-waving, and lame misdirections to someone up the chain of command or lateral in the hierarchy, always somebody somewhere else who bore responsibility for the decision.

Each bridge crew I question tells me they were following orders, delivering their stolen ships to the Free Army and cleansing their ranks of MSS lackeys and loyalists. Just as they were told to do.

Not one of them made an attack run on those Trog cruisers. None of them made the hard choice to defend their orange-suited brothers and sisters who were being slaughtered on the ground and vaporized in the air.

Had those ships remained to fight, thousands of men and women, teenage boys and girls, would still be alive. Not only would hundreds of assault ships still be airborne, but with the 20-to-1 advantage in assault craft we started the day with, we could have destroyed the Trog fleet. The Trog menace in our solar system would have ended, and instead of us trading guesses about how we’re going to find the enemy cruisers and win this war, we’d be fighting humanity’s real enemy, the Grays and the MSS.

Every time I indulge this line of thought, trying to reason through to a better conclusion, I come to only one logical set of choices: My revolutionary comrades from these eight ships are cowards. Or idiots. Or incompetents.

It’s unfair for me to believe that about so many when only a relative handful made the choice to flee. Yet they strut around an asteroid base my soldiers took with their blood and bravery, and they pretend I’m the traitor the rumors paint me to be, all the while closing their eyes to the hypocrisy of it.

A division is running deep into our little revolutionary army, and I fear what will become of us when we’re tested by battle.

Chapter 2

My destination is ahead, Reservoir 9D. It’s one of the dozen built on this level for storing water extracted from the asteroid’s rock. Of late, this particular one held more than a hundred human prisoners, put there by the Trogs who’d taken the Potato, and compelled to remain there by the Trog guards stationed in the corridor.

Now, the cavernous reservoir holds only one occupant and one visitor. The guards outside the watertight door are human. Not one is wearing an orange spacesuit. They’re Blair’s people.

Every soldier in the two Heavy Assault Divisions launched wearing an orange suit over a green inner liner. None of us carried anything but weapons, ammo, and backup H packs—no duffle bags stuffed with personal items, and no off-duty clothing to wear.

These eight, like most of Blair’s bunch, are wearing coveralls scrounged from the stores the mining company used to clothe its personnel before the base went rogue, well before it turned into a Free Army outpost. The coveralls, like every leftover anything we humans have, are colored in various shades, all faded from some initial hue of matching blue. Military insignia are stamped on the upper arms and chest in black ink.

It looks like five of the guards are in their teens. Kids. That feels more surprising than it should. I know at least half of both divisions are made up of teenagers. When we were all in our orange suits and engulfing white helmets, we seemed a little more generically similar. Two of the adults are in their forties. One is in her mid-fifties.

Each wears a thin backpack, the detachable microreactor from their orange suits. The fusion reaction burning in their packs pumps power through the conductive, fingerless gloves each wears. They need those to power their railguns and the emergency breather masks they each have on their belts.

What the dumbasses don’t understand is the gear will suffice to get them through a short line at an airlock for a chance to save their lives. It won’t help them into a suit fast enough to combat the most likely cause of a sudden decompression event, attacking Trogs. I suspect once a group of those Trogs understands the enemy behind each airlock is without suits, well, let’s just say the solution presents itself—break a door, and let the cold vacuum separate the souls from the corpses.

The guards eye me with blank, hard stares one of them learned from an old vid full of twentieth-century actors pretending to be soldiers. Since most of them are trying for the same look, I figure my guess is correct that one of them saw the old movie and taught the others.

Bravado with nothing behind it that isn’t a lie.

Eight fakers.

Eight fuckers.

I suppress a chuckle. Both fit.

One boy, a broad-shouldered kid with a flat face and green eyes, hefts his weapon and rolls his shoulders as he stares so hard at me it’s like he’s looking right through. He pretends like he doesn’t, but I’m sure he recognizes me. I’m known Potato-wide—hero, or the asshole who betrayed humanity. Nevertheless, he’s challenging me in the body language of whatever group of bullies he ran with back in school.

He’s bigger than me, and he probably thinks that’s enough, because in his past, it always was.

What he doesn’t understand—what none of these green, sim-trained recruits has any inkling of—is that I’ve already seen real people die. I’ve killed Trogs, Grays, and humans alike. I flew into space in the company of soldiers who chose to follow me rather than desert, and most of them are dead, too.

Now an empty black hole gapes wide through my concept of morality and the foundation of my identity.

It started to grow when I murdered that first North Korean. In that moment, I think I was standing at a fork in the road to two distinct futures. In one, guilt promised to haunt and maybe rule me. In the other, the ache of the deaths in my wake would nag my silent hours until the memories faded into tolerable tedium.

For whatever reason a mind does what it does, I subconsciously embraced the path to tedium.

What the bully private in his off-color coveralls doesn’t understand is that he exists outside my circle of loyalty, and if he postures himself as too much of a threat, I’ll kill him. Not because I’m stronger or faster. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. I’ll put a railgun round through his sternum, because while he’s still running through the slow escalations of grade-school bully behavior, I’ll have already taken the ultimate step in that decision tree.

Something the war as already changed in me.

A sergeant, one of the two older men, looking soft enough to have spent his twenty-five adult years sitting at a desk, steps tentatively in my path. “Major.”

I stop two paces in front of him and point to the door to Reservoir 9D. “I’m going in.”

“What’s your business?”

“Let’s not pretend you have the authority to question me.” I sprinkle some acid on the words to make them sting with an ambiguous threat.

“Our orders are to let no one in without explicit permission from Colonel Blair.”

“Get permission.”

It’s then I notice the gray-haired woman is already talking quietly into her radio.

The sergeant glances back at her.

I tire of the grownup grade-school bully’s glare and turn back in his direction, silently daring him to do something, anything.

His eyes don’t hold mine. They drift around, looking for something to focus on. His posture loses its menace.

Apparently, my dare isn’t something he wants to accept.

“Permission granted,” says the gray-haired woman from where she stands near the back of the group.

The sergeant gives me a nod and tells the tall bully to open the door for me. The soldiers part, allowing me a wide path.

A young girl opens the reservoir’s maintenance door and nearly gags as she gets a face full of the air from inside.

Gray stink.

I pass the guards without another word and enter the reservoir. I’m used to the smell.

The door closes behind me.

Inside, the room is a big, hollow disc, probably fifty meters across, with a ceiling ten meters above the floor. A half-dozen thick posts are supporting the ceiling. Down here near the asteroid’s axis, most of the gravitational pull from the stone below us is canceled out by the pull of the rock above.

The walls, ceiling, floor, and even the support posts are covered in a watertight white polymer, leaving every surface smooth and echoey, though smudged from the boots of all the people the Grays had stored down here after they captured the mining base.

Near the far side of the reservoir, in front of a post, in the glare of several portable lamps, a Gray is basking uncomfortably on the floor. On a chair, a few paces in front of the Gray, fidgets Phil. They are the only two in this makeshift prison.

Chapter 3

Without turning around, Phil greets me. “Hello, Dylan.”

“You never did that kind of obvious mind-reader shit back on earth. Are your skills sharpening, or did you always keep them hidden?”

“Or I guessed who you were.” He’s smug about it. “Who else comes in here?”

“But you didn’t guess, did you?”

Phil turns to look at me.

It’s creeping me out that I’m on the uncomfortable end of a conversation where I know I’m being mentally probed in a way I’m afraid I can’t defend against. “And the answer is?”

“Both.”

“You sneaky bastard.”

Phil smiles.

I chuckle my way past my discomfort, reminding myself I need to stop seeing Phil as the façade he shows to the world. “You’re full of surprises.”

He shrugs as I step up beside him.

My attention falls on the Gray who is moving from a lying to a sitting position, trying to expose different parts of its skin to the light.

“He doesn’t like these lights,” says Phil. “In fact, he’ll eventually die. These LEDs only emit a narrow band of frequencies.”

“All light is not created equal,” I cleverly muse. Natural white light is made up of a wide range of frequencies, and humans can only perceive a small percentage of them.

“For a Gray,” says Phil, “depending on the light from a narrow band of frequencies is like putting a human on a diet of saltine crackers and nothing else. The human will eventually die of malnutrition. A similar thing happens to the Gray. They need a full spectrum.”

“How long are we talking?”

“A year or two.”

“So nothing urgent.”

Phil shakes his head. His face tells me he doesn’t agree. “It will suffer.”

Of course, I look at the Gray, shifting around and trying its best to resemble a starving puppy. Well, a big-headed, hairless puppy with a squirmy alien soul that would murder me given half a chance. Oh, and as lovable as a novelty buttplug—that kind of puppy.

Still, I watch it.

It lies back down and adjusts its position in slow, wretched moves. The Gray can’t get comfortable on the cold floor. The light isn’t strong enough to keep it warm. It’s already suffering.

I don’t want to look at it, but my eyes don’t want to turn away, or even blink.

If it wasn’t for my animosity toward the smelly little planet-conquering bastard, I might feel sorry for it. Hell, who am I kidding? I do feel—

Wait!

I step back.

I glance at Phil, epiphanies materializing in my mind.

The feeling of pity surges hard through me, urging me to cry, to get on my knees, and pet the big-eyed, world-buggering Tick and warm it up.

I jump away and take a few more quick steps, never turning my back, not taking my eyes off it. I know what it’s doing. It’s manipulating my emotions.

“You feel it?” Phil’s amused.

“You could have warned me.” But he didn’t. I turn away from the Gray and focus suspiciously on Phil.

“Don’t,” he responds flatly. “I’m not taking its side.”

I’m not sure I believe him.

“I was going to tell you it’s been trying to influence me since I came down here. After you killed those three in the pool, I knew you had full knowledge of what they can do with their minds.”

I nod, because I can’t argue that point. “I’d guessed at the time it was the terror and wrenching pain I was inflicting on those Grays…” Oh, shit! I was going to say, ‘gave him the magical power to influence me,’ but I realize right away how stupid that’ll sound. “I didn’t think they could project their emotions at will. We’ve never seen this kind of behavior before.”

Or never noticed it.

That thought frightens me.

“I believe they’re usually much more subtle about it, undetectable.” Phil’s looking back at the Gray now, with intense interest. “I think you’re right about the stress. You beating that one drove it into hysterics and made the others desperate. To save it, they all combined their mental strength to amplify what it was feeling, hoping that if you felt it, you’d stop.”

“Only it wasn’t just me who felt it.”

“Everybody did.” Phil takes a second. “Think of a whisper, you can tell just one person, but a shout is heard by everyone. When you were killing that Gray, they were all screaming.”

“They nearly stopped me.” It was a supremely painful episode, one I hope I won’t have to feel again.

“This one,” says Phil, “being alone, and being a relatively young one, doesn’t have the control to be able to influence a person in a subtle way.” Phil reaches up and puts a hand on my shoulder. “To be honest, I wanted to see if you felt it trying to whisper before I warned you.”

“Whispering?” I’m back to searching my suspicions, trying to figure out how to feel about all this. “Is that what you’re calling what they do?”

Phil nods.

My suspicions are winning their mental battle. I drill Phil with a hard look. “There’s more to this. What aren’t you telling me?”

“I figured out pretty quickly what it was up to.” Phil stands up and scoots his chair back. He starts walking toward the door, waving me along. “I’ve been experimenting with communication. One of the things I’m trying to understand is if it can whisper to anybody and if anybody but me can tell.”

The Gray stands up straight, defiant.

Keeping an eye on the Gray, I take a few tentative steps toward Phil, while I try to guess what he’s up to.

“C’mon,” he urges.

I hurry a few paces to come up beside him. “What are we doing?”

“You’ll see in a second.”

As we come to a stop just inside the guarded door, Phil turns and says, “Look at him.”

I do, and see the Gray still standing, as placid as a plastic doll.

“You feel it, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

“Defiance,” Phil explains. “When we came this way, and it stood up, you felt it staring daggers into your back, right?”

I nod.

“Now you don’t.”

I shake my head.

Phil ambles toward the Gray. I follow along, rolling my eyes as Phil drags me through the proof of some point I’m sure I’ll have no—

Holy crap!

I freeze in my tracks.

Phil stops beside me and grins. “You feel it now?”

I look at my spot on the floor and glance back at the door. How could I not know this already? “Its range of influence is around forty feet?”

“It grows stronger as you walk closer.”

My feet move me toward the Gray in slow steps. I don’t want to believe any of this, but my resolve crumbles as I start to imagine I see defiance on the little thing’s indecipherable face.

“Back on earth, we spent most of our time around mature ones,” says Phil. “Their whispers were subtle.”

“They’ve been trying to influence us all along?”

Phil nods.

“How long have you known?” It sounds like an accusation. I decide I don’t care. “Were you aware of this back on earth?”

“I suspected.”

I know he’s lying.

He shakes his head slowly. “No, I knew about it. They didn’t know I was aware. I learned how to block their influence a long time ago.”

“Why didn’t you say anything to me?”

Phil is ashamed. To deflect, he points at the Gray, directing his attention there. “What I find interesting—”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Phil sighs and hesitates.

“Tell me, Phil.”

“I was afraid.”

“Of?”

“They do more than whisper.”

“I’ve always known that.” Trying to read a person’s thoughts is vastly different than trying to create thoughts in a person’s mind.

“When they pry into peoples’ minds, they nearly always do it without the person knowing.”

I tap the side of my head. “You know I have a way to block that, right?” I laugh harshly because the truth of that should be so obvious. “I mean, you know how long I’ve been dreaming about this revolution, right?”

Phil nods, as his voice turns into a whine. “You never know what somebody might say, or when a secret might slip out.” Phil purses his lips. His shame of what he’s done has been eating away at him for a long time. “I didn’t want the truth getting around. I didn’t want to risk the Grays finding out and sending the MSS to torture me.”

“Or kill you.” Thoughts of Vishnu cross my mind, surely dead by now, and having suffered more than I want to imagine.

I tell him, “I understand.” I don’t, but I promise myself I’m going to try. That personal covenant and a few moments of silence between us settles the matter. Phil and I are more closely connected than I’d ever guessed. “Can you always tell when they’re trying to influence you?”

“Yes. And if you spend an hour or two down here with him trying to sway you, you’ll be able to recognize it, too. Every time. Then when a whole pod of experienced Grays tries to influence you in the future, you’ll know.”

I want to believe, but it sounds too easy.

“You know the difference between hearing your voice and hearing someone else’s voice?” Phil looks smug, like he’s just spun off the best analogy ever. And maybe he did.

“Really? That easy?” No way it can be.

“Eventually.”

The watertight door leading to the corridor unexpectedly opens.

Chapter 4

Brice enters the reservoir, slamming the door behind him, and striding across the white polymer floor with a purpose in his steps.

I know immediately he has the answer I sent him to find. “What’s the story?”

“She had the other two Ticks put in an assault ship and hauled off to another Free Army base.”

Phil erupts. “The other two Grays aren’t coming back? Nick will die!”

Brice tilts his head in an ambiguous gesture. He doesn’t care.

I skip right past apathy over the Grays’ pending demise. And Nick? “Who the hell is Nick? You named it?”

Phil responds with guilty silence.

“If you knew they were gone,” Brice shoots Phil a dirty look, and then he turns to me, “why’d I have to chase around this rat-maze asteroid to get an answer out of Blair’s people?”

Phil turns his back to Brice, snorting angry breaths.

The Gray drops to its knees and then slumps to the cold floor, laying its head down like it’s dying.

The sight makes me feel its despair.

No!

Not its despair, but the emotion it’s whispering to me.

The Gray is trying to manipulate me, and Phil’s right, I see the difference as clearly as Phil described. The desperate thoughts are not mine.

“What’s wrong with that?” asks Brice.

I answer, “It understands.”

“He felt them go,” Phil clarifies for us, still looking at the Gray. “Out of range. He’s been despondent since Blair’s people came in here and took the other two out. His depression worsened the farther away they went. Until now, we thought they were still coming back.” Phil turns to look at Brice and me. “Grays can’t survive alone. Their minds need the social structure of a pod to function.”

“You mean it’ll go nuts without anyone to talk to?” asks Brice.

“More than that,” Phil answers. “I don’t understand it fully, maybe not nearly at all. It’s like their brains slowly go haywire when they’re alone.”

Brice makes a face. “Isn’t that what I said?”

“How long will it last?” I ask.

“Two or three weeks.” Phil drops into his chair.

“Is that a problem for us?” I ask, switching to pragmatic mode. In the end, I don’t want the thing alive. I only want whatever information Phil can squeeze out of it.

“Yes.” Phil leans in close and taps his fingers against his skull so hard it sounds like a melon. “The way they store their memories, the way they share.” Phil throws his hands in the air, huffs, and stomps off.

“What?” I ask, staying in my spot. “What is it?”

Phil spins around and waves a hand at Nick while he tries to calm himself. “It’s like watching a movie. That’s the best I can do. When Nick shares his memories with me, they come across like a movie.”

“So you really can talk to it?” Brice seems like he’s just now accepting the truth of this new revelation.

“Yeah,” Phil snaps. “I can.”

“The movie thing?” I ask, trying to put Phil back on track.

“I’ve only barely tapped into what Nick knows. Tapping into his mind is like walking into one of those old video stores and seeing thousands of DVDs on the shelves. Tens of thousands. I need time to watch them all. Probably years.” He turns and glares at Brice as if something about the situation is Brice’s fault. “And no, I can’t just pry whatever I want out of his brain. I have to talk to him. I have to earn his trust. He has to share.”

“Or lie.” Brice glances at me to corral me into that supposition.

“They don’t lie the way we lie,” says Phil. “When you’re a telepathic species, and your brain is open to everyone you know, you can maybe hide some things,” he nods at me, “the way Dylan does, but manufacturing alternate fictions to substitute as truth, well, that’s impossible.”

“Whatever you say.” Brice shrugs and casts a bored look toward the door.

I need to know more. “Phil, explain this to me.”

Phil comes closer to make his case. “He’s starting to trust me. With the others gone, he has to. I’m the only one who can bond with him and keep him sane.”

“Is that a good thing?” I ask. “If it were crazy, wouldn’t it be easier to manipulate?”

Phil is disgusted with that idea. “You don’t understand.”

“What I do understand,” I tell him, “is this Gray keeps trying to screw with my head. How do you know he’s not doing that to you?”

“I told you. It’s easy for me. I can tell when he tries.”

“And what, he’s going to stop doing that when you become friends?”

“Yes,” Phil tells me, completely believing it. “Grays aren’t individuals. They have to be part of a collective mind. Usually the pod they’re part of. With the other Grays gone, I’m the only thing he’s got. And if he bonds with me, he has to change. He doesn’t have a choice. It’s part of the thing I told you about their brains. They keep each other from going haywire. At least until they mature into old age, and then their brains become more static like ours. This one was the youngest in the pod.”

“Impressionable?” I ask, joking with the oversimplification.

“Don’t be an asshole, Dylan. I’m explaining to you how this works. And yes, impressionable is exactly right, only more deeply and eventually more permanently than you know. If he fully bonds with me, then his mind conforms to mine. I don’t conform to him. He comes over to our side. I don’t go to his. He becomes the best resource we’ve ever had for understanding the Grays.”

“That’s too bad,” Brice tells us.

Phil is hurt by Brice’s callousness.

I’m curious. “Why?”

Looking at Phil, Brice tells him, “You’ll need to pump it for whatever intel you can get by this time tomorrow. Turning back to me, he says, “I learned a bit more when I was out looking for your lost Grays.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Blair wants us to go out on a milk run for her.”

“A milk run?” Phil doesn’t understand.

“An easy mission.” Brice shakes his head in disgust. “Although I think I know Blair well enough to guess she’s probably sending us on a suicide mission.”

Chapter 5

“She wants us to scout Ceres and a dozen other suspected Trog outposts before we mount an attack.” It pains Brice to say it, not because he’s a coward. He sighs heavily as he looks for a way to explain.

“The cruisers will be gone by now,” reasons Phil. “Right?”

“Yeah,” answers Brice. “Our plan—maybe I should say hope—to mount a quick attack on Ceres was predicated on the assumption that the Trog fleet would be there replenishing their supplies. When they’d attacked the Arizona shipyard and bombarded earth’s orbital battle stations, they likely fired most of their railgun slugs, so they’d be nearly defenseless.”

I add, “Unfortunately, our week-long window to exploit that weakness has closed.”

“So, Phil,” says Brice, “to answer your question, it depends on the Trogs’ strategy now. They’ve always had the strength to attack earth directly, yet they never could do it successfully.”

“Why’s that?” asks Phil.

“Because of our fleet.” Brice looks around the empty reservoir, searching for an available seat. “It’s complicated, though.”

It would be more comfortable for us all to sit, but we only have the one chair.

“The Trogs never had more than sixty or so cruisers. Before Arizona, we had twenty-six battle stations orbiting earth, and any one of them was a match for six, or maybe a dozen Trog cruisers, especially with the supporting fire from the other battle stations. So, any attack with a small number of ships was bound to fail. Unless the attackers’ goal was to lose cruisers.” Brice chuckles.

Phil rolls his eyes and glances at me. He doesn’t appreciate Brice’s undeveloped sense of humor.

Brice looks at each of us to ensure we’re following along. “Here’s the important part. If the Trogs had committed all of their cruisers and attacked in force, then our fleet wouldn’t have to engage. They’d have waited until the Trogs ran themselves out of ammo destroying a few stations, then followed them back to their bases and attacked them there.”

“What if they only used half of their ammo before going back to resupply?” asks Phil.

I’m tired of being a silent observer, so I jump to the conclusion. “Same result. Cruiser battles are about attrition. With all the ship designs being very similar, the distinguishing difference between winners and losers comes down to tactics. Either outnumber, outgun, or outlast your enemy. A cruiser with a hold only half-full of railgun slugs will probably lose to one with a full load. I mean, it certainly can’t win, all it can do is hope to maneuver and manipulate its defensive grav fields long enough to run the enemy out of ammunition.”

Nodding to confirm my assessment, Brice proceeds. “That makes the ambush of our fleet at the moon base the turning point in the war.”

“Duh,” blurts Phil, and then he sees Brice’s face turns suddenly dark. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

“He’s never had much interest in military history,” I explain to Brice, “or anything having to do with the Grays’ tactics.”

Brice nods at Phil to let him know he’s forgiven, and follows it with, “You’re right. ‘Duh,’ is the reasonable response. I probably should have spoken more carefully and noted that the destruction of our fleet afforded the Grays the opportunity to change their tactics. They no longer have to harass our mining colonies to draw our fleet into engagements. They can attack the earth directly. That works to our advantage.”

“I don’t follow.” Phil is shaking his head and frowning. “Why’s it good for us if they attack earth?”

“We know what they’re going to do,” answers Brice. “They’ll bring their whole fleet in to attack the battle stations. They knocked out three last time. If they can do that every time, then all they have to do is make another dozen or so runs at earth. You figure two or three days of fighting for each battle, and then a week to resupply and—”

“And,” I do the quick math, “in three months’ time, we’ll be right back where we were when the Grays first showed up thirty years ago, defenseless against a space-based enemy who can pound us with impunity from above. The only question is, how long until the Grays surrender the planet? How many more humans will die?”

“Let’s not forget the more important question,” concludes Brice. “How will these new Grays and their Trog slaves treat humans? Better or worse than the Grays we already have?”

That’s not a question I’m interested in wasting any thought cycles on. “All I can say is—”

Phil says this next part right along with me, “—I’m not going to be a slave.”

I ignore his mockery. He’s probably tired of hearing that song from me. It has been a few years. “What Brice is saying is though we missed our opportunity to attack them with their pants down at Ceres, we still have a good idea what the Trogs are going to do. We can wipe them out.”

Chapter 6

Leaving Phil with the Gray, me and Brice exit the reservoir. Under the silent glare of the hallway guards, the watertight door clangs shut behind us. Except for the tall bully with the flat face and a few others, the guards seem respectful as we pass by.

Once we’re well away, Brice says, “Don’t worry so much about them.”

“What?”

“You’re stewing about the way they looked at you.”

“How do you know what I’m thinking?” Yeah, how? Really. “Do you have a bug in your head you didn’t tell anyone about?”

Brice laughs loudly.

I take that as a no. Of course, Brice doesn’t have a bug. Only a warped sense of humor.

“You spaghetti-heads ever wonder if you’ve come to depend on your bug so much you forget how to communicate like a human?”

No. It never crossed my mind. Seriously, no sarcasm. Yet, I don’t confess that to him. “Why do you say that?”

“We’ve spent enough time swimming in the same sewer. I don’t need a billboard to see it written all over your face.”

“The stewing?” I make the genius guess.

Brice glances at me to let me know I’m on the right track.

“What of it?”

“I told you, don’t worry so much about them.”

“Okay, Grandpa Brice, how about you help little DK out with something more than a pontification?”

“Ooh. Pulling out the big words. Don’t get mad at me. I’m just trying to help.”

“My God, Brice. I think I liked you a lot more before you got comfortable speaking your mind.”

Switching to a formal tone, Brice says, “You can transfer me to another unit, Major.”

“I wouldn’t trade you for the world, Grandpa.” Heavy sarcasm.

“You ever wonder why officers get fragged so much?”

“Never crosses my mind. Tell me why I shouldn’t worry so much about the guards. And everybody else who gives me the stink-eye when they see me.”

Brice shakes his head to dramatize his disappointment. “This thing with you and Blair, you need—”

“This thing?” I stop walking and turn on Brice. We’re pretty far up the hall. So the guards can see us and most likely hear us, but with the echoes bouncing off the rough stone, they probably can’t make out what we’re saying. “Blair has mental problems. She hates me because she sees me as a threat. I’m her competition for center stage. She wants credit for everything we’re doing here. The Queen of the Potato needs to have her needle-y man-fingers up everybody’s ass, controlling every—”

“I agree.” Brice embarrasses me into nipping my rant short with his placation. “She’s a vile woman with her priorities in the wrong place but—”

“And here comes the best part.” I don’t put much of an inflection on my retort, because I know I probably shouldn’t have even said it. Brice is trying to help.

“But,” Brice emphasizes, “she has this base running like clockwork.” He inhales the hallway air deeply. “The breach is sealed shut. We’re walking around in breathable air. Pay attention when you’re stalking through the tunnels like a pissed-off teenager. Everybody is busy. Everybody has a job to do. Not just the military personnel—everybody.”

I have the urge to recite my way through Blair’s long list of character flaws and deflect Brice’s point, however, the truth comes out in an unenthusiastic admission. “She does seem to have an aptitude for administrative tasks.”

To drive the point in a little deeper, Brice tells me, “Armies, navies, any fighting unit you can imagine needs rear-echelon support to make it combat-capable. Officers like Blair, as much as you want to frag them, make our jobs possible.”

I surrender. “What should I do about the nine shades of shit she’s painting me in?”

“We can’t know for sure she’s responsible for all of it. The MSS is always looking for scapegoats to blame their fuckups on. Have you considered the possibility you were just unlucky, and they drew your name out of a hat? You have to understand that as much as Blair wants to be in the spotlight, the last thing the MSS wants is a rebel war hero on their hands.”

I nod. I have considered it. I don’t want to believe it. It’s easier to have Blair’s arrogant face to focus my anger on. “Even if she’s not at the root of this, Blair’s exacerbating the situation here.”

“I’ll give you that.”

“What do I do about it, then?”

“I’ll think about it.” Brice rubs his chin. “For the moment, don’t do anything. Let her administer the base. You lead the combat operations. That’s what you said your agreement was, right?”

“Informally,” I admit. “In the heat of the battle. Who knows where we are now with the division of responsibilities?”

“Maybe get together with her, work it out like big kids.”

I sigh. Brice is right. Again. “I still don’t know what to do about the troops on base. I think most of them are buying the MSS line.”

Brice shakes his head as he pushes me to get moving up the corridor again. “You don’t know what these people think. Like I said earlier, you depend too much on the bug because you grew up with a bunch of bug-heads, you spent your adult life around bug-heads, and all your friends are bug-heads. You people feel each other on some telepathic level and don’t even realize you’re doing it. It’s made you lazy about the way real people communicate.”

“I didn’t forget how to speak,” I argue.

Brice doesn’t let me derail him. “You can’t read people’s faces anymore to know how they feel about something. Hell, maybe you never could. Remember this, morale is good. It’s good because of our victories, and everybody knows that’s because of you and our platoon.” Brice shrugs dismissively. “And our company. Stop chafing your nads about things you can’t control. Let me worry about what the troops around here think. They’re not as against you as you believe.” Brice stops and takes a moment to consider what he just said. “If it gets out of hand—”

The floor shakes and a deafening rumble blasts through the hall.

Brice drops to his knee and gravs tight to the floor as he reaches to unclip his helmet.

Klaxons echo louder than the alarmed thoughts racing in my head. I grav tight and reach for my helmet, too.

Chapter 7

Brice pulls his helmet over his head and seats it as he turns to look at me and make sure I’m following his lead.

I am.

I’m relieved from the deafening clang of the klaxon as my helmet muffles out much of the sound.

Brice has his gloves on and locked at the wrists before my helmet is seated in the neck ring. In a fluid motion that looks natural for him, he raises his railgun to his shoulder and he’s ready to fire, scanning one end of the hall to the other.

It takes me half a rushed minute, but I fumble through shoving my hands into my gloves and locking the wrist rings before raising my rifle.

Using the grav switches buried in my helmet, I bring all my suit’s systems online and comm Brice. “Thoughts?”

“No decompression, yet.”

“Attack!” It’s a voice over the command comm—not Blair, one of her lackeys.

“This is Major Kane.” The flunky on the other end of the comm link should be able to read that off her display, but her frantic one-word warning tells me she’s rattled. “Calm down. Get me Colonel Blair on the line.”

I turn to Brice. “Round up the platoon. I want a squad stationed in the hall outside Phil and Nick’s cell, and I want the rest to meet up with us. Pick a rally point. On the surface, or just inside one of the airlocks up there.”

Brice nods.

“Colonel Blair is busy,” the girl on the command comm tells me. “We’re being attacked.”

“Trogs?” I ask. “How many cruisers?”

“Not Trogs,” she answers. “There’s fighting in the hangar facility.”

I need information. “Is Tarlow in the command center?”

“Who’s Tarlow?”

I turn to Brice. “The main hangar. A firefight of some sort.”

“Follow me!” He runs.

As I follow, I comm Tarlow directly.

“Yeah?” He sounds frightened.

“Are you in the command center?”

“No.”

“Can you get there?”

“No. It’s locked down.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m standing in the goddamn hall outside. The doors are locked. The guards inside won’t open them.”

This situation already has clusterfuck written all over it. “Can you contact Blair?”

“No.”

“Do you know what’s going on?”

“An attack?” He clearly doesn’t know.

“Is your secret communications closet still operational?”

I hear Tarlow start to pant like he’s running. “On the way there now!”

“I need a tactical picture of what’s happening as soon as you can provide it. I need to know if Blair is okay. If so, what’s she up to. I talked to one of her comm officers, and she said there are no Trog cruisers and no Trogs. Is this some kind of coup?”

“I don’t know.” Tarlow gulps air. “The command center didn’t look under attack, just locked down.”

“Let me know a soon as you’re online.”

Brice reaches a set of lift tubes, peers up and down inside one of them, then yells, “Level one! Stay on my heels!” He jumps inside.

Chapter 8

We pop out on sub level one to see an empty hall. The alarms are still ringing.

An all-hands announcement comes over the comm. It’s Blair’s voice. “A group of SDF loyalists have detonated the explosives shack and have taken control of the maintenance hangar. By our count, there are twenty to thirty of them. Every Free Army soldier needs to arm themselves and converge on the hangar as fast as possible. We can’t allow these traitors to escape with a ship.”

Ironic.

Every one of us on this rock is a traitor who escaped with a stolen assault ship.

Well, except the ones who are trying to re-escape.

Brice isn’t running. He’s looking at me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

He’s focused on the tactics while I’m toying with the semantics. I make a guess. “That it’ll be a mess up there?”

Brice nods. “Not right away. Soon enough.”

“All the more reason to rally our unit and go in together. Lead the way, as fast as you can. I’ll try and raise Queen Blair again.”

Brice engages his suit’s grav functions and flies down the hall.

On instinct, I fly behind him, and jump back on the command comm. “This is Major Kane. I absolutely need to speak with Colonel Blair. It’s urgent. It has to do with the SDF loyalists.”

“Uh…” It’s the same girl I spoke with earlier.

“Get her on the comm, now!”

“Yes, sir.”

I comm to Tarlow. “Are you in yet?”

“Powering up my monitors,” he tells me. “I’ll be online in less than a minute.”

Brice speeds around a ninety-degree turn, and I maneuver along behind.

“I need intel, and I need it fast,” I tell Tarlow. “You know the situation. We can’t let those ships escape.” I quickly tell him which hallway I’m in and where I’m headed. “Find me the safest attack path.”

Brice decelerates hard, and I collide with him because I didn’t react fast enough. Neither of us loses our balance. We find our feet and come to a stop as Brice punches an airlock button. The door swings open.

In a few eye blinks, we’re inside with the door closed and air hissing out.

“You have six people, all outside,” says Tarlow.

“Outside this airlock?” I ask, looping Brice into the conversation.

“Our rally point is right through here.” Brice points at the outer door.

Blair connects with me over a private comm. “Make it quick, Kane. If you’re still on our side, that is.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” I snap. “Listen to me, don’t send all the troops in right away. They’ll end up shooting each other, because in case you haven’t noticed, we’re all in the same orange suits.”

“You don’t…” Blair stops because she realizes I’m right.

“Instruct the lieutenants and sergeants to rally their platoons to a jump-off point they select. Once they’re together, then go in. While they’re doing that, figure out some way to identify which ones are stealing the ships, and who is with us.”

“How the hell am I supposed to decipher the loyalty of an officer over a comm link?”

“I can’t answer that one,” I tell her. “Make your best guess. If they have their unit together maybe they’re loyal. I’m guessing there aren’t any full units defecting.” Total shit logic, I realize. “I’ll bet it’s a collaboration of individuals who don’t like where this rebellion is headed.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Wait!

Duh!

I ask, “Why don’t you freeze their suits? Can you identify the loyalists up there individually?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Well, issue a global freeze command on all the damn suits, then. That neutralizes everything until we can sort things out.”

“I tried to freeze them,” says Blair, “but they’re wearing helmets outside my chain of command.”

“I thought you had the whole division.” Was she bluffing about how much authority she had when she pushed it on me earlier?

“I, uh.”

“You fucking worthless pile of shit!” I shout over the comm. She was bluffing, and I bought it.

“They’re wearing Chinese helmets.”

Ugh! Why didn’t we start there? The Chinese helmets all have the red PRC flag emblazoned on the side. “Bad guys and good guys sort themselves by helmet color. Just tell everybody that!”

Brice pushes the door open to face the business end of a half-dozen railguns. Thankfully, all the eyes looking down through the sights are familiar—Lenox, Silva, Peterson and a few others. They’re my people.

“I have a squad up here,” I tell her. “I’m taking them in, and the rest of my platoon will soon follow. Keep me apprised.”

Chapter 9

“They’re trying to board your ship,” Tarlow tells me.

Brice curses.

“Not to worry.” I can hear a smile in Tarlow’s voice. “Your pilot, Penny, is inside with a few mechanics. She has the doors locked.” He was baiting me.

“Direct me to them,” I order, as I glance around at the maze of hulking ships and piles of equipment standing in the dust. Three days since the Trog bombardment and the Potato is still shrouded in debris. Visibility is maybe forty meters. “I need an attack route.”

Brice gives me an anxious glance. “Orders?”

I point to Peterson. “You stay here. Wait for the rest of our platoon.”

“You see the wall to your left?” Tarlow asks.

I glance and can barely make out the wall in the fading gray. “Yeah.”

“If you follow that wall to the front of the hangar, you won’t see a single orange suit until you reach the assault ships.” Tarlow quickly describes the tactical situation.

“Got it. Thanks.” Looking at my troops, I point to the hangar wall and tell them, “We’re going in fast and hot. Right at that wall and then left. Nobody’s there to stop us. A row of nine ships is sitting down at the open end of the hangar, all lined up and facing out. From where we’ll come out, the second ship in line is ours. Penny’s on the bridge, and the bad guys want in. The rest of the loyalists are boarding two other ships, the fourth and seventh in line. Once we’re there, shoot anybody with a PRC flag on their helmet. Don’t trust anybody who’s not us. For the moment, we’re the only unit here on our side. The situation will change in a hurry, so pay attention to your comms. Two fire teams—Brice, Silva, with me. Lenox, you take the other two. Let’s fly!”

I jump into the air and run up the power to my suit’s grav and zip toward the wall. My squad follows.

I cut the turn hard and hug the hangar wall, accelerating on a straight shot for nearly two hundred meters, following Tarlow’s directions. The dust is so thick in this part of the hangar, every shape fuzzes to gray before I can identify it.

As we reach a huge stack of parts packed in battered metal crates, I spot the stern of a partially disassembled ship. I reverse my grav and call over my tactical comm. “We’re here.”

I slow for the turn and rotate to put my feet on the ground, drifting around the corner, weapon at my shoulder.

My squad follows, raising their guns, ready to fire.

I pass the first ship and look into the gap between it and the Rusty Turd.

Flashes from a hundred sparks cut through the gray haze.

I instinctively duck as I spot three orange-suited loyalists standing near my ship, firing their weapons at one of the assault doors.

I take aim just as the Turd surges bright blue.

A gravity pulse knocks me and my squad back against the stack of metal crates.

On the second it takes to clear my head from the effects of the gravity punch, I see the soldiers who’d been firing bounce off the hull of the neighboring ship and drift in apparent lifelessness.

I hear my squad grumble over the comm, and I take their complaints as a good thing. They’re pissed and bruised instead of injured or dead.

“Lenox.” I point between the two ships where the soldiers are drifting. “Take your fire team and handle these. Check the other side. Coordinate with Penny. Make sure the Turd is ready to fly.”

“Brice, Silva, with me!”

I accelerate again.

“The three of us against, what, twenty or thirty?” asks Brice.

“They’re boarding their ships to make a run for it,” I tell him, hoping I’m right. I link to Tarlow for my next question. “Are the loyalists all on board the other ships?”

“Can’t say for sure. Mostly.”

“Can you tell if the reactors are powered up? How soon before they’re ready to go.”

“I have to guess on that one. Less than a minute.”

We’re closing in on the other two ships and I see a faint glow of blue emanating from both their drive arrays. “Tarlow, any more loyalists out here we need to worry about?”

“None that I can find on the cameras.”

I push my suit grav hard toward the nearest ship. “Brice, Silva, either of you have any C4?”

“I do,” says Silva, “Three charges.”

“Let’s each take one.” I spin around as I fly and reach out.

Silva shoves one into my hand as she gives another to Brice.

“Attach it to the drive array,” I explain. “Anywhere, it doesn’t matter. We just need to damage the array enough that the loyalists can’t bubble jump.”

“You stay here,” Brice tells Silva, “and trigger the charges before they are out of range.”

Brice points at the first ship as he accelerates away. “I’ve got this one.”

I spin and max grav toward the other.

The whole ship starts to glow blue. As it rises off the surface, and as the drive array flashes to brilliance, the ship jumps toward the hangar door.

Shit!

I turn into the gap it left and see its stern passing through the gaping doors as the ship angles upward toward the stars.

It’s going to get away!

I over grav my suit’s plates and feel a burst of acceleration.

In seconds I’m out of the hangar and shooting out of the Potato’s obscuring haze.

Silva and Brice are saying something over the comm, but my helmet is generating an alarm and is flashing a series of red lights from my reactor. I’m pushing my systems too hard.

The ship seems to pause as it searches for the right vector.

My opportunity to catch it.

I only have seconds before it gets away. I don’t let up.

One of my grav plates pops and punches my leg so hard I think it might have broken the bone.

No time to whine over the pain.

No choice but to push.

The ship is starting to accelerate again as I reach the edge of its drive array cone and grab on.

The array blazes bright, and I feel it pick up speed.

Another grav plate, one in my boot, ruptures and torques me so hard I nearly break my wrist from trying to hang on, but the spin puts me in a position to grasp the outside of the cone with both hands. I manage to lodge one foot in a gap between two support beams.

Thank the Arizona shipyard for shoddy construction!

Despite my grip, I have to keep my grav plates maxed as the ship accelerates so my momentum doesn’t drag me off the rear.

The ship is burning hard to escape.

It’s then I realize the reason I have two hands precariously gripping the ship. I’ve let go of the C4.

Dammit!

Looking astern, I see the haze-veiled mining colony starting to recede.

What few desperate choices I have are rapidly degrading to ineffectual, suicidal ones.

No time to dawdle.

I scoot down to the edge of the cone, knowing I’ll be blown off when my next grav plate ruptures. I let go of the ship with one hand and point my rifle at the nearest grav plate I can see, hoping as I pull the trigger the shrapnel my slugs spall off will be shoved away by the ship’s drive field before they hit me.

I unload a full magazine through a shower of blazing metal, and the ship jerks.

Not much.

But enough?

The shape and intensity of the ship’s blue drive field changes.

With one hand, I try to reload my weapon.

The ship blasts hard on its drive array and jerks out of my hand, and accelerates surprisingly quickly.

With both hands free, I hurriedly load a new magazine and fire. The stream of glowing rounds veers away from the grav field formed by the ship’s array as it recedes.

I curse, and hope.

It seems like every alarm in my helmet is blazing red and beeping. Every one except for my hydro pack sensor. That one is still silent.

I try to adjust my suit’s grav to set a vector back toward the Potato. My failing suit barely responds.

I curse again and try to raise my squad on the comm.

Chapter 10

Penny comms in, urgent, but not panicked. “I’m loading the squad.”

“Brice and Silva, anybody there?” I look back toward the Potato. I must be five or six kilometers out.

“Almost here.” Brice crackles over the comm.

I’m relieved they’re both alive. Brice is more than my sergeant, he’s my friend. Silva—I don’t know what she is. I only know what I’d like her to be.

The day after we took the Potato from the Trogs, I saw her and a few others from my platoon in nothing but their translucent undergarments as they were going through maintenance with some of the techs we’d freed. Bottom line, she didn’t look to be a day over seventeen. A teenager. I felt like a pervert for the thoughts I’d entertained about her. I still do.

I checked my d-pad to pull up what info I could get on her, hoping, maybe a little desperately, she’d be over eighteen. Of course, the fucking d-pad showed me nothing. The feature that handles personnel files was on the fritz.

Skimming slowly over the surface of the Potato I see the second ship of escapees. It’s running down the asteroid’s long axis. The metal on one edge of its drive array looks torn, and its blue grav field is flickering and misshapen. It’ll be going nowhere fast. Brice must have set his charge in the perfect spot. “Penny, can you see that other ship?”

“I see its grav signature.”

“Knock it out if you can.”

“Will do, boss.” I see the Rusty Turd drift out of the hangar, floating just off the asteroid’s surface. The grav blaze flashes to life.

Brice comms in. “We’ll be on board in ten seconds.”

“Waiting for them,” Penny tells me. “What’s all that noise on your comm?”

“My suit is failing. I pushed it too hard.”

She switches into savior mode. “To hell with those loyalists, I’m—”

“It’s not as urgent as it sounds. Take out that ship, and then come for me. I’m not going anywhere.” Anywhere fast. I’m still speeding away from the Potato on the vector I was riding when my suit grav decided to switch into useless mode.

The loyalist ship below starts to pick up speed but can’t hold a straight course. It’s over the open pit mine, and I can’t believe what I see, what I think I see.

Are those captured Trogs still there? All in the open, lined up in rows, not moving?

I thought Blair took care of them. Housed them, or something.

I make a mental note to talk to her about the prisoners, not that I have a clue what to do with them. As Brice tells me, though, she’s the logistics queen. She should be able to figure it out.

I look up into the blackness to see the blue glow of the escaping assault ship. It’s as bright as a comet, impossible to miss. Phil isn’t aboard the Turd to keep track of their grav signature, however, we should be able to see them as long as they don’t cut power to their drive and try to disappear into the background.

“Tarlow,” I call, “can you track those loyalists?”

“I have some equipment I can redirect,” he tells me. “It will take a few minutes.”

“Do it,” I tell him.

I link into the command comm. “This is Kane. I need to speak with Blair.”

“Just a moment, Major Kane.”

“What?” It’s Blair, shiny happy as usual. Not.

“One ship got away. I’ve damaged the drive array so they can’t bubble jump. The other ship is struggling and heading south.”

“We have it on tracking.”

“Can you track both ships?”

“Yes,” she tells me. “We have them both.”

Penny cuts in, “We have Brice and Silva on board with the rest of the squad.”

I look down, and I see her pointing the Rusty Turd in the direction of the damaged ship. “One sec,” I tell her, then I switch back to Blair. “I think we’ve disabled bubble jump on both ships. What do you want us to do now?”

“Stop them!” Blair shouts.

I look around near the Potato, scanning the sky. “Where are the other assault ships, the ones that brought reinforcements?”

“Not here.”

I rev up to yell at her that she needs to stop with the secrets. I don’t. I stick with pragmatics. “If it’s just us out here, we only have one way to stop those ships.” I want it to be clear. “Capture is out of the question. We have to ram them. They’ll likely be killed. Is that what you want?”

She’s silent.

I don’t add that all the men, women, girls, and boys on those ships are human soldiers just like the rest of us. Maybe all of them are loyalists. Maybe some of them were unlucky enough to be caught in the herd when the others decided to make their break. Maybe they just want to run as far from this war as they can.

Finally, Blair comes up with an equivocation she thinks will keep her hands clean. “Whatever solves this problem the fastest.”

“Kane out.” I huff on my anger at Blair and then link to Penny. “Ram that ship, try to aim for the drive array and disable it.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“If it can be done, you’ll do it. You’re the best pilot in the company.”

Penny laughs. “Out of both of us left?”

Far below, I see the Rusty Turd’s drive array burst a blue grav pulse that pushes it to accelerate away from the Potato.

I’ve seen this tactic before, but from a different perspective.

The whole ship is glowing brightly from the strain on its internal inertial bubble as Penny pulls a high-g arc to come in perpendicular to the path of the loyalists’ wounded ship.

I guess there’s no grav officer on escaping vessel, because it doesn’t respond to Penny’s maneuver. A bug-head would have seen the Rusty Turd glowing like a supernova zipping through the sky off their port side.

A few seconds pass, and all that’s left is inevitability.

I see the collision in a blue flash.

All in an instant, the loyalists’ vessel’s grav plates cut from living blue to dead black. The conical drive array bursts into a thousand shards of deformed metal, spraying in every direction. The Turd passes through, barely slowing as it zips safely away. The rest of the loyalists’ ship, most of the bridge, and the platoon compartment remain intact, caught in a flat spin, careening into the void.

I comm to Blair. “The first ship is neutralized.”

“I know,” she tells me.

“Probably survivors.”

No response.

“Blair, do you hear me?”

No response.

Leaving the grav lens powered up, Penny angles the ship up toward me. “I can’t make out where you are out there with all this grav blazing around me. You’ll have to guide me in.”

“You’re headed in the right direction. Just don’t come in too fast and skewer me with that thing.”

She laughs, I guess thinking how I might look kebab-style.

I turn to confirm for myself the other ship is still burning bright to make its getaway. “Let’s cut that grav lens off for the moment.”

Chapter 11

Everyone is on the bridge when I get there. Plenty of room. No crowding.

“You should take Phil’s grav and nav console,” Penny tells me.

We’re the only two bug-heads on board, so I comply. “Can you still make out the other ship?”

“Yes.”

I look around the bridge. “I guess Jablonsky didn’t make it.”

“Why would he?” asks Penny.

“Why wouldn’t he?” I shoot back. Sometimes we blabber on about nothing, just like any two people who’ve known each other a very long time. “What are you thinking, tactic-wise?”

She shrugs. “Same as with the other ship?”

“Ram the drive array from the flank?”

“It’ll be harder with them accelerating the way they are, and, well, with you on grav and nav instead of Phil.”

“You nailed the other ship with no help.”

“It was disabled. It was slow.”

I’m losing the argument. I point forward. “Go that way, fast.”

Penny chuckles politely.

I turn to Brice and Lenox. “Any ideas?”

Shrugs.

“Anybody know how to use the communication console?”

Silva raises her hand. Nobody else does.

“Did you train for it?” I ask.

“Not really. I ran through one of the simulators.” She smiles sweetly, flirting with me. She doesn’t seem to mind the age difference between us. “No guarantees.”

“See if you can raise that other ship. We’ll be out of range soon for suit comm connections with the base. So we’ll lose Blair and Tarlow.” I nod toward the console. “Get them on the line as well.”

Silva steps over to the comm panel, and Lenox goes with her.

The interior light on the bridge is turning a brighter blue, so I know without looking through my small window that Penny is accelerating and tracing an arc to bring the Turd in from the other vessel’s flank.

“Do we have enough of a speed advantage for this?” I ask.

Penny nods. “I don’t know if the damage you did to their drive array made the difference or if those Chinese assault ships are just slower.”

I turn back to Brice. “You’ve spent some time up in the hangar with the repair crews. Anything you can tell us?”

“Nobody knows for sure. Everybody thinks they’re slower because of the smaller drive array and smaller reactor, but with no grav lens, those ships have a lot less mass to push.”

Penny chuckles again.

“So,” I summarize, “you don’t know.”

Brice shakes his head. “There’s something you will find interesting. About half of those ships are armed.”

“Interesting isn’t the word I’d choose.” Though I’m stymied for a better one at the moment. “Do tell.”

“Some of them have a railgun mounted down the axis of the ship. A big bastard, sixty feet long.”

Penny whistles.

“So that’s how they were supposed to work,” I muse. “Some of the ships were tasked to shoot holes in the Trog cruisers, and then the Chinese SDF troops were to disembark and pour through the holes in the hull.”

“Sounds like a recipe for big casualties,” says Brice.

Turning to Penny, I say, “If that—”

“It’s not my first day on the job, Skipper.”

“Sorry.”

“You just be ready to activate that grav lens, in case they do get a shot off.”

“I linked back to the base,” says Silva.

“Any updates from Blair?” I regret asking.

“She wants to know why we left so much of the other vessel intact.”

Brice puts a hand on my shoulder to calm my instant anger. I shouldn’t say what I want to.

Brice answers for me, “Ask her to launch some ships to capture the loyalists.”

“Did you hail the loyalists?” I ask.

“No response,” Silva replies.

Disappointing.

I turn back toward our quarry, which is growing closer as we pick up speed and angle in for our attack.

The other ship’s grav signature shifts.

“It stopped accelerating,” I tell her. “It killed power to its drive.”

Penny pushes the Turd faster and adjusts her angle.

“They’re spinning the ship,” I tell her.

“Turn on that grav lens!” she shouts at me.

“Not yet.”

“They’re trying to line up that gun to shoot at us,” Brice clarifies.

That’s one of the things about dogfighting in space that’s distinctly different than dogfighting between terrestrial aircraft, spaceships don’t have to be pointed in the direction they’re flying. If a ship kills its drive power before turning, it can pivot in any direction without changing course.

“Grav lens,” Penny urges.

I tell her and Brice, “I don’t want to spook them away.” And I know it’ll be difficult for me to see them once the grav lens powers up and obscures every gravity field ahead of us. God, it would be good to have Phil here.

“Almost around,” Penny tells us. “Everybody prepare for impact.”

“One way or the other,” Brice laughs darkly. He braces himself against mine and Penny’s seats.

The other ship’s nose lines up on us.

I push power to our grav lens as a dozen rapid rounds spew out of the other ship, red and menacing as they bear down on us.

Just as impact seems imminent, the hot slugs skew off their paths and fly harmlessly into space.

Our grav lens did the trick.

I guess the bridge crew in the other ship must be realizing they’ve made a terrible miscalculation.

More rounds fire toward us as the other ship’s drive array fires up and the vessel starts to pivot to a new vector.

They’re still far enough away that they might escape.

“Max grav!” I command.

The bridge pulses to bright blue, and I feel grav pull me aft as Penny accelerates our ship and adjusts course to keep the escaping assault ship lined up.

Before I can gulp another breath, the loyalist ship grows huge ahead of us.

The grav lens flashes blinding blue and the inertial bubble pulses with the collision.

We ram the other ship just behind the bow, tearing down through the main cabin and blasting out the other side, just in front of the bridge.

Penny’s cutting hard into a turn and decelerating as we come out the other side.

I kill the grav lens.

The squad cheers. They know what a collision feels like.

I turn to look, and sense pieces of the disintegrated ship careening in every direction.

Penny turns back to Brice. “Direct hit.” She looks at me. “We good?”

I nod. Of course.

“The ship,” she clarifies.

“Oh yeah.” Dammit. Running through a few sims and being competent at a job are two very different things. I sigh. “Sorry, I’m no Phil.”

“We only need one Phil.” Brice smiles widely. The number of people we just killed doesn’t seem to have phased him at all.

I realize I don’t feel anything either. I start checking the status of ship systems on my console.

Chapter 12

In the principal’s office.

Well the lobby, really.

It’s my first visit to this part of the asteroid base. The control room being Blair’s lair, I subconsciously manufactured excuses for avoiding it. Until now.

The Potato Queen has summoned me.

Ugh.

I’m with Brice, looking through a row of blast-proof windows into a semicircular control room. On the flat side, a bank of monitors covers the wall. Inside, a few dozen techs work at computers tracking various aspects of colony infrastructure and equipment. Others surveil the empty reaches of space surrounding us, while still more scan the comm channels picked up by the assortment of radio receivers packed into the little parabolic dish farm up on the surface.

Altogether, the place reminds me of a launch mission control center from one of the pre-siege space videos.

Along the arcs of the semicircle both left and right of us stretches a walkway providing access to rows of glass-walled offices looking out onto the control room. The doorway off the lobby to each walkway is closed. Armed guards in the uniform du jour—coveralls with stamped rank—stand at each door with serious faces and eyes that might as well be comatose except they’re open, staring straight ahead, and blinking so infrequently it makes me uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, like the guards that stand in the corridor outside the lobby, these two are necessary. We don’t know how many more SDF loyalists are still lurking among us, waiting for an opportunity to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our diminutive war machine.

Or hoping for a chance to assassinate the Potato Queen.

Or looking for a favorable circumstance to rid the solar system of me.

“Those guards are a good idea,” says Brice, as though he’s been auditing my thoughts.

Overly dramatic?

I wonder if the bug in my head is somehow broadcasting on a tight thought band that self-activated a connection between us because of all the time we’ve spent together.

More excess drama.

Perhaps a more parsimonious explanation is a possibility, like Blair is making us wait for no other reason than to lord her rank over us, and Brice and me are bored from sitting out here, and our thoughts happen to be wandering in similar directions because the room is white, the chairs are boring gray, and once the control room busywork lost its grip on our attention, the only visually interesting thing left were the two guards pretending to be heartless killers.

“I wonder how she selects the loyal ones?” muses Brice.

I skip right over that question and silently try to guess whether the guards are loyal to her, or loyal to the Free Army? Either way, not productive things for me to dwell on. “You’ve been spending a good deal of time up in the hangar with Penny—”

“With the ship,” Brice corrects.

I turn and shoot him a knowing look.

He shrugs and smiles. “We like each other’s company.”

I let it go. “What’s the deal with things up there? How many ships will they be able to repair?”

Brice thinks about it for a moment. “Seven Arizona-class ships—”

“Arizona-class?” I immediately make the connection, but I didn’t know. “Is that the official designation for our class of assault ship?”

“It is now,” answers Brice. “I picked it up talking to the techs in the hangar. They’re calling ours the Arizona class as a way to distinguish them from the Chinese ships we saw stored in the bottom of the strip mine. Those are Beijing-class.”

“Beijing?” I ask. “I thought the Ticks obliterated Beijing during the siege. Did they rebuild?”

Brice shakes his head. “I think it was the only city name any of the guys up there could think of.” He laughs. “Come to think of it, that’s the only Chinese city I could name.”

I shake my head to show my disappointment, but don’t admit I couldn’t name more than two or three. “Are they fixing the Beijing-class ships too?” Good news, except we don’t have crews for those.

Brice nods. “Three Arizona-class ships are nearly ready to go. The others, they think they’ll be able to get airborne in a few weeks. One needs its drive array rebuilt with scavenged plates. Most have damaged reactors.”

“Can they use the Beijing-class ones for parts?”

“The Chinese reactors are so much smaller, nothing is interchangeable.”

That’s disappointing. “I heard a rumor about the number of Chinese vessels that went up. I don’t know whether to believe it. Did you hear anything?”

“Three thousand?” guesses Brice.

That’s the number I heard. Unbelievable.

“Details are sketchy,” says Brice. The rumors say they tried to assault the known Trog bases in the asteroid belt and on the Jovian moons. Heard they were massacred.”

“Some of them must have deserted.” I look involuntarily up toward the surface. “Those Chinese ships that arrived for the ambush here.”

Brice nods.

“Three thousand ships.” It had to be an impressive fleet. The Free Army might have a few divisions of Chinese assault troops floating around out here. Hundreds, hell, maybe a thousand out here somewhere. All on our side.”

“Let’s not get too optimistic,” says Brice. “For all we know, those Chinese are frozen dead like the bunch we found up top when we arrived.”

One of the guarded doors swings open and Blair’s adjutant steps through and summons us.

Chapter 13

I sense it well before we arrive at the door.

I feel it when I enter Blair’s office. She has g, and it’s set to earth standard. It fills in the gaps in my suit’s inconsistent field and reminds me what the burden of full-g feels like.

Brice stumbles when he crosses into the office, but catches himself without comment.

Blair sits in a plush chair like a sadistic cat with a passive face, catching mean-ass perv thrills from watching mice squeal after finding their feet stuck on a glue trap.

Or, she’s bored and staring blankly across a desk made from a sheet of polished asteroid rock big enough to dance on.

I go with option A.

Of course, I do. I don’t have any incentive to imagine charitable thoughts sprouting from her selfish cortex.

I come to a stop at the edge of the shiny slab of rock. “Yes, Colonel.” I don’t salute.

She tries to keep her anger under a lid, yet she says nothing.

Her adjutant steps into the hall and heads off on some errand—pointless is my bet. Blair likes to yank on the reins of her underlings.

Blair tells me, “I need you to scout some Trog outposts.”

“Okay.” Sounds reasonable. “What have we heard from earth? Did the Trogs mount another attack?”

Making no effort to answer my question, Blair’s lips remain mannequin-still on her plastic face.

I challenge her with my own silence and wonder what game we’re playing.

She wears the most inexpressive face I’ve ever seen on a human.

Instead of chasing those thoughts to another derogatory description, I instead recall my conversation with Brice about how she’s doing a good job with the administrative aspect of our revolutionary endeavor.

Is it possible the root of our disharmony is my attitude toward her?

I think about what her life on earth must have been like while I was trudging through my years in the grav factory. She was working her way up through the MSS, lying more in a day than I had to lie in a week. Every single person she worked with, or talked to, and probably everyone she socialized with would have thrown her into a torture room if they suspected what she was.

What does that do to a person?

How different, really, was that from my life?

Still, I decide not to challenge her further. I’ll try and play the good military boy and follow her pedantic, often obscure rules, until things get better. Putting every ounce of sincere syrup into my tone, I say, “We can scout the locations. I simply request information so I can better do my duty.”

Without giving an inch of ground, Blair says, “My adjutant will provide the orbital coordinates of Ceres and the other suspected Trog resupply depots.”

Like I can’t find Ceres.

Brice nudges my boot with his. He’s telling me not to lose my temper with Blair’s implication that my crew can’t navigate.

He is getting very good at reading me.

I keep my calm. “May I speak?”

The plastic-faced Potato Queen lets my request hang in the ether for a moment before she deigns to grant my request with a nod.

“If we time our scouting run to occur twelve hours after an attack, it’ll give the Trogs plenty of time to return to their resupply bases, configure their guard, and settle into the routine of restocking their holds. We’ll get a picture of how many ships resupply at which bases, and we’ll better be able to plan our eventual attack.”

Letting the boredom in her tone speak louder than the words she chooses, Blair says, “We know the cruisers don’t resupply at the same bases every time. Sometimes they go to the same base two or three times in a row. Sometimes they don’t return for months.”

“This is good intel,” I compliment. “The Free Army obviously has multiple sources throughout the solar system. Are they not able to provide a current picture of what’s at each base?”

Blair doesn’t answer my question. “You’re tasked with scouting the outposts on the list.”

“These other eight ships,” I guess, “are they out scouting bases?” Knowing I’m not going to be given an answer, I push straight on to the reason why my questions are important. “If they are, then you need to keep in mind Grays can see grav better then you and I can see visible light. If the ships come close enough to a base, any Gray looking up at the sky will see them shining like Christmas stars. That only needs to happen once before the Grays know to keep a lookout for more scout ships to come through. They might start laying traps. Worse, even though all of these vessels look alike to us, they don’t look that way to the Grays. Those big-eyed Ticks can see the unique grav fields generated by each ship’s array—unique because they were all so shoddily constructed back on earth. What I’m saying is, by scouting them, we’re giving away our strength.” I realize my argument is turning indignant. I take a breath to calm myself. “I know you don’t want to give the Trogs any intel and you don’t want to get any of our people killed. That’s why I need to know what you know, so I can help you make better decisions.”

Blair’s face shows she’s thinking. That’s good. At least my arguments have geared up enough of her brain so it’s incapable of fully maintaining her impervious façade. “We haven’t been sending ships,” she admits. “The intel is old, generated from sources we had in place from early in the war. That’s all I’ll tell you.” Her face goes hard. “We still don’t know if you’re a spy for the Trogs or the SDF.”

I shake my head in disgust. If she believed either of those things, she’d have locked me up by now.

“How many locations do you need scouted?”

“You have orders for three.”

“Not just us. How many ships are you sending out? How many suspected Trog bases do you need intel on?”

“You want to know how many Trog bases we know the locations of?”

“My God! Give it a rest.” That just slipped out in full, exhaustive exasperation. Sometimes it just happens. I calm myself before I proceed in a civil tone. “Let’s stop pretending this spy thing is about anything real. Play that game with your adjutant and the other officers if you want, but between us, you know what I’m about. So give it to me straight and let me do my job. Let me help the Free Army win this war.”

Blair turns her attention to a computer monitor, and the fingers on one hand tap randomly on the keys. She’s buying time.

My guess.

Finally, she looks at me. “You’re right. We don’t want to give away our strength to the enemy while trying to assess his. My adjutant will send the coordinates of eleven suspected bases to your d-pad. You’ll be the only ship going out. Leave tomorrow morning. Provide me your flight plan. I don’t expect to see you back here until you need to refuel or you need to participate in the next attack.”

“I need to be in on planning that,” I tell her.

Ignoring my assertion, she continues. “I need to know where you’ll be and when. Send us a communiqué every time you come out of bubble jump and before you jump again. I’ll need photographs of—”

I cut her off there. “No photographs. We won’t get that close. Phil can sense grav like a Gray—well not nearly as sensitive as a Gray. His long-range grav sense is better than anything we’ll get out of the navigation cameras mounted on our ship. We won’t be able to keep the Grays from seeing us, but three hundred and sixty degrees in 3D space is a lot of sky to watch. The farther away we are, the less likely we are to be spotted. The less likely they’ll be able to do anything about our presence, especially if we only stay for a few minutes before we bubble out again.”

“Send my adjutant that flight plan before you leave.”

Chapter 14

Twenty-four hours pass and I’m in a new—different, but fully functional—orange suit, walking around the ship with Brice, an inspection before we set out on our mission.

Something that feels like intuition makes me want to say I know something’s wrong, yet I can’t. Because I don’t know for sure. I only have a nagging sense that becomes incongruously stronger and more ambiguous the closer I am to the Rusty Turd.

Brice points out patches on the hull that look to have been welded by a kid on his first day in metal shop. Guessing at my apprehensive look, Brice explains, “They hold air.”

I shake my head. “I guess they don’t make the ship any uglier. What about the airlock?”

“It functions.”

I had a long list of requests for the ship when they went to work on it in the hangar. “Extra H tanks?”

“We’ve more than doubled our stores of hydrogen.” Brice pats the hull. “They salvaged some tanks from a Beijing-class ship that was never going to fly again. They’re mounted in one of the storerooms. And that’s about it, as far as repairs and improvements.”

I point to a new assault door in place where one was blown off in our first attack. “That’ll come in handy.”

“Yeah, the doors,” Brice nods. He steps quickly toward the aft section and points to a new radar dish embedded in the side of the hull.

I don’t like it. “We lose some protection. They had to cut out a grav plate that was mounted here to put this thing in.”

“The only way to install it,” Brice tells me, “or our ship’s grav fields would rip it off once we started pulling some heavy g’s.”

“How many dishes in all?”

“Six.”

I shake my head, despising Blair for pushing this on us. It tells me she doesn’t trust the information we’ll get from Phil’s grav scan of any base we survey. “Did Tarlow run his diagnostics to make sure it all functions?”

Brice nods. “I don’t like having him on board.”

“I suspect that’s one of Blair’s motivations for forcing him on us. Is his console set up on the bridge?”

“It looks as jury-rigged as the rest of the ship, but Tarlow seems satisfied.”

“Satisfied is probably as close to happiness as he’ll ever get. What about the flight plan?”

“You know,” says Brice, “if I’m going to be your XO, you could promote me.”

“I don’t know if I can or not. I’ll tell the Potato Queen once we get back. What do you want to be?”

“In the SDF, skipping ranks wasn’t something that was done.”

“Lieutenant, then?”

Brice grimaces. “I already don’t like it. Maybe I’ll stay a sergeant.”

“Up to you. What about the flight plan?”

“Penny and Phil put one together and sent it down to Blair.”

“Communications?”

“Another dish,” Brice glances up and points. “Up there. Mounted above the bridge.”

“We lost another grav plate?”

He nods. “Seven altogether.”

“My God. We’ll be defenseless soon.” Is that what Blair has in mind? To reduce the ship’s defenses by such a degree that we’ll be shredded by railgun fire in the next battle? “Does Jablonsky know how to configure the dish to send a signal back here?”

“Well, it’s mounted in the hull, so…”

“We have to adjust the orientation of the ship in space.”

“Mostly,” Brice explains. “The dish can be aimed using a set of controls on Jablonsky’s terminal. So as long as we orient the ship with the antenna pointed in the general direction of the Potato, he can make the final adjustment and home it in before he sends.”

“And he can do that?”

Brice shrugs. “He says he can.”

“And receiving?”

“He says he’s got that covered as well.”

“So we could aim it at earth, and send and receive from there?”

“I suppose.” Brice reaches up to scratch his chin, only to realize the helmet is in the way. “I don’t know what kind of range we have for communications. Jablonsky has the details. You can quiz him on that once we’re underway.”

I nod. I’ll do that. “Is everyone on board?”

“Penny, Phil, Jablonsky, and now Tarlow on the bridge.” Brice looks toward the platoon cabin. “Lenox, Silva, and Peterson, of course. And the rest of the survivors of the platoon we came up with. Seven more in all.”

“So, a squad.”

“Blair wouldn’t spare any replacements for us. I’d say we were lucky she let us bring along any grunts since she sees this as purely a recon mission. I argued with the squirrelly prick of an adjutant for nearly an hour to get permission to take the remnants of our platoon. We’re in a war zone. You never know when you’re going to run into trouble.”

“Or opportunity,” I tell him, reaching out to pat the Rusty Turd’s steel hull. “You have to remember, we’re the orcas in an ocean of whales.”

“Or we’re the sharks in an ocean of orcas. The Trog cruisers bite back.”

Yeah. So he’s right about that. I switch back to logistics. “Do we have enough H and C packs for everyone?”

“Enough to last for months. And none of that nasty Trog shit. We don’t want to run short on our cal packs again.”

I laugh, thinking back to our recent adventure on the wayward asteroid. “How about ammunition?”

“Everyone has a full load, but not much more. Blair doesn’t want us marauding across the solar system and never coming home, I guess.”

Brice and I both laugh at that.

“Let’s board up and fly.”

Brice opens the door to access the bridge, and I climb in.

Chapter 15

After a short burn and an hour-long, efficient coast, during which I spent most of the time listening to Blair’s adjutant reiterating our orders, I’m thankful I’m able to cut the radio conversation short. Penny announces to the crew that we’re starting our first jump. I feel the drive array surge as our inertial bubble glows bright.

We’re riding a wave past the speed of light.

It’s good to be away from the Potato, away from Blair’s overbearing management, and away from all those Free Army troops. Even though we share the same dream, I don’t feel like I fit in.

Still, something undefinable nags at me.

I glance around the bridge. Penny and Phil are attentive to their consoles, though there isn’t much to do now that we’re in bubble jump except wait until we exit. Then their work starts again with determining exactly where we are with respect to where we hoped we’d be. Jablonsky is leaning back in his chair, having a conversation with someone, one of the soldiers strapped in the seats up front in the crew compartment. Tarlow is engaged with his computer screens, going through their functions and explaining to Brice how his system is supposed to work for acquiring and filtering information to provide us with a three-dimensional picture of the space around the Turd. In the midst of a bubble jump, the screens show nothing.

I stand up and announce, “I’m going forward to see how the troops are doing.” I exit the bridge and enter the central hall. The hinky feeling is stronger. Is it intuition? Is there something about the bug in my head that allows me to sense the future?

I open the storeroom and see the large H tanks that were hurriedly installed. I look at them and concentrate, trying to imagine how I’ll navigate the path to honing this sensation into something specific. I step inside and lay my hands on the nearest tank, thinking the feeling is slightly less pronounced.

Good. That’s progress.

I step away front the tank and back into the doorway. The sensation’s intensity, if it could be called that, notches back up a click or two.

Maybe, across the hall in the captain’s quarters. I turn and nearly jump out of my skin.

Phil is standing in the hall, just a few feet away.

“Jesus Christ, Phil. You scared the crap out of me.”

“What are you doing?”

I don’t have a vocabulary for what I’m feeling. Even if I did, I’m not sure I’d share.

Phil says, “I thought you were going forward to talk to the squad.”

“Are you checking up on me?”

“No.” Phil steps back and looks around nervously. “Nothing like that. I was… I was coming forward, too.”

“Why?”

Phil hesitates. “I was—”

I raise a hand to stop him. He’s lying, though I have no clue why.

I step across the hall and reach for the handle on the door to the captain’s chamber.

“Were you going to see Silva?”

Mention of her name puts me on the defensive from an unexpected flank. “I… what?”

“Silva? You like her, don’t you?”

I step back. “I never said anything about that.”

“You don’t have to. I’ve known you forever.”

“And that doesn’t make you mad? You know, considering everything?”

Phil pulls a face and shrugs dramatically. “She’s seventeen and a half but—”

And a half.

Any girl who has to add that suffix to her age is too young.

“Only six months from eighteen.” Phil seems to approve. “That eighteen thing… that’s for old pre-siege prudes, right? Half the girls are married by then these days. Half of those already have a kid. It’s like in the olden days when people used to be married by the time they were sixteen.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Phil?”

“I just don’t think you should let the age thing stop you two. Everybody can see it. You like each other.”

“I can barely begin to list the things wrong with it. For starters, I’m her superior officer.”

“We’re not in the SDF anymore.” Phil steps forward, seemingly to herd me up the hall toward the airlock leading to the platoon compartment.

I don’t budge.

Phil nods forward. “You should go talk to her.”

I tap my helmet. “I can talk to her from here.”

“You know you’d rather see her, right? She is pretty.” Phil steps forward again and bumps me.

I push him back with two hands on his chest. “What the hell is going on here?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I scrutinize his face. He’s hiding something. “Do you feel it?”

Phil’s face looks theatrically innocent, all but proof of the falseness.

“You feel it.”

“What?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t. I know if I can feel it, you can, too. And whatever it is is stronger out here than up on the bridge.”

“The inertial bubble field,” Phil explains. “They took out those plates. Now the field isn’t even.” He taps his helmet with a finger. “The non-uniform grav field causes the bug to feel discomfort.

I nod my head to agree, but stop. “That’s not true. Our plates were damaged in the battle over Arizona. I’ve been through much worse fluctuating fields than this.”

“It’s the subtle change that—”

I stop him with a raised hand. The feeling is getting stronger. I reach down quickly and fling the captain’s quarters’ door open.

Phil gasps.

I step into unexpectedly bright light, as he babbles something to slow me down.

The feeling is stronger in here.

Phil puts a restraining hand on my arm, says something I ignore, and I step into the room, following the feeling like a Geiger counter.

Further, deeper, toward the corner.

Movement.

Small, gray, startling.

“Goddammit!” I spin on Phil with rage bursting red on my face. “You smuggled Nick the Tick onboard?”

Chapter 16

Seething, I turn to Phil. “You have some explaining to do.”

“It’s not what you think.”

I emphatically turn to look at the little gargoyle. “I think there’s a Gray on my ship.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Phil pushes past me and walks across the room to get closer to Nick.

“You’re not explaining.”

“For starters, you need to calm down.”

“Always good advice,” I huff. “I’m not ready to give up on being pissed just yet.”

“Why?” Phil is defiant. “What good will it do? Are you going to punch me? Shoot me? Yell at me?”

Sure, he’s right. What good will the anger do, except make me dumber the madder I get?

“You want to have a toddler tantrum.” Phil looks down his nose at me as he crosses his arms and puts his body between me and the Gray. “Go ahead. I’ll wait for you to grow up and then I’ll explain.”

Putting a tremendous effort into keeping my words even and measured, I say, “We’ll get to the why in a minute. First, how?”

“The answers to the why and how are intertwined.”

I labor through a sigh.

“He’d have died if I’d left him.”

“That’s the why question, Phil.”

“You have to understand, I couldn’t let him die.”

“Or just go a little crazy until we got back.”

Phil shakes his head in disgust. “Nick is not a monster.”

I disagree, but don’t have to voice it. Phil can read it easily enough from the shining neon thoughts I make no effort to conceal. “How did you get it out?”

Phil’s eyes start to wander. His arms uncross, and his hands busy themselves grasping one another.

“Tell me.”

Phil stops fidgeting, and he looks at me. “I’m going to tell you something, but you can’t freak out.”

I laugh meanly and point at the Gray. “You brought that on the ship. You’re endangering us all. So say I’m freaking out if you want, but I think you were a lot closer with the word ‘tantrum.’”

“Grays, when they get together, have a way of amplifying their mental abilities.”

“They network. I get that. So, BFD.”

Phil shakes his head. “You don’t get it. What I’m saying isn’t that collectively the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

“That sounds like manager nothing-talk. Say what you’re trying to say.”

“We don’t have a way to measure mental power,” says Phil. “When we were down in the reservoir, Nick was able to project his emotional influence to a distance of forty feet. Do you remember?”

“That was yesterday, Phil. Of course, I remember.”

“Two Grays linked together can project more than forty feet.”

“So what, like forty plus forty? Eighty?”

“No.” Phil’s excited by my guess. “Twice that, at least.”

“What, did it tell you that?”

Phil nods and then shakes his head. “At first. And then he showed me how. We linked and did it together.”

“You projected emotions onto a bug-head, what, a hundred and sixty feet away?”

“At least that far, and not a bug-head, a normal person.”

My anger gives way to concern. No, a whole list of concerns. “Tell me you’re still in charge, here.”

“You asked about that when we were in the reservoir.”

“And?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Phil looks back at the Tick who’s still squatting in the corner, trying to stay out of my line of sight.

I am worried about it.

“With Nick’s help, I manipulated the guards. I made them afraid of something in the dark, way down the corridor where it opens up to the mine shafts.” Phil looks proud. “They went down together to investigate, leaving the door to the reservoir unguarded. Nick and I walked out.”

“And nobody noticed.”

Phil shakes his head.

“And what? You did that with everyone you came across all the way up until you boarded this ship?”

“Some,” Phil admits. “Mostly, we were able to sense them in nearby hallways, and we just avoided them.”

“It was that easy? You walked out of the base avoiding people?”

Phil nods.

“That’s bullshit.”

“You say that because you’re mad again.” Phil pauses and then says, “You think because you can’t do it, I must be lying.”

“No.” I am struggling with how to put my feelings into words. “That kind of shit worries me.”

“You’re worried about the influence,” Phil guesses. “You shouldn’t. You know what to look for. We’d never be able to pull that off with you.”

I’m not sure I believe that. “What I don’t believe is that you made your way off the base without Blair’s people in the control room seeing you on one of their cameras. A Gray wandering the halls is the kind of thing that catches someone’s attention.”

“We avoided areas covered by cameras.”

“More bullshit.”

“You know nearly half the surveillance cameras don’t work.”

“Yet you don’t know which ones are out. Fess up, Phil. Stop bullshitting me. Give me the whole truth or I’m tossing the Tick out into space as soon as we finish this jump.”

Phil looks at the floor.

“Tell me.”

Phil looks around.

“Dammit, Phil. Spit it out.”

“Tarlow.”

“What about him?”

“Tarlow mapped out all of the cameras for me.”

“You and Tarlow plotted this?”

Phil turns squirrelly again.

“You did. Both of you, together.” My anger is boiling again.

Chapter 17

“You have to understand,” says Phil, “Tarlow helped because he was afraid of Blair.”

That knocks me off track, because I know Tarlow quakes away from Blair the way any sane person would fear a grizzly bear scratching its way through the kitchen door. Still, the leap from there to helping Phil doesn’t make any sense. “Keep talking.”

“Those radar dishes they put into our hull.”

More to fume about. “Are you trying to piss me off?”

Phil shakes his head. “Tarlow inadvertently mentioned to Blair that he was working on modifying some surplus equipment to try out on the assault ships after he found out how little instrumentation they were built with. Blair heard what she wanted to hear and ordered Tarlow to install the equipment on our ship even though he didn’t think it was ready.”

“Why didn’t he just tell her?”

“Not everybody’s as ready to argue with Blair as you are.”

I don’t know whether to take that as a compliment or something else. “I still don’t follow.”

“After Blair harangued Tarlow into coming along, he contacted me to see whether I could gather the information Blair needed from a safe distance.”

“And?” I ask. “You can, can’t you? From earth orbit on our first day up, you were able to sense the absence of our cruisers defending the moon base.”

Phil confirms it with a nod. “I explained as much to Tarlow, but manipulated him by telling him that with Nick’s help, he and I could see much farther with more clarity.”

“Is that true?”

“Of course it is.”

“So with the Tick, we don’t have to get as close to get the same information?”

Phil answers with a shake of his head. “We can keep a good distance. With the ship bubble jumping the way it does, we won’t have much control over where we come out. We may be far away, or we may be uncomfortably close.”

Chapter 18

We pop out of bubble jump between Saturn and one of its largest moons. Iapetus is an odd, half-black, half-gray orb with a 60,000-foot ridge of mountains running around its circumference, giving it something of a walnut shape.

Our drive array is powered down, as are all internal grav systems. Any Gray looking in our direction would have seen a flash of grav when we pulsed out of bubble, however, if they’re not concentrating on our piece of sky, we’ll avoid detection.

At least that’s how it’s gone on the three outposts we’ve scouted so far. No Trog cruisers, and no detection we were aware of, although two of the bases were operational, with plenty of surface activity and plenty of Trogs.

“We’re too far away,” Phil tells us, with a cross glance at Penny. He and Penny are both irritable from struggling with our imprecise navigation for the nearly thirty hours since we left the Potato.

Penny apparently interprets Phil’s observation as a slight and decides to pick up the gauntlet. “We were in bubble exactly how long you told us to be, Grav Man.”

Standing on the bridge between their stations, I laboriously remind them, “None of this is exact. If the Rusty Turd had been built with the kind of computing power a starship should contain—”

I leave it hanging there. Everyone knows the conclusion.

We’ve all seen pre-siege vids, the true-to-life banned ones that revealed the technical prowess of our armies. We’ve watched the fictions that showed the kinds of spaceships humans should be riding to fight our space wars, ships filled with every imaginable instrument for measuring, understanding, and visualizing the void, its hazards, and its hostile denizens. Maybe more important than the full-color, high-def fantasy was the computing power that went into generating vids that appeared so incredibly real.

If we could only harness that kind of power now. With the Gray’s grav tech in our hands, there’d be no stopping us.

Penny asks Phil, “You and Nick can’t scan the moon from here?”

Phil concentrates as he stares into space. “Something’s anomalous, but I can’t be certain.”

“Cruisers?” I ask.

Phil shakes his head. “Probably not.”

“And the Tick?” I ask.

“I’m speaking for both of us.”

I cast a glance at Tarlow, but his system went on the fritz when we scanned the last moon. “Almost there, he tells me. I found the problem. Just fixing it now.”

No help there.

“I can power in closer.” Penny scans around the bridge. What she’s proposing would endanger us all.

Phil explains, “Powering up our drive array will illuminate us too bright for any Gray down there to miss.”

“We’re too close to Iapetus to try a bubble jump.” Penny is looking at the instruments on her panel.

Phil shakes his head. “From a grav perspective, that would flash us brighter than powering to a closer position.”

Bubble jumping right at the moon, or even to anywhere near it would leave us with too little room for miscalculation. We’d likely end up liquefied by the g-forces resulting from our mistake. I need more information. “Penny, leave all the grav systems powered down for now. Phil, you can’t resolve the structures on the surface for certain, or anything in the air?”

“If there were anything of a substantial size above the surface,” answers Phil, “especially if it was a Trog cruiser, I’m pretty sure we’d sense it.”

Brice crosses his arms. “We don’t know the Gray won’t lie.”

“I keep telling you,” shouts Phil. “Grays don’t know deceit like that. They’re a telepathic race and they don’t have a mental mechanism for conveying lies. There’d be no purpose in it. All Grays can read each other’s thoughts.”

Brice points at me, then lets his accusing finger rest on Phil. “You and him both keep your shit hidden from the Grays. You’ve done it all your lives. You’ve told me so.”

“Well, yeah,” Phil stutters. “Grays can do that, too.”

“Lying by omission,” Brice clarifies. “Still lying, right?”

“You don’t understand.”

“I guess I don’t.” Brice turns to me. “The Gray has been helpful so far. I’ll give you that. It’s just the longer we have it on the ship, the more uncomfortable I feel about it.”

No point in getting any further into that right now. I glance around at the others. “Okay Phil, it was you and the Tick who sent us on this detour. Where are these anomalies you sensed, are they on the surface?”

He answers, “I didn’t say they were on the surface.”

“What are we talking about them for?”

“They’re anomalies.”

I open my mouth to shoot back with something stinging, yet I feel like manufacturing an insult is not only counterproductive, it would keep me from spending thought on more important questions I should probably be dreaming up to ask.

“We don’t know what they are,” Phil tells me. “They’re transient and small. Sometimes larger and fast. Mostly near Iapetus.”

“Massive?” I ask. “Do they have grav fields?”

“Something about grav.” Phil is perplexed. “Like nothing I’ve seen before. More like ghosts.”

“Ghosts?” Brice laughs.

“I don’t have a better word.” Phil looks into the distance again. “Faint. They don’t seem to be there. And then they are again, like something you notice out of your peripheral vision and when you turn to look, it’s gone.”

Penny switches to Phil’s side and shoots Brice a dirty look. “Sounds like ghosts to me.”

“Phil,” I ask, “do you and the Tick sense anything going on near the surface?”

“We’re pretty far out.”

Sometimes being the boss is frustrating. I turn to Penny, and pause as I make my commitment. “Hard-g, right at the moon. When we get close enough for a fast, tight orbit, slow us down for orbital insertion and then kill the grav arrays and let’s float our way around to the other side, as invisible as we can be to a pair of Gray eyes. Phil, you and Nick keep your attention glued to that ridgeline. As soon as you sense even the slightest hint of a grav plume, alert Penny. Penny, when that happens, you punch it and get us the hell out of here before the railgun slugs start coming our way.”

“If there are hostiles down there,” argues Phil, “any grav plumes we see will probably be from railgun slugs, not ships.” Phil can’t help it, I know. I figure he and Blair have a contrary gene in common that just won’t let them allow anything to slide on by.

“Just alert Penny.” I sigh. “I don’t want any more holes in our hull.”

Penny gives Phil a glance in the silent language of two people very good at working together. She powers up our drive array as Phil compensates with an internal inertial bubble to save us all from injury.

Chapter 19

We enter orbit above the black side of Iapetus.

Brice is glued to one of the small viewports, watching through the glass for anything he might see down on the dark surface.

Tarlow turns away from his monitors to glance at me, nodding emphatically to make sure I know his system is online. “Nothing but natural geological structures.”

Our grav systems are all offline, though Penny sits with her hand on the throttle, ready to amp up the power outflow from our fusion reactor and goose the drive array for a quick exit.

Despite the absence of a field from our hull plates, I’m having trouble with my grav sense making out any but the roughest detail below on the moon’s surface. Instead, I look over Tarlow’s shoulder and watch the visual feed streaming across two of his six computer monitors, the two that display the quadrant containing the moon.

The terrain creeps sideways from edge to edge, monochromatic but sharp. In the absence of visual cues, I have to remind myself that the rows of peaks stand twice as tall as Mt. Everest and twenty times taller than those giant Trog cruisers are long. What I’m looking for won’t be a row of whale-sized Trog ships docked along the face of the mountain range, but a tiny school of guppies in an Olympic-sized pool.

“No unusual gravity fluctuations,” Phil reports.

“And the Tick?” I ask, “what does he see?”

“Same,” he answers. “I speak for both of us.”

I nod. I don’t want to get used to Phil’s implicit mental merger with Nick the Tick.

Penny is watching her external monitors, as is Jablonsky. Both are tense.

Penny taps her screen, and I step over for a look.

A sliver of light gray is glowing across Iapetus’s horizon.

She says, “We’ve crossed the entire black half.”

That feels like a relief, though one I guess is based purely on the fear of the dark fostered by the lizard part of my brain.

The light gray sliver grows wider, as the black recedes toward the bottom of the screen.

Penny announces, “We’ll be passing over the border momentarily.”

I glance back at Tarlow’s monitors. His colors haven’t changed. Of course, they haven’t. His system is radar-based. I knew that before I looked. Still, I had to do it.

Glued to his screens, now that they’re functioning, Tarlow tenses and raises a finger to point. “Hey.”

I lean closer to get a better view. I don’t see what he sees.

Penny’s fist grips the throttle.

Brice is looking back and forth rapidly through the window. “I don’t see anything.”

“Something’s out there!” Phil shouts. “Nick sees it. Coming fast from the stern.”

“There!” Tarlow’s fingers are sliding across his monitor, tracking a faint smudge.

“Punch it!” I order.

Penny hits max grav and we all sway with the jolt because the inertial bubble kicks in an instant late, just long enough to make if feel like we were sloshed by a high-speed wall of Jell-O.

“Trogs?” I ask.

“I—” Phil doesn’t have an answer.

“Coming fast!” shouts Tarlow.

“It’s going to hit us!” Phil braces for the collision.

Penny swerves hard left and down. The inertial bubble flashes brilliant blue under the strain, and I feel my stomach do a flip.

“It went past,” Tarlow tells us. “It’s fast.”

From where I’m trying to keep my feet stuck to the deck, I can’t make out anything on Tarlow’s screen, but that doesn’t change what we need to do. “Get us out of here, Penny.”

“Another one!” shouts Phil. “Right behind us.”

Penny cuts a sharp turn as the ship jolts hard.

Phil hollers.

Jablonsky curses like he thinks the ship is going to come apart.

Penny mutters something and pours power into the grav array. The ship strains and shudders as her words turn to a string of curses.

“The array,” Phil tells us, “it’s been hit.”

“Penny.” I drop to a knee on the deck beside her. “Talk to me.”

“He’s right. The array is damaged. We can’t bubble jump.”

“How do you know?” asks Jablonsky.

“Hit to the drive array,” Phil explains quickly as though Jablonsky just came into the conversation. Phil turns aft and shakes his head. “I see an unstable deformation in the fields. If we jump, we’ll disintegrate.”

“Find us something to hide behind,” I tell Penny, quickly. “Phil, what was that?”

“Not a railgun slug,” he answers. “The first one tried to turn with us and missed. The second one followed our turn and exploded.”

“Exploded?” I ask. “Or hit us?”

“Both,” answers Phil. “I think it was a missile.”

“A guided missile,” Brice clarifies.

“Missiles?” I’m taken aback. We might as well be talking about catapults. Nobody’s fired a missile in the solar system since the siege. “How could a missile match our acceleration? They have chemical drive systems, right?”

“Shit!” Phil’s head snaps as he looks in a random direction. “Grav plumes.” He seems confused. “I think.”

“I’ve got more bogies,” Tarlow tells us. “Same as before. Only different.”

What the fuck does that mean?

“Where?” The inertial grav bubble glows bright in response to Penny’s high-g maneuver.

“Nick sees them,” Phil tells us, making sure to credit the Tick for the benefit of the rest of us. “No wait, I see them, too.”

Tarlow points to his screen. “Here.”

I step over to take a closer look. Three prominent smudges are accelerating off the side of a mountain.

“Three,” Phil tells me. “Accelerating hard.”

“Penny?” She knows what I’m asking.

“I can only get eight g’s.” She’s worried.

“Phil?” I ask. “How fast are they coming?”

He’s shaking his head. “Fifteen…sixteen g’s.”

“What are they?” asks Brice. “No way a cruiser could move that fast.”

He’s right. “How big are these ships, Phil? Tarlow, anybody have an answer? Jablonsky, radio them, see who they are.” Trogs and Grays don’t have radios. If they answer, at least they’re human.

“Can’t tell until they’re close,” Tarlow rattles.

“Impossible to say,” answers Phil. “The grav fields are foggy, almost invisible. Only the hard acceleration warping the grav field around them is clear.”

Probably more maneuverable than us. I’m worried. “Phil, use the hull plates to help Penny pull some hard turns if we need to. Get ready to shunt power to defensive grav.”

“Together, me and Nick can—”

“Now’s not the time for Tick shit,” I tell him. “Don’t give him control of any system on this ship, you hear me?” That’s when I start hoping I have something to say about it. The Gray can probably access every grav switch on the whole ship.

Chapter 20

“We’re not going to get away,” admits Penny.

“Phil,” I urgently ask, “anything we can hide behind out here? Asteroid? Clouds of shit? Saturn’s rings?”

“Nothing close. Wouldn’t do any good. They’d see where we went.”

“Over-grav the drive plates,” I tell Penny. If we lose a few, it doesn’t matter. We’ve already lost our ability to bubble jump. “Straight line. Don’t maneuver.”

Worry on her face, Penny puts us on a straight course and pours power into the misshapen field formed by our drive array. The ship struggles with the vector and the inertial bubble shimmers and flows to make up for it.

“More,” I tell her.

Penny increases the power.

A harmonic hum runs through the hull. Its frequency starts to build. Vibrations run along the deck and the array flutters.

“Phil,” I order, “fix that vibration.”

“It’ll tear us apart,” Penny tells us.

“I’m on it.” Phil is sweating over his console. The inertial bubble starts to fluctuate nearly out of control.

Putting a ton of effort into keeping a steady voice, I turn to Tarlow. “What’s the story?”

He stutters. He didn’t expect to find himself in an active role in a combat situation. Still, the words find a way out. “Coming in fast, right up our ass.”

“How far out?” I ask. “Time to intercept?”

“I… ah… I”

“Seventy seconds,” Phil answers, “unless they accelerate even faster.”

Time for me to earn my pay. “Who feels lucky?”

Brice laughs darkly. He knows something unconventional is coming up.

I put a hand on Penny’s shoulder. “How long to spin the ship around?”

“Spin?” She doesn’t know why I’m asking. “You want to fly backwards?”

I nod.

Penny runs an estimate in her head. “Five, ten seconds. I haven’t tried it. I’ll have to cut power to the drive array to make it work.”

Phil is maybe catching on. “I can assist with the grav plates.”

“Wait until the last second,” I explain. “When they’re almost on us, spin the ship. As soon as we’re lined up one hundred and eighty degrees, fire up the grav lens and dump the rest of our power into the main drive array.”

“With any luck.” Brice leaves the half-spoken thought hanging over the comm.

Tarlow starts jabbering about the technicalities of why the idea is the worst one ever.

Phil and Penny are talking between themselves in clipped phrases before Penny blurts, “Everybody, hold on!”

The fields flash blue.

“They’re firing!” shouts Phil.

Vertigo spins my head.

Momentum reverses. The grav lens fires up. All my sense of gravity outside the bridge goes blind.

I feel the wash of a grav tornado blow past, jolting everyone.

The ship lurches twice in rapid succession.

Phil whoops.

“Was that them?” asks Penny.

“Two!” shouts Phil, barely able to contain his excitement. “One turned away. Two disintegrated when they hit the grav lens.”

Nobody tells me I’m a genius ship captain, but that’s okay. We’re not out of the shit yet.

Phil cuts power to the grav lens.

“Ninety-degree spin,” I tell them. “And then, Penny, step on it.”

We need to put some distance between us and our pursuer while he slows down to come back after us.

“Brice,” I ask, “is everyone strapped in up front?”

“Don’t worry about them. I’m on that.”

I glance quickly around the bridge. “Everybody buckle up. Things are going to be bumpier before they get better.”

“Nick is fine,” Phil tells me even though I didn’t ask about the Gray.

I grav tight to the floor between Penny and Phil. There aren’t enough seats on the bridge for all of us. “Penny, push the drive plates harder.”

Several pairs of worried eyes look at me. They don’t approve.

I can’t blame them. “Phil, spare all the power from the inertial bubble you can.”

I feel the change like a punch in the chest as he immediately complies.

I hear grunts and groans sound over the comm.

“Tarlow,” I ask, “any more coming up from the surface?”

“I… I’m trying to reorient.”

“Get back in the game!”

“We’re pretty far away from Iapetus.” Phil tells me. “But those grav plumes, they were powerful. We’ll be able to see them.”

He’s talking about him and Nick the Tick.

Tarlow is fumbling with his computer controls.

I have no patience. “Tarlow—your radar is the best chance we have if there are more missiles out there.

He’s shaking his head vigorously. “We’re probably going too fast, and we’re probably too far out for chemically powered rockets to have a chance of catching us.”

“Unless that ship fires some,” I counter. “Jablonsky, are you trying to hail these ships?”

He looks at me like it’s the stupidest thing I’ve said yet.

“They’re not Trogs or Grays. Not with this tech.”

“They’re not humans,” Tarlow argues.

“Tarlow,” I remind him, “you have your job.”

He mutters something and goes back to work.

I turn back to Jablonsky. “Hail them. We need to know for sure.”

Interior grav is stabilizing. It’s pulling hard against Penny’s acceleration, but it’s steady.

Brice unstraps and hurries over to take up a position beside Tarlow, setting his suit to grav tight once there.

Brice gives me a glance to let me know what he’s up to. Tarlow knows the tech, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. Brice will make sure he’s focusing on the right threats, which are sure to multiply again.

“That ship has adjusted its course, and it’s coming in fast,” Phil warns.

“Close?” I ask.

“Pretty far away,” answers Phil. “His momentum took him well beyond us. There’s a lot of velocity to accelerate against.”

“Stop talking physics, Phil, and give me an intercept estimate.”

“Two minutes, maybe two and a half.”

I turn to Penny. “He won’t fall for the reverse-spin trick that just killed his buddies.”

Penny laughs. “I’m surprised it worked the first time.”

“They were too aggressive.”

“We might need to keep our bow pointed at him,” says Phil. “The grav lens will protect us from his railgun.”

Shit. I forgot about that. “You said he fired?”

“Six rounds in rapid succession,” answers Phil. “Big slugs, right out the front of his ship.”

“So, he’s like some kind of fighter plane?” I correct myself immediately. “Fighter spaceship?”

“Seems that way.”

“And his railgun?” I ask. “We need to worry about it?”

“Big slugs,” Phil answers. “High-velocity. Enough energy to turn us into a cloud of debris.”

Crap.

I turn back to Jablonsky. “Anything on the comm yet?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you scanning all frequencies?”

“No, I’m waiting for someone to dial me up.”

Brice laughs. Tarlow chuckles.

Point taken. I apologize with, “Just checking.”

“Phil, can you think of any way we can outrun this guy?”

“No.” Phil sounds certain.

“Penny,” my next idea coalescing even as the words come, “pick a spot in the sky far away from everywhere and drive toward it.”

The ship swerves as she adjusts course.

“Okay, Physics Boy Phil and Penny, as soon as the fighter has us lined up in his sights again, cut power to our drive array and spin us to keep the lens pointed at him. Nothing he fires at us can penetrate that field.”

“What are we doing, then?” asks Penny. “Hoping he’ll chase us until he runs out of railgun slugs?”

“Or runs out of H for his reactor,” answers Phil, nodding as he’s catching on to my current stroke of starship genius. “In a craft that size, the reactor has to be smaller than ours. And less efficient. Much less. That ship can’t be designed for bubble jumping and not for interplanetary travel. He’ll have to turn back at some point. What’s better, the more we make him maneuver to get a shot at us, the more H he’ll burn, and the sooner he’ll have to turn back. We’re already moving fast as hell, so with every second that passes without Iapetus launching more fighters, the harder it will be for them to reach us.”

“That’s my plan,” I tell them, looking around the bridge as I come up with at least a dozen ways it could fail. “Any better ideas?”

Crickets.

Something with at least a hint of foolproofery would have been nice.

Chapter 21

Dogfight in space?

Sure, if one dog is a three-legged hound in a neck brace and the other is a sharp-toothed slobber mutt.

Maybe an exaggeration.

“He’s swinging wide to make his turn,” Phil tells us.

Necessary information but not news. Our attacker just finished his third strafing run with all rounds deflected into space by the powerful field of our well-directed grav lens. As soon as he passed, Phil reoriented the ship to point down the vector of our escape, and Penny juiced the drive to accelerate us to a faster speed.

“Let me know when,” Penny tells Phil.

“Another few seconds.” Phil is tense. He and Penny both are. They’re doing the work to keep us all alive. “Now!”

Penny cuts power to the array.

The hull plates pulse uneven blue through the bridge as the internal g fluctuates drastically.

“Damn!” curses Brice.

“Sorry,” Phil shakes his head. “He’s getting quicker about bringing his ship around to re-aim at us.”

The deck is shifting beneath my feet so fast I feel like I’m falling, and I push more power to my suit’s g.

Everything stabilizes.

Phil has the ship lined up again, pointing at the incoming attacker.

I glance at Penny.

She takes on the fault of it. “We didn’t get much speed that time.”

I shake my head. “You’re both doing a good job. We’ll make it out of this.” I turn to Jablonsky. “Any luck yet?”

“Still trying,” he tells me. “I’m picking up high static on a few bands. I think it’s encrypted radio traffic.”

“Radio?” Brice’s question is full of speculation. “Grays and Trogs don’t need radio.” He looks at me. “Can this be SDF?”

Tarlow gulps. “Did Blair send us into an SDF trap?”

I shake my head. “This can’t be an SDF fighter.” Though I can’t piece together any line of logical steps to disprove my hope. “Jablonsky, have you tried hailing in Korean?”

He turns away from his panel to show me his mocking silence. I’m pretty sure he’d punch me if he were in arm’s reach.

“Of course,” I answer for him. “We’re all frustrated. Keep trying.”

He turns back to his panel.

“He’s slowing and turning,” Phil tells me.

“Different tactic?” Without a doubt. “Keep the bow pointed at him.”

“He’s coming in behind us.” Phil shakes his head. “Not behind us exactly.”

“You’re keeping the bow on him?” I verify.

“Right,” Phil tells me. “He’s coming to a stop, relative to our position.”

“You mean he’s following us?”

“Yes,” answers Phil. “A quarter mile back.”

“We’re flying backwards.” Penny confirms. Two ships, ours pointing backward, the attacker rocketing forward, both careening through space in excess of twenty thousand miles an hour, both in the same direction.

Tarlow has a clear picture of the other ship on his screen. “What’s he waiting for?”

“He doesn’t want us to accelerate any more.” I’ve already run through the progression of possibilities, and I’d hoped our assailant would take a while longer to run through them as well.

After we survived the first pass, keeping our bow pointed toward him to protect our ship, I knew we’d be safe. He could try different angles and different speeds, yet Phil didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping the grav lens between him and us. What’s more, he was losing ground after each pass because we accelerated a little while he was turning.

He was going to lose that game, and he figured it out.

One of his only alternatives would have been to come in close, orient his ship’s gun toward us, and fire while he tried to use his hull plates to shift sideways for a better angle. Geometry was against him in that endeavor. No matter how close he maneuvered the vessel, he’d have to traverse some span of space to set up his next shot. Our ship only had to spin on its center of mass. And when his passion for a kill overcame his good sense, he’d move in too close, and we’d have the opportunity to ram him.

Unfortunately, he skipped right over that tactic.

Instead, he positioned his fighter between us and Iapetus. The best choice, assuming reinforcements are coming. Now we can’t turn, or we open up our flanks. We can’t accelerate, or we slow and eventually fly back toward Iapetus.

Our only hope is that no reinforcements are coming.

I already know they will. Otherwise, the enemy ship wouldn’t have chosen this tactic.

Tarlow hasn’t thought through the possibilities. “He has to know he can’t win doing this.”

I turn for a better view of Tarlow’s computer monitors. “Keep a close eye on Iapetus.”

“Bullfight?” Brice looks at me with a question on his face. He’s a ground game soldier, not a fleet battle naval type. He hasn’t worked through it, either.

“Physics.” I shrug. “Tactics.” I shake my head. “For the moment, a stalemate we’ll win by default.” I turn to Penny and Phil, however, I know the answer to the question I’m going to ask. “Can we ram him from here?”

Phil shakes his head.

“I can try,” answers Penny. “But he’s smaller and faster.” She doesn’t want to give in.

While we’re waiting, my curiosity turns to another question. “Phil, why was that ship anomalous?” With the grav lens blazing brightly on the bow of the ship, I can’t sense the fighter out there.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “It should be glowing bright back there. I can only make it out because it’s close. Its grav field is mostly what I see.”

“Any ideas as to why?”

Phil shakes his head. “Some kind of stealth technology we don’t know about.”

“Oh, no,” mutters Tarlow, pressing his finger to one of his monitors.

I look to see a trio of smudges moving on the screen with Iapetus in the background.

Chapter 22

“Same type of ships?” I ask Phil.

“Seems that way.”

“Tarlow?” I ask. “Can you make out enough detail to tell?”

He points to the small, accelerating smudges, turns to me, and shrugs.

“Something you should know,” says Phil. “Nick can tell it’s a human inside that other ship.”

“The Tick can?” I ask. “By himself. Not you two working together?”

Phil doesn’t answer.

It was both of them. “Good to know, but it doesn’t do me any good.” I slap Penny heartily on the back. “You’re up.”

“You hit me that hard again, and I’ll break your arm.”

“Don’t act like a sissy,” I laugh. “You’re the toughest one on the bridge.” I point down the ship’s axis. “I want you to try and ram that ship.”

“But—”

Phil glares at me. “We talked about this.”

“We’re not trying to hit it. We just want it to look that way. Penny, try and ram that bastard, and keep at it until you’ve decelerated us to zero speed with respect to Iapetus.”

“What?” Tarlow shrieks. “We’re giving up?”

I shake my head. “Planning for the next phase.”

“By giving up?” he reiterates. “You’re going to let them shoot us out of the sky?”

“We don’t have a choice in that, Tarlow. They’re going to catch us. They’re going to shoot us. There’s nothing I can do except delay them. I choose to spend our efforts on the next phase.”

Phil tells us, “Those three ships are pegging the dial at fifteen g’s, just like the ones that first attacked us.”

“Are you sure the drive array is toast?” asks Brice. “What are the odds if we chance a bubble jump?”

“One-hundred-percent we’ll die,” answers Phil.

I turn to Brice. “We’ve been through worse.”

He laughs again.

“Comm the squads up front. I want them to load up with as much H and C and ammo as they can carry. I want them all as close as possible to the backside of the grav lens, strapped in tight. Hopefully, when the shooting starts, our friends will aim for our drive array or reactor.”

“Yes, sir.” He knows I have a plan.

“Tarlow, you go, too.” I glance at Penny and Phil. “You two as well, as soon as we’re down to zero speed. I want all power shut down back here. Leave the grav lens powered up and the defensive field around the platoon compartment maxed.” I look at Jablonsky. He’s already looking at me with a frown, awaiting his instructions. He’s guessed what’s coming. “You stay back here with me, just in case they get talkative once they see we’re giving up.”

Jablonsky bravely accepts my orders.

Scanning across their faces, I tell them, “I think they’ll shred our drive array. The front half of the ship will survive.” I’m betting on it. “Once the carnage back here is done, there’s no reason for them to hang around. They’ll go back to base. After that, we’ll wait a day or so, and then we’ll say goodbye to the Rusty Turd and use suit power to grav down to the surface of Iapetus. We’ll go commando on these bastards and make them pay.” I glance toward Phil. “The Tick says they’re human, which means their ships have the life support we need if we steal a few. Now, everybody go.”

Penny and Phil coordinate between themselves, and our ship’s inertial bubble strains as they run their first ramming maneuver.

Tarlow needs no convincing to go forward, he’s out of his chair and wobbling across the bridge in seconds.

Brice has a wide hero streak in him. Our discussion on the matter turns heated through a second ramming attempt. In the end, it’s his duty to keeping platoon members alive that convinces him to go forward. He has experience on a trip through space with only suit grav to keep you moving. He needs to stay in the game and to lead the others in case I don’t make it.

Jablonsky works a steady rhythm on the comms, hailing the other ships, shifting frequencies, and trying again.

Over a private comm, Penny tells me, “I’m not leaving you up here to go down with the ship, Captain Ahab.”

I laugh.

She doesn’t know about my irrational belief in immortality in war, and I know trying to explain it to her will only serve to expose the folly of the concept. “I’ll be fine.”

Penny hammers hard on the drive array for another ramming attempt.

I struggle to take over Tarlow’s abandoned seat to keep from falling over in the rough grav.

“Sorry,” Phil apologizes.

They really are trying to hit that other ship.

“Did you get close?” I ask.

Penny shakes her head.

“How’s our speed?” I’m trying to stay calm. “Will we be able to shed it all before those other ships arrive?”

“Yes,” Phil answers.

“Leave when they get close,” I order Phil. “Make sure you have enough time to make it all the way forward.”

Phil ignores my order.

I don’t need to be a mind reader to know he’s not going anywhere either. “Why?”

He rolls his eyes. “I can keep the railgun slugs from hitting the bridge. I’ll make sure they impact where you want them to.”

“You seem awfully confident when you say that.” I don’t believe him.

Phil snorts and turns his attention back to his console. “I can be as confident as you can be.”

Touché.

We attempt twice more to ram, and then Penny announces that we are at a dead standstill, at least in the reference frame of Iapetus.

“The three ships are taking up positions around us,” Phil announces. “Not firing.”

If they were shooting, I think I’d already know it, but I keep that to myself.

“All static now,” Phil relays.

Except for the ship on the other side of the lens from me, I can sense the ghostly grav fields from the other ships, too.

“What now?” asks Penny.

Jablonsky turns away from his panel, his face alive with excitement. “They’re hailing us in English with a UK accent.

“Acknowledge,” I tell him.

Jablonsky nods to me. He already has. “They’re telling us to follow them back to Iapetus. One of their ships will lead, the other three will hang behind. They’ll set the speed and the course. If we deviate, they’ll destroy us.”

“Penny,” I order. “Do as they say.”

I turn to Jablonsky. “Find out who they are.”

He talks with them for a moment longer and then passes the answer to me. “We’re to do as we’re told. Once we land on Iapetus, they want us to leave our weapons on board and exit the ship.”

Chapter 23

Everyone is quiet.

Like me, imagining a dozen scenarios that might play out when we set down on Iapetus’s surface, fantasizing OK Corral shootouts that leave all my people standing amidst a field of enemy corpses. I think of the warehouse prison back on the Potato and how inescapable it was for those inside until my platoon came along to retrieve their helmets. What will my new prison be like? Will my people be tortured or summarily executed?

And what instructions do I give them?

Save yourself?

Tell all you know?

Go down fighting?

Risk everything to steal some of these faster, smaller ships?

And then what?

We’re skimming the moon’s black surface, maybe a thousand feet up. Iapetus has no atmosphere to speak of. Its terrain is rugged and pocked with craters from ancient asteroid strikes. In front of us, looming larger and impossibly giant is the mountain range we were scanning from orbit when we were attacked.

“If we’re going back to the damn mountains,” asks Jablonsky, “why did they bring us down so far away?”

“Deception,” I guess. “In case anyone or anything is watching from afar. Maybe they’re hoping to conceal the location of their base.”

“Stupid,” he mutters.

“Phil,” I ask, “can you and the Tick see what’s ahead?”

He nods. “It doesn’t make sense to me.” He points at a cliff face on the mountain that seems to have been sheared in two. “Just to the left of that canyon about halfway up the cliff.”

I see it, too, yet I also don’t know what to make of it. It’s a dull grav field of some sort, rectangular and enormous, fifty meters tall, a few hundred wide.

“I count at least a dozen,” he tells me.

I shake my head and squint.

“Only that one is active. Others are burning at a much lower intensity behind closed doors. I think it’s a hangar. There are underground structures all through that mountain.”

“Are you saying it’s bigger than the base at the Potato?” I ask.

“As big as a city,” answers Phil.

“Humans, Trogs, or Grays?” I ask.

“Hard to tell,” he answers. “There’s a lot of inexplicable interference. We don’t sense any Grays.”

I hope that’s good news.

The ship ahead of us alters course toward the peculiar rectangular hangar entrance, and we start to gain altitude. We have thousands of feet to climb to reach our apparent destination.

Penny turns to me. “We’re going inside when we get there?”

I nod. I don’t have any ideas to get us out of this predicament.

Silence settles back over us.

Kilometers slide past below.

The rocky cliff face grows to dominate all we can see, black except for the growing rectangle of blue.

The ship in front of us levels out and adjusts its speed.

We do the same.

As we close the distance, I stare through my small viewport. The hangar entrance is covered with a grav field shimmering dull blue and translucent, but distorted. It’s like looking through the surface of a wavy pool. I think I see rows of ships inside a brightly lit space larger than several football fields. Figures appear to move among the vessels, but the movement could be an illusion of the wavy vertical surface.

When the ship in front of us nears the barrier, it slows to a crawl, and as its nose encounters the rippling blue, its grav drive notches up to push through. It takes only seconds.

Penny follows and does the same, slightly increasing power to the drive array to pass through the barrier.

In moments, we’re inside a hangar that runs deeper into the mountain than I had guessed. Several dozen ships of designs I’ve never seen are in rows, some abuzz with mechanics—human mechanics. None of them are wearing spacesuits, though they all appear to have emergency decompression kits attached to their belts.

There’s atmosphere inside the hangar, held there by the shimmering grav field.

What the hell?

I haven’t heard a peep about this kind of technology existing anywhere except in old sci-fi vids.

“What is this place?” mutters Penny.

We’re guided to an empty area surrounded by squads of orange-suited soldiers with weapons at the ready. They’re not a danger to us inside the Rusty Turd, but the other four ships are still hovering nearby, their guns trained on us.

Penny sets the Turd down in the indicated spot and reluctantly powers down our systems.

Our instructions are conveyed to Jablonsky.

He turns and looks at us, worry stretching his face. “They want us to come out one at a time. No weapons.”

That’s not unexpected. I open a comm to the crew. “I’ll go out first. The rest of you, follow their instructions. Brice, you exit last.” I can depend on him to make sure no one screws around and does something stupid. We’ll all be prisoners soon enough, but we’ll have to find a smart way to turn the situation back to our advantage.

That will have to come later, not now.

Chapter 24

A group of a dozen soldiers stands ten meters away. All with helmets, defensive grav fields glowing bright, and railguns in their hands, not aimed at me, but pointing in the general direction of the Turd.

Despite their ships and miraculous grav tech, they look like us. I try to take some comfort in that.

With an assault door pushed all the way open, I stand in the doorway, hands raised.

One of the soldiers steps forward and waves me to proceed.

I hop out, floating on the light-g down to the deck.

The soldier points at Penny, who is in the doorway behind me, and he raises a hand to her. She needs to wait until summoned.

I comm across the channels, trying to establish a connection with my captors. Nothing comes back but static, leaving me only hand motions for communication.

I don’t talk to anyone on my ship. We decided before we landed to keep the comm links silent as they might be monitored. Unlike our captors, our comm links aren’t encrypted.

Once I’m close enough to the soldier giving the instructions, I’m ordered to stop. Four of my silent captors surround me, two in front, and two in back. They lead me away from my ship.

I look over my shoulder as I cross the hangar and hope I didn’t make a huge mistake in surrendering.

Penny is walking away from the ship to meet up with her own set of handlers. Phil is standing in the doorway with his Gray by his side. Nobody seems to react any more or less aggressively. Maybe that’s a good thing.

My guards lead me past a pair of parked spacecraft similar to the ones that attacked my ship. I take the opportunity to scrutinize both with my eyes and my grav sense, trying to discern the shape of every piece of mass wrapped inside the ship’s thick metal skin.

Unlike my Arizona-class jalopy, these ships weren’t thrown together in a rush. They’re sleek and tough. Someone had the time to build them the right way. Both are black—flat black. The builders wanted to keep them hidden from human eyes scanning the heavens, not just Grays looking for traces of grav.

I have difficulty making out the internal systems, though I’m sure Phil will see every obscured detail when they bring him this way.

I do see seats for a pilot and copilot, but no room to get up and walk around. It confirms my suspicion that these are designed as space-based versions of the old terrestrial fighter planes. They weren’t built for traveling deep space.

I sense tanks, presumably for hydrogen stores. The fusion reactor sits in the rough center of the craft, and the main drive array takes up the back half. Like the Rusty Turd, the hull is embedded stern-to-tail with grav plates in various sizes and shapes. The most notable feature is the railgun. The ship seems to have been built around it, with the railgun running right up through the long axis, stretching from the reactor all the way out through the ship’s nose. A pair of magazines is stacked full of slugs, each the size of a bowling pin. Plenty big to rip a hole right through my ship.

I’m led into an airlock which doesn’t require cycling since the atmosphere in the hanger matches that of the underground complex.

Once through the airlock, we stop in an anteroom and my helmet and gloves are removed. A bag is placed over my head, blinding me—at least blinding my visual sense. I can still see the men around me in the room, as well as the wide hall I’m led into.

We walk in silence for nearly half a mile, making turns through broad and narrow halls, passing rooms and what appear to be factory and barrack facilities, store rooms, cafeterias, apartment blocks, everything one might expect to find in a city buried in the ground.

Several times we ride lifts to take us up or down. We’re in Iapetus’s equatorial mountain range, so I suppose there’s no practical limit to how far up or down the layers of this city are stacked.

Eventually, I’m taken into a room and deposited in a chair with my back to the door. The bag is removed from my head, and my captors leave, locking the door behind.

I’m alone, nothing else in the room but a nondescript table and a few empty chairs. A camera is mounted up in one corner, pointed down at me.

Through the walls around me, I sense I’m in a row of cells just like the one I’m in, only for every interrogation room, there sits one next door for observers with their computers and recording equipment. I can make out the level below me, and it seems to be a holding facility with metal bars—a jail. Some people are down there, but not many. Above, rows of desks are lined up in a large room with dozens of people moving about or working. I can’t sense much past that—the thick floors and ceilings make it difficult to extend the range of what I can extrapolate by grav sense alone.

I figure I’m in a police station or the office of the underground city’s intelligence agency. Whichever. And it makes sense, any place this size would have thousands and thousands of residents, hence a need for an organization for keeping the peace.

I wait in silence, expecting the rooms nearby to be filled with others from my ship—Penny, Phil, his Gray, and Brice. Lenox will be along, as will my platoon’s draftees, whose only sin was their random attachment to my company by the SDF administrators back on earth before being shipped out.

None of them shows.

In fact, the interrogation floor on which I sit is mostly deserted, though I do sense people in the room next door. I wonder what they’re hoping to see.

I wait.

Boredom sets in.

I scan everything around me again, and again.

I try to make a game of picking out individuals on the floors both above and below. I’ve never tried before to identify another person from their grav signature alone, but I have time. My captors seem to be in no hurry to move this along.

Hours pass.

Perhaps my captors have forgotten about me? The presence of the bodies in the room next door is a reminder they haven’t.

Finally, the door behind me opens.

I don’t turn to look.

Chapter 25

A man and a woman walk around to the other side of the table. Both are older. His hair is mostly white. Hers is silver with streaks of black. Both wear at least sixty years of wrinkles and sag in their skin.

Wordlessly, without any animosity I can sense, they each scoot out a chair and sit down across from me. The man reaches a hand across the table to shake. “Major Kane, I’m Dr. Spitz. This is Dr. Gustafson.”

“Am I ill?” I ask, keeping my hand to myself.

“I’m a physicist,” says Spitz. “She’s an engineer.”

“Aerospace engineer,” she corrects. “We were both on staff at JPL before…”

Before the siege she means. “JPL? I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know what it is.”

They share the smile of an inside joke. “Jet Propulsion Lab,” answers Spitz. “Before the siege we were instrumental in exploring the solar system.”

“You were the ones who dropped the ball by not seeing the Grays coming?” It’s an unfair jab, but I’m not trying to make friends. If they’re even telling the truth about who they are. Who they were.

“The Grays didn’t come from our solar system.”

“They didn’t show up here by accident,” I argue. “They had to have scouted our system. ‘Not just passing through. Must have been some sign they were coming long before they arrived.”

Gustafson bristles but says nothing.

“You may be right about that,” admits Spitz.

I decide I want to push my pointless advantage because I feel powerless. A hundred insults come to mind but they back up so quickly in trying to get out all I manage to communicate is a shake of my head. “I’ve been a slave my whole life.”

Spitz short-circuits my nascent rant with, “You’re not one now.”

“Yeah, I’m a prisoner.”

“You’re our guest.”

I decide that despite looking like a nice old man, Spitz must be as contrary as Blair.

Gustafson pushes a few strands of hair behind her ear, then takes a turn at me. “You have a loyal platoon.”

I decide maybe Spitz is honest, but Gustafson, no. I poke a finger in spite right at her friendly old eyes. “Are you torturing them? Are you beating the truth out of them?”

“What truth?” asks Spitz.

I clamp my mouth shut. I’m not about to give them anything.

Gustafson is shaking her head, more disappointed than insulted. “Torture isn’t something we condone. We’ll not foster the vile aspects of human nature that would make such behavior possible.”

“Not humans,” Spitz clarifies as he glances over at her. “With Grays and Trogs?” He shrugs.

“You tortured Nick?” It’s an accusation, not a question. Of course, it completely sidesteps my hypocrisy for doing what I did to Nick the Tick’s Gray comrades less than a week ago.

“Who’s Nick?” asks Spitz.

“The Gray.”

Gustafson informs me, “Keeping a Gray as a pet is a risky choice.”

I’m growing impatient with this cryptic fencing. “Why did you attack my ship? Why did you take us prisoner? What is this place, and who the hell are you? And don’t tell me JPL scientists because that doesn’t tell me anything.”

Spitz leans forward to put him in sincere buddy range. “I’ll answer your questions in a minute. First, there’s something I’m curious about.”

I respond to his pause with a deadpan gaze.

“Was your father named Billy Kane?”

I’m surprised by the unexpected tack. It’s all I can do to keep a passive face and quiet mouth. This is obviously an interrogation trick to prime the pump so my words will flow more easily.

Then I realize I’ve already been blabbering. They’ve already primed the pump.

“The birthday would be right.” Spitz looks down at a thin, flat d-pad with a screen nearly as big as the one on my salvaged computer back home. “You were born about the time Billy Kane’s son would have been born.”

I don’t respond.

Spitz tells me a birthdate.

Indeed, it’s mine. I start to suspect Blair has a hand in whatever mess this is I’m stuck in. This has to be a Free Army base, and Blair must have forwarded my SDF record so they’d have it when I arrived. Unfortunately, the puzzle pieces for my burgeoning Blair-plot-theory fall apart nearly as fast as I can jigger them into place.

Spitz looks at my eyes and my face, analyzing the details, developing his previous question into unapologetic certainty. “I knew your father.”

“Not likely.” I top off my counter-certainty with a harsh laugh to make it clear he’s wrong. “Maybe all of you JPL scientists worked night jobs at the molybdenum factory up north of Leadville. Doubtful. That’s where he was working when the cave-in killed him.”

“No.” Spitz doesn’t say it like he’s making an argument. He’s speaking like a grandpa correcting a grade-schooler. “Billy Kane was a first sergeant and was part of earth’s expeditionary force sent to the moon to combat the Grays at the beginning of the siege.”

I shake my head and decide it’s time to spout the official party line, mostly because I don’t know how else to respond. “Everybody knows that’s a lie people tell each other to feel some sense of human pride. The MSS says no such attack ever took place. After an unexpected meteor shower killed millions and devastated our planet, our brothers from space, the Grays, arrived to lend us a hand to lead us to enlightenment. No siege occurred. No war was fought. We serve the Grays to repay them for their generosity.”

Pure MSS propaganda shit.

Spitz’s mouth hangs agape.

Gustafson laughs. “Spitz, I think you guessed wrong on this one.” She turns and glares at me before glancing at her d-pad and reading something there.

Spitz shakes his head slowly before settling his gaze on me again. “I can see your father in you. You look a lot like him.”

I sigh and look around the room to emphasize my boredom with the charade. “Can we get to the point of all this?”

“Your father didn’t die in a mine in the mountains.” Spitz straightens himself up in his chair. “I was on the project responsible for the design of the rockets that took your father and thousands of brave men just like him to the moon. I met Sergeant Kane during a training session for his unit. I was one of the experts called in to brief the men on the assault vehicle’s capabilities. As unlikely as it was, we became friends, and after I returned to California, he and I kept in touch. We met a handful of times during his training, mostly after I was assigned to supervise the vehicle preparation at the secret launch site at the molybdenum mine where you believe your father died. He even invited me down to Denver once to have dinner with him and his wife, your mother. Of course, because of the secrecy around the project, I had to lie to her and tell her I worked at the mine with your father.”

“You met my mother,” I scoff. “This just gets better.”

Spitz puts a hand out in front of his belly. “You were in there. She said you couldn’t sit still, you were too anxious to come out.”

That stops me cold. My mother told me dozens of times when I was a kid how anxious I was to always get on to the next thing. She said I was that way when she was pregnant, eager to get out, always squirming, never letting her get a full night’s sleep.

“Dark brown hair.” Spitz snips a pair of fingers over his ears. “She liked to wear it short. Boyish, but pretty on her. She had the most striking blue eyes, and a smile that would melt your heart.”

I’m dumbstruck. How can he know so much about me, about my mother?

“Your father didn’t work in that mine,” Spitz tells me with confidence. “Despite what the apocryphal stories of our moon assault tell us, not all of the ships were destroyed on the way. Your father’s assault craft was one of the few to touch down on the lunar surface.” Spitz’s face turns sad. The emotion leaks through. “They didn’t succeed in destroying the Gray ship, but they fought humanity’s first battle on another world, our first war with an alien species. Your father died a hero, Dylan Kane. You should know that.”

Reeling from the story, feeling like it could be true, wanting it to be true, I ask, “What do you want from me?”

“This ship of yours,” says Spitz, “what do you call her, the Rusty Turd?”

Frustration!

Either Spitz and Gustafson are being truthful, or they are ridiculously good at interrogating rubes like me. “The name is a joke. The ship is a royal piece of shit, but it is effective.”

“I know.”

Gustafson laughs, but this time it seems she’s laughing at Spitz.

He turns to her and puts a hand on her wrist and pats. “I know. I know now.” He looks at me. “You rammed those Trog cruisers in what the MSS is calling the Arizona Massacre?”

“Fuck the MSS.”

“You took out three?”

I nod, and figure, why not fluff my cap with all my feathers? “Two more out in the asteroid belt, though I wasn’t onboard for one, and with the other, we destroyed it without using the ship.”

Spitz and Gustafson exchange a surprised look. They didn’t know that.

I wonder if I’ve just been tricked into giving away something they were seeking.

“Five?” Spitz is shaking his head. “Incredible.”

It’s time to squeeze them for a real answer before their faux admiration wears off. “Why am I here? What is going on?”

Both turn somber.

Best to be direct, I guess. “We killed two of your pilots in that dogfight today.” Then I figure I better throw in the truth of the matter—the violence was their fault. “After you fired your guided missiles, came close to destroying my ship, and then sent those fighters after us.”

“Good people, those two who were killed.” Spitz glances at Gustafson again. “Nobody’s happy about what happened. I guess all I can say is we’re at war. We should be thankful no more were killed. It’s a good thing you surrendered when you did.”

“All is forgiven?” I don’t believe it.

Gustafson is looking back at her d-pad again and doesn’t look up when she says, “Probably not the right choice of words.”

“No,” agrees Spitz. “Still, there’ll be no repercussions if that’s what worries you.”

I raise my hands and wave at the interrogation room. “What is this then? Why am I here talking to you two about nothing important?”

Spitz looks disappointed.

Maybe that choice of words wasn’t the best, either.

Gustafson reads something else off her d-pad, turns a pair of hard eyes at me and says, “We’re asking you to join us.”

Chapter 26

Join?

I sit up straight in my chair. It’s time to take a real interest in the conversation. “You understand my apprehension here. First, you attack my ship. You capture my crew. You separate us and march me into the bowels of a massive military base buried in a mountain, a place so secret we only stumbled upon it accidentally. You’re obviously human. You possess military tech the likes of which I didn’t know existed, and there don’t seem to be any Grays or Trogs around. Is this the Free Army headquarters?”

Gustafson and Spitz both laugh, and Gustafson tells me, “Good heavens, no.”

“Who are you then?”

“We don’t have an official name,” explains Spitz. “I suppose we’re just humanity.”

“A better descriptor,” suggests Gustafson, “might be ‘humanity’s hope.’”

“Who’s in charge?” I ask, looking at Spitz. “You?” I turn to Gustafson. “You?”

Both shake their heads.

Spitz says, “Secretary General Kimura is our elected leader.”

“Secretary General?” I ask. “The UN, when there still was one, had a Secretary General. Is this the UN?”

Spitz shrugs. “Is that a bad thing?”

It’s my turn to shrug. “I don’t understand any of this. Is this a UN operation?”

“No.” Spitz waves his hands at the walls. “Originally, this was a mining colony. Back then it was a tiny fraction of today’s size. As for the people here, well, you already know that Dr. Gustafson and I were JPL scientists.”

The longer I listen, the more certain I am that Gustafson is hiding the most important information about who she is, but I don’t say that.

Spitz says, “In the years after the siege, when we saw how the Grays were looting our planet and turning us into an uneducated slave species, we organized into a movement.”

“A revolutionary movement?” I ask, “Like the Free Army but not the Free Army?”

“No, our goal wasn’t to fight the Grays,” says Spitz, “not unless we could stumble upon a technological breakthrough that would give us such an advantage over them we could win without sacrificing most human lives to do it. That’s our long-term goal, I suppose, to free all of humanity.” Spitz shakes his head as though the years in pursuit of that goal have worn him out. “We focus our efforts on exploring other star systems far from here where we can start anew.”

“Most of our research and manufacturing efforts,” adds Gustafson, “are spent on designing and building ships to find these places and to take us there.”

“Not those big Gray cruisers,” I figure.

Spitz answers with a shake of his head. “Ships that size would be impossible to hide from the Grays. The last thing we want is to alert them to our presence here or to give away the location of the system we’re fleeing to.”

“The system we’re fleeing to?” I quote. “Are you saying you found a planet where we can live, and you’re actively colonizing it?”

Both Spitz and Gustafson nod like they’ve just given me the best birthday gift ever.

Can this be true?

“Where?” I ask.

Spitz turns deadly serious. “The galaxy is an immense place. Telling you we have a colony in another star system isn’t giving you any information that will endanger us. If you were MSS, for instance, that bit of information by itself is nearly useless. It’s the location that makes it valuable.”

“You think I’m MSS?”

“We’re careful,” says Gustafson.

I can understand that. “So the big plan is?”

“We reestablish humanity somewhere else,” answers Gustafson. “Stay quiet. Keep our heads low until we know who’s in the neighborhood, until we can defend ourselves from the local bullies.”

“And eventually come back here and rescue our people,” finishes Spitz.

“And all the while,” I conclude, “the rest of humanity, at least the ones who survive this war, will live as slaves to either our Grays or the Trogs’ Grays. For what, years? Decades? Centuries?” I’m turning judgmental, but I make no attempt to rein it in. “By running away, how many billions do you condemn?”

“By staying,” Gustafson calmly argues, “all of humanity is condemned to bondage forever, or it all dies in a war so terrible nothing survives. Tell me, saving some and rebuilding elsewhere, is that better or worse?”

“We’re not unanimous on this point,” Spitz tells me. “However, our policy, our priority, is to colonize.”

“Why do want me?” I ask.

“Maybe the equation has changed,” says Spitz.

Chapter 27

Gustafson glares at Spitz. “That’s his opinion. It’s not shared widely here.”

Shaking his head, Spitz cuts in, “Many of us—”

“A minority,” Gustafson emphasizes.

“—believe we can help earth despite our primary mission. I believe a man like you, using your ship as the weapon it can be, can rally earth’s people to win the war against the Trogs and then defeat the Grays in a revolution.”

Me? A hero?

I laugh.

Gustafson chortles. “Dr. Spitz, one unexpectedly successful weapons system may be good for destroying Trog cruisers, however, the main problem remains. The Grays and the North Koreans control the railgun emplacements on the moon, and they command the remaining battle stations orbiting the earth. All of those guns can be turned on earth in case of revolt. No revolution stands a chance. We’ve had this discussion a million times. Unless you find a way to neutralize those orbital gun platforms and by some magic of simultaneity take out everything on the moon, no revolution can succeed. It can’t even start. Nobody wants to throw their lives away on nothing.”

“They’ll do it for hope.” Spitz smiles. He’s a dreamer. “If people have someone to believe in, if they have victory to believe in, they’ll turn on their masters. Despite the fact the Grays control the North Koreans and the North Koreans are in command of every significant military installation, most of the SDF soldiers—manning those guns, maintaining the bases, repairing the equipment, marching their drills, wearing orange spacesuits—are not North Koreans. They’re people just like Mr. Kane here, and they hate that they’ve been made into slaves. They’ll take up arms against their masters. That’s the natural human response to slavery.”

Both Gustafson and I are left momentarily wordless in the afterglow of Spitz’s lofty appraisal of humanity.

I find my voice first. “You seem to know a whole lot about what goes on back on earth, being out here for three decades.”

“Well not three decades, yet,” corrects Spitz. “But yes, we do know a lot of what goes on. We keep in touch, you might say.”

“Then you’re aware of what the propaganda videos are saying about me,” I tell him, glancing at Gustafson to gauge her reaction as well. “The Arizona Massacre? The MSS claims I’m a spy for the Trogs. Hell, they’re blaming every loss in the war on me.”

Spitz laughs. “Utterly ridiculous.”

“People believe that shit,” I argue.

“Some do,” he agrees. “Some don’t. Most, who knows? They stopped listening to the lies so long ago they don’t care. They just apathetically go about their business, trying to keep their children fed.”

“Not the Free Army,” I tell him. “The ones who don’t believe I’m a Trog spy think I’m an SDF double-agent because I didn’t murder Lieutenant Holt when I had the chance.”

“You have to know that doesn’t make any sense at all,” says Spitz. “It’s not logically consistent.”

“It doesn’t have to be.” I sigh loudly. “People don’t make decisions with their heads. They make them in their hearts, and then apply constructed rationale later. You people have PhDs. You should know this kind of stuff.”

“You underestimate yourself,” Spitz tells me, “and you underestimate everyone else. People are better than you think they are.”

I shake my head.

“If you didn’t agree with me, why’d you put on an orange suit in the first place? Why’d you join the SDF? Why’d you destroy five Trog cruisers at great personal risk, when retreating to a safe orbit over Pyongyang would have been the easiest path to take, the safest?”

I don’t know how to respond.

“Don’t listen to any of that,” says Gustafson. “You have your answer already. What’s the point of rejoining the Free Army if half of them hate you and the other half suspect the stories might be true? Our military isn’t what it should be. We develop weapons, yet we’ve never built the kind of army or navy we should have. All of our manpower has been dedicated to building colony ships and transports. Our people, when they can, take the opportunity to settle our new homes.”

New homes? More than one?

I don’t comment on the slip of the tongue.

“We need good military people,” continues Gustafson. “Convince your crew to go out with the next colony ship. You’ll take your ship along, of course.”

My bitterness over the attack bubbles up. “My damaged ship that can’t make light speed?”

Gustafson waves a hand. “It’s being repaired right now. Better than before.”

“It’ll perform as it was designed,” says Spitz, “Not as it was shoddily built.”

“Out on a colony world,” says Gustafson, “humanity has a chance. Go there, fight if it becomes necessary, if we encounter a hostile race. At least out there, we have a chance. Here, in this system, you’re wasting your life.”

Chapter 28

Call it intuition.

Call it something like me spending too much time with Phil and picking up a smidgen of his talent by osmosis.

All I know for sure is something’s not right. “Here’s my whole problem.” I rudely wag a finger at Gustafson. “She’s a liar.” I glare at Spitz. “You’re telling me stories with too many holes.”

Spitz seems surprised, Gustafson hesitates before she feigns offense, and any doubts I have about her honesty disappear.

I tell Spitz, “She’s a bug-head.”

Gustafson pretends disinterest.

Now that the words are out on the table and nobody denies them, their veracity stretches into full-blown truth. “I think she’s an early implant, but at her age, it was probably implanted when she was around thirty, maybe thirty-five. She’s had a long time to assimilate, and she’s put a lot of practice into hiding it. People like me,” I tap a finger against my temple, “especially people like Phil, we were practically born with bugs in our heads. They’re as much a part of us as hands and eyes. This clumsy shit Gustafson is doing might fool you, Spitz, but it doesn’t fool me.”

“Fool me?” Spitz chuckles. “I know what she is.”

“I’m enhanced,” Gustafson corrects.

I’m thrown off balance. I was all ready to grill Gustafson. I didn’t expect such a quick confession.

Nodding, like a happy teacher, Gustafson says, “I received an implant early on, right after the Grays took control of earth. Yes, I’ve gone to great lengths to learn how to hide it from people like you. It’s necessary for my job. And as you’ve likely guessed, I’m no engineer. I do hold a PhD in psychology. Before the siege, I worked for the FBI, helping them understand terrorist psyches so we could better fight them. After the siege, I was given a choice to leave the FBI or accept an implant so I could assist them in tracking down domestic insurgents as the department slowly morphed into an MSS tool. I took the bug, but I didn’t stay on.”

“Obviously,” chuckles Spitz.

“Here on Iapetus,” she explains, “I’m in charge of what you might think of as the CIA and FBI rolled into one. Part of my agency’s responsibilities are vetting the people we recruit from earth to either work here or to become colonists. I don’t think I’m standing too tall on my laurels to tell you we do a good job of ferreting out liars, spies, and potential saboteurs. We have a system that works well. We’ve had no major failures in the twenty-something years I’ve been in this role.”

Gustafson leans across the table. Her voice carries a hint of a threat. “One thing I’ve learned is that bug-heads can be hard cases to crack.” She leans back and looks at me with what I think is admiration. “You, in particular, Mr. Kane, are a challenge.” She touches her head for emphasis. “You’ve built a psychological wall we can’t penetrate. You could be hiding anything.”

“That’s what we’ve been doing here?” It’s not a question, just a preface to an accusation. I look at the wall behind which I sense the presence of people sitting in chairs eyeing computer monitors. “You have three bug-heads over there trying to root around in my mind while you’re in here distracting me with your bullshit.”

“Yes,” she admits, “that’s right. They’ve been analyzing you the whole time we’ve been talking.”

“And you have, too,” I tell her, “While I talk to Dr. Friendly here and he prods me for responses about my parents, you’ve been getting updates on your d-pad all along.”

She nods.

I smile viciously, “You’re good at it, I’ll give you that.”

“I’ve been at it awhile,” she tells me proudly.

“So,” I decide it’s time to find out what the truth behind all these layers of charades really is, “what have you decided about me? What’s going on here?”

Spitz leans forward, “We’ve been hiding nothing. We’ve been honest with you.”

“As I said,” starts Gustafson, “you could be hiding anything in that mind of yours. We had to see for ourselves if we could find that ‘anything.’”

“And you couldn’t?”

Gustafson shakes her head.

“Then why trust me?” I ask.

“It’s not you who we trust,” Gustafson tells me. “It’s Phil.”

I laugh.

“Phil is unique.”

I’m still laughing as I agree.

Gustafson doesn’t see the humor in it. “Phil might be the most talented bug-head I’ve ever come across. He and the implant have melded to a degree I’ve never seen. He seems completely comfortable binding telepathically to your Gray. What’s more, he can telepathically link with a human to any degree the human can. You see, we’re the weak link when it comes to Phil’s telepathic abilities, he can do so much more than any of us.”

“Okay.” I knew Phil was talented. Perhaps our long, difficult relationship blinded me to just how much so. “More than anything, Phil and Penny are the reasons we were able to destroy five Trog cruisers.”

“Interesting,” responds Gustafson. “Phil and Penny say pretty much the same thing about you.”

“I did my part.” I slump in my chair and eye the pair across the table. I’m feeling outfoxed, and I don’t like it. “So this telepathic linking, you have people who can link with Phil a lot more than I can?”

“By way of analogy,” answers Gustafson, “if you were to recognize Grays as the premier experts at telepathy and you were to rank them on a scale of one to ten, nearly all Grays would rank above seven. The young ones and the dullards would be the sevens. Most others would be in the eight or nine range, and some would rank at ten. Trogs with an implant—and all we’ve encountered so far have implants—come in around five and run up through seven, with some going as high as eight. At least from what we’ve been able to determine. The best person I have on staff—Elizabeth—ranks around five, maybe six on a good day. A handful of us on the station rank above four. Most of my staff comes in at three, though we have plenty of rookies at two who show promise. Dr. Spitz here, along with most humans, aren’t even on the scale.”

“Where does Phil rank?” The suspense is sarcastically killing me.

“Easily seven.” Gustafson looks jealous but quickly hides it. “He could be eight. More testing would tell us for sure.”

As good as the average Gray.

Good for Phil.

I’m curious. “You know what I’m going to ask.”

Spitz blurts out a laugh. “One doesn’t have to be telepathic to know that you want to know where you fall on the scale.”

Gustafson looks at me, silently coaxing me for a guess.

“Two?” I shrug. “Two and a half? I don’t even know what the criteria are.”

“Phil has memories of you when you’re not actively thinking about using your implant, and you do some things that suggest a six.” Gustafson sighs. “Unfortunately, you spend so much energy building your mental blocks to keep the Grays out of your mind you stunt yourself. He says there are more elegant ways to hide your secrets from other telepaths, yet you’ve never been open to any suggestions.”

I find myself on the defensive about Phil’s assessment.

I scan my memories for any cryptic conversations Phil and I might have had through the years where he tried to tutor me into a better method of controlling my mental privacy. I sigh. The exercise is frustrating, it seems like half the things Phil and I ever talked about were cryptic. That’s just how things were when dealing with Phil. “So what’s my day-to-day number, then? Four?”

“Your first guess was right,” answers Gustafson, “Two, two and a half. You could work at it.”

“Yeah.” I shrug. I don’t have the first clue as to how to do that. “What else did Phil tell you?”

“Not so much to tell,” clarifies Gustafson. “Elizabeth—the six I mentioned previously, the girl on my staff—connected with Phil, and he shared much of your history with her.”

That stops me cold. “Like Phil was trying to do with the Tick, read the history of his memories. So you know all of mine and Phil’s dirty laundry?”

“Not all of it, I’m sure,” answers Gustafson. “If Elizabeth was on the same level as Phil, then maybe. Sadly, she’s only had glimpses. She’s seen some memories fully from beginning to end. For others, she had to ask questions to understand the context. It was by this process we learned Phil was a person we could trust. He held nothing back, at least that Elizabeth could see.”

“And how did I fit in?”

“Phil trusts you,” responds Gustafson, as she pushes strands of hair behind her ear again. “The psychologist in me deduced when his younger brother died, that bond transferred to you as a way for Phil to deal with the loss. I wouldn’t say he also hates you but—”

“Hate?” I can’t believe it. Or, I don’t want to. He has cause.

“Perhaps ‘hate’ is too strong a word. Phil fosters a host of unresolved grievances, the most egregious I need not mention.”

“His wife?” I make it sound like a guess, but I know.

“That’s the most obvious.” Gustafson leans back in her chair, and her fingers fidget over the screen on her d-pad. “Even Phil believes it’s the most significant of his grievances. My guess is it’s the combination of a thousand times when you didn’t treat him as an equal, when you looked down on him, or disrespected him in front of others. Those things add up in a relationship.”

“Jesus, you sound like a marriage counselor.”

Gustafson cocks her head. “A relationship is a relationship whether there’s a bond of marriage or not.”

“So despite all of this affection and animosity going on in Phil’s head, you decided you could trust me anyway?”

Gustafson nods. “Phil trusts you. He’s loyal to you. He’ll follow wherever you lead. Both of you have the same goal, though if it were entirely up to him, he’d go about it a different way.”

“Which way is that?”

“Can’t say.” Gustafson looks around at the air.

“Why?”

“Phil doesn’t seem to have that answer. Maybe it’s the reason he relies on you, because you do. You worked out a way to contact the Free Army. You set up your network of insurgents among your friends at the grav factory. All of you trained together, and those of you who lived through the Arizona Massacre mutinied just as you committed to do. On many levels, your plan succeeded. Phil’s a follower. You’re a leader.”

I laugh at that. It’s something I still feel like I’m faking my way through.

“I didn’t need a summary of Phil’s memories to tell me that,” says Gustafson. “I saw it myself. You need some experience, though. You need confidence.”

I defer to a bromide response. “Doesn’t everybody?”

Gustafson agrees.

“So your offer to go to the colonies, was that the real deal?” I ask.

Spitz nods.

“It’s as much for you as for Phil.” She catches herself and admits, “In truth, it’s for Phil. We need him. We can’t afford to lose him navigating an assault ship in a losing war. He can teach us so much, maybe show every human with the talent how to be as proficient with the implant as he is. The benefit of that for the human race would be immeasurable.”

“Phil didn’t agree to go to the colony?” I’m surprised. It sounds like the kind of thing he’d jump at.

“Like I said,” answers Gustafson. “Phil is loyal to you, and Penny, and Jill Fix and the rest of your people. He won’t abandon you to die in this war if he can do something to stop it.” Gustafson’s face turns pensive. “Maybe it’s tied to the trauma of losing his brother.”

“Or he’s just a good person,” I argue.

Gustafson apologizes. “A pitfall of my education, I’m afraid, distilling life’s choices to oversimplified reactions to childhood trauma.”

Chapter 29

Spitz walks me down a broad corridor, one of the many my guards followed when I first arrived. I have no guards now. I’m not masked. People, hundreds of them, are going about their business, some hurrying, others strolling. Some wear coveralls like they’re on their way to work or coming home. Others are dressed in casual clothes, the kind I’ve seen on earth.

“How many colonists have made the journey to the worlds you’ve discovered?” I ask.

“Worlds?” Spitz asks. “I don’t think I said anything about having more than one colony.”

“Gustafson slipped once and used the plural.”

Spitz shrugs.

“What does it hurt to answer?” I ask. “Like you said, the galaxy is a big place, with what, a hundred billion stars? Who knows how many millions or billions of habitable planets? Does it matter if I know how many contain human colonists?”

“If you choose to join us out in the colonies, we’ll tell you all you want to know. Besides, what good would the information do you? The risk of harm to us is greater if you fall into the Grays’ hands and they figure out how to extract your secrets.”

“I understand the risk, but you have to know the information would help me make my choice. I don’t want to get dropped in the new Roanoke, if you know what I mean.”

“You mean the British colony in North Carolina that disappeared?” Spitz looks at me quizzically. “Is that what you mean?”

I nod. What else could I mean?

“Do you think we’d leave a hundred people on a strange planet a few dozen light years away and ask them to fend for themselves?”

“How would I know? I just met you people today.”

Spitz laughs. “I suppose you have a point.” He stops and turns to me, putting on his most sincere expression. “I assure you, we have no intention of abandoning our colonies. We explained why we’re doing this, right? To save humanity.”

“What if things go badly here?” I ask. “What if you have no choice?”

“Fair question.” Spitz starts walking again. “I’ll tell you this much. We have multiple colonies. Just over a thousand people live in our smallest.” Spitz’s eyes twinkle. “Can you imagine, a whole world with only a thousand people there to shape it?”

I can imagine that—well, I believe I can. In truth, I probably have only storybook inklings of what life like that would be. Probably more drudgery and boredom than adventure, although adventure would always be waiting just beyond the wall.

The wall?

Would they have a wall?

So many millions of questions come to mind.

“Our largest colony,” Spitz is full of pride, “houses more people than our base here on Iapetus.”

“And I don’t know how many people are here,” I counter.

“Don’t be contrary. You have an idea of the size of this place. We have a fleet of vessels that make trading and supply runs between the worlds. It’s not a large fleet, but it exists so the colonies can support one another.”

“And act as a lifeboat in case things turn sour,” I guess.

“Exactly that,” confesses Spitz. “We’ve built and supplied countless ships for every purpose you can imagine, both commercial and military. I think you’d be surprised by our degree of success. It’s time for humanity to spread across the universe.”

“And abandon our home planet.” It slipped out on a puff of pent-up bitterness. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound harsh.”

Spitz is unfazed. “Collectively, we chose to devote our resources to saving people. Though I’ve been in favor of taking a more active role in the war here, I know if we had, we wouldn’t be where we are today on colonization. In fact, I believe if Iapetus were to come to a bad end, the colonies are self-sufficient—not individually so—but working together they can survive.”

Spitz comes to a stop, and the twinkle returns to his eyes. “No matter what horrors befell earth as a result of the Grays’ arrival thirty years ago, mankind has stepped through the threshold to a dream we’ve had since we put our first human on the moon, that of colonizing the stars, and that, Mr. Kane, ensures the survival of our species more than anything we’ll ever do while stuck on one planet. In fact, the siege, and now this war with the Trogs, underscores that fact. A race who lives on just one planet is doomed. Eventually, something will happen, whether an alien invasion, an unfortunately proximate pulsar, or even a significant asteroid impact—any of those could end in our extinction. On multiple planets, the odds of extinction turn astronomically small. I don’t know if we’ll ever have any impact on this war. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to rescue the billions who still live on earth. I do know that if they are the price humanity has to pay to guarantee its continued existence, then it’s worth it.

Chapter 30

Spitz’s words leave me cold and wanting to point a blame finger.

They shouldn’t, though.

Sacrificing the few to save the many is the essence of the choice I make every time I take my soldiers into a fight. Why should the colossal calculus of sacrificing earth’s four billion survivors to save the trillions of future humans be any different?

Because nothing is certain.

The beating hearts of the people who fight by my side are reality.

The hundreds, maybe thousands of anonymous orange suits in the Free Army—few of whom I’ve met, many who despise me—are my brothers and sisters through a bond I don’t fully understand.

Every man and woman in the SDF is a comrade, in their hearts, if not in their actions. A certainty I’ve clung to my entire life. It’s the impetus for every step I take down my mutinous path. Like Spitz, I believe they’ll aim their railguns at their oppressors when they finally know they aren’t alone.

On that day, a conflagration of freedom will burn across earth and every vacuous rock in the solar system, leaving the ashes of North Koreans, Grays, and Trogs in its wake.

That dream has been the fire in my beating heart all these years.

Can I abandon it to take the easy road out to the colonies and a future any kid on earth would salivate over?

I thought I knew when I had no real choice to make.

Dr. Spitz leads me into an airlock. When we come out the other side, I see we’re in the hangar where Penny docked the Rusty Turd. The ship reminds me of my first taste of freedom. It reminds me of the price so many of my soldiers have already paid.

I can’t run away.

I look around and spot the Turd. It’s buried in a structure of scaffolds and industrial lifts. Mechanics swarm all over it. “What are they doing?”

“Repairing,” Spitz answers. “Enhancing.”

Enhancing?

“I need my ship.” Shaking my head, I turn to face Spitz, attempting to engage him in a battle of the wills. “I don’t know what Phil is going to choose, but I can’t stay here. I have to finish scouting—”

Spitz raises his hands.

Tamping down my concerns as I look back at my ship, I tell him, “We’re planning an assault. You may not have any respect for the Free Army, and that’s okay, but they need to gather intel to make their attack successful.”

“It’ll be a week before your ship is ready,” says Spitz.

“A week?” Despite the damage I know we sustained to our drive array, I don’t believe it. The techs back on the Potato managed their repairs and minor upgrades in a few days. “You’re delaying us on purpose so you’ll have time to convince Phil to go to the colonies.”

“Some things are out of my hands,” admits Spitz.

Violent thoughts tempt me to do something stupid.

They call stupid acts stupid for a reason.

“Tell them to finish what repairs they can, and then tell them to get off my ship. We’re leaving tomorrow.” It’s a totally arbitrary date, but looking at the current semi-disassembled state of my ship, I’m guessing there’s no way it can be ready to fly in any small number of hours.”

“Impossible,” Spitz says calmly.

“Who can make it possible?”

“No one, now.” He starts walking toward the ship. “To be honest, had we just repaired the drive array, we might have had you back into space in a few days.” He glances at me to take my measure before he proceeds. “Your guess is correct. I was directed to delay you. Lucky for you and all your people, the method I chose to delay you was to enhance your ship. My apologies, but we all have to answer to someone.”

I’m trying to guess whether yelling at him will hurry things along.

“Now that the enhancements have begun, it’ll take nearly as long to put your ship back to its original state as it would to proceed to completion. So, you can yell at me if you want, you can go and meet with Dr. Gustafson and voice your complaint to her. Perhaps you may even meet with Secretary Kimura. None of that will change anything. No physically possible path exists for completing the work on your ship in less than a week.” He points. “You see, we have as many techs as possible working to get it done as quickly as possible.”

I huff as I walk, and I try to estimate the number of people at work on the Rusty Turd. A hundred? And more inside I can’t see.

Anticipating my next question, Spitz says, “Your communications man, Jablonsky, your pilot Penny, and your sergeant Brice have already left to complete your scouting mission.”

That does it.

I stop, plant my feet, and put my fists on my hips, because I know if I don’t keep them restrained, I might punch the old man, consequences be damned.

“They’re all fine. They went voluntarily.” Spitz keeps his cool and points toward the ship again. “Phil will help explain.”

I turn to see Phil emerging from the ship, and smiling as he spots me.

Awkwardly climbing out of the ship behind him is Nick.

They’re letting the Gray wander the base?

Guessing the question in my mind, Spitz nods toward Phil and his companion. “Notice something different?”

I look again. The tick is wearing a wide black collar. “And that is?”

Spitz digs in his pocket and hands me what appears to be an overly bulky wristwatch with a long strap. “Put this on. You can wear it outside your suit, right by your d-pad.”

I look at the watch. There’s no display for the time.

“Phil has one, too. If at any time, the Gray is more than one hundred meters distant from both of these actuators, the collar around his neck will detonate and send a blast of shrapnel through his skull. The explosion shouldn’t be powerful enough to harm anyone nearby as long as they aren’t too close, but afterward, there won’t be much left of the Gray’s head but wet particles and mist.”

I nod as I wrap the band around my wrist.

“On top of the proximity sensor, it contains a grav switch and a manual switch.” Spitz points to three robust buttons. “You can operate the grav switch mentally, but you know that. To trigger the manual switch, depress all three buttons. The order doesn’t matter. That way you can dispose of the Gray if it becomes necessary. I’ll have a tech connect it to your undergarment’s biosensors later today. Once that’s done, if the collar can’t receive a life signal from either Phil or yourself, the Gray dies. So don’t leave your wristband lying around if you want to keep the Gray alive.”

“You know Phil won’t kill it.” It’s not a difficult deduction to make. “I think he’s too close to it already.”

“That’s why you have the second watch.”

“And you didn’t tell Phil about my mine?”

“No,” Spitz tells me, “but he guessed. Or rather, he probably read it from Gustafson’s mind when she presented him with his wristband.” Spitz’s eyes turn flinty serious. “Phil is being allowed to keep his Gray because Gustafson believes what Phil will learn from it may lead our species to a quantum leap forward in our use of telepathy. The disagreement among our policymakers on this point is stark. Gustafson had to pull in every favor she was owed to get her way. You see, Major Kane, our dilemma is that Gray has seen not only the Free Army base on the Potato, but he’s also seen our installation. The risk we’re taking by allowing it to live is beyond measure. In effect, we’re betting everything.” Spitz grabs my arm and squeezes to emphasize his point. “Make sure it never gets close enough to another Gray to share what it knows.”

I accept the responsibility with a nod. “There’s no way I’ll put all of this at risk for the life of one Gray. You can put those worries to rest.”

Phil is within a dozen paces.

“I’ll leave you to talk with Phil.” Spitz points at the Turd. “Come over when you’re finished, and I’ll walk you through the enhancements to your ship.”

“What about my platoon?” I ask.

“All fine. They’re quartered nearby. I’ll take you to them after we finish here.”

Chapter 31

Phil hugs me. It’s apparently an awkward new ritual in our relationship, made more so by the fact I’m still wearing my orange suit.

Pulling myself out of Phil’s embrace, I notice the Gray keeping its distance. “I don’t think your new friend likes me.”

“You killed half his pod. That’s the closest analog to a family a Gray has.”

It was a bad day to be a Tick.

I keep the thought to myself. Nevertheless, the disappointed expression on Phil’s face tells me he probably intercepted it. “What’s the story with Penny, Brice—”

“Don’t worry,” Phil cuts me off. He points two fingers randomly. “These people don’t appear to be hiding anything from us. They are what they seem.”

“Penny is scouting, then? With Brice and Jablonsky?”

Phil nods. “Jablonsky will radio the reports back to Blair. When they finish, they’ll come back here to meet up with us.”

“The ship they went out on?” I ask. “Will they be in danger if they run into trouble?”

“I guess they didn’t tell you that part?”

I shake my head and silently wait for the next part.

Phil grins. “They didn’t mean to tell me, either.” He glances over at the Gray. “I know you’d prefer that we kill him. Trust me on this, Dylan. Please. I know what I’m doing. Nick and me, we’re bonding on a level you might understand if you tried. You wouldn’t believe what it’s like. Together, we’re so much stronger than alone.”

I’m apprehensive. No, suspicious is a better word.

I reach over and take hold of Phil’s wrist, putting a declarative finger on the detonator strapped there. “Will you be able to do what’s necessary if it comes to that?”

“It won’t.”

“Don’t be naïve. Anything could happen. Will you be able to exterminate the Tick if we are captured?”

“Call him by his name, okay?”

“He doesn’t have ears, Phil.”

“He understands more than you think.”

“Because you understand.”

“Even without my help. Nick. Call him that, please?

I groan and nod. “Will you be able to do what’s necessary if it comes to that?”

Phil ignores the question again. “I’m learning from him.”

Disappointed Phil won’t answer my question, I flatly ask, “How so?”

“Their history for one. How to better understand telepathic communication for another.”

I don’t try very hard to hide the derision running through my thoughts.

Phil steps away from me and shakes his head.

Crap.

I didn’t say anything, and I’ve gone too far anyway. “I’m sorry.”

Phil recovers from the unspoken rebuke. “It’s okay. No, not okay, but I understand. I’d rather know what you feel than guessing at things you hide.”

Realizing I need to be much more careful with my thoughts, I ask, “The things I hide, you can’t see those?”

“No.”

“Honestly?”

“You know I’m being honest.”

He’s right. I do. Looking for a way to change the subject off of me, I go with, “You’ve always seen through people’s words, right? You always understood what they really felt.”

Phil nods. “Always. Now, with Nick’s help, the clarity of other people’s thoughts is coming through like I thought them myself.”

I purse my lips and scratch my chin. “Do you think that’ll have an impact on your relationships with other people?”

Phil shakes his head. “Knowing a truth isn’t that different than believing one. People are who they are. Just because I see them more clearly doesn’t mean I have to feel differently about them. Just because I see past their public façades doesn’t mean I have to despise the complex, mixed up human underneath.

I don’t know how to respond to that, so I move on. “You said Penny, Brice, and Jablonsky won’t be in danger.”

Phil shakes his head. “I didn’t say that exactly.”

“Okay, you implied they’d be safer than I’m afraid they will be.”

“That’s true.” Phil has some bit of information, and he’s enjoying teasing me with keeping it hidden.

“Just tell me. If you’re reading my mind, you know how suspicious I am of these people.”

“They didn’t plan to tell me, but with Nick’s help, I picked it up from Dr. Spitz when he and Gustafson were interrogating me.”

“And the mystery is?”

“They’ve figured out stealth.”

“Stealth?” I start spinning through a thousand sea-changing scenarios. “Are you sure?”

“Spitz confirmed it after I questioned him.”

I laugh. “Was he surprised when you read it from his mind?”

A smile creeps slowly across Phil’s face. “He was speechless at first, but it was Gustafson who was the most shocked.”

“Is that when they realized how good you are?”

Phil is embarrassed. He’s not used to compliments. “Maybe I realized it then, too, though Gustafson was already drilling me about how much I was capable of.”

“Before we run off on that tangent,” I ask, “tell me about this stealth technology. Are we talking about gravity stealth?”

“Exactly.” Phil glances down at Nick. “Grays’ awareness of the universe is shaped more by their sense of gravity than their sense of vision. It’s the sense they use to resolve the existence and characteristics of distant objects. Spitz’s stealth makes their ships nearly invisible to a Gray.”

“And Grays really can’t see it?” Hard to believe.

“They can’t unless the ship is too massive. Their stealth tech can only do so much.”

I don’t think this stealth business is entirely true. We didn’t see them exactly when they captured us, but we knew they were there.

“They were attacking us,” Phil argues.

It occurs to me I didn’t say anything. “Dammit, Phil. If we’re going to talk, let’s talk. Don’t respond to my thoughts. You’re creeping me out.”

“Sorry.”

I sigh.

He explains, “We saw the ships because they were attacking, burning heavy g’s to catch us, and coming in close.”

Makes sense.

“If they go slow, and keep distant, they’re nearly impossible for a Gray to see.”

I switch back to my original concern. “The ship that Penny, Brice, and Jablonsky rode out on, it’s a stealth ship?”

“Yes, scout ships. Small and light. Fast, but not armored and not armed.”

“Because they have to keep the mass down for the stealth to work?” I ask.

Phil nods.

I point toward the Rusty Turd. “Is that what they’re installing in our ship?” I’m hoping we’re not too massive.

“No,” he answers, “Ours is too big. The grav lens is too heavy.”

Oh, well. “Let’s go see what Spitz is doing to the Rusty Turd.”

Chapter 32

We find Spitz near the aft end of the ship, standing among the drive array plates which were formerly mounted in a conical housing thirty feet across.

“Did you guys take out every plate?” I dodge heavy discs arranged in rows on the hangar deck, and at first, I think my clever line is a joke. I realize quickly it’s not.

Spitz smiles widely. “Yes.”

“Why?” It’s not an accusation. I’m curious. “Were they all damaged in the attack? Are you testing them?”

“No.” Spitz kneels down beside one.

Phil and I do the same.

He points to a scattering of small deformations on the surface. “This plate functions, yet you can see it suffered when the missile debris struck it.” Looking around at the other plates, he says, “Three don’t work at all, another half-dozen show some damage.” He stands back up. “All in all, they are functioning well. My people have already tested these. We’ll replace the damaged plates and start remounting and aligning them in the drive array tomorrow.”

“Good.” I don’t know what else to say. My eye is drawn to all the techs working inside the drive array cone, at least ten. “What are they doing if all the grav plates are already out here?”

“Fabricating new mounts.” Spitz walks toward the cone. “You see, the static mounts installed when your ship was constructed at the Arizona shipyard are prone to imperfection.” He turns to look at both Phil and I. “You may have noticed when you were flying her. Imperfect performance, maybe.”

Phil laughs.

I can’t help but laugh, also.

“With dynamic mounts, we can adjust the angle of each plate on the fly. All controlled by an onboard computer-enhanced drive system.” Spitz points at a nearby ship of a type I haven’t seen yet. It looks like it’s in a similar state of disrepair. “We’re cannibalizing that one for parts. It’ll save us time.”

“Thank you, Dr. Spitz.” I don’t know what else to say. They’re losing a ship so my crew can have a better one.

He shrugs it off. “With the dynamic cone shaping, we can optimize the shape of the gravity field for sub-light speeds. The ship will be more efficient. Better still, where it makes the most difference, we can dynamically shape the field for light speed.”

“I like what I’m hearing,” I tell Dr. Spitz. “I assume you’re not doing this just to improve the mileage.”

“Heavens, no,” he answers. “The fuel savings we’ll talk about momentarily. The primary driver for dynamic shaping is performance.”

I smile widely.

“With the drive array enhancements and the others we’re making to the ship, and with the oversized reactor already in the Rusty Turd—” Spitz grins so widely that he can’t talk through it.

“What?” I ask.

“We’ve never put a reactor this large in a vessel of this size,” he reveals. “Theoretically, your ship might pull twenty g’s of sub-light acceleration.”

I’m dumbfounded. The twelve g’s we had already was pretty spectacular.

“And faster than light?” asks Phil.

“If the reactor performs as we expect—” Spitz is reluctant to continue, but his excitement forces him to tell us his hope. “If the reactor improvements behave as expected, this ship might make 18c.”

No Trog or Gray cruiser we know of will do more than eight times the speed of light.

“Eighteen?” Phil is awed.

I am, too.

Spitz proudly nods. “Theoretically, when we’re done, this might be the fastest ship in the solar system.”

“With no requirement that we stay in the solar system.”

Neither of the two finds my joke funny.

I laugh, giddy over the ridiculous performance upgrade my ship is receiving. I nudge Phil. “We may have to give it a new name.”

“Phoenix?” he suggests.

“Trite.” I’m not enamored with it.

Phil shrugs. “We’ll think of something.” He looks over toward Dr. Spitz. “How did you figure out all this stuff so quickly? I mean, this ship was built on earth, not here.”

Spitz looks smugly at Phil. “I designed it.”

Chapter 33

I turn to Phil, too surprised to make my own guess about Spitz. “Is he lying?”

Phil shakes his head.

“Obviously, there’s a lot going on I don’t understand,” I admit.

Spitz pats my shoulder. “I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have about our contact with earth after we finish here. In short, I’ll tell you we have a network of people terra-side for coordinating our effort to recruit talent.”

Given the colonization effort, it makes sense. “And the stealth ships?” I’m making a guess. “You use those to ferry people from earth to Iapetus? That’s why the Grays don’t know about any of this?”

“That’s correct.” Spitz smiles at me like I’m a good student. “We share information with certain governments on earth when we have something of value to give them. The design for this ship was created by my team but couldn’t be built here, so we gave it to earth.”

“Why couldn’t it be?” I ask.

“Everyone has resource constraints,” says Spitz. “Our mineral mining capability here on Iapetus is limited. Our ability to import ores from the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt is even more limited, given how much attention moving large masses around the solar system would attract. Then there are the politics of resource allocation that have bedeviled humanity from the beginning of time. We have to allocate according to our priorities. Colonization wins. I want to build more warships, however, I’m not allowed to. We all have to do what the boss says, right?”

I can’t help but laugh at that. My boss is a prickly Potato Queen who spends her time checking off items on her secret agenda and misallocating our resources as well.

“This ship with its grav lens,” says Spitz, “required so much metal for construction it was never approved. Not wanting to waste the work we put in, we smuggled the plans to groups of earthbound shipbuilders in several countries. Of course, each country modified the plans according to the whims of their engineers, subject to their resource allocations. Unfortunately, earth’s shipyards were unable to produce the vessels with the precision they required. The rash of catastrophic failures and underperformance is proof enough of that.” He pauses to take a breath. “Not one of the final designs incorporated all of the ship’s features. Let’s go inside.”

Moments later, we’re all standing on the bridge in a space much more crowded than it was before.

“A bit more cramped,” admits Spitz.

I notice the walls and deck. “You increased the shielding.”

“Yes.” Spitz moves over to the pilot’s seat and sits. “Extra layers of alloy steel, and another layer of grav plates.” He points to an obtrusive refrigerator-size lump standing in the center of the bridge’s space. “All of your ship’s new computers are located inside. The extra shielding is in place to protect them as much as the bridge crew. The slightest damage to the computing systems will cause the ship to malfunction, possibly with catastrophic results. If we had more time, we’d install a backup system in one of the forward cabins, however, time is a factor.”

I nod, but don’t succumb to the temptation of asking for a backup system. I suspect that alone might cost me another week I can’t spare.

“One of the systems controlled is the fusion reactor. Much like the benefit of the improvements to the drive array, a computer control system on the reactor allows us to burn less hydrogen while delivering more power.” Spitz smiles.

Time for me to make a big guess. “More than a little?”

“A lot more power. As far as I know, no ship has ever been constructed with such a favorable ratio of reactor output to ship mass. Who knows? One day, if we all live long enough, we might see ships top 50 or 100c. Can you imagine?”

One hundred times the speed of light? Amazing to think about. So much of the galaxy would lie within reach.

“You also have a computer-controlled bubble jump system,” says Spitz. “It’s built to assist the gravitational officers.” Spitz nods at Phil, since that was Phil’s job on the Rusty Turd, “It should drastically reduce the time between jumps, decreasing your overall travel time.” Spitz nods toward the doorway leading into the central hall, only the door has been moved. It no longer aligns with the ship’s long axis. “Let’s go forward.”

Spitz steps through. Both Phil and I follow.

The central hall running from the bridge to the crew compartment has been widened to accommodate a tube covered in complicated shapes and wires. The airlock at the far end of the hall, like the door to the bridge, has been moved off-center.

“A railgun?” I guess, though it doesn’t make sense. From here to the nose of the ship it would have to be over two hundred feet long and cut right through the grav lens.

“Yes,” Spitz proudly confirms. “It’s not exactly experimental. We’ve tested. This is an early production model.”

“Experimental? Early production model?” I don’t like the sound of either one.

I start forward, but Spitz stops me and points at each of the aft-most rooms off the hall. One was the captain’s quarters. He says, “They’ve been converted to magazines for the weapon. What’s another twenty tons of slugs in a ship of this weight?” He chuckles.

“Twenty tons?”

Nodding, Spitz explains, “Twenty-five thousand one-kilogram slugs will feed into the railgun at eight hundred per minute, fired by the pilot. We’ve added a trigger to her control stick and a safety on the console.”

I didn’t even notice the extra controls.

“If it works as planned,” says Spitz, “this weapon alone will overwhelm the defensive grav fields on any Trog cruiser. You don’t need to ram anything.”

One-kilogram slugs don’t sound like much to me for attacking a Trog cruiser. “Unless we want to capture it.”

“A dubious tactic at best, don’t you think?” Spitz leads us up the hall. The airlock doors are propped open, so we walk right into the platoon compartment. The railgun does indeed run right through, past the jump seats, and into the grav lens on the Rusty Turd’s bow.

“What about the grav lens?” I ask. “Will it still function?”

“Of course,” Spitz tells me. “In fact, it now serves three purposes. One, as a particle shield during hyper-light and sub-light travel; a second, as a ram for skewering Trog vessels; and now, as a final acceleration stage for slugs shooting out of the railgun. Our calculations suggest a final slug velocity in excess of 100,000 miles per hour.”

Phil can’t contain his wonder. “Holy shit!”

“That’s faster than those big gun emplacements on the moon.” It’s hard to believe so much firepower could be built into my ship.

“The grav lens is the kicker,” says Spitz. “The acceleration is so intense, it’ll disintegrate any material we put through it.”

That doesn’t sound good to me, though Spitz isn’t bothered at all. “Depending on how far your target is, it might be hit by a plasma of heavy nuclei and free electrons that’ll tear through pretty much anything, or it’ll be hit by a kilogram of solidifying metal the diameter of a straw a dozen meters long.”

I nod appreciatively. It’s roughly the secret behind the effectiveness of the grav lens—its ability to focus the ship’s ramming momentum behind a pencil-point tip. “Either way, the target is toast.”

“Toast,” Spitz agrees. “One thing, though.”

“What’s that?” I hate the fine print.

“You’ll need to take along a few of my techs. As I said, the railgun is an early production model. The techs will need to operate it and repair it as needed.”

I turn to Phil.

He shrugs.

“One condition,” I tell Spitz.

“Which is?”

“Phil has to okay anybody you send with us.”

“Cautious.” Spitz seems pleased by that. “Agreed.”

Patting the steel railgun tube as we stand in the platoon bay, I can’t help but start to think about the implications of what we’ve done here. Looking admirably at Spitz, I say, “So this is the fastest and probably most powerful space-based weapons system in the solar system.”

Spitz nods proudly.

Phil seems a little worried. “It’s not going to blow up on us, is it?”

“Doubtful,” Spitz answers. “However, that is a legitimate concern.”

I elbow Phil. “Our odds of spontaneous combustion were one-in-twenty when we first pushed the Turd to light speed.” I turn to Spitz. “We’re better off now, right?”

“Much better,” he assures me.

Now, for the most important of the implications I’d just thought through. “How many of the surviving assault ships can you refit like this? Can you turn them each around in a week?”

Spitz’s face turns to worry, though I can see his gears turning as he considers the question. “It takes us several months to construct one of these railguns, and we only have two others. The most I could convince my boss to spare is the one. You’ll be on your own when you go back out there.”

I shake my head. “No, we’ll be with the Free Army fleet. We’ll just have a better chance of destroying the enemy in the battle to come.”

Chapter 34

Besides the brief hour or so I was out of my suit back on the Potato after frying my grav plates while chasing down the SDF loyalists, I’ve not had the orange antique off.

Now, with nothing covering my skin except a sweatshirt and thick cotton work pants, I feel the kind of naked that torments the dreams of insecure people. I’m vulnerable. I don’t know how many doors and airlocks stand between my thin human skin and the vacuum of space, but they are only tidbits of technology that could fail at any second.

Or be destroyed by attacking Trogs.

Or Grays.

Or SDF loyalists.

Who knows how many varieties of hostiles lurk in the blackness, waiting for an inattentive moment to pounce on their prey?

That’s what I feel like without my suit. Inattentive. Unprotected. My life in the hands of others.

I don’t like it.

I wonder, if I ever get back to earth, will I ever feel secure again, even beneath miles of atmosphere coddling me from the cold?

And there’s more.

I have unprocessed calories gurgling their way through my intestines.

Not suit goo, but actual food!

It tasted good when I ate it, though my jaw tired quickly from the chewing.

That was unexpected.

I felt full much sooner than I thought possible. I guess all the fiber I so rapidly grew used to not having. I don’t know how the next few days will go with the solid foods. I expect I’m going to spend a lot of time sitting on or frantically sprinting to the nearest commode. Cramping. And maybe, just when my body is starting to adjust back to normal food again, it’ll be time for another intestinal cleanse, the salty syrup treatment for making my system ready for the suit.

More sitting. More sprinting.

I know this time out of the suit is intended to be a kindness, something I’m supposed to need and want, something to make me feel like a human again. Perhaps I adjusted too fast to life in the orange.

A knock sounds at my dorm room door.

Even as I look up through the darkness, I know it’s Phil with his Gray in tow. “Come.”

The door swings open, letting the dim light from the hall drizzle over my darkness.

“Why are you sitting in here with the lights out?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Too much on my mind.”

Phil steps inside. The Tick follows.

“Close it?” I ask.

Phil complies.

I reach over to a dimmer switch on the wall beside my bed and illuminate the room in dusky gray. I motion to a chair.

Phil seats himself and the Gray stands beside him.

“Everyone else asleep?” I ask. Our hosts have housed us in a barracks facility designed to handle a few platoons. It’s much too large for our needs, with less than half of one platoon surviving. We’re all in adjacent rooms on the same floor. The rest of the barrack stands empty.

“Some are asleep,” answers Phil. “Some are logged into computers, reading the news. Six are in a room four doors down, talking.”

“About?”

Phil shrugs. “Nothing important. At least not now. I think they miss the constant communication.”

I nod at that. As physically isolating as the suits are, you’re never, ever more than a heartbeat away from talking to another person. It’s a strange sweet-and-sour state of connectedness to exist in.”How do they feel about things?”

“Are you asking if they’re on board?”

“I guess I am.”

“Nothing has changed as far as I can tell. They’re a loyal bunch. Several are talking about turning colonist if Spitz lets them.”

“If any ask,” I’m reluctant to say it, but it’s the right thing to do, “tell them they have my blessing. It’s probably the smartest option.”

Phil silently agrees.

“What about you?”

Phil shrugs.

“Do you want to go to the colonies? That’s what Gustafson and Spitz want for you.”

“I know.”

“And?”

“I’m staying with you and Penny.”

“But what do you want?”

“I want to go to the colonies,” answers Phil. “Yet, more than I want that, I want to stay with my friends.” He looks away so I know he’s going to admit something he’d rather not. “I think you’re both alive because of me.”

I chuckle. I’m not sure if it’s because I agree or disagree.

“Well, that’s not exactly right,” he clarifies. “We’re alive because we’re together. If any one of us weren’t along for the ride, the other two would have been killed.”

“I think you’re right about that, Phil.”

“What do you want?” he asks. “I know you’ve built your self-identity around this concept of turning rebel and saving the human race.”

“I’m not a superhero.”

Phil grins. “That’s what it looks like in your fantasies, though, right?”

Mind readers suck. “Yes.”

“Don’t glower. You’re normal. I think most people have an aspirational version of themselves they picture in their minds, knowing all the while they aren’t that person, and knowing they’ll likely never be that person. I don’t think that makes them vain or crazy or anything.”

“Thank you, Dr. Phil.”

“Don’t feel bad because I peek at your secrets. Most of the time I can’t help myself. The hard part is keeping my mouth shut about what I’ve seen.”

“Don’t sweat it.” I sigh. “You’re right. I want to be the hero. I know I’ll never—”

“You already are the hero.”

I laugh out loud.

“You don’t see it, do you?”

“Phil…” I don’t know how to continue.

“The things you do.” Phil shakes his head in wonder. “I’d never do any of that. Yet you jump right in like you’re invincible.”

“Well, if you’ve been reading my mind, you know I believe in the lie of my invincibility.”

“That’s just another lie you tell yourself, because it’s easier than admitting that you’re brave enough to risk your life in ways most people wouldn’t.”

I never thought about it that way. But then, I never had another person giving me a third-party opinion about the thoughts buzzing between my neurons. “Why would I do that?”

Phil laughs. “Ask Dr. Gustafson. It’s hard enough reading people’s thoughts without trying to figure out what they all mean.”

I shake my head slowly and return to the question that troubles me. “Why don’t you go to the colonies? Penny and me, we’ll be fine.”

Phil takes a long time to consider his answer. “I’m not as special as they think I am. I suspect plenty of Gustafson’s people can use their bug as well as I can, they just don’t know it. It’s like they’ve been standing on a dark street in the pool of light from a street lamp, afraid to venture into the darkness, thinking of it like a wall they can’t get through. All I’ve done is walk in from the dark carrying a flashlight. Now that they see it, who knows what they’ll be able to do? They don’t need me.”

“I think you underestimate yourself.”

Phil smiles weakly. “Maybe we have that in common.”

Chapter 35

A week passes in a flash of boredom and anxiety.

Each day brings with it updates from Penny and Brice on the Trog fleet. The cruisers are nowhere to be found. They restocked their holds after the last attack, and now they’re gone. Not back at earth. Not around the moon. Nowhere we can find them.

Everybody’s worried, especially Spitz and his people.

Five of my platoon have come to me and asked for permission to stay on Iapetus. They want to queue up for a spot on a ship bound for the colonies.

It doesn’t anger me, losing them. I don’t feel betrayed. In fact, it makes me jealous they can answer the call from the greener grass on some faraway planet and tumble their dice for a chance at peace.

I can’t.

I won’t.

I can only hope to join them one day.

One day.

I’m standing in Spitz’s office, viewing the expansive hangar through a window on a wall opposite the door, while I wait for him to arrive.

I don’t see much activity around the Rusty Turd, and that worries me.

Phil is nearby, silently communing with his Gray. They’ve been doing that a lot lately—constructing a thought space from the comingling of their minds, a place where they explore their combined strength, a tele-space where they seem to prefer to exist.

The idea of it gives me the willies, and I find myself always aware of my thoughts—always careful to keep them hidden. I’m guarding my mind with the same diligence I did after my wife brought the Gray hatchling into my house back in Breckenridge.

And I think of Amy.

Those inexplicably lifeless eyes. Her pearly smile. The corn silk hair.

The softness of her bare skin.

She was cold inside, but such a beauty to look at.

Before the hatchling started killing her.

Now she’s a wrinkled hag, the outside matching the inside, devoid of life, except by the strictest definition.

Thoughts of her always lead me to sadness.

I turn my eyes back toward the hangar and try to shake the memory.

In less than twenty-four hours, if all goes well with my ship, I’ll be back in an orange suit. During the week I’ve spent out of it, I’ve not touched another human being skin-to-skin. The closest I’ve come are Phil’s engulfing hugs.

Those leave me feeling strange. Dirty. I can’t explain why.

My mind wanders and I close my eyes. I’ve thought about Silva more than once.

More than a thousand times, probably.

But God, she’s not even eighteen.

My old-fashioned sensibilities won’t allow me to make an advance, though if I hadn’t been told she was six months shy of her eighteenth birthday—had she lied and told me she was nineteen—then her true age wouldn’t have mattered.

I wouldn’t have known the difference.

I sigh.

“What?” asks Phil.

“Nothing.”

“It’s something.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Phil’s content with that. He goes back to pretending he’s a Gray.

The door swings open and Dr. Spitz walks in with a big smile.

“Good news?” It’s the obvious question. I ask it anyway.

“The work is done,” answers Spitz. “The diagnostics check out. All that’s left is cleanup and supply.”

Phil grins about this, and I don’t understand why.

I’d have guessed he wouldn’t be so happy when it was done. I know he’d prefer to stay on Iapetus.

Spitz walks over to plant himself in the chair behind his desk.

I take one on the opposite side. “Are Penny, Brice, and Jablonsky still due back tomorrow?”

“You talk to them more than I do,” answers Spitz. He leans forward and scrutinizes me for a moment. “You still don’t trust us, do you?”

“No,” Phil answers for me.

I was going to lie, come up with something that sounded plausible, because despite my distrust, I’ve grown to like Dr. Spitz very much. “Sorry, it’s just—”

“No worries.” Spitz leans back again. Casual. “Perhaps when you fly out tomorrow with your crew aboard, you’ll trust us then.”

I nod. I will.

“It’ll be best if you allow some of my technicians to ride along and monitor your systems for a shakedown cruise before you speed off into the universe.”

“How long will they need to be aboard?”

“I imagine we can run through all of our tests in three or four hours.”

That sounds reasonable. “Do ships often fail at this stage of the process?”

“They can fail at any stage,” answers Spitz. “This one of yours, who knows? We didn’t construct her, remember? Earth did. We’re improving her with our technology. We have a lot of unknowns.”

“Like we could blow up on our first jump to light speed?” I smile, but I’m deadly serious. That was the hand we were dealt when we first lifted off from the Arizona shipyard.

“We built in every failsafe that was practical. The ship might malfunction, however, the possibility of a catastrophe is extremely remote.”

I glance at Phil to make sure he’s paying attention. It’s hard to tell.

“We put some extra suits on your ship,” says Spitz. “They’re in the infirmary. They’re the same orange ones you wear now, manufactured on earth.”

“Why?” I ask. “We have ours.”

“War,” Spitz answers. “We send our ships out with spares. We thought you should have extras.”

“And helmets?” I’m suspicious. I know what a helmet can do.

Spitz guesses right away. “We can replace all of your helmets if you like. They’re all coded to your commander, right? She can freeze your suit, even kill you if she chooses.”

“You’d rather I give that power to you?”

“We disable those functions in every suit we refurbish.”

I glance to Phil, looking for confirmation on Spitz’s lie.

Phil says, “He’s telling the truth.”

Still, I can’t bring myself to trust him that much. “We’ll stick with what we have for now.”

“Suit yourself.” Spitz giggles.

I roll my eyes.

“One more thing,” he says. “This has been a matter of some debate on our end. We’d like to—”

The office door bursts open and a panting officer rushes inside. “Dr. Spitz, we need you in the operations center!”

Spitz jumps to his feet as he asks, “What’s going on?”

“We found the Trog fleet.”

Not here at Iapetus.

My heart sinks as I rise, ready to muster my crew, board the Rusty Turd, and fight.

Spitz hurries toward the door. “Where?”

“They’re attacking the Free Army’s main base.”

Spitz glances at me.

I ask, “Can I come?”

Spitz waves me along as he turns to Phil. “You stay here with the Gray. It’s not allowed where we’re going.”

Chapter 36

It takes longer than expected, at least a brisk fifteen-minute walk.

When we arrive, I can’t believe the size of the comm room. It reminds me of Blair’s control center back on the Potato, only many times larger, with hundreds of people working at small groups of desks and in front of banks of video screens.

A man in a military uniform, a colonel, steps up to intercept us. “Dr. Spitz.”

“Colonel Hawkins.” Spitz is looking around for something.

So am I. I’d expected to see a frantic hive of activity bordering on chaos. I don’t see that at all. The control room is divided into a handful of sections and a least a dozen more subsections. Some of the computer screens display what appears to be a space battle. Most look nearly static, displaying charts and spreadsheets with row after row of numbers. Most of the operators don’t appear to be agitated.

Hawkins leads us toward a conference room. “The others have already left.”

Spitz is surprised, but doesn’t say anything.

“They were here for the weekly meeting when it started.”

Spitz checks his watch. “Where did they go?”

“The meeting is already over.”

The chairs in the conference room are in disarray. Rings left by coffee cups spot the long table. Crumbs surround them among a few crumpled napkins. I’m guessing these others Hawkins referred to must be some kind of management committee, yet I don’t ask. I’m more curious about the battle.

“They’re getting together again at five,” says Hawkins. “After they’ve each had some time to think over the implications.”

Spitz takes a seat.

So do I.

Hawkins walks to the front of the room and powers up a screen big enough to be watched comfortably from anywhere in the room. He pauses and points at me. “You want him to see this?”

Spitz nods. “It’s been approved.”

“Just now? On the way over here?” Hawkins is skeptical.

“It was decided yesterday that granting Major Kane access to information garnered from our surveillance network would help more than hurt us.”

Hawkins grudgingly turns to a computer and scrolls around for a video, which subsequently pops up on the screen, frozen, waiting for him to hit the play button. He turns and looks at Spitz.

Spitz takes his silent meaning and turns to me. “We have sixty surveillance satellites—”

Hawkins is shaking his head.

“Am I mistaken?” Spitz asks him.

“We lost seven.”

“Seven?” Spitz is knocked off-balance by this. “Malfunctions?”

“Six in the aftermath of the battles around earth,” answers Hawkins. “We have no cause to believe they were discovered. We suspect debris strikes.”

Spitz understands.

I do, too. Hunks of metal, stone, frozen bodies, and everything in-between are filling the space around earth, orbiting in every direction at every speed, colliding, breaking up, and crashing into other things.

“If this war ever ends,” muses Spitz, “it’ll take years to make earth-space safe again.” He focuses back on me. “We developed a class of surveillance and communication satellites that are very small, perhaps the size of a beach ball.” Spitz holds his hands out a few feet apart to demonstrate. “They aren’t particularly durable, nor powerful. Many versions, like the ones we orbit near earth, can intercept broadcast signals, both audio and video. Most models can scan the space or solar bodies nearby using an array of sensors. Some of our satellites operate merely as signal relays for the other satellites. In this way, we keep an eye on earth and its moon so we have a pretty good idea what’s going on in that part of the solar system.”

“But not the rest?” I guess.

Spitz shakes his head. “Earth surveillance requires nearly half our satellites. As for the others, we keep them near points of interest, but we don’t cover nearly enough of the solar system to maintain a comprehensive picture.”

“I suppose you’d build more of the satellites if you could.” It’s an obvious guess.

“Of course,” responds Spitz. “We build them as fast as our resource constraints allow us. However, since the war started, we barely keep up with the mortality rate. We need a more durable design, but more durable means we either increase the overall size of the satellite with more shielding, or maintain the same size and decrease the functionality by decreasing the hardware to make room for additional shielding. The problem is the larger we make them, the more likely they’ll be discovered. That we can’t have, as every discovery might turn into a clue whereby our enemies might discover our base here.”

I have enough background. “What’s this video we’re about to see?”

Hawkins points at the screen. “An attack on the Free Army’s main base.”

“Where is that?” I ask.

Spitz looks at me, surprised.

“Colonel Blair won’t tell me anything.” I feel belittled by admitting it.

“Compartmentalization of classified information is a virtue,” Hawkins tells Spitz.

Spitz dismisses Hawkins’s wisdom with a wave. “We have three satellites tasked with watching the FA’s main base on Callisto.”

“That’s one of Jupiter’s moons?” I ask, because I’m not sure.

Spitz nods.

“Do you maintain surveillance of the Potato?”

Spitz shakes his head. “Resources.”

“Do you know how many rebel bases there are? Do you know the strength of the Free Army?”

Hawkins snorts. Whatever respect he might have for me, it’s evaporating. He starts the video.

It’s a base like the installation on the Potato, only much bigger. Dozens of glass domes glow, scattered in no apparent pattern among other structures. Several of the buildings are hangars as large as the one back on Blair’s asteroid base. Many others structures hide their purpose from the vacuum and the prying eyes of Spitz’s surveillance satellites.

In a relatively flat area, between the base and a giant white pock scar where a meteor struck Callisto some millennia in the past, rows of Arizona-class assault ships are docked on the rough, tan surface. Though ‘docked’ is a generous word. They lay on the ground where their pilots parked them. Trails discolor the surface where the feet of thousands of soldiers offloaded and marched to airlocks are arrayed along one edge of the aerodrome.

Also contained within the rectangular border of the landing area are rows of Beijing-class assault ships, all in good order. All purposely placed. None crashed. None damaged.

I start counting as I watch the image. Altogether there must be over a hundred ships.

I like what that implies. Despite the number of vessels destroyed in the Arizona Massacre, a significant portion of the American ships made it to the Free Army base. A large number of the Chinese ones found their way too. That doesn’t take into account other bases.

Is it possible as much as half of the SDF will turn traitor given the opportunity?

I don’t know, but my God, the numbers imply the proportion is significant.

Hawkins distracts me from the video by walking to the rear of the room and turning down the lights. “It’s easier on the eyes,” he explains, as he takes a seat in one of the chairs behind us.

“Is this a still photograph?” asks Spitz.

“Video.” Hawkins points at the screen. “If you squint, you can just make out the tiny, dark spots of people moving about. In a few minutes, the angle changes so you can see the view from another satellite just coming up over the horizon. That one’s camera is zoomed in much closer. You’ll see all the detail you want.” He glances at me. “More than you want, I suspect.”

A few pixels in the screen seem to shimmer like heat coming off a summer highway, and a second later, a Trog cruiser pops into view. Before I can gasp, its railguns fire down on the base.

More cruisers pop out of bubble jump, all dangerously close to the planet.

I’m leaning forward in my seat, and my words come in an anxious rush. “We saw the same thing at the Potato. One popped out of bubble a few kilometers up. It caused chaos with the local gravity for a moment.”

At least ten Trog cruisers are firing down on the base now.

More shimmers promise the arrival of others.

“Their grav control is...” Spitz doesn’t finish. “We’ve never seen this before.”

“We can’t do it,” Hawkins tells him, as more cruisers come into view. “Not consistently. Not without losing half our ships to collisions.”

“There must be twenty of them,” I count. All are firing, and more are arriving. “They’re going to be slaughtered.” I don’t mean the Trogs.

More Trog cruisers pop out of bubble jump.

The camera angle abruptly changes.

“The Free Army has some ships in the air.” Hawkins’s tone sounds more ominous than what he’s telling us. “You’ll see them coming to the rescue in a minute.”

From the angle we’re viewing, it looks like Arizona all over again. No, more a nightmare of Arizona. The Trog ships loom large in the sky, too many to count, and the rain of railgun fire is plowing up the surface of Callisto and obliterating every human construct.

Huge geysers of dirt and rock explode into space. Pieces of shattered ships fly in every direction.

A ship emerges from the slaughter on the surface in a sudden burst of acceleration, blazing bright blue grav, it arcs toward one of the cruisers overhead.

Spears of red-hot slugs lance across the sky, creating an impenetrable crisscross that destroys the ship before it’s a kilometer up.

Another ship shoots off the ground, followed by another. Before they meet their fate, I see what looks like hope. A squadron of six assault ships is raging down from above at impossible speed.

Kamikaze speed.

Oh, no.

Grav fields burst bright blue around the Trog cruisers as they try to evade and deflect.

The first attacker is knocked off course, and it flies past its target in a blur. It explodes in a titanic plume of rock and dirt when it hits the ground.

A second Trog cruiser takes a hit right through the reactors, and its midsection disintegrates along with the assault ship that rammed it.

The other incoming ships are blazing hard on their brakes to slow down.

Two more deflect, crashing against Callisto. Another explodes after being struck by railgun fire. Yet another pierces a Trog hull and the cruiser reels from the impact, spinning and surging so close to the ground I think for a moment it might crash.

More assault ships take off and attack the cruisers.

Others skim across the surface, trying to escape.

There’s so much movement, it’s impossible to keep track of everything. The sky is blazing red against black with thousands and thousands of railgun slugs. Grav fields glow blue around white Trog cruisers and streaks of rust mark our ships as they race to their deaths. The surface of Callisto is turning into a sandstorm filled with debris that floats slowly down to the surface in the moon’s light g.

Only one thing is easy to see—the Free Army is being slaughtered.

Chapter 37

I lose track of the minutes as I watch.

The slaughter, initially horrifying and vicious, turns systematic and numbing. No more assault ships shoot out of the cloud cloaking the surface to make a heroic attack run. None streak out over the horizon trying to escape. The remaining Trog cruisers have stopped firing at small targets. Only their largest railgun slugs fall, pummeling the base below. The Trogs are turning it to rubble—rubble infused with the corpses of thousands of humans.

They’re mopping up, and murdering any survivors whose only hope is that the tons of stone above their heads holds longer than the Trogs’ slugs last.

The Trogs don’t want the base. They just don’t want humans to infest it again.

“It goes on like that,” says Hawkins, like he’s talking through a tin can that stripped all the feeling from his words.

“How old is this video?” asks Spitz.

“Taking into account the time for the transmission to reach us—”

“Is it coming direct?”

Hawkins shakes his head. “Nothing comes direct anymore. All of the surveillance drones shoot a tight beam at one of several relay satellites, then it’s bounced to a few more before the signal ends up here. The transit time for signals from Callisto right now is running nearly two hours. By the time we put everything together for display down here, we’re running over four hours behind.”

“Are the Trogs still there?” I ask.

Hawkins nods.

“They’ll stay until there’s nothing left,” Spitz tells me. “Or until they run out of railgun slugs.”

That I know, but I don’t mind the confirmation on the strategy. “How long do you think it will take?”

“To completely slag the base?” asks Hawkins. “That’s what you’re asking, right?”

I nod.

He glances at Spitz as if to ask permission.

Spitz silently grants it.

Hawkins sighs. He’s very unhappy with me knowing any of this. “The base housed nearly six thousand SDF soldiers and—”

“Six thousand?” I’m stunned. With those kinds of numbers, the SDF is both real and significant. However, at the same time, destroyed.

“This is their main base,” he goes on. “It’s not unlike our base here. More crude. Like most of these pseudo-military complexes, it was a converted mining colony.”

“Back on the Potato,” I tell him, “we were nine levels deep. Figure each tunnel is two to four—sometimes six—meters from floor to ceiling, plus several meters of rock between, and the deepest levels are at least fifty meters deep.” My assumptions are running now on a full charge of optimism. “Simple pounding from above can’t reach the deeper layers. The rubble from the first several will collapse and act as a shield for those below. Sure, some of that rock will blast out, but most won’t.” I’m guessing on this part, knowing I’m basing everything on earthbound intuition and extrapolated guesses from dramatized explosions in old Hollywood movies.

When I look up from my thoughts, Hawkins is glancing at Spitz again. More confirmation.

“Wait.” I’m missing more than I know. “What? Why do you keep looking at Spitz?”

Spitz tells me, “Not only do we have surveillance, we have people there.”

“Spies?” I ask.

“We prefer not to think of them that way,” responds Spitz. “We’re all on the same side.”

I shrug off the differentiation he’s trying to make. “So you know the base in detail. You know if they’re still alive.”

“It’s not that easy,” says Hawkins. “Every directional radio dish on the surface has been destroyed. It’ll be a long time before we hear anything from our people there, even if any survived.”

“But it was a mining colony,” I argue. “Surely the depth—”

Spitz is shaking his head. “Callisto is the largest undifferentiated body in the solar system.”

That throws me for a loop. “At the risk of sounding like the stupid one in the room, not only do I not know what that means, I can’t begin to guess why it’s important.”

“Geologically,” says Spitz, “Callisto never separated into layers. The earth, for instance, has its core, mantle, and crust. In the most simplistic explanation, think of it like the layers of stone you see on the side of a mountain. Elements and like compounds tend to collect in these layers.”

Easy so far. I’m following along.

“In an undifferentiated body,” says Spitz, “that doesn’t happen. It might be that any ten-ton scoop of rock you take from the surface might have the same composition as a similar scoop taken from a few hundred meters down.”

“But the Potato—”

Spitz raises a palm to hush me. “Every geological situation is different. “On Callisto, they never had a need to dig the mines deep. Everything they sought, they found near the surface.”

“How deep did they go?” I ask, feeling the ominous answer.

“Two levels,” answers Hawkins. “Most of the base is less than twenty meters deep.”

Another major defeat. Another slaughter. I shore up my disappointment and ask, “How many ships got away? How many SDF bases are left? What’s their strength?”

Chapter 38

Spitz nods at Hawkins. “He knows the SDF better than any of us.”

“By our count,” says Hawkins, “it looks like one hundred and thirty-six ships were destroyed. Over eighty percent of the SDF’s strength.”

I’m running through calculations in my head. “Are you saying the SDF now has what—twenty-five, thirty ships left?” So much hope and so much taken away over such a short time.

“That’s our estimate,” admits Hawkins. “The SDF has three more bases—the one you and your people escaped to, and two more.”

“Escaped?” I’m a bit insulted. “The Trogs had taken that rock, and we had to fight for it. Escape isn’t the right word.”

Spitz leans forward. “This is all overwhelming, Dylan, but please remember, Colonel Hawkins is on your side. He’s trying to give you the information you’re going to need.”

I accept my rebuke and turn to the colonel. “Sorry.”

“Amateurs get emotional. I’m used to it.”

I bite back my reply, and ask instead, “Did you know the Potato was in Trog hands?”

Hawkins shakes his head. “The main SDF base is the only one where we maintain surveillance. Our information on the others is inferred and delayed.”

“So there may be more than twenty-five or thirty SDF ships left?”

“Or fewer.”

I can’t argue with that. “What about the other two bases? Were they attacked by the Trogs?

“Not that we know of.”

Not reassuring. “So they could both be in Trog hands.”

“Possibly.”

“And if they are?”

“Then the SDF is down to maybe ten ships, depending on how many of the damaged ones at the Potato have been repaired.”

“I’m not going to press the argument,” says Spitz, “but with this attack, maybe it’s time to give up on the SDF, Dylan. Maybe it’s time to reconsider going to the colonies with your crew.”

“Are you ready to give up?” I ask.

The conference room door swings open and a woman asks to speak with Hawkins.

With a quick apology, he steps outside and closes the door behind.

Spitz continues our conversation. “As I said, I’m not trying to sell you. I simply suggest that the situation has drastically changed. Perhaps the decision you made is no longer valid.”

“What would you do in my shoes?” I ask.

“I can’t answer that.”

“You can.”

Spitz leans forward, stress running through the wrinkles on his face. “I have my own set of worries at the moment.”

I’m taken aback. This is the first time I’ve seen him under pressure. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Spitz laughs without joy. “We’re withholding nothing.” He points at the screen. “The SDF has been safe on that moon for eight years, growing their rebellion ever so slowly. Now, when they finally have an armada of ships, that if used properly could destroy the Trog fleet, they’re wiped out in a matter of hours.”

I look at the screen and watch as the overkill destruction continues. “There’s more than that?”

“Maybe the Trogs found the location of the SDF base yesterday.” Spitz pauses for effect. “Maybe they’ve known for two years and decided to do something only after the SDF became a threat. What worries me is whether the Trogs know about this place and whether their fleet is going to come into orbit over Iapetus after they reload their holds. So you see, Dylan. It’s not your choice that worries me as I watch this feed. I’m worried for all the people here.”

Hawkins comes back into the conference room with his eyes locked on me.

“What was that about?” asks Spitz.

“The comm links between the remaining three bases have come to life. They know about the attack on the main base.”

“And?” asks Spitz.

“A Colonel Blair has declared that having the most seniority, she has crowned herself the SDF’s new military commander. She has ordered every ship to her base, the Potato. They’re going on the attack.”

“Colonel Hawkins,” I say, “would you communicate with the scout ship and tell them to get back here ASAP. Dr. Spitz, I need my ship as soon as you can get it in the air.”

“Well, the tests—”

I shake my head vigorously. “It works, or it doesn’t. You don’t know Blair. She’s one hell of an administrator, yet she can’t keep her head when the bullets are flying. Worst of all, she doesn’t know it. I need to get back there. If she doesn’t have somebody with her to keep things moving in the right direction, she’ll do something stupid.”

Chapter 39

The scout ship arrives eleven long hours after the first railgun slugs fell on Callisto. Me, Phil, and the Gray are waiting in the hangar as the vessel flies in through the flat grav field that holds the atmosphere inside.

Over the hours, my impatience to get underway has put a rough edge on my mood, and Phil has had to remind me dozens of times to keep it under control. I’m having difficulty because I keep imagining all the wasted resources and people who are going to die if we don’t execute our counterattack properly. I feel like our last opportunity to win this war is slipping away.

The scout ship sets down. The blue glow of its grav fields blinks out of existence.

Colonel Hawkins walks up. “Kane, I have an update on Callisto.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“The Trog cruisers are jumping out in twos and threes. It started about an hour ago.”

“The Callisto base is dead?” I ask. “Completely dead?”

Hawkins barely nods, as if a limited acknowledgment might undo the truth of it.

I understand. Such a defeat is hard to take.

“We suspect they’re convoying back to their bases as they run out of ammunition.”

“Convoys?” Phil asks. “No point in that for hyperspace travel.”

“It’s so they won’t be alone when they arrive at their destinations,” I guess. “We may not be winning this war, but our ships have given them something to be afraid of.” I glance at Hawkins for his thoughts on my conjecture.

“It’s not unusual for ships to jump down the same heading when they have a common destination, yet these ships are coordinating their departure times. They’re leaving with in seconds of one another. They want to arrive together.” Hawkins nods as he confirms his thought process. He looks at me and says, “I’d say you’re right.”

“Are they jumping out to random points in space to conceal their destinations?” I ask. “That’s what we do. Now that they’re afraid of us—”

“Afraid?” Hawkins asks. He’s skeptical on that point.

“Concerned,” I correct. “Respectful? No. Not that. However, they see us as a danger.”

Hawkins agrees. “They aren’t concealing. Most are hopping down vectors toward Ceres. Others are headed out to the Trojans.”

“The Trojans?” Phil looks at me, and then at Hawkins for the answer.

“An asteroid field scattered in Jupiter’s orbit at the L5 Lagrange zone.”

“They have a base out there, too?” asks Phil.

We had no knowledge of anything out there.

Hawkins nods.

“How many went to Ceres?” I ask.

“More than half,” answers Hawkins.

“They haven’t sent that many to Ceres since just after the Arizona Massacre. Has this information been forwarded on to Blair?”

Hawkins nods. “Through your people on the ship.”

“Shit!”

Both Phil and the colonel look at me like I’ve just lost track of reality.

I quickly apologize. “I was just thinking, they knew a bunch of these Arizona-class ships escaped on the day we all lifted off from earth. And because of the way that battle turned out, they understood the danger. I’ll bet that’s why they spread themselves across the solar system. They were afraid a coordinated attack by all of our ships could destroy their fleet.”

“Makes sense,” Hawkins agrees.

“Now that they’ve destroyed the bulk of our fleet, the concern is gone. They think they’re better off together than separate.”

The colonel thinks his way through to my conclusion. “They believe that together they can prevail in any attack the SDF or the Free Army is able to mount with what they have left.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, too.”

“There’s one other thing,” suggests Hawkins.

I don’t like the sound of the question. “What?”

“I’ve been ordered to ask you to allow me onto your ship.”

I point at the Turd. Spitz’s work crews are loading up the last of the railgun slugs and topping off the hydro tanks. “It’s right there.”

“He wants me with you when you leave.”

I look him up and down to emphasize the point I’m going to make. “I’ve been off solid foods for three days already. I drank down the vile intestinal cleansers. There’s nothing in my gastrointestinal system left to clog my suit’s recyclers. Phil and every member of my platoon has been doing the same. All we need to do is don our junky orange suits and board up. We can’t wait three days for you.”

“I’m ready to go now.”

That takes Phil and me both by surprise.

“My CO ordered me off solid food once your platoon switched to the liquid diet.”

“So you all made this decision three days ago.” My edginess pushes me to be annoyed, though being out of the loop isn’t something I have any legitimate cause to be offended over.

“They were considering it, and had to keep their options open. Look, if you don’t want me on the ship, then say no. I’d rather go back to the cafeteria and have a pseudo-beef sandwich and some French fries. I’d much rather stay here where I’m not likely to be killed chasing a losing cause.”

I ease up. “Why do they want you to come along?”

“Dr. Spitz has convinced the powers-that-be we need an official liaison with the SDF.”

“Now?” I laugh. “The SDF just got slaughtered.”

“A day is going to come when you’ll have to explain how your ship was upgraded. There’s no way you can do that without exposing us.”

“So what,” I ask, “you’re just going to tell Blair about the base?”

“We’re not giving her anything like that,” says Hawkins. “We need to bring along a few flight crews to ferry ships back and forth between here and the Potato. We’ll upgrade them as much as we can, and send them back to Blair. We can’t install the axial railguns like the one you have on your ship, however, we can fix the drive arrays and automate the fusion reactors so they won’t be death traps.”

“And they’ll be just as fast as our ship?” asks Phil.

“That’s right.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Why?” Hawkins repeats, like it’s obvious. He waves a hand at the Rusty Turd. “I just told you. You can’t explain—”

“No,” I cut him off and turn to Phil. “He’s bullshitting me, right?”

Phil nods. “There’s more he’s not telling you.”

The colonel admits his guilt with a nod. “If I meet Blair and I judge all is well, then I’m to coordinate more than just the upgrading of the ships. We’ll share intel with the Free Army. In exchange, we need the Free Army’s fleet to provide security for our freighters so we can send them to the rogue asteroid mines for materials. As Spitz told you, we have a hard time mining enough of what we need here on Iapetus.”

I look to Phil to see if he’s satisfied with Hawkins’s answer.

Phil nods.

“So,” I say, “I get you, a couple of techs to work the railgun, and another six or so, the crews to ferry the assault ships back and forth.”

Hawkins nods.

“And they’re all ready to fly within the hour?”

Hawkins says, “You have room in your platoon compartment for all of us.”

I look at Phil again. “Thoughts?”

“I don’t see a downside,” he answers.

I turn back to Hawkins. “Welcome aboard.”

Chapter 40

We spend half an hour accelerating to a safe distance from Saturn and its abundance of orbital objects, each exerting a complicating influence on the local gravitational topography.

It feels good to be back on the ship’s bridge again, although it’s becoming crowded. Penny, Phil, and Jablonsky are at their stations, as is Tarlow, lounging in front of his monitors and taking up too much space. Brice is standing near me. Hawkins is in one of several seats along the back wall of the bridge, talking over the comm to his people who are mostly in the platoon cabin in the front of the ship. Lenox, Silva, and Peterson are up there with the rest of my soldiers. The Gray is in one of the cabins forward of the bridge, physically alone, but unbreakably linked to Phil.

“Our distance is good,” Penny tells me.

I glance to Phil for confirmation.

“We’ve been a lot closer on both ends of a bubble jump.” He’s not bothered.

I tell him. “I’d prefer to be careful when we have the time for it.”

Phil laughs at me but doesn’t bother to explain why he thinks that’s funny. He turns to Penny. “I have the jumps programmed into the system.”

Over the ship comm, Penny announces we’re going to jump, and she turns to me. “While you’re being all safety-minded, you should probably sit down and strap in.”

I’m gripping a handhold on the ceiling, and I have my feet grav-locked to the floor. I’m in the best position to see across my bridge crew’s consoles. “I’m fine.”

“Suit yourself. Can I punch it?”

I nod.

Blue flashes bright all around us, starts to dim, and then flashes to full brightness again.

I glance at Phil. The strobe is not normal.

“New system,” he tells me. “At 20c, our jumps only last a few seconds before we pop out of bubble to start the next one. The computer handles the interim part so fast, it’s doing in seconds what we spent thirty or forty minutes doing manually before.”

“And upgraded equipment,” adds Hawkins, “that helps, too, because your performance is consistent.”

“We’re right where we should be,” Penny confirms. “The ship flies like a dream.” She turns to me with a grin on her face. “We need to rename it. This not a turd anymore.”

“How long until we reach the Potato?” I ask.

“Thirteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” answers Phil. “If we did it all in one jump, we’d be there before you knew it.”

“Let’s be safe while we can,” says Penny. It sounds like she’s having fun mocking me. “There’ll be plenty of time for hotshot risks later. I’m sure of that.”

“Me, too.”

Chapter 41

We pop out of bubble in a familiar spot, on the far side of the Potato from the mining colony.

“Jablonsky,” I say, “get me Blair on the comm. We need to find out what we have and—”

Phil interrupts, “There’s no one here.”

That stops me cold. “They’ve abandoned the base?”

“No,” he answers. “There aren’t any ships here.”

“Are they docked on the other side?” asks Penny. “In the hangar? Maybe down in the mining pit?”

Phil shrugs. “Possibly. Nothing’s flying, though.”

“Nothing in the air?” I can’t believe Blair would be so stupid, especially after what happened on Callisto. “Tarlow, anything on your scanners?”

He shakes his head.

I see Jablonsky talking, but I’m not linked on that comm, so I ping him “Jablonsky, what’s the word?”

“I’m arguing with one of her minions.”

“Keep at it,” I tell him. “Penny, bring us in close. I may have to talk to Blair in person.” I groan.

“You have to set me and my two crews down,” says Hawkins. “We need to land no matter what.”

He’s right. Mostly. “Jablonsky,” I call, “tell them we’re coming in. Get us in to see Blair. It’ll be me, Brice, and Hawkins.” To Hawkins, I say, “We’ll bring your crews in later after we pave the way with Blair.” I turn to Penny. “As soon as the three of us get off the ship, I want you back in the air. Put some distance between the ship and the asteroid. I don’t want any of you in danger in case the Trog fleet shows up.”

Chapter 42

Forty minutes later, I’m feeling naked with no rifle in my hands. I’m in Blair’s office, standing in front of her desk with my helmet clipped to my belt. Brice is on my left and Hawkins on my right. None of us has a railgun, a pistol, or a hand grenade. They’ve been taken away.

Two guards, wearing blue coveralls and lurking near the wall behind us, have their weapons ready to fire. That disturbs me almost as much as the fact that they’re not in their orange suits. Indeed, I saw very few in space suits on the way down. No matter what it says about loyalties, these people aren’t ready for an attack that could come at any moment.

Blair’s eyes are glued on Hawkins, looking him up and down, making it clear with her silence she’s displeased with his crisp orange suit and its unusual appearance. He has no name and rank stenciled on the chest in Korean script. He has unusual insignia on his shoulders.

“Are we going to stand here all day?” Brice asks, finally breaking the silence.

Blair glares at him. “Are we going to stand here all day, sir?”

“Don’t ask me,” he answers, ignoring her intent. “This is your show.”

“You received our message about the attack on the Free Army headquarters?” I ask, trying to move things in the right direction.

Blair’s interest falls back on Hawkins as she asks me, “How would you know about that? It wasn’t on your flight plan?”

“This is Colonel Jake Hawkins. He’s with—”

“Oh,” Blair acts surprised. “I get an introduction?”

I roll my eyes. “Colonel Blair, this is Colonel Hawkins. Colonel Hawkins, this is Colonel Blair of the Free Army.”

“Commander of the Free Army Ground Forces and Fleet.”

Hawkins steps forward and extends his hand to shake, “Good to meet you, Colonel Blair.”

Blair doesn’t reach out a hand. She doesn’t stand up. “Who are you, Jake Hawkins?”

He steps back, unfazed. “You might say I’m with the UN, or what became of the UN.”

“The United Nations?” Blair scoffs. “There’s no UN anymore.”

“Like the Free Army,” says Hawkins, “we’ve taken our operation off-planet.”

“Where?” she asks.

“Off-planet.” His tone makes it clear that’s all she’s going to get.

“How am I supposed to trust anything you say if—”

“Let’s not play that game,” Hawkins tells her. “I am who I am. Believe it or don’t. It doesn’t matter to me. In fact, I hope you don’t, because to tell you the truth, I don’t want to be here. I was ordered here. So here I am. I was told to offer you what assistance we can provide. If you want it, good. If not, I don’t care. I’d prefer to go home.”

“Assistance?” asks Blair, her interest piqued. “Do you have ships? Soldiers? Are you going to fight with us?”

Hawkins shakes his head. “We can provide technological assistance and intelligence.”

Blair throws her head back and laughs.

The three of us share a look and let Blair finish.

“They modified my ship,” I tell her.

“While you were supposed to be scouting?” Blair shoots back. “Were those reports you sent back genuine, or made up?”

“While we were gone,” I explain, “we stopped at their base. They sent out a ship to cover our scout duties, and in the meantime, they modified my ship.”

“This all sounds so convenient. So preplanned.” Blair’s glare settles on me. “Who are you working for, Kane? The Trogs? The SDF? The MSS? Or this reincarnation of the UN? Do you wonder why we don’t trust you here?”

Hawkins turns to me. “This is a waste. We should go.”

“Who says I’m going to let you?” asks Blair.

Deciding I should have taken one of the ambiguously coded helmets offered by Dr. Spitz’s people, I step forward and lean on her desk. “Don’t start this shit again. You’ve made your accusations one too many times. I’ve proven myself. I’ve fought, and I’ve bled. I’ve led my people into war while you sat in your lair and played your games. I don’t care what you think you’re implying by saying you might not let us go, but let’s get straight to the point. I’m out of the Free Army. Right this moment. I’m done with you and your sad shit. We’re leaving, all three of us, and if you have the slightest inkling that you’re going to stop me, then spit it out, tell me right now. Because whatever you believe about us bug-heads, and especially about me and Phil and his little stick-figure buddy, we’re in communication right now. Phil reads my thoughts like you read a book. And it won’t matter if you believe my ship was modified or not, you know if you do anything to us, he’ll ram so many holes through this place there won’t be anybody left alive when he’s done. So you pick—do you want to play your game or do you want to give me a cordial send-off?”

Blair is mortified.

She glances at her guards.

I feel them tense. They’re ready for violence. “Don’t do it,” I tell her. “Don’t put your people at risk for your ego.”

I see the mean defiance in her eyes as her mouth starts to open, and I guess what she’s going to do. That preemption is my only choice.

I juice my grav plates to max capacity and shoot across the room, slamming one of the guards into the glass wall he’s standing in front of. The wall flexes but doesn’t break. I avoid injury by cushioning the impact on my body with defensive grav.

The guard is unconscious before he even knows he’s been hit. The other guard is shouting something furious and raising his weapon when Brice copies my move and slams him against the glass wall on the other side of the door.

Three seconds later, the guards’ weapons are in our hands, pointed at Blair. She freezes, stuck in mid-reach beneath her desk.

“Show me your hands,” I tell her. “Do it slow.”

Blair doesn’t move, but says “No.”

Chapter 43

“They’re looking,” says Brice.

Blair still isn’t moving. I know she’s trying to guess if she can reach the weapon hidden under the desk before I pull the trigger on the railgun I have pointed at the center of her chest.

In my peripheral vision, I see Hawkins point through the glass wall at the front of Blair’s office. “Out there in the control room,” he says, “they’re looking.”

Blair decides on the weapon that’s always worked best for her. “If you think—”

No time for thinking.

I turn a shoulder toward Blair, goose my suit grav, fly over her desk, and slam her into the wall behind before she has time to gasp.

I bounce off her and stumble to my feet as she crumbles to the floor.

“They’re coming!” Hawkins tells us.

“Brice,” I order, “make sure they know you have that railgun.”

“Do you want me to use it?” he asks.

“You know I don’t.”

“Are you willing to die, so people will think you’re the good guy?”

“No.” I find Blair’s pistol and attach it to my magnetic belt clip.

I hear the grin in Brice’s voice as he says, “Then we’re on the same page.”

Kneeling down, I check Blair’s pulse, realize I can’t feel the subtle rhythm through my thick gloves and see her chest rise and fall. She’s not dead. Her eyes flutter, she’s not even unconscious—not really. She just had the crap knocked out of her and she’s dazed, but anger boils back quickly in those eyes.

I drag her to her feet and pin her against the wall. “Hawkins, get over here.”

He hesitates.

“One of us has to manage her,” I tell him. “One of us has to take this railgun.”

He was just supposed to ask a simple yes/no question and then go back to Iapetus. He doesn’t want responsibility for Blair. By the look on his face, he doesn’t want any of what’s going on in front of him.

I can’t blame him. I nod at the railgun. “Listen, the faster we do this, the higher the chance it’ll work.

He reaches a conclusion. “I’m pretty good with a railgun.”

“Can you use your grav plates to fly?” I ask.

“Don’t assume because we’re not in the war we’re not trained. I’ll do my part. Let’s stop yacking and get this show on the road.”

“Helmets on,” I tell Brice and Hawkins. “Do it quick. Brice, check on those two guards, make sure they don’t need medical attention.”

He looks down at them. “They’re both breathing.”

Moments later, we’re in front of Blair’s glass door, ready to exit. Most of her people in the control room are stunned, staring, immobile. Some are hurrying to the exit. Others are on their comms, calling reinforcements. A few of her loyal guard, I sense, are already here. They’re in the hall, positioning themselves to contain us inside.

“Time to rock,” I tell Brice and Hawkins. “I’ll lead, you two stay close and watch our six.”

Blair is standing rigid and angry. I know she wants to resist, yet I’m not going to give her the chance. Once we’re out of her office and out of its artificial gravity, we’ll be subject only to the asteroid’s nearly null grav. I’ll carry her by the collar outstretched in front of me, my shield. She’ll be a hefty mass to shift around, but as long as I keep her hands away from the walls and her feet off the floor, there’ll be precious little she can do to resist.

“Hawkins,” I point with the barrel of the pistol I’m now holding, “grab that mask and breather off the guard’s belt.”

Blair tenses. “You are not taking me outside.”

I give her a shove toward the door, stopping just before I push it open. “Life sucks when you’re a conniving pog. You’ve got no authority over me anymore so keep your orders to yourself.”

“Pog?” Blair asks, like that’s the most important thing I just said. “What does that even mean?”

“Persons other than grunts,” laughs Brice.

Unexpectedly, Blair tries something different. Her tone softens, and she affects the voice of a normal, feeling human being. “We can work this out.”

“We are working it out.” I push her through the door, amping up my defensive grav as I go.

Chapter 44

In the hall, without the grav field from Blair’s office floor pulling her weight down and my suit’s defensive field pushing her from behind, I have to hold onto her like a helium balloon trying to fly away in a breeze. I grav my feet tightly to the floor and keep her body between me and the three coverall-wearing soldiers up the walkway, all aiming their weapons at me.

One step forward. “I’m Captain Sokolov, and I order you to release Colonel Blair.”

I brandish my pistol just long enough for Sokolov to glimpse at it before shoving it back against Blair’s skull. “I don’t like your toady,” I tell her. “Make him and his buddies go far away, and remind them, they’ve got no defensive grav. I can exterminate them as easily as I can kill you.”

Blair blurts out rapid orders, and her men turn and clear the hall.

“Follow me,” I tell Hawkins and Brice.

I hustle up the hall and shove Blair through the door into the control room’s lobby, taking a second before I step through to use my bug to make sure the room is empty of hostiles.

Brice seals his faceplate shut, and so does Hawkins. I leave mine open, so I can talk to Blair.

Over the comm between the three of us, Brice says, “I’m connecting with the ship, although as soon as someone in the control room realizes we’re on their network, they’ll kick us off.”

“If we move fast, it won’t matter.” Hurrying across the lobby to the main doors, I ask, “How long do you think it takes to put on one of these suits?”

“In a hurry,” Brice answers, “with help, five minutes? Three if you’ve practiced.”

“Three to five minutes,” I tell him. “That’s how long we have to get to the surface. Then our advantage goes away.” I glance back at the control room. “My guess is it’ll take them longer than that before it occurs to them to cut us off the network.”

“What about freezing our suits?” asks Brice. He and I are in our original helmets, still coded under Blair’s command hierarchy.

“She doesn’t have her helmet on,” I tell him. “I guess we’d better hope we’re out of range before somebody thinks to use it against us.”

“Three to five minutes on that, too,” says Hawkins. His UN troops use the same orange suits we do. Earth produces the uniforms by the million, and the solar system is just awash in them. “The helmet won’t work independently. It has to be powered through the suit, which won’t fire up until it has a body inside.”

We’re at the door.

“Once through,” I tell them, “we’ll go left, fly as fast as we can to the end of the corridor, make another left down a short hall, and then a lift will take us up to level one. We have to pass through the domed recreation pavilion up there to reach an airlock that’ll give us access to the surface.”

“That glass dome we came through after the Trogs first attacked us?” asks Brice.

“That’s the place.” I turn for a quick glance at each of them. “Brice, tell Penny to bring the ship down for the pickup.”

Brice laughs. “I thought you and Phil were connected via bug-net.”

“Him and his Tick might know what’s going on, but they’re too far away for me to sense them.”

Hawkins chuckles as I shove Blair through the door.

Chapter 45

I glance in both directions. “Shit.”

Brice and Hawkins are out of the lobby and into the hall in seconds, weapons up, one pointing left, the other right.

A handful of soldiers is taking up positions in both directions, weapons readied, making the threat. More are coming into the hall.

“Well, boss?” asks Brice.

“Shoot if they shoot,” I tell him. “Stick to the plan, let’s take this witch for a ride.”

Blair glares at me and shouts something I don’t listen to because her shout turns to a scream as I hold her by the collar and take off. Flying down the hall, I accelerate toward the soldiers arrayed to stop us.

Brice and Hawkins don’t need instruction. They’re right behind me.

Ahead, I see wide eyes and hesitation.

Blair sounds like a Stuka screaming down from above.

“Max defensive grav!” I shout into my comm.

Red railgun rounds spray past us from behind, hitting walls after deflecting from our shields.

Brice curses. Like me, he doesn’t want to shoot. Despite the situation, these soldiers aren’t our enemies.

“Fire?” asks Hawkins.

A few more rounds hit the wall just ahead. I hope they’re just trying to scare us. I shout, “No!”

The soldiers ahead dodge out of our way, diving to the floor or pinning themselves against walls. We blow past, bowling them over with the combined effect of three strong grav fields.

The fire from behind stops.

We reach the side hall, and I decelerate hard. I have to grab Blair by the belt to keep her with me as I make the turn. We both hit the wall on the way around. My defensive field bounces me off, and I careen forward. Blair is bumped and scraped, but we stay together.

We reach the lift in a flash and come to a stop, panting.

I glance up to make sure the lift is clear. “Everybody good?”

Nods from both Hawkins and Brice as they level their weapons at our rear flank.

“Up we go!” I jump into the lift tube and accelerate.

Hawkins comes in right behind, and Brice follows—all too close, all too fast.

I exit on sub level one.

Hawkins pops out half a second later, knocking me down and sending both Blair and me tumbling into the hall. Brice is out of the tube next.

I’m tumbling, a victim of my defensive grav field, as I realize three of Blair’s troops are standing just down the hall, surprised.

Blair situates her feet beneath her and pieces the situation together before I do, shouting at the three that she’s being kidnapped.

I bounce off the ceiling, trying to figure out which way is down as my head spins, and I scold myself for using too much defensive grav.

The three soldiers rush me.

Before I know it, I’ve got hands all around, trying to push through my grav field and grip me, grasping at my weapon, my helmet, my H pack.

Brice hits all of us unexpectedly with the full force of his accelerating suit. The impact sends me spinning down the hall amidst the three soldiers, one with blood and teeth burbling from his mouth, another cursing, and the last dazed, with eyes rolled back in her head.

I focus on orienting my suit and taking control of my trajectory, and turning down my defensive grav. “Where’s Blair?”

“She was just here,” says Hawkins.

I turn to see he’s on his feet, back by the lift, weapon up, and coming toward us.

Brice is in the hall near me, watching the three soldiers spin off toward a ninety-degree turn ahead of us. “Only one way she could have gone.” He takes off in a burst of blue grav wash.

I wave Hawkins to come, and I follow Brice, making the turn just in time to see Blair struggling with him as he grabs her from behind and lifts her. Brice glances back at me.

“Just through the open doorway ahead of you,” I tell him.

Brice gives me a nod and accelerates away.

Hawkins catches up in a snap, and I give him a smile as we take off together. I realize he’s exceptionally competent with his grav controls.

We zip through the doorway a few seconds behind Brice and fly up a dozen stairs, and suddenly we’re in the dome in the company of nearly twenty people, all lounging in chairs, taking their leisure time to sit under the stars and watch the low-g fountain undulate its water into living art.

“Everybody stay seated!” I shout as I wave my weapon at them.

Hawkins brandishes his as he pans across the room, making sure they all know they’re each a trigger pull away from the end of their lives.

Brice pushes Blair toward the airlock door.

She protests and flails her limbs.

“Put on your mask,” Brice orders as he punches the button to cycle the airlock. “This next part is going to suck for you, but not as much as it will if you don’t have your mask on.”

I don’t know if Blair can hear him through the helmet, nonetheless, she grabs at the mask we gave her. She knows what’s coming.

A woman and then a man courageously stand. “You can’t take her out there,” the woman says, pointing at the airlock. “She’ll die.”

“What are you doing, Kane?” It’s some guy. “Is this it? Are you really a Trog spy?”

“I believed you,” says the woman. “I thought the propaganda was bullshit.”

“Look,” I shout, “Blair’s going to be fine. She threatened to kill us.”

“Don’t,” Hawkins tells me. “You can’t litigate this here.”

The airlock door is open, and Brice pushes Blair inside. “The comms are down,” he tells me. “I can’t raise the ship. It’s just us three now.”

Hawkins taps his helmet as he backs toward the door. “I’ve got just you two.”

“Inside,” I tell him.

I back in, pointing my pistol outward as I pull the door closed behind me.

Blair has her mask on, and she’s screaming at me about all the terrible things she’s going to have done to me when her wrath comes home to roost.

I pull my faceplate down just as I pick up a telepathic image from Phil.

The ship is coming down outside.

Air whistles out of the airlock and Blair’s panic turns shrill as she grasps her hands over her mask, deathly afraid it’ll pop off and leave her at the mercy of the cold vacuum.

The three of us in suits wait silently as the air drains away. Brice points his weapon at the outer door, and Hawkins does the same.

All of Blair’s animated protests turn into a horrified stare as she pushes her back to the wall. “I’m freezing!” she shouts. “Don’t do this!”

The airlock finishes. The outer door pops open.

Brice goes out first, panning right to left with his weapon.

The Rusty Turd is setting down in a cloud of dust just a dozen meters away.

Hawkins follows Brice out, weapon up.

“Clear!” calls Brice. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 46

Blue grav surges all around as the ship blasts away from the Potato.

“Still nobody around but us,” Phil tells me over the comm.

I glance at Brice. He shrugs. The absence of ships means only one thing.

None too gently, I seat Blair on the exam table in what passes for an infirmary on the Turd. We’re inside the ship’s pressurized compartments, but she’s still wearing her breathing mask, with eyes searing tungsten hate-needles at me through the glass faceplate as she gasps to the point of hyperventilating. She’s shivering. Her skin is blotchy with cold on the verge of frostbite over new bruises.

It’s obvious her short minutes exposed to the vacuum were unpleasant.

I point at a cabinet on the other side of Hawkins. “Grab me a blanket out of there.”

He cuts his eyes at me disapprovingly as he reaches into the cabinet. I don’t think he wants me to keep her alive.

“Not that one,” I tell him. “The ones on the bottom in the plastic wrap. They’ll automatically heat up when you break the seal.”

He unwraps the blanket and throws it over Blair’s shoulders.

I comm the bridge, “Phil, can you come back here?”

He instantly steps through the door. “I knew you were going to ask.”

“Everything okay up there?” I ask Penny.

“All’s good. Where are we headed?”

“Just hide out in the vacuum for now,” I answer. “We’ll have a destination in a minute.”

I unlock and raise my faceplate, and then remove Blair’s mask.

“You’re an imbecile,” she croaks. “Do you even know what the hell you’re doing?”

I nod. “Where did you send the fleet?”

She looks down at her discolored arms and rubs a hand over her skin. “You are a piece of shit.”

“I know. Where did you send the fleet?”

She glares up at me. “If you think I’m telling you that, you’re the dumbest spy who ever lived.”

I turn to Phil.

“Ceres,” he tells me.

Blair gawks at him for half a second before hitting me with a laugh. “You idiots think you can read my mind? Ha! You’re morons.”

“Yeah,” I answer. “When did they leave?”

Blair clamps up and turns away. “You’ll hang for this.”

“Just over two hours ago,” Phil answers for her.

Even I’m impressed. Turning back to Blair, I ask, “What about the—”

“Stop asking me questions!” She tries to pull herself off the examining table, but Brice puts a heavy hand on her shoulder to keep her from standing up.

“The other two bases?” I ask. “What about their ships?”

“Stop it!” Blair shouts, angry tears running out of her eyes. “Stop it, damn you!”

“All going to Ceres,” Phil tells me. “He looks down at his d-pad. Looks like the attack started thirty minutes ago.”

“Thirty minutes?” It’s my turn to shout anger at Blair. “And you were sitting behind your desk like nothing special was going on? Your whole fleet is engaged.”

“Not the whole fleet,” Phil clarifies. “She told them to engage as soon as they arrived. They’re not going in together.”

“What?” I grab Blair by the shoulder. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

She’s not intimidated. “We had to respond, and we had to do it before you and your spy compatriots gave us away.”

“My God!” I step back. “You don’t know the first damn thing about tactics.”

I turn to Phil. “Get back to the bridge.” Over the comm, I call, “Penny, get us to Ceres as fast as you can.” I turn to Brice. “Have three of your people put Blair in a suit, secure her hands, and bring her to the bridge.” I lean over to face Blair, noses nearly touching. “Now you’re gonna see what the truth is.”

Chapter 47

My soldiers are good despite their negligent training back on earth. They do their jobs efficiently.

Blair is in a seat at the back of the bridge, buckled in, wrists bound, and pissed off. She’s been dressed in one of the spare orange suits loaded along with our other supplies back on Iapetus. It doesn’t fit her well. She doesn’t have an H pack installed, so no power. She isn’t wearing a helmet, though we have one for her nearby.

Penny is in the pilot’s seat, Phil, Jablonsky, and Tarlow are all at their stations. The Gray is alone, sitting in his brightly lit room, feeling whatever passes for tension along with the rest of us.

We have two techs on the railgun that runs up our axis—a man and a woman whose names I don’t even know yet. I hope the gun will do what Spitz promised.

Hawkins is in the platoon compartment with his two crews of three—pilots, navigators, and comm officers—all preparing to use their weapons the way they probably haven’t since whatever passed for basic training up on Iapetus. They seem like good people, not one of them complains.

Brice is up front with them. He and Lenox divided our remaining troops into two fire teams. With Hawkins’s people, that gives me three units, not even half a platoon.

We strobe through a final jump, as Phil brings us to a place far enough away from Ceres that he and his Tick are able to tell me what’s going on, but not so close we’ll be noticed.

It only takes minutes to put it all together.

We need to get down there and attack the Trogs. It’s time for the pep talk.

I open a comm to the ship. “None of us planned to fight today—war happens on its own schedule.” I can’t help but cut a glare at Blair. “I can’t say what we’ll have to do. We didn’t have time to plan. We have Spitz’s wonder weapon running through the hull. We’re riding the fastest, sexiest, turd-textured beast in the whole damn universe—”

That earns me some chuckles.

“—and pretty much the whole damn Trog fleet is waiting where we’re going.” I take a moment to let that sink in. “On the bright side, these are the same odds we faced our first day up, and we took out three Trog cruisers that day.”

The platoon whoops and hollers. We have some confidence against long odds.

“Like that day, the battle is already underway. The Trog fleet just took out the Free Army headquarters up on Callisto. They caught us by surprise and destroyed most of the fleet. They killed over a hundred ships—Arizona-class and Beijing-class—while they were docked on the surface. Because the Trogs are a bunch of stupid Neanderthals and Ticks, they shot their wad trying to pound the complex to dust. The cruisers that didn’t use up all of their railguns slugs used up most of them. That might work to our advantage. We have twenty-seven assault ships either engaged or soon to be. By our count, there are more than thirty Trog cruisers down there. The rest high-tailed it out to the Trojans to resupply. Things are fucked up, but we’re grunts. This is just another day at the office for us.”

More whoops.

“Sit tight up there. We’re going to try to blow as many of these cruisers out of the sky as we can. We’ll only disembark to take a cruiser if the situation calls for it. Get ready to fight.” I close the comm and open a private link to Jablonsky. “Once we’re down there, find Jill and open up a comm link to any surviving ships.”

“Surviving?” Jablonsky asks. He’s more of a pessimist than I am.

Chapter 48

We bubble jump one more time. We’re too close for safety. However, with our new computerized systems, I’m feeling bold.

The Rusty Turd pops out of bubble a thousand klicks up from the surface of Ceres. We’re not directly above the captured SDF base, but we’re pretty close.

Far below us, there’s almost too much happening to take in.

“Tarlow,” I order, “get me a picture up. Phil, max our defensive grav. Penny, orient us nose down. Power up the grav lens.”

“They’ll see us,” Phil warns. And he’s right, once the grav field from that lens flares, every Gray in the fleet will see us shining brightly up here like a brilliant blue gargoyle, poised to swoop down and kill their babies.

“Phil,” I tell him, “you and the Gray make sure there aren’t any Trogs out here trying to flank us.”

That’s our vulnerability. From the sides and from the rear, our defenses aren’t sufficient to stop their railgun rounds.

“Here!” Tarlow hollers, pointing at his screens.

“Thirty-three Trog vessels,” Phil announces.

My grav senses are nearly overwhelmed by the number of ships and high-velocity projectiles careening through space. I look over Tarlow’s shoulder and see an array of bright shapes moving in an intricate dance like a bait ball corralled by oceanic predators.

The Grays in those vessels have already learned the Arizona-class ships are a danger and they’ve adjusted their tactics. Their formation is roughly spherical with cruisers oriented in different directions, seeming to move randomly. They’re flying on interweaving paths in every direction, keeping their rows of railguns oriented outward. They aren’t allowing themselves to be stationary targets and they don’t want their assailants to know which direction the defensive fire will come from.

It’ll be impossible to attack one without opening my ship up to flanking fire from another.

Goddammit!

“Seventeen of the cruisers aren’t shooting,” Phil tells us.

I wouldn’t have guessed that. There are too many slugs flying out in every direction from the formation.

“Where are our ships?” I ask Tarlow.

“Seven coming in on an attack run,” Phil informs us. “Two thousand klicks out.”

Tarlow is fiddling with his machines, working on the resolution. “Here! Here!” he points.

I see the seven Arizona-class ships. No, four Arizona-class and three Beijing-class ships, flying in a loose formation down the same vector.

“Three of the Trog ships have taken hits,” Phil tells us.

I nudge Tarlow. “Find them.”

“One of the Trog cruisers has been rammed by three of the Arizona-class ships. One Cruiser has been rammed near the bridge by the other Arizona, and one cruiser has a Beijing-class grav locked to its hull.”

“Jablonsky,” I call. “I need to talk to those captains.”

“Working on it,” he answers, “but they’re busy.”

“I need a status.”

I’m doing the math. We have twenty-seven ships left in the fleet and twelve accounted for. “I need to know where those other fifteen are.”

I turn to Penny and tell her, “Pick one of those cruisers that’s still firing. Line up a course. We’re going to kill it.”

“Kill it?” she asks me. “How? We can’t just blow these things up.”

“I know.”

“I can go in shooting—do you want to aim for the bridge, the reactors, or the drive array? Each target is half a kilometer apart. We can’t just strafe and hope for the best. We need to pick a point and pound it.”

She’s right. I hadn’t thought this part through. The reactors in the heart of the ship are my first impulse, yet there are three of them, spread over a relatively wide area. They’ll be hard to knock out. My intuition tells me the drive array will be the least defended if we hit it from the flanks. The bridge, if the Grays are smart, will have the strongest defensive fields around it. They aren’t strong enough to deflect a ramming Arizona-class ship, we’ve already established that, but they might be strong enough to deflect the plasma fire from our main gun.

“Phil,” I call, “me and Tarlow will work on finding the other ships. You and Penny pick a Trog cruiser, find its gravity field weaknesses and let’s go light it up. Penny, how fast can you get us down there?”

“Max grav?” she asks rhetorically, “Ninety seconds.”

I nod to Penny. “Phil, you and the Tick have ninety seconds. Give me a target we can kill.”

Chapter 49

“Is it possible they aren’t here yet?” I ask Tarlow.

He’s leaning close to his screens, trying to coax more information out of the pixels. He points. “Here. And here. I think those are yours.”

I see a broken tube, and a scatter of fast-moving debris. “Wrecks?”

“Another.” He stabs his finger at a monitor.

Crap. Twelve unaccounted for.

“I have Jill,” Jablonsky tells me.

My degree of relief is surprising. “Connect me through.”

Jablonsky works at his console with quick fingers as he tells me, “Her ship is one of the three responsible for ramming that one cruiser. They’re going for the bridge. Here, I have her.”

“Jill?” I call.

“I only have a second,” she tells me. “We just blew the forward doors. We’re waiting for the atmosphere to dissipate, then we’re rushing in.”

“You’re taking the ship?” I ask.

“Same as last time,” she assures me. “Three full platoons. Light casualties so far.”

“Get it done and get out,” I urge.

“Same plan as before,” she laughs. “We’ll bounce this bitch through their formation and turn this—”

“Jill?”

Crackles and syllables.

“Jill?” I turn to Jablonsky.

He shakes his head. “I’m trying.”

“Don’t bother her directly,” I tell him. “Keep in contact with the bridge crew on each. I want to know if they get in trouble.”

More trouble!

“Phil, Penny?” I ask, seeing the inertial field blazing bright around us. I know we’re on our attack run and we’re accelerating. “Are we on course?”

“We’ve picked one that seems to have no shortage of ammo,” Penny tells me.

“Over ninety-percent chance we can disable it on one run,” Phil says, “if we aim at the drive array. Maybe seventy-percent we can take out a reactor, and maybe fifty-percent we can destroy the bridge. Which do you want?”

“The drive array doesn’t take them out of the fight.” I clench my teeth as I consider my options. “Penny, give us a course to come at them from the flank. I want to use the grav lens to ram right through their bridge and blast out the other side if the railgun doesn’t do its work.” I turn to Phil. “One hundred percent.”

“Ramming is a gamble,” says Phil. “It might destroy us.”

“Penny,” I pat her on the shoulder. “Max grav. Let’s see what this ship will do.”

“Those attacking ships are being shot to pieces!” Tarlow shouts. He’s freaking out a little bit.

“How many?”

“Two destroyed. One out of control.”

I look down at Tarlow’s monitors and see a ship flying high-g corkscrews out into space. “Which ones are left?” At the resolution on the monitors, I can’t tell the difference between the Beijing-class and the Arizonas.

“Arizonas,” he answers. “Both.”

I watch as they each impact a cruiser amidships, shoving it so hard into a spin that its railgun rounds pummel another nearby cruiser. Explosions follow, and the Trog ship goes dead.

“They hit in the reactors,” Tarlow tells me.

“Jablonsky,” I call, “hail those ships and tell them to disengage and ram another ship. That one’s no longer a threat.”

Chapter 50

“Strap in!” Penny shouts.

The ship is jerking right to left, and the inertial grav is struggling to keep up.

I reluctantly strap into the captain’s chair. I don’t have the best view of what Tarlow, Penny, and Phil are doing from the seat, but I’m buckled in tight, which I’ll need once we ram the cruiser.

“Incoming!” Phil shouts.

The ship shudders.

“We’re deflecting,” he tells us. Our ship’s defensive field is doing its job, but we still have to fight the momentum of big railgun slugs pounding us from the flank.

Through the tiny forward-facing window, I see a Trog cruiser looming large ahead of us, a web of complex defensive fields wrapped around it in glowing jellyfish tentacles to keep it safe.

“Firing!” Penny pulls the trigger. It sounds like a zipper made of anvils ringing through our steel hull. It feels like a road covered in speed bumps, slowing us and throwing me forward in my seat.

A blazing, thin stream of plasma rips into the cruiser, crossing the distance in an instant, splattering off the blue fields and tearing through.

The hull erupts.

Penny sends another burst, and all I see is a chaos of gravity fields, fire, and shrapnel.

The ship jerks again with another sound, our familiar friend. We’re taking fire.

“Hit it!” shouts Phil. “We hit it.”

I strain my grav sense to see our target cruiser’s bridge. It’s disintegrating.

Penny pulls the trigger again, and another stream of plasma rounds tears into the cruiser’s bow, easily piercing the disrupted grav fields and turning the hull metal into molten explosive gas powerful enough to bump the cruiser off its course.

“Penny, max grav us the hell out of here,” I order, and our inertial bubble flashes brilliant blue as she pours twenty g’s of acceleration through our drive array and we arc across a course change to get away from a storm of railgun slugs flying across our path.

“One down!” Penny’s giddy over her kill as we put kilometers between us and her victim.

“Tarlow,” I remind, looking past my excitement to focus on the business at hand. We’re not the only ship. “Stay busy, buddy. Find me the rest of our fleet.”

He looks away from the small viewing window and goes back to work, glancing around with worried eyes.

“Brice,” I call. “Any damage up there? We took some hits.”

“Two right through the goddamn platoon cabin,” he answers. “Can’t those bastards aim somewhere else?”

“Status?”

“All is good,” he answers. “Nobody hit. “No damage to the gun.”

Phil glances my way. “We took a round through one of the pressurized compartments.”

“Where?”

“I can’t find it. It didn’t damage any system I have sensors on.”

“Brice,” I’m worried about the railgun, “send a few people back to check the rest of the ship. Tell them to be careful. We’ll be pulling some serious g’s to get around for our next run. Phil, find us a target. Tarlow, I need to know where those ships are.” I click over to Hawkins. “I have a question.”

“I’m here to serve.”

I laugh. “Are you taking smartass lessons from Brice?”

“No. It comes naturally.”

“Your two flight crews, can they handle a Trog cruiser?”

“They’re just like ours,” he tells me. “Except the seats are different.”

“If we put one of your crews down on the ship that Jill’s platoons are assaulting, can they fly it?”

“Flying isn’t the problem,” he answers. “Keeping it is.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “See if one crew will volunteer. We’ll take this one step at a time.”

Chapter 51

“Penny,” I make my request, “after we hammer this next ship, try and bring us in close enough to the Trog cruiser Jill is assaulting so I can drop off a flight crew.”

She turns to look at me like I’ve just lost my mind.

I smile in the most reassuring way I can. “If you can do it without opening us up to too much flanking fire.”

Shaking her head, she says, “Will do.” Then she and Phil go to work.

“Tarlow,” I ask for what seems like one too many times. “Where are our other ships? Are they here, yet? What about those two that took out the Trog cruiser just after we got here? I need to know what the hell is going on out there.”

He points at his screen, showing me the surface of the planet as he shakes his head. Four new craters are still blossoming debris into space. “Near as I can tell, our ships came in too fast, deflected off the grav fields of cruisers, and couldn’t pull up. They impacted, here, here, here, and here.”

Shit.

Eight left unaccounted for. I scan the screen.

He points. “See this mass of debris drifting into orbit?”

“I do.” It’s a hundred klicks from the battle and moving slowly away.

“I think one or two ships impacted a cruiser too fast. Blew the hell out of everything.”

Six or seven left.

“I see four circling out for another attack run.” Tarlow points at the screen again. “Two here.” They’re coming around at the top of an arc and will be impacting in another forty-five seconds. “There, that one is just getting away.”

As I watch it accelerate from the swirl of cruisers, railgun fire flares all around and it explodes in a shower of debris.

“One more over there.” Tarlow taps the screen.

It’s moving too slow. “It’s damaged.”

“They’re ignoring it for the moment,” Tarlow replies.

And that looks like the score right there. We’re taking out Trog cruisers, however, we’re losing more ships than we’re knocking out.

I think back to the thousand assault ships I saw standing in the Arizona desert, bleaching and rusting while the desert dust settled over their shoddy hulls. How could we build so many brutal weapons, plenty to destroy the Trog fleet, and then manage them so poorly? How could the SDF piddle about with their hundred and fifty ships, waiting for some perfect moment to attack, until they were caught with their pants down sitting on Callisto?

And now this, Blair has thrown the last of our fleet into an uncoordinated desperate swing for the fences.

It’s no wonder we’re losing this war.

“Jablonsky,” I shout, “tell every surviving ship captain to get the hell out of here. Rendezvous at the Potato.”

“They won’t listen to us.”

“Orders from Blair.” I glance back at her. She won’t meet my eye. “Get over there,” I tell her, pointing to Jablonsky’s station. “Pass the order.”

“What about the ships that are locked in?” asks Penny.

“We’re staying to cover them until they break free.” I look back at Blair. She’s not moving. “Don’t kill the rest of them for nothing. Tell them to break off and retreat.”

She shakes her head. “We may not win today, but we’re not cowards like you.”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shout. Really, what the hell is wrong with her? I think she’s come unstuck from reality. “Do you see what’s happening? Are you going to kill all these people for nothing?”

“I called for the retreat,” Jablonsky tells me. “They’re not paying attention.”

“Buckle up,” Penny calls. “Twenty seconds to impact.”

The hull buzzes loudly as our axial gun rips through a stream of rounds.

I see them veer off target, pushed by a well-structured defensive grav field.

Penny triggers another stream that doesn’t hit the bridge of our quarry.

“Hold on for impact!” She shouts as blue blasts so brightly it stuns the bug in my head, nearly blinding me.

Chapter 52

My head is swimming, and I can’t find my balance.

Tarlow pukes inside his helmet.

Blair is screaming and holding on.

Penny is struggling with the ship’s controls.

I shout, “Talk to me, Penny, I need to know what’s going on!”

“We rammed it,” Phil explains, seemingly unfazed by the gravity flux and ensuing disorientation. “Their defensive field was too well-structured for our rounds to get through.” He glances at Penny. “We followed your orders.”

“Are we okay?” I ask.

The inertial field starts to settle. The sense of spinning dissipates. Penny accelerates the ship.

“The impact sent us into a crazy tumble,” Phil goes on. “Penny has it under control now.”

“Did we do some damage?” I ask. “Or did we glance off?”

Phil is looking out through the hull, utilizing his fine-tuned grav sense. He nods and smiles. “Destroyed the bridge. Tore a gaping hole through the bow where the bridge used to be. The ship is blasting gas through its forward sections. That cruiser is out of the fight.”

“Do we know where Jill’s ship is?” I ask.

Penny seems to have the ship flying straight enough I can feel the momentum stabilize, however, I can sense a big cruiser coming up right in front of us.

The axial gun rips through several hundred rounds as the ship lurches backward with the momentum transfer.

The cruiser’s hull erupts in fire and blasting metal fragments. Penny’s not aiming. She’s just shooting because the cruiser is unexpectedly there.

More plasma rounds fire, running up the length of the hull as Penny steers our ship away from a collision amidships.

“I have them.” Phil points over our heads. “Back that way, eight klicks.”

I turn and just make out a crude image of a damaged cruiser with three assault ships jammed into its hull.

Penny pulls the ship into a tight turn to line up on the cruiser. “What do you have in mind, Dylan? How do you want me to play this?” Her uncertainty over this choice is frazzling her.

Before I can answer, the cruiser bursts blinding blue and flashes out of sight.

“Bubble jump!” shouts Phil, as a powerful field shoves our ship off-course, careening toward Ceres’s surface.

As I realize we’re headed for an impact, Penny swings the ship into another high-g turn, straining the inertial bubble past its limits and punching me with an eight-g fist that knocks the wind out of my lungs and the liquids through my rectal tube.

We come out of the turn in time to see three of the big Trog cruisers crashing into one another in the chaos caused by the jumping of Jill’s cruiser.

“What was that?” asks Tarlow, shaking his head to get the puke off the inside of his faceplate.

“We still have atmosphere on the bridge!” I shout at him. “Wipe that shit off. I need you!”

He pops open his faceplate and works at wiping the bile away.

I turn to Phil. “Was that Jill? Or are the Grays still flying that ship?”

“Can’t say.”

“Doesn’t matter, then.” Time to make the best of the situation. “Penny, run straight for the nearest ship’s drive array. Shred it. Phil, taking momentum into consideration, be ready to send Penny to the next closest Trog ship. Target the drive arrays. Let’s pin as many of them here as we can. And keep them too busy worrying about us to pay attention to the others.”

We’re blazing blue in the cabin even before I’m finished.

Phil is rattling something to Penny on their shared comm link. Blair has decided it’s time to interject her mastery of tactical command and she’s babbling crap I’m not listening to. If only I could freeze her suit or cut her comm.

Brice links in. “Everything going okay up there? The ride’s getting pretty rough.”

“We’re stuck in a rat-filled shit pit up here—we’re holding our own,” I answer. “Stay on the command comm to keep your people in the loop. We’re not getting off the ship today unless things really go to hell.”

“Aye, Captain.”

I roll my eyes and smile as I tell him, “Major.”

Brice laughs. He’s always good for that.

The axial gun blazes out three quick bursts, and Penny shouts victoriously.

I glance forward using my bug to see the tail end of a cruiser coming to pieces as we tear through the debris field and cut a hard turn to line up on another victim.

Another cruiser, one with apparently no slugs to fire, makes a jump and sends the local grav fields into momentary chaos.

Penny fights with the control to keep us lined up, and the axial gun rips again. Plasma rounds stream through wiggly ribbons of fluctuating gravity and veer away from their target.

We fired from too far away, but we can pull twenty g’s to move in for the kill. Penny is wringing every amp out of our reactor and grav plates, so we close the distance to our victim in seconds and the axial gun buzzes again.

Another drive array blasts to pieces.

“Hell yeah!” shouts Phil, as he cuts his comm back to Penny and we line up on another target.

Two more ships jump, and one of the remaining cruisers is pushed so far off course it rams the planet below.

While that’s taking the attention of every Gray helmsman in the Trog fleet, we maim another cruiser.

The cruisers with slug loads are onto us and our tricks. They’re filling the sky with glowing rounds, trying to track us, a ship moving at speeds they haven’t seen before, and trying to put their slugs through our hull, not paying enough attention to what lies beyond, mostly other Trog cruisers.

Yet they all have defensive grav fields tuned for just such an assault, so nearly all of the slugs are deflected through the chaos and sent in every which direction.

The sky is turning into a metal grinder.

More ships jump, and our gun is blazing so quickly it barely pauses for new targets. Penny’s shooting at anything that crosses our bow.

“Tarlow!” I holler, “Where are our ships?”

“Hell if I know!” he shouts back.

“We’re dry! We’re dry!” shouts a voice over the comm.

“Who’s that?” I ask.

“Benson, the gunner,” the man answers.

“We’re out of slugs?” I’m frustrated. The damn thing is turning out to be a seriously lethal weapon.

“Not a one left,” he answers excitedly.

“Shit.”

Phil gathers his adrenaline-soaked wits the quickest. “We should go.”

Penny swerves hard to avoid a flurry of railgun slugs.

More cruisers make the jump to light speed, and the rest start strobing out of sight.

Guns from down on the surface start to light up the sky with their fire.

“Tarlow,” I ask, “is anybody still here?”

“I can’t tell anything from anything.” He’s frustrated by the kaleidoscope of deadly metal represented by the dots on his screen. He mutters, “We’re going to be killed.”

I keep my frustration to myself as I scan across the bridge and see the eyes looking back at me.

“We can ram them,” Phil tells me. “But you know that’s risky. We’ll probably survive, or we might incur enough damage that we can’t get away.”

I know he’s right.

We’re better off coming back later when we have a full load of ammunition, when we have a few more ships equipped like this one. “Tarlow, you have ten seconds to scan the area as thoroughly as you can and get me a full picture of the aftermath. Penny, max grav us out of here and bubble jump as soon as you feel safe.”

Chapter 53

Our first jump seems to last forever, though it only runs for seven or eight minutes, landing us a billion miles perpendicular to the plane of solar rotation. Each of us is quiet when we come out of bubble. We’re all thinking about what just happened, trying to count a score out of the chaos.

“The Potato?” Phil asks, as the vast emptiness settles in. We’re farther than any of us has ever been from the realm of our world.

I shake my head. “Not yet.”

Blair unbuckles herself and starts in about something.

“Brice,” I comm, “send a few people up here and get Blair off my bridge.”

It only takes a few moments for Brice to enter with Lenox and Silva in tow.

Looking at them, I ask, “Would you put her in the room with the Gray and stay there to keep an eye on her?”

“Will do,” Lenox tells me.

Silva smiles, and over a private comm tells me, “Good job, sir.”

I smile back. Dammit. Just six more months to get past the heebie jeebies over her age.

Brice stays put. “I notice we’re not jumping. Where are we?”

I point him to one of the small bridge windows. “A billion miles from nowhere.”

“We’re doing a lot of that lately,” he laughs. “What are you going to do with Blair?”

“I don’t know. I just want her out of my sight.”

“What’s the plan?” Penny asks. “We can stay as long as you like, but sitting here doesn’t achieve anything.”

I pat her on the back. “You did a good job, Penny. I look around the bridge. All of you did. Even you, Tarlow.”

He snorts, and I slap him on the back to let him know I really do appreciate the effort. “Tarlow, I need to know the score.”

“That’s crass,” he sneers, speckles of vomitus still splattered on his faceplate. “This isn’t a game.” He doesn’t yet appreciate my sincerity.

“Let me know how many ships we destroyed or disabled. Not just us, our whole fleet. I need to know how many of ours got away. And if you can, I need jump vectors.”

“Why?” Phil asks. “If they don’t go back to the Potato, does it matter where they went?”

I start to tell him I’ll round them up and give them hope to push on, then I stop. I see his point. “You think they’ll desert?”

He nods.

I glance at Penny and Brice.

“After that fiasco,” asks Brice, “wouldn’t you?”

Is our conviction so frail?

Or am I expecting too much of people with more than a mild interest in self-preservation?

“What about Jill’s ship?” I ask, looking at Phil. “She and the other two that rammed that Trog cruiser. They were lodged inside when it jumped.”

“You want to go after them?” asks Penny, disbelief huge under her tone. “She’s our friend too, but…” Her voice trails to nothing. She believes Jill is dead, or at least chasing her is futile.

“Why would they jump?” I ask. “The Grays didn’t have anything to gain by it.”

“You mean, you don’t know what they had to gain,” Phil corrects.

He’s right. “Do you have any ideas?”

Phil shakes his head.

“It only makes sense,” I say, “if they were hoping to go somewhere where they could find help. The battle was too intense for them to get assistance from any of the cruisers nearby.”

“Or,” Brice counters, “Jill and all the others are dead, and the cruiser’s captain knew he could do nothing to help in the battle, so he bubble jumped to safety. They could be headed to any of a dozen Trog resupply bases and who knows how many we don’t know about. They could be anywhere right now, filling their holds, cleaning the bodies out, and trying to unjam those assault ships from the holes in their hull.”

They haven’t been gone long enough for anything like that to happen, still, I take Brice’s point. That could be their goal. “What about jumping back to their home world?” I ask, as I look around to let them in on my latest speculation. “Could they go back and take three copies of our grav lens with them? What happens when they come back here with ships equipped with those?”

Phil’s thinking and scratching his lips as he puts together a thought. “I don’t think so.”

“Elaborate,” I request.

“You know as well as anybody how finicky jumping can be. With all that unbalanced mass and structural damage, I just don’t know.”

“Yeah,” I argue, “but we saw them jump. Finicky isn’t a problem.”

“They made a hell of a mess when they jumped out,” says Phil, staring off in some random direction, collecting his thoughts, or looking at something with the bug in his head. “We both saw it, me and Nick, but didn’t put things together until just now. They weren’t stable. Their grav field was half-chaotic. That’s why they caused such a local grav flux when they jumped.”

“What are you saying?” I ask.

“They might not have the control they needed over direction or speed. They could be anywhere.”

Phil is right, yet I can’t let it go. “Jill is our friend. Her people are our brothers and sisters. The soldiers in the other two ships are the same. They’re us. We’re them.”

Brice laughs darkly and goes to buckle up. He knows what’s coming next.

“Phil—”

Penny raises a hand to shut me up. “We don’t have any ammunition for the axial gun. Didn’t we just decide ramming was a tactic that carried too much risk and should be avoided, given that we now have a much better way to shoot those bastards out of the sky?”

“Yes.” Of course, she’s right. I can’t let it go, though. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if we find that Trog ship, maybe nothing, maybe we’ll ram it. We’ll decide when we get there.”

“You’re missing a whole lot of ‘ifs’ in there.” Phil turns to his console and starts working the controls, which I know is mostly just a way to disengage. He does nearly all of his grav work in his head.

“Calculate their direction,” I tell him. “We’ll jump down their heading, coming out at intervals of a second or two, look around, and see if we see them.”

“If they haven’t decided to mask their destination by jumping in a random direction,” says Phil. “You know, like we do.”

“We’re going to check,” I tell him. “They’d do the same for us.”

“How far?” Phil sighs. He’s reluctant, yet he’ll do as I ask. “Out to the Kuiper belt? All the way to the next star? What?”

“We’ll run a few billion miles out. If we don’t come across the ship, then we’ll go back to the Potato and see who made it.”

“We need another load of ammo from Iapetus,” Penny tells me. She likes the power that axial gun gives us.

I nod. “We’ll squeeze it in.”

Chapter 54

We give Ceres a wide berth and come out a half-million miles away. We’re waiting on a heading to take us down the path Phil calculates is the one most likely followed by the Trog cruiser.

My bridge crew is cooperating, yet with each passing minute, it’s more and more obvious to me they believe we’re wasting our time.

Talking to Phil, I tell him, “Set your jump at intervals you can confidently scan for a cruiser.”

“You think they’ll be waiting out in space for us somewhere?” asks Penny.

“No.” I don’t take offense to the question. I simply explain, “If they’re as damaged as they seem to be, they’ll take smaller hops. I think they won’t be able to make 8c.”

“They won’t be able to stay on course,” she argues.

“Still,” I counter, “they have to have a destination, right? They’ll readjust as they go along, always moving toward the same place.”

“Well,” Phil tells us, “the only place down this heading is Pluto.”

Brice laughs.

“They have a base out on Pluto?” Tarlow asks, not sure what the joke his, not knowing that the joke only exists in the realm of Brice’s dark humor.

Nobody responds to Tarlow.

“Pluto it is, then,” I tell Phil. “Makes better sense than the Trogs just flying off to nowhere, right?”

“Nothing is nowhere,” he argues.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” scoffs Tarlow.

Phil cuts a sharp glance at him. “If you go far enough in any direction you’ll run into something eventually.”

“No, you won’t.” Tarlow isn’t buying it. “Most of the sky is black. Or haven’t you noticed?”

Phil sighs. “I’m just saying there are stars out there. There are a million, maybe a billion, within a degree of the heading we’re on, though most of what you see in front of us looks black. For all you know, those Trogs are trying to get back to their home world.”

“Only their home world would be close enough to see, wouldn’t it?” Tarlow puffs up his chest with confidence on that one. “Those cruisers will only do 8c. That’s fast, but still, it limits how far the Trogs’ home star can be, doesn’t it? Unless you think they traveled for a hundred years to get here.”

“I’m not saying that,” Phil retorts.

“They don’t have any suspended animation pods, do they?” Tarlow looks at me for confirmation. Everybody knows I’ve been on one of their ships.

I shake my head.

He glances back at Brice.

“Keep me out of it,” Brice tells him.

Tarlow looks back at me. “Any female Trogs? Any space-based agriculture? These aren’t multi-generational ships, are they?”

I shake my head again.

“What’s the point?” asks Phil, already tired of the argument.

“If they’re going to their home star,” says Tarlow, “it’s not going to be some micro-pixel of faint light from the galaxy next door. They’ll be coming from less than a few light years away. So how far are Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri—a little over four light years distant? Six months at the speeds their cruisers travel? What about Sirius A or B? Or Ross 154? You’re talking about a year to get here. I mean, what do you think the farthest distance is they traveled? How much effort is a whole planet full of human slaves worth?” Tarlow looks around to see if anybody wants to venture an answer to his rhetorical question.

“There are two hundred and fifty-nine systems within ten parsecs,” he says.

“I always wondered how long a parsec was,” mutters Penny.

Tarlow spins on her. “About 3.2 light years.”

“Good to know.” She turns back to her controls like she couldn’t care less.

“At cruiser speed,” continues Tarlow, that’s four years, right there. Anybody think the Trogs made more than a four-year, one-way trip to get here?” He looks around. “Anybody?”

I raise a hand to stop him, not because I’m tired of the rant, but because I’m suddenly thinking of a different problem. “How many of those two hundred and fifty stars are similar to our sun?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” answers Tarlow.”

“Jesus,” mutters Penny. “How do you know so much trivial shit?”

“Nerd stuck on a rock a billion miles from the sun,” he tells her. “What else is a curious man going to do but learn about the neighborhood? There’s so much stuff to learn when you’ve got nothing to do. You’d be amazed at the random shit I know. Ever heard of a Prince Rupert’s Drop? After the Trogs started developing unbreakable glass—”

“Tarlow, focus!” I interrupt. “How many with rocky planets in the Goldilocks zone?”

Tarlow’s animated command of the floor stops in a sudden gawk, which slowly turns to a smile. He wags a finger at me. “I know what you’re thinking.”

Phil glares at me because he’s reading the wrong portion of my thoughts.

Brice cuts in, looking at me with increased curiosity. “Now I’m interested, because I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“He’s trying to figure out where the Trogs’ home world is,” guesses Tarlow.

“That’s right,” I answer. “Not today, and not tomorrow. Maybe not even soon. But I’ll tell you what, we’re not going to win this war until we can take the fight to their doorstep.”

“Oh, shit.” Phil doesn’t like that idea one bit.

Brice laughs again.

Penny laughs also, but hers is more hysterical than dark.

Chapter 55

We start jumping. Between each one, we pause so Phil and the Gray can scan the vast empty area around us for the grav signature of a Trog cruiser, and then we jump again. It gets boring very quickly.

“What if we miss them?” asks Tarlow.

I ignore him, because I don’t want to be drawn into an argument where I’m pretty sure Tarlow has already figured out an answer and cemented himself into a position.

“How so?” asks Brice.

“What if we’re leapfrogging them?” Tarlow mimics a frog hopping with his hands over one another for all to see. “What if we’re scanning while they’re jumping and we’re jumping while they’re laying out their next jump?”

Penny sighs, unwilling to hide her sarcasm. “You’re such a positive guy.”

“You’re not happy to be on this snipe hunt,” Tarlow guesses. “I’m just speaking everyone’s mind. That’s all.”

“You’re not talking for me,” Penny tells him. “You just keep speaking for yourself, okay?”

“You’re not happy about this,” Tarlow argues. “I know you’re not.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Penny doesn’t turn away from her controls to answer. “We’re doing this. We’ll try to find our friends and see if they’re alright. They’d do the same for us. It’s that simple.”

“It’s a bargain, then?” Tarlow deduces. “We’re obligated because—”

“Because,” Brice cuts in with a tone that conveys his displeasure with Tarlow, “maybe it’s a good time for you to put all that shit back up your ass and do your job. Didn’t Major Kane ask you to run an analysis on the aftermath of that fight we were just in?”

Tarlow is thrown off-balance. He’s intimidated by Brice’s veiled aggression. “I’m… I’m…”

“Where is that analysis?” I ask.

Tarlow huffs and turns back to his computer monitors, taking a few seconds to pull up a series of still shots of the ships in the sky over the Ceres base. “A lot was happening,” he starts to explain. “We weren’t in an optimal place to catch everything that was going on. We may have missed some of—”

“Tarlow,” I tell him, “I get that this may not be perfectly accurate. Can you skip the qualifications and get to the meat of the answer?”

He deflates even more. “I’m just trying…” he doesn’t finish. Instead, he points at the screen. “This one shows what things looked like when we arrived.”

I sigh. “I don’t need the blow-by-blow. Not right now, anyway.”

“But—”

“Tarlow,” I tell him, “I would like a full analysis of the battle. I want to know which tactics worked and which didn’t. Just not right now. At the moment, I need the brief version. How many ships did we lose? How many Trog cruisers did we destroy?”

Tarlow’s confidence returns. “Seven Trog cruisers destroyed. Five damaged, a few of those unsalvageable in my estimation. Another four are disabled. They won’t be leaving the system until they manage to build a new drive array.”

“And us?” I ask.

“Looks like two of them got away. Maybe three. All were Arizona-class ships.”

Two? Three?

I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. I suck in a sharp breath and try to hide my dismay.

Penny sees right through my hasty mask. “It’s not your fault. It was already clusterfucked when we got there.”

Brice is suddenly standing just behind me, boots grav-locked onto the floor. He pats my shoulder. “I can go forward and kick Blair’s teeth in if you think that’ll help.”

“Ejecting her into space would help, it just won’t help the right things.” I turn to Tarlow. “Are you counting Jill’s ships?”

Tarlow thinks it’s a stupid question. “Of course not.”

“There,” Phil is suddenly erect in his seat. He’s focused forward. “Penny, don’t jump.”

“What is it?”

Tarlow starts fiddling with his controls, trying to focus his dishes forward.

“A debris field,” Phil tells us.

Chapter 56

We grav drive through ten thousand klicks, following Phil’s honed senses.

With my bug, I don’t see anything but vague blurs until we’ve crossed most of the distance.

“Wow,” utters Penny, as we draw close. “I thought that was a gas cloud or something.”

“Keep going,” Phil tells her. “I’ll let you know when to slow down.”

“I can see it, now,” Penny responds. “And I think I know when to slow down.”

“Sorry.”

“Tarlow,” I ask. “Can you map it?”

“Space junk?”

Phil tells him, “That junk is the Trog cruiser we’re chasing. And Jill’s ship, and the other two.”

I look through one of the small forward-facing windows. I can’t make out anything with enough clarity to know what the misshapen bits are.

“I think there are survivors,” Phil tells us.

“Penny,” I order, “get us there as quick as you can.”

She gooses the power.

Tarlow speculates as to what happened, but everyone’s preoccupied.

As we close in, I can see pieces of ship hull, grav plates, and railgun barrels. Railgun slugs bounce off the hull, sounding like hail. Trogs in suits, whole and in pieces, fall into our wake.

We swerve to avoid a huge piece of the cruiser’s drive array.

“They’re alive,” says Penny, staring through her forward-facing monitors. “Some of them are moving.”

“Mostly,” says Phil, “you’re seeing the effects of gas leaks from their suits.”

“Mostly?” I ask.

“I think some are alive.” Phil says it like he doesn’t quite believe it either.

“More than some.” Penny points. “Those up ahead, most of them look like they’re moving.”

“Jablonsky,” I command, “broadcast on the suit frequencies. See if any of those bodies out there… if any of those suits out there are our people.”

Looking forward, I spot sparkles of blue grav fields in the black sky. Others come to life.

“What the hell?” asks Penny.

“Power up the grav lens,” I order. “Do it, now.”

“But—”

“Do it!”

Phil does. The points of light are lost in the blue glow of our grav lens field.

Every object in space nearby is pushed away.

“Those were disruptors,” I explain. “Some of those Trogs have the presence of mind to—”

Brice pushes past, going forward, alerting the platoon over the comm. Just before exiting the bridge he turns to me. “I need to get our soldiers outside. If we’re going to search this mess for our people, we don’t want to pick up any hitchhikers, especially Trogs with disruptors wanting to hack our ship to bits.

“Penny,” I order, “you have the ship. Jablonsky, find our survivors.”

I rush after Brice.

Chapter 57

Blair, unfortunately, is back on the bridge, restrained again, buckled into a seat and out of the way. I have someone else watching her. She’s not a priority at the moment. Silva and Lenox, her recently assigned babysitters, are with me, Brice, and the rest of the platoon, along with Hawkins and his people. We’re spread out on the Rusty Turd’s hull, boots grav-locked to the metal, weapons aimed at a black sky sprinkled with ten thousand Trogs and the remains of their cruiser.

Most of the Trogs are dead. Their stiffening bodies don’t move when we fly past. However, way too many of them are alive, and most of those are ready to activate their suit grav and attack us, despite their inherent fear of flying. They have to. They’re drifting tens of millions of miles from nowhere, and the only hope they had before we arrived was to die swiftly, without significant pain. Now they have a way out—our ship.

Beside me, Silva lets loose a burst from her railgun.

Another soldier fires.

Three hundred meters out, the slugs impact a Trog’s defensive field and send him spinning in another direction. More weapons fire and light up a section of the void with red-hot arcs through the black.

Silva fires again.

The Trog she’s aiming at is farther away but spun around with his back facing us, his vulnerable side. The rounds tear through his suit and body and rip him apart.

“Got him!” Silva tells me.

“Good shooting.” I point at other Trogs, ten or more, glowing blue with suits pushing hard-g. “More up there,” I announce to the platoon. “Port side. Twenty degrees off our bow.”

Guns start to shoot in that direction.

Brice directs others to fire at a trio accelerating at us from the rear. On the platoon’s command comm, with just me him and Lenox, he asks, “How did anyone survive this?”

It wasn’t an impact that destroyed the ship,” Lenox deduces. “No impact. No broken bones, and no squished bodies.”

Brice laughs.

I don’t see the humor in it, well, not that much humor. I suggest, “Or one of the reactors exploded like that first one we destroyed over Arizona.”

Lenox disagrees. “If that was true, I think there’d be a lot more shredded bodies. Lots more mangled equipment.”

“And what do you call this?” Silva asks, unexpectedly on the channel.

“To me,” says Lenox, “it looks like somebody cracked an egg and spilled the contents all across ten kilometers of space. Like Phil was talking about, I think the instability in the structure because of the three assault ships caused the cruiser to rattle apart.”

Some of the cruiser’s pieces are a hundred or even two hundred meters long. In a way, they do look like giant sections of a cracked eggshell.

“The Trogs spilled out with everything else,” Lenox finishes.

More railgun rounds scatter across space, as most of my platoon’s guns erupt.

“No shortage of targets,” laughs Brice.

“We have plenty of ammunition, right?” I’m pretty sure we do, but with so many things going on and everything happening so fast, I’m not sure.

“Enough to kill twenty-thousand Trogs,” answers Lenox. “I watched as they loaded each box.”

“Keep an eye on how many rounds your people have,” I advise. “Maybe assign someone to start ferrying more out here. I have a feeling we’ll be running through a lot of ammo.”

Lenox passes an order and one of her people heads for the open assault door.

Brice elbows me. “Don’t worry so much. This isn’t as bad as it seems. If things get hairy, Penny will zip ten or twenty kilometers out, and we’ll be fine.”

I nod. I don’t completely agree, yet I don’t have a good argument against.

“I have survivors,” Jablonsky comms in.

Good. More than good. As much as I was hoping we’d find some, I wasn’t a believer. “Tell them each—”

“Dylan,” interrupts Phil.

“Yes.”

“We can figure it out.”

“Of course.” I go back to spotting targets and aiming my rifle, just when I spot a spindly Gray. I fire. “Silva,” I say, to get her attention, “a Gray.”

She aims her fire at it as well.

“What are you doing?” Phil is back on the line, and he’s agitated.

“You know what I’m doing.”

Silva hits the Gray, and its big head erupts.

“You’re upsetting Nick.”

The ship accelerates toward the survivor Jablonsky found.

I lower my weapon and connect with Silva on a private comm. “Kill all of those you see.”

Phil says, “Dylan, you know you’re close enough I can pick up most of what you say. I don’t need the comm for that.”

“There’s only so much I’ll do to keep your Tick happy,” I tell him.

Chapter 58

It takes most of a day. We recover seventeen, including Jill. Unfortunately, no other member of her bridge crew survives. In the tally of mortality in my head, I tick off two more friends from the grav factory. Along with them, two more bridge crews, and three platoons of forty soldiers each—we paid a substantial price for one Trog cruiser.

The calculus of trading three of our tiny assault ships for one of the Trog’s starfaring leviathans and swapping a hundred and twenty-nine human lives for ten thousand Trogs would work out dramatically in humanity’s favor if it weren’t for us being the species we are. The SDF generals and admirals are self-serving MSS functionaries, and the Free Army’s leadership is little better. Even that might not be a fatal disadvantage if humans were united in their effort, yet we’re still fighting each other, swayed into hating one another by the Grays’ MSS propaganda machine.

It might cost us this war and every generation of human children their freedom.

We make a quick trip back to Iapetus, blinking out of bubble jump and then radioing in to let them know it’s us before they send their defenders up to attack. Two hours later, we’re back in the air with our hydrogen tanks topped off and the magazine for our axial railgun once again full. Even better, we have another thousand rounds packed in cases and jammed into every empty space we can find in the ship.

After hearing about how effective the gun was at blasting Trog cruisers, Spitz’s people were only too happy to give us all we could carry. Spitz even hinted that he was willing to apply pressure on the UN council to outfit two more of our ships with the remaining long-barreled railguns they possessed. With three such ships working together, we could make short work of our Trog infestation.

The only problem? Getting two more Arizona-class ships under my command.

We max grav our way out as soon as we have our load, and bubble jump to the Potato.

It’s a fast journey with our newfound speed.

We pop out of bubble a thousand klicks over the asteroid’s surface.

“Three ships here,” Phil tells me before I can see anything but fading blue.

“Three good ships?” Penny asks. “All functioning?”

“Yes,” Phil answers. “Reactors burning H, grav fields up, though one is damaged. Its defensive field is a mess.”

“How far out?” I ask.

“All three a few klicks above the surface,” answers Phil. “They’re starting to react to us.”

I turn to Jablonsky. “You’re up. Send them the message we discussed. Tarlow, do you have the video ready?”

“Aye, sir.” He embellishes it with a pirate, “Argh!”

I spin on him. “You, too?”

He grins and shrugs.

“Jablonsky, send them Tarlow’s file. Tell those ships to stand down, or we’ll blast them out of the sky. And set up a meeting with whoever is in charge down there.”

Chapter 59

Penny brings the ship in so fast everyone on the bridge cringes for fear of making a new impact crater.

She pulls it up at the last second and drifts to a static point five feet off the asteroid’s surface.

I’m already in the bridge airlock and I swing the door open as we come to a stop. Jumping out, I amplify the asteroid’s weak gravity with my suit’s plates, and my boots pound down in the surface dust amid the roiling cloud pushed out by the Rusty Turd’s powerful fields.

More boots hit the ground around me. Brice, Hawkins, Lenox, Silva, and Phil are on the ground with me in a matter of moments. A squad of six others exits through an assault door. They’re all veterans of our attack on that first Trog cruiser over Arizona—men and women who’ve fought with me and Jill in every skirmish since. We’re as battle-hard-badass as any platoon in the solar system, and we’re brandishing our weapons like we’re ready to shoot down every one of Blair’s coverall-wearing pussies, if not out of necessity, then maybe just for fun.

We’re carrying full loads of ammo, hand grenades, and C4 charges. We fully packed for the violent side of diplomacy and we’re in no mood to fuck about. I’m tired of the Free Army’s petulant incompetence, and I’m ready to preach some come-to-Jesus truth at them or leave them to die when the Trogs come in force to slaughter them in their holes.

With Penny at the helm, the Turd flashes bright blue and accelerates away, giving us all a hard-gravity shove as it leaves.

I don’t need to look up. I feel the ship go.

Penny’s going to a position twenty kilometers up where she’ll wait like a raptor ready to swoop down and kill the three ships that survived Ceres, or the three others that ferried the commanders from the two remaining Free Army outposts. Besides the half-repaired junkers in the Potato’s expansive hangar, those six are the last of the Free Army’s fleet, the pittance of their military might not squandered at the shrine of their incompetence.

“What a bunch of fucking idiots,” muses Brice, as he looks at the sky, echoing for the thousandth time exactly the thoughts zipping through my synapses.

Getting right down to the practicalities, Jill asks, “Inside or out?”

We’re standing among the colony’s surface structures, twenty meters in front of the familiar recreation dome that’s turning into our favorite path in or out of the Potato’s subterranean levels. “Anybody see any movement?”

Nobody’s supposed to be on the surface but us. That’s what the Free Army commanders agreed to before my squads came down.

Now, all of my troops are keeping their eyes sharp and weapons ready, looking for any sign of treachery.

“They’re all inside,” Phil tells me as he employs his enhanced grav sense to scan the area. Having him along almost makes things unfair.

Jill polls our troops, and they concur. We’re alone on the surface.

“Jill,” I tell her, “you stay outside with your squad. Hunker down and don’t hesitate to blast anything that moves. These knuckleheads need to stand by their word, or we’ll make them regret it.”

“Aye, sir. And the airlock?”

I roll my eyes. “Plant the C4. Blow the charges at the first sign of trouble. We’ll be standing inside, well away from the door, on grav tight. We’ll be fine while all the air blows out.”

Brice heads for the airlock door. The rest of us follow.

Chapter 60

It starts badly.

Jill’s squad is outside as planned. The charges are planted. Nothing is wrong there.

The rest of us are inside, under the dome, watching the hypnotically slow water dance in the fountain dominating the center of the floor, and we’re alone.

None of us is standing near the door. We’re well off to the side. Me, Phil, and Hawkins have our faceplates open, but our helmets are on. I have my comm open to Penny up in the ship, to Jill outside the dome, and to my team inside. Brice, Lenox, and Silva are all buttoned up, spread along the wall, defensive grav glowing, both hands on their respective weapons. They only need to feel the breath of a threat, and half a heartbeat later they’ll let loose a spray of high-velocity metal on anybody foolish enough to be near.

The Free Army officers have kept us waiting for fifteen minutes, and I’m losing my patience. I know we’re being jerked around by some kind of power maneuver left over from some pre-siege corporate playbook. I look down at my d-pad to confirm the time, and I’m immediately frustrated. I can’t get it to respond to any screen gesture.

Piece of crap!

I glance at Phil. “I’m about ready to bail.”

He shakes his head. “They’re on the way.”

“Were they coming from the other side of the asteroid?”

He shakes his head again and points to his right. “They’ve been down near the end of the hall, arguing with one another.”

“About?”

“Hard to tell with so many of them there and so far away, but I’d say some want to kill us. Others want to make a deal. They think you executed Blair.”

“Do any of them know Blair?” I laugh.

“They’re coming now. Almost here.” Phil nods toward one of the doorways on the opposite side of the dome.

“Ready,” I tell the others as I see bodies in the dim light down the stairs.

I step forward several paces until I’m in the wide, clear walkway near the fountain. Phil stays on my shoulder, Hawkins does, too.

Soldiers in orange file up the stairs, helmets on, faceplates closed, weapons in their hands.

At least they have the good sense to match our readiness posture. Had they come decked out in their blue coveralls, I’d have been tempted to shoot them down because I could get away with it.

“No you wouldn’t,” Phil tells me.

“What?”

Phil casts a disappointed look my way. “You’re not the person you pretend to be half the time.”

That’s when it hits me. “Stop reading my damn thoughts.”

He shrugs and smirks.

“Concentrate on those bastards with the guns. I don’t want to be surprised if one of them decides to kill me.”

“Knowing something’s coming isn’t the same as being able to do something to stop it.”

“Thanks for bestowing your wisdom upon me, oh great sage.”

Phil smiles but doesn’t respond to my sarcasm.

Chapter 61

Twenty soldiers ring the far perimeter by the time they’re all in.

After what somebody thinks is a dramatically sufficient passage of seconds, the three guys in charge come up the stairs to enter the dome.

Like us, the two colonels and one captain are wearing their orange suits, helmets on and faceplates open. One is a young guy with dark hair, mean eyes, and a mustache. His name is Herrera. Another is as pleasant and plain as a mannequin. His eyes remind me of Blair’s, and I remember him. His name is Sokolov. We met him in the hall outside Blair’s office when I invited her to take a ride on my ship.

I don’t like Sokolov, and I don’t trust him.

The last guy towers over the other two and looks to be in charge as he walks up and takes his stand between the others. His wrinkled, brown skin is a stark contrast to his bright, green eyes. His name is Bird.

I decide he’s trustworthy, and I step forward to risk a handshake. “Dylan Kane.”

Bird takes my hand and shakes. Herrera follows, and Sokolov goes last, reluctant and ready to jump away.

“This is Phil, and that’s Colonel Hawkins.” I nod to my three soldiers. “These are my people. Let’s get right down to business. All of you viewed the video I sent of our last engagement?”

“We did,” answers Bird in a deep, rich voice.

“My ship killed four Trog cruisers and disabled three others. As many as the rest of the fleet.” I resist the urge to add, ‘What’s left of it.’

Silent nods.

“You know what my ship and crew did over Arizona,” I tell them.

“Propaganda,” mutters Sokolov.

I ignore him and stay focused on Bird and Herrera. “Everybody knows what my platoon did when we arrived here. We took this place from the Trogs, and we destroyed two more of their ships. Now I know what Blair says about—”

“And what about Colonel Blair?” blurts Sokolov. “You kidnapped her and what, killed her? Ejected her into space?”

“She’s a guest on my ship.”

“A prisoner,” he retorts.

“Exactly, a prisoner,” I confirm. “She’s a great administrator, but she’s gone mental.”

“So what is this?” asks Sokolov, waving a hand toward my soldiers with their guns at the ready.

Bird turns and glares down at Sokolov, who suddenly loses his brave mouth and turns squirrelly.

“Blair,” I tell them, “is a separate problem. But we can waste our time on her and her shit if that’s what you want.”

“You need to free her,” Bird tells me. “Bring her down to the surface, unharmed. Right now.”

I shake my head. “If I wanted to kill her, she’d already be dead. If I wanted to harm her, she’d already be harmed. Right now, the only value she has to me is guaranteeing the safety of my people. When I’m done, you can have her back.”

“Then we have nothing to talk about,” says Bird as he turns to walk away.

I reach out and grab his shoulder. “Don’t.”

He spins back and glares down at me, yet I don’t back down like Sokolov, I look up and match his silent ferocity with my own.

We stand there like that, measuring one another, until he steps back and suffers through a long sigh. “Tell us why you brought your highlight reel here for us to see.”

“So you know who I am,” I answer. “I’m not what the MSS says. I’m not a spy for the SDF or the Trogs. If I am, well, I’d have to be just about the worst damn spy in the world, because I’ve been out killing cruisers while the rest of you lazy jackasses have been hiding in your rocks in the middle of nowhere pretending to have a war.”

Bird’s temper flares magma hot, and he explodes toward me in a flash, bumping his chest to mine and looking down at me with flaring nostrils and wide eyes. “You listen to me you little piece of pig shit. I’ve been out here killin’ Grays since you were still trying to peep at naked girls in the junior high gym shower. I’ve lost my friends and my soldiers. I’ve won my victories and taken my losses. So don’t you think you’re anything special with your three weeks of time in an orange suit, because you don’t have a clue what life out here is really about.”

He retreats to his spot between his two colonels. Everybody is stunned by the outburst except Herrera, who mutters, “He’s no soldier.” He’s talking about me.

I’m puzzled, still looking only at Colonel Bird. “Why didn’t you take charge after Callisto got attacked? Why was Blair running the show?”

“She wasn’t,” says Herrera. “She thought she was.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She took charge,” says Bird. “She announced to everybody within radio range that she was in charge, and given the urgency of the matters at hand, we sent our ships to participate in her attack, knowing we’d all come here afterwards and work out the details of succession.”

“And her plan was a crock,” I say, because somebody needs to. “We lost most of our ships and hundreds of good people for nothing.”

“Not according to your highlight reel,” snipes Sokolov.

“You dumbass,” I tell him. “You are one of Blair’s toadies aren’t you? Do the math, moron. We killed plenty of Trog soldiers, but we lost most of our fleet. We don’t have the strength to go at them again. Not in that kind of engagement. All we really accomplished was to show them what a danger we are, to bring their attention down on us. So you know what’s going to happen now, as soon as those cruisers of theirs refill their holds, they’re coming after us—not the earth—us. They’re going to root through every asteroid in the belt, and destroy it. They already know this one is here, so you can expect them any day now. And then we’ll have just the two. I doubt they’ll last long. And then we’re lost, because it won’t matter if we have five ships or fifty, if we can’t resupply them, we can’t fight.”

It’s sobering medicine, hearing that everything you worked for is crumbling to shit. That’s what’s going through Bird’s head and Herrera’s thoughts. I don’t need Phil to tell me, yet he does. He plants those thoughts in my head so deftly I almost think they’re my own. He also tells me that Sokolov is exactly what he seems to be, a liar in Blair’s service. He’ll stab me in the back at first chance.

“You didn’t come down here for lecture time,” says Bird. “Why are we all here?”

I laugh as my goals morph into something unexpected. “I came down here to tell all of you what a bunch of knuckleheads you are, and that your only chance of making this revolution work is to get behind me. I came down here to tell you I was taking charge of this clown car.”

Herrera laughs out loud.

Sokolov glares daggers at me.

“But?” asks Bird, offended, but hiding it well.

I look over at Phil. I know he knows what I’m thinking. I know he’s already evaluating Bird as deeply as is possible given that Bird doesn’t have a bug in his head.

Phil tells me what I need to know by giving me a slight nod.

“What was that?” asks Bird, on edge.

I look Bird in the eye and say, “I think you should be in charge of the Free Army.”

Chapter 62

Sokolov goes apoplectic as unintelligible words bubble through the spit on his lips.

Herrera agrees, yet he’s wary.

Bird doesn’t react, not at first. He takes a solid thirty seconds as he evaluates me and contemplates my assertion. Finally, he says, “I don’t need your blessing for anything I do.”

“No,” I agree. “You don’t. I’m putting my cards on the table here.” I look past Bird at the twenty men and women standing along the wall, pretending to be prepared to kill me. I know—at least I think I know—nearly half of them are faking it. Their loyalties don’t lie with Blair and her lackey Sokolov. “All of you back there, you know who I am. I know you’ll follow me in to fight the Trogs. I know you’ll bleed with me. I know you’ll die for me, just like I’ll die for you.” I look back at Bird. “They’re the ones I came for. They’re the beating heart of the Free Army. I thought the rest of you were a cancer. But I didn’t know all of you.” I glance at Sokolov. “Now I think it’s him and a handful of others who are the tumors. For the rest of you, I think if we fight together for what we all believe in—”

“What we all believe in?” Herrera interrupts.

“Freedom,” I tell him. “That’s why I raised a rifle. Not just freedom for me, but for all of us, for every human on earth and on every rock from here to the Kuiper belt. Everyone.”

He nods. He believes me.

“If we fight together,” I continue, “we might still win this war.” I fix Bird in my hard stare again. “I think you’ve got the mettle of a man I can fight for. You need to take charge of this army, and you need to decide right now whether you’re going to believe in me. I’m no spy, not for anybody. I am exactly what I seem to be. Let me do what I do, take the fight to the Trogs, pound them with our metal fist, and take our freedom back.”

“What about Blair?” Sokolov shouts as he wags an accusing finger at me. “He’s a kidnapper. He can’t be trusted.”

Bird turns his angry eyes on Sokolov, and the captain loses his will to talk. He seems to shrink into his suit.

Bird looks back over at Herrera, who gives him a nod. Bird turns to me. “Okay.”

I salute Colonel Bird and say, “Thank you, sir.”

Bird returns my salute and then looks at Hawkins while he asks me, “Now, who’s this guy?”

“This is Colonel Hawkins. He can give us what we need to win. He’s our secret weapon.”

FREEDOM’S FIST

Book 4 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

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 Lenox.”

“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 soulmates.”

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.

freedom’s fall

Book 5 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

Chapter 1

“Why are we fighting?” asks Phil.

He and I are sitting on the tank ring’s shadow side as it circles Cygni A. A few hundred meters distant, the Rusty Turd floats in the same orbit as the ring while Brice, Silva, Lenox, and a few others toil over the bracket repairs. I’m thinking about Silva. Aching for her, really. Somehow, as I stare at a multi-colored nebula smeared across the sky, I can’t stop picturing the last time she and I were naked in the library. Every pornographic detail plays through my memory—the tastes, the touches, the warmth of her sweaty skin. In answer to Phil’s question, I shrug, because I don’t want his bullshit to ruin my moment.

“With all those stars and all those planets,” Phil goes on. “There’s enough of everything for everybody.”

I shrug again. In my mind, Silva is straddling me, leaning over with her hands pressing against my chest. She’s telling me she loves me, and I’m believing I love her, too. It feels real.

Phil elbows me. “Are you listening?”

“No.”

“You should.”

“I doubt it.”

“Don’t be an ass, Dylan.”

“Sometimes I can’t help it.”

“That’s not news.”

I sigh. “Why do you want to talk about the war?”

“Do you ever think about what comes after?”

I make a flippant guess. “Victory?” I know that’s not what Phil is getting at. In fact, my answer is irrelevant. That’s just the way talking with Phil goes.

“We have to make peace.”

“Not if there’s none of them left.”

“Genocide?” Phil tries to pretend he’s disgusted. He knows I’m toying with him.

“Why don’t you just say what you’re going to say so I can go back to staring at the pretty colors and fantasizing about Silva?”

“We’ll have to make peace with the Grays and the Trogs,” says Phil. “The alternatives are unending war or genocide.”

“There’s subjugation,” I remind him. We spent our lives on the shitty side of that verb. How could he forget that?

“Peace is easier.”

“I don’t know.” And I don’t. I truly don’t. “Peace never lasts. War always comes again. It’s always been that way. For us it has—humans, I mean. It was always that way for the Trogs, and now war is the defining element of Gray history.”

“Maybe it’s peace that always comes again,” argues Phil. “Maybe peace is the natural state and it’s merely interrupted by war.”

I reach over and rub my hand across Phil’s faceplate.

He brushes it aside. “What are you doing?”

“The rosy tint on your faceplate is making the universe look funny.” I laugh. He doesn’t.

“Maybe I’m realistic.”

I shake my head. “Peace. War. Peace, and then war again. It doesn’t matter which is first or last, or natural. One always follows the other.”

“You’re in a black mood for somebody who’s on the infatuation end of love.”

I roll my eyes. I hadn’t told Phil the depth of my feelings for Silva. He stole it when he was rooting around in my head uninvited.

“Sorry,” he says. “It’s hard to miss. She’s all you’ve thought about since we got out here.”

“She’s all I want to think about.” Another admission, I’m loath to make. What’s the point of trying to hide anything from Phil?

“You’re tired of the war, aren’t you?”

“Why are we talking about this?”

“Well, because—”

“Just stop.” I hold Phil in a stern glare for a moment. “Cut the shit. What are you trying to circle around to?”

“Nicky and I have been discussing the situation.”

“You two are scheming to bring peace to the galaxy?” I laugh.

“If you don’t want to listen to the answer—”

“Sorry,” I interrupt. I don’t feel like a lecture on being an ass again. “Just tell me.”

“We should go back to Trinity Base and talk to the Trogs we stranded there. Nicky thinks we can claim them as chattel.”

I laugh hard at that. “Peace in Nicky’s mind is the same as subjugation?”

“No.” Phil is offended. “Yes, but it’s a first step. Nicky thinks you should claim your right to enslave them, since you defeated their masters. And then, when you have their loyalty, you should free them.”

I laugh so hard at that one, I bump myself away from the tank ring and spin off into space.

Chapter 2

Everything takes longer than you think. It’s just a rule of life nobody ever wants to learn. Nevertheless, the repairs are complete. The tank ring is mounted. All we need to do is plot a vector and make our first bubble jump toward earth. Everyone is looking forward to shedding their orange suits for a chance to feel human again, if only for the months it’ll take us to get back to earth and back into the war.

I have the crew crammed onto the bridge for a meeting before we leave. “Before we start back,” I say, “Phil would like to present us with an alternative.”

Tarlow groans so loudly he eclipses everyone else’s displeasure. “Let’s just go home.”

Phil ignores him and jumps to his feet. “Most of us were together for the battle at the mining station.” He looks around. Nobody nods.

“The Potato,” Brice clarifies. “He’s talking about the Potato.”

That gets them.

“Yeah,” says Phil. “Remember all those Trogs we captured?”

Most of us do. For the ones who weren’t there, they’ve heard about it. During the long trip out to 61 Cygni, we had plenty of time to learn one another’s war stories.

“What some of you don’t know,” says Phil, “is that the Trogs weren’t exactly our prisoners. When Dylan convinced the Grays to surrender…” Phil casts a look at me. Convince was a generous choice of words—I’d beaten one of the Grays to death and I’d killed two others. That convinced the others to surrender. “The Trogs became Dylan’s property according to their law and customs.”

“So what are you saying?” asks Penny, jumping ahead. “All those Trogs in those ships orbiting over Trinity Base are our property?”

“Or our responsibility.” Brice and the bright side. “By their law.”

“Both,” says Phil.

“We’re not really governed by their law,” I say. “You know, since we’re at war and all.”

“When those Grays back on the Potato surrendered,” says Phil, “the Trogs were obligated to accept Dylan as their new owner. Since the Grays at Trinity Base didn’t surrender, we killed them, and the customary thing for Trogs with dead masters to do is to commit suicide.”

Penny reaches over to lay a hand on Brice’s arm. “So no responsibility.”

“What Phil is suggesting,” I explain, “is that we go back, and see if we can take possession of the Trogs.”

“To what end?” asks Penny. “None of their ships have any H. Their loving masters pumped it all out so they could escape back to their home world.”

“The Trogs are already dead,” says Tarlow, daring anyone to challenge his certainty. “Most of the ships shut down right after offloading their fuel. They did nothing but sit there when we made our last attack run.”

“There’s something you’re not considering,” says Phil.

“H packs,” guesses Brice. “And cal packs.”

Phil nods.

“Depending on stores,” says Phil, “the Trogs onboard might stay alive for years in their ships, just waiting for the next Trog fleet to rescue them.”

“With no functioning supply depot,” says Silva, “that won’t work.”

“Or it might,” says Penny. “The protoplanet’s gravity wasn’t that strong. There wasn’t much atmosphere. They could make their way down to the surface and try to scavenge for stores. Or maybe they could repair the base. There might even be subterranean H tanks that survived our attack.”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” I say.

Lenox pipes in, reluctance in her voice. “We could go back to Trinity Base and spend a few weeks mopping up, making sure the base is toast, and finishing off all the cruisers. We have enough railgun slugs aboard to do it, especially since we’ll be shooting at defenseless, stationary targets.”

“Or we subjugate them,” says Phil. “We offer them a chance to pledge their loyalty to their conquerors and we offer to save them.”

“How?” asks Penny.

“One of those H tankers we shot up over Cygni Saturn was damaged but not finished off. Maybe we could repair the drive array and use it to refuel the fleet.”

Nobody likes that idea. Talking about the enemy as Trogs is one thing, talking about the fleet is something powerful and frightening. Fleets of Trog cruisers are the whole reason earth is losing its war, the reason every kid goes to bed afraid of what might come down out of the night sky.

“We’ll never have any way to know the Trogs will give us their loyalty,” says Brice. “Who’s to say they won’t betray us at the first chance?”

“You have to think of them like Samurai,” says Phil. “To them, honor is everything.”

“Honor is irrelevant if what you’re lying to is a lower life form,” argues Brice. “And that’s what we are to them. We exist outside the bounds of their honor code.”

“You don’t know that,” says Phil.

“Neither do you,” says Brice.

“Yes I do,” says Phil. “I learned it from Nicky.”

Brice shakes his head, making it clear he doesn’t trust the Tick. “And what do you imagine happens here? We take all these Trogs back to earth and they fight at our side. Fight the other Trogs. Their cousins?”

“No,” says Phil. “I don’t think we do that at all. I think we subjugate them, save their lives, and then set them free.”

Tarlow loses his manners and shouts, “The whole reason we came here was to destroy their supply depot so the fleets that show up would die. Why save them just so they can go back home to their masters?”

“And why risk our lives to do it?” adds Brice.

“We’d give them exactly the same thing we’re fighting for,” says Phil. “They wouldn’t be our slaves or the Gray’s slaves. We give them their freedom.”

“And maybe,” I say, getting caught up in an inspiration, “they go home and start their own revolution.”

“Or they fly on to earth,” says Brice, “and kill everybody.”

Chapter 3

We didn’t take a vote. I didn’t dare let that happen. It was easy to tell which way the wind was blowing—against Phil—and I’d chosen to side with him. The upside was big enough to justify the risk. My regret was that I’d had to cash in the trust I’d built with the crew on just one decision. The cynic in me lobbied for the bet. If I didn’t win, we’d all be dead, so I’d never have to suffer the consequences of my loss of credibility.

But I would be dead.

With the tank ring mounted snugly on the hull, we popped out of bubble at a safe distance from Trinity Base and took a slow course in. The neat rows of Trog cruisers we’d found when we first arrived were no more. The ships and wrecks drifted as though tossed into space from a dice cup. No order. No sign of life.

“You ever wonder,” says Brice, “what would have happened after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor if one of the Jap pilots would have circled back, landed at one of the burning airfields, and said, ‘hey, let’s be friends now?’”

Tarlow finds it funny.

Penny’s eyes shoot daggers at Brice.

“What?” he asks.

I ignore them. Everyone else is in their places—gunners manning the plasma gun, my grunts ready to pitch in and hump the heavy rounds out of the storage lockers and into the magazine, Tarlow watching his screens, Penny flying the ship, Phil running the nav console, and Nicky, sitting in one of the forward compartments, concentrating on the most minuscule of gravitational fluctuations.

“Tarlow,” I ask, “how many ships are out there?”

“Twenty-nine seem to be totally intact or only have minor damage. Another seventeen are in some state of—”

“Destruction,” Phil finds the word for him.

“Yeah,” agrees Tarlow. “Seventeen are too damaged to fly again.”

“Do any have their reactors running?” I ask.

“Nine aren’t as cold as the others,” says Tarlow, glancing up at me. “I have infrared capabilities.”

“Meaning?” I ask.

“They maybe ran out of fuel later?” Tarlow is guessing.

“They shut down their reactors when they sensed us coming this way,” says Phil. “They’re playing dead. They want us to leave them alone.”

“Or they’re setting a trap,” says Brice. “How long after they fire up their reactors before they can use their railguns?”

“Those reactors take nearly a half-hour to power all the way up,” says Penny. “You can’t cold-start a fusion reactor.”

“That’s something,” says Brice as he steps up to press his face to one of the small bridge windows.

“Phil,” I ask, “you said they want us to leave them alone. Is that a guess, or did Nicky read some minds to find that answer?”

“It’s not specific,” says Phil. “It’s a general feeling. Nicky senses the mood.”

“The mood?” Brice snorts and he slaps me on the back. “You like to step in the sticky shit, don’t you?”

I smile when I turn to him. “Don’t go soft on me now, Brice.”

He laughs at that, taking it just how I meant it, as a dare. “Alright, boss. I’ll play. Let’s do this. Phil, tell Nicky to find out who’s in charge out here.”

“It’s not that easy,” says Phil. “These are all Trogs out in these ships. They aren’t used to being in charge of anything.”

“Ghost Trogs aren’t just assassins,” says Brice, “looking around the bridge. They’re like the Samurai class. They’re the generals and captains over the lesser Trogs. They’re the smart ones. You can bet there’s one or two in charge on every ship, and you can bet one of them in this mess has declared himself the big cheese.”

“I thought they were all waiting to die,” says Penny.

Brice shakes his head. “Nobody waits to die. Even if they don’t stand a chance of living, it doesn’t mean they all quit. My bet is they’re trying to figure out how to get themselves out of their predicament.”

“And they can’t risk another confrontation with us,” I say. “They’re smart enough to know we can kill every ship at our leisure. That’s why they’re playing dead.”

Brice turns to Phil. “The big cheese, find him.”

Chapter 4

Of course, it didn’t go as quickly as I’d imagined it would.

Contacting the Trogs through Nicky was easy enough. We managed that on the first day. Navigating the Trogs’ evolving politics was a problem. In this case, Brice turned out to be wrong. There was no single Trog in charge. There would be, but it was taking time.

In the mean time, I issued some rules to each Trog ship: no reactor power-ups, and no Trogs outside.

They weren’t in a position to negotiate, but they broke the outside-Trog rule immediately and frequently, just not with live ones. Trog tradition, given the death of their Gray masters in battle, dictated that they kill themselves. It made perfect sense to them. They’d failed in their most important duty as soldiers, that of protecting their masters. The bodies of the dead were ejected into space, in what turned into a fairly regular stream off each ship as individual Trogs onboard arrived at their personal decision and took action. Each of the dead’s still-living buddies took upon themselves to strip corpses of hydro packs, cal packs, and weapons before sending them into the void.

The weird thing, though, was the position in which each body died. Trogs, before skewering themselves with their disruptors, went to the trouble to kneel on the ground and wrap a cord around their thighs and ankles which held their legs bent, calf to hamstring. It was Tarlow who asked Phil about the oddity as he observed a cloud of the frozen bodies on his radar screen, all in that position. Phil explained that in Trog culture, anally raping the corpses of the vanquished was a way to dishonor them in the next life. Binding the legs put their big feet in the right spot to block any attempt at entry from the rear.

Now, so many kneeling corpses were in orbit above the protoplanet it was making navigation dangerous.

Penny now has the Rusty Turd parked alongside the fractured hulk of one of the sentinel ships we destroyed early in the battle. The Trogs who’d lived through the explosions had long since crossed the void in their spacesuits for refuge on one of the intact ships. Or they’d all harakiri’d themselves off my list of concerns. It didn’t matter to me which, as long as the ship was empty of live Trogs.

I’m outside the Rusty Turd, standing on the hull near the bow with my rifle at the ready. Brice is at the stern, and a few of my grunts are also outside, keeping an eye out for movement in the wrecked cruiser’s structure.

One of the things Phil had done to pass the time between sessions where he and Nicky were telepathically communicating with the Trogs was to scan each of the cruisers for a clear picture of its contents. He was getting scary good with his bug at seeing the grav from any sized mass. He was like a portable long-range MRI. That’s how he found that this ship still held scores of full hydrogen tanks. No doubt the surviving Trogs would have found it eventually, but we’d beaten them to it. My crew had already rigged up a high-pressure hose from inside, and we were using it to top off our tanks with H.

“So where are we,” asks Brice, opening a private comm link, “with your little Trog circus?”

Keeping my eyes on my sector I say, “They have a leadership council. I asked Phil if they were going to elect a president or whatever they call it. He told me they don’t have any concept of voting.”

“So how do they decide?”

“Don’t know. Phil told me Nicky explained it to him but then he yammered on for twenty minutes describing it before I gave up and told him I didn’t care.”

Brice laughs.

“He tells me they’re going to pick one today, though. Hell, maybe they already did.”

“What then?” Brice asks. “Is there a limit to how long we’re going to wait around for the Trogs to get their shit together?”

“Don’t start again,” I tell him.

“I’m not starting. I’m just wondering what the mission parameters are.”

“But you admit it’s a good thing we came back, right?”

“Given what we found, yeah.”

It turned out the full tanks of hydro in some of the broken ships were the least of our problems. Upon scanning the derelicts, Phil also came across one that wasn’t like the others. It held refining equipment for processing hydrogen out of more complex molecules. It carried machinery for bootstrapping a new supply depot and it carried a pair of hydro tankers, atmosphere skimmers like the ones we destroyed at Cygni Saturn. Our fear that such ships might be sent out with each fleet turned out to be true.

“About those parameters?” Brice asked.

“I don’t know, exactly. I’m running on the assumption we’ll meet our goal—full cooperation from the Trogs who are left. I don’t have a backup plan.”

“We should put one together. We may have to destroy the rest of these ships and bubble back home. It’s not even a question of waiting out here until we run out of patience. You have to accept the Trogs just might not do what you want them to.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I get that.”

“Maybe we call a meeting on the bridge after dinner tonight to talk about it?”

“Yeah.” The reality is I don’t want to talk too much more. I don’t want to undermine my authority.

“So what’s the deal with Nicky and Phil? I heard they were going to try something new today?”

“They’re trying to form a communal connection with the leadership council and Nicky wants to show them Gray history and their history. Kind of like an internal brain movie.”

“They don’t know their history?” asks Brice.

“No,” I tell him. “Not that we’ve been able to determine. The Grays like to keep them ignorant. The less they know, the more malleable they are.”

“So what, then?” asks Brice. “What did the Grays tell them? There had to be a story, right?”

“The Trogs believe the Grays created them out of mud and sticks. Kind of a Garden of Eden thing. The Trogs believe they’ve always served the Grays. They don’t know about anything from before.”

“So no idea they used to be the local badasses and they used to be the Grays’ masters?” Brice chuckles at that. “If you can get them to believe Nicky’s version of their history, you may get your way yet. I can’t imagine how pissed off I’d be if I found out every thing I ever believed was a lie and my species had been bred down from super-predator to lap dog.”

Phil comms in. “Dylan, are you there?”

“You know I am.”

“What’s that?” Brice isn’t on the link, not on Phil’s side, but he hears me. Comm link management is one of those things that never goes seamlessly. I loop Brice in and say, “Phil, Brice is on. What’s up?”

Phil says, “The Trogs want to meet face to face.”

Brice laughs and turns to look at me down the length of the ship. “What did you think was going to happen?”

Chapter 5

"That's stupid." Penny says it in the final way that ends arguments or escalates them to yelling. With the silence on the bridge, I wasn't sure where we'd go next.

Phil steps up to the challenge first. “What you don’t—”

“They want to meet face-to-face.” Penny raises her voice. “Not standing in spacesuits on the planet’s surface. Not on a neutral asteroid. Not even on the outer hull of one of their ships, but face-to-face in actual air. You know what that means, right?”

“Of course, I—” starts Phil.

“Of course you do,” she snaps. “But you told him anyway.” She flings an accusing finger at me. "Him. You know he doesn't have the sense to say no to any stupid idea that comes his way. You know that better than anybody, and you told him anyway."

Brice finds it all very funny.

“Hey,” I say in my defense.

Penny huffs and crosses her arms. “I’m not saying you’re stupid, Dylan—just—just. You know.”

“I’m not saying we have to do this,” I tell her. “I’m saying—”

“Cut the crap,” she shouts. “You know you’re going to do it. The only way you can have a face-to-face meeting with a bunch of Trogs is in an airlock on one of their ships. That’s it.”

Brice waves a hand at the bridge. “Here?”

“Don’t be a stupid asshole,” Penny snaps. “Even you two dumbasses aren’t stupid enough to invite a bunch of hostile Trogs onto our ship.”

I look over at Brice. “Are you and me the two dumbasses?”

“Don’t make fun,” Penny tells me. “You’re not going to let Trogs on our ship. Please tell me you’re not thinking of that?”

“No.” I reach a hand out to pat her on the shoulder. “No Trogs aboard. I won’t risk the ship for this.”

“But you are going to risk the ship,” she argues. “You know the only way this works is if you take Phil and Nicky with you. Otherwise, you can't communicate. Not effectively. You need them there to translate."

“We need them for navigation,” says Lenox, coming into the discussion on Penny's side.

“With the computerized navigation system,” I counter, “Tarlow can guide the ship home with no trouble.”

“He can’t replace Phil in a fight,” says Penny. “You know that.”

“Not even close,” I answer. It’s not much of an admission. Everybody knows Phil is a talent. “If things go badly for us here, when you get back to Iapetus you can pick up one of Dr. Gustafson’s bugheads in and use her as a navigator. Probably get a new pilot, too, since you’ll be the captain of this ship then.”

“I don’t want to be the captain of the ship,” Penny tells me.

"If we don't come back," I tell her, as deadly serious as I feel about it, "you need to step up. You're best-suited for it."

“So you’ve decided, then?” she figures, and figures right.

“Sounds that way to me,” says Lenox.

Silva, who’d been lingering near the bridge’s doorway, turns and hurries down the stairs.

Ugh.

“I’ve decided,” I admit. “I’m going. I think the risk is worth the payoff.” I glance at both Brice and Phil. “I need you two along to make this a success. Well, really just Phil. Brice, I’d like you to come and watch my back.”

Brice turns a glare at Penny when he answers me. “I’m too much of a dumbass to say no to something this stupid.”

Penny snorts and spins in her chair to put her back to Brice.

I turn my attention to Phil. “You have to volunteer.”

He nods.

“What do you think?” I ask. “Honestly. Are the Trogs looking to draw us into a trap and extract some revenge, or are they sincerely wanting to talk?”

“Nicky believes they’re approaching this in good faith.”

"But if they change their minds," says Lenox, "you'll be trapped in an airlock on one of their ships, and there's no way you'll get out alive."

“That’s true,” agrees Phil.

I know the risks already. “I’m willing to take a chance. Phil, are you in or out?”

Phil is apprehensive. “I’ll go along.”

Chapter 6

With comm links available to any of my crew at any time, and in a ship just 180 feet long, it's hard to think one of us could avoid another for any length of time. Silva, though, is making it work. In the eight hours between the end of the meeting on the bridge and where I am now, boots autogravved to the hull, Silva has managed to stay out of my sight and off the comms. Like the rest of the crew, she thinks I’ve finally chosen to do the thing that will kill me.

“No you haven’t,” says Phil over a private comm link.

“Stop reading my mind,” I tell him.

“Stop thinking so loud.”

“You’re saying it’s my fault?”

Phil shrugs.

Brice, Phil, Nicky, and me are outside, standing on the hull, watching the Trog cruiser grow to fill the sky in front of us. Only, the cruiser isn’t moving, our ship is. Penny’s instructions are to drop us off, and then to race away to a safe distance. If anything happens to us, of course, her orders are to blast the remaining Trog cruisers to junk before she takes the Turd back to earth’s solar system. In fact, if any of the Trog cruisers powers up. If anything unexpected happens, even if the Trogs take us hostage and try to negotiate for Penny to surrender the Rusty Turd, her orders were explicit: open fire.

Capture worries me, but Penny assured me she wasn't gullible enough to believe any one of us would be returned alive. To her, a hostage Dylan Kane is the same as a dead Dylan Kane.

Penny brings the ship to a halt.

An airlock door slowly opens on the side of the Trog cruiser, exposing a bay easily large enough for the Rusty Turd to fly inside.

“I’m not going in there,” Penny tells me over the comm.

“I know.”

“I don’t like that they think I’m dumb enough to fall into a trap like that,” she goes on. “I don’t trust them.”

“I know,” I reply, again.

“And you’re still doing this?”

“Risk versus reward.”

Penny kills the comm link. More drama than usual for her.

Twenty or thirty Trogs file out of a pair of airlocks on the back wall of the hangar bay, cross through the outer door, and form up in two neat rows, standing on the outer hull.

“They’re a disciplined bunch,” says Brice.

“They want us to come,” says Phil.

I give Brice a look, for final confirmation.

“This is your show,” he says.

“You have your railgun set on full-auto?” I asked.

“Is yours?”

“You bet your ass.” I smile, and pat the grenades attached on magnets across my chest. “The four of us might die, but if we do, we’re taking a bunch of Trogs with us.”

“Or we could kill ‘em all and go home now,” says Penny.

“Sorry,” I answer. “I thought you disconnected from this comm link.” I leap into the vacuum, steering myself toward the airlock. “C’mon.”

Chapter 7

As promised, eleven Trogs in fine black suits are waiting for us—orderly, in a straight row near the back of the airlock. They aren’t wearing regular suits, not like the ones SDF soldiers and most Trogs wear. These aren’t even like most of the Ghost Trogs I’ve seen. These guys have armor plates on their arms, legs, and shoulders. They look like ultra-mod medieval knights. They each have disruptors attached on their backs. Some carry two. Several have railguns.

Not one of them moves as we touch down on the deck and set autograv in our suits to keep our feet on the ground. With power out in the cruiser, none of its plates is operating to create internal grav in the ship. In fact, no lights are on anywhere. The entire ship feels dead.

A pair of the Trogs who’d been outside climb back inside and grab onto a large wheel they immediately start to turn. The airlock doors slowly slide closed.

“Those others are staying out there?” asks Brice.

“Makes no difference,” I say. “The doors will be shut.”

“You say that now,” he says. “If we have to fight our way out, it’ll be easier knowing there’s no one there to ambush us.”

“Stop being so paranoid,” I tell him.

“You brought me along to watch your back,” he answers. “That means I need to be paranoid.”

“Everything’s fine,” Phil tells us.

“Are you guessing?” I ask.

“Nicky says so.”

“Did the Trogs tell him that?” I ask. “Can he tell if they’re lying?”

“They’re not practiced in deception,” Phil tells me. “In a telepathic society, it doesn’t have a lot of value.”

“Unless you’re dealing with people who aren’t telepathic,” I argue. “Like us.”

“Only we are,” Phil counters. “You. Me. Nicky. Stop forgetting you’re not like most humans.”

It takes several minutes to close the outer door and seal it. After that, we wait while air hisses into the airlock. That takes another few minutes. As soon as the air pressure stabilizes, the Trogs each take off their helmets, and attach them to dangle on their belts.

“That’s our cue,” says Phil.

I remove my helmet first. Brice and Phil follow.

“It stinks,” says Brice, knowing the Trogs can’t understand. “Not as cold as I expected.”

Phil says, “It’ll take weeks for the ship’s interior to cool off now that it’s powered down.”

I notice the impassive Trogs are sharing glances with one another. “What’s that about, Phil?”

It takes a moment, but Phil says, “Nicky asked what they’re talking about. Telepathing about.”

“Talking is fine,” I tell him. “I understand how they communicate.”

“Speech is forbidden for Trogs,” says Phil. “They were surprised to hear you use words with Brice.”

“Do they use words at all?” I ask.

“I told you,” he says. “It’s forbidden.”

“I know. Ask them anyway. Find out if they use their words when the Grays aren’t around.”

Phil is reluctant.

“Do it. Please.”

More silent moments pass. The Trogs share a few more glances, and then one steps out ahead of the rest and says something in a deep voice with noises that don’t sound anything like words.

Phil is surprised when he turns back to me. “You guessed right. They have a secret spoken language they keep hidden from the Grays.”

“So deception is more common than you think,” I observe. “What did he say?”

“He said they have a spoken language that—”

I raise a hand to stop him. I got it. I step forward, deliberately, careful not to appear to be attacking and I say, “Hello. I’m Dylan Kane.”

The Trogs stare blankly at me.

“Is Nicky translating?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Do they have names?” I ask, “Or are they like the Grays?”

“They have names.” Phil pauses, and then nods at the Trog standing in front. “The nearest translation for his name is Prolific Man Killer.”

I turn back to Phil, unable to hide my surprise. “Seriously?”

Phil nods.

“Has he killed a lot of us?”

“I gather it’s more of an aspirational name. Trogs often change their names. Prolific Man Killer took this one prior to embarking on his journey to the war.”

“The war with us.”

“Yes.”

“What was his name before?” I ask.

“It’s not polite to ask that,” Phil tells me.

“Okay, then. Is Prolific Man Killer the one in charge?”

“Yes,” Phil answers. “The situation with them is still rather fluid. They suffer from the influence of Gray culture where leadership is always in flux, but they’re more comfortable with the idea of Trogs claiming a leadership role and holding onto it for long periods of time.”

“So, what are you saying?”

“Prolific Man Killer is in charge for now. Tomorrow it might be someone else.”

“If we make a deal with Klingon Pete here, will tomorrow’s headman be bound by the agreement?”

“Don’t call him Klingon Pete.”

“Why? It’s not like he can understand me.”

“Do you really want to be childish about this, Dylan? We’re trying to negotiate an interstellar treaty here.”

“It’s a term of endearment.”

Phil labors through a sigh and his attention turns to the Tick. He looks back at me and says, "Nicky wants to remind us we shouldn't talk in terms of agreements with Prolific Man Killer. Trogs are the lowest of the lowly forms of living beings. Every Gray knows that. You should assert your authority over the beast. Tell him to bow, and if he refuses, you should kill him. Then the other Trogs will be more apt to listen to you."

“Like I did to Nicky and his buddies back on the Potato?” I ask.

I feel Nicky cringe at the memory.

“Will the Trogs be bound by whatever we agree to today?” I persist.

It takes a moment, but Phil finally answers, “Probably.”

“Is that Nicky answering, or Klingon Pete?” I’m looking into the Trog leader’s eyes as I speak.

“Prolific Man Killer,” answers Phil.

“Who are all these guys?” I ask.

"Representatives of the surviving clans. Thirty-two of them made up the fleet before our attack," Phil explains. "Some shared ships, richer clans had several ships to themselves. The Grays controlling the clans own the ships and the Trogs onboard."

“What about Klingon Pete here?” I ask. “How many ships does he control directly?”

“Seven.”

"How many of his clan's ships did we destroy?"

“Four.”

“So we killed some of his cousins.”

“Three of his brothers,” Phil tells me. “Dozens of his cousins and some of his nephews.”

“I didn’t expect that answer.”

"Trog families tend to be very large. Prolific Man Killer has seven brothers and nine sisters. The sisters are all back in the home system. His two older brothers went to war with earth in the first fleet."

“And he doesn’t know if they’re dead or alive?”

“No,” answers Phil. “He can’t.”

“So he’s down five brothers already. He must hate us.”

“The Trogs exist in a warrior culture. They live to serve their Gray masters and to die in the service of those masters. Dying in war is how they expect their lives to end. In fact, death in battle opens the door to their version of heaven.”

“So what,” I ask, “he doesn’t hate us for killing his family?”

“It’s complicated,” says Phil. “But you know that, right?”

"How's that? I don't have any brothers."

“We could have destroyed all these ships for what the Trogs and Grays have done to our people, but here we are, talking to our enemy.”

Brice chuckles. “He’s got you there, Boss.”

“Prolific Man Killer has a question,” says Phil.

“Yes?” I ask.

“He wants to know if any of the ships sent to the earth system survived. He wants to know if we’ve imprisoned or killed the surviving Trogs.”

That brings to mind all those Trog prisoners we captured and left back on the Potato, and I wonder whatever became of them. "Tell him the war was still underway when we left, and I can't honestly say whether it's over. As for prisoners, tell him we've taken some, but I don't know what became of them. As far as I know, they weren't killed. That's not usually how humans deal with war prisoners.”

“He says the disruptor on your back appears to be a Trog blade.”

I admit it is as I slowly take it off my back, being careful to handle it with only my fingertips so as not to activate the grav field.

“He asks that you put power to the blade.”

This makes Brice uncomfortable. “We should have left the blades back on the ship.” Unfortunately, neither of us thought to. The blades have become a natural part of our kit. “I think he’s going to challenge you to a duel.”

Wary, with Brice’s warning at the top of my mind, I grasp the handle and watch the blue field lines come alive over the steel. The Trogs shuffle and look at one another. “What is it about this disruptor that’s making them react?” I ask Phil.

“It is the blade owned by the son of a chieftain of a rival clan,” says Phil. “A very powerful one. Half the ships that went to earth in the original fleet were from that clan.”

I say, “It was won in our first battle. We killed eight Ghost Trogs on that first ship.”

“With your rifles?” asks Prolific Man Killer.

“Some,” I admit. “I killed several with this disruptor after I took it.” I don’t speak Trog, but I can feel a sense of respect from them that wasn’t there when we first came in.

Phil says, “Prolific Man Killer asks how it’s possible that the war isn’t over? With one ship, we destroyed half their fleet here, and killed their Gray lords.”

“War is complicated,” I answer. “How is it that a race as powerful as the Trogs can be controlled by creatures as frail as the Grays?”

“Prolific Man Killer asks if humans have killed their Gray masters.”

“No,” I laugh, and so does Brice. Prolific Man Killer’s laugh rumbles like an avalanche—human enough that any doubts that his species is originally from earth disappear. I turn to Brice. “He has your sense of humor.” To Prolific Man Killer, I say, “We suffer under the Grays just as the Trogs do. That is why I don’t want to enslave you. I wish to be master of no living creature.” I feel Nicky’s shock, even as I say the words.

Nothing happens for a few long moments.

“Phil,” I say, “are you making sure Nicky is telling them exactly what I’m saying?”

“Yes. Nicky thinks this is by far the most stupid thing you’ve done.”

“Nicky hasn’t been around him long enough,” laughs Brice.

"Tell him," I insist. "Tell Prolific Man Killer he needs to believe the history that Nicky told them. All the Trogs need to believe. The Grays aren't gods—they're mortal, and they're evil. They need to be exterminated for what they've done to both our species. If the Trogs are capable of accepting freedom, then I extend a hand as their friend. I want to make peace, and ally against our common enemy." I step forward and outstretch my hand to shake.

Prolific Man Killer jumps back and draws his disruptor.

I step away, raising my railgun as I do.

Brice's weapon is up and he's ready to fire as Phil runs out between us, waving his arms and begging for calm.

Everyone stops.

“What just happened?” I ask.

“Your right hand,” says Phil. “You put it out, open. Trogs are a left-handed species. They see an extended right hand as a challenge to fight. It means you’re going to draw your weapon with your dominant hand as soon as your enemy takes the challenge by grasping your right.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Not one bit,” he says.

“Are you explaining to him that I didn’t mean to challenge him?”

“Nicky is.”

Prolific Man Killer puts his blade back on its mount, and he cautiously steps forward, extending his open left hand as he does.

I lower my weapon and put my left hand out, stepping slowly toward him until his large hand engulfs mine. He smiles, and I do, too. Like the laugh, I hope it means the same thing in his culture as mine.

Chapter 8

By my fifth meeting with Prolific Man Killer, I decided to go in alone. That’s to say, I planned to. Penny and the rest of the crew wouldn’t hear of it. They threatened to restrain me and bubble jump back to earth. It was only when I agreed to bring Brice as my bodyguard—again—that things settled down. Nobody was happy I’d chosen to go in without Nicky and Phil, but what the non-bug heads on the crew couldn’t accept was how readily telepathic communication with the Trogs came to me. That sounds like a brag, but by the end of the second meeting with them, Phil could communicate with the Trogs nearly as well as Nicky. I was catching up.

The thing that made the whole thing work was the bug. In its way, it acted as a universal translator. I won't make any attempt to explain why I think that was so, but I know Dr. Gustafson back on Iapetus would have been fascinated to have some Trogs to participate in her research. Maybe I can make that happen.

Penny brings the Rusty Turd in close to Man Killer’s ship, as has become the norm. I exit with Brice and suit grav over to the cruiser while Penny takes the Turd out to a safe distance where she can keep an eye on the fleet and watch for danger. We still don’t trust the Trogs. Again, that's to say Phil and I are developing trust because we're building mental bridges. Nicky, as I’m coming to learn, will always despise them. His racism was baked in too early to overcome, and it makes me wonder how he and Phil managed to get so close, being of different species. That’s a question for another day.

As Brice and I drift through the void, not moving fast, just floating at a comfortable clip, I see below us three Trog cruisers arrayed side by side with a kilometer of spacing between, just like they were lined up when we first arrived to spy on Trinity Base. From what Prolific Man Killer has shared with me in our powwows, I know those three ships have refueled from the tanks of wrecked cruisers and have enough hydrogen onboard to sustain themselves for several months.

The process of doling out the limited supply of fuel to the surviving cruisers is going slowly, as most of the ships are completely dry. Hydrogen needs to be transferred from one of the wrecks to an intermediary cruiser, and then from there to the recipient, all while navigating a shifting pecking order over which ship should be serviced first. I don’t envy Prolific Man Killer the task of keeping his coalition in order.

For our part, Phil and even Nicky employed their combined grav sense to identify which wrecks had hydrogen stores onboard that could be salvaged. They even provided the locations on each ship where the unruptured tanks could be found. Would the Trogs’ desperation have driven them to find that fuel eventually? Certainly. But having the fuel sooner rather than later adds credibility to our relationship with the Trogs.

Far below, on the surface of the protoplanet, tens of thousands of Trogs are working to rebuild Trinity Base. That was a point of contention between my crew and me. The purpose of our mission to 61 Cygni was to destroy the base. Now we’re letting the Trogs salvage what they can to turn it operational again. My hope is we’re overseeing the construction of the Trogs’ first rebel base, the beginning of their war with the Grays back in their home system.

As for everything in the cruiser containing their bootstrap equipment, much of it has been deployed to the surface, and the two tankers it carried are now making runs to Cygni Saturn to bring stores of H to the stranded cruisers.

Again, hope rears its ugly head as I wonder for the thousandth time if I’m doing the right thing in allowing it all to happen.

Brice and I touch down on the hull of Prolific Man Killer's ship, and an airlock immediately opens. It's not the hangar-sized airlock he and I first entered the ship on, but one much smaller, maybe big enough for only a few dozen soldiers at a time. The door closes once we’re inside, and the air starts to cycle in. We’ve moved past meeting the Trogs in airlocks. Now we go inside, led by a trio of guards to a room in the bow of the ship once used only by the Gray officers who ran this ship. Now it’s part of Prolific Man Killer’s domain. He’s standing when we enter the room, as are three others, the remainder of the original eleven we met. All eleven are fine as far as I know, but these guys are Prolific Man Killer’s most dependable advisors. All three are Ghost Trogs, clad in intimidating black, looking like armored ogres from a medieval fairytale, yet smiling like we’re all friends.

With my pistol holstered, rifle in my hand, and disruptor on my back, I extend my left hand to shake with each, finishing with Prolific Man Killer. He seems genuinely happy to see me, and it’s become easy for us to talk without being burdened by the language of diplomacy, though all the death between us has left dangerous pitfalls we both take trouble to avoid.

“When will you leave?” he asks me through our telepathic link.

“If you can finish your repairs without our assistance, this will be our last meeting.”

Prolific Man Killer accepts that without response. He guides me to take a seat on one of a dozen saddle-style stools at a kidney bean-shaped table. The stool is a comfortable fit for a human, which is no surprise since Trogs and humans are so similar.

After sitting on a stool across from me, Prolific Man Killer says, “You see me as a friend, no?”

“I do,” I answer.

With some difficulty, he explains a concept I take as forgiveness, a new word in our mutual vocabulary. “For your kind,” he asks, “is forgiveness easy?”

“No.”

“It is difficult?”

“Mostly. And for Trogs?”

“The same.”

“This makes peace difficult, no?”

“In human wars, peace often comes many years before forgiveness. Sometimes, forgiveness never comes.”

“Does this lead to more war?” asks Prolific Man Killer.

I’ve never looked at human history from that perspective, but I make a guess. “I think so.”

“For a Trog, peace does not come without forgiveness. It is a necessary precondition.”

I didn’t realize that. “You and I are at peace,” I say. “Does that mean you have forgiven me for what happened here?”

“The death of my family members? The death of entire clans? I have chosen to forgive you to reach peace.”

“Forgiveness is a great gift,” I tell him. “I thank you for that.”

“And for the friends and comrades who were killed by Trogs,” asks Prolific Man Killer, “do you forgive for that or only offer peace?”

“I’ve not thought about forgiveness,” I tell him. “I was satisfied with peace.”

“Perhaps forgiveness is something you should consider.”

“You’ve done nothing that needs forgiving,” I explain. “My crew came here to destroy the base and to make war on the Trogs. We did that. We suffered no losses. For you and I, peace and forgiveness are the same.”

“What of the Trogs who killed your friends in your home system? Do you forgive them?”

“I’m still at war with them.”

“And the humans in your system,” asks Man Killer, “they are still at war with us?”

“Just as you cannot speak for the Trogs who are not here,” I tell him, “I cannot speak for humans who are not. We can make peace, you and I. I can go back to my home and explain what happened here. Perhaps the Trogs in our solar system will be willing to meet with me the way you and your commanders did. Perhaps the human leaders will allow me to do this. It is my hope that together we can turn to face our common enemy—the Grays—as allies. If we do, we will defeat them and both our peoples can live in peace. My belief is when I return, the war there will already be over. You saw for yourself how my single ship was able to destroy so many of yours.”

“Most, without fuel or ammunition,” Prolific Man Killer says.

“You are right about that. I have let my ego turn the victory into something more than it was. My point is that during our trip here, my people were creating more vessels like the one my crew flies. It will not take many to destroy the last of the Trog cruisers in our system. Please do not take my certainty on this as an insult to the bravery of your soldiers. Ships like mine are faster, more maneuverable, and more deadly than your cruisers. With enough of them, we will have an advantage that cannot be overcome.”

“That is where I think you will be surprised,” says Prolific Man Killer. “Two more fleets, of sixty-six ships are on their way to your system. They each left well ahead of us. It is likely one arrived during your journey here, and the other may be there now. If your people are able to produce your new ships fast enough, you may indeed win the war there. If not, then when you return, your attempt to speak with the Trogs will be met with hostility, and you may be killed. It is not the Trog way to negotiate with someone they feel certain they can beat.”

I’m still stuck on the number of ships heading toward earth’s system, one hundred and thirty-two, in addition to the ships that were there when I left. I fear disaster for earth. Unfortunately, I’m not able to hide my feelings from Prolific Man Killer. In trying too hard to keep communication open with him, my ability to deceive is left wanting.

“Knowledge of these fleets worries you?” he asks.

“Yes,” I answer.

“Perhaps you should not return until we can go together.”

“You’re coming to the earth system?” I ask, suspicious.

“It is not my purpose to join the war against the humans. The Trog revolution may be easier to start there, where we can negotiate with other clans from a position of relative strength. We will not win if we go back to the home world with only the fleet we have.”

“How many cruisers would you need,” I ask, “if you were to go to war with the Grays and loyalist Trog clans?”

“Thousands.”

Thousands of cruisers? That boggles the mind. “Your navies are that large?”

“Yes,” Prolific Man Killer tells me. “We are at war in seven systems with five other races. Most wars go well. Some do not. We need many cruisers to fight.”

“And you only sent sixty to earth in the original fleet.” I laugh. “Your Gray masters did not think highly of humans, did they?”

“No,” says Prolific Man Killer. “We did not. Until the battle we fought here against your single ship, neither did I.”

“What is your plan, then?”

“To visit the remote systems like your earth, and turn our forces against their Gray masters.”

“Will they listen to you?” I ask.

“The truth of our history is hard to deny. Though we have been subjugated, Trogs aren’t as subservient as the Grays believe. Even your pet Gray underestimates us. They are an arrogant little species, and that will be their downfall."

“Then we should meet,” I tell him, “when your fleet arrives in earth’s system. If I am still alive.”

We make arrangements for a time and place.

Chapter 9

When we jumped from our orbit around Cygni A to Trinity Base, we did it with the tank ring attached, so we felt confident it wouldn’t fail in interstellar flight. Still, our first jumps were all short. Caution can be your friend when you can afford to exercise it.

On the second day of our trip, we made a twenty-four-hour hop, then we spanned two days, after that, we tried a week. It was the process we utilized on the way out from earth. At that time we were using it as a means to stay in sync with Jill's ship. Now, with our journey reminding us of the ambiguity of Jill's fate, we reverted to our previous method.

I’m on the bridge, in my command chair, not doing anything except being comfortable. We're mid-jump. There's nothing to do except watch the blue glow of the hull's inertial bubble shimmer across the ceiling and floor. If something happens during the jump, I don't know that we could do anything fast enough to prevent the ship from breaking apart, but none of us has experienced a catastrophic mid-jump equipment failure. In fact, we humans don't have any information about what happens when a ship fails while traveling faster than the speed of light. Either it falls out of bubble and finds itself stuck somewhere on the way to its destination, or it's atomized by the forces at play.

Even Nicky isn’t helpful in this respect. She didn’t pick up that part of Gray knowledge before Phil assimilated her into their relationship. Or it’s still hidden down in her jelly brain somewhere.

That leaves me with winging it. I keep a crew on the bridge through each shift. They’re tasked with regularly scheduled systems checks and periodic walkthroughs to eyeball the interior of our hull and bulkheads. And, though it seems strange to think about, to look for anomalous variations in the shimmering blue grav fields. It might be a useless endeavor. Or, it might be pointless duty that keeps my people busy at something.

"What I don't understand," says Jablonsky, "is how those Trogs are going to fly those ships. I mean they're grunts, right? Like us. The Grays piloted the cruisers, and they targeted the railguns. Right?"

It’s my first shift with Jablonsky since we left 61 Cygni. My plan is to rotate the lineup every few weeks so I can keep the crew cross-trained and socially integrated. This bridge shift at the moment is me, Lenox, Jablonsky, and Silva. Lenox is in Penny’s pilot seat. Silva is out taking her time on the hull inspection.

I say, “Klingon Pete told me his people have been watching the Grays do their jobs—well—since forever. The Grays think they bred every shred of intelligence out of the Trogs, but the Trogs, at least the smarter ones, are good at hiding their thoughts and feelings from the Grays.”

“Like you and Phil do,” guesses Lenox.

I nod to answer her but continue with Jablonsky’s question. “Klingon Pete thinks his Trogs are capable of flying their ships and targeting their weapons.”

“Watching isn’t the same as doing,” says Jablonsky.

“I know.”

“You think they’ll be any good?” he asks.

“Don’t know.”

“You know we might have to fight them, right?”

Lenox turns to Jablonsky. “We don’t need to have this discussion again. Major Kane took a gamble. What’s done is done.”

“I’m not arguing about that,” he says. “I’m just wondering whether the Trogs will be as good with gravity as the Grays. Ticks are born to it. The rest of you bugheads, Trogs included, have it added on. You’re not hardwired for the talent, if you know what I mean.”

“Right now,” I tell him, “we have the technological advantage. It’s enough to overcome the Grays’ talent edge. It should be enough to beat the Trogs if it ever comes to that.”

“And if they show up around earth with a thousand cruisers one day?” asks Jablonsky.

“You saw all those Arizona class ships that day we lifted off from the shipyard,” says Lenox. “I’d take a thousand Arizona Class ships against a thousand Trog cruisers any day.”

“Except,” says Jablonsky, “we had over a thousand assault ships—eleven hundred, if memory serves. And what’d they have, three cruisers bombing the hell out of us and another thirty or forty attacking the space stations?”

“That was different,” says Lenox.

“You know what we did,” I say, “with the Rusty Turd that day. You know what we did since. The Arizona Massacre was a failure of leadership, training, intelligence, and maybe three or four other things. If we can buy some breathing room, and we can build a decent sized navy, we’ll be able to hold our own against any Trog fleet that comes our way.”

“With a hundred ships like this one,” says Lenox, “with good crews to fly them, we can defeat ten times our number.”

I agree with Lenox.

“Will we have the time to build the ships?” asks Jablonsky. “One of those fleets Klingon Pete told you about will be in our system months before we get back. The other will show up around the same time we arrive. Maybe. Maybe they’re already there. He didn’t seem to have too much info on that. Is that right?”

“That sounds right to me,” I agree.

“What if they win? Then what?”

Lenox looks at me. She wants that answer, too.

“The colonies, I suppose. If the war is lost, then we go to the colonies.”

“What about your appointment with Klingon Pete?” he asks.

“We’ll deal with these questions when we need to,” I tell him. “I’ll meet with Prolific Man Killer when he arrives in system.”

“In system with empty gas tanks and no armaments,” clarifies Jablonsky.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“What’s that mean?” he asks.

“Nearly a third of his Trogs committed suicide.” I know Jablonsky knows that. Everybody on the ship knows that. “They couldn’t live with defeat and surrender. Maybe the history Nicky showed them helped them make that decision. Maybe it was a shame thing. It probably means he’s got roughly a third fewer people in each ship. Maybe he uses the free payload for more fuel, maybe more railgun slugs. He told me he was going to strip down some of the ships and send them on long bubble jumps with small crews out to other systems to pass the word. Either way, I don’t think they’ll show up in earth’s system like helpless hatchlings. They’ll be ready to fight. At least a little.”

“Let’s just hope it’s not us they want to fight,” says Jablonsky. “They won’t get there until what, seven or eight months after we arrive? That’ll give them a long time to have second thoughts about our peace.”

I don’t respond, because I’m carrying that same worry.

Chapter 10

“Lenox told me what you said to Jablonsky on the bridge today,” says Silva.

I run my fingers over her skin, tracing a line from her breast down to her hips. She usually likes to talk when we’re too tired for another go. Something about the naked vulnerability, maybe. “What did she say?”

“Just that stuff about the colonies.”

“What about the colonies?”

Silva snuggles up close, putting her head on my chest and looking up at the ceiling. “Do you ever think about just giving up on this war and running away? Starting fresh on a new world. No Grays. No Trogs. No war. You know, maybe getting a chicken farm or something and having some kids?”

I laugh.

She punches me in the stomach and sits up. “Why are you laughing?”

“I never pictured you out feeding the chickens and hollerin’ at the young ‘uns.”

“I’m just thinking about life after the war.” Silva pulls away, sits up, and leans against the wall to glare at me.

“I don’t think that much about it.”

“But if the war is over when we get back, then what?”

“You mean if earth lost?”

She nods.

“I don’t know. The colonies, I guess. But I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I’m a chicken farm kind of guy. I don’t know if I could live that life.”

“You never wanted to settle down and just, you know, be happy?”

“Yeah,” I admit, but I don’t bring up my time with Claire. “I don’t believe in that dream anymore. Is that what you want?”

“You’re deflecting.”

“I think I answered.” I think about it for a moment before trying again. “I think the colonies are a dream.”

“You think Dr. Spitz was lying?” she asks.

“No. I believe Dr. Spitz. I just don’t think things out there will be the utopia we imagine.”

“Things will be hard,” says Silva defensively. “I don’t think pioneering on an alien world will be easy.”

“I’m not saying that, not really. I mean, I think I kind of imagine those worlds that way too, all rainbows and sunny days. Fields of clover and sex in the afternoon. No mosquitoes or ants.” I laugh. “In my mind, that’s what it’s becoming. Kind of a paradise.”

Silva settles back in to lay on my chest and strokes her hand across my belly. “Me, too.”

“This war has changed me,” I tell her.

"Made you hard?" she asks. "I think it's made me that way. Lots of times, I feel like I'm not in touch with myself anymore. Like I've gone numb. It's a self-defense thing, I guess."

“I think that’s normal, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t look at the sky and see stars now. I see ships full of armies coming to kill everyone I’ve ever known. I don’t think the colonies will be a haven for long. The Grays or the Trogs or some other alien race will find us there. Klingon Pete said they were at war in seven systems with five alien races.”

Silva says, “Do you ever think the universe is just so big you could hide on a hospitable planet out of the way somewhere and never worry about aliens again? Earth made it a long time between when the Trogs left and when the Grays came back. Maybe a hundred thousand years. That’s plenty of time for a good, long life for you, your kids, and anybody who would ever remember who you were.”

“I can’t argue with that,” I tell her. “I just can’t live under the illusion of peace again. I think if we went to the colonies, I wouldn’t be a farmer. I’d join a colonial defense force.”

“A colonial defense force?”

“Sure,” I chuckle. “They have to have one of those, don’t they?”

“Do you ever think maybe you just don’t want to be happy?”

“I’m happy when I’m with you.” I squeeze her tight. She turns her face up to mine and we kiss. Her hand on my belly slides down to see if I’m ready to give up on talking and pursue something a little more fun.

Chapter 11

The voyage goes fast and slow at the same time, depending on the day, depending on the mood. The closer we get to earth, the more anxious everyone becomes. We speculate incessantly on what to expect, but there’s no enthusiasm for it. Five months in a steel tube is a long, long time. We’re anxious to be home, no matter what we find.

Along the way, I started scheduling “swim” days. I know that’s a weird way to think of them. Rather than running the distance in long jumps lasting a month or more, we break it up into one-week chunks. On each day when we’re coasting along at sub-light speeds, we don our suits and go outside to fly around, practicing our suit-grav skills, swimming through the interstellar void and watching the universe slide by—a nice break from looking at the glowing interior of the ship. We never stay outside for more than two or three hours, not enough to slow the journey by any significant degree. Even if it did, I’m not sure I’d stop. The swim hours do wonders for the crew’s morale.

Now that we’re only three days out from the inner solar system of our home star, the sun, Phil is taking short hops, twelve hours at a time. We have a party planned to mark the anniversary of our departure date. We’re all excited about it, though the truth is we won’t do much. We’ll talk, play games, dance, and wish we had some alcohol to make a real party. We ran out of solid food stores months ago and we’ve been subsisting on cal packs. We aren’t in danger of starving, but solid food is the fantasy that comes up in every conversation.

I find myself fixating on a buffalo steak. The last one I ate was the one Phil grilled on my back patio the night we celebrated his birthday. That steak was the only good thing to come out of that night four years ago. It was the day my fake life finally fell apart and I started chasing the dream I was born to catch. The day my revolution began.

Chapter 12

We pop out of our last bubble ten thousand kilometers above the Free Army’s new base—new the last time I’d visited and Colonel Bird assigned my ship the mission to 61 Cygni. Jablonsky opens a frequency to hail them, to let them know we’re friendlies. Penny lines the ship up to cruise toward the base at a comfortable pace.

Phil gasps.

Phil's surprise spikes my tension meter to the top of the scale, and I tell Penny to be ready at the throttle. “Tell me a story, Phil. Tarlow, you got anything?”

Tarlow works his keyboard and dials to put some pictures on his screens. I turn to look at them as Phil starts to explain. "They were hit. The Free Army base."

It feels like the air just ran out of the bridge.

On Tarlow’s screens, I see what Phil can already make out with his grav sense. Where there’d been fifty-four metallic asteroids arranged in rows and columns by a long-gone mining operation, now there’s disarray. A slowly expanding sphere of debris, thousands of kilometers in diameter, sparsely fills the space around the base, a cloud of rock and metal, and—

“Oh, Jesus,” says Phil. “Corpses.”

Enormous pieces of Trog cruisers drift through the vacuum, some right down among the base’s asteroids, others at a distance, part of the growing cloud.

Penny has us on a line, moving toward the massive rock that housed the command center. Details of the carnage come into focus as we draw closer.

“Jablonsky?” I ask.

“You want me to tell you I got nothin’? ‘Cause you can already guess that, right?”

I sigh. I was hoping. “Keep broadcasting.”

“What’s this mean?” asks Lenox.

“Exactly what it looks like,” says Brice, peeking over Tarlow’s shoulder for a glance at the radar displays.

“Brice,” I say, “make sure the gun crew is ready. Lenox, tell the squad to be ready to fight.”

“You think we lost the war?” asks Tarlow. “That’s what it looks like, right? Like we lost.”

“Tarlow,” I tell him, “no speculation. All we know for sure is there was a battle here. We need to go down, scout the installations, look for survivors, ask questions, and—”

“Or,” starts Tarlow, “we can—”

“No.” I don’t let him finish. “We go down. We check it out. Phil, you and Tarlow keep an eye on the space around us, make sure no Trogs are lurking. Keep the grav lens powered up.” It’s our defense in case anyone down there starts shooting. “We need to know what happened here.”

Chapter 13

We moved in slow, careful to keep an eye on the space around us, watching especially hard for Trogs hiding among the ruins to ambush any ship that happens by. It’s one of their tricks we learned at the Potato over a year ago.

Nevertheless, nothing attacked us, and now we’re scavenging.

Lenox and Brice are out with everyone but the bridge crew. They’re collecting H packs and cal packs, extra weapons—pretty much anything they can find that we might put to use. We have a long hose hooked up to a hydro supply we found in a buried tank farm on one of the asteroids that doesn’t seem to have taken as bad a beating as the others.

As for survivors, we spent hours drifting among the battered collection of rocks with Phil and Nicky focusing their senses into the warrens, searching for signs of life. They found nothing. Whoever lived through the battle must have fled. Or were taken prisoner.

And even those are optimistic thoughts. It’s possible no one survived.

“One hundred and forty days ago,” Tarlow tells us.

“What’s that?” asks Jablonsky, diligently scanning the radio frequencies.

“When the battle took place,” answers Tarlow. “One hundred and forty, give or take a few weeks.”

“How do you know that?”

Tarlow points at his monitor, though Jablonsky is on the other side of the bridge and can’t see. I look, though. “No friction in space,” says Tarlow. “If you map the trajectory of each piece of debris, you can draw a straight line back to where it started. All those pieces of ships and bodies out there,” Tarlow points up, “they were all blasted away from here. All their tracks point back here. By calculating the velocity of various pieces, you can tell when they started on their path away. It looks like the battle lasted a few weeks.”

“That fleet that beat us here,” says Penny, “I’ll bet it was them.”

She’s talking about the Trog fleet Prolific Man Killer told us about. I don’t disagree. I turn to Jablonsky. “Radio Brice and Lenox. Tell them to keep an eye out for any digital media, a log or something.”

“What’s the point?” asks Tarlow. “We know what happened.”

“We don’t know how it happened,” I tell him.

“They came in and blew the crap out of everything,” he argues. “Peek through the window. This isn’t rocket science.”

“Tarlow,” I stop myself from venting my frustration at him. It’s not just the loss of the base and all that implies. I don’t know if the Free Army can survive the loss of Colonel Bird. “It’s intel. Maybe the Trogs attacked like they always attack. Maybe not. If we can find a detailed record of the battle, we can start developing a set of guidelines for classifying their tactics.” We should have done it long ago. I don’t say that out loud. The weight of another loss is bearing down on us, every single one of us. Having me point out a mistake won’t help anyone’s mood. “The better we understand our enemy, the easier he’ll be to defeat.” I turn to Phil. “After you wrap up what you’re doing with Nicky, plot us a course out to Iapetus. Bounce us around the solar system a bit first, just in case the Trogs have a ship floating out there in the darkness hoping to track down anyone dumb enough to stop in here.”

Phil checks the time on his d-pad. “We’ve been here for eleven hours already. Maybe we take our time en route and give the crew a chance to sleep. We may soon lose control over our schedule.”

“Agreed.”

Penny turns to me, fresh worry on her face. “Do you think Iapetus is safe?”

Chapter 14

After spending nearly twenty hours on edge, searching, we’re back in space. The crew is frazzled. Their morale has tumbled into a dark hole. There's not much chatter on the comm. The crew is talking amongst themselves in pairs or small groups of three, rarely more. They need the kind of comfort they can only get from their closest friends. I eavesdrop because I can, and because I’m worried. They believe our successful mission out to 61 Cygni was a mistake. Colonel Bird should have kept us in system. A ship like ours could have been a difference maker in any battle with the Trogs. Most think the war is lost. If it's not, their confidence in the Free Army's commanders is shot. First, there was incompetent Blair, and now Bird. Bird was better than Blair in every imaginable way, yet in the end, the vacuum was full of bodies and broken ships.

Penny skims close in over Pluto, and we're slowing down over the surface of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. “You want me to set it down?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I answer, giving Phil a glance for confirmation.

“We’ll be less likely to be spotted on the surface,” he says, not that any of us are expecting to see a Trog or anything else way out here.

“Twelve hours,” I announce over the comm. “Get some sleep. Get out of your suits if you have the urge. This may be the last chance you have to do it for a while. We don’t know what’s waiting for us on Iapetus.”

I divvy bridge duty among the three shifts as the ship settles onto the ground. Penny starts to power down the ship’s major systems. Tarlow sets his radar antennae to scan the sky above. Phil stares silently into space, and I know he’s fully connected to Nicky in their own little telepathic fantasy world. I find I’m a little bit jealous of their closeness, and concerned that I don’t have any clue what they talk about in there. Is Nicky slowly turning Phil to the Gray side? Or is that my paranoia coming to the surface?

I comm Silva. “Library?”

"No one up here is taking off their suits."

“Really?”

In an unnecessary whisper, she says, "We're in a war zone. No one's comfortable getting naked."

Naked, a word that doesn’t mean bare skin anymore. Sure, that’s one meaning, but out here, naked means suitless.

“Some of us are going out to walk around on the surface.”

I didn’t expect that.

“Has anyone ever been here?” she asks. “To Charon? Explorers or anything?”

“Miners maybe.” It’s hard to imagine Pluto’s largest moon would have gone unsurveyed, but the solar system is enormous beyond imagination, the number of places where minerals lie is countless, and many of them are much closer to earth. “It is possible we’re the first ones ever.”

“You want to come out with us?”

I’d prefer they all sleep, but I leave it to them to decide what they need most. “I’ll stay with the ship.”

“Don’t,” she tells me. “Come. Let go of the war for a minute. Nobody knows we’re out here. Nobody’s ever going to notice. Come and sit on a mountain with me and watch Pluto set. Or rise, or whatever. It’ll be romantic.” Silva giggles, although it sounds forced. She’s trying hard to hide from other feelings. “I’ll bet you’ve never done that with a girl.”

No doubt about that. “I’ll come forward.”

Chapter 15

We’re holding gloved hands and sitting lightly on the ground at the top of a small mountain on a world so cold the temperature would kill an unprotected human faster than the vacuum. On an icy plane far below, the Rusty Turd rests, sleek and shiny from the high-temp glazing it received chasing that hydrogen miner through the deep atmosphere on Cygni Saturn.

Over the drastically curved horizon, Pluto is frozen in the sky, huge and beautiful.

“I guess it’s not moving,” says Silva.

Neither of us realized Charon was tidally locked with Pluto. So, no setting or rising. The planet just stayed in the same place in the sky. “It looks like Pluto is tidally locked to Charon as well,” I observe. “See how it doesn’t seem to spin?” Only the shadow of Pluto’s night shows movement, creeping ever so slowly across its surface.

“You know,” she says, “when my mother was my age, she was working in a factory where she’d probably still be working if she were still alive. She was already married, already had two kids. Me and my brother.”

“The MSS likes to get fertile young ladies producing as soon as is biologically feasible.” I start to run the math in my head. Am I as old as her mom? Close?

Maybe guessing what I’m thinking, Silva says, “My mom was born before the siege. My grandma didn’t have my mom until she was thirty-six. She was a lawyer before.”

"I don't know much of anything about my grandparents. I never met them."

“You didn’t know who your father was,” says Silva, “based on what Spitz told you, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you think you’ll try and look up your real grandparents when you get back to earth?”

“You think we’ll make it back?”

“I don’t know.” She turns to me, and she smiles.

“If we do, why not? I think if I were them and I had a grandkid out there in the world, I’d want to know.”

“I wonder why they never looked you up?”

“Maybe they passed before I was born,” I guess. “Maybe if my dad was one of the soldiers sent to the moon, maybe the situation with the MSS after the war made it unwise to be a family member of any of them.”

“That would make sense.” Silva sits in silence for a few minutes while her mind wanders to other things. “I hate the MSS.”

I nod.

“You know what?”

“With you, I don’t think so.”

She laughs, and for a moment, it feels like we’re two normal young lovers sitting in the moonlight and sharing our dreams of a tomorrow where we’ll live in a big house by a peaceful river and raise our kids and grow old and reminisce over faded photographs and bore our friends with stories of our grandkids. It was the kind of dream people on earth used to have before the Grays came, banal, but alluring. It’s peace.

“If we’ve lost the war,” she tells me, “I want to hijack one of those big mining tugs like that one we saw on the Potato.”

“Yeah?” I ask.

“I want to find a heavy, metallic asteroid and push it toward earth and drop it on Pyongyang.”

I nod, but I know an asteroid big enough to destroy the city would be detected by the Grays a billion miles from earth, or at least a hundred million miles away. They’d divert it long before it became a danger. Silva’s fantasy is just that, a fantasy. I don’t say anything about it. I understand how she feels, and it gets me to wondering whether there’s any way to exact some revenge on the MSS before we leave the solar system for good.

And then I realize I’ve taken a mental step. A few. I’ve accepted that we've lost the war, that our only chance at a life is to flee to the colonies. I squeeze Silva's hand again. Maybe a long life with her, fifty light years from here, wouldn't make such a bad future.

She snuggles up next to me, as much as that can be done with layers of composite cloth, insulation, and wiring separating our needy skins.

I wonder, how many trillions of worlds are out there orbiting the stars. How many cultures have evolved out of the swamp goo, built civilizations, and then died away? Did any of them find their way past the genocidal urge that pulls the Grays, the Trogs, and us to such dark places? Did any of them imagine a Heaven into existence to make their cold nights less frightening? Did any of them build a world that matched their dreams, or did they all race their nightmares down to Hell?

It bothers me with Silva so close that my thoughts fall into such bleak places.

Maybe every intelligent race is doomed the moment it forms the concept of self apart from others of its kind.

“Sometimes it seems like you’re a million miles away,” says Silva.

“Sometimes I am.”

“Were you happy before?”

“Before?” I ask.

“When you were married to Claire.”

“I’m happy with you. Back then, I can see now I was just pretending, and telling myself if I tried hard enough, it would turn real. What about you?”

“I’ve never been married.”

“You’ve had boyfriends. Have you ever been in love?”

“Puppy love. It never lasted. I thought it would at the time. Doesn’t everybody, the first time the love bug bites?”

I laugh. “And probably every time after that.”

“What about us?” she asks.

“We’ll last forever. Of course.” I don’t know if I’m being sarcastic or serious.

“I’m glad we came out here, but I wish we had time to go to the library and take our suits off before all this gets started again.”

“I have some pull with the boss,” I tell her. And then my thoughts turn dark again. “I doubt anything is urgently waiting for us on Iapetus.”

Silva squeezes my hand tightly. “I doubt it, too.”

Chapter 16

The time in the library with Silva never came. I didn’t extend the Rusty Turd’s stay on Charon. The war was calling. We left on schedule. We’ve been bouncing around the solar system on our indirect path to Iapetus, and we’re in our last bubble jump.

“Another moment,” Phil tells us. He feels the crew’s mood better than I’ll ever be able to, but even I see the tension run silently through the bridge.

“Be ready to scan the area,” I tell Tarlow.

“I know,” he whines. “You don’t have to tell me every time. I’m not one of—”

“Can it,” I tell him. “Just can it.”

“Thanks,” mutters Penny.

The shimmering blue on the hull rapidly dissipates. The feeling I get when we come out of bubble makes me want to punch something. It always feels like loss to me. I can’t explain why it affects me so much. It’s something I’ll need to talk to Phil about someday.

“We’re about 10k out,” says Phil.

“That’s what I’m showing,” says Tarlow.

Through Penny’s forward facing screens, I see all I need to see, know all I need to know. Iapetus is dead.

“Lots of debris in orbit around the moon,” says Tarlow in a clinical voice.

“Trog cruisers?” I ask, looking for danger.

“Nothing we can sense,” says Phil.

“Tarlow?” I ask.

“I’m scanning the space around us. I don’t see anything moving under power.”

“Derelicts?” I’m hoping at least the defenders of Iapetus were able to take a significant fraction of the Trog fleet with them.

“Nothing we can see,” says Phil.

Brice grumbles over the comm.

“They weren’t set up for a direct engagement with capital ships,” I say, measuring in my mind Spitz’s tiny, stealthy ships against those kilometer-long battle cruisers. They had no hope of winning. “Penny, take us in close.”

“Any of Spitz’s ships out there?” asks Brice.

“I already told you,” says Tarlow, turning to cast his glare. “There aren’t—”

“Tarlow,” I interrupt, “he’s not asking about live ships. He’s asking about wrecks. Are the wrecked UN ships floating around in all the junk? We need to know what happened to their fleet.”

Tarlow grumbles and turns back to his monitor. “There’s so much debris in orbit, it might take me weeks to sort it out.”

“Then you better start,” I tell him. “I need to know if they lost everything or escaped.”

“I’m not going to be able—”

“Do your best.” I settle into my chair. The ship is picking up speed. The grav lens is glowing a conservative field, enough to keep us safe, not bright enough to announce our presence to everything on this side of Saturn.

Penny points to a discolored smudge on the mountain range that bisects the moon. “There, that’s where the base was.”

Was.

The tense seems correct.

“Phil,” I ask, “can you and Nicky sense anything below the surface?”

“We need to get closer,” he answers.

“Brice,” I say, “get the squad ready. We’re going in.”

“We’re not—”

I turn to look at him. “We are going in.” I pat Penny on the shoulder. “You’ll have the ship. You, Jablonsky and Tarlow. Phil, you and Nicky are coming with us.”

“What about the railgun crew?” asks Penny.

“They’ll stay aboard with you,” I answer. “Same rules as usual. Stay close. Wait for us, unless things get ugly. If they do, then bug out and come back for us later. Get us down there.”

“What if I want to blow up a Trog cruiser?” she asks. “If one shows up, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop myself.”

“They almost never travel alone. ” I tell her. “Not anymore. If you find one, there’ll be others lurking nearby.”

Chapter 17

We fly in like the way we did on our first visit. Penny brings the ship down near the surface and we skim over the terrain, scanning the horizon for our objective.

The base isn’t hard to find. Craters, small and large, dot the mountains all around the base’s entry and exit points. Where the rock gave way and the base was breached, the atmosphere exploding out from the inside left cone-shaped fields of broken equipment, shattered rock, and the frozen bodies of the dead spreading tens of kilometers over the surface.

Penny follows one of the cones to its tip, the hangar where Spitz renovated the Rusty Turd. With no power maintaining the base, the curtain wall that had separated the interior atmosphere from exterior is down. Where there had been a neat, rectangular hole cut right into the face of the mountain, only a ragged gouge is left. Nevertheless, we fly toward it, moving slower and slower the nearer we get.

Before entering, Penny looks to me for confirmation.

I nod. We have to go inside.

Penny brings us in, carefully hovering over the floor until she finds a place large enough and flat enough to set the Rusty Turd down.

It takes only moments for us to exit—Brice, Lenox, Peterson, Silva, Phil, Nicky, and me. We stand silently in the dark chill and watch Penny lift the ship off the ground, sliding out of the bay, and up toward the safety of open space. She’ll wait in a geosynchronous orbit over Iapetus, powering down the ship and lingering amidst the biggest field of orbiting rocks and broken ships she can find.

I take a look around at the misshapen hangar space. I don’t see a single ship. The massive volume of pressurized air escaping the base blasted the place clean.

Brice points toward the back wall of the hangar. A gaping, black maw opens where the airlock door used to be. “That way?”

I turn to Phil. “You need to guide us.”

“That was the way in,” he says. “It still is.”

“Are the hallways inside intact?”

“Some are,” he says. “As far as we can sense. Many are blocked or partially collapsed.”

“Survivors?” I ask.

“Nothing we can see yet.”

“Let’s go,” I order. “Stay on your toes, people.” That last instruction was probably unnecessary. Iapetus feels like a ghost town with real ghosts lurking in the shadows. We’re all nervous.

Chapter 18

Four hours in and it feels like we’re trapped in a maze. The dark hallways we tromp through come in three classes: pristine, partially collapsed, and impassable. Outside of that, it’s hard to tell one from the other. Every sign has been removed. Every distinguishing feature has been blasted to rubble. Doors are mostly gone. Some of the relatively thin walls that had separated individual rooms have been demolished with the remnants stacked into bunkers. At every turn—every bottleneck—the ceiling, and floor are heavily scarred from the firefight or ambush that took place there. The ground where every fight took place is littered with deformed railgun slugs, rock chips, empty H cartridges and cal packs, and all too frequently, shards of faceplate, cracked pieces of helmets, and power packs. Everything a man or Trog might carry that could be blasted to bits by high-velocity railgun slugs is crunching under our boots.

We come across corpses as we ventured deeper. First a few, then dozens, then hundreds. We find one place where the bodies of the solders were stacked into ramparts that survivors were ultimately unable to defend. The floor behind the bloody wall is carpeted with corpses. How effective the Iapetus soldiers were at killing Trogs, we can only guess. The Trogs took all their dead with them after their victory.

“Haven’t we been down this hall already?” asks Silva, as we exit a stairwell and choose left upon entering the corridor. She points to the right. “That pile of rocks blocking the way looks familiar.”

“You’re becoming an expert in rock pile recognition?” laughs Brice.

“No,” she answers. “But soon.”

“We have to go down some halls more than once,” says Phil. “They’re the only ones open between different parts of the complex.”

Brice turns to me and winks. “You can admit you’re lost, Phil. None of the rest of us knows where we are.”

"I know where I am." Phil is irritated. He's been catching the gripes of the squad for the better part of an hour, and he's fed up. "I know where we are. Exactly. If you want to go back to the hangar and wait in the cold, I can take you there in ten minutes."

“It’s pretty cold in here, too,” Brice deflects, though like all of us he wouldn’t have a clue about the external temperature without his d-pad telling him. Our second-hand suits keep the internal temp in a comfortable range.

Phil stomps on ahead.

“Lay off Phil,” I say. “It’s my fault we’re searching.”

“I know where things are." Phil turns his eyes toward the ceiling, and he scans as though he's watching an invisible roach crawl across. "Working together, Nicky and I can see three floors up and three floors down. A hundred or two hundred feet in every direction.”

I’m lucky if I can sense thirty feet of grav variations through the rock.

“I have a full picture in my mind of everything we’ve surveyed so far,” finishes Phil.

“What are we looking for?” asks Lenox. “Records again? We know what happened here. Given a few hours, Tarlow can probably tell us when it happened. We don’t need to top off our supplies. We’re nearly full.”

“This battle took a while to play out,” says Brice. “I’ll bet it went on for two or three months down here.” He looks up and down the scarred corridor. “Reminds me of the moon when the Trogs came.”

“Let’s take a break here,” I tell them. “Find a place to sit. Stay alert, though.”

“No need to stay alert,” says Phil. “There’s nothing alive down here but—”

Everyone looks up.

“Phil?” I ask. “What?”

He looks down the corridor. He cocks his head. Nicky is staring in the same direction.

Lenox shines a light down the long hallway.

“Something’s down there,” says Phil in a quiet voice.

“Something?” I ask, walking up next to him to look into the endless black. “What?”

“Too far to tell,” he says. “Maybe a half-mile that way.”

Around us, the squad arrays against the walls, weapons pointed down into the darkness or toward the stairs. They’re ready to fight.

“People?” I ask. “Trogs?”

Phil shakes his head. “Something is moving down there. Way down there. That’s all I can tell you.”

An authoritative voice crackles across my comm. “Put your weapons on the ground and identify yourselves.”

Chapter 19

“We have four coming up the stairs, all human,” says Phil. “Three flights down. They’re sneaking. They want to ambush us. Another squad of six is up two floors.”

Brice casts a hard glance at Phil. “They surrounded us?”

“With all the rubble,” Phil excuses, “it’s hard to make out things. The grav fields are chaotic.”

“Phil,” I tell him. “I need to know who these guys are.” Over the comm, I say to the voice, “Identify yourself.”

“Negative,” says the man. “Lower your weapons.”

"Hardly," I tell him. "Tell your four coming up the stairs to hold fast, or we'll drop a few grenades on them and step over their bodies when we blow your amateur envelopment tactic." I hear a partial word over the comm, and I read surprise and frustration into it. I give Phil a nod. Now they have to wonder what our capabilities are.

I turn to Brice. “We need to get out of this trap.” Back to Phil. “Find us a path out of here and keep an eye on those guys up top.”

Brice passes out orders. People start to move.

Phil points up the hall. “They’re starting to work their way toward us.”

I stare down the long, black corridor for a second and sense the mass of bodies, running from cover to cover.

Phil turns to Silva, who’s starting to climb through the rubble blocking the hall behind us. “Up in that corner,” he says. “Near the top. We may be able to crawl through if those rocks are loose enough to push aside.”

“Gotcha,” she says, and scrambles up.

Down the hall, Brice disappears through a doorway, and immediately comms in. "This place is large and defensible. Doesn't appear to be a side door, though."

“It can be our Alamo,” I tell him, “if we can’t find something else.”

“We need some time,” Brice tells me.

“I can buy it,” I answer, and switch to the comm channel the unidentified officer contacted me on. “This is Major Kane. Are you MSS, SDF, UN, or Free Army? You don’t want to go KIA on a case of mistaken identity, do you?”

“KIA?” he laughs. “You’re cocky. We have you outnumbered, two to one.”

“Really?” I prod, noticing he didn’t specify our number like I did with his. I suspect he doesn’t know. “You have six in the stairwell two floors up in addition to the four downstairs. I don’t know how many you have up the hall, but if you think it’s enough, why are we talking and not shooting?”

“You shouldn’t taunt him,” says Phil.

“You do your job,” I say. “I’ll do mine.

Phil says, “I think there’s a narrow shaft in a room about sixty meters down on the left. It runs up and down between the floors.”

“Got it,” answers Brice, and he rushes out of the room he’s in with Peterson in tow.

“We can’t get out this way,” says Silva from atop the rubble pile, “unless we blast it.”

“Will a grenade do it?” I ask.

“C4 will do the trick.”

“Set a charge,” I tell her. “Brice, forget that direction. We’ll blast our way out back here.”

“I heard.” He’s already running back toward us.

“Identify who you are,” asks the voice over the comm. “Are you MSS, SDF, UN, or Free Army?”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I conclude for both of us. “Why don’t you trot on down here and you and me can talk about it over a beer before we get a bunch of our people shot for nothing.”

“You’d like, that wouldn’t you?” he asks, suspiciously.

“Yes,” I answer, ignoring the sarcasm, I would like that. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Lieutenant. Call me that.”

Silva says, “I have the charge set.”

Brice orders everyone into the stairwell.

“You can’t get out that way,” says the lieutenant.

“Phil,” I ask, “how are they tracking us?”

“Night vision?” He guesses. “Telescopic site from down the hall? I don’t know.”

My squad is in the stairwell in seconds, all on the landing inside the door, not on the stairs where they’ll have a direct line of sight to the troops above or below. Once we take that step, the bullets will start to fly.

“Lieutenant?” I call.

“What?”

“Sir, might be more appropriate,” I taunt. “I am a major.”

“You’re an unidentified target,” he says.

"I have a charge set on the rubble in the hall. I'm going to blow it, and we're heading out that way."

“You shouldn’t have told him that,” says Brice. “You gave away our surprise and put the squad in danger.”

“I’m still hoping to end this without a fight,” I tell him.

“We can fire down the length of the hall,” says the lieutenant.

Brice nods, to confirm that danger.

“So can we,” I argue.

To Brice, I say, “As soon as Silva blows the C4, drop grenades down the stairwell and take out the four below us. If we’re lucky, they’ll be charging up to hit us in the flank.”

“Cakewalk,” says Brice with a grim smile.

“Okay,” says the lieutenant. “I’ll come and talk to you face-to-face. Don’t blow up anything. Once you do, I can’t guarantee—”

“Guarantee?” I ask, “What? That you won’t attack?”

“That’s right.”

“Fine,” I tell him. “Bring a photo ID.”

“Are you joking?”

“A little bit.”

“We should blow it and go,” says Brice. “They may be buying time to put a force behind the barrier or to reinforce what they have in the stairwell.”

“He’s right,” says Lenox.

I peek out into the hall, delaying my decision for just a moment.

Chapter 20

Against the advice of my sergeants, Phil, and even Silva, I step back into the hall, turning to Brice as I go. “At the first sign of trouble, you know what to do.”

He knows, but he shakes his head anyway, because he wants one more time to tell me I’ve made a bad choice.

I amp up my defensive grav and start up the hall at a brisk pace, keeping an eye out as I proceed for places to dive for cover, rooms that look like good places in which to defend myself.

It takes several minutes before I can clearly make out the lieutenant coming toward me out of the darkness. He has no light shining to guide his way, I don’t either. I'm making my way on my grav sense. I guess he's got to be using an infrared HUD display built into his helmet, as I can't make out any extra gadgets in front of his eyes. That makes me feel optimistic, a little. The suits from earth aren’t manufactured with that kind of equipment. The UN is still developing new tech, though.

He slows down as we come in close. At five paces, I stop. He does, too.

“I’m going to turn on my light,” he says. “It’s not for targeting.” His shoulder light blinks on.

I turn mine on, too, and squint, to give my eyes a moment to adjust.

Through his faceplate, he looks like a young man, mid-twenties, dark hair, normal, average. Not a middle-aged man. Not a kid. Probably not SDF, demographically speaking. “Major Dylan Kane,” I say. “And your name?”

“Marsh,” he says. “Lieutenant Marsh. Will you step closer, please?”

“Why?”

“So I can see you more clearly.”

It’s a lie. I reach out with my grav sense, and visualize my escape—I can unload my rifle on full auto while I max grav back toward the stairwell. It might take all of five seconds to get there. I don’t do it. Not yet.

“I need to get a clearer picture of your face for the video feed,” he says. “My CO wants to see what you look like.”

“It doesn’t matter what I look like,” I tell him.

“She wants to see who you are.”

“She?” I ask.

“Colonel Blair.”

I groan. “Good God, she’s not dead yet?”

I catch a bit of a smirk on Marsh’s face, and guess right away that Blair hasn’t changed. “You know her, then?”

“Of course, I do,” I answer. “Did she turn MSS, or is she still an SDF problem?”

“She’s—” Marsh stops himself. “Step closer, please. So they can see your face over the video feed.”

I do as told, still not sure whether I’m stepping into or out of danger. “Can you loop me into the comm so I can talk with Blair, too?”

Lieutenant Marsh fingers his d-pad, and a comm opens up, with Blair scolding him in mid-sentence.

“Blair,” I say, “is that you, darling?” I laugh, because to me, it’s funny.

“You haven’t changed,” she snarls.

“Please tell me Bird is still in charge.”

“It’s none of your—”

"Are you still stuck on the traitor shit?" I ask her. "Really, after all we've been through?"

The line goes to static, giving me another moment of trepidation over the mistake I might be making. A familiar, old voice comes on the line. “Kane, this is Bird, I’m glad you made it back.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

“You can see we’ve had a hard time of it since you left.”

“We saw the Free Army HQ,” I say. “We stopped there day before yesterday.”

“So you’ve only been in system for a few days?”

“Thirty or forty hours so far.”

“Did your mission go well?”

“We destroyed the base,” I tell him, “and caught a fleet with their pants around their ankles.”

“You attacked a fleet?” scoffs Blair, back on the comm. “By yourself. You alone. How many ships?”

“Sixty? Sixty-five. Plus some hydrogen tankers.”

“Marsh,” says Bird. “Stand down. Lead the Major’s people down to the command bunker. Kane, we’ll talk when you get here. We’d pretty much given up hope on you. I’m so glad you made it.”

Chapter 21

Wary, with Blair back in the equation, I send everyone but Brice back to the surface for pickup. Penny will take them aloft and hide in the ring of debris forming around Iapetus in the aftermath of the battle.

Marsh and a squad of his troops are leading us deep into the bowels of the rocky moon. At every turn, we descend four or five flights of stairs. No hallway we enter is more than a hundred meters long. At the end of each stands a fortification, cut from the rock with gun slits set for firing at invaders coming down the corridor. Every bunker has a protected exit to the stairs leading down to the next level.

The walls were cut hurriedly, roughly from the living rock. The subterranean refinement of the formerly well-lit city above is absent down here. This is a fort, though none of the walls bears blast scars or gouges from high-velocity projectiles. None of this was fought over when the Trogs invaded.

Periodically, we pass through heavily defended airlocks, each marked with a depth. Half-kilometer, one kilometer, two. The last airlock we pass through is at the three-kilometer mark, and Marsh mentions that we’re nearly twelve klicks from the UN base as the lock is cycled to let us through. Inside, we see busy people headed here or there—soldiers, I guess, since they’re all armed, wearing orange suits, all with helmets dangling from their belts. They’re ready to fight.

Marsh and his squad take off their helmets to breathe the dank air. Brice and I do the same.

Through an expansive complex of intersecting tunnels and natural caves with cathedral ceilings, we walk past offices, shops, and barracks. It’s a deeper, smaller, cruder version of the wasted city above.

Marsh leads us to Bird’s office, or what passes for an office. It’s a rectangular room burrowed into the stone with no door to secure it. A cot and small cabinet sit by one wall, telling me this is probably Bird’s apartment as well as his office. Brice and I both sit at a table with several chairs on each side, and Marsh explains that Bird will arrive soon. After that, he leaves.

"You suppose they're waiting out in the hall?" Brice asks.

I shrug. I do suppose that. I imagine Brice and I could be seen as a risk after being gone for so long. Who knows?

We wait. We don’t talk much, but I grow impatient. I get up and peek into the hall. I don’t see Marsh or any of his men. I do see others, all in suits, helmets off like the rest of them, all occupied with problems that don’t have anything to do with Brice or me.

After nearly an hour, Bird hurries through the doorway, apologies bubbling over.

Brice and I both stand, but before I salute, Bird wraps me in a hug. He does the same with Brice.

Three more officers follow in, a major and two captains. We introduce ourselves and still no salutes. I wonder if the formality has been beaten out of the Free Army by their defeats.

Bird goes behind the table and sits down like it's his desk. “Give it to me as briefly as you can.”

I run through a quick version of our arrival in the 61 Cygni system, our search, our destruction of the tankers at Cygni Saturn, and our victory at Trinity Base. I then take care to explain my justification for leaving Prolific Man Killer with a fleet that could one day be used against us should he break his word. Bird and the other officers exchange silent glances as I proceed through that part of the story, but to my surprise, not one of them protests, no one calls me out for my stupid decision.

“What about Jill’s ship?” asks Bird.

I can’t believe I’ve left that part of the story out. “We were hopping in sync for the first several weeks of the journey. When we came out of one bubble jump, she didn’t show. We waited, we searched. Nothing.” I shake my head as I recall the event. “We were hoping her ship would show up at 61 Cygni. It never did. We told ourselves she must have experienced a mechanical problem and turned back. My God, that was a year ago when we lost her.”

“She never made it back here,” says Bird, as he glances at his gathered officers.

One of them says, “If the ship didn’t disintegrate while making a jump, they might still be out there.”

“Doesn’t matter," says another. "At least if you disintegrate, it’s over. If your ship malfunctions in interstellar space, all you can do is wait until you run out of supplies and die.”

"They carried enough for eighteen months, and that's if they don't ration," says the first guy. "If they’re stranded out there, they could have sent a distress call that might have taken all year just to get here.”

“Wills,” says Bird, “have your comm people point an antenna toward 61 Cygni. Listen for a signal. If the ship is out there, they’ll be broadcasting their position. We can send a rescue.”

“So what’s the plan with the Trogs we left in 61 Cygni?” I ask. “I expected more resistance on my… ” I look for the right word, “treaty. Are you going to honor it if they show up here?”

“You took a big gamble with that,” says Bird. “We’ll honor the agreement, but it won’t matter.”

“How’s that?” I hate the fine print, even when it’s spoken. “Do we need to bring this up with the UN? I can’t imagine Secretary Kimura will be against it.”

“She’s gone,” says Bird.

“Dead?” I ask, saddened at the thought of losing another good leader.

“Off to the colonies,” says Bird. “Before the battle here, they left.”

"The Trog fleet was coming, and they detected it early?" I asked.

“It didn’t happen exactly like that,” says Bird. “A new Trog fleet showed up in system, I imagine the one your Prolific Man Killer told you about. They joined what was left of the fleet already here.”

“How long after Jill and I left?” I ask, knowing the Free Army and the UN needed time to build up their forces before they’d be able to put up a fight.

“Two months, maybe. They had a big enough fleet to go after earth’s battle stations again. We were repairing every Arizona Class ship we could get our hands on and upgrading as fast as we could, but we only had one ship like yours when you left.”

I don’t point out that was Bird’s choice. The pros and cons of that decision had been debated by people with a lot more brass on their collars than me. “Hawkins’s ship. How are they doing?”

“Still alive,” he says. “Hawkins is one fine ship captain.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Hawkins was raiding then,” says Bird. “Quick in-and-out missions, hitting single ships whenever he could, trying to catch them when they went in for resupply. Safe missions. We didn’t want to risk our only effective ship in a fight we didn’t know we could win. As we brought other Arizona class ships online, we threw them into the war. The Trogs didn’t like that one bit. So, instead of attacking earth, they came after us. They ran around the whole solar system in pairs of squadrons, twelve ships each, turning over every rock in search of us. They found the base out near Jupiter first.”

“We saw it,” I tell him. “It’s the first place we stopped when we got back.”

“We held out for nearly a month,” says Bird, silently counting through the dead as he recalls it. "It was a loss from the beginning. I saw that. The Trogs were coming at us with over seventy cruisers, and we weren't even fully operational. Hawkins was in charge of the fleet by then." Bird shrugs. "He'd trained most of the Arizona Class ship captains, and they’d taken to calling him ‘admiral.’ It might have gone to his head a little because I ordered him to save the fleet and leave us to our fate. The fleet was still too weak and inexperienced for a direct confrontation. He didn’t listen. So, it was Ceres all over again. We knocked out nearly thirty of their cruisers, most of those destroyed, the rest disabled and probably repaired by now, but it almost cost us our whole fleet, and only bought us a few weeks.”

Bird picks up a cup of water off his desk and takes a big drink. He asks if Brice or I would like any. We decline.

“After the loss,” says Brice, “Secretary Kimura saw the writing on the wall more clearly than any of the rest of us. They had an evacuation plan all ready to go, and she gave the word."

I raise a hand to stop him. “I thought the UN didn’t have the ships to evacuate everyone to the colonies.”

“They didn’t,” says Bird. “They don’t.”

My shoulders sag as I start counting up deaths in my head. Twenty thousand of humanity’s brightest, all dead because there was no room to squeeze them into a freighter out to the colonies. “They stayed to fight off the Trog invasion here?”

“The invasion came,” says Bird, “but that’s not exactly what happened.”

“Tell me.”

"The UN took every ship that could make the journey, packed it with as much difficult-to-replace equipment, supplies, and people as they could, and they made their run. That left close to thirty thousand here."

“Jesus,” I say. “I didn’t realize there were that many people on Iapetus.”

“We set about rigging the whole complex with explosives. We didn’t want any of our advanced technology to fall into the hands of the Trogs when they took this place, and we didn’t have any doubt they would. There were too many of them, all battle-hardened warriors. We had ten or eleven thousand troops, a bunch of civilians, not enough weapons, and not nearly enough ammunition to fight through a siege.”

Bird stands up from his desk, dismisses his three officers and leads Brice and me out into the hall. “Walk with me.”

It feels good to be on my feet again.

“You probably noticed it took a long time to get here,” says Bird.

“We did,” says Brice.

“There’s only one passage leading from the main complex all the way out here,” says Bird. “It was set with explosives and sealed up during the battle. We’ve since cleared it again so we can run patrols in the main complex. There’s still plenty left there we can use. We can probably piece together a few dozen ships capable of making it out to the colonies. We have people working on that.”

I’m looking at the rough-hewn walls, the pipes on the ceiling overhead and the exposed wiring. It’s a hiding place, not a home. “What about the rest? Are all the survivors down here?”

“All of this was built out years and years ago,” says Bird. “It was the UN’s backup plan.” Bird stops talking and leads us down a long hall, finally coming to an airlock, and leading us through.

On the other side, we step into a subterranean warehouse as large as the biggest ones I’d seen back on earth, covering acres and acres and acres of ground under a ceiling at least a hundred feet overhead. Filling the space are warehouse racks filled with coffin-sized pods. Every one of them has a small instrument panel glowing at the foot.

“What are these?” asks Brice.

“Stasis pods,” he says.

“Stasis?” I ask. I guess immediately from there, but I didn’t know the technology existed.

“They call it cryo-sleep,” says Bird. “The UN developed them initially so they could escape earth’s system when they thought the nearest safe place might require a trip of decades through space. Turns out they were right, mostly. The nearest colony is nearly a hundred light years away. That’s a twelve-year trip in one of those big Trog cruisers. Longer in the freighters we built. The problem is that you have to load so much H to fuel the trip, you have to start cutting back on payload. And by the time you figure enough food to feed the crew for twelve years, you get down to some pretty small numbers.”

“So you ship them in the pods,” I guess. “Does that save much?”

“You can run a pod for a decade on an H-packs,” he answers. "The weight savings, hence the fuel savings, is significant."

“So you can ship more colonists in one load,” I say.

“A hundred light years,” muses Brice. “That’s a long way. There weren’t any habitable worlds closer?”

“For safety, to save our race,” says Bird, “the distance is worth it.”

“How many of these pods do you have?” I ask.

“Seventeen thousand, give or take.” says Bird.

“But,” I’m thinking of the thirty thousand he said were on Iapetus before the attack.

Bird cuts me off. “We only had seventeen thousand pods.”

“Everyone else?” I ask.

“We have six thousand active people down here,” says Brice. “The rest died fighting for Iapetus.”

“Why?” I ask, “If it was a lost cause.”

“Sacrifice,” says Brice. “If the Trogs had rolled into that complex up there and nobody was home, they’d have known something was up.”

“That’s right,” says Bird. “We had to fight because we didn’t want them to spend years here scouring for survivors.”

The math of war: kill a few to save the many.

That’s what we’re talking about, yet I don’t summarize it so.

“We didn’t fight to win,” says Bird, “we fought to kill as many Trogs as we possibly could. We had miles and miles of tunnels to do it in.”

“How’d it work out?” asks Brice.

“It was expensive in lives,” says Bird, “however, we estimate killing sixty or seventy thousand Trogs.”

“Good night,” says Brice.

I’m shocked, too. “Sixty or seventy thousand?”

“We made ‘em pay,” says Brice.

“So what’s the plan now?” I ask.

“We’ll maintain our presence here until we can get all of these people shipped out,” says Bird.

“By building ships you don’t seem to have the resources to build?” asks Brice.

“And waiting for the ships already out at the colonies to return,” I add. “You’ll be here the rest of your life. What about the war?”

“Moving them all out might take twenty-five years,” says Bird.

I shake my head. “You know you’ll never keep this place secret that long, right?”

“It was a secret at least that long before,” argues Bird.

“But now the Trogs know it was a base,” I say. “They’ll be back when they finish off earth.”

“They’ve already finished off earth,” says Bird.

That’s a gut punch.

Chapter 22

“After Iapetus fell,” says Bird, “another Trog fleet showed up. No SDF fleet. No Free Army. No Iapetus.” The circumstances explain themselves from there.

Brice says, “At least those Gray bastards on the moon got what they had coming to them.”

“No,” says Bird, as we stroll down a long aisle between the tall racks of stasis pods, “as soon as that last fleet came into the system, the Grays pulled up stakes and ran for it.”

Brice stops us there. “In the original ship they arrived in? They lifted off from the moon and ran?”

I’m angry, but I’m not surprised. “We always knew they would.”

"Bastards," mutters Brice.

“After the Grays left,” says Bird, “the MSS surrendered the remaining battle stations.”

“I’ll bet they didn’t like being left behind,” I guess.

"Word has it," says Bird, "a few thousand went along. The MSS leadership and enough grunts to do the work in the next place they land."

“The next place they destroy,” I correct. “It doesn’t matter where they go, this other bunch of Grays will chase them down.”

“Their problem, not ours,” says Brice, “but I’ll tell you what, if the war here is lost, I wouldn’t mind jumping back in the Rusty Turd and chasing those bastards down whatever vector they left on. Those big Trog cruisers will take decades to catch them. We could be waiting for the Grays when they come out of bubble jump at the next star system and blast them to dust. Settle this shit once and for all.”

I nod at Brice, although I don't agree. I suspect vengeance on the Grays isn't something we can afford at the moment. "So the Trogs have the earth?"

Bird nods. “The MSS who were left behind brownnosed up to the Trogs and helped them scour the planet for Grays. Killed every Gray on the planet as far as we know."

“And the hosts?” I ask. “People who were raising the hatchlings? How were they handled?”

“Same,” says Bird, “as far as I know.”

That means Claire is dead, murdered by Trogs, unless that hatchling had already sucked the last breath out of her. The deduction passes through me like a stale wind. Pain, but I feel better when it passes. I wonder if Phil will be concerned about Sydney. She probably would have been killed, too, there in the end, trying to protect a sister she thought she hated.

“So no more Grays on the earth?” asks Brice.

“Just the ones the Trogs brought with them,” says Bird.

“Meet the new boss—” I start the cliché.

“—same as the old boss,” Brice finishes.

Chapter 23

“So you’re in charge?” I ask. “Of everything?”

“There’s no everything,” says Bird. “This is it.”

“The revolution is dead, then?”

“Sometimes,” says Bird, “we have to accept that we’ve failed, and salvage what we can from the ashes.” Bird pats one of the stasis pods. “All these people’s lives are in our hands. That's what we're working on now.”

“Is anyone still fighting?” I ask.

Bird shakes his head. "The Trogs are consolidating their position. A dozen of earth's battle stations were still active when they surrendered. The Trogs pulled the construction crews off those damn space wheels the Grays had them building, and they’re repairing the remaining battle stations. I don’t have any intel on how far along that effort is. Either way, earth will be a fortress again. The Trogs are fortifying the moon, too.”

“Jesus,” says Brice, “that place was already a fortress.”

“We’ve learned they plan to triple the number of railgun batteries in the next year, and they have crews excavating around the clock to expand their footprint there. When you consider the number of cruisers they have in system, they’ll be able to take a hell of a punch if war comes again.”

“If?” I ask.

Brice doesn’t respond to my question. “They’re sending out salvage crews to find the ships wrecked in the war. They’re especially interested in the Arizona Class ships. They want that technology, probably because they know how close we came to whipping their asses with it.”

“And all the people on earth who built those ships?” asks Brice.

“The MSS earthbound administration is still in place,” answers Bird. “The Trogs probably already have ships rolling off the lines down at the Arizona shipyards. The big yards in Europe and China, too.” He drills me with a hard look. “It’s everything we feared. The Trogs will use humans for labor and engineering. They’ll pick up where our Grays left off and probably expand all through the system, milking the place dry of resources to build their fleets. No doubt they’ll return to building those space stations, too. Eventually. More real estate for them to raise hatchling Grays and baby Trogs.”

“So no more war?” I push, because Bird never gave me the direct answer I wanted. “No more resistance? Nothing?”

“Nothing,” says Bird. “We save the people in these pods. That’s it.”

“I can’t accept that,” I tell him. “What about Hawkins? With my ship and his ship together, we can do some damage. We can work out some tactics that’ll give us the advantage, and then—”

“Hawkins has already taken his ship out to the colonies.”

“We can start over,” I tell him. “We can raid, just like Hawkins was doing. We can capture Arizona Class ships as we go. We can keep the resistance alive. The longer we do, the more humans will come to our side. Even in the face of incessant MSS propaganda, humans won’t give up hope.”

Bird stops my argument with a raised hand. “If you start raiding, then the Trogs will start looking for a base. They won’t find one, not until they start searching through the remains of the installations they’ve already destroyed. So they’ll eventually come back to Iapetus. I can’t have that. The Trogs need to believe they’ve pacified the solar system.”

I don’t buy it. “People on earth won’t accept this. Not in the long run.”

“They did for thirty years already,” says Brice.

“Earth is a different story,” says Bird. “What happens on the surface is separate from what happens out here. Even the Trogs can see that.”

“So that’s it?” I ask.

“These people in these pods are mankind’s hope. The UN got into the war, much, much too late, that’s obvious to everyone now, but the factions that advocated for staying out of it used the destruction of Iapetus as proof they were right all along. Not a lot anyone can do to make the counterargument now that we’re standing in the proof. We’re all on their plan now. We need to get these people out to the colonies. Out there, we’ll have time to rebuild. No matter what the difference is now in arms, we have the people to create a technological advantage, so in a few generations, or a few centuries—who knows—we can come back and defeat the Trogs and free the people of earth.”

“Except,” I say, “earth is full of humans, too. Who’s to say the Trogs won’t figure out how to utilize them to their fullest. Can a colony of a few tens of thousands compete with the brainpower of a whole planet?”

“A planet of uneducated slaves?” asks Bird. “Earth’s top talent was here. Iapetus has been harvesting the best from earth for a generation. They’ll have the edge out in the colonies.”

I don’t agree, but I don’t push it. Even through my stubbornness, I see things have been decided. Worse, I can’t fault the logic. Mostly, I can’t. “I know where we can get our hands on a Trog cruiser.”

“The solar system is full of them,” says Bird.

“I’m not talking about hijacking one,” I say.

“You want to go back to 61 Cygni?” he asks, the gears starting to turn as he guesses where I’m going. “You’re thinking of taking all of these pods out in one load?”

I nod. “But I don’t think we have to go all the way out to 61 Cygni to do it. I know of a salvageable ship we can get right here in our solar system.”

Chapter 24

It’s me, Phil, Nicky and a pilot in one of the UN’s stealthy little scout ships, one of just two left, with the other having problems. We’re bubbling out toward Jupiter, of course taking low-power short hops in random directions to obfuscate our point of origin.

Back in our battle for the Potato, Phil rammed the Rusty Turd into the bridge of an attacking Trog cruiser. Later, when the battle was over, Jill’s pilot used the mining operation’s tug to push the cruiser into an orbit around Jupiter. We didn’t destroy it because I thought a day might come when we’d be able to salvage the ship.

“How do you feel about it?” Phil asks me. He’s not talking about the cruiser.

“About the demise of our cause?” I punctuate with a shrug, but the gesture is a lie I’m trying to make myself believe.

“You’re not going to give up, are you?”

I shake my head. “I don’t want to, but what can one ship do against—” I want to say fleet, and then navy, yet it’s so much more than that. It’s not even just one planet now, it’s the whole solar system under Trog control. Well, there are the rogue mining operations out in the belt, but that’s a legless argument. They’ll fall under Trog dominion as soon as they’re discovered.

“If they haven’t all been destroyed or conquered already,” says Phil.

“Stop that,” I tell him. “If we’re going to have a conversation, we do it in one medium—speech, okay? I can’t keep up with you and Nicky in your telepathic connectivity.”

“You don’t want to be the dullard in the back of the class?” It’s not much of a deduction. He and I have talked about it before.

“We’ll get Bird this cruiser,” I say. “After, who’s to say we can’t stay here with the Rusty Turd and see what we can spark. With a little time and caution, we can mount a guerrilla war here and—”

“What if Bird won’t let you keep the ship?” asks Phil.

“Because…”

Phil nods. “You know, it’s not exactly your ship.”

“It’s not his either, is it?”

“We were in the service of the SDF when we mutinied and took it.”

“But the SDF is no more,” I argue. “Bird said it himself.”

“He didn’t exactly say that,” says Phil, prying into my memory of the encounter. “He said the resistance was at an end. The SDF still exists. Their role has changed.”

“They can’t exactly make me give them the ship,” I tell him. “Not if I decide to keep it.”

“I don’t agree.”

“The only way they can take it,” I say, “is if we happen to be at their base and they lock us up, but taking the ship when we’re in flight—” I snort, “there’s not a damn thing within fifty light years that has a chance against us.”

"Only it's not that simple," says Phil. "If it were, we'd fly over to earth and defeat the Trog armada today, and we wouldn't be having this conversation."

I roll my eyes. "Okay. Whatever. I'll make my case with Bird when this cruiser salvage is all wrapped up, and the stasis pods are on their way to the colonies. After all we've done, he can hardly order us to leave with them if we want to stay and fight.”

“What about the we in that statement?” asks Phil.

“Are you asking about the crew?”

“You need to consider what they want, don’t you?”

“You think they’ll want to go out to the colonies?”

“Some of them might. You need to leave the choice up to them.”

Of course, Phil is right. I sigh. I don’t want to lose anyone from my crew, but I don’t want to force them into risking their lives.

“What do you think Silva wants to do?” asks Phil.

“We talked about it already,” I tell him. “Hypothetically. But you know that, don’t you?”

“I didn’t read it from your mind,” Phil says. “Silva talked to me about it.”

“When?”

“The journey back from 61 Cygni gave us all a long time to talk about the what-ifs.”

“You don’t think the crew wants to stay?” I ask.

“They’ll do whatever you ask of them.”

“But?”

“I think most of them would prefer to go to the colonies,” says Phil. “None of them expected to come back to a total loss.”

“It’s demoralizing.”

“What you need to know is they’ll follow you, whatever you decide to do, even if they don’t want to keep up the fight.”

“Are you saying it’ll be my responsibility if they don’t go?”

“Yes.”

I don’t agree. “I’ll give them permission to leave. I’ll talk to them like adults about it. If most go, I’ll bet there are plenty of guys in Bird’s command who’d jump at a chance to crew with us and get some payback.”

“You need to give them more than permission,” says Phil.

“What does that mean? I’ll have to order them all to run away?”

“Run away?” asks Phil. “Is that how you see it?”

I deflate. Maybe I do. “I don’t know if I can give up. I don’t know how to convince the crew to go, if that’s what they want.”

“They’re loyal to you.”

“Now that seems like a bad thing.”

“It’s not bad,” says Phil. “If you’re loyal to them—”

“If?” I challenge him. “Do you think that’s even a question?”

“Sorry. No, I don’t. Bad choice of words on my part. I’m just saying loyalty will make it difficult when the time comes.”

“Two minutes,” says the pilot over the comm. “And we’ll be close enough to slip into orbit around Jupiter.”

Chapter 25

Even with Nicky and Phil and their unparalleled skill with gravity, even knowing the orbit in which we left the cruiser, it takes us several hours to locate the ship. Jupiter is just that big.

I’m standing up, looking over the pilot’s shoulder to get a view through the cockpit glass. Phil and Nicky can see everything they need to see from where they sit, down inside the ship’s all-purpose payload bay. Gravity is all they need.

“Can you sense any life?” I ask.

“We’re still scanning the area for other ships,” answers Phil.

“I don’t see any,” I say, as I reach out with my grav sense, knowing that for a distant ship, I’m more likely to sense a grav plume if it’s accelerating or slowing down than I am to see it with my eyes.

“I think we’re alone,” says Phil. To the pilot, he says, “Fly in close and slow.”

Careful not to push too much grav through the drive array, the pilot guides the scout craft toward the derelict cruiser.

Even dead, it’s an ominous sight, hanging in the sky, silhouetted by Jupiter’s swirling clouds. As we close in, the damage to the bow is almost hard to find. It doesn’t look as bad as I’d imagined. Perhaps I’d enhanced the memory to inflate my ego for my part in the ship’s demise. However, on the scale of the kilometer-long vessel, spotting the roughly round hole three meters across is like looking for a pimple on an elephant’s butt.

And that brings something more important into perspective, that these giant cruisers can be disabled with such a small wound in just the right place.

“How close?” asks the pilot, as the distance to the cruiser shrinks.

“A hundred meters if you can,” says Phil. “Start at the bow and follow one of the spines all the way to the stern. Then follow each of the other spines.”

“It’s difficult for Phil and Nicky to scan the interior,” I tell the pilot, “with all the complexities of the cruiser’s internal structure.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I get it.” To Phil, he says, “If I’m going too fast, just tell me. I can approach as slow as you like.”

We end up scanning the ship several times before Phil finally says, “The ship is completely powered down. Inside the temperature is a few hundred degrees below freezing. Every Trog inside is frozen stiff.”

“What about damage?” I ask. “Anything besides what we did to the bridge?”

“The ship looks to be intact,” he answers. “It even has about half its hydrogen stores and most of its water.”

“I wonder why the Trogs didn’t use the H in the ship’s tanks to refill their H packs,” I muse.

“Probably ran out of cal packs and starved,” guesses Phil. “Or, they killed themselves, like Prolific Man Killer’s soldiers did. We did kill their Gray bosses when we rammed their ship.”

It doesn’t matter. I say, “I think we should bring a work crew back to salvage the ship. What do you think, Phil?”

“I don’t see any reason why not.”

I pat the pilot on the shoulder. “Take me closer, then.”

Moments later, the pilot has the scout ship floating in space just off the cruiser’s bow. Except for the dark hole where the Rusty Turd breached the hull, the rest of the ship looks like any other Trog cruiser—white, worn, and dirty. Ready to fly again.

I slip out of the hatch and suit grav my way toward the hole through the cruiser’s bridge. I have a video camera mounted on my helmet next to a bright light to illuminate all I see. We’ll need a detailed look at the bridge for the engineers back on Iapetus to make the final call on a salvage attempt.

Chapter 26

Three days pass by the time I find myself sitting in another conference room down in the bowels of Iapetus. Bird is running the meeting, Phil and I are there, with Brice, of course, and Nicky, since we all saw the damaged cruiser firsthand. Our scout pilot is with us and so is Penny, since she was piloting the Rusty Turd when it smashed through the bow of the cruiser.

A gaggle of Bird's officers is in the room, and so are a handful of engineers. A few of them look familiar. They were on Spitz’s staff, part of the pack of productive geniuses that built the enhancements into the Turd. They’re led by a competent guy named Punjari. That’s something to feel pretty good about.

The video from my helmet cam is playing on a cracked LCD screen hanging on the wall. The image is panning across the wide bridge. Pieces of metal and glass hang motionless in the vacuum. Three Ghost Trogs are on the bridge—two whole, one not. Frozen Grays, whole and in pieces, are in every shot. Some are floating, some are belted into their seats. Their bodies are shrunken and crinkled. Their resilient gray skins found their match in long-term exposure to the harsh vacuum and deep cold. All the internal liquids—liquids at normal earth temperatures—have slowly sublimated into space.

It’s strange that the bridge seems like a crime scene frozen in time, something that could have happened hours ago, or centuries past. Besides the desiccation of the Grays, there’s no way to tell.

“The shockwave of the impact and intense field of the ship’s grav lens killed everything on the bridge, or close to it,” says Punjari. He points a casual finger in my direction, “Major Kane explored much of the forward section. Bodies like these are in most of the compartments within sixty or seventy meters of the impact, which goes a long way to explaining why no attempt was ever made by the ship’s occupants to affect some kind of repair. Every Gray or Trog capable of stepping into a leadership role was killed or mortally wounded in the impact.” He glances at Bird. “Not to belabor the obvious, but this information could be used tactically.”

Bird makes a note on his d-pad, politely, I’m sure. The colonel doesn’t need an engineer to tell him what he’s seeing. Any good officer knows an opportunity when it’s presented.

“The fortunate surprise for us,” says Punjari, “was the angle of the impact.” He finds a frame on which to freeze and goes to the screen to point out the features we should examine. “See here how these consoles right through the center of the bridge are missing?”

“Looks like a direct hit to me,” says Brice, glancing proudly at Penny.

“Exactly,” says Punjari, “however, it’s more direct than you could imagine. See these scrape marks coming across the floor all the way through the wall at the back of the bridge?”

Everyone nods. They’re pretty obvious.

“The ship came in parallel with the floor and sheared off the workstations,” Punjari chuckles, “obliterated them is more accurate. Many of the pieces of metal you see floating are from the consoles. My point is, because of the angle, because of the tremendous forces involved,” he zooms in on the floor beneath where a bank of workstations had been attached to the floor, “the conduits and wire bundles connecting the console to the ship’s system were sheared cleanly.”

Bird’s attention is on the screen. He leans forward.

Punjari points at the connectors. “We should be able to splice into these with ease.”

“What are you saying?” asked Bird. “The ship is definitely salvageable?”

“Given the information we have on the hydrogen levels in the tanks,” says Punjari, “I think we could go in with the right set of replacement consoles and a handful of engineers to reactivate the nuclear plants, and we could have the ship ready to fly in four to six hours."

“Ready to fly?” asks one officer, “or ready to fight?”

“Ready to fly,” says Punjari. “I wouldn’t risk going too fast.” He changes to another view of the front of the ship. “Nothing is left of the smart glass panels or support structure to protect the bridge crew.”

“How long would repairs take to make the ship fully operational?” asks Bird.

“Depending on the size of the crew and resources available, anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.”

“But if we do the quick repair,” asks Bird, “to get it moving, we could take it away from Jupiter, and put it somewhere safe where we could manage the repairs?”

Punjari nods.

Bird glances over at me and then looks back to Punjari. “That’s what we’ll do then. Put together everything you need, the people and the equipment. We’ll go back and take that ship. I don’t know where yet, but we’ll think of a place to go. How long do you need?”

“A few days,” answers Punjari.

“We’ll send one of the freighters with the engineers and the equipment.” Bird looks back at me. “Your people will ride shotgun in your ship.”

“Yes, Sir.” It feels good to have a mission.

Chapter 27

True to his word, Punjari’s people are ready in two days. The freighter is loaded with what looks like a few tons of replacement equipment and tools. Nearly twenty of Punjari’s techs and engineers are onboard, leaving room for a few squads of SDF grunts, all experienced. I remind myself to thank Bird for those when we get back. You can never be too careful.

The freighter and the Rusty Turd fly out of Iapetus together with flight paths and bubble jumps planned out ahead of time. In bubble, our ship and the small freighter will be alone for all practical purposes. The freighter, being a faster ship than the Turd II, will dial back its speed so the Turd II will arrive at each jump point first, giving us time to ensure the security of the area before the freighter arrives.

As Bird told me more than a dozen times, with most of the best engineers having already been sent to the colonies, Punjari is valuable. And the engineers he selected for the mission represent the best left on Iapetus.

Trying to get a clarification on that point, I ask Bird, “And if I have to sacrifice my ship to save them? Are you telling me to do that?”

Bird shook his head. “You do your duty, that’s all I’m telling you. I’ll never order a man to give his life for another. Just know, Punjari is important to us.”

At three hours away from Saturn’s moon, we initiate the first jump.

Chapter 28

Our last jump brings us out on the dark side of Jupiter, the side facing deep space. The inner solar system is full of Trogs and Grays, and we’re taking any advantage we can to avoid their notice. Penny slides us into an orbit that’ll intersect with that of the derelict cruiser. The freighter takes up a position in the same orbit a few kilometers off our stern.

“Jablonsky,” I start.

“Already calling,” he tells me, working the comm to connect with the freighter.

I nod, wondering why I even go to the trouble to give Jablonsky orders. He’s always a half-step ahead of me when it comes to his duties. I turn to Phil. “Time to intercept?”

“Ninety minutes,” he answers, “give or take.”

“Tarlow,” I say, “I want you on that radar, looking for anybody who might wander into the neighborhood.”

“Nobody knows the ship is here,” says Penny.

“That’s what makes me nervous,” I respond.

“Complacency kills,” opines Brice.

Penny rolls her eyes.

“An hour and a half to get there,” I say. “Six hours to make the repair.”

Brice laughs.

"And another six," I add, "because nothing goes as planned, and we'll be off to deep space, where we'll be safe."

“Nobody will find us out there,” says Phil.

“Jablonsky,” I say.

“I already told ‘em,” he says, “be ready to go as soon as we arrive. We don’t want to waste time dickin’ around.”

I nod. “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Chapter 29

Things don’t go as planned, but they proceed without major incident. We found the cruiser at the prescribed time, just where we expected it to be. After that, things slowed down.

We’re at hour three since coming in alongside the cruiser, and the last of the consoles has just been transferred from the freighter to the bridge. That puts us two hours behind schedule.

“They don’t have experience working in zero-g,” Brice tells me as he stands on the bridge of the Rusty Turd, gazing through one of the small windows. “Light-g down on Iapetus, sure, but zero-g, no.”

“Now that they have the equipment and tools moved over,” I ask, “will they be able to catch up, you think?”

Brice shakes his head. “It’s not just getting over there. It’s handling tools in zero-g. It’s setting your suit grav so it’s strong enough to keep you on the floor, but not so strong it makes it hard to work the tools. We might be here for days.”

“Jablonsky,” I say, “can you link me through to Punjari?”

“The captain of the freighter is going to back off a klick or two,” says Jablonsky. “He just called in with that update.

“Thanks,” I tell him.

“Linking to Punjari now,” he says.

“The freighter is moving out,” confirms Phil.

“Kane?” Punjari’s voice comes over my comm. “Do you see that view?” He sounds like a kid at the zoo. “Do you?”

“Yes,” I answer.

The full, sunny face of Jupiter is below us, filling half the sky with its living, hippie-candle swirls of organic color.

“It’s amazing, right?” says Punjari. He’s not really asking me.

“Doctor,” I say, “I know this stuff is stunning the first few times, but we have a schedule.”

“Oh, don’t worry about us.”

“If we’re spending all our time,” I say, “looking at the big swirly planet…" I figure I'll let him come to the conclusion. It's not my position to scold.

“We’re not wasting our time on sightseeing,” he assures me without the slightest deflation in his enthusiasm. “We were crossing between the ships. We couldn’t help but look.”

“I know,” I say. “How are things going now? Do you have everything you need inside?”

“Yes, yes,” he tells me. “We’re already installing the helm console.”

Brice looks over at me and shrugs. He’s listening in.

“So you’re ahead of schedule?” I ask.

“Don’t focus so much on the schedule,” he tells me. “It was a plan we talked about in the meeting, with estimated times. That’s all. This isn’t a factory floor here. You understand that, right?”

Brice laughs, not over the open comm, just over the bridge comm.

I roll my eyes. “Of course, Doctor. Is the security team deployed?”

I hear him talking on another comm link, then the voice of the captain in charge of the security detail links into the loop. “Madsen here.” He’s all business. He’s bled, and he’s killed his share of Trogs in Iapetus’s unending subterranean corridors. He’s lost soldiers, too. I like him. More importantly, Brice likes him.

“Madsen,” I ask, “are your troops in place?”

“Per the plan, Sir. Nobody can make it to the bridge unless they come through us.”

And that was the plan. Madsen has shooters each in the three halls that parallel the cruiser’s spines. Those corridors run from the bow of the ship all the way back to the wall that separates the forward section from the rest of the ship. Any Trog or Gray coming to the bridge has to come up one of those halls.

The teams are stationed at the bottom of the three banks of lifts leading to the bridge and officer apartments. Madsen is on the bridge with the balance of his grunts—two men and a woman who’ll act as his reserve, and who’ll kill anything that somehow managed to stay alive in the command sector of the cruiser’s forward section.

“Comms working alright?” I ask, recalling how much trouble my platoons have had communicating inside the cruisers.

“As long as they don’t wander too far,” Madsen tells me, “but they won’t. No point in it. We’re not here to explore.”

He’s right about that. We’ll have plenty of time to do a thorough search of the ship once we ferry it out to deep space.

“The place is dead, right?” asks Tarlow. “That’s what you and Phil did when you came here with the scout ship, right?”

“Yeah,” I tell him. “We’re just being careful.” Back on the link to the cruiser, I say, “Madsen, comm me directly with anything that comes up. Anything.”

“It’s not our first rodeo, Sir.”

Brice chuckles.

“I have something,” says Phil, alarm in his quick words. “Grav signatures.”

Chapter 30

“Two tugs and three Arizona class ships,” Phil tells us, “just popped out of bubble.”

“I have them,” says Tarlow. “Two hundred klicks spinward.”

“They’re coming this way,” says Phil. “Already.”

“They’re in a hurry,” observes Brice.

“Jablonsky?” I ask.

“Alerting the freighter, and Punjari,” he tells me. “Hailing the new arrivals on all frequencies.”

“You hear this?” I ask Madsen.

“Got it, Sir.”

Penny already has the reactor amping up, as she’s spinning us to point our grav lens toward the unexpected ships.

I alert the crew. “Jablonsky, any response from our visitors?”

“Not a peep,” he tells me.

“Are they SDF?” I ask no one in particular. “Miners coming to salvage the ship?”

“No,” says Phil, not guessing, he knows now. “They’re Grays and Trogs.”

“What?” shouts Penny. “In Arizona class ships?”

“You certain, Phil?” I don’t want to believe it.

"Nicky can tell," he says. "I can feel them, too. Three Grays on each bridge." He concentrates for several impatient seconds. "Crew compartments full of Trog soldiers.”

“And the tugs?” I ask.

Phil looks at me like he’s disappointed. He knows I’m grasping for straws. “Grays and Trogs.”

“Shit!” shouts Tarlow. “Acceleration.”

“One just max gravved toward our freighter,” says Phil.

Penny has us moving.

Phil has the grav lens powered up.

“Get me a target,” I tell him. “Brice—”

“I know.” He’s rushing forward to make sure the ammunition crew is ready to keep our plasma gun full of metal.

“The tugs are going for the cruiser,” says Tarlow.

“Two Arizona class ships are coming at us,” says Phil. “Ramming speeds.”

Penny is blazing toward them as our internal grav fields pulse brilliant blue.

“The freighter!” shouts Tarlow. “Hit!”

I feel, as well as see, the explosion as the attacker’s grav lens pulses through the defender’s deflective field on impact. The freighter flies apart as the Arizona class accelerates through.

Dammit!

“I got this,” Penny tells me before I can give her an order. She fires, and the familiar zip of a hundred plasma rounds tears through the space in front of us. It’s then I realize I’m too slow to react, too focused on the destruction of the freighter. Good thing Penny was doing her job.

She drives the Rusty Turd toward the gap between the two Arizona class ships coming for us. It’s happening so fast, I'm just guessing what she and Phil are up to as they're doing it.

Phil pulses the lens, and then I feel the punch of hard grav from two sides at once, knocking my breath out and filling my eyes with stars. Phil has bumped both of the ships onto unexpected tangents as their powerful grav fields are repelled by ours. Before I can pass an order, our ship is spinning on hard g to reverse direction. Penny lines us up on the vector one of them is following, accelerating after, pushing max-safe grav through our drive array.

In seconds too short for anyone to react, I see the rear drive array of the attacking ships looming large in Penny’s forward facing monitors. She fires the railgun again, ripping through the ship’s grav plates, its reactor, and bridge. Superheated plasma from the reactor, released from its containment, bursts like a star inside the hull. The ship blows apart.

I’m impressed. “Good flying, Penny. Now, get that other bastard.”

Phil is already passing her a heading, and she's pulling our ship into a hard turn.

“They’re surprised,” Phil tells us, talking about the Grays. “We’re too fast for them.”

Penny fires, and she curses. She missed.

She pushes the ship faster.

“Careful,” I tell her. Spitz’s warnings about the probability of self-destruction with increasing reactor output are ringing in my ears. “We don’t want to blow ourselves up.”

“Trust me,” she says.

I leave her to her business. “Tarlow,” I call, glancing back at his monitors. “Do you have the big picture for me?”

“What?” he’s rattled.

“Dammit, Tarlow. Focus!”

“Ah, ah.” He’s playing with his controls as he jabbers, and a picture comes up on his screen.

“Are those the tugs?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he answers. “Yeah. They’ll be on the cruiser in less than a minute.”

“They’re trying to salvage it, themselves?” I guess the most obvious thing.

Penny’s shooting again.

“Cut it off to the left!” Phil calls to her. “They’re going left.”

The ship pulls hard, and Penny rips a long burst of fire out of our gun.

“Yeah,” shouts Phil, getting into the excitement.

Penny shouts, too. “Got ‘em.” She glances back at me with a grin.

“Can they bubble out with those two tugs?” I ask Tarlow. “Or is one enough to push that cruiser?”

“I don’t know if they can—”

“Jesus, Tarlow, give me your best guess. You know that mining equipment better than any of us.”

“They can probably jump with one tug pushing,” he tells me.

To Penny, I ask, “You hear that?”

She’s already guiding the ship back toward the tugs.

“Careful with the shooting,” I tell her. “We don’t want to—”

“I know,” she tells me.

In seconds, I see we’re lining up on the tugs. They’re pulling hard g’s to put the cruiser between us and them.

But they don’t have time. We’re just too ungodly fast, and in seconds, we’re on them. Penny zips in close to one, strafing it with a burst of plasma that has no chance of missing. Metal explodes from the tug as we fly by, and Penny pulls the Rusty Turd into another painful turn to move back around to line up on the other target.

Before I can warn her that the shot she’s lining up for is too dangerous, she rips through two short bursts. The first misses the tug and tears through the empty space below the cruiser’s bow section. The second burst hits the tug aft of its bridge, sending shards of hot metal in all directions. Internal power goes down.

“Oh, hell yes!” says Tarlow, watching our victory unfold on Penny’s screens.

“Where’s that other Arizona class, Tarlow?” I know there’s still one shark in the water. I turn to Phil, silently asking him as well.

“Lost it,” Tarlow tells me, as we close in on the cruiser again, sliding cockeyed through space, the ship moving in one direction but pointed off the axis.

“There!” Phil shouts.

Penny gooses power into our drive array.

I see what they’ve both already spotted—the third Arizona class ship just pulled a hard arc around from the other side of the cruiser. They used the cruiser’s mass to hide themselves as they came back for us.

Shit!

They’re racing toward us with their grav lens powered up, aimed at our port midsection. We’re accelerating, yet the fractions of a second aren’t enough time. I don’t need Phil to tell me or Tarlow to show me.

The impact knocks me senseless.

Chapter 31

Nobody wins every time.

Nobody wins every time.

The words repeat themselves in my head until I realize my body is spinning so fast my blood is pooling in my feet and skull, making my eyes feel like they’re about to burst.

Holy crap.

I compensate with suit grav to stabilize my motion. I’m floating free, careening really, in a cloud of debris—the remains of the Rusty Turd.

Double holy crap.

The Trog cruiser is racing toward the horizon and powering to a higher orbit, only that doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s still a big, dead beast. Sure, the dots of a hundred Trog warriors are crawling across its hull, but—

I shake my head to pull my senses together.

The cruiser is going nowhere. It’s following a long, slow orbit around the gas giant. I’m moving rapidly away from it. I’m falling. I don't need to know the details of the equations, but I have enough of an intuition about orbital mechanics to know that the collision with the Arizona class ship not only obliterated the Rusty Turd, but arrested whatever orbital momentum we had. Now me and all the pieces of my ship are falling toward Jupiter. We’re on a trajectory toward the atmosphere.

And that means burning up.

“Dammit, Dylan.” It seems like a good time to shout at myself, to push all the fuzzies out of my head and get back in the game before I turn into a shooting star across Jupiter’s cloudy stratosphere.

“Dylan! Dylan!” It’s Penny, and she’s in trouble.

I comm back, “Where are you?”

“We took a hit,” she tells me.

I know. I’m looking around for her. I see half of my ship’s drive array spinning slowly but falling fast. I see plates, broken and whole, a lump of wreckage that is probably my reactor, every shape of rusty metal debris I can imagine, and a body strapped into a seat. I grav toward it, knowing from the familiar shape of the chair, it’s Tarlow, and then I realize I'm still strapped into my chair, too. I unbuckle to free myself of its weight, and as I do, part of Jablonsky passes by, his head and most of his upper torso, and one arm. The vacuum is sucking the fluids out of his chest and blowing a cloud of frozen red corpuscles all around him.

Losing the Rusty Turd is one thing. Losing my crew—

I want to scream a new kind of rage. Loss. Failure. Defeat.

How many are dead?

I have to ignore Jablonsky.

That’s war. That’s just war.

Dammit.

I don’t have any seconds to spare for indulging unproductive emotions.

I grav on toward Tarlow.

At ten meters, I see I’ve wasted the effort. The inside of his faceplate is covered with red jelly—him. In the chaos of the crash, a grav field got the best of him, mashing him inside his suit.

“Penny,” I call, as I open the comm to my entire crew. A rush of panicked voices tells me many are alive, but they’re in peril.

“Get that door open,” Brice tells them.

“Brice?” I call, “Where are you?”

“Busy here,” he calls back. “Blow it!” I hear him order.

“Yes, Sarge,” says Silva.

I spot the Rusty Turd, at least the forward two-thirds of it, spinning far below me, moving much slower than I am. The Arizona class ship must have struck us just aft of the bridge. Most of the crew was in the forward section, and they're trapped. Penny is alive, somewhere. Jablonsky and Tarlow are dead. I can't find Phil.

And Tarlow was sitting in a chair not three feet behind me.

What did Brice tell us about the randomness of war, the luck of staying alive?

“I need some help,” says Penny, her voice shaky.

“I don’t know where you are,” I tell her.

“Still in my seat,” she tells me. “The forward section of the bridge is crushed around me. I can’t get free.”

I start scanning the wreckage strewn through space. “Pulse your suit grav if you can.”

I see two flashes of blue pulse out of a hunk of wreckage. I max grav toward it. “I’m coming.”

Far away, the Rusty Turd’s forward section erupts from an explosion, and the door on the forward airlock flies off into space. Seconds later, orange suits pop out in rapid succession, all glowing blue from hard g as they try to distance themselves from the dying spaceship.

I reach the hunk of bridge I think Penny is trapped in, grab onto a piece of jagged metal and peek down inside. It’s all steel, bent loosely like a ball of foil. I look and shift, turn on my light, trying to make sense of the jumble of metal, trying to guess which piece was where on my bridge, trying to see down into its core. “I’m here.”

And then I spot her.

Penny looks up at me, and I see fear in her eyes. She’s already assessed the situation. She thinks she’s done for.

I move to another gap, another perspective, to see what I can see. “Phil?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

Dead? Or does she not know what happened to him?

“My legs are jammed under the console.” She doesn’t mention the instrument panel pushing against her chest.

“Can you breathe alright?”

She smiles weakly.

“Are you injured?”

“My suit didn’t rupture,” she says.

“Can you move?”

She waves her free arm, but winces with a pain. Her breathing comes in short gulps, and that’s when I notice blood bubbling in her nostrils. “I’ll get you out.” It’s a lie, but one I’m determined to make true. I climb around the hunk of bent metal to find a way to her.

“We’re out,” Brice comms in.

“Casualties?” I ask.

“Me, Silva, Peterson, and Lenox made it.”

“The others?”

“Crushed by the gun when it broke free of its mounts," Brice explains. “And we got Phil’s dink.”

“Nicky?”

“You know another one?”

“Jablonsky and Tarlow are dead,” I tell him. “We took the hit just aft of the bridge. I can’t find Phil, and I’m with Penny now.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“Big hunk of the bridge.” I look around to get my bearings. “Two klicks up from you, coming your way.”

Chapter 32

Fifty percent?

Sixty?

I’ve lost most of my crew. It’s the Arizona Massacre all over again. Only it’s intensely personal this time.

Brice and the others are working at the six-ton clump of metal keeping Penny pinned inside. They’re prying and pulling, hacking out hunks with disruptors, talking about trying a C4 charge to crack it open, and discarding the idea because the explosion will kill her. We’re desperate. The bridge section is getting closer to the atmosphere. We have only minutes.

Movement out of the corner of my eye catches my attention, and I turn to see a damaged tug limping across the sky, and I guess where it's going. It's chasing the forward section of the Rusty Turd. "Dammit. I thought they were both dead."

Lenox is moving toward me across the hunk of wreckage, and she turns to see what I’m looking at. She guesses the same. “They’re going to try and salvage what’s left of the Turd.”

“I don’t know what we can do about it,” I tell her, my brain still too saddled with the shock of loss to lead like a good commander should.

“We’re all hurting,” she tells me, guessing my problem.

I’m still staring at the tug, watching it slowly close in on the Turd. As if of their own volition, words come out. “We can’t let the plasma gun fall into their hands.”

Switching to a private link, Lenox tells me, “Penny isn’t going to make it.

Brice and Silva are working together now, alternately chopping at a section of the bridge’s forward bulkhead, making headway.

“We have to get her out,” I tell Lenox, wondering why I didn’t start with the disruptor as soon as I found Penny.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she tells me.

That captures all of my attention.

“Her d-pad,” says Lenox. “I accessed her med functions.”

“The d-pads,” I tell her. “You can’t trust ‘em.”

“Penny is not going to make it.”

I want to argue. I have to. I don’t want to see another friend die, but I know Lenox is right. I knew it from the moment I saw Penny’s face. Penny knew it, too. I raise a hand to Lenox and open a private comm link to Penny. “I—”

“I know,” she whispers, because she doesn’t have the strength for stronger words. She sniffles. “I know.”

Tears well up in my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I did what I did. I wanted to be out here.”

“I wish—”

“All that freedom bullshit.” Penny coughs. “We all share the dream, Dylan. This isn’t your fault.”

“I—” I don’t know what to say.

“Get off the line,” she tells me. “I want to talk to Brice.”

“Penny—”

“This isn’t your thing,” she says. “Just say goodbye. And Dylan, don’t give up. Please?”

“We’ll get you out.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“I know,” I say. “I won’t.” I kill the link, and turn to face Lenox, knowing she can see the tears gathered up around my eyes, making everything blurry. Damn zero-g. “You ready to fight?” I ask.

Lenox nods, and I see all the pain she feels turn to determination. She’s ready to kill something. So am I.

I turn to the ship closing in on the Rusty Turd, trying to match speed with it. “I’m taking that tug. You comm the others, see who’s coming with. Brice will do what he needs to do.” I don’t wait for a response, I jump away from the hunk of bridge metal, amping up my grav, blinking my eyes free of tears, and letting them burn with vengeance so hot it’ll make me stupid. I don’t care. I’m attacking a space ship with a railgun, a disruptor, and a few hand grenades, I’m going to need some stupid on my side.

Chapter 33

But not too much stupid.

I kill my grav as soon as I think I’m on a ballistic intercept path. I know there are Grays on that ship, and if I blaze in too hot, they’ll see me coming. I know, because I sense three suits coming behind me, each following when they felt the moment was right, leaving Brice and Penny to spend their last moments in solitude. “Off with your suit grav,” I tell them. “We want to surprise these bastards.”

I see the tug sidled up next to the Turd, matching its slow spin.

Trogs are hurrying out through one of the crew doors just behind the bridge. They're carrying tools and dragging rigging cables to work on attaching the tug to my ship. Not one of them thinks to look around. They don't have much time to secure their prize before Jupiter's gravity and atmosphere make the task impossible. I imagine I hear the telepathic shouts of their Gray masters, cajoling them to hurry their lazy Neanderthal asses.

“Ignore the Trogs outside,” I tell Lenox, Peterson, and Silva. “It’s the ship we want.”

“10-4, chief,” says Lenox.

The ship is looming large in front of me, and I pulse just enough power through my grav plates to make a touchdown on the side of the tug beside the maintenance door. Like all human-designed airlock doors, this one doesn’t lock in the secure sense, at least that's not its default state. It can be locked from the bridge, but you have to go out of your way to do it. I punch a big glowing button and it opens up. It doesn’t need to cycle; it contains no atmosphere because the Trogs left it that way. I step inside, and wait.

Closing my eyes to focus on the subtle gravity of bodies moving through atmosphere, or sitting at control consoles and ship helms, I try for all I’m worth to match Phil’s super-human sensitivities.

In my mind, I see an internal hangar bay lies just to the left of the airlock door. The density of metal machines has a peculiar glow that’s different from thin air. I feel the flow of air through the ship’s ventilation system and the pulse of heat transfer liquid through its reactor core. I feel every one of the ship’s grav plates finessing the boxy craft against Jupiter’s incessant pull, trying to hold it in place beside the Rusty Turd while the Trogs out on the hulls do their work.

The more I focus, the more I see, and the wicked shapes of three Grays on the bridge come into view, each having a density unlike any other material, living or dead. They seem to sponge grav waves from the ether, making them almost black to my grav bug. I know the black color is an artifact of the visual processing centers in my cortex, interpreting the grav input from my bug in the only way it knows how, as color.

Two Trogs stand on the bridge. They’re armed, and I figure I’m seeing the Gray’s M.O. for ship control, a few of them driving the ships, a few favored Trogs standing nearby with weapons in case the onboard slaves find inspiration to mutiny.

Another six Trogs are moving inside the hangar, doing what? Who the hell cares? I just want them to catch my railgun slugs when I fire them their way.

Lenox alights in the airlock, floating through the open door like a fairy who’s been flying her whole life.

Silva grabs the door as she arrives and swings herself in. Peterson hits the door and climbs through. Not one of them used their grav plates for deceleration so close to the tug. They're following my orders to the T, not wanting to risk alerting our enemy.

Silva pulls the outer door closed, and I cycle the airlock.

I hate pinning anything on hope, but that’s all I’ve got. I’m hoping the idea of Trog workers coming back inside will make our quick trip through the airlock pass the notice of the Grays on the bridge.

“Ship’s grav is set to ten percent earth g,” I tell my team. I point in the direction of the hangar bay, “Lenox, you and Peterson go left when you exit. You’ll come out at the front corner of an open hangar. Lots of machinery around. You’ll see six Trogs inside. None of them is armed with a railgun. Two are carrying disruptors. They all seem to be working on the cable system that locks the tug onto its load. None of them has defensive suit grav activated. Start shooting as soon as you have your shots lined up, before they know what’s happening.”

“With surprise on our side,” says Lenox, “we can take them.”

“How do you know their suit grav is off?” asks Silva.

“I’ve been taking lessons from Phil.” A half-lie is the best I’ve got. To Silva, I say, “We’ll go right. Two meters down, there’s a ladder to the left. Another two meters up will put us in a stubby hall that leads onto the bridge. The door to the bridge is closed, and I can’t tell if it’s locked.”

“You have been taking lessons,” she smiles, but she’s got killing on her mind, and looks like she showing me fangs, rather than teeth.

“We’ll try the door once, if it opens, we go in shooting, if not, we blow it.” I scan across their eyes. “Ready?”

Shit.

I missed something. “Where’s Nicky?”

“Brice has him,” says Lenox.

Perfect. I don’t say that, but I know Brice knows we can’t allow the Grays to capture Nicky. He’ll kill the Tick before he lets that happen. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 34

Lenox and Peterson are through first.

I jump out, bounce off the wall, grab the ladder after one long, low-g step and fling myself up. In two breaths, I have a grip on the handle to the bridge door. Silva is right behind me, and before I can ask whether she’s ready, the pulse of grav-drive railguns hits my bug, and I know Peterson and Lenox are shredding their targets. I turn the door handle and throw my shoulder against the door. It doesn’t budge.

“Pull!” shouts Silva.

Doh!

Surprise is gone, thrown away on a stupid mistake. I pull the door open and Silva slips past, rifle firing before she’s even through. Following behind, I see what had to be the Gray captain, with a ruptured head, drifting toward the observation windows. Silva goes left, so I go right. One Gray and one Trog are on my side of the bridge. The Gray is slow to react and pays for it when a spray from my railgun turns his head into a puff of sap and little pieces. The Trog on my side has powered up his defensive grav and is pulling out his disruptor to face me.

I don’t aim at his chest, I see the strong grav from his main plate generating a field that’ll deflect my rounds. I blast away at his feet and knees, shredding them into useless tangles of tendon as the Trog falls. Jumping across the bridge, I land near him, pulling my disrupter out as I come down to finish him off. As I turn, I see that Silva’s already handled her Trog. The Gray is on its feet, staring at her with its unreactive face. A few rounds from my railgun puts an end to that.

“Lenox?” I call over the comm.

“Clear,” she tells me.

“You and Peterson alright?”

“Not a scratch.”

“Get up here,” I tell her. “You’re the most experienced pilot we have.” We have left.

“They’re coming,” says Silva. She’s searching for the controls to secure the airlock’s outer doors.

Without looking up, I know she’s right. I feel the grav plates in the Trogs’ suits outside powering up. I can’t tell if they know what just happened—they know something did. “Most of them are armed.”

Chapter 35

Silva has the tug’s outer doors locked by the time Lenox puts herself into the pilot seat. “Orders?”

"Max grav to drive the Rusty Turd into the atmosphere. We need Jupiter to burn up the ship so the Grays don't get their greasy little hands on it."

“Aye Aye, Sir.”

Before I have a chance to roll my eyes, I feel the tug push, slowly ramping up to max grav. Lenox knows her stuff. Penny taught her well. Metal grinds metal as the tug pushes against the Turd.

Silva powers up the tug’s monitor screens, providing a video feed of the ship’s full exterior. It’s something the Grays would never use. They depend too much on their innate grav sense to perceive the world. “I have Trogs on airlock two,” she says. “Disruptors out, hacking at the door. They’ll be through before you can think of something snarky to say about it.” She looks at me with a smile. “More on airlock one and three.”

“C4.” I smile back. “You and Peterson. Do it quick. In the center of the inner door on each airlock. Set them all to blow simultaneously.”

Silva is on the comm to Peterson, coordinating. They have three airlocks to attend to quickly—one port, one aft, and one on the stern, just to the side of the main hangar bay door.

“That last Arizona class is going to come for us,” says Lenox.

“I know,” I tell her. “Keep an eye on it and let me know as soon as you see a reaction.”

“Right now it’s offloading its platoon onto the cruiser.”

“Can you raise Madsen or Punjari?”

She cocks her head to the left. “Comm panel is over there.”

I don’t need to be told twice. “I’m on it in a flash, and see immediately a handful of railgun rounds have ripped the guts out of it.” I try my suit comm on all channels. “Madsen, Punjari? Anyone on the cruiser?” I wait, and call again to no answers.

“Too far for suit comm,” says Lenox. “Too much metal between us. I’m sure they know by now the Trogs are onboard.”

“A hundred?” I ask, trying to guess how many Trogs they had packed in the tugs when they offloaded troops onto the cruiser’s hull before I attacked them. And a full platoon off the Arizona class that was still out there, the one that killed my ship. “How long to get the Rusty Turd in position?”

“It would be easier if we had Phil.”

“I know.” I try not to think of Phil. Penny’s death is still tugging at my attention, urging me to grieve. “Best guess?”

“Three minutes, but it’ll be rough getting back out again. Momentum and all.”

“You understand the importance of keeping that ship out of their hands.”

“I do. I won’t let you down.”

“Charges set,” Silva tells me.

“Get back up here as fast as you can, both you and Peterson. The bridge is our Alamo.”

Our big windows are starting to glow. I glance at Lenox, not sure that I’m seeing what I’m seeing. It’s so faint, so transient.

“Atmosphere,” she tells me, as the glow steadies into blasts of wispy fire.

Through the glass, I see the rough edges of the Rusty Turd pushing sideways through the atmosphere. They start to burn, with streaks of plasma flowing off.

Silva and Peterson rush onto the bridge. Silva takes up a position in front of the ship’s monitor screens without any instruction from me.

“As soon as they breach the outer airlock doors,” I tell her.

“Can I wait until they’re inside the airlocks?”

“Use your judgment.”

The fire around the ship is rapidly growing.

“We’re losing Trogs,” says Silva.

I glance over to see bodies flying away from the ship. They can’t hold on with the atmospheric drag increasing exponentially by the second.

I feel the ship lurch.

“They’re in,” says Silva.

I know the Trogs have to be cramming themselves inside the airlock to move out of the atmosphere. Any that don’t might as well be dead.

“One more moment,” she says, glued to her monitors. “They’ll be in airlock number two.” Silva hits the detonation button to blow the inner airlock doors. The ship quakes so hard I think it might break up.

“This is exciting,” says Lenox, wrestling the controls to keep us on course.

“Any word on that Arizona class?” I ask. It’s a stupid question, with the atmosphere turning into a fireball around us, the ship’s sensors are as blind as I am.

“Another thirty seconds,” says Lenox, “and we can head back up.”

“If we can head back up,” says Peterson, not a complaint, more a dark, Brice joke. Silva and Lenox laugh. So, why the hell not? It’s funny enough for me to shake off some of the despair I feel over having just lost half my crew.

Chapter 36

The tug’s metal hull is glowing bright. The air on the bridge has heated up fast enough to kill us if it weren’t for the orange suits maintaining comfortable temps inside.

“If it gets much hotter,” says Lenox, making a guess, “we’re going to start losing insulation around the ship’s wires, and then—”

She doesn’t need to finish. If the ship’s systems fail, we all die. Each of us knows it.

“Deep enough?” I ask, looking at the elapsed seconds on my d-pad, and then trying to gauge Jupiter’s pull on the Rusty Turd.

Lenox answers by punching the tug’s grav plates into reverse.

A cable breaks and the Rusty Turd speeds ahead through a plume of burning atmosphere.

Our glow diminishes with our speed.

“So far so good,” says Silva.

We’re not out of the woods, not by a long shot.

“Keep an eye on the internal temp,” I tell her. I don’t know what number will kill the ship, but knowing the current temp seems better than knowing nothing.

The tug creaks under the strain of Lenox changing its course.

“We gonna make it?” asks Peterson.

Lenox answers with a fast series of nods. They’re a lie. She’s not sure.

“Everybody strap in,” I tell them. If the ship breaks up, we’ll have a better chance if we’re belted down. I think.

“Won’t make a difference,” says Silva.

She’s probably right.

“Look.” Silva points at one of her monitors.

Far below and far behind, the Rusty Turd is careening to its death in a spectacular fireball.

Burning hard g’s to chase it, the last Arizona class ship is blazing its own meteoric path through the atmosphere.

“They know what it’s worth,” says Silva, watching the distant chase.

“They won’t make it,” Peterson hopes out loud.

“If they do or don’t, it’s out of our hands,” I say. We made our bet when Lenox broke away. I don’t say that last part, because I don’t want to blame her. She made a guess. I concurred.

The glow on our smart glass windows is thinning significantly. Above, I can see a hint of outer space.

I start to formulate a plan based on what I think will come to pass. We’ve chased a ship down into the atmosphere of a gas giant back at Cygni B. I decide the Rusty Turd will vaporize, and I make the further guess the Arizona class ship’s captain will soon come to the same conclusion and choose to save his ship. Once he makes that decision, he’ll come after us.

I tell Lenox, “As soon as we hit space,” wherever the hell that vast, ill-defined border exists, “punch it back to max grav and put us on an intercept course with the cruiser.”

“Plan?” she asks. “We’re not ramming it, are we?”

“We’re going to bail out.”

“Bail out?” she asks.

“It’s our only choice.” I turn to Silva. “Did any of those Trog riggers make it inside?”

“Nope.”

"Good job, you two. If you can, see if you can get the rear hangar door open. The sooner, the better."

“And?” asks Silva.

“Get down to the hangar bay and chuck out everything you can lift. Do it fast. We won’t have much time.”

“What the hell?” asks Lenox. “That Arizona class won’t be fooled. The Grays onboard will know we still have power. They’ll see our grav plates pushing g’s.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Chapter 37

The Arizona class makes its choice. It gives up on chasing the flaming remains of the Rusty Turd and changes course to come for us.

“If you have any more C4,” I comm to Silva, “blow up anything you think we can afford to lose.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” I tell her, “just be careful back there.”

“10-4, Chief.”

“Chief?” I ask.

Her and Peterson are laughing as they cut the comm.

“Is this a joke with you guys?” I ask Lenox.

“Can’t say, Skipper.” She grins at me. “That Arizona class can’t chase us at max acceleration, because it’s still down in the soup, but it can cut through the atmosphere faster than we did using its grav lens to clear the way, so to speak.”

“How long do you think we have?”

“Three? Four minutes? You know I’m guessing, right?”

“Me, too,” I say. “I just wanted to see if your guess was in line with mine.” We’re out of the atmosphere and picking up speed as Lenox pushes all the ship’s power to its grav plates.

“I’m gonna blow the rear door,” Silva tells me. “At the hinges.”

“She’s an overachiever,” says Lenox. “That’s a quick way to shed twenty tons. It’ll make us faster.”

I know the incremental increase won’t win us a race with our pursuer, yet it’ll pad our margin of error. “Be quick, Silva. We have maybe three minutes before we have to abandon ship.”

“Abandon ship?” Lenox asks, getting the reason even as she speaks. She knows we don’t stand a chance once that Arizona class ship breaches the atmosphere. “That could work.”

“So we’re on the same page.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going down to help out Silva and Peterson,” I tell her. “As soon as you have us on course. Autopilot if it still works, and then get down to the hangar with us.”

The ship lurches violently.

“Oh,” says Silva over the comm. “Brace for detonation, like, a second ago.”

“Thanks.” Sarcasm. “Did the hangar door break free?”

“Oh, yeah.” She’s proud of her work.

With my grav sense clearing up now that we’re out of the atmosphere, I see the massive hangar door falling away behind us. “Keep at it. I’m coming down to help.”

“I have the autopilot set,” says Lenox.

Damn, my people are good.

“Let’s go together,” I tell her, feeling better that I won’t be abandoning her on the bridge.

It only takes a few moments for us to race from the bridge down to the hangar bay. Lenox and Silva are busy throwing out every piece of equipment they can lift. Down the path our ship traveled, pieces of steel, tools, thick lengths of cable, pieces of crap I can’t even guess the purpose of are flying through the vacuum. Far back, the heavy door, its momentum significantly diverted when the C4 separated it from the tug, is glowing as it brushes along Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.

Past that, barreling toward us out of a cloud of fire, the Arizona class is passing it by. It’ll max grav any moment. Destruction of the tug will come seconds later.

“It’s time,” I tell the ladies. “Everybody out. Don’t grav your suit, do your best to look like a corpse.” None of them needs encouragement beyond that. It’s a race to run to the vast broken doorway at the back of the tug and dive into open space.

Chapter 38

None of us went out in a straight line, that's to say we didn't jump straight out the back. Doing that would have left us on the path the tug followed on its run toward the cruiser. With the assault ship bursting out of the atmosphere far below, intent on chasing the tug down, that path wasn’t a good place to be.

“Everyone okay?” I ask.

“I’m low on H,” says Silva.

“What?” I’m pissed. “Spare?”

“My Velcro thigh straps broke. It got hung on a piece of rebar back on Iapetus.”

“I have plenty,” says Lenox. “You can use my spare.”

"Can you make it to Lenox?” I ask.

“Don’t get melodramatic,” says Silva.

“Don’t do anything yet," I tell them. "Let's let this play out a bit, and once their attention is off us, we'll move."

“You’re the boss.”

The comms go silent.

Accelerating away, the tug is glowing in a mishmash of poorly shaped grav fields, but it's on a collision course with the cruiser—at least with the vast distance to cross, it looks that way to me.

Below, the Arizona class has changed course. Its grav lens is blazing bright blue. In contrast to the tug, it’s sleek and fast. It looks like a living torpedo of lightning, blazing an arc through space well off to our right.

“I figured he’d come right at it,” says Lenox.

“My first guess, too,” I admit, as I see the error in it. The captain doesn’t want to come at the tug from behind, because he doesn’t want the debris from the collision to stay mostly on the course it’s traveling toward the cruiser.

The attack ship is lining up on the tug’s flank. We all know what’s coming, having ridden the Rusty Turd on similar maneuvers countless times. We've just never seen it from this perspective.

“Good thing we got out when we did,” says Lenox.

Silva and Peterson voice their approval.

It’s frightening watching the assault ship blaze in on the lumbering tug. One is a shark, the other a helpless victim, with no recourse but to pray. We’re on the front row, watching the carnage take shape, and then the collision. The tug shatters, sending a thousand shreds of steel in every direction. The bridge section is mostly intact, careening toward Jupiter. The reactor core is spewing coolant from a dozen leaks and is flying toward us.

The Arizona class is already fifty kilometers away, shutting down its grav lens, and redirecting gracefully toward the cruiser.

“Anybody survive that?” asks Brice over the comm.

“Brice?” I’m half surprised, and the rest happy. I wasn’t entirely sure I’d hear his voice again.

“Anybody but you survive that?” he asks.

Silva, Peterson, and Lenox answer.

Brice says, “I found Phil.”

“And?” I ask.

“I’m okay,” says Phil. “Banged up. I’m with Brice now.”

“You still have Nicky with you?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“And Penny?” asks Lenox.

“We’re down to seven,” says Brice, “if you count the Tick as one of us.”

“Seven it is,” I agree.

“I’m so sorry about Penny.”

Others express their condolences, unfortunately, we’ve all lost. And the conversation turns to that, each of us trying to comfort another.

Phil comms me on a private loop. “Do you have a plan to get us out of this?”

“I’m glad you made it, Phil. I don’t know—” I feel like a drama queen. Of course, I know what I would have done if I'd lost him. I'd move on. That's how I'm wired.

“No need to tell me what I already know,” he says. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Over the open comm, I ask Brice, “Where are you in relation to the cruiser.”

“Twenty or thirty klicks ahead of it. Well below.”

“Meet us at the cruiser?” I ask. It’s not a suggestion that needs selling. Unless we want to orbit Jupiter until we run out of H and freeze to death, our only chances are the cruiser and the ship that just rammed the tug we were on. “We’re flying out of here on one of those two ships. I don’t care much which one.”

Chapter 39

With no layers of hull metal cocooning us from the vacuum, relatively little debris in the vast space between us, and with a direct line of sight, Phil is close enough to link to each of our suits. I handle the permissions through my d-pad, and Phil takes over control of our g. Using our suits’ grav, he gives us each a nudge to send us on an orbital intersect path with the cruiser.

If Phil calculated correctly, Lenox will arrive shortly before Silva, and the rest of us will come in a few seconds later, all at the same place. The ‘exact’ same place, or so Phil tells me. We won’t have to grav adjust our speed or path in flight. Phil assures me of that as well. And the Grays on board shouldn’t see us coming. Well, they’ll sense a handful of insignificant masses coming to gently bump the ship. Not a danger, and not even worth remark. Debris from the fight is spread all through the orbits around us, moving in every direction.

We have twenty minutes to kill as we float toward our target. We have downtime to reflect, or an opportunity to watch Jupiter’s mesmerizing clouds slowly swirl.

On a private comm, I link to Phil. “How’s Brice doing? Are you two pretty close?”

“Brice doesn’t even like me,” snaps Phil.

“What I meant was, are you physically close?”

“In arm’s reach.”

“How’s he doing?”

“You know Brice. He has the emotional depth of a brick.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “You’re letting your dislike of him color your evaluation.”

Phil heaves one of his petulant sighs. “His girlfriend just died. He’s handling it like any macho asshole would, by pretending that beating the shit out of something will make it better.”

“That doesn’t work?” I laugh.

“You know it doesn’t.”

“Sometimes it’s all you have,” I say.

“It’s never all you have,” says Phil. “We all have friends to talk to. We—”

I don’t point out that most of our friends are dead, because I don’t have to. That’s why Phil stopped himself. “How are you?”

“I think we killed off the whole crew now.” Phil’s voice deflates with each word. “Not just on our ship, but all of our friends from the grav factory.”

It sounds like an accusation to me, and I want to argue that we don’t know for sure all of them are dead. But I don’t. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for things to turn out like this.”

“Yet you knew they could die when you started this whole thing.” Phil sniffles, like he’s trying to hold in some tears. “We both did.”

“All of us did.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” he asks. “We all knew what we were getting into? We’re all adults?”

"No, I don't. I carry the guilt. I probably always will. I take responsibility."

“Everybody we ever knew is dead, Dylan. Do you ever think of it that way? And Claire with that Gray, and Sydney.” He stops. “I’m sorry. I’m getting carried away.”

“If you need to blame me, Phil. Go ahead.”

“I do, but it won’t help.”

“If we get out of this, maybe you should go to the colonies.”

“Oh, thanks for permission,” says Phil. “That’s the only choice any of us has.”

“No, it’s not.”

“You’re the most hard-headed person I’ve ever known. You’re going to stay here? You’ll die, you know that, right? We’ve lost, Dylan. The war is over. All we have left now is to escape if we can, and rebuild somewhere else.”

“After I got all my friends killed?” I ask. “I’m supposed to run away? Phil, what’s that life supposed to be like for me? What?”

“Happy?” It’s not a guess. It’s sarcasm. “Silva loves you. You love her. You’ll build a life out in the colonies. You’ll have kids. You’ll be happy. That’s what you always wanted, right? Why does that life have to be on earth?”

“We don’t know anything about the colonies except they’re far away.”

“You’re afraid of the unknown? You think you’ll get cheated?”

“That’s not it.”

“You’re just arguing for the sake of disagreeing with me.”

“No.” I know what it is. “If I run away, it means all my friends died for nothing.”

"Sometimes you do your best, and you lose anyway," he counters. "Maybe our friends died to give us a chance to live. Us and everyone else who's gone out to the colonies."

“We’re talking in circles. Are you going to be okay?”

“Will I be ready to help you fight when we get to that cruiser?” he asks. “That’s what you want to know, right? You think I’m too fragile. You think—”

“Phil, stop. I just want to know if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re our secret weapon. With you on our side, everything works."

“Says the man with a wrecked ship and only a handful of survivors left.”

“If we don’t do this, Phil. We’re all going to die.”

“You’ll have Nicky and me both, one hundred percent.”

Chapter 40

As promised, we’re floating in like a cloud of corpses. Lenox is out ahead by a few hundred meters. Part of the plan.

“Madsen,” I call over the comm for about the tenth time since we started closing in on the cruiser.

“Kane?” he answers.

“What’s your status?” I ask.

“Fucked. What’s yours?”

“The same.”

“How fucked?”

“We lost the ship. But we’re headed your way.”

“That’s pretty goddamn awful news,” he tells me. “We’re under some pressure here. The Trogs stormed in through the hole in the nose and killed about half the engineers. We lost some marines, too. Now it’s me and four others, protecting what’s left.”

“Punjari?” I ask.

"He's with us. We're in one of the fire control bays, down at the end. It's a constricted space, about ten meters wide, a few meters high. You've seen the targeting bays, right? One down each spine to aim the railguns firing from that spine.”

“Yeah.” I know exactly what they look like.

“We’re about forty meters from the door. It gives us plenty of time to shoot at them before they get in range with those disruptors.”

“Is the situation stable? Can you hold out?”

“No. We mauled ‘em pretty good. Unfortunately, there’s too many of them. They’re whittling us down. We’re getting low on ammo. They haven’t made a run at us in about thirty minutes. I think they’re trying to formulate a new plan. Maybe using those disruptors to cut through the walls to flank us.”

“Any Ghost Trogs with them?” I ask.

“Not that we’ve seen. I think this was just a salvage crew out here. The b-team. These guys could have taken us all out if they’d been better coordinated.”

“Gotcha.”

“Any Grays inside?”

“Not that we’ve seen, but we wouldn’t have. Know what I mean. They don’t tend to get close enough to the fighting that we see ‘em.”

“Makes sense.”

“How many are you bringing with?” he asks.

“Just six of us survived the collision.”

“That’ll have to do, then. What’s your plan?”

“Once we’re inside, we’ll have a way to track the Trogs.”

“How’s that?”

“Phil and the Gray will be able to sense where all the Trogs are. If they’re spread out and trying to find another way to get at you, they'll be divvied up. If we can attack them in small groups, we should be able to win."

“You know that’ll only work once, right?”

“Sure, but a man can hope. I’ll ping you once we’re inside.”

“What about that other ship, the one that rammed yours?" he asks. "Even if we win in here, it'll just kill the cruiser, and we won't have gained anything."

“I’m working on that, but I’ll need you to help us.”

"I don't know how I can give any help considering the situation."

“You can do it,” I tell him. “I’ll explain.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Chapter 41

The Arizona class ship is floating alongside the cruiser, maybe fifty meters off the bow, doing nothing but waiting for the battle inside to resolve. On the bridge, the three Grays have to be directing their Trog lapdogs inside on how best to attack Madsen.

Lenox isn’t moving her arms or legs in the slightest as she sails through the vacuum, doing her best to look like a corpse slowly shedding its heat into space, turning the body inside to ice. Because Phil is good at what he does, her path won’t cause her to collide with the assault ship, but to fly past, very closely, but past. The Grays inside should be able to sense that, and she won’t seem like a danger in any way.

I open a comm loop to Madsen. “Now is the time to attack.”

“Distract, you mean.”

“Don’t risk anyone,” I tell him. “Just make it look like you’re charging out of the targeting bay to kill some Trogs.”

“Done.”

“Good luck.” I cut Madsen and link back to my squad. “We’re good to go.”

I turn my attention to the assault ship, hoping the captain doesn’t pulse his defensive grav to push Lenox away, hoping he doesn’t reposition his ship.

They do nothing, exactly as Phil predicted.

It’s good to have an arrogant enemy.

Lenox is a dozen meters away from the Arizona class ship. Her closest point of approach.

I don’t need to say anything over the comm. She sees it’s time to make her move.

Her suit amps up to full power. She pulses her grav plates to change course, and closes the twelve-meter gap in a few eye blinks. It’s barely enough time for a human to react, let alone a trio of startled decision-committee Grays.

And just as the Grays’ collective consciousness is gelling around a response, Lenox is pushing hard g’s to get away from them, making them rethink their reaction and distracting them from the C4 charge she left attached to the outer airlock door on the side of the bridge.

As soon as she has the bulk of the assault ship between her and the door, she blows it. The door cracks and flies into space. From power-up to detonation, the whole thing didn’t take six seconds, and that was only phase one of the attack.

It wasn’t her job to get inside, just to plant the charge, detonate it, and then to distract the shell-shocked Grays so they wouldn’t notice what was coming next.

What I want them to miss is Silva.

Silva hit the grav on her suit as soon as Lenox blew her charge.

Silva is crossing the gap between us and the Arizona class vessel.

Seconds tick.

The ship’s grav array starts to power up, and it lurches forward. The Grays strobe their defensive grav because now they know Silva is a threat—but they were too slow to react, again. Silva’s already in the airlock, placing her last C4 charge on the inner door.

When she blasts out of the damaged airlock a second later, I know she’s done what she needed to do.

She cuts a hard turn to move out of danger’s way, and the second charge detonates. Steel door parts blast out of the airlock on an expanding plume of interior air. A Gray and a Trog come flying out.

The rest of us are already blazing toward the ship at top speed.

Brice arrives first. He’s through the airlock just as I pass through the outer door, and then the inner.

I'm on the bridge, leveling my railgun and shredding a disoriented Trog on the far side of the room. Brice has already handled the last two Grays.

“Kill those two outside,” I comm to the squad as I check the time on my d-pad. “Twenty-seven seconds,” I tell Brice.

He‘s checking the ship’s internal systems, to see whether any other Trogs or Grays are onboard. “Speed works to our advantage with the Grays,” he says.

I’m heading to the forward sections.

“I think it’s empty,” he tells me.

“Let’s double check, anyway.”

As I race up to the first doorway in the assault ship’s main hall, Brice comes after. I call to Lenox and the others, “Head for the breach at the bow but don’t go in until we get there. Brice and I will follow as soon as we clear the ship.”

“You still want me to pilot that thing?” asks Lenox.

Lenox is a precious asset to take off my assault team, but the ship is way too valuable not to seize. “Yes,” I tell her. “Make sure it’s ready to fly at a moment’s notice.”

Chapter 42

Though the assault ship’s forward sections turned out to be empty, verifying that fact took longer than expected. Not that I hadn’t imagined each step in the process, I mean, I’ve been inside one of these metal tubes for more than a year. They aren’t that big. In my mind, it all just played out faster than it did in real life. By the time Lenox had the Arizona Class ship sailing off to a safe distance from the cruiser, and Brice and I were at the breach in the bow to meet up with the others, nearly fifteen minutes had passed. Any hope we had of carrying the momentum of our surprise to the battle inside was gone.

As soon as my feet grav tight to the hull outside the breach, I say, “Tell me a story, Phil. Anyone inside waiting for us?”

“The bridge is clear.”

“You’re shittin’ me,” says Brice.

“I haven’t taken a decent shit since they ran the tube up my ass back at the Silverthorne spaceport,” says Phil.

Everybody laughs. We're a happy lot when we're on a roll and we're killing Trogs.

And Grays.

Especially Grays.

“So that’s a no, then?” asks Brice, not in a mood for humor. “You’re not shitting me.”

“No,” answers Phil. “I’m not.”

“In we go,” I tell them, even as I’m off my feet and flying through the gaping tear in the hull, weapon at my shoulder, ready to shred anything with the gall to take a breath.

The bodies of Trogs and Punjari’s engineers float in a red fog of frozen corpuscles. The freshly dead. The desiccated corpses that had been on the bridge are gone. I don’t know whether Punjari’s people stored them inside one of the interior rooms or pitched them into space.

I land on my feet, and grav tight to the floor as the rest of my squad comes in around me. I comm to Madsen, “We have the bridge. You still good down there?”

“We ran up to the door,” he says, “hosed ‘em with railgun fire for as long as we could, given our ammo situation, and then made a show of trying to hold our ground before we retreated to our original position. Everything go alright out there?”

“We took that Arizona class ship.”

“Captured, not destroyed?”

“It has an extra hole in the hull, but it’s ours. One of my crew is piloting it right now.”

“That’s good news,” says Madsen. “We were getting worried down here. We expected the Trogs to counterattack after that last little play. Haven’t seen one since we retreated.”

“The Trogs have gone to the central bay,” says Phil.

“They’re not going to fight us in the halls?” asks Brice.

“They’re all going?” I ask.

“I’m I hearing that right?” asks Madsen.

“Could they be planning an ambush?” asks Brice.

Phil shakes his head.

“No Trogs playing opossum,” asks Brice, “you know, like we just did outside? Trogs are fast learners.”

“Maybe,” says Phil. “From up here, we can see the Trogs moving. We can detect lots of bodies. We won’t be able to tell if any are alive until we get closer.”

“Maybe they want a face-to-face fight,” suggests Silva. “That whole Samurai-honor thing they do.”

“You could be right about that.” I think it’s something else, though. I’m thinking of the Prolific Man Killer situation. “Maybe they’re giving up because we killed their Gray leadership.”

“Why’s this suddenly a new thing?” asks Peterson. “The war’s been going on for three years. Why are we seeing this now?”

“Because up until now,” says Brice, “We’ve only been losing.”

“Up until now?” whines Phil. “Aren’t we still losing?”

Brice glares at him. “Right here. Right now, we’re winning.”

Phil isn’t having it. “The war—”

I shush him with a raised hand and telepathic nudge.

Telepathic?

I just messaged Phil telepathically.

“You’re getting better,” he wordlessly tells me.

“Let’s get the engineers off the cruiser while we have some breathing room,” I tell everyone. “Madsen, we’ll head your way, and together we’ll escort them out.”

“What about the cruiser?” asks Punjari, on the line now.

“We can reboard after we handle our Trog infestation. Right now, the safe place for you and your people is elsewhere.”

“Or,” suggests Phil, “we could cut our losses and get out of here.”

“We need this cruiser,” I tell him. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Silva takes the lead and jumps into one of the dormant lift tubes.

Chapter 43

It doesn’t take long once we get moving. Madsen’s people are eager to hook up with my small squad—safety in numbers, or so they say. Punjari’s engineers are plenty pleased to get off the ship, though for most, stepping onto the rusty assault craft, poorly constructed and shoddily repaired, tweaks their anal-retentive sensitivities. It’s a flying bundle of risk, and they know it.

The trepidation for we soldiers comes when we start making our way slowly through the halls toward the cruiser’s vast central bay. Brice and Silva are leading the way, with me and Peterson backing them up. Phil and Nicky are sandwiched in behind us. Madsen’s squad is taking up the rear. Phil is keeping us apprised of the status of every hidden body we encounter, so we’re careful as we approach.

“Where are they now?” I ask.

“At the center of the ship,” he tells me. “Lined up straight across in three ranks, sixty-two of them.”

“What are they doing?”

“Can’t tell. They aren’t moving?”

“Are they standing?”

“No,” he answers.

“Banzai, harakiri, or surrender?” asks Brice.

“Don’t forget attack,” says Silva. “They might have some fight left in them.”

“Let’s just go see what they have in mind,” says Madsen, not up for the fun of speculation.

“Can you contact them?” I ask Phil.

“If you want,” he answers. “Once we’re in the hangar bay where they can see us, it’ll be easier.”

“You think we can swing them over to our side?”

“You’re optimistic,” he tells me.

“What would we do with them?” asks Brice. “How do we trust them?”

“How did we trust Klingon Pete?” I ask.

“We didn’t,” he says. “You did.”

The airlock doors at the end of the long spinal hall don’t open at the press of the button. No power in the ship. We open them manually. Phil reminds us to seal it up tightly behind us. The bulk of the ship still holds atmosphere. Not breathable, as it's been suffocating Trogs for over a year, but under normal pressure. We leak it into the airlock through the manual valve, and once the pressure equalizes, Silva opens the door to the hangar bay. Outside, the enormous ship is dwarfed by Jupiter's immensity and the infinite void of space. Inside, with only Trog machinery supporting the railguns and the reactors spread out over a kilometer, the ship’s interior is wondrously vast.

Brice and Silva are out the door first, checking the flanks for ambushers as the rest of us hurry out. We have our weapons pointed out at our sectors, ready to blast anything into bloody shreds. There’s nothing, nothing moving under its own power, anyway. In the zero-g, bodies drift, frozen, some in suits, others not. Railgun slugs hang here and there in the air. Even a huge ball of water is suspended a hundred meters away from us, high overhead, near the axis of the cruiser. Nothing but surface tension holds it together. Why it’s there, none of us takes a moment to ask. We have deadlier things to think about.

“Let’s get moving,” I tell them.

We take flight as a dirty, orange flock, all drifting sternward.

We know where we’re going, yet we’re careful. Phil and Nicky probe for any sign of life, our early warning system for ambushes.

Once the three ranks of Trogs come into view, speculation ends. They’ve bound their legs bent, calves to hamstrings, and they’ve skewered themselves with their disruptors.

“We won,” says Brice, though his tone belies his mood. Whether for vengeance or catharsis, he needed to fire his gun and spill some blood.

Chapter 44

All went smoothly after we found the ranks of dead Trogs. Without the time or troops to search the entire ship, we returned to the forward section, secured the bridge and the access corridors, and invited Punjari and his engineers to re-board and finish their work.

Twelve hours later, both the cruiser and the captured assault ship freed themselves from Jupiter’s gravitational pull and set an indirect course to the predetermined rendezvous point eight light hours above the solar plane. Far enough out of the way no Gray would see us. So far away from anything, no squadron of enemy cruisers would happen upon us.

Now that journey is almost over, and I’m sitting in the captain’s chair on the bridge, dead-tired, with only the suit juice jitters keeping me awake through the boredom of jump after jump after jump.

Into a silence that might have been running for an hour or more, Phil makes an announcement. “Nicky is pregnant.”

I’m too frazzle-worn to gawk at him. “Three words in, and this is already the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

Brice gets up from the seat on the back wall of the bridge. I didn’t realize he was awake. He makes for the door leading to the central hallway, not wanting any part of the coming conversation.

I check my d-pad. It says just Phil and me are on the comm link, though I learned long ago what an unreliable piece of crap it is. Just us. I open a link to Brice. “I know we eyeballed everything before we left, but do you mind putting together an inventory of our supplies. Grab someone to help.”

Brice gives me a nod.

Peterson unstraps herself from the couch at the back of the bridge, and follows Brice with all the enthusiasm of a teenager escaping the boredom of after-school suspension.

“How long left on this jump?” asks Lenox.

“Eight minutes,” Phil tells her. He’s tired of the drudgery. He got used to the computerized navigational system Spitz installed on the Turd for us.

“What are you guys talking about?” she asks.

“How do you know I’m talking to Dylan?” asks Phil.

“I can see your mouth moving.”

I tell them both, “I’m not saying anything.”

Phil gives it up. “Nicky is gestating.”

“Gestating?” Lenox looks perplexed. “Nicky is going to have a baby?”

“Well,” says Phil. “Not like a baby. You know how Grays are, with that egg thing.”

“I don’t think gestation is the right word,” says Lenox.

“Does it matter?” asks Phil.

She says, “You two, didn’t…”

“To be honest,” I jump in, “that was my first question.”

“Why,” asks Phil, “can’t I have a mature conversation with you, Dylan?”

“I think it’s a legit question.”

Silva giggles. “Did you and Nicky, you know…?”

I take another look at my d-pad and rap it a few times with my fist. Damn thing.

“Grays are asexual,” says Phil. “You guys know that, right?”

“Is everyone on this comm loop?” I ask. “I thought this UN equipment was supposed to be better than that shit they gave us back on earth.”

“They don’t have sex,” continues Phil. “The one or two Grays in each pod with the least status spontaneously start to produce eggs when they reach physical maturity. Because I’m the alpha in our pod, that makes Nicky the egg-bearer.”

“So every Gray is a clone of the parent?” asks Lenox. “How do they evolve?”

“Grays don’t have DNA like humans do,” says Phil, “but they do have free-floating molecules in their bodies that control their development.”

“But they had to evolve,” I say as I give up on my d-pad and settle into my chair, “which means they still have to be evolving right now, but slowly, right? Asexual species evolve slowly, right?

“But if they evolve,” guesses Lenox, “how do they remain one species? If each line is a clone of the parent, it seems the species would diverge down a billion different branches.”

“They control the content and development of their genetic material,” says Phil, “not consciously, but they do.”

“They control it?” I ask, “Epigenetically?”

“Not exactly,” answers Phil, “but yes. Traits the species values are expressed. Traits they don’t value are repressed.”

“That still doesn’t explain how they don’t diverge,” says Lenox. “Eventually, they would, right? Or am I thinking their development molecules act too much like DNA?”

“Expressed molecules tend to be passed to subsequent generations more than repressed development molecules.” Phil stops there, but throws in an afterthought. “And they share.”

“Wait,” I say. “What? They share? I thought they were asexual.”

Phil regrets having thrown in that last bit.

“C’mon,” says Silva, “you started this. Tell us.”

“Through their skin,” says Phil. “Development molecules are always present in the secretions on their skin.”

“Ewh!” Lenox is grossed out.

Silva shivers.

“Whenever they touch,” adds Phil, “they exchange molecules that contain bits of their genetic code. It keeps them all genetically similar.”

“That’s disgusting,” says Silva.

“They’re just different,” says Phil. “I don’t know why I ever brought it up.”

“Why did you bring it up?” I ask.

“The stresses of being out in space,” he says, “like today. Being rammed by that ship, it’s bad for Nicky when she’s reproducing. The stress could kill the egg.”

“But it’s not just an egg,” guesses Silva.

Phil shakes his head.

And then I figure it out, too. “You see the egg as your child, don’t you. You’re its father.”

Phil nods at that one.

“How?” All concepts of adoptive parents aside, the thought of Phil co-parenting a Gray is too alien to me.

“The intellectual development of Grays starts from the moment the egg forms,” says Phil.

“Go on,” says Lenox.

“It’s why having the weakest member of the pod carry the egg doesn’t have a detrimental effect on the species. There’s the genetic sharing I told you about, but there’s also the intellectual development. All of the pod members influence the hatchling, the most dominant having the most influence, and the most submissive having the least.”

“So,” I guess, “This Gray hatchling Nicky has in the oven will come out thinking like a human?”

"It will assimilate most of what I know," says Phil, "and much of what Nicky knows. Education in a Gray, if you can call it that, is the process of the older Grays helping the younger ones to learn how to understand all the knowledge they’ve implanted when it was developing.”

“It’ll be a little Phil in a Gray body.” Lenox looks at the rest of us after she says it. “Is that a good thing?” She smiles at Phil to let him know she’s kidding. “Congratulations.”

"Yeah," says Silva walking over to hug Phil.

“Let’s go back to this stress thing,” I say. “Are you telling us that Nicky needs bedrest?”

“No,” says Phil, “but she can’t come with us on these missions anymore.”

“And?” I press.

Phil shakes his head. “The hatchling is my child as much as it is Nicky’s. I have to protect it. I can’t fight in this war anymore. I’ve decided, we’re going to go to the colonies.”

Chapter 45

We pop out of bubble, and the cruiser is there. It can travel at nearly eight times the speed of light. We can barely exceed the speed limit by fifty percent. We didn’t expect to beat it to the rendezvous.

“Bring us in alongside,” I tell Lenox. I turn to Silva. “Call—”

“I’m no Jablonsky,” she tells me, “but I know when to make a call.”

“Right.” I wonder if I made a mistake in letting the formalities of rank fall by the wayside.

“What now?” asks Phil.

“We wait,” I tell him. “We’ll be here awhile. Why don’t you run a full diagnostic on the ship and—”

“Diagnostic?” Phil asks. “I don’t have my tricorder. I think I left it on the Turd.”

Lenox laughs. She’s old enough to get the joke.

I point to Phil’s console. “Just get me a status on the ship’s system.”

“The ship systems’ instrumentation was damaged when Silva blew the interior airlock door,” says Phil. “I can barely keep the ship running, let alone tell whether it’s going to blow up.

“You’re being obstinate.” I take a breath and proceed without rising to his argument bait. “Inspect the grav array and the reactor. Check all the hull plates for damage. Look for any H leaks. The Trogs didn’t build this ship after they conquered earth. They salvaged it, which means it was probably damaged once before we attacked it. I want to know how and I want to know how effectively the repairs were made. You and Nicky don’t need any instruments to evaluate every grav plate in the hull.”

“One thing that does work,” says Phil, “is our hydrogen sensors. They’re showing we’re below fifty percent in the tanks.”

“We’ll top off the tanks from the cruiser’s stores.”

“Do you have permission for that?”

“Aside from it just making sense,” I tell Phil. “I’m taking Brice over to the cruiser to talk with Punjari. I’ll make the arrangements when I’m there.”

“After we do all that?” asks Phil. “What then?”

“You’re being a dick, Phil.”

“That’s not a very majorly thing to say.”

“Look, Phil,” I calm myself again, “I’m sorry we lost the Rusty Turd. I’m sorry we lost the crew.”

“Why did you say the Rusty Turd first?”

“Goddammit, Phil. I don’t want to argue with you right now, okay? You and I can deal with all of our shit some other time. Just give it a rest.”

“Phil,” says Lenox, “not now.”

He says, “I just want to know what the plan is now that we’re here.”

“Colonel Bird’s ships aren’t supposed to be here for another four days,” I tell him. Hell, I thought he already knew. “After we get this rusty piece of ship into fighting condition, to whatever degree that's possible, we'll assist Punjari with the cruiser."

“How?” asks Lenox. “We’re not engineers.”

“However they need us,” I tell her.

“After Bird gets here?” asks Phil.

“Phil,” I tell him. “I know where you’re going with this. You want to stay with the cruiser. That’s fine. That’s your prerogative. That’s probably best for you. I already told you that. Besides, you have your responsibilities, now. The Turd II will be a volunteer ship. I’ll raise a crew from Madsen’s and Bird’s people. We’ll head out and do whatever Bird tells us to.”

“And if he tells you we’re all going out to the colonies together?” asks Phil.

Silva turns to look. She’s interested in the answer.

“Do you have Punjari on the line yet?” I ask her.

Chapter 46

Days pass quickly when you’re sweating through twelve hours of work, even with a skin-tight suit regulating your temperature beneath the orange outer layer.

Phil and I have been avoiding each other. And that’s not easy given his sphere of telepathic awareness is growing larger. I know we should sit down and have one of those big heart-to-heart things. I can feel so much anger coming off of him, all directed at me, and I don’t want to dive into it. I don’t want to listen to him explain to me in gory detail how I’ve led us all here. I don’t want to hear his take on every mistake I’ve made, along with his reason why it could have turned out better if I’d not been so sure of myself. If I’d only taken the time to query him for his advice. I know that’s what he wants. That’s his way.

I’m sure the conversation will turn into an argument, and with the grief of Penny's death still raw, I'm afraid we'll both say things we won't be able to take back. So, I'm acting like any good adult, and I'm letting the situation fester.

“We should switch sides again,” says Brice.

I silently agree and move to change places with him. That puts me on grabbing feet and him picking Trogs up by the head.

A few hundred Trog corpses are stacked loosely on the hull, just outside one of the airlock hangars. The door is open, as we’re on the last step of the process.

By practiced consensus, Brice grabs a frozen Trog corpse by the helmet. I grasp the ankles. We lift him easily because there’s no grav to fight with, and we heave him into the void. There’s no back-and-forth swing for momentum—that would be pointless work with no gravity to swing against—there’s just the one heave. A few paces away, Peterson and Silva are flinging another corpse. Several pairs of Madsen’s people are doing the same.

The cruiser held more than ten thousand bodies when we took it. They all need to be disposed of by the slow process of hauling them through the massive ship, stripping them of anything of value, stacking them in the nearest airlock until full, evacuating the airlock, and then hauling the bodies out onto the hull. The last step is tossing them into the void.

Now a stream of corpses is spinning many long kilometers away from the cruiser, all moving in generally the same direction. We’re not even halfway through.

“It was good of Punjari to spare a few techs to work on our assault ship,” says Brice as he reaches down for another corpse.

“Yeah,” I agree. “Now that the bridge airlock door is repaired and the assault ship is airtight again, he says they can tweak the reactor to get another fifteen or twenty percent out of it.”

“I was talking to the guys aligning the array,” says Brice. “They think we might get another few g’s out of it at sub-light speed.”

I nod and grunt. The increase in performance is nothing like what we got from Spitz’s crew back on Iapetus, so I’m underwhelmed. Still, any edge we can get over the Trogs will increase our odds of killing their ships and living to brag about it. “What’s the lineup looking like?”

“No change,” says Brice. “Still you and me, Lenox, Peterson, and some of Madsen’s guys.”

“Madsen?” I ask.

“He’s in. You talk to Silva yet? She’s a hell of a good shooter to have on our team in a scrap.”

We toss a Trog and grab another.

“I’m not pushing Silva,” I tell him. “I don’t even bring it up with her.”

“She hasn’t decided on the colonies, yet?” asks Brice.

“She thinks we should go with Phil and Nicky and everybody else.”

“If I were you,” says Brice. “I’d go.”

We toss a few more corpses in silence before I say, “I’m sorry about Penny. I truly am.”

"Nothing you could have done to make it come out any different," says Brice. "It's just war." He says it with an empty darkness I think I finally understand. I've lost enough people that the blackness in his soul finally makes sense.

“Would you have gone out to the colonies?” I ask. “You and Penny?”

“That’s an easy ‘yes’ in retrospect.” Brice laughs. It’s black, like everything in his mood lately. He’s found a new depth in his internal void, and it makes me wonder how much loss one person can take before they finally break. “Neither of us would have, though. Can’t say we’d have done anything different. You know, after a while, no matter how many times you tell yourself every day is a roll of the dice, that you’re just as likely to die as any other corpse in the void, you don’t think it’ll happen to you.”

We go back to work in silence after that, sweating through the weight of all our dead friends. We work through most of the corpses on the hull when Brice says, “You still have Silva. You should go before you lose her.”

“You think—”

Brice stops, stands up straight and looks at me. “You and me, we know what’s coming, right? It’s gonna be more of what’s already happened. You know that, right? This war here, it’ll never end for us. We’ll fight until we’re dead. Maybe more will step up to take our places. I don’t know. But when people stop resisting, that’s when the war will be over.”

“You don’t think we can win?”

“You don’t need to sell me on the bullshit,” says Brice. “I’m in until the end, but I can read the scoreboard. The war is lost. It’s people like you and me who’ll never accept the defeat, never shame the memory of the dead by laying down our guns. Guys like us only have one way out.”

I don’t know how to respond.

“You,” says Brice, “you should really think about it, though. What’ll you do when Silva dies? What’ll she do when you get killed? Right now you have something. You should take your chips off the table and find a way to convince yourself that going to the colonies isn’t losing. It’s just not the victory you wanted.”

“I’ll tell Silva to go,” I tell him. “You were right before. I can’t lay down my guns and quit. I don’t want to die, yet I can’t live knowing I could have done more.”

“Even if it’s a lost cause.”

“It’s not lost while I’m breathing,” I tell him.

“That’s why you should take Silva and go,” says Brice, “because, and don’t take this the wrong way, you’re still stupid enough to think there’s a chance we can win here. Be honest with her. Tell yourself the truth. You’re both going to die if you stay. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. It’s just a matter of when. That’s all. If you want to stay and fight out of stubbornness, then tell her what she’s throwing her life away for. She deserves to know.”

Chapter 47

“What?” asks Brice, picking up on my tension just as Phil shouts a warning over all comm channels.

I point at something so far away it can’t be seen with the naked eye. “Trog cruisers. That way.”

“Shit.”

Another two pinprick pulses of blue pop out of the emptiness near the first six.

Punjari and Madsen are on the line, asking Phil for clarification. How close? How many? How soon? Are you sure?

The first six Trog ships to arrive are now glowing bright blue, pushing max g’s to close the distance between us and them. And that erases half the questions from my mind. This is no accident. They know we’re here and they’re coming for us.

“Punjari!” I shout to get his attention. “One hundred percent on all three reactors. Do it now. We need to jump as soon as possible.”

“It’ll take time,” he tells me. “Two reactors are powered all the way down to save fuel. We need time to ramp them up."

“Don’t waste time talking to me,” I tell him. “Do it.”

Madsen connects with me over the comm. “What do you need from me?”

“Get to the bridge and kick Punjari’s people in the ass.”

“Will do. Madsen out.”

“Seven minutes,” says Phil, “until they get here. Less for their railgun slugs if they start shooting.”

I look toward the Turd II and see it awash in blue as it powers through a spin to slide back along the cruiser’s hull.

“We’re coming to pick you up.”

“Brice,” I say, “get Silva and Peterson. We’ll board through the assault doors, once Lenox brings the ship over.”

“Twenty minutes,” says Punjari, “that’s how long it’ll be before we have enough power to jump.”

Goddamn slow Trog reactors.

“Phil,” I say, “head for the bridge. We need to change the plan.” I turn to Brice and the others, “Max grav for the bridge.” I jump and push every amp of my suit’s power into my grav plates. In seconds, I’m skimming over the hull, following one of the curved gun spines toward the bow. Brice, Peterson, and Silva are behind me.

“Punjari,” I call. “Are you on the bridge?”

“Of course.”

“I want you and all your people off and on the Turd by the time I get there.” It’s an unrealistic request. Lenox will beat us to the bow by only twenty seconds.

“Are we abandoning ship?” asks Punjari.

“You are,” I tell him.

“My work crew is in a maze of hallways in the barracks section,” says Madsen. “We’re moving as fast as we can, but we won’t make it.”

“Half my team is working on reactor optimization," says Punjari. "They’re back in the main bay. It’ll take three minutes just to cycle the airlock for them to move out of the hangar bay and into the forward section.”

Ahead, I see the Turd II coming to a stop where the hole still gapes on the nose of the cruiser.

“I can’t abandon them,” says Punjari. “We can’t lose this ship.”

“Sunk costs,” says Brice over a private link. “We escape with what we can and live to fight another day.”

Brice doesn’t tell me that because he’s a coward. It’s because he’s right. But I’m not ready to give up. Over the private link, I tell him, “As soon as we reach the Turd II, make sure Silva and Peterson get inside. I want Silva on the comm station as soon as possible.”

“On the comm station?” he asks. “Why is that—” And then he gets it.

“Get your people off the ship,” I tell Punjari, as I decelerate under hard g’s and slip between the Turd II and the cruiser to make the tight turn through the hole in the bridge. Over the comm, I hear Brice ordering Peterson and Silva not to follow me, and then I’m dodging past a pair of Punjari’s engineers struggling awkwardly to get out through the hole and onto the hull.

I make the attempt to grab control of their suits and fly them over to the Turd, but I don’t have admin permissions. So I curse instead. “Not much time,” I announce to them as my feet land on the deck. Gravving tight with my boots, I run to a position at the helm. “Why aren’t you moving, Punjari?”

From the opposite side of the console, he says, “I told you, I’m not—”

“Don’t be a hero,” I tell him as I scan over the helm console. The board isn’t the Gray standard. It’s the UN model, designed by humans for human use. All manual. No grav switches to control anything. That'll make this harder. "There's no upside. Colonel Bird said you were some kind of indispensable genius. Please act like it and get to the Turd.” I glance quickly across the bridge, catching as many eyes as I can. “All of you need to get over there fast. They’re not going to wait for you. If you stay, you’ll probably die.”

Phil comes on my comm. “What are you doing?”

“Is Silva on the bridge yet?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” he asks.

“What’s going on?” asks Silva, panting from the effort of getting to the Turd II’s bridge quickly.

“I need you on the comm station,” I tell her. Then I turn to Punjari’s people and open up my comm to everyone. “Move now. Phil is leaving in sixty seconds.”

“I’m at the comm station,” says Silva. “Who do you want me to connect with?”

“Me,” I tell her. “Keep the link open to the cruiser.”

Silva curses and I cut her comm.

“If you’re thinking of repeating your trick from the Arizona Massacre,” says Phil, “you need to—”

“That’s not the plan,” I tell him, as I watch most of Punjari’s engineers climb out through the hole. “I’m going to try and save the rest of these people and this cruiser if I can.”

Chapter 48

“I know what you did over Arizona,” Punjari tells me. “If you’re going to fly this ship, you’re going to need help.”

"I managed just fine last time." I glance down at my d-pad. "You're wasting your seconds." I comm to Phil, "How's our intercept time looking?"

“Maybe four minutes,” he tells me. “Those last two blips were Arizona class ships. They're accelerating out for a flanking attack."

Great.

“Ramming other ships is one thing,” says Punjari, “if you want to keep this cruiser intact, we’ll need a bridge crew to do it.”

“The Grays keep a crew of twenty or thirty up here to run the ship,” I tell him. “We don’t have that many people, and we don’t have that much expertise.”

“We have more than you think,” he tells me as he comes around to my side of the console. He points to the grav control workstations to his left. “That’s all still Gray equipment over there. None of my people can work it. If you want us to survive, then prove you can competently manage a complex defensive field. Or are the Grays that much better than you?”

“Trying to manipulate me won’t do anybody any good,” I tell him. “Do you know how to pilot this ship?”

“I’m not just an engineer,” he says. “I’m a pilot in the UN’s reserve force. I can fly.”

“Well do it, then.”

Punjari points to a woman who's been lingering and watching. “Reactor systems.”

Phil comms in. “Everybody who came out is onboard. I’m leaving.”

“Hide behind us for the moment,” I tell him. “Can you read my thoughts from there? Because to me, you and Nicky are a blur.”

“I can read you,” says Phil, “but that won’t last.”

“Tell Silva to keep us connected through the ship-to-ship.”

“Do you have someone on your ship manning the comm station?” Phil asks me.

Punjari directs one of his people to the communications console, another to internal systems, one to navigation, one to the tactical radar, and one to the bubble jump computer.

“We’re good to go,” I tell Phil. I comm to Madsen. “In thirty seconds, I need you, your people, and every engineer in the main bay or rear sections to be secured in a room or tied down. After that, get up to the bridge as quickly as you can. Make sure you herd any engineers this way.”

“After what?” Madsen asks.

“You’ll see,” I tell him. “Punjari, as soon as you have enough power to move, punch the array up to max grav.”

I feel the drive array push. “Bring us around. I want you to head right for the six coming this way.”

Punjari is reluctant.

“Do it,” I tell him. I call to Lenox. “Things are going to get bumpy in a sec. You may want amp up the Turd’s defensive grav in case we hit one another.”

“Aye, aye,” she says.

Phil asks, “What do you have in mind, Captain Surprise?”

“Madsen?” I call.

“Ready,” he tells me.

To the crewwoman on internal systems, I order, “Open all internal and external airlock doors.”

“But the air,” she says. “We’ll need it.”

"No, we won't."

Internal Systems goes to work with quick hands, and I see the console’s alarms light up with warnings and overrides.

“Venting a quarter-million tons of air,” says Punjari. His tone tells me he approves. He knows with that much weight off our backs, the cruiser will accelerate significantly faster, and it’ll turn faster than the cruisers coming after us. We’ll be no match for the assault ships headed our way. That’s a separate problem.

The deck starts to rumble under my feet and the cruiser pushes to the left as the air exiting out of the hangar bay acts like a rocket.

“Keep us on course,” I tell Punjari.

“I’m trying,” he says.

“What’s our power status?” I ask Reactor Lady.

“Nearly thirty percent.”

“You take it all for acceleration,” I tell Punjari. “I’ll reroute as much as I need to the grav systems, as I need it.” Talking to Internal Systems, I say, “I can sense the grav switches for the power priority system from my console. So leave those alone.”

“I have us lined up directly on the oncoming fleet,” says Punjari. “What’s the plan?”

“Blow by,” I tell him.”

“What’s the point?” he asks. “They’ll just turn around and come get us again.”

“They were expecting us to run,” I tell him. “Now they’re moving so fast they'll overshoot us, and it’ll take them an additional three or four minutes to slow down enough to turn and start coming after us again. The seven-minute intercept window we started with will grow. Phil, how’s my guess on that?”

“You’re right,” he answers. “You still won’t have enough time.”

“Baby steps,” I tell him.

The cruiser is settling down. Much of the internal air has already blown into space and the rest is flowing out in a less violent way.

“What about the Arizona class attack ships,” asks Phil. “You have maybe forty seconds to impact.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I tell him. “You’re still close.” I can tell the Turd has kept itself within fifty meters of our hull through the venting exercise. “I’m taking your power, Punjari.”

Just like that, I pull all the power out of the main drive array and divert it to the ship’s deflective plates, using them to spin the cruiser around to face the oncoming Arizona class ship. I strobe my forward-facing plates in a rapid burst of max blue flashes, positive and negative g, once or twice a second. Phil is reading my mind as I’m doing it and he knows what my plan is, so he sets the Turd’s fields to strobe in sync with the cruisers and runs max power into his drive array.

The incoming assault ships jostle in the cruiser’s fluctuating field and their lines of attack float off-target.

Phil already has the Turd accelerating up through my cruiser’s pluming grav field, and he’s using it for camouflage as Lenox sets her sights on the nearest of the attackers.

“You ever play pool?” I ask

“No guarantees,” Phil tells me. “You know how hard this is, right?”

“If anybody can do it,” I tell him, it’s you.”

Through the hole in the front of the ship, Punjari and the bridge crew can see the attacking assault ships coming and they see Phil’s counterattack racing toward them. With the grav pulses strobing everything light and dark, it’s hard for any of us to make out exactly what’s going to happen.

They brace themselves and gasp at the imminent collision.

I cut the grav strobe just as the Turd II hits the first attack ship in a glancing blow that tears the Turd’s grav lens down the starboard side of the attacker, ripping its hull open, and shattering its drive array. The broken ship spins off to its port side, as I max power through the cruiser's grav plates in an attempt to create a crude funnel-shaped field, nudging the spinning attacker into the starboard side of the other oncoming vessel.

The bridge crew, observing the chaos, cheers as the collision breaks both ships apart. That's when I look to see what’s become of the Turd II. "Phil," I call over my comm, as I see it sliding sideways away from the first collision.

No response.

“Comm Guy,” I call, not having the time to learn any of the engineers’ names. “Can you connect with Silva?”

“Working on it,” he tells me. “I can have the ship-to-ship patched into the suit comms in a moment.”

I spin the cruiser back in line with its course of travel and shunt internal power back to Punjari. “I’m running everything back into the drive array,” I tell him. “Blow past those Trog cruisers as fast as you can.”

Chapter 49

“Reactor Lady,” I ask. “What’s our reactor output?”

“Thirty-four percent,” she answers.

“Bubble Guy,” I ask, “what’s the minimum power we need for a bubble jump?”

“Ummm, you really shouldn’t run—”

“If we don’t jump,” I tell him, “we’re dead.” I put my stern gaze on Punjari’s people. “You all have three minutes to get me a number.”

“Intercept with the Trog squadron in two and a half minutes.” Radar tells us.

I tell the other three, “Two minutes would be better. Get me something.”

“Comm Guy,” I ask. “Any luck on that connection?”

“Still working.”

“Do you want to go above or below?” asks Punjari.

“See that one farthest on the right of the formation?” I ask.

Punjari is adjusting the magnification on his screens so he can make out the rough ring of cruisers coming toward us. “Okay.”

“Head right for that one,” I tell him.

“We’re going to play chicken?” he asks. “And hope he turns?”

"These Grays are better at this grav shit than we'll ever be," I explain. "As we close in, alter your course, so we're on a line to slip past on his port side at a distance of a few hundred meters.”

“At these speeds?” Punjari tells me. “That’s suicide.”

“You asked for the job, Punjari,” I tell him. “Now fly the ship.”

“I—”

“Do what I tell you, and you'll be fine." I go on, “As we close in, veer toward the ship. I want to run past so close we can reach out and touch his hull.”

Punjari goes pale, but alters our course as ordered.

Madsen comes onto the deck from one of the elevator tubes. “Where do you want us?”

“You have everybody?” I ask.

“Yes, Sir.”

I throw a thumb toward the long, curving wall at the back of the bridge. “Line up back there. Grav tight to the floor. Things are going to get rough, but if we have to bail out, we’ll all need to max grav through the hole.”

“That hole?” Punjari is pointing at the gaping tear in the front of the ship.

“It’s the only hole we have,” I tell him. “It’s the fastest way out if the ship starts to come apart.”

That earns me a few groans from my crew of engineers and techs.

Phil’s voice crackles over the comm. “Can you hear me?”

I give Comm Guy a nod of thanks. "I have you, Phil. Is everything all right? Is everyone okay?”

“We were jostled pretty good, but all’s fine.”

“Great job,” I tell him. “Great job to all of you.”

“What’s the plan, here?” he asks.

“Find us some random spot in space. Send the coordinates to Nav Guy. We’ll meet you there in a day or two.”

“Can you jump?” asks Phil.

“We’re still a few minutes away from that.”

“More like ten,” says Punjari.

“Ten minutes?” asks Phil. “We’re not leaving until you jump.”

“We might not make it out of this, Phil.”

I see the plume of his grav as his ship maxes power to move into an arc that’ll put him on a flanking course toward the oncoming cruisers.

“We’ll draw their fire and attack,” Phil tells me.

As if on cue, a swarm of railgun fire erupts from the oncoming Trog fleet.

“They’re shooting at you, too,” says Phil.

I divert some of Punjari’s drive power to my forward deflectors. The choice will reduce our acceleration, and reduce the distance I’m hoping this maneuver will put between us and the Trogs. Which means they’ll be back in attack position sooner. It should keep us alive for a few more minutes.

“Send the coordinates,” I tell Phil. “We’ll bubble out as soon as we can. Good luck.”

Chapter 50

We’re flying through a flurry of red-hot railgun slugs. So far, our deflective fields are holding up.

“Thirty-eight percent,” says Reactor Lady.

“The rest of you have that number, yet?” I ask.

Bubble Jump Guy says, “I think we can do a short hop once we hit sixty-percent.”

“Sixty,” I say. “That’s good.” It's better than waiting for one hundred percent.

“How long of a jump?” asks Punjari.

“A hundredth of a second,” he says.

“What’s that,” asks Punjari, “fifteen thousand miles? That won’t do us any good. They’ll see us come out of bubble. They’ll know where to find us.”

“Less,” says Nav Guy.

“At sixty percent,” says Reactor Lady, “we won’t make the full 8c this ship is capable of. With the current mass, you know, without the atmosphere, and current power availability, we might make 4 to 6c.”

“I’ll bet on 10k,” I say. “That buys us some breathing room.”

“Just for a second,” argues Punjari. “They’ll just jump right after us.”

“It’ll take them a few seconds to figure out what happened and where we went. They’ll have to plot a jump to come after us. Hell, we might buy eight or nine seconds. And that’s if they don’t have to assemble into one of their telepathic committees to decide.” I turn back to my team. “How quickly can we make a second jump? Immediately, right? If you use the nav computer?”

“Four or five seconds,” says Bubble Jump Guy. "I need to reset the parameters for the new output levels from the reactor, so each jump will be longer than the last."

“I don’t care about that,” I tell him. “Program in ten jumps as fast as the nav computer can run them. We’ll pause at the last one and recalc the reactor output and jump another ten. And don’t run us down a straight line. I don’t want the Trogs to guess where we’ll be coming out of the last jump.”

“We’ll use a hell of a lot of fuel,” says Reactor Lady.

“Use it or lose it,” I tell her, “along with the rest of the ship.”

“Less than a minute until impact!” says Punjari.

“Not impact,” I tell him, “unless you need me to fly the ship.”

“No,” he says, “I have it.”

“I’m drawing more power for the deflective grav field. In a moment, you won’t have any left.”

“Take what you need,” he says.

“What about the jump?” asks Bubble Jump Guy.

“You let me know when you need it,” I tell him. “I’ll shunt everything back to the drive array as soon as you’re ready.”

“Got it.”

I comm out to Phil. “What are you doing? I thought you were drawing fire off us?”

“Better plan,” he says. “We’re staying in your shadow.”

“They know you’re back there,” I tell him, though deep in my heart, I’m just fine with him keeping the new Turd out of the line of fire. Our cruiser, even at thirty-eight-percent power, can absorb a lot of railgun slugs before its deflective shields start to fry.

“They don’t know what we’re up to,” says Phil.

That’s when I realize what he’s doing, using the grav noise of my cruiser to mask an attack run, and staying out of harm's way while he does it. "Good move," I tell him. "Don't aim at the cruiser I'm headed for. He won't be there when you come out from behind me."

“Can do.”

“Forty-one percent,” says Reactor Lady.

“That was a big jump.” I’m pleased.

“The ramp up isn’t linear,” she explains.

I turn to Punjari. “You ready?”

He nods as his eyes fix on the shower of railgun slugs deflecting off our grav field and the Trog squadron growing large in front of us.

“Get us in close,” I tell him as the last seconds tick away.

Most of the bridge crew flinches. Some of them duck uselessly behind their consoles.

It really does look like we’re going to ram the other cruiser.

It takes all my concentration to adjust defensive grav fields to keep them lined up in a deflecting wedge growing from our bow right down or port side, to push the incoming fire to the sides with minimal energy expenditures.

Our target cruiser comes up beside us, veering hard to starboard as they lose their nerve about being so close to our trajectory.

To Punjari's credit, he steers after them. As we swish by at a distance of less than a hundred meters, I punch every amp of current through my port side plates to push against the cruiser, and I feel it knock us hard to our starboard. Action versus reaction.

Punjari curses as I feed power back to his systems.

Our cruiser is rolling and spinning. Everyone on the bridge not locked tight enough to the floor is thrown toward a wall.

Concentrating on the big picture outside, I wrap a cocoon of deflective grav around the whole cruiser. It's weak, because I don't have enough power for all of it, and the ship is changing orientation so rapidly I can't keep the field on only the side facing the cruisers.

Thankfully, they’re still firing in the direction we were headed before we bounced grav fields off the cruiser we just passed. Now, we’re spinning off in another direction, and two-megatons of Trog cruiser is careening toward the other five.

As I see it happen, Phil blasts the Turd II straight through the lead cruiser’s main bay, in one side and out the other, right behind the reactors. It’s a clean shot, but the momentum transfer from the collision is violent enough to send it spinning into one of the other cruisers in the formation.

“Run for it!” I call to Phil over the comm as I see Goliath-size ships colliding behind me or throwing out powerful deflective fields to save themselves from damage. Through it all, the still-firing railguns are sending slugs in every direction.

Punjari is working on righting our ship.

“As soon as we’re pointed away from them,” I tell him, “give it all the power you can.”

“Forty-three percent,” says Reactor Lady, thankfully, still at her station. “Forty-four.”

I release more power from the deflective shields as we’re generally heading away from the attackers, so I have less hull area to defend.

Our cruiser is accelerating and stabilizing.

“I didn’t think that would work,” says Punjari.

“It didn’t,” I tell him. “Not like I hoped it would.”

“We left them in disarray,” says Punjari. “We have the time to get away.”

“Nav Guy,” I call, “I need a new intercept estimate.”

“Working on it,” he answers. “None of their courses or speeds is constant.”

“What did you want to happen?” asks Punjari, steadying the ship now.

“I wanted to nudge that cruiser hard enough with our grav field so it lost control long enough to hit another of their ships, but it seems we got the worst end of the momentum exchange.”

“Because we vented the atmosphere,” says Punjari, “to lighten our ship so we could accelerate faster.”

Doh.

I knew that.

I just didn’t know it intuitively enough to make the right call.

I comm to Phil. “Did you make it through alright?”

“Perfect,” says Phil. “Lenox is a fearless pilot.”

“No doubt. Are you setting up to bubble out?”

“Coming around for another run.”

“Phil, dammit.” I sigh loudly. “Escape while you can.”

“You need more time or you won’t make it.”

“We’re working our plan,” I tell him.

“If we can distract them with one more attack,” he tells me, “you guys should have enough time to escape.”

“Don’t be a hero.”

“Gotta plot this next strike. Gotta go.”

Chapter 51

The farther we move away from the squadron of cruisers, the more I feel like a coward.

“Forty-eight percent.”

“Thanks,” I tell Reactor Lady, though I’m trying to see Phil’s attack develop through the blue flare of our drive array.

“Come on, baby,” says Punjari, urging our cruiser to move faster.

Madsen is rounding up the wounded, those who didn’t have their suit grav set high enough when the action started. One has a fractured arm, another a sprained ankle, and a third a broken collarbone.

“Radar,” I ask, “what’s our relative velocity with the Trog ships?”

“Twenty-seven k,” she answers.

That drastically cuts the impact velocity of any railgun slugs they have aimed at us. Good. I shunt more power out of our rear-facing shields to feed the main drive array. “How are we doing on those bubble jump solutions?”

“Ready to go at sixty-percent,” Bubble Jump Guy tells me.

“No fudging?” I ask.

“Sixty is the best we can do.”

I turn to Radar, “I need to know as soon as the Trogs reverse course and start closing again.”

“No estimates, yet,” she tells me. “They’re still preoccupied with Phil’s ship. They’re evading.”

“No second impact yet?” I ask.

“No.”

“Soon?”

“It looks like another twenty seconds if Phil doesn’t miss.”

“How fast?” I ask. “Will they shoot right through or get lodged inside?”

"They're traveling about the same speed as they were on the last collision."

If they hit the cruiser in the hangar bay, they’ll survive. In the dense bow or stern barracks, or even through one of the reactors, traveling at that speed might obliterate the Turd II. “Madsen,” I call, “there’s a war room or conference room or something through that door at the back of the bridge. Take the wounded in there and make them comfortable.”

“They have an infirmary in the rear of the ship,” he tells me. “In the Trog section. Their physiology isn’t all that different from ours.”

“The rear section of the ship is still sealed,” says Internal Systems.

“We could get them out of their suits,” says Madsen.

“Anyone with medical training?” I ask the group.

We get a volunteer from one of the unoccupied engineers. Not a doctor, but a medic in the reserve force.

“Do it,” I tell Madsen. “Leave us a few shooters here, take whoever else you need.” I don’t expect trouble. We’ve been working on the ship for three days and haven’t seen a live Trog. I just hate being surprised.

“Impact,” says Radar.

“And?” I ask.

“Straight through,” she answers.

I comm to Phil. “Hey.”

“Busy right now.”

“They’re being pounded by railgun fire,” says Radar.

“Bubble jump, Phil. Do it, now!”

The comm goes dead.

I look aft, but still see little but blue. “Phil?”

“He jumped,” says Radar.

“You sure?” I ask, hoping to God the Turd II didn’t take a few rounds through the reactor. “Debris?”

“No,” she tells me. “No ship debris. It just disappeared.”

A tremendous weight falls off my shoulders. Now I only have one ship to worry about. Being honest with myself, my friends are safe. That’s the relief.

“Fifty-percent.”

Chapter 52

Our race with the Trogs settles into long minutes with nothing changing. After the adrenaline-jacked first attack, it seems like boredom as we all hang on each announcement from Reactor Lady.

“Fifty-four percent,” she says.

Radar says, "They've turned three cruisers this way, and they're accelerating."

“The other three,” I ask, “all too damaged to chase?”

“No way to tell,” she says. “They could be playing it safe. One could be hanging back to take survivors off the other two, but none seemed to have been completely disabled by Phil’s attack.”

“I didn’t think so either.”

“Don’t forget what we did,” says Punjari.

I’m not sure we had much more than a disruptive effect, yet I don’t say that. “How many g’s are we pulling?”

“Effectively two point six,” says Nav.

“Shouldn’t it be just over two?” asks Internal Systems. It's simple math, a Trog cruiser should max at four g's thrust at sub-light speeds. Half-power should yield half-thrust.

“Because we dumped the atmosphere,” says Nav. “Our drive array has a lot less mass to push.”

“Two point six.” I like that. “Radar, now that those cruisers are up and running, let me know once they’re moving as fast as we are.” I glance over at Punjari. “That’s when we need to start worrying again. We need to come up with our next evasive maneuver before they overtake us.”

“They might not,” says Punjari. “They’re charging hard now, but they’ll back off at some point. If they intercept at full speed again, they’re smart enough to know we’ll hit the brakes and they’ll overshoot, turning the advantage to us. In slowing down as they close in, they’ll increase the intercept time.”

“They have to know,” I guess, “that we’re underpowered at the moment. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we jump, right?”

“Agreed,” says Punjari. “So they think they’ll only get one more chance at us.”

“You’re right.” I turn to Nav. “Can you estimate an intercept time taking their deceleration into account?”

“I can give you a guesstimate,” he says. “You’ll have to reroute more of our power to the rear shields the closer they get, right? I’ll have to adjust for that.”

“Of course,” I tell him. “I’ll do my best to keep it to a minimum.”

“Give me a minute.”

I look at Reactor Lady, silently urging another update out of her. That's when another inspiration hits me. "Punjari, can any of your people manage this ship’s targeting systems?"

“We haven’t done anything to upgrade the fire control systems,” he tells me. “We’d planned to remove all the railguns to reduce weight for the trip to the colonies.”

“Unfortunate.”

“We can’t shoot it out against three Trog cruisers,” he tells me. “We don’t have the crew to reload the weapons.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” I tell him. “I was primarily hoping to sprinkle our path with railgun slugs so our pursuers would have to divert power to their forward shields.”

“So they couldn’t accelerate as fast,” says Punjari, as he gets it. “The holds are filled with loose slugs that—”

I realize just as he does. “We probably blew most of those out with the atmosphere when we opened all the airlocks.”

“What else have we got?” I ask, as I glance around the bridge, open to any suggestions.

“I think,” says Nav, looking up from the furious work he’s been doing at his station, “the Trogs will intercept us when we hit fifty-eight percent power.”

“In what?” I ask, “Three or four minutes?”

“About that,” he says. “If they’d only waited another minute or two before starting the pursuit.”

I don’t like if-only musings. I turn my attention back to Punjari. “What do you think? Maybe we spin the ship again, a last-minute sort of thing, punch everything we have into the drive array and try to nudge them again?”

“I don’t think it’ll work a second time,” says Punjari.

Radar says, “They just matched our speed. And they’re spreading out as they come.”

“So much for the idea of nudging,” says Punjari.

“Fifty-five percent,” says Reactor Girl, just as something flashes blue, way out in front of us.

I try to make it out, but I know it’s a ship coming out of bubble.

I shunt power to the forward shields and curse. I didn't think the Grays had the ability to perform a micro-jump. Not on purpose, anyway. "How many of those ships are still behind us?"

“Six,” says Radar.

“Reinforcements?” asks Punjari. “For us?”

A voice crackles over the comm. “Dylan, can you hear me?” It’s Phil.

“Phil?” I ask. “Is that you?”

“Keep coming,” he says. “Right at us.”

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Buying you some time. We’ll push past you as close as we dare and give those Trogs something to think about for a minute. Maybe give you the chance to finally get away. You are trying, aren’t you?”

“Are you trying to be funny, Phil?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Phil,” I say, “I take back all the bad things I ever said about you.”

“The Trogs have stopped accelerating,” says Radar.

Even I can see the bloom of their powerful deflective shields. They’re maxing power output to protect themselves from the Turd II. I can practically feel the return of hope in the people around me.

Punjari looks at me, grinning. “We’re going to make it, aren’t we?”

“Don’t get too happy, too quick,” I tell him.

The Turd II grows impossibly fast out of the distance and passes us by in a blue blur.

“Good luck,” I call after Phil, feeling my anxiety knot up again.

“They’re redirecting fire,” says Radar. “They’re trying to hit Phil’s ship. He’s taking evasive maneuvers.”

“That should buy us the time we need,” says Nav.

“Shift course,” I tell Punjari. “A few points off our current trajectory.”

He does, and asks, “Why?”

“It’ll put us off our axis of travel, and out of the path of the last volley of railgun slugs they fired at us. It means I can cut power to the rear deflectors for a moment and transfer it to the drive array.”

“Thanks,” he says, as the ship jumps forward on the surge.

Behind us, another big grav bloom tells me Phil just bubbled out again, taking the Turd II out of danger.

“That seals it,” says Nav. “There’s no way they can catch us before we hit sixty percent.”

“Fifty-six percent,” says Reactor Girl.

“Be ready to punch the button at sixty,” I tell Bubble Jump Guy. “Let’s not waste this chance.”

Chapter 53

Our escape made, we run through a series of bubble jumps that culminate in a final thirty-seven-hour hop that'll drop us into interstellar space at some random spot Phil passed to our navigator before the battle hit its destructive stride. At eleven hours into the journey, I'm sitting at the grav control console, focusing my concentration aft, examining grav waves flowing out of our drive array. I'm searching for flaws that might expose underlying damage that needs to be repaired.

“How do you think they found us?” asks Punjari.

I open my eyes and see he’s come over to lean on my console. I shrug. “It’s not a question I’ve been thinking much about. I’ve been occupied with running tests on every grav plate and grav control system onboard, looking for battle damage.”

“Anything yet?” asks Punjari.

I shake my head. “Besides the hole in the nose, the ship is in good working order, though I’d suggest as a matter of course, we never power down any of the three reactors to save H again.”

Punjari laughs, because the giddiness of escaping with your life sometimes takes a while to fade. “I concur.”

“How are the injured?”

“I spoke with Madsen an hour ago,” he says. “No one is in danger, however, we need to get them back to the hospital on Iapetus to see a real doctor.”

“We’ll put them on the freighter when we meet up with Bird.”

“We radioed a message to Iapetus during the attack,” says Punjari. “But radio waves travel at the speed of light, which means the signal might just now be arriving.” Punjari examines his d-pad for a moment. Bird was scheduled to take off two hours ago.”

“Phil will have gone back to tell him,” I say. “He’d have bubbled into range, sent the message, and bounced back out. I don’t think you have to worry about Bird. My guess is he’ll show up at the new rendezvous without a scratch.”

“I didn’t have you pegged for an optimist.”

“I’m not. I just know Phil. He’s thorough.”

Punjari sits on one of the narrow stools designed for a Gray, and scoots around to find a comfortable spot. “In earth g, this chair would hurt.”

I don’t disagree.

“Do you think the Grays observed us coming out of bubble at the rendezvous?” asks Punjari. “That far out? Are they that sensitive?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Is there another explanation for them finding us?”

“We could have a spy,” says Punjari.

I shake my head. “My people are solid. Given what you Iapetus people have gone through, what most of you have spent your entire lives working toward, I don’t see it.”

“Yet it’s possible,” says Punjari.

“I never figured you for the paranoid type,” I say.

“I’m not, just careful.” He smiles about that.

“I think the most likely explanation is the right one, in this case. The Grays are supersensitive to grav flux. I bet they recognize the bubble signatures of these cruisers as readily as you’d recognize your own mother’s face. I think it’s possible a Gray might notice a cruiser come out of bubble, even from far away, against the background noise of the universe. Hell, probable. Maybe a Trog cruiser was passing by somewhere in the neighborhood, and one of the Grays was out wishing on a star or something and noticed us bubbling out in a place no cruiser was supposed to be. Word probably got back about the salvage crew we helped into the afterlife, and the Grays deduced the rest. I think that's why that squadron showed up."

“So we go farther out this time,” says Punjari.

“I don’t know,” I answer. “We can talk with Nicky about it, but if this doesn’t work out, we’ll try twice as far next time, and even further the next. As long as we keep our reactors cooking, then we should be able to escape at the first sign of trouble. We’ll find a safe distance eventually.”

“Or we go back,” says Punjari. “Schedule a whole series of pickup points five or six light hours out from Iapetus, meet up with the freighters, pick up a load of pods, and bubble out before the Trogs have time to send a squadron out to catch us.”

“If they see us bouncing around the solar system, they’ll start to wonder what we’re up to, don’t you think?”

“They’re an arrogant lot,” says Punjari. “In the absence of an obvious motive, they may choose to believe we’re not smart enough to drive the ship to the destination we want.”

I laugh because he may be right on the money with that strategy.

Punjari smiles and leans on the console.

"Whatever you do," I say, "I think you shouldn't do it for long. The Grays and Trogs aren't as stupid as we like to think they are. And we've all been guilty of that. We talk about the arrogance of the Grays, and we're guilty of the same attitudes. Now here we are. They found us. They came after us, and we barely escaped."

Punjari’s smile seeps away. “Twice.”

“Yeah,” I agree, “back at Jupiter, too. They almost got us there.”

Punjari rubs his eyes, and he looks away, the loss of his friends is still too fresh for him not to be ambushed by the feelings.

“Sorry,” I say, my feelings sufficiently repressed. I’ve had a lot more practice than Punjari.

Chapter 54

We arrive at the rendezvous, and then the waiting begins.

My first order of business is to set up a bridge rotation to keep a full flight crew on duty at all times. The cruiser is a pirated ship in a war zone. No safe base. No free parking. The duty schedule I order doesn’t leave us much time to proceed with our work on emptying the cruiser of the bodies or the half-million tons of unused railgun slugs, but priorities had to be set.

We convert the unused war room behind the bridge into a dorm, moving Trog bedding from the rear barrack section of the cruiser up to the front. Punjari puts together a work schedule for anyone not on bridge duty, and orders his repair workflow to move forward, keeping in mind no major system can be offline again.

On the morning of our second day, I wake up in one of the cots in the war room. I’ve slept long enough I should feel revitalized, yet I don’t, so I feel cheated instead.

Not wanting to wake others in the room who are still asleep, I make my way out, check in on the bridge crew, and hop into one of the lifts in order to access the forward section’s other decks, and I explore. I don’t have a goal. There's nothing I hope to find. I just want to get my blood flowing in the cruiser’s ten-percent g. I decide along the way I want to familiarize myself with every detail of the layout—the thickness of the bulkheads, the position of airlocks, and the contents of each room I come across. It’s all tactical knowledge that might prove valuable the next time I find myself assaulting one of these leviathans.

When my free time starts to run out, I make my way back to the lifts, hop into one of them, and pop out on the bridge.

“Good morning,” says Punjari. He’s standing near the back wall, not on duty yet, just watching.

I check my d-pad. We still have thirty minutes before our shift starts.

“You sleep well?” he asks as I walk over.

“Fitful?”

“Nightmares?”

"I keep thinking about mistakes and near-misses, trying to imagine what I would do if I were a Gray right now, knowing we're out here somewhere. They have to find us. And they have to kill us.”

“How do you think they’ll try and find us?”

I sigh, because the answer isn’t one I have. "In these cases, I depend on Phil and Nicky to tell me.
Without them, I don’t know if we’re far enough away that a Gray can sense us or not. I don’t know if our radar can see a Gray cruiser before the Grays aboard can sense us. So, I have to assume one of them is always close, and I have to have a plan for escape when they show up to attack. Moreover, I have to assume the Grays all share their info on us, so if they attack again, they won’t come at us like they did last time. They’ll do it in such a way that we can’t escape.”

“And how’s that?” asks Punjari.

“Risk a bubble jump endpoint such that the arriving ships pop out in a spherical formation with us at the center. Close enough that it'd be dangerous to bubble out.”

Punjari goes pale. “They’d have us.”

I nod. “It would be a good way to trap us. That’s one of the things that worried me last night. So I got up and left a standing order with Nav and Helm to set a random timer that’ll trigger a move event. When the timer fires, their orders are to move the ship by five or ten thousand miles in a randomly selected direction.”

“We’ll burn a lot of fuel,” says Punjari, “but that should work. Roughly how frequently will we move?”

“I told Nav to program the average length of time between moves to about three to four hours.”

“If it took us thirty-seven hours to get all the way out here,” muses Punjari, “we could set the timer for much longer intervals.”

“Well, we don’t know they’ll make the attack run from earth to here in one hop. They might pick a spot a million miles away to marshal their forces, and jump in from there.”

“If they do that,” says Punjari, “we may need to move more frequently, or just keep moving.”

“With random course and speed changes,” I say. “As long as we stay in the same general area so we’ll be close enough to communicate with Bird when he shows up with his freighters.”

“I think we should do that.”

“Agreed.” For the moment, it feels good to have a plan to thwart the next attack. Yet the peace of mind lasts for only that—a moment. “Once our next evasion succeeds, we’ll need to come up with a means to escape detection on the third attack, because they’ll learn, too, and they'll come back with a new plan the next time, and we may not have the luxury of a few days to come up with a new evasion plan."

“And the next, and the next,” says Punjari. “A problem that keeps requiring a new answer.”

“And maybe that’s why war is the mother of invention.”

“War?” asks Punjari.

“The cliché works better that way, I think.”

“You have a good mind for this,” says Punjari.

“I just like staying alive.”

“I think you’ve found your place.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I think everyone has a talent or two. Me, I’m an engineer and a fair pilot. I suppose I could have been good at any number of things, but as an engineer, I shine.”

I don’t make a joke of Punjari’s lack of humility. “Bird said as much before we left. In fact, he said you were so valuable he suggested if I had to choose between your life and mine, I should choose yours.”

Punjari is appalled. “I’d never want anyone to sacrifice themselves for me. Especially you.”

I laugh at that. “I’m just another grunt with a gun.”

“You’re the reason we’re alive. The revolution needs people like you more desperately than it needs another engineer.”

“Revolution?” I laugh in a very Brice-ian way. Most days it seems our long list of defeats have put our revolution in a hole too deep to climb out of. Ever. “Tell me about the colonies.”

Chapter 55

Punjari’s initial instinct is to clam up. He starts to speak, thinks better of it, and stops. And then he laughs.

“What?” I ask.

"The colonies," he says, "they're our best-kept secret."

“But they’re real, right?”

“Of course.”

“You know this for sure?” I ask.

Punjari shakes his head and says. “Of course.”

“Why did you shake your head?”

“You were raised on earth,” he says. “Under the MSS.”

“Were you born on Iapetus?” I ask.

“Earth?” he says. “I was recruited to Iapetus when I was fourteen.”

“I never imagined they took kids that young. I guess, well, to tell you the truth, I never thought about it much. I just assumed they were culling the planet for PhDs and whatnot.”

“Fourteen is unusual,” says Punjari. “Somehow I was identified as a candidate and picked up.”

“Just like that?” I ask.

“They brought my parents, too.”

“That had to be something,” I said. “Going from earth, with what it’s been like, to Iapetus. What a change.”

“The biggest change,” says Punjari, “though you’ll find it hard to believe, is being able to trust again.”

“Trust?” I ask, and the urge to laugh starts but stops as I begin to think about the reality of it.

“I know,” he says. “On earth, you’re constantly bombarded with MSS propaganda you know is untrue because it tells you not to believe what you can see with your eyes, hear with your ears. Propaganda isn’t a lie the state asks you to believe about the world. Effective propaganda is a lie the state convinces you to tell yourself.”

Holy shit, he’s right!

“It undermines the rational part of your mind,” says Punjari. “It creates a troubling cognitive dissonance that’s difficult to accept.”

“Unless you surrender to it,” I guess. “That’s the only way to find any mental peace. You have to give up, right?”

“Correct,” says Punjari. “I couldn’t give up. Neither could you. That’s the reason for us both being here. The root of it, I think."

“So, that’s why you believe the colonies are real,” I say. “You believe the government on Iapetus.”

“We have an understanding,” says Punjari. “We were a society working toward a common goal. We disagreed on the war with the Grays and the Trogs, and the arguments sometimes became heated on what we should do about it, yet at the end of the day, every one of us was committed to the community. We were committed to the whole human race. That was more important than any rancor that might have grown between us. And you can do that in a society where trust exists. So, to answer your question, yes, I believe what I’ve been told. I’ve never been to the colonies—I’ve only seen pictures and videos, and I’ve read the stories. Mind you, everything I know is necessarily out of date. Every bit of information we have about our colonies is years old by the time it reaches us. The flight takes years in our freighters, and they travel at three times the speed of light.”

“Are they safe?” I ask. “The colonies, I mean.”

“My parents are there,” he says. “They were lucky enough to get a place on a ship before the fall of Iapetus. Perhaps I shouldn’t say they are in the colonies. They won’t reach the nearest for several years yet. They’re in transit.”

“I know you can’t tell me where the colonies are,” I say. “I’m fine with that. Considering what I do for a living and all.”

Punjari laughs, and so do I. There’s always the possibility that I might be captured and have my memories mined by some Gray who knows how to read the human brain. How long could I hold up my façade of lies if the Trogs decided they wanted to make me talk? I’ve already seen what little value they place on their own lives. What would hostile Trogs do to an uncooperative prisoner?

“What are these worlds like?” I ask. “Are they like Iapetus, or more like earth?”

“Colony A,” says Punjari.

“A?” I ask. “I can’t even have the name?”

“Better that I don’t tell you.”

I shrug. “Go ahead.”

“Colony A is very much like earth. A little lighter g, a sun producing light very much like on earth. More water, if you can believe it. Rich flora and fauna. Minerals. It’s as close to an ideal planet as we could ever have hoped to find.”

“And how is the colony there doing?” I ask. “I’ve read old history books about the early colonies in the Americas back in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. It was a hard life for those who made the Atlantic crossing.”

"We've had our setbacks," says Punjari. "But you have to keep in mind, we're a technologically advanced race. Back in the sixteen hundreds, the people might have been forced to drink brackish water from a well dug too close to a salt water source, not knowing the high salt content was slowly killing them. They didn't know mosquitoes carried malaria. They were clueless about bacteria and viruses and proper nutrition. We know these things. We account for them."

“So people didn’t go to Colony A and die for no apparent reason?” I ask.

“At first,” says Punjari, “yes, to a degree. Nearly a third of all the colonists who arrived on the first ship didn’t live through the year. Due to pressures here in the earth system, risks were taken for the sake of expediting the process that wouldn’t have been taken otherwise. Because of that, the people died. Nowadays, with all we’ve learned about our new home, mortality rates are only slightly higher than Iapetus. One thing is for sure, though, people on Colony A live longer than they would on earth.”

That’s easy to believe. “So are they living in grass huts or log cabins out there?”

Punjari laughs at that. “No. On Colony A we have a handful of towns and numerous agricultural and mining hamlets. The towns are quite modern, though they have shortages from time to time. Out in the hamlets, I’m told life is much like life on earth in the agricultural zones. They don’t have modern conveniences, but I understand there are few complaints. The people I’ve talked to who’ve been there, the people who crew the freighters that fly back and forth, they want to return. They describe colony A like it’s a virgin earth, savannahs covered with great herds of native herbivores, oceans teeming with fish, unending forests, and air cleaner than any living human can remember.”

“Sounds like heaven.”

“That’s a word they use,” says Punjari. “Are you asking because you want to go to the colonies?”

“I’m on the fence about it,” I tell him. “One day, all I want to do is stay and fight. The next, I just want to leave.”

The woman currently on the radar calls over the bridge crew comm, “A ship just came out of bubble.”

That puts us all on alert.

Punjari steps over to the helm to take the place of the man there. I do the same on the grav console, and I try to see into the distance for detail.

Our cruiser is already accelerating.

“It’s a freighter,” says the radar woman.

“Comm?” I ask, as I turn to the man stationed on the ship-to-ship.

Tense moments pass as we pick up speed.

“It’s Bird,” says the man at the comm station.

Everyone relaxes.

To the radar woman, I ask, “Any others?”

“I see just the one,” she tells me. “No, wait. Two more. Both freighters.”

Chapter 56

Logistics. Ugh.

It takes several hours to plan, but finally, Bird sends a naval crew aboard to pilot the cruiser and coordinate with the three freighters. Relieved of my responsibilities for the leviathan, I leave the bridge with Punjari in tow to go down to the main bay to watch. With grav set to zero inside the hangar, we take up a position floating on the long axis of the ship with our backs to the wall separating the forward section from the main bay. It gives us a commanding view of the cavernous space.

Soldiers in orange, each carrying a weapon, are at work, more than a hundred of them. Some ferrying stasis pods in through the open doors, others securing them to the floors. Some are working with hoses, transferring H into the cruiser. It’ll be a little more than a sip considering the size of the cruiser relative to the size of the freighters, but I suppose, given enough loads, eventually, they'll fill up the cruiser's H tanks.

Given the view of all the work Punjari and I see, it’s no surprise when Colonel Bird comes floating toward us from one of the open airlock doors with several of his personal guards following close behind.

Easily in comm range, Bird has the good etiquette to wait until he comes to a stop in front of us before he says anything. “Congratulations are due.”

“Thank you, Sir,” says Punjari.

“Just doin’ the job,” I say.

“Sorry about your losses,” he says. Bird looks us each in the eye and adds, “You’ve both lost friends you’ve been with for a long time.”

I nod and keep my words to myself.

Punjari does the same, learning, I guess, that sometimes the words don’t help.

“Your people on the Turd II are fine,” says Bird. “Phil told me to be sure and tell you when I arrived.”

“Thanks.” I'm relieved, but I have other things on my mind now, like seeing to it the cruiser we sacrificed so much to salvage is defended. I point at the floating orange suits. “How many of those troops are staying with the cruiser?”

“Nearly all of them,” says Bird, turning to watch the crews work.

Knowing part of what’s planned is to use the metal from the railguns and supporting structures to build racks for storing the thousands of stasis pods we’ll be transporting from Iapetus, I ask, “And steel workers?”

“All of our troops serve double duty,” says Bird. “Everyone who came along on this trip is capable of helping with restructuring the cruiser’s interior space.”

“How many pods did you bring on this trip?” asks Punjari.

“A hundred or so,” says Bird, “but we used most of the room inside the freighters for people, tools, and materials. Once we’re moving primarily pods, we’ll be able to ship a few hundred with each trip, for each freighter.” Turning back to Punjari, Bird asks, “How’s this cruiser? Is it all we hoped for?”

“Yes,” says Punjari. “It’s in excellent shape. Enough fuel to keep it running for another six to twelve months, depending how much we use evading the enemy. We still have repairs to finish on the bridge and equipment to switch out, but we’re on track.”

“Will we be able to fly it to the colonies?” asks Bird.

“It’s everything Kane said it was,” says Punjari. “Better still, with reactor optimization and drive array refinements, we should be able to increase the range and speed.”

“Good,” says Bird. “Very good. We’ll run through a formal debrief once we have everything and everyone offloaded.”

“How soon before the freighters leave?” I ask.

“You’re anxious to get back to your new ship,” says Bird.

“New?” A sour smile is the best I can do to convey my feelings over that. “It’s hard to fly that thing after losing the Rusty Turd.”

“If we had the capacity,” says Bird, “we’d retrofit the new ship to match the capabilities of the one you lost. You and your crew were hellions in that beast.”

“Yes, we were.”

“The first two freighters will leave immediately after they offload,” Bird tells me. “My ship will delay until I have some time with Dr. Punjari and his engineers. So, six to eight hours. I’d like you to ride back with me on my ship if you don’t mind waiting.”

“I will.”

Chapter 57

In the ubiquitous blue bubble glow, the freighter seems utilitarian, yet it’s still the nicest spaceship I’ve ever been on. Nothing’s rusty. Nothing’s broke. All the welds are smooth and the metal plates—no matter where I look—seem to be of the right size. The angles are square where they need to be, and the complex curves look natural. In some ways, the freighter feels like a sleek yacht built for sailing around the Caribbean three decades ago. It’s been stripped of its luxuries, leaving only the necessary pieces behind to make it fast and functional.

The freighter has a crew of six, but can bunk twice that number. With twelve on an interstellar haul, things get pretty cramped. The areas of the ship for the crew to shower, eat their meals, or spend their free time are pretty sparse. Most of the freighter’s interior has been allocated for payload.

“You like this ship, don’t you?” says Bird. He’s sitting across from me at the only table in a space that doubles as the freighter’s dining room and common area rec room.

“What makes you say that?” I ask.

“They way you keep looking at her lines.”

I shrug. I’ve been busted. “The UN builds them better than they do on earth.”

“They take their time and try to get it right. Or so I’ve been told.”

The crew section is pressurized, so Bird has his faceplate open but his helmet on. I’m configured the same way. We both could have doffed our suits, or even removed our helmets, but we’ve seen too much war in space. Neither of us wants to take the risk of being naked.

“So you said in passing they were retrofitting the Turd II?”

"I hope that didn't raise your hopes too high," says Bird, "considering what the UN did for the original Rusty Turd."

“I never get my hopes too high about anything.” Even as I say it, I wonder if it's true.

“Bigger H tanks for one,” says Bird. “You’ll carry six times the fuel load.”

“The small gas tank they designed those things with,” I say, “borders on criminal.”

“They designed them for a single purpose," says Bird. "Well, they built them for a single purpose. The room to expand their capabilities has been in the ships’ hulls since they were on the drawing board.”

“So more H,” I say. “Much more range. If you tell me we can travel at 30c again, I might lean across the table and kiss you.”

“30c?” asks Bird. “You’d rather have that than the plasma gun?”

“I’d rather have the gun—I figured that was a no-go given the state of affairs on Iapetus. I don’t expect the reactor upgrades and computerized plate actuators to optimize my drive array, but for no good reason, I thought they might be a more realistic thing to wish for than the gun.”

“You’ll be disappointed, then,” says Bird. “You’re not getting those either.”

I laugh. “Besides a new airlock door and bigger gas tank, am I getting anything?”

“And no radar console.”

That’s a kick in the gut, because of what it implies. No radar means my ship will be nearly blind unless I break my word to Phil and convince him to stay. I can’t imagine doing any of what we did with the Rusty Turd without Phil, and without Penny. “No chance on the radar?”

“I could say we’ll try, but we sent our only functional spares to the cruiser.”

“I don’t know that I’ll be able to convince Phil to stay with the new ship, unless we’re flying it to the colonies.”

“That could be a problem. Has he already decided to go?”

“Pretty much.” I put the question aside for a better time. “So bigger gas tanks in the new ship. More range. Other stuff?”

“The techs are aligning the plates in your drive array to tighter tolerances,” says Bird. “And they’re making further tweaks to the reactor. It won’t produce the kind of output we got with one of the UN’s reactor control systems built into it, unfortunately, we don’t have the hardware for that anymore. However, the ship will be faster and more efficient. Also, you’ll get a nav computer.”

“The basic version?” I ask. “Or the whole deal?”

“Just like you had before. You can preprogram jumps, and pop in and out of bubble so fast the Grays will barely notice you were there.”

“That’s something.” In fact, that’s something pretty good. That makes me a little happy.

"You've proven resourceful with what you've been given so far," says Bird. "The Turd II ain't no Cadillac, but you'll have an advantage over the enemy."

“And what to you have in mind I do with that advantage?” I ask.

“That’s what you and I need to talk about.”

“We’re not talking about laying low while we load the cruiser, are we?” Before Bird answers, I make another guess, because something in his tone doesn’t seem quite right. “Or are we talking about even more than that?”

“Maybe more.”

“I lost half my crew when I lost my ship.” I don’t want to feel sorry for myself, but Penny’s death haunts me by coming to mind whenever it pleases and trying its best to squeeze some tears from my eyes. I can’t shake the feeling. I can’t ignore it. All I can do is try to blink my eyes clear and keep my confidence from crumbling.

“I understand,” says Bird, reaching across the narrow table to lay a fatherly hand on my shoulder.

I nod, accepting the gesture, and wondering why I never noticed before how large Bird’s hands were. The things a mind will focus on to avoid fresh grief.

“You’ve seen enough good people die,” says Bird. “I’m not saying it gets easier. Ever. This isn’t new for you. Not for any of us.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t let the loss knock you off your game,” says Bird. “No sooner did you lose your ship than you were thinking clearly and making sure the remains of the Rusty Turd didn’t fall into Trog hands. That’s the smartest thing you could have done. You did more than that. You turned defeat into victory. And then, when you were out at the rendezvous, you and what was left of your crew knocked three more Trog cruisers out of commission before making your escape. Despite the losses, you accomplished the mission.”

“But—” I say.

“But.” Bird nods and smiles. “Of course, there’s a but. There’s always a but. It's not bad, though. You know that. You've proven for a second time what a good captain can do with an Arizona class ship.”

“Phil was flying the Turd II when he hit those cruisers.”

“Phil never would have attacked if not for learning from you.”

“Phil sees grav better than most Grays. Captaining the ship is easy for him. There’s nothing about an assault ship that doesn’t come naturally to him by now, and there’s little about a cruiser’s capabilities he doesn’t understand. Phil doesn’t need to learn anything from me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. If not for the time Phil spent with you, seeing what you could make the equipment do, earning the confidence of your victories, he never would have done what he did. Phil learned how to win from you.”

Maybe true, maybe not. “Where are you going with this?”

“You and I need to decide what we’re going to do about this war,” says Bird. “We need to figure out if we’re headed to the colonies or if we’ll to stay and fight.”

“We?”

“I think we’re both stuck on the question. Am I right?”

“I’ll be honest with you,” I say. “I can’t answer that question. I mean, I could tell you right now what I want to do, yet I keep changing my mind. First I want to stay and fight. A few hours later, I want to give up and go to the colonies. I can’t settle on a position. What about you? Have you decided to stay? Is that what you’re saying?”

Bird shakes his head. “I’ll be honest with you, too. I don’t know, either. What I do know, is if both of us stay, we might have a chance. A small one. If only one of us remains, then I don’t think so.”

“Are you saying you’ll stay if I do?”

"No," says Bird. "If you choose to stay, others will, too. I know my soldiers. Despite what we've been through, they don't feel defeated yet. What I don't know, is whether or not you understand that if they stay, you'd be best served having someone like me—or I dare say, Blair—to organize them. You're a hell of a ship captain and leader. You inspire people because you lead from the front and you win, but you've got too much cowboy in you to be an effective admiral or general."

“What you’re telling me is you don’t want me to get your soldiers killed. Is that it?”

“No,” says Bird, a little disappointed. “You know, I talked with Punjari. He says you’re still carrying around your paranoia from living under the MSS your whole life. So, I understand why you keep questioning my motives. I’m playing no game with you, Dylan. If you remain, and my soldiers want to stay, I won’t try to convince any of you otherwise. It’s a hard choice whichever way you go. I’m only trying to explain to you the problem as I see it. I think the optimal outcome is that you and I choose to do the same thing. If we split, we’ll divide the force. Worse still, whether it’s a war here or a war that comes to us one day out in the colonies, I think you and I in the same navy or army, or whatever this is, have a better chance at victory than either of us has when we’re apart. That’s what I’m telling you.”

I slump in my seat. I hadn’t thought of any of this in those terms. My view was myopic—myself and my close friends, my crew.

And whatever is driving me to keep fighting.

Chapter 58

I wake to a comm message coming in from Bird. “Yeah?” I ask, alarm bells starting to wind up through the grogginess.

“Sorry to wake you,” he says. “If you need more sleep, this isn’t important.”

Doubting I’ll be able to get back to sleep anyway, I tell him. “I’m awake.” I sit up, and glance at my d-pad to confirm there’s still atmosphere in the bunk room. There is, so I slide my faceplate up. I don’t like to sleep with it open. I don't ever want to wake up suffocating in a vacuum while my body spins off into space with the ship falling to pieces around me.

Pulling the curtain on my berth back, I see two other berths on the opposite wall have their curtains closed, meaning crewmen are sleeping inside. Keeping my voice down, I say, “Give me a sec to get outside.”

Moving toward the door, I notice the blue glow is gone. We’re out of bubble. I don’t feel the thrust of the drive array pushing the ship, which means we’re drifting. That puts me on edge again. War has conditioned me to be wary of any change in anything for any reason. Still, I’m careful with the door, opening it slowly, stepping through on light feet, and closing it behind with as little noise as I can manage.

Now I’m in the wardroom where Bird and I spent a few hours talking the day before. Only he’s not inside.

“Can you talk now?” asks Bird over the comm.

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“I’m outside on the hull above the bridge.”

“What’s going on?”

“We’re out of bubble,” he says. “We’re on a ballistic path down to Iapetus. No power in the engines, nothing to raise the interest of a Gray. Should take another eight hours or so to touch down.”

I’m thrilled to know that. “Why did you wake me?”

“Come out through the airlock just behind the bridge and sit with me out here.”

I groan and stretch.

“Unless you’d rather not. I’ll be back inside in an hour or two. We can talk then.”

“You’re calling me outside to talk?” I ask. “That’s why you woke me up?”

“And the view,” says Bird, and I realize it’s strange hearing him talk like a regular person, someone gawking at the wonder of Niagara Falls for the first time, not the commander of a defeated military.

“Give me a minute,” I tell him as I cross the wardroom and blink the sleep out of my eyes.

It takes a few moments for me to run through my pre-vacuum suit checks, a habit I proceed through in near mindless fashion because I’ve done it so many times. I seal my faceplate tightly, step into the airlock and wait for it to cycle.

Once the outer hatch opens, I climb the ladder, setting my suit grav to keep my boots locked to the hull. As soon as my head clears the outer hatch, I see the view that has Bird so thrilled he has to share it—Saturn. Remembering back to my meeting with Bird outside at the Free Army base before I left for 61 Cygni—also outside, looking at the manmade wonder of the base—I say, "You're a kid at heart, I think."

He turns and smiles. “I can never get enough of it, the beauty of the universe.”

From the freighter's position, the sun is shining on Saturn's rings, and they're spread out across the sky with giant Saturn's yellow and gray bands glowing behind.

I close the airlock hatch and move over to stand beside Bird. “Did you sleep well?”

“Not really.”

“Was your mattress lumpy?”

“No,” he answers. “I have too many unanswered questions on my mind.”

“What we talked about yesterday?” I ask. “Did you make a decision yet?”

“No. You?”

"No, but I won't decide until I can talk to Silva and Phil."

“Lenox and Brice, too?”

I nod. “They’re good people. If they choose to stick with me, it would make the choice easier.”

“But then you have the responsibility for them.”

“Yeah. That’s one of the things that worries me.”

“What about Silva?” asks Bird. “What’s up with you and her?”

“You know about that, too?”

Bird nods, a gesture that’s hard to see when you’re wearing a space helmet.

“Am I breaking any rules? You know, her being my subordinate and all.”

“You’re joking about that, right? Sometimes it’s hard to tell with you.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure myself.”

“No rules I care about,” says Bird. “I was just asking as a friend.”

“Friends?” I ask. “Is that what we are?”

“We may as well be,” says Bird. “Will you still follow orders from your CO if he’s your friend?”

“Can you still order me to trade my life for Punjari if I’m your friend?”

“I didn’t—”

“You did,” I tell him. “You know me well enough by now, that by suggesting it, I’d probably do it. It was as good as an order.”

“Not consciously,” says Bird, “but you’re probably right. And it was a mistake.”

“How so?”

“Punjari is valuable, I’m not going to deny that. So are you.”

"Thanks, dad." I say it with a chuckle, because I’m not really hurt by it. “I’m a soldier. Before this whole thing started, I accepted I might have to trade my life for the success of a mission. It’s the job.”

“That it is,” says Bird. “That it is. So you and Silva, are you two in love?”

“Yeah,” I say, maybe finally accepting for myself what our relationship is. “It’s all I ever wanted. Happily ever after. Grandkids. A dog. A cat. The whole thing.”

“Does she know it?”

“Yeah, mostly.”

“She wants that, too?”

“I think so. I’m pretty sure she does.”

“Then go to the colonies,” says Bird. “Leave all this behind.”

“Do they have dogs and cats in the colonies?”

Bird laughs. “Not yet. Or maybe they do. Hell, I don’t know. One of the things Iapetus has been building out here since The Siege is a genetic bank for all of earth’s species. I’m sure they only have a small fraction in the vault, but the scientists wanted to have the ability to create a new version of earth wherever we wound up. As far as I know, though, they don’t yet have a way to go from a test tube of genetic material to a living creature. At least not on the scale they’d need to populate a planet.”

“Make a few,” I say, “and let nature take its course.”

“I suppose so.”

“What about you, Bird? Wife? Kids?”

He shakes his head. “Both my boys died in the war. MSS wasted them for nothing.” I can hear Bird is still bitter about it. Understandably so. “Wife died before they joined up. The flu got her one winter when there wasn’t enough to eat.” Bird’s bitterness runs deep over that, too. “Too many winters that way. That’s what we’re fighting for, you know. These Trogs and Grays don’t care one iota for the life of a human. We’re cattle to them. Nobody’s ever going to save us, but us.”

Chapter 59

“Let’s talk about the situation with the Trogs,” I suggest. “I’ll need to know what I’m up against if I’m going to lay it all out for my friends. “How many ships do the Trogs have left?”

“Seventy or eighty,” says Bird. “Near as we can tell. The number is changing all the time. Thankfully going down a bit, with you and your new ship in the game. But you have to remember, the earth had sixty cruisers when the war started. Since then, three full fleets of Trogs have come into the system and that small fleet that showed up just before the Arizona Massacre. There’s got to be a hundred and fifty or two hundred derelict cruisers around. We know the Trogs are actively searching them out for salvage. Some they use for parts. Others they repair and bring back into service.”

“If anything,” I conclude, “we can expect the number of cruisers to grow even if another fleet never arrives.”

“The only constant,” says Bird, “is the number of Grays and Trogs in system. What’s it take, eighteen months for a Gray to make an egg, and then five years for it to reach maturity, so six and a half years for a new crop of Grays, eighteen years for a Trog, if they even brought females with them, which as far as I know they haven’t? If reinforcements don’t arrive, what we have is what we’re going to have.”

“What’s the estimate on the number of Grays and Trogs?”

“A few hundred Grays on a ship,” guesses Bird. “Nobody knows the exact number they crew with.”

“We’re always pretty busy with other stuff when we board,” I joke. “I never stopped to count.”

Bird politely chuckles and says, “We know each one has a crew of three thousand Trogs, give or take, and a division of Trog marines in the barrack in the rear. They have berths for ten thousand there, just like our cruisers.”

“But they’ve taken huge casualties, right?”

Bird nods. "Back on Iapetus, we gave them a black eye."

“More than that,” I say. “And how many Grays and Trogs are on the moon, or in the battle stations, or on earth running things? Or do you think they’re all staying out in space and letting the MSS run the show?”

“We estimate half their strength is deployed to the moon, the battle stations, and the planet.”

“And they weren’t at full strength to start with, right?” I say. “Because they lost so many troops on Iapetus. What about the battle for the Free Army base?”

"That was mostly a naval engagement," he says. "Not much action on the ground. Which means we weren't in a position to put up much of a fight once they destroyed our fleet and defensive guns.”

“Do you think it’s safe to guess each cruiser still on the line is down to thirty percent on the low side and fifty percent on the high side?”

“I think the range is right,” says Bird.

I venture another guess. “I wonder if that’s why we were able to save ourselves from those six cruisers we encountered. If they didn’t have full bridge crews and weapons targeting crews, it would have made them less effective.”

“You could be right about that,” says Bird. “Which means they aren’t as strong as their numerical advantage in cruisers suggests.”

“And they’ll get weaker the more cruisers they bring online,” I say, “Because they’ll be spreading themselves thinner and thinner.”

“They’ll realize that at some point,” says Bird. “They’ll stop spreading themselves, but that doesn’t mean they won’t stop salvaging.”

“Hell,” I say, “there might be a depot out there now where they’re storing and repairing cruisers they hope to use again after they have the manpower.”

“If that’s true,” says Bird, “that would be one hell of a prize if we were somehow to win this war. We have no shortage of people on earth—”

“No matter how hard the Grays try,” I joke again.

“No matter,” agrees Bird. “We could train up the crews in simulators back on earth. Recruit a new navy, and in a few years, we’d have a large enough fleet to defeat anything the Trogs send our way.”

“Big dreams,” I say. “Humans, suddenly a power in this tiny spiral arm of the Milky Way.”

“Don’t turn cynical on me,” says Bird.

“Sorry, you missed the boat on that advice by about twenty-five years.”

“I suppose so,” agrees Bird. “But I know you see the value of that many cruisers. The derelicts plus the ones we might salvage if we win, that’d put us at well over two hundred. Throw in the Arizona class ships we could build if we had all of earth’s resources, and we’d have a fleet of four or five thousand before the Trogs could hope to get another fleet here.”

It sounds rosy.

“Can you imagine,” he says, “if we had even a thousand Arizona class ships with fully trained, experienced crews, no Trog fleet could stand against that. With the rest, with the technological advances built into ships like the Rusty Turd, then the Trogs wouldn’t be a problem.”

“And neither will the races they’re at war with in the other systems,” I say. “I mean, if those wars aren’t blowouts, then the tech those races have has to be comparable in capabilities to what the Trogs use. Logic says, if we can beat the Trogs, then we should be able to beat the others if they come this way.”

“Now,” says Bird, “doesn’t the optimism feel better?”

I shrug instead. War has a way of beating the optimism out of people no matter how many happy endings they can imagine.

Chapter 60

“What do we know about deployments?” I ask. “Do you have any of those stealthy scout ships or those little surveillance satellites operational?”

“We have one stealth scout left,” says Bird. “We have another we’ve been trying to get back online. We took some risks with them during the battle for Iapetus, and used them for something they were never designed for—as attack platforms. Our squadrons severely damaged nine or ten ships before the Grays figured out a countermeasure.”

“Which was?” I ask.

“They stopped searching with their grav sense and put up Trog lookouts. You know our stealth scouts are black against a black sky, but you can still see them by the stars their silhouettes occlude, or by light reflected from the sun. That’s hard for humans. The one thing we need to remember that we keep forgetting is Trog eye physiology isn’t the same as ours. Trogs have excellent night vision. So what might be hard for a human to see out in the dark of space isn’t necessarily difficult for a Trog to see.”

“So they saw the stealth scouts coming and shot them down?” I ask.

“That’s pretty much the way it went,” he answers. “All was going well at first, then one day we sent them up and lost nearly all of them.”

“That’s brutal.”

Bird nods.

“What about the satellite network?”

“The system is still up,” he says, “over a hundred satellites and signal relay buoys throughout the system, but the signal control center where we received and decrypted the data was destroyed along with the computers that handled the load. Punjari has a team working on salvage and repair, but we have a long way to go.”

“What about retrieving the satellites and buoys and reprogramming them to match whatever hardware we do have and then redeploying when we’re finished?”

"That's an option already discussed. It would be the fastest way to start the process of rebuilding the network, but we haven't been willing to risk a ship to go out and retrieve the hardware."

“What about the stealth scout?” I ask.

“We’ve been keeping it close to Iapetus as part of our early warning network in case the Trogs come back.”

“The Turd II could retrieve the satellites and buoys and redeploy them,” I suggest. “It wouldn’t be a stealthy solution, not by far, yet if we combined the runs with harrying attacks, then the Grays would never be the wiser. They’d likely see us coming in and out of bubble, but think we were scouting around for them.”

“If we’re going to have a chance,” says Bird, “having the intel advantage is necessary.”

“I’ll make a note of it,” I say. “Maybe enough little advantages exist that we can swing the battle our way, you know, enough to make the choice to stay feel less like suicide and more like courage." Changing the subject a tad, I say, "Let's say we can find a way to mount a credible resistance, maybe a guerilla-style campaign, wear the Trogs down, and find a way to get the information back to earth, so the people there see what we're doing. Do you think we can foment a grassroots rebellion?"

"Hard to say," says Bird. "You know what it's like on earth. Nobody's happy with the current system. The MSS has been selling their lies for so long, most people believe things are the way they are, they’re how they should be, and how they’ll always stay.”

“No,” I say a little too forcefully, “I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that. I agree that lots of people are true believers. Many people are too broken to even want to fight back, but most? No. I have to believe the majority will rise up in support if we give them hope.”

“If we give them enough hope,” says Bird, “all of them will revolt. People are followers. If they see the bandwagon rolling in a new direction, they’ll jump on.”

“I think you’re right about that. What about the MSS?” I ask.

“The MSS?” Bird is thrown off the scent. “What do you mean?”

“I hate to even suggest it, but what are the chances we can ally with the MSS? The ones who are left just got screwed by the ones who went with the original Grays when they ran off.”

“Or,” says Bird, “they were thrilled with all the promotion opportunities that suddenly appeared.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “But they have to see, don’t they? They’re people, too. They have to know that what just happened to their bosses and the old guard could happen to them. They have to be suffering as much as the rest of the world. If not in terms of hunger, in terms of children lost to the war. There was a reason the Grays opened up the officer ranks to more than just the Koreans. I think they were running out of bodies to stand in front of the railguns. I’ll bet there are a lot of pissed-off mothers in Korea and a lot of angry brothers and sisters.”

“Assuming something like that was even possible,” says Bird, “assuming that bringing the Koreans into a coalition doesn’t alienate us from the rest of the planet, how would we even go about it?”

“Blair,” I say. “She practically grew up in the MSS. She was a mole there her whole life. She knows them, not just how they think and how they’ll react, she knows plenty of them personally.”

“Assuming,” says Brice, “the MSS didn’t purge everyone she ever knew after she defected to our side.”

“We could ask her,” I say.

“And you’d trust her with that,” says Bird, “opening up our flank to the Koreans?”

"I despise the woman," I say. "She's half an idiot when it comes to military matters, but as you've told me, she's a brilliant logistical administrator, and she successfully played the MSS game for years. She has untapped talents there. If we could get the MSS to turn to our side, I think we could make this happen."

"And what about afterward?" asks Bird. "What if we do ally with the MSS, and the people in the SDF and earth all go along with it, and we win? What happens after we expel the Trogs and the Grays? You know the MSS will try to seize power for themselves. We won’t be any better off than we were before.”

“Who says we have to pretend like they won’t be planning to do just that?” I ask. “I don’t have any problem with using them to help us win the war and then annihilating them at our earliest convenience.”

“You’d betray an ally that way?”

“I don’t see the MSS as an ally. But I don’t mind using them as a tool.”

“You think Blair can keep all that hidden?”

“I wouldn’t tell Blair that part. Would you?”

“No,” says Bird. “I don’t think I would either.”

Chapter 61

Bird is standing beside the helmsman’s chair, occupying the only empty floor space in the cramped bridge compartment. My mind full of questions, I linger in the doorway at the back of the bridge. I don’t have a reason to be there, it’s just more entertaining than sitting in the wardroom by myself or lying in my bunk and staring at the curtains.

The journey in from the rendezvous has taken longer than expected, well, longer than I expected. The freighters are slower than the Trog battlewagon I took out there. Bird and I have had long hours to discuss and rethink and second-guess. Now, I need something to keep my hands and feet busy, impossible problems to solve in short timeframes, the emotional intensity of a battle to wake me up from a stupor I feel like the long journey is dragging me into.

And I’m anxious to see my crew.

In more than a year, this is the longest I’ve been away from Silva, and I find I’m missing her. It’s strange to me how attached I’ve become. Though, as Phil pointed out, what I have with Silva is what I’ve always wanted. It makes me wonder sometimes if I’d met her at that MSS social function all those years ago instead of Claire, if I’d be sitting in the grav factory back in Frisco right now, sweating, coaxing symbiotic microbes into place on grav plates, and daydreaming about getting home in time to play catch or go skiing with my kids.

That’s the life I yearned for, no matter how much I told myself I needed to fight the Grays for earth’s freedom.

The pilot has the ship skimming over the surface of Iapetus. The equatorial mountain range is on our left. The moon’s relatively flat surface spreads to the horizon on our right. There’s no Saturn in the sky. It’s on the other side of Iapetus at the moment, so only stars and a few of Saturn’s other small moons are above us.

As we close in on the UN base complex, I don’t need to see the airlocks and hangars cut into the face of mile-tall cliffs to know. Off-color debris spreads across the plane below us, reminding me of the steep price the defenders paid to keep their subterranean secret away from the Trogs.

The pilot steers the freighter toward the base of the cliffs, passing most of the debris, finally turning into a ravine a half-mile wide, with walls on either side standing so tall I can’t see the sky. The freighter slows as it slips into the chasm. As the walls close in on our sides, I see on the floor the scatter of stone and steel, blasted and broken. It’s a mini-version of the destruction we saw out on the plain. It tells me what I’m going to see at the end of this ravine.

Way up on one of the walls, I spot something that doesn’t belong there. It takes a moment for me to understand what it is—a gun emplacement. Only it doesn’t look to have been blasted.

“Is that manned?” I ask.

Bird turns to see me. “Didn’t realize you were there.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up.”

Bird points up through the wide windows. “Up there, and over there. There, too.”

Even with Bird pointing them out, the other emplacements are difficult to spot.

Bird turns to look at me. “We have a small hangar down here. The Trogs didn’t find it until after they’d already landed troops and took most of the upper levels. They blasted this place, but it didn’t take the pounding from above like the larger hangars did.”

“Everybody gets lazy,” I respond, because I figure I should say something.

“Because of the topography, they couldn’t hit from above.” Bird points at the floor of the canyon. “It looks like a lot of debris out here, but the hangar is in pretty good shape. Most of the equipment we’ve been able to salvage came from this part of the base.”

The farther in we go, the more I see. “Do you really think you can stand against another Trog fleet?”

“No,” says Bird. “This little base we have set up here is functional, there’s no doubt about that. It’s bait. If the Trogs come back, we want them to think this is it, all that remains of us. They’ll beat us here. They’ll destroy this base and take heavy losses doing it. We’re so deep in this canyon our gun positions can’t be hit from above. To attack, the Trogs will have to squeeze one of their big cruisers between the walls. They won’t have any room to maneuver, and our gunners won’t be able to miss. After we destroy enough of their starships trying to come down this canyon, then they’ll have to attack on foot, and we’ll slaughter more of them.”

“They won’t give up,” I tell him. They never do, not until you kill their Gray masters.

“We don’t expect to win here,” says Bird. “The hangar up here and the installation in the mountain behind is functional, but it’s a decoy, and it's bait. This canyon is a meat grinder. None of this is set up for us to win. Our defenses are set up to maximize Trog casualties. Kill and retreat, that's our strategy here.”

I approve.

“When they do take this small complex, they’ll think they’ve won again. That’s the most important role of this place. If the Grays come to realize we’re still using Iapetus for operations, this will be the base they find, not the one we have buried twenty klicks from here.”

“Same trick twice,” I say. “Just like last time. You put up a fight on the surface so they won’t go deep to root you out.”

“And if they try, we have all the access tunnels wired with explosives. Nobody has the patience to dig through twenty kilometers of rock in the hopes they might discover a cavern full of rebels at the end.”

I hope he’s right about that.

Pointing toward the edge of the cliffs overhead, Bird says, “We have radar stations up top, and others hidden in the debris ring left around Iapetus from the battle. Our largest orbital observation station is in the broken front third of a Trog cruiser. We have a few hundred observers in the posts in orbit, constantly monitoring Saturn and everything in the vicinity. We should have plenty of warning when they come.”

A score of orange flashes sweeps past the windshield, each shimmering blue under hard g acceleration. I feel, as much as see, their boots land on the hull. I’m stepping back into the corridor and pulling up my weapon as Bird starts to laugh.

“Friendlies?” I ask.

“Our soldiers are experienced in tunnel fighting, mostly," says Bird. "Sergeants Brice, Silva, Lenox, and Peterson are teaching my troops what they’ve learned fighting out in the void.”

“You promoted my whole crew?”

“What they’ve learned is invaluable.”

I look up, feeling the bodies moving around on top of the freighter’s steel hull. “They’re practicing an assault on a ship?”

“It worked for you,” says Bird. “More than once, if I recall.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “More than once.”

“The Grays are used to one style of war. As long as they’re vulnerable to guerrilla-style attacks, we should train to take advantage of the weakness.”

I nod. I’m proud of my crew.

Making a turn past a jagged spire of rock, the pilot follows the ravine, and before us, right at the end, I see a familiar rectangular hole cut out of the craggy wall. Inside, it's black, but my grav sense makes out the shape of another freighter, several stealthy scout ships in various states of disrepair, and the Turd II.

Home. At least for a while.

Chapter 62

Dozens of stasis pods, each powered-up with an Iapetus resident inside, are in a line on gurneys ending at the open loading door of the freighter docked in the hangar. Several hundred pods are stacked along one wall.

Bird points at the pods as we exit the freighter. “We’re staging them for quick turnaround when the freighters land.”

I turn to see the crew already opening the loading bay on the freighter on which we just arrived.

“They’ll refuel while they’re here,” he says.

I hadn’t even thought of fueling. “You have H stores?”

“We drill it,” says Bird. “Iapetus’s rocks are laced with frozen hydrogen deposits. All we have to do is pump in some steam and warm up the rock a little bit. Hydrogen freezes at negative four hundred and fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit. It changes from liquid to gas at negative four hundred and twenty-three. It doesn’t take much warming to free up what we need.”

I turn my attention to the Turd II. “What about my ship?”

“Should be ready in about a week.”

“Seven days is a long time.”

“Should give you plenty of time to talk to your people and decide what you want to do.”

“Maybe too much time,” I say. “I might overthink it.”

“You’re not buying a sofa,” says Bird. “You’re making a decision with hundreds or thousands of lives in the balance.”

“Or billions,” I say, and feel like a pretentious idiot for having voiced the thought.

“Don’t feel bad about saying it,” says Bird. “You’re right. If we stay and fight and win, billions of lives will be changed. Billions might be saved.”

“Gambling a few thousand to save billions,” I say. “When you put it that way, I can’t help but feel selfish for considering a run out to the colonies.”

“Don’t oversimplify it,” says Bird. “You and I both know the odds of the gamble. It might be that nothing can be done to save earth. Nothing you and I can do. Not now. Not with what we have. Then what is renewing the war going to get us except dead?”

“Yeah.” My eyes are on a row of thick glass windows overlooking the hangar. None are broken. Inside, I see people. They’re not wearing orange suits. “You’ve repaired the airlocks?”

“In this section of the base,” says Bird. “We have to sell the ruse if the Trogs come back. And to do that, we need to have a station that contains atmosphere. That’s the only way it works.”

“How big is the base up here?”

“More than we need,” he says. “We could house a thousand, maybe two thousand, if we didn’t mind close quarters.”

I sense the presence of Phil and Nicky. And then I see them standing at one of the windows, looking down at us.

Bird sees where my eyes are focused. “You’ve got people to talk to. Get to it. I’ll give you some room. In the mean time, I have things to tend to.” Bird heads toward an airlock at the back of the hangar as he points to another, a smaller one leading into the office complex beneath the row of windows. “That’s you over there. Let’s plan on getting together for dinner the day after tomorrow. That’ll give us both time to think things through.”

“A deadline?” I ask.

Bird shakes his head. "No deadlines. Not yet, anyway. But you know as well as I do, the world spins whether we're watching or not. Eventually, circumstances will force us to make choices. It's better to face the future proactively, don't you think?"

“The day after tomorrow,” I agree. “Good luck.”

“Good luck to both of us.”

Chapter 63

I have my helmet off, hanging on the clip from my belt. I'm still armed with my railgun, of course, carrying extra ammo, hand grenades, a C4 charge, and a disruptor on my back. My suit bears a dozen scuffs and scars. It's dusted with the soot of burning ships, and is sprayed in the flash-frozen blood of countless dead.

Breathing in the smell of this new station’s air—every station has its own unique smell—I’m aware of the odor inside my suit, something you get used to when you’re packed inside for weeks at a time.

When I walk into the room, Phil doesn’t trouble himself with words. Instead, he crosses over and wraps me in a hug—weapons, dirt and all. I put an arm around him as Nicky comes close and slithers its spindly arms around my thigh. So close, the Gray’s fermented-diaper smell mixes with my odor. I shiver, and want to pull away.

I still have trouble seeing the Tick for what it is, a part of the Nicky-Phil unitarian psyche, or however they think of themselves.

Phil lets go of me and smiles. He has happy tears in his eyes. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it.”

I laugh. “Death’s too slow to catch me.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“I know, but it makes me sound like a badass, right?”

“Or a dumbass.”

I laugh. It’s kinda funny. But mostly I’m happy to be reunited with Phil.

He turns and walks over to the window. “Have you talked with Silva yet?”

“She’s outside.” I point through the hangar doorway. “Drilling the troops with Brice and the others.”

“Have you talked to her yet?”

“I just came in on the ship, Phil. You saw me.”

“I didn’t know if you’d radioed her on the way in.”

“Why is this so important? Have I missed something?”

“No,” says Phil. “She missed you is all.”

“I missed her, too.” I take up a place by the window. “How’s she holding up?”

“She’s a resilient girl,” says Phil. “How are you doing?”

“Same as always.”

“How’s that?”

“You’ve known me all my life. You don’t know? You didn’t read it from my mind?”

“I know how I think you’re doing,” says Phil. “How do you think you’re doing?”

I take a moment to figure out the right words, and then shake my head when they come out. "Pedal to the metal, racing to somewhere I can’t see.”

“What’s that mean?” asks Phil.

“I used to feel certainty when this whole thing started,” I tell him, “back when we were playing at war games in the anti-grav simulator we set up in that old theater up in Breck. Now, I don’t.”

“You thought winning would be easy?”

“At the time, I would have told you no, because I knew things would be hard." I shake my head again, and my eyes wander off-focus. "Every step has been harder. Every loss has been more difficult than the last. And to be honest, yeah, I thought by now we'd have won the war. I thought most of us would still be alive." I sigh. "I thought a lot of things."

“Are you giving up?”

“Are you asking me if I’ve decided to go to the colonies?”

“No,” he says. “That’s how I would describe it. For you, it’s giving up. Quitting. Surrendering.”

I don't argue.

“I don’t want to talk you into going,” he says. “A smart man, a rational man, would go. I’m not saying you’re not intelligent, but I don’t know you’ll be able to live with yourself if you do it.”

“You have been poking around inside my head, haven’t you? Staying or going, that’s all I’ve been thinking about for three days.”

“Did you and Colonel Bird talk about it?”

“A lot.”

Phil turns away from the windows and goes to sit beside one of the desks in the room.

I follow him over, drag out a chair, and drop my low-g weight in it to face him. It takes nearly an hour, but I fill him in on the things Bird and I discussed. Phil, to his credit, listens, makes no judgments, and asks few questions.

At the end, he finally speaks. “Which way is Bird leaning?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“If he decides to go to the colonies, will you heed his advice and go no matter what you’ve decided for yourself.”

“And spend the rest of my life feeling like I ran away?”

“Yes,” says Phil. “If you take Bird’s assessment of the situation at face value, then staying here without him means you’re little more than a hard-headed fool who’s going to die and get everyone who stays with you killed as well.”

“I think Bird is right,” I admit. “I am what I am. A fighter. I can lead my grunts into battle, but I’m no general.”

“No,” agrees Phil. “You’re not cut from that kind of cloth.”

“With no general, we can’t win.”

“Without someone to believe in,” says Phil, “someone like you, Bird can’t either. Not to belabor the point but you need each other. So will you go to the colonies?”

“I might have to.”

“It might be the most difficult thing you ever do,” says Phil, “yet it’ll be the right choice.”

“What about you?” I ask. “You need to leave for the colonies to protect Nicky and her egg. But you know as surely as I’m sitting here the Rusty Turd did what it did because you and me and Penny were on the bridge.”

“Not everything of importance we did was on the Rusty Turd,” says Phil. “You were out there fighting the war with your disruptor and your railgun.”

“It was the three of us,” I tell him. “In truth, it was all of us. You, me, Penny, Brice, Lenox, Silva, Peterson, and the others.”

“And the majority of them, we’d never met before we saw them at the staging station at the Silverthorne Spaceport,” says Phil.

“What are you saying?”

"I'm saying it makes you a good leader that you want to give credit to your people. And you should. We all fought together, and people died for you, for the revolution. But you need to recognize what all the rest of us see. You’re the catalyst that turned us into something more than a bunch of grunts with guns. It’s you.”

“Who did this, who did that? None of it matters, Phil, unless you’re in the mix.”

Phil guesses what the question is I’ve been circling around. “You’re asking me to stay if you stay?”

“Yes.”

Chapter 64

Phil reaches over and takes Nicky’s small hand in his.

I suppress a shudder.

“I know this is hard for you,” says Phil, “seeing Nicky and me.”

Common social graces would have me pretend that’s not true, yet I know Phil’s already aware of the truth. So, I nod. “I’m trying.”

“I know.”

“Do you think you’ll ever be able to accept what we are to one another?”

“Maybe I’m just not as evolved as you are,” I admit. “I can’t promise anything except that I’ll try. That’s the best I can do.”

“Will you try?” he asks. “Honestly?”

“You think I haven’t tried so far?”

“You know you haven’t. You tolerate Nicky. You want me to help you with the Turd II because you believe in my talent with grav and nav.”

“You have lots of talents,” I tell him.

“What you need to understand is that everything I did to assist on the Rusty Turd, I did with Nicky’s help. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. You need to accept that.”

I look at Nicky’s big black eyes embedded in a passive face. “I do know, on an intellectual level. This is hard for me.”

“You harbor a lot of hate for the Grays.”

I can’t disagree.

“Have you ever thought about how hard this is for Nicky?”

“I thought you two were some kind of merged transcendent intellect.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“I’m right, right?”

“Yes,” says Phil. “In a way. But Nicky knows where she came from. She knows the other Grays are her kin. As different as they are from what she is now, Nicky feels the pain of what we do when we kill them.”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“And what about Prolific Man Killer?” asks Phil.

“What’s he got to do with anything?”

“You went against everyone’s advice to make peace with him, and then to befriend him. You were able to set aside your hate for Trogs and do that because you were finally able to see him as something besides a one-dimensional monster. He’s not human, yet he’s a thinking feeling being, just like you.”

Phil’s argument sinks in quick.

“Yeah,” Phil pushes, “just like you, with relatives and wants and dreams and fears. A commander who cares for his people and loves his family and wants to do his duty for his kind.”

Nicky’s unnatural face is too much to look at, so I hang my head instead. I never accepted Nicky because I didn’t want to. That’s the truth of it. I acted like an ignorant bigot.

When I look up, I make eye contact with Phil, and then with Nicky. “I’m sorry.” I unlatch the metal rings connecting my gloves to my suit, remove them, and reach across the table to take Phil’s hand in one of mine, and to take Nicky’s hand in the other. “It’ll be difficult for me to get past what I am, but I apologize, to both of you.”

“That means a lot to us,” says Phil. “Now stop feeling sorry for yourself and go find Silva.”

Chapter 65

The water falls slowly in the low g, pouring out of the showerheads above us. Just Silva and me. Alone, and together.

Our suits, our weapons, our inner liners, everything but our naked skin is lying on the floor outside the shower. We’re in a war zone, and we’re risking our lives to feel each other’s touch.

There are no words, what we have to say is best said without them, with touches and kisses, and hugs that seem to last forever but never long enough. We can’t get enough of one another, and every second we spend apart seems long enough to break our hearts.

The doubts I had about what I feel for her are gone. I tell her I love her. She says the same, a dozen times, and then a dozen more.

The small apartment we've commandeered doesn't look to have been touched since the Trog invasion. The sheets have been blown off the bed. The cupboards are open, and some of the dishes and utensils are on the floor. Two chairs, the only furnishings besides the bed, are shoved into a corner, one on its side. The bed is the only thing we're interested in, and we spend the next several hours there, trying to make up for the time we've lost apart, trying to salve the anxiety we both felt when death was stalking, and we were afraid the other of us was going to be killed.

“If you ever do that again,” says Silva resting her head on my chest while I stare at the ceiling.

“In a complete sentence?” I ask.

She sits up and punches me in the stomach.

“What?”

Lying down again, she says, “Sending me away. You were supposed to be right behind us. You lied to me.”

“Not exactly.”

“Exactly enough. You knew you weren’t going to board the Turd II when you sent Brice inside with us.”

“I knew.”

“And you knew I’d thought you were coming or I wouldn’t have gone.”

“Yeah,” I admit.

“That’s what a lie is. Don’t pretend like you don’t know.”

“I wanted you to be safe,” I say. “I thought you’d have a better chance aboard the Turd II. I didn’t know Phil was going to go all Captain Ahab and start ramming cruisers.”

“We didn’t do anything you wouldn’t have done. What did you expect was going to happen?”

“I was hoping you guys were going to bubble jump to safety. Maybe I didn’t think it through.”

“If we did bubble out, you’d be dead right now.”

“Probably.”

“Definitely.”

“Maybe.”

“You’re as stubborn as everybody says you are.”

“Is that a lot?” I smile. “Of stubbornness, I mean.”

“Not if you’re a sociopath.”

“A sociopath?” I ask. “That’s harsh.”

“I’m just mad at you.”

I look down at her, running my eyes over her bare skin, tracing the curve of her hip with my fingers. “I like it when you’re mad at me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“If you say so.”

Silva sits up and crosses her legs, done with the after-sex snuggling. “I need you to make me a promise.”

Rolling on my side and propping my head in my hand, I ask, “What?”

“You can’t just agree?”

“Not until I know what it is.”

“Why? Don’t you trust me?”

“You’re being difficult today.”

“I told you. I’m mad at you.”

“Fine,” I say. “I promise to do whatever it is you want me to promise.” I instantly regret it.

“You’re an asshole.” She punches me again. “You don’t mean it. I see it in your eyes.”

I reach out to pull her close. “Come here.”

She pulls away.

I say, “I thought you loved me.”

“Don’t be a bitch about it.”

I laugh. “A bitch?”

“You know what I mean.”

I sigh. “I liked it better when we weren’t talking.”

“Don’t dig your hole deeper, Mister.”

“Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to do?”

She pauses to let a dramatic moment build. “Don’t ever lie to me again. Not even if it’s a lie like the one you told me when you ordered me onto the Turd II. Don’t mislead me. Ever.”

“Okay,” I tell her immediately.

“Just like that? You didn’t even think about it.”

“You’re not turning into one of those high-maintenance crazy chicks, are you?”

“Chick?” She’s offended. “I’ve killed as many Trogs and Grays as you. I’ve been by your side since this war began—”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I’ll never say ‘chick’ again.”

“I don’t care about that.”

Exasperating. “What the hell are we talking about?”

“I told you, I’m angry. I thought you were going to die. I never want to feel like that again.”

“You know what I do for a living, right? I could be killed any day. So could you. Where’s all this coming from, all of a sudden?”

Silva lies back down and puts her head on my chest.

I pull her close and kiss her on the top of her head. “I love you.”

“All the times before,” she says, “we were in danger together. If we were going to die, we were going to die together.”

Not exactly. But I don’t say that.

“I want you to promise me that we’ll stick together from now on.”

“You know things don’t always work out like that, right? Sometimes we get separated. Sometimes in a fight, we have to go different directions. Different missions.”

“I know,” she says. “I understand that. We’ve always been in the fight together. That’s what I want. If we win, we win together. If we lose, we lose together.”

“You mean we die together.”

“I don’t want to live without you. I’d rather be dead.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“You’re too much of a self-centered man to know what I mean.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. So just listen to me and believe me when I tell you that’s how I feel. Don’t ever abandon me again. If you plan to go on some kind of suicide run, I’m going with you.”

“You’re young. You don’t know what you want out of life. I don’t want you to die. And I don’t want you to spend the rest of your life alone in a cabin pining away for me. I want you to go to the colonies, find a fat, ugly man, marry him, and have lots of babies. That way you can pine for me in the company of others.”

She punches me again. “You’re a shit.”

Chapter 66

After spending the entire night in a real bed, sleeping with Silva’s skin touching mine, sharing the same breath, and feeling connected, morning comes on the chiming alarm from a d-pad connected to a suit still on the floor. The war is calling. Nothing urgent, just the usual list of a million things that need doing. We don our suits, checking one another as we go to make sure every seal is set, every wire connected, everything functional.

“What are you going to do?” Silva asks as she clips her helmet to her belt.

“About?”

“The only thing you’ve been thinking about since you landed?”

I reach out and squeeze her breast through the layers of suit cloth. “That’s all I’ve been thinking about.”

“Liar. Are we staying to fight, or are we going to the colonies?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I told you already. I think we should go. I don’t care if we give up on this war and all the people of earth. I hate to sound like a selfish bitch, but if earth wanted its freedom, why isn’t it fighting? This isn’t the siege anymore. We’re not helpless. If the people of earth grow a spine and fight the Trogs and the Grays we’ll win, hands down, no contest. Millions or maybe billions will die, yet they’d have their freedom. Unfortunately, freedom’s not worth the sacrifice to them. And if it’s not worth them risking their lives, then it’s not worth it to me, either.”

I don’t know how to respond.

“You don’t see it that way?” she asks.

“I follow your logic. I understand.”

“Still, you can’t let it pass. You think leaving makes you a coward.”

“No,” I say, “but it makes me give up on a dream, and that’s hard. It’s the only dream I’ve ever believed in.”

This time, Silva reaches out for my hands and puts them on her heavily protected breasts. “The only one?” She smiles. I do, too. “That’s why you have to decide,” she tells me. “I’ll stay by you. I won’t regret it. I won’t resent you. I’m with you, now. That’s my dream. This is happiness to me. I don’t want to ever have anything else.”

“I don’t—”

Silva puts a finger to my lips. “We’re not talking about me anymore. Not us. I’ve made my choice. You need to do what you need to do to live with yourself.”

“I meet with Bird tonight for dinner. He’ll expect an answer.”

“Then, tell him.”

With all the awkwardness of two fat ducks, we hug—layers of orange, weapons, ammo, helmets, and all.

“I love you,” she says.

“The emotive drive of our mutual attraction—”

She punches me so hard I fall down.

Chapter 67

I had higher expectations for the meal with Bird. Unrealistic, but still.

On my first visit to Iapetus, I ate well. Vegetables and fruit were plentiful at every meal, though limited in variety. What passed for meat were soybean and algae proteins restructured into products resembling bacon, chicken, pork, and beef. The pseudo-meat tasted okay, but it wasn’t nearly as good as the real meat I had on earth on those rare occasions when it was on my table.

Another class of foods was something the Iapetens called Neapolitan porridge—NP. NP came in three flavors, hence, three colors: almost red, barely blue, and bright green. One bowl was rumored to contain a balance of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and vitamins, enough to make up an average-sized meal for an average-sized person.

NP was the easiest food product to produce on Iapetus, given the base’s limited resources. It was easily stored in bulk, and apparently had no shelf-life limitations.

NP is what filled the bowl on the table in front of me. Bird had the same, barely blue for both of us.

Bird enjoyed his. Apparently, one develops a taste for it.

I fiddled with mine, eating it because I needed something in my stomach, but mostly playing with the lumpy gel in low g.

“You don’t care for the blue?” asks Bird.

“Almost red is my favorite.”

Bird reads my sarcasm correctly and he chuckles. “You get used to it.”

“Have you had enough time to consider what you’re going to do?” I ask.

Bird nods. “I don’t want to beat around the bush, but before I tell you, have you decided?”

“Yes. I want to stay and fight.”

Bird’s determined smile tells me what his answer is going to be before he says it. “Me, too. You talked to Phil?”

“He’ll stay with the ship.”

“And the rest of your crew?”

“All staying,” I answer. “I didn’t sell any of them on it. In fact, I urged them to go to the colonies. The odds are stacked against us here.”

“Your people are experienced. They know what they’re getting into. They each made a choice.”

“Are you telling me not to feel bad about influencing them to stay by doing that myself.”

“Yes. You need to hear it, and you need to accept it. Things could go very badly for us all. The death of people we love is hard enough without carrying the burden of their choices with you.”

“And?” I ask.

“I don’t want you cracking under the weight of that choice.”

“Gotcha, boss.”

“Don’t be flippant,” says Bird. “Please. I’m serious.”

“I’ll do my best with it,” I tell him.

“Do better,” advises Bird. “Trust me on this one.”

“You’re guilty of carrying the responsibility for other people’s choices?” I guess. “That’s what you’re telling me, right? You feel strongly about it because you’ve made the mistake before.”

“Life gets easier,” he says, “when you don’t have to make all the mistakes yourself. Learn from others when you can.”

I know good advice when I hear it. I don’t always heed it, but at least identifying it is a first step. “Now that you and I are on the same page, we have one ship and one crew, where do we go now?”

“I’m going to address the troops,” he says. “I’m going to explain the situation, tell them the odds, and ask how many want to stay. Hell, you know what I’m going to tell them. You’ve had the conversation a half-dozen times with your people.”

“Makes you wish Secretary Kimura was here,” I say. “She’d inspire all of them to stay.”

“Which is why it’s better that it’s me,” says Bird. “These men and women need to make this decision with their heads, not their hearts.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “How many do you think will stay on?”

“It’s hard to say. At least a thousand. Maybe most of them. We have a good bunch of soldiers. They’ve all fought in the tunnels here on Iapetus. A good number of them fought at the Free Army base before it fell. Many have been in the war for years.”

“At least some of them may have given all they have to give,” I suggest.

“And if that’s the case,” says Bird, “and I’m sure it is, I’ll make it easy for them to go. I’m not going to sell them on this. Like I said, I’m going to lay it out and let each soldier make his or her own decision. That’s the way it’s got to be.”

“I know,” I say. “I think now that I’ve decided to stay and fight, it’s easy to succumb to the expectation that everyone else should, too.”

“I understand.”

“After the speech,” I ask, “what then? Have you thought about our strategy?”

“Yes,” says Bird, “but I don’t have all the answers. You know that. I like the idea of trying to turn the MSS to our side. I think bringing earth into the war by showing them that revolution is in their best interest is the right path. What we’ve been doing so far, trying to win the war in space to pave the way for them to reach for their freedom has been the wrong way. If the people of earth want to be free, they need to fight for it. All of us together can win. That’s the only way.”

FREEDOM’S FATE

The Final Episode

Book 6 in the Freedom’s Fire Series

Chapter 1

Blair’s hateful eyes drill me so fiercely I blink. “What I’m telling you, Major Ego-Up-His-Ass Dylan Kane, is exactly what you should already know. The Grays conquered us thirty years ago. This new war with the Trogs has been wearing us down for three years, and what do we have to show for it? Earth is being stripped of everything, especially people. We lost the fleet we built for the Grays. The Free Army is defeated. And all we’re doing now is more of the same, thinking something is going to change. What you don’t seem to understand is that we’re wasting our time.”

I look down at my d-pad, and make a note. Nine times. It’s the ninth different way Blair has told me how everything we’re doing is a stupid fiasco that’ll end in our pointless deaths. Yet it feels like the hundredth.

Blair and I are in the cramped cargo hold of the Free Army’s only operational stealth scout. Brice is with us. He’s sitting on a bench beside Blair, pretending he’s asleep. Or maybe he’s really trying to sleep. I’m not sure. Phil, and Nicky with the barely noticeable bulge of a growing seed in her lower abdomen, are on the bench beside me, facing Blair and Brice. The only other person on the ship is the pilot, a competent guy name Chikere. He’s busy keeping the ship en route.

“How much longer?” I ask Chikere over a private comm link.

“Depends,” he tells me. “Thirty minutes? Two hours? Plenty of traffic around that we want to avoid, if you know what I mean.”

He’s talking about Trog cruisers, battle stations orbiting earth, and fleets of grav lifts. They’re moving materials and the next crop of expendable humans cocooned in dilapidated orange suits into orbit. The new bunch of Grays in town is working on bringing the damaged stations back to full operational status. Like the old Grays, they’re doing it on the backs of the humans in their labor pool.

If there were a million people in orbit doing the work it wouldn’t surprise me. Little orbital ant specks, all orange and busy, are everywhere. Among them, MSS supervisors are conveying their boss’s instructions. Grays are on the stations, guiding the work, using Trog muscle to enforce their will.

Any one of those humans, Grays, or Trogs might notice us and put us in jeopardy. It’s a risk we discussed at least a dozen times before we embarked on the mission.

By our estimate, there are probably six thousand Grays in the system, spread between earth, the battle stations, the moon base, and three score Trog cruisers still strutting through the solar system like they own the place. For the time being, I guess they do.

On the Trog count, we’re guessing fifty to a hundred thousand.

As for the MSS, the betrayers of our species, and the bureaucrats that hold their leash, Blair estimates a count of ten million—give or take a few. One of the things about the MSS is that their rank counts are swollen by the requirement that every boy or girl born to Korean parents join one of the youth organizations responsible for funneling bodies into the machine. That doesn’t even mention the draftees like Blair and I, non-Korean humans holding rank and wearing the uniform while hiding hatred in our hearts.

How many true believers are in the MSS? Blair guesses a soft twenty-percent. She further guesses that half to two-thirds of those are sick of seeing their brothers and sisters die to appease their interstellar masters. She thinks they’ll take up arms if given a big enough nudge.

My skepticism runs deep on Blair’s guesses, but they’re the foundation of the only hope humans have left. We need the MSS if we’re going to have a chance at victory.

Picking up on my mood, and looking to keep me from letting it run off with my mouth, Phil enters the conversation. “When we were on Iapetus, back before the mission to 61 Cygni, I asked around about what they were doing to combat the Grays and Trogs, you know, besides conventional force.”

“And?” asks Blair, not wanting to wait for Phil’s pause to transform drama into importance.

“They were researching ways to create a microbe that would infect Grays without harming humans.”

“No surprise,” says Blair. “The Free Army looked into it. So did the MSS.”

“What about Crazy Stick?” I ask, thinking back to the Gray Phil and I saw when we were kids. It lost control of itself and stepped in front of a truck driving down the road. "We know they're susceptible to something."

“Getting samples was always the problem with that,” says Blair, losing her hostile edge with having something to talk about other than her anger. “Grays are connected,” she taps her helmet. “The telepathic thing, you know. If one dies, the rest know about it. They know when it happens and where it happens. No Grays, live or dead, were ever available for rogue MSS researchers or anyone else on earth to study.”

“But that changed when the war started,” I suggest, “right?”

“Of course,” says Blair.

“There are the pair of prisoners I left with you on the Potato,” I tell her.

“We had those two shipped off,” she said. “I don’t know what became of them, but you can bet medical research was part of it. The Free Army had a standing order to capture as many Trogs and Grays as we could. It was never discussed openly, yet everybody knows biological warfare was on the table.”

“And the MSS?” I ask. “Did they have any backroom research projects to find a magic virus to kill the Trogs?”

“From time to time,” admits Blair, “but every time one of those projects came to light, the labs were burned, and everybody involved was tortured and hanged. Not just the scientists, but their families and anybody they were connected with.”

“Typical MSS,” I muse.

“Effective,” says Blair, as if that’s a valid defense.

I don’t rise to the fight. “And the Trogs? Their physiology is pretty close to ours. I’ll bet we share more than 99% of our genetics.”

“True, as far as I know,” says Blair. “But you have to remember, before the war started, there were no Trogs on earth. Even during the war, there weren’t any, not until they invaded while you were out at 61 Cygni.”

“What about all those Trog prisoners we left on the Potato?” I ask.

“Mostly used up in experiments,” says Blair. “I heard through the grapevine they were exposed to a dozen strains of influenza, chicken pox, smallpox, even ebola. Nothing phased them.”

“Ebola?” Phil asks. “You can’t be serious.”

“They tried diseases I’d never heard of,” says Blair. “I don’t know how, but the Trogs are immune to every earth-borne illness we had samples of.”

“On Iapetus,” says Phil, “there was speculation, and I confirmed this with what I learned from Nicky, that Grays had been visiting earth for decades before choosing to conquer us.”

“You never told me that,” I say.

“It never came up.”

"Not in all the months we spent flying back from there?" I ask.

Phil doesn’t answer me. Instead, he says, “The Grays have scouted out every world within a hundred light years of their home system, knowing one day they’d need to return and invade. The Grays don’t understand immunology in the same way as human scientists—they understand cause and effect enough that they’ve devised a way to breed immunity into their Trogs. I think they can resist any disease they’re likely to encounter on any of the planets they might one day occupy.”

“So we were always a target?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Phil. “Earth had been scouted and forgotten, scouted again, and forgotten again, a dozen times before our Gray conquerers finally showed up. One of the reasons they thought they’d be safe here.”

“So disease is off the table,” I conclude, “unless we can re-establish a bio-warfare lab and capture enough Grays and Trogs to keep the pipeline full of test subjects.”

“And a few years at least,” says Blair, “or decades. This kind of research can take a long time to bear fruit.”

“They have time in the colonies,” I tell her. “We may lose the war here, however, if we can send enough prisoners out to the colonies, they may be able to create a germ warfare defense.”

“You better tell Colonel Bird your thoughts on that,” says Blair, “because you won’t live long enough to make any of it happen.

Brice chuckles, giving away the fact he was only pretending to sleep.

“People keep predicting my death,” I say defiantly. “And they keep being wrong.”

“Eventually, all of us will be right,” she says.

Chapter 2

“You all buttoned up back there?” asks Chikere.

All of us have our suits sealed up with faceplates closed, even though the scout ship sustains an internal atmosphere. “What’s up?” I ask.

“There’s a pretty dense sphere of debris around the planet,” he says, “I’m going to slip us through with the rest of the crap until we can hop over to our rendezvous point. We might catch some high-speed space junk and get a hole or two.”

“Understood.” Looking at the others, I say, “You might want to amp up your suit’s defensive grav a bit.”

Each of them does. Phil scoots close to Nicky and pushes her against me. Being so close, the combination of our fields will protect her nearly as well as they protect us.

“We should consider a scorched-earth approach,” says Blair. “It may be the only way.”

“Scorched earth?” asks Brice. He wasn’t in on the meetings where that had been discussed. Well, not really explored, more suggested and shouted down was more like it.

“You need to talk to Colonel Bird,” says Blair. “You don’t have many good qualities, but you’ve got balls. You can do what needs doing if it comes to that.”

“What’s she talking about?” Brice asks me.

I nod at Blair, “It’s your idea. Sell it.”

“You think I’m afraid of a dare?” she laughs. “Brice is a pragmatist. He’ll understand better than you.”

“What?” he asks. “Are you talking about blowing up all the factories? Collapsing the mines? Burning the crops? What?”

“Oh, no,” I laugh. “That might work when you’ve got columns of armor marauding across the steppe in a diesel punk war from last century, but on a planetary scale?”

“The Trogs and Grays are here for one thing, and one thing only,” says Blair, “and they stay, because of one other thing.”

“Don’t be cryptic,” says Brice. “Spit it out.”

“The Grays and Trogs are here to harvest the earth of its labor pool. Material resources are secondary.”

Brice frowns. He’s already guessed.

“The Trogs and Grays stayed to fight us because we’re weak. An easy mark. Good slave material. We can win if we change the equation.”

“Change the equation?” I chide. “That’s an awfully bland euphemism.”

“It’s simple,” says Blair, focusing on Brice, “we take over the command center on one of the battle stations.”

“You can’t defend it,” says Brice. “Not unless you bring a huge force, or convince the MSS and SDF troops to mutiny and support you.”

“They won’t,” says Blair.

“Not if they know what you intend,” I say.

"We only need to hold it for five or six hours," says Blair. "Every battle station has enough grav plates to keep it stabilized in its orbit, and enough reactor power to shift to a higher or lower orbit if need be. Nothing can be done quickly, but they can be moved."

“And?” asks Brice, pushing for the surprise we all know is coming.

"We drop it into the orbit of another station," she says, "on a collision course. A head-on collision course."

Brice shakes his head.

I say, “By arresting the momentum of both stations—”

“I know enough about orbital mechanics,” says Brice. “They’ll both fall to the surface.” He turns to glare at Blair. “A billion—two billion tons of rock from the sky.”

“Won’t matter where it hits,” I say. “Won’t matter much how fast it’s going when it does. I mean, the remaining hunks won’t be traveling at planet-killing speeds, but they might as well be. So much debris will be ejected into the atmosphere it’ll throw the planet into a winter that’ll last a thousand years.”

“It would kill everyone,” says Brice.

“Everyone who would otherwise be used to build fleets of ships that’ll eventually come out to your colonies and conquer them, too,” she says. “This way, no ships, no invasion force, and the best part, the Grays and Trogs will never fuck with humans again, not after they see what we’re capable of. They can’t win a scorched-earth encounter on a planetary scale, so why fight it.”

“But they won’t lose, either,” says Brice, “if we kill off our species to avoid becoming slaves.”

“Which would you rather be,” asks Blair, “a dead man or a Gray slave?”

Chapter 3

“You might want to stop talking and clear your mind,” Phil tells me. “We’re coming up on one of the battle stations.”

“Gotta slide by pretty close,” says Chikere. “Or I’ll have to nudge the grav drive, and at this range, one of those Grays down there might see right through our stealth field and figure out we’re a hostile ship, and not just a black spot floating across space.”

“You think they’ll sense us?” I ask Phil. By us, I mean him and me.

“If we can sense them,” he says, “they can sense us. There are plenty of Grays and bugheads down there. You can hear the noise of their thoughts if you focus. Lucky for us, all of their thoughts create a background noise that we’re not likely to stand out against, but if you’re arguing with Blair, the emotion brings your thoughts into a bright focus that’s easy for a Gray to pick up on.”

I accept Phil’s guidance with a silent nod, lean against the wall behind me, and close my eyes. I try to watch using only my grav sense to see, only the bug in my head to hear.

Brice and Blair stop talking.

Phil and Nicky seem to disappear, where a moment ago their thoughts were bouncing through the ether, now they’re gone. All I sense of them is the gravity of Phil’s mass and the void where the Gray takes up the space beside me, seeming to sponge gravity from the space around her.

The mass of the battle station glows bright as we close in.

From one end to the other, we skim over its surface not two hundred meters up.

Below us, across the rough surface, I’m able to make out the barrels of railguns, some long, some short, large calibers and small, clumped and spread out in no apparent pattern, except to make the gigaton asteroid look like an astral sea urchin covered in tiny spines. Many of the railguns are broken. More are bent. Pocks the size of swimming pools crater the surface.

Through the beating the station took during the war, I don’t see any holes big enough to have knocked it out of commission.

As a human, it shames me to deduce that the station surrendered, like I know they all did at the end. Though, I suppose the Trogs could have landed and taken the asteroid by invasion.

That’s some solace.

Below me, down in the rocky corridors, I can sense hundreds of Trogs moving from place to place, hauling rock and repairing walls. Grays are down there, too, not many of them I can see, but they’re present. Some are broadcasting their orders loudly on telepathic links, keeping their Trog slaves busy and their human slaves hard at work. I can’t guess if the Grays are expecting an attack soon. They seem to be preparing for one.

Eventually, the battle station passes aft of us. I watch its bulky mass slide into the background, and hear the noise of alien thoughts fade to nothing.

When Phil is satisfied we’ve gone far enough, he says, “They didn’t see us.”

Blair sighs, realizes we noticed, and works on resituating herself in her seat, pretending her relief was something else.

“How many do you think were down there?” I ask.

“I knew you were going to ask me,” says Phil.

I make a point of looking at Blair, and say, “That’s the whole point of this mission. That’s why you’re along. We’re gathering intel. Right?”

“Of course,” she says.

“No colliding battle stations, right?”

Her expression turns sour. “I don’t know what you think—”

I raise a palm to stop her. “Just checking to make sure we’re all on the same page.”

“I’ll be lucky if I don’t get arrested and tortured,” she tells me. “Taking control of a battle station isn’t something I’ll be able to do on my own. It’s not something anyone in the MSS was able to do by themselves, not even before the Trogs took over.”

“So why’d you suggest it?” asks Brice.

“There are other ways to take control of a battle station,” she tells him.

Brice shrugs and goes back to counting stars.

“Refueling schedules,” I say. “That’s what we want. Docking procedures, hydrogen transport details, everything having to do with taking H from earth up to the Trogs’ cruisers in orbit. If we can get— ”

“I know the mission,” she tells me. “Swap out an alternative gas for the hydrogen in the supply chain, something that’ll spontaneously generate a powerful exothermic reaction on contact. That’s what we want—to destroy their fleet through sabotage.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“It won’t work,” she tells me. “We’ll be lucky to damage one or two cruisers before the Grays realize what’s happening.”

She doesn’t know all of the plan. She doesn’t know we only need a few cruisers to blow up before other parts of our plan work out. “It’s a start. You need to quickly establish a counterintelligence network, and work towards our list of—”

“Don’t talk to me like I don’t know what I’m doing,” she snaps. “I was a member of their Young Pioneer Corps before I even understood the difference between a Korean and a Caucasian, but I learned pretty quick that I wasn’t as good as they were and that I never would be. When I was thirteen, I earned a spot in the Youth League, and I was already a mole by then, lying to them to make them despise me a little less while I stole every trivial secret I could learn. I was developing stupid, pubescent Korean boys into spies when you were still trying to get up your nerve to kiss your first girl. I know what I’m supposed to do. I know how I’m supposed to do it. I don’t need your advice on any of it.”

“I’m just…” I don’t know what point I was trying to make.

Phil takes her side. “She’s right, Dylan.”

“Sorry,” I tell her. “I wasn’t trying to say you didn’t know your job.”

"I know you don't like me," she spits. She cuts a glance at Phil and Brice. "None of you do. I know you'd be just as happy if I'd been killed back at the Potato or when the SDF base out in the Trojans was destroyed. Happier, I'm sure. But I didn't get killed. You know why? Because I know how to take care of myself even when every single person I see every hour of every day is my enemy.”

Chikere calls over the comm to us. “Thirty-five or forty minutes before we come up on our destination.”

Blair gets up and moves into the cockpit to peek over Chikere’s shoulder for a view of the earth.

“You should talk to her,” says Phil, over a private comm link.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“No, I’m not.”

"You should," I tell him. "Me and Blair will never be friends. We don't have anything to talk about besides the mission. That's it."

“You should try.”

“Phil,” I tell him, “the world isn’t rosy pink and pretty like you seem to think it is sometimes. Blair is a sour-sap Medusa who hates everybody she meets.”

“Because of how she grew up,” says Phil. “You know what she’s been through? How does anybody come out of that still being capable of normal relationships?”

“You’re dumping shit on me I don't want and can't do anything about. Too much sewage as flowed under the bridge between Blair and me. There's nothing we like about each other, and the only reason one of us doesn't shoot the other is because we're working toward the same goal. That's it."

“That’s something.”

“Whatever it is, it’ll never be what you seem to think it is. If you want Blair to have a shoulder to cry on, you go ahead, but don’t get your hopes up. She’s a heartless husk of a human in a female wrapper. Don’t let your eyes fool you. That little woe-is-me show she just did, that’s some kind of manipulation, is what it is. I’ll bet both my balls on that. When’s the last time you ever saw her vulnerable side? Never. Right? She’s up to something.”

Brice says, “I’m with Dylan.”

I curse and look down at my d-pad. It says I’m on a private comm link with Phil. Brice shouldn’t be on it.

“I don’t need any shoulders to cry on,” says Blair, apparently on the comm link, too. “And you two can fuck off.”

Great.

Chapter 4

The battle station ahead is cratered so deeply it’s hard to imagine how it didn’t fracture. It’s been months since the last battles ended and jets of oxygen and hydrogen still shoot out, burning brightly against the black sky when they mix and spark. It’s no wonder the station is one of the few not swarming with workers trying to bring it back to life.

The pilot sets our ship down inside one of the blast craters and reduces power to all systems. He calls to us, “It’s your show now.”

Using the ship-to-ship radio, Blair broadcasts her signal. I imagine to some starry-eyed Korean man she tempted with her touchy-feely parts back when they were in junior high together. And now he’s still pining for another taste.

And then I want to kick myself, because I can be a judgmental bastard sometimes. I just can’t get past my dislike for Blair.

“Anything?” asks Brice.

“Nothing yet.” She checks the time on her d-pad like it’s an excuse.

We’re on time, despite knowing that a precise rendezvous minute was only an aspiration. “Were you able to connect at all?” I ask. “Do we know if they’re on their way?”

"No response," she tells me, and I can hear the tension in her words. It's been a long time since she was in contact with her people on earth. At least, that's what she told us when we were planning the operation. Time has a way of turning loyalties into holiday relatives that you prefer never called you in the off-season.

We’re in the off-season.

“We sense work crews here,” says Phil.

“I thought this rock was abandoned,” says Brice, glaring at Blair. “That’s what your source told you, right?”

“They’ve been refurbishing all the damaged stations,” says Phil. “They were bound to get to this one eventually.”

“Bad timing, though,” says Brice. “Don’t you think?” He’s suspicious.

“Yeah,” I agree, but I’m not ready to jump to a conclusion just yet. “Phil, do you and Nicky see ships coming this way?”

“Nothing has reacted perceptibly to our presence,” he answers.

“How many workers are here?” I ask. “Are there Grays with them?”

“We can’t feel the presence of any Grays,” says Phil. “No Trogs, just humans.”

“And their ships?” asks Brice.

“Can’t say for sure,” says Phil. “Maybe they landed on the other side of the asteroid. There’s nothing we can see except the battle station’s rock.”

“How many?” I ask again.

“A group of six fairly close,” says Phil, “working their way across the surface. Several hundred meters to our stern, just over the horizon. A few more groups of six are deep inside.”

“They aren’t working on this place,” I guess. “That’s not enough workers to make a dent in the damage. They’re assessing it.”

“Probably,” Brice agrees.

“Could any of them be your people?” I ask Blair.

“None responded to the encrypted message I just sent,” she answers.

“You wanna try again?” I ask.

“Even if the message is encrypted,” she snaps, “the more we broadcast, the more likely it is someone will notice. We’re dealing with humans now, not just Grays and Trogs.” She’s right, and she wants to make sure I know she’s right.

“Phil,” I ask, “that group on the surface, tell me they’re headed away from us.” I’m hoping, but I know how luck always seems to turn out badly for us.

“Can’t,” he says. “They’re coming this way.”

“Quickly?” I ask. “Like they saw us?”

“No,” he answers. “They’re not moving with purpose. Their progress is slow. Lots of starts and stops.”

“If they’re assessing,” says Brice, “Like Dylan thinks, then they’ll be testing the rock for fissures. Blasting seismic charges and mapping the interior structures. They’ll have to do that as a first step in evaluating this station.”

“Probably right,” says Phil.

“Can you read their thoughts?” asks Brice.

“If they were bugheads and closer,” says Phil. “But normal humans from this far, no.”

Brice looks at me, hefting his railgun. “What’s the plan, boss?” He’s asking if we’re going to run for it or kill some innocent orange-suited workers.

“We’ve been working on this for two months,” says Blair, starting on her argument for staying and toughing it out.

“And we’ve been working on the cruiser longer than that,” says Phil. “Sending the pods to the colonies is still our first priority. We have maybe another month to go, so we can reschedule this for another time.”

“We’re not going to endanger our transport cruiser by waiting here for my contact to show,” says Blair.

“It’s not your call to make, Colonel,” says Brice. “It’s up to Colonel Kane. He’s running this mission.”

Blair snorts. She’s been pissed since the moment Bird told her he’d promoted me.

“We may not get another chance at this,” says Blair. “

"Don't be dramatic," says Brice. "Your contact will get another chance."

“This took a long time to arrange,” argues Blair. “You don’t know how regimented the MSS is.”

“And neither do you,” says Brice. “You know how things were under the old regime. Maybe the rules are different now.”

Blair turns to me. “Are we running away, or are we going to act like real soldiers?”

“How many of them are there?” I ask Phil, though I didn’t forget. I’m stalling while I decide.

“Six,” he confirms.

“Armed?” I ask.

He says, “I can’t tell from here.”

“Alright, Blair,” I say. “I hope you can handle a railgun. We’re going out to meet these guys. All of us.”

“We’re going to kill them?” she asks, not bothered by the idea. She just wants clarification.

“We’re going to ambush them,” guesses Brice.

To Chikere, I say, “You broadcast that signal to Blair’s contact as frequently as you think necessary. If you get a response, ping us immediately, and we'll send Blair back.”

To Phil, Chikere says, “Keep an eye out there for bad guys. I don’t want to get stuck here with my pants down.”

“Don’t go soft on me,” I tell him.

Chapter 5

We fly out of the crater using suit grav, but once we're on the surface, we put our feet on the ground and split up. A handful of orange-suits flying over the surface of a derelict battle station shouldn't be enough to attract any kind of attention, but the grav pulses would be a detection risk with little payoff. The work crew isn't that far away.

I keep Phil and Nicky with me. Brice takes Blair and flanks to our right. “Go wide,” I tell them. “I don’t want the crew to spot you.”

“Yes Mother,” says Brice as he skips toward the asteroid’s horizon.

Phil and I start to walk. “Are they still coming this way?”

“Yes,” says Phil. “Do you think it’s a good idea for us to expose ourselves?”

“I didn’t think you’d be up for just killing them.”

“I’m not,” he says. “But we have to protect the mission.”

“This is worth the risk.”

“Why?”

“Can’t you just sneak in and read my thoughts about it?” I ask.

“You’ve gotten pretty good at walling everything off from us.”

“You mean I have my privacy back?” I ask, but I don’t believe him. “Are you telling me a story so I'll think my thoughts are more private than they are?”

“What do you think?” he asks.

“I just told you what I think.”

“I already answered your question," sighs Phil. "You're going to believe whatever you want to believe, so it doesn't matter what I tell you.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Then why are we talking about this?” asks Phil. “Why don’t you just tell me?”

“This whole idea of us inspiring the people of earth to take up arms in a revolt,” I say, “how do we know if any humans are left who have any fight in them?”

“So what?” asks Phil. “You’re just going to ask these guys?”

I shrug. “I figured I could, and then have you and Nicky tell me if they’re telling the truth.”

“And what?” he asks, “They’re going to be the representative sample in your survey of earth’s willingness to revolt?”

“When you’re dismissive like that, Phil, it makes other people feel bad.”

“You mean when I don’t agree with your dubious plan it makes you feel bad.”

“We need to start somewhere,” I argue. “We can’t exactly poll the populace.”

“We should leave this to Blair. It’s one of the things she’s going to earth to find out—how willing the people are to take up arms against the Trogs and Grays.”

“I don’t trust her.”

“Yet,” says Phil, “here we are, risking our lives—not to mention our last stealth scout—to rendezvous with her MSS contact so she can go to earth to get our answers and set our plans in motion.”

I shrug.

“If you don’t trust her, what good is any of it?”

“We’ll see,” I tell him. “Asking these fellows up here what they think won’t hurt anything.”

“And if they call back to their MSS bosses?” asks Phil. “What then?”

“We kill ‘em.”

“Regular people out doing their jobs,” says Phil.

“Phil, why are you being so argumentative?”

“This feels like a bad idea.”

“They were coming toward the ship, right? You told us that, right?”

“They might have veered off in another direction.”

“But they haven’t yet, have they?”

“No.”

“Then stop pretending like we have a choice in this. I’m just trying to salvage something positive out of this, rather than killing them outright for nothing but our security.”

“We’d be better served spending our time hiding and trying to figure out how we’re going to make this whole revolution thing work.”

I sigh. Phil can be so tiring when he gets into one of his contrary moods. I open a comm to Brice and Blair. “You see them yet?”

“Just got started,” says Brice. “We need a few minutes.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Will do, chief.”

“I could have told you that,” says Phil.

“I know. Can you tell yet if any of them are armed? Is this a work crew or a security detail?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Concentrate on it, okay?”

“Why are you in a bitchy mood?”

“Jesus, Phil.” I draw a long breath and think of a way to steer the conversation to anything but this pointless yammering. “The problem comes down to something that seems like it should be simple, right?”

“What’s that?”

“How do you exterminate six thousand Grays?” I ask. “They aren’t physically formidable. They can’t run away from you. They’re pretty easy to kill once you get your hands on them. You just stomp on ‘em a little bit. That orange goo spews out, and they die."

“We could do without the graphic imagery,” says Phil.

“There’s got to be a way. Let’s call it seventy thousand Trogs and what, still another three or four billion humans on the planet?”

“They conquered us with only eighteen Grays, if you remember right.”

“Of course, I know that. Everybody does, but things were different then. The Grays had the advantage of controlling outer space. Humans only had a handful of chemical-powered rockets back in those days. We were technically outclassed. But not anymore. We have the technological advantage.”

“But we still lost,” says Phil.

“Why?”

“They had more ships?”

“They had the production advantage,” I suggest. “That advantage has won more than one war on earth.”

“Sometimes that’s enough.”

“I guess any one advantage can be enough. But still.”

"Right now they have all the advantages," says Phil. "The Trogs and their Gray masters have a fleet of star cruisers. They control the moon base. They control the major bases in the asteroid belt. They control the battle stations orbiting the earth. They've started building a fleet of Arizona Class ships. And they control earth through the MSS, and that means they control all of earth's resources and production capacity. And what do we have? One semi-modified Arizona Class ship, a stealth scout, the remnants of an intel gathering system and a few freighters. Oh, and one MSS double-agent who might be killed the moment she makes her way down to the surface. Without the people of earth in the equation, we don’t even outnumber the Grays.” Phil laughs bitterly. “Remind me why I agreed to stay here and fight again?”

“There’s something we’re not seeing here,” I tell him. “There has to be something we can turn to our advantage.”

“And not get ourselves killed or the population of earth annihilated.”

“Yes,” I agree. “I’m with you on both counts.”

Brice comms in. “We have a visual.”

“Are they aware of your presence?” I ask.

Brice snorts. “Blair’s a handicap, but this isn’t my first rodeo. We’re on their left flank, a little to the rear.”

I turn to Phil.

He nods toward a rocky mound rising in front of us. “We’ll be able to see them from the top. And they’ll be able to see us.”

I tell Brice, “We’ll be in position in about a minute.”

Chapter 6

“We should kill them all,” says Blair over the comm.

“No,” I tell her. “Brice, make sure she doesn’t fire.”

“You want me to take her gun away?” he asks. “It’s not like I have another way to do it. Unless you want me to shoot her.”

Don’t, Phil tells me telepathically.

I roll my eyes, and press the authority of my command. “Blair, you’ll do what you’re told. Don’t fire unless Brice does. That’s an order.”

“You’re going to jeopardize this mission and get me killed. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Worse things have happened.” I cut her outgoing comm. “Brice. Keep an eye on her.”

“You shouldn’t treat her that way,” says Phil.

“I know.” Sometimes a platitude is all I have.

Luckily, Phil doesn’t have a chance to call me out on it. We reach the crest of the rocky mound and see the six workers. They’re spread out, and just as Brice guessed, they’re planting seismic charges. His years of experience from working space construction comes in handy at the most unexpected times.

It takes only a moment for one of the workers to notice us. Once that happens, the other five stop what they’re doing and look up. Alerts bounce across their comm link.

“I have open shots at all of them,” Brice says, to remind me of the action we should be taking. “Even Blair could hit one or two from here.”

I broadcast a message across all channels, and give the workers one to tune in on so we can talk. Nicky standing between Phil and me conveys all the authority I need for them to obey.

“I hope no one else is in range,” says Brice.

Ignoring him, I further instruct the workers to come to the foot of the mound on which Phil and I are standing.

Without the ability to commandeer their radio signals, I don’t know what they’re saying to each other, so I turn to Phil. “Can you read them now?”

“They’re alarmed,” he says.

“Are any of them trying to contact anyone?” I ask.

“The second from the left,” he says. “He can’t connect, though. Too much rock between us and his ship.”

“Is he in charge of the crew?”

“No,” says Phil. “On the far right. That woman is the foreman.”

“He’s not talking to her?”

“The others are,” says Phil. “She’s telling them this is no big deal, and to do what they’re told. They think we’re MSS inspectors or something.”

“What’s the guy saying—the one who’s trying to make the call?”

“He’s suspicious.”

I fiddle with my d-pad to scan all frequencies so I can listen in. I’m not finding the guy’s broadcast frequency. “Brice,” I ask, “do construction crews use encrypted communication or nonstandard bands?”

“Nope.”

“Blair,” I ask, “does the MSS?” I turn her outgoing comm back on.

“Now you want to let me back in on the conversation?”

“Blair, just answer the question.”

“Yes,” she says. “They use frequencies other than the standard bands.”

“So this guy’s communicating on an MSS band?” I ask.

“I could have told you that,” says Brice.

“It doesn’t make sense,” says Phil. “He can’t know we’re anything out of the ordinary yet.”

“Except that we’re here,” I say, “where we’re not supposed to be. The new Trogs in charge just murdered every Gray in the solar system that wasn’t one of theirs. I’ll bet the MSS has standing orders to keep their noses to the ground for any Grays that might have slipped through.”

“And the MSS likes to plant their snitches where you least expect them,” says Brice. “Back when I was working construction, we had a way of dealing with the ones we discovered.”

“We do, too,” I say. “Second one from my left. Take care of him.”

Phil starts to say something, but a handful of red-hot railgun rounds tear into the guy’s back and explode out of his chest, nearly ripping him in half.

Workers scream over the comm. One dives for cover. Two launch themselves off the surface, maxing suit grav to escape.

“Stop!” I command. “Don’t make us kill you.”

“Why’d you do that?” shouts the leader, still on her feet and standing defiant.

Pointing at the two flyers, I tell her, “Order your people back down here. I won’t ask again.”

A moment passes and everything settles down. The runners on the ground stop trying to escape. Those in the air reverse their paths and head back toward us.

“Here,” I tell the leader, pointing at the foot of the rock mound, “The rest of you, I want you here in thirty seconds.”

“Blair,” I ask. “The comm units on the snitches’ suits, do they have extended range as well as extra bands?”

“Yes,” she tells me. “Of course they do.”

“How much more range?”

“Double or triple, depending on conditions.” She sounds happy that I didn’t ask this first.

“You think the snitch’s message got out?” asks Phil.

She says, “You said he didn’t get an answer.”

“That doesn’t mean somebody didn’t hear what he was sending,” says Phil.

Yes, of course he’s right, but sometimes, ugh. I say, “You and Nicky keep on the lookout for incoming ships. We may need to move out of here in a hurry.”

“What’s this about?” asks the leader of the work crew, as she glances at the carcass of the suspected MSS man, slowly floating away into space. “Why did you have to kill Geeslin?”

I read the name stenciled on her chest. “You don’t get to ask questions, Parker.”

The rest of her crew comes into line at the foot of the hill, each taking glances behind them. They know generally where Brice’s shots came from.

“What now?” asks Blair.

“Yeah?” asks Phil.

Chapter 7

I call Parker to the top of the hill to separate her from her crew.

She looks back to the others, deciding what to do, but realizes she has no good option. With grav set pretty heavy on her boots, she starts to trudge up the slope. She’s a tall woman. Old, but not ruined by her years. She carries herself like she might take a risk and punch me in the face when she gets the chance. At a few paces in front of me, she comes to a stop. She says nothing, but her eyes settle on the disruptor handle sticking up above my shoulder. I can tell she’s starting to deduce an explanation for it being there, and she’s not comfortable with what she comes up with.

“Phil,” I say, “you can read her, right?”

“Yes,” he tells me. “She’s frightened.”

"Not unexpected." To Parker, I say, "I'm not going to monkey around with this, so here it is. We're not MSS, and we're not SDF."

“There is no more SDF,” says the woman. “The ones who weren’t killed in the war were put on the work crews and marked,” she shows me what looks like a long white brush stroke painted down her left arm from shoulder to wrist. “That way the Trogs know if we cause any trouble they should cut our heads off straight away.”

“You were SDF?” I ask, as though that wasn’t obvious.

“Wasn’t everybody?”

Of course, everybody wasn't. I say, “We’re not with the invaders.”

She looks bored. “I thought you weren’t going to monkey around. Why don’t you just tell me who you are and what you want?”

“She has you there,” says Phil.

“I didn’t want to tell her,” I say, “in case she’s interrogated at some point and tells her captors who we are.”

“If you’re going to have a revolution,” says Phil, “you can’t do it with people you keep in the dark.”

Damn, sometimes Phil being right about things frustrates the hell out of me. Turning back to Parker, I tell her, “We’re Free Army.”

“I thought the Free Army was wiped out.”

“We’re still here. We’re still fighting.”

“Fighting?” she asks. “By shooting innocent construction workers in the back. You know, he had a mother and father back on earth. What are they suppose to think when they find out, huh? The Free Army, or whatever you really are, is just as bad as the Trogs and the old Grays and the new Grays and the MSS. Everybody in the universe is an asshole, just like you.”

“She’s got a lot of frustrations,” says Phil.

“Oh really?” I ask. “Is that what you and Nicky figured out with your mongo-psycho, mind-reader powers?”

“Sarcasm doesn’t do anybody any good,” says Phil.

“I find it cathartic,” I say.

Phil scans the dark sky with its million bits of rock and wreckage glistening in the sun. "Why don't you ask her what you want to ask her and let's get on with this before we run out of time?"

“We killed your man,” I tell Parker, “because he was an MSS snitch.”

“So what?” she asks. “That’s what the Free Army is doing now? Sneaking around construction sites assassinating snitches?”

“No,” I tell her. “We’re here for another purpose. Your crew wasn’t supposed to be here.”

“What?” she asks. “You thought you’d come to a battle station in near-earth orbit and not expect to find anybody here?” And then she has an epiphany. “Oh my god, don’t tell me this is your secret base. Please don’t tell me the hope of all mankind is buried in a crumbling rock a hundred kilometers above the atmosphere.”

“Good thing you’re a fan of sarcasm,” says Phil.

Brice is laughing. “Maybe we killed the wrong one, Kane. I think you’re overmatched.”

“I need to know where your loyalties lie,” I tell her. “Right now. Tell me.”

“Or what?” she asks. “You’re going to kill me, too? You’re going to shoot us all?”

I don’t answer, instead staring at her with all the menace I can put into my eyes, hoping she does the math on the situation pretty quick, decides to quit harassing me, and chooses to cooperate.

Her eyes settle on the Gray.

“You’re thinking,” says Phil, “most Grays can’t read human thoughts.”

“That’s not much of a deduction,” she tells him. “What’s my mother’s maiden name?”

“Blomqvist,” says Phil like he’s reading it right off her forehead.

“Shit,” she says.

“Your loyalties lie with your crew,” Phil tells her. “That’s what you’re going to tell Colonel Kane, yet you’re weighing the risk of telling him that and trying to decide if there’s a good lie you can tell that’ll save them.”

And finally, Parker doesn’t have anything to say.

“Even though Colonel Kane is acting like an ass, he doesn’t want to hurt you.” Phil casts a stern glance at me, making sure I’m going to be on the same page whether I like it or not. “We need to protect our mission. We need to know if you’re a threat.”

“You want to know if I’m going to rat you out for killing Geeslin?”

“We can make it look like an accident,” I explain. “People die out here every day.”

“You’re sure he was MSS?” she asks.

“No doubt,” says Phil. “None at all.”

“Snitch bastard,” she mutters. “Darcy always said he was. I should have listened.”

“Wouldn’t have made a difference,” says Phil.

"We'd have been more careful," she says. "Snitches always end up having somebody hauled off and killed. Never for any good reason, except maybe for a promotion, I guess. The MSS is the lowest of the low.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “We need to know, will you keep our presence here a secret?”

“I can forget I ever saw you,” she says, “but what about my people?” She glares at Phil. “You’ll use your little Gray mindreading trick on them, too? What will you do with the liars? Because you know, they’re either going to feel the same way about this as me, or they’re going to lie to you about it.”

“Industrial accidents,” I tell her.

“Killing an MSS snitch is one thing,” she tells me, “but killing one of us in cold blood because we don’t believe Geeslin was a snitch, all you’ll do is cause the rest of us to hate you. And then where will you be? Will you kill all of us?”

“We have to protect the mission,” I tell her.

“You are as bad as the MSS,” she snorts. “Maybe humans are just as well off being slaves. We’re not capable of managing ourselves as a species.”

Blair connects on another frequency. “Chikere just called. My contact is coming in.”

“Go meet the ship,” I tell her. “We’ll handle this.”

“You should stop arguing with them,” Blair tells me, “and act like one of those commanders I heard about with actual man balls. Kill them all and be done with it.”

“Blair,” I tell her, “you have your mission. Get to it. And stay out of sight. They haven’t seen you, yet.”

“Yes, Bossman.”

Phil chuckles. “Catharsis. Everybody needs it, right?”

Chapter 8

Brice comes out from his concealed position to supervise our detainees more closely. He instructs two of them to retrieve Geeslin's two halves. The legs and lower torso have come to a stop fifty meters away against a rocky rise. The upper torso is drifting slowly toward earth, nearly two hundred meters farther.

Phil and Nicky move down the slope to interrogate the remaining workers one by one. We need to know where their hearts lie before we choose how to proceed with them.

I put myself at a distance of four or five meters and keep my railgun ready to shred any or all of them should things go sideways.

When Brice’s pair return with Geeslin’s body portions, he directs them to pack seismic charges into the chest cavity, haul him back over by the rocks, and detonate everything. It’s not a pretty sight, seeing bits of orange suit, a deformed helmet, and a haze of frozen, red crystals dispersing into the void from the spot where a man’s body lay just moments before. At least there’s enough evidence left to corroborate the industrial accident story Parker and her people will tell. If Geeslin was just another worker bee killed on the job, it’s likely the request for a replacement would be the last official mention ever to be made. Being an MSS snitch, anything was possible.

I comm link to Chikere. “Has Blair departed with her contact yet?”

“Nope.”

I ask, “Have you seen anything on your radar we should be worried about?”

“Nothing unusual,” he says. “As far as I can tell, no one is on to us yet.”

I comm link to Phil as I glance down at Nicky. “Any danger out there you two can pick up on?”

“Nothing we’re aware of,” says Phil.

“You’ve been checking?” I ask.

“You’re nervous,” says Phil. “You get controlling when you get nervous.”

“What about them?” I ask, meaning Parker and her four survivors. “Are they solid?”

“Geeslin was new on their crew,” says Phil. “He’d only been around a few months. No one was close to him.”

“No hard feelings, then?”

“Nothing they won’t get over.”

“They believed it when Parker told them he was an MSS snitch?” I ask.

“Proving you can read someone’s thoughts isn’t that hard,” says Phil. “Once you’re past that, the rest is easy.”

“Can they be trusted?”

“Most people are exactly who they appear to be,” says Phil. “You can’t be suspicious forever, Dylan.”

I don’t agree, yet don’t trouble myself to say it. Besides, Phil can read it from my mind if he decides he wants to know what I’m thinking.

“Brice,” I call. “It’s safe for you to come in. I want you and Phil to talk to the crew and get a feel for their thoughts about the war.”

“I suppose they’re my kind of people,” says Brice.

“Don’t let your guard down,” I tell him.

“You know,” says Brice. “I hadn’t even thought about that. Gee wiz. Thanks for the tip, Kane.”

I sigh.

“You do this to yourself,” says Phil.

“Brice was sarcastic before I met him.”

“I’m still on the line,” he says.

“I know,” I tell him.

“What are you going to do while Brice and I talk to the crew?” asks Phil.

“I’m going to have a word with Parker,” I tell him.

“Maybe I should hang back and let Phil finish up with this bunch,” says Brice.

“If they’re relaxed, they’re more likely to open up,” I say. “If they like you, Brice, they’re more likely to join us.”

“Join us,” asks Phil. “We can’t put them on the ship.”

“We need them here,” I say. “Them and a few million just like them.”

"What am I supposed to say to make them want to join us?" asks Brice. "Recruiting was never my thing. I'm a soldier, not a salesman."

I reach down and tap my d-pad. “Phil, you still have that report you wrote for me, the Gray and Trog history? Give them that. Tell them how you know it’s true. Nicky is proof enough of that. If they don’t care that by choosing not to fight they’ll be condemning all their successors to being bred down into stupid house pets and factory slaves, then there’s nothing that’ll convince them.”

“That should work,” agrees Brice.

"And when they get back to their barracks," I add, "tell them to share that document with everybody they know. Everyone needs to know what's coming. Everyone needs to make a choice."

“We got this,” says Brice.

“Stay on your toes, just in case, okay?”

“That’s never a problem.”

“Parker,” I call, “you mind if we talk?”

She comes back over to me.

Distance isn't necessary when you're having a conversation over the comm. Parker and I could have been standing among the others and opened a private comm and talked all we wanted, but it's hard to break the habits of a lifetime.

We’re a good twenty paces away from the others when Parker says, “What?”

“You understand why we had to handle this the way we did, don’t you?”

“Are you asking me to give you a pass on the guilt you feel about threatening to kill us?”

I take a long look at Parker as I think about that. She’s a good twenty years older than me. Her eyes are hard, yet not cruel. Like any human still alive, she’s seen the tough side of life. “No,” I admit, as much to myself as her, “I don’t feel any guilt over that at all.”

“What do you want?”

“Since you’re a no-bullshit type, I’ll get straight to it. I want to know what the mood is. Does earth have the stomach for more war? And if so, can I recruit you?”

Chapter 9

Parker laughs like I just told her the best joke she’s heard in months. But her laugh isn’t dark like Brice’s, and it’s not mean like something I might hear from Blair. And then I stop to wonder, has Blair ever laughed?

“What are you thinking?” asks Parker. “You’ll Shanghai my crew, and haul us off to fight in the rebel alliance like in some old movie? Blow up the Death Star and save the galaxy?”

"The solar system is blowing up around us, and everybody thinks they're funny."

“I don’t think I’m funny,” says Parker. “I’m just trying to get through the day.”

“Fine.” I look down at my d-pad and start searching for the file Phil sent. “I’m fishing for good people who will pick up a weapon and join the revolution when the time comes.”

“You’re a romantic,” she guesses.

“You were pretty straightforward ten minutes ago. I thought you were the no-bullshit type. And now we’re dancing around the words. I’m not trying to sell you on this. If you’re not interested, just say so, and we’ll be done with it.”

I’m still searching my d-pad, and she asks, “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a report to send you.”

“Propaganda?” she asks.

“The real deal,” I tell her. I point at Nicky and Phil. “You know what Phil can do. You ever wonder what a telepathic person could learn from a Gray?”

“Lies?” she asks.

“It’s complicated to explain,” I say, “but this Gray can’t lie to Phil.” I find the report, make a link to Parker’s d-pad and send it over. Everything’s in that file. Gray history. Trog history. How we came to be in possession of a Gray and why I believe every word of it is true.”

Parker downloads a local copy of the file, and when she’s done, she takes a long look at me and says, “You’re that guy, aren’t you?”

“Kane?” I ask. “That guy?”

“The MSS major who turned traitor and had all those assault ships blown out of the sky?”

“Is that the story the MSS sold you?” I ask.

“You’re him?”

“I am. But what you need to know is that everything the MSS tells you is bullshit.”

“Everybody knows that,” she says.

“Then you have to know that story is a lie.”

“It’s the only story we heard about the Arizona Massacre.”

“Whether you want to believe it or not,” I tell her, “I was captaining one of those Arizona Class assault ships that day—”

“I heard you were a commissar.”

“I was,” I admit. “We mutinied shortly after takeoff, killed the Korean officers, and led the attack against the Trog cruisers bombing the shipyards. After we destroyed the cruisers, we escaped to join the Free Army."

“Is that true?” she asks.

“I can give you the full story with all the details at some point, if that’s what you want to hear, but right now, you can believe me or not. This Arizona Massacre thing they pinned on me was just the MSS scapegoating me for more of their incompetence. I was on the ground in Arizona that day, all those ships sitting out in the open, just asking for the Trogs to bomb them from outer space. We had over a thousand warships there. Even with our inexperience we had enough power to win the war right then and there, but the MSS admirals ruined it. Most of those ships were destroyed before they ever left the ground. The MSS leadership is a bunch of idiots whose only talent was sucking up to their Gray masters. We never should have lost the war with the Trogs.”

“You like getting on your soapbox,” says Parker.

“Most of my friends died that day,” I snap. “Of those who lived, most of them died fighting Grays and Trogs out here in space. We’re still trying to win this war for the sake of every human,” I point at the earth, “down there. So forgive me for ranting about it.”

“We’ve all lost people,” she tells me. “Some of us have lost everyone.”

“Sorry. I wasn’t challenging you to a pity contest. Every person on earth has suffered at the hands of the Grays and the MSS. These Trogs that invaded, you don’t know this, but they’re a race not that different than us. The Grays enslaved them, too.”

“That’s what people say,” she says.

“They’re just a different bunch of Grays than the ones who conquered earth. That’s the worse thing about this whole war, it was never us against the Trogs. It was always Gray against Gray. Trogs and humans are pawns in a Gray power struggle. That’s it.”

“You may be wasting your time,” says Parker. “To answer your question. I think most people have given up hope. I mean, how many deaths can a person endure before they can’t do it anymore?”

“You’ve given up?” I ask.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But most people have?” I ask.

“When the Grays came, I was just starting college,” says Parker. “It was a different world in those days. Life was a valuable thing then, every life. I’d never personally known a person who’d died before that. All of my grandparents were still alive, and even my great-grandmother was still around. When it started, a lot of people were killed in the siege, and a lot starved when the climate turned cold because of all the ash thrown into the upper atmosphere by the railgun strikes. By then, I knew people who’d died, mostly acquaintances, but over time, there were more and more, and they were closer and closer. When everything finally stabilized, and the MSS was running the earth, people were still dying, either through disease and starvation, or from being shipped off for the construction projects. All through it, people tolerated the deaths, because they thought things couldn't get any worse. And then the war with the Trogs came, and now we've lost a whole generation—maybe two. There's nobody left on earth anymore except the very young and very old. It's rare to see people older than fifteen and younger than fifty. Even up here, my crew, we're all over fifty. A few of us are over sixty. And that's not unusual."

“Where are you going with this?” I ask.

“The suffering on earth has been worsening for thirty years, but now the war is over, and things are finally becoming better. People don’t have hope, but at least the bleeding has stopped. We’re a defeated people, Kane. That’s what I’m telling you. We’re a hopeless, defeated people. You know what most people on earth believe?”

“What?”

“They think we’re the last. They think when the children alive now die out, there’ll be no more humans. This is the end.”

“And you believe that, too?” I ask.

“My husband died ten years ago. Our daughter and her husband died in the war. My grandbabies starved. I don’t have a stake in it anymore. I'm just trying to keep my crew alive for as long as I can. I can't think about the world, and I don't want to."

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I guess I’d hoped things were better down here.”

“I don’t know what kind of spaceships you rebels have left,” says Parker, “but you should stock them up, point them at the farthest star, and fly away from here.”

“I’ve done that already,” I say. “I’ve been to another star.”

“Why’d you come back?”

“I did what I was sent to do.”

“What’s that?”

“You won’t believe it.”

"Does it matter?" she asks.

“We destroyed a depot to cut the Trog’s supply route.”

“Like a road?” she asks. “I thought space was open and free.”

“Yeah,” I say, “but it has to do with the range their ships can travel between stars. There are only so many direct routes you can take. If you make one hop unavailable, you break the link.”

She nods. “So you blew up a gas station.”

“And destroyed the fleet that was there refueling.”

“A fleet?” Parker is skeptical.

“More than thirty cruisers.”

“We shouldn’t have sent all our ships out there to do that,” she says. “You should have stayed here to fight the war.”

“It wasn’t all of our ships,” I say. “It was just one.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“I’m not,” I insist. “We had some technologically advanced ships, and it was all we needed to destroy their fleet. I was the captain of one of them.”

“If that’s true,” she says, “why are the Trogs in charge here? Why not use your super-special ships to win the war?”

“We only ever had two,” I say. “The Trogs were able to destroy our manufacturing facility before we were able to build more.”

“Two’s all you need, right? If they’re as powerful as you say.”

“We don’t have two anymore. One is off on a mission and I don’t know when it’s coming back. Mine was destroyed in a battle out by Jupiter.”

“So, no ship.”

“No.”

"Too bad," says Parker, "maybe with some ships like that shooting the Trog cruisers out of the sky, you could give earth enough hope to try and fight again. Without your ship, what have you got—me? My crew? A network of insurgents? That’s not enough.”

“What if we could find a way to give you hope?” I ask. “You and all the people of earth?”

“Real hope?” she asks. “Or propaganda?”

“Real,” I say. “I don’t want anyone to risk their lives for something I don’t think will work.”

“Maybe,” she says. “I don’t know what would be enough, but I suppose if you could pull something off, something big enough that the people of earth could look up and think they had a real chance, then yeah, maybe hope would be enough to make them want to get back in the war.”

“If everybody thinks they’re going to die anyway,” I say. “If they think they’re seeing the last of the humans, then why not fight? What have you got to lose?”

“What have you got to lose?” Parker laughs. “You might want to work on something more inspirational than that.”

Chapter 10

“Don’t be so glum,” Phil tells me.

We’re in the cramped hold of the stealth scout, slowly making our escape. Brice is leaning against the wall again, sleeping, or pretending to—again. Phil and Nicky are sitting across from me. I feel like I’m on stage. “I’m just thinking.”

“You thought it was going to be easy,” says Phil.

“No.” Maybe. I don’t know. Phil might be right. At least a little bit.

“You had to know the first earth humans you came across weren’t going to drop everything and join up, right?”

“Phil, are you trying to make me feel worse about this?”

“I want to make sure we’re both being realistic.”

“I’m realistic, Phil. Okay?”

“It’s not the end. You know that, right?”

“Others might respond differently. There have to be cadres of revolutionaries all over earth, just waiting for a chance to strike. They’re the people we need to find.”

“Phil, you’re patronizing me now. I know you’d prefer to take this setback as proof we’re wasting our time on this effort and we should head out to the colonies instead.”

“I do prefer that,” says Phil. “But we’ve settled this question. Now we’re making the best of it.”

“Yippee,” says Brice, not bothering to open his eyes, or even fake the enthusiasm.

I say, “Don’t you start, Brice. You and I talked about this, too. You and I don’t have a choice. We are what we are.”

“You shouldn’t ever listen to me,” he says. “I’m too jaded to have valid opinions.”

I groan. “You guys piss me off, sometimes.”

Brice goes back to pretending he's asleep.

Phil looks away and loses himself in his thoughts.

I let it all lie for a bit, but it won’t leave my mind. Without a plan, I’m lost. “I don’t like pinning all of our hopes on Blair.”

“It’s all we have at the moment,” says Phil. “Besides, she’s not just looking for traitors in the MSS. She’s working to secure the intel on all the seditious groups on earth they’re tracking. Those are the people who’ll join up for another war.”

“And if Blair produces nothing?” I ask.

“We could always land in Omaha or something,” chuckles Brice, “and ask anyone who passes by if they want to join the revolution.”

“Why are you being such an asshole?” I ask.

Brice finally goes to the trouble to open his eyes and join us. “I thought everyone was past speculating on the nature of my being.”

“You inspire us to explore,” I say.

“That makes me feel good.”

“I doubt it.”

“You should,” says Brice.

“You two were made for each other,” says Phil.

“He doesn’t appreciate my tactical genius,” replies Brice.

“That’s because he doesn’t like it when people outshine him,” says Phil.

“How did this turn into you two against me?” I ask.

“I thought we were talking about my tactical genius,” taunts Brice.

“My god,” I shout. “Do you have something you need to say? Or do you need to get something off your chest?”

“Just the answer to your problems,” says Brice.

“The answer?” I ask.

“You know, the big plan to make this whole revolution work.”

The sparring stops. I’m ready to listen. “Tell me.”

“That battle station we passed on the way in,” says Brice, “the one we did the fly-by on.”

“Yeah?” I prompt.

Brice nods at Nicky and Phil. “They said there was just one clan of Grays running the show there, right?

Phil confirms with a nod.

“A weak clan,” says Brice. “How many Grays were there on the station? A dozen? Two dozen?”

“Something like that,” says Phil.

“And Trogs?” asks Brice. “A few thousand?”

“Probably not that many,” says Phil.

“And how many humans?” asks Brice.

“We’re not sure,” answers Phil.

“Doesn’t matter anyway,” replies Brice. “The thing we’re all missing here is that we can win this war if we change tactics and use the Grays’ weaknesses against them. We saw it on the Potato, and we saw the answer out in 61 Cygni. Trogs are slaves. They live by an honor code that keeps them in chains as much as anything else. We keep acting like we need to kill 6,000 Grays or seventy thousand Trogs. We don’t. We just need to kill a few dozen Grays on that one battle station.”

“Not exactly,” says Phil.

"Not to win the war," says Brice, "but if we commando in and take out the Gray leadership on that one station, then we acquire a few thousand Trogs for free, and maybe humans on board see what we'd done, and they join up. Suddenly our little army doubles in size."

“And maybe we can leverage that force into taking out the next smallest clan,” I guess. “That’s what you’re thinking, right?”

“Knock down the smallest domino first,” says Brice. “The next one in line falls easier.”

“It’s not that easy,” says Phil. “They have the moon base. They still have more than sixty cruisers. They have Arizona Class ships now.”

"No," I agree. "It's not that easy, yet Brice's idea might be the key. We might be able to come up with a plan that'll work."

“See?” says Brice. “I told you. Tactical genius.”

I comm up to Chikere. “Turn the ship around. We’re going to be staying in system for a while.”

“How long?” he asks. “I’ve only got fuel for two or three weeks.”

“Maybe all of it,” I tell him. “Send a message to Bird and tell him what we’re up to.”

Chapter 11

It takes us thirteen days to map out the hierarchy of the Gray clans controlling the battle stations while sitting in the cramped all-purpose rear compartment of Chikere’s scout ship. Thirteen days of radioed requests that we return to Iapetus. Thirteen days of worry, orbiting among our enemies.

We watched cruisers come in to refuel, a squadron at a time, all served by tenders up from earth, meeting in geosynchronous orbit high over an empty stretch of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When we were able to sneak in close enough, Phil and Nicky snooped the details of their clan structures.

We finished our mission with dozens of orbits around the moon, learning what we could of troop strengths and deployment, as well as Gray clan organization. According to Phil and Nicky, they guessed Grays, numbering in the thousands, were on the moon, all in one area. The Grays were hiding out in the subterranean structures beneath the densest concentration of railgun batteries, the place where the original Gray conquerors landed all those years ago and started building the massive guns they’d eventually use to subdue the earth.

Nearly as good as the rest of it, Parker managed to get to a radio, a rare find in a Gray-controlled system. Lucky for us, the MSS still depends on them. So they’re around, just not widely used or their existence common knowledge. The upshot, Parker is in. Her people are spreading Phil’s report to all the workers on Rodman station, giving humanity a glimpse into their future.

On the flip side, we also intercepted a radio message from Blair, her second, beamed toward one of the relay satellites for eventual delivery to Bird. She'd already heard about the history document circulating, and she was livid, claiming it could throw off her meticulous plan.

“Every minute we spent there was worth it,” I tell Bird.

After two hours of sitting behind his desk in the bowels of Iapetus’s tunnel system, kicking around ideas for mounting an attack, Bird yawns and stands up to stretch. Phil and I stay in our seats with Nicky standing between us. Brice remains on his feet, leaning against a wall.

“What are you thinking?” I ask.

“It’s not enough,” answers Bird. “I don’t doubt you can find a way in and kill the Grays running Rodman station, but after that, everything falls apart. You don’t know their Trogs will follow you. They might all kill themselves for having failed their masters. Even if they don’t, how effective can they be at fighting? Will they defend the station? How would you get them to another station to mount the next attack?”

“I agree,” I say. “I don’t think one commando raid on one battle station will turn the tide of the war. What I think we get out of it is a template for success. We’ve been fighting this war all wrong since day one. When the Trogs arrived in system, our Grays fought them using the same tactics they’ve always used, only they plugged humans into the cannon-fodder role instead of Trogs. The SDF and MSS fought the war, and lost using Gray tactics. With few exceptions, we’re doing the same. We need to stop fighting their war their way and attack them asymmetrically, pitting our strengths against their weaknesses.”

“Asymmetrically?” asks Bird. “You gonna blow buzzwords up my ass now?”

“Sit down,” I ask. “Please. You’re tired. You’re stressed. This is the first time I’ve seen you this way. What’s going on?”

Bird slumps in his chair and gathers his strength. He says, “We can’t load all the stasis pods onto the cruiser.”

“It’s big enough, isn’t it?” I ask.

“The math doesn’t work out,” says Brice. “Once we calculate the quantity of fuel we need to fly the cruiser out to the nearest colony, it gets pretty simple. For every kilogram of payload, we need to add over a hundred kilograms of hydrogen to power the reactors.”

“What about reactor optimization?” I ask. “Like your engineers did with the Turd II? What about drive array optimization?”

“They’re working with the drive array as best they can,” says Bird, “but without real-world tests, there’s only so much we can do.”

“And you can’t do the tests,” guesses Phil, “because the grav signature emitted from driving a cruiser that size around the solar system might attract attention.”

“That,” agrees Bird, “or a mistake in the calculations might lead to the ship breaking up mid-jump."

“And you’re already loading it with pods,” I recall.

“And it’s the only cruiser we have,” says Bird.

“Waiting for the freighters to haul the load,” says Phil, recounting an earlier conversation we all had, “will take decades.”

“On the reactor optimizations,” says Bird, “again, there’s only so much we can do. We don’t have the human or computational resources here to optimize reactors of that size. Our engineers and physicists have done all their work on reactors that fit in our freighters, and those reactors aren’t much bigger than the one in the Turd II. On the larger reactors, we’re on new ground. We have no way of knowing whether the theory behind any potential change will have catastrophic consequences.”

“What have you been doing, then?” I ask.

“Playing the odds,” says Bird. “The changes we felt highly confident in were made, but the more pods we load, the less tolerant of the risk I get.” He rubs his eyes with his palms. “I haven’t been sleeping.”

“Sometimes life just deals a crap hand,” I say. “The way I see it, accept your choices. You send the cruiser with what you can load, and let the others wait on the freighters.”

“That’ll take years and years,” says Bird.

“How many pods are we talking about?” I ask.

“Nearly four thousand,” he answers.

“The way I see it,” says Brice, “it’s simple. We postpone the war, or put those four thousand at risk?”

“When hostilities reignite,” says Bird, “Iapetus will be targeted. That’s inevitable. Those four thousand will almost surely die. They'll never even know what happened. Their last memories will be going into the pod and putting their trust in me and my people to save them.”

“We can’t postpone,” I say, “because our window of opportunity won’t stay open that long. The Trogs could set up a new supply depot. They could start sending reinforcements here. If we're going to fight, we need to do it now. Or we give up, and all go to the colonies."

“Exactly,” says Bird, “and abandon all the billions still on earth.”

“That’s the only question we need to answer,” I say. “Are we going to fight or run, that’s it. Once we decide, the rest follows from there.”

“What about the four thousand pods we can’t ship?” asks Brice. “How do you pick who stays and who goes?”

“Most of those going are already loaded,” I guess, glancing at Bird for confirmation.

He gives me a nod and I continue, “There’s little to decide, which is too bad.”

“Too bad?” asks Phil. “How’s that?”

“If we’re going to be stuck with four thousand,” I deduce, “and we’re going back to war, we’d be better served pulling those people from their pods and putting a weapon in their hands. Better yet, if we’d loaded the cruiser in reverse order according to how valuable someone might be to the revolution here... ”

“That’s exactly what I did,” says Bird.

“What?” Phil asks. “You knew from the beginning this was going to happen?”

“The cruiser’s payload was always going to depend on how much weight we could strip out of it,” says Bird. “We hoped we’d be able to lighten it enough. Unfortunately, my engineers guessed early on we wouldn’t be able to transport everyone. There was no way to know how many we'd have left. Within a week of capturing the cruiser, I had a committee of my officers prioritizing the loading queue.”

“So what we have left in the pods,” I ask, “they’re the best soldiers we could hope to get out of the bunch?”

“Not just soldiers,” says Bird. “We have pilots, engineers, medical personnel—backups for any skillset where we’re running a little thin. We even have some of Gustafson’s people in case we need some experienced bugheads like you two.”

“How many?” I ask.

“Eleven,” answers Bird.

“How many more are already loaded?” I ask.

“Nearly forty,” he says. “I’d have to check the records.”

“How many of Gustafson’s bugheads have already gone to the colonies?” I ask.

“The people who’ve already gone,” says Bird, “are enough to continue our efforts out in the colonies. I hate to use the word—everyone still here is expendable. We don’t want to lose any of these people, but that’s the truth of it.”

“We need Gustafson’s people to be taken off the cruiser,” I tell him. “We’ll need every one of them if we’re going to make this war work out for us.”

“What are you thinking?” asks Phil.

“The sticking point in our plan of going commando into a battle station and taking out the Gray leadership has been that we only have one Phil. You can communicate effectively with the surviving Grays and work out the surrender of their Trogs. In case the Grays all die, you can communicate with the Trogs—”

“You can communicate with Trogs as well as I can, now,” says Phil.

“What I’m getting to,” I tell him, “is we need to bring Gustafson’s bugheads up to speed, putting them with you and Nicky until they can make that connection with the Grays. You and I are no longer the failure points in the plan. We can then launch separate, simultaneous raids on every station and the moon.”

“I like that better than your domino theory,” says Brice, “but our problem is four-fold. The Grays control the battle stations, they control earth through the MSS, they control the moon with its heavy railguns specifically built to blast earth cities into dust, and the have the fleet. Taking control of the battle stations won’t do us any good. First, the Trogs have already proven that our battle stations aren’t powerful enough to stand against a concerted attack by sixty Trog cruisers. Worse still, without help from earth, we won’t be able to resupply the stations. It’d only be a matter of time before they fell. If you could overcome those two problems, the Trogs still control the moon base and there’s nothing to stop them from bombing the earth again, or even the battle stations, until we surrender again.”

“Again,” mutters Bird. “Surrender is getting damned old.”

“We won’t surrender again,” I tell them. “With Gustafson’s bugheads, and another four thousand fighters, we can mount a surprise attack on the battle stations and win. We can bomb the moon base from the battle stations if we have to, and take out the big guns.”

“Lots of people will die,” says Phil.

“Fewer than if the Grays up there start bombing cities on earth again,” I argue. “If we take out those guns, the moon becomes irrelevant. It’ll take years to rebuild.”

“Months,” says Brice.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “That takes two of the four pillars of Trog power off the table. If the battle stations fall, and earth realizes for the first time in more than a generation it doesn’t have a gun pointed at its head, there’s nothing to stop it from overthrowing the few Grays and Trogs on the planet.”

“Nothing but the MSS,” says Phil.

“If Blair does her job,” I say, as I look at Bird, “and doesn’t betray us.”

“Or just fuck it up,” adds Brice.

“What have you heard from her?” I ask.

“She’s on earth,” says Bird. “She’s safe. She’s establishing a network. No guarantees yet on what intel we’ll get or what she’ll be able to make happen.”

“What about Iapetus’s spy network on earth?” I ask. “Can we depend on them for anything?”

“We’re working that angle, too,” says Bird. “Iapetus never depended on them for anything outside of intel and candidate identification.”

“Candidate identification?” asks Brice.

“The people they kidnapped from earth to join the colony here,” says Bird.

“Do you think they can become an effective insurgency?” I ask.

“We don’t know yet.”

“If we take the battle stations and the moon,” I say, “and the earth, then it’s only the fleet and their resupply bases left to contend with.”

“The fleet and the supply bases are enough,” says Bird. “That’s how this war started. It’s all they had when they attacked. A fleet a little smaller than the one they have now—about the same size as ours—plus a full-strength moon base, full-strength battle stations, and the industrial power of an entire planet.”

“All under dysfunctional Gray control,” I counter. “Earth can go into high gear manufacturing Arizona Class ship—”

“You’re overestimating the efficiency of humans,” says Bird. “I don’t think we’ll be able to make an instant change from being a planet full of slave people who don’t like one another into a species united against a common enemy.”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Brice. “The first thing the Trog cruisers will do is blast every shipyard into dust. By the end of the first week, we won’t be able to build another Arizona Class ship until the war is over.”

“We can distribute manufacturing,” I suggest. “Other countries at war have done it with great success.”

“With an organized government and a motivated population,” says Bird. “I’m not sure we have either of those.”

“Unless we co-opt the MSS,” I say. “They can be our organizational tool.”

“The MSS will never go to work for us,” says Brice. “At the first chance, a general will take control and then it’ll be one coup after another until some strongman consolidates enough power to stay at the top of the hill. Then things will be just as bad as they always were, only we’ll be working directly for a North Korean dictator instead of a North Korean manager who’s working for the Grays.”

“We can cross that bridge when we get there,” I say.

"If we don't plan for it," says Bird, "then Brice is right. That's what we'll get, and the earth won't be any better off than it was before."

“Then we need to plan for it,” I submit. “I don’t know how yet, but we need to find a way to keep the MSS organizational structure in place while cutting off the head, just like we’re doing with the Grays and the Trogs. And we must find a way to weaken the Trog fleet enough that we can fight them off with the battle stations we have, long enough to give ourselves some breathing room to build up a fleet of Arizona Class ships. I know we don’t have all the answers right now—we’re close. We can do this. What do you say, Bird? It’s your decision. Should we ship out to the colonies to save the last four thousand in the pods, waiting for years to see if there’s any earth left to save, or are we fighting with what we have?”

It’s a difficult call for Bird. “It feels like I’m condemning them, yet four thousand lives isn’t a steep price to pay if we win.”

“And another four thousand won’t matter, if we lose another three or four billion on earth,” says Brice. “Rounding error.” And then he laughs.

“We’ll do it,” says Bird. “We’ll wake them and give them the bad news.”

Chapter 12

“Peace,” I say. “That’s how we end the war.”

“Did you just read that off a fortune cookie?” asks Brice.

Taking a second to look at Phil, Bird, and Brice in turn, I tell them, “If we can successfully take control of the battle stations and the earth, and neutralize the moon, we might kill half the Grays in the system. Three thousand dead. We might take thirty thousand Trog prisoners in the deal. That’s a fifty-percent loss.” I turn to Phil, “Earth armies crumble under those kinds of losses. What will the Grays do? Are they resilient enough to take those kinds of casualties?”

“Not to mention all the cruisers they’ve lost since the war started,” says Brice. “More than half of everything they’ve sent here.”

“In total,” I guess, “they’ll be down by what, eighty percent, since the war started? With no chance of reinforcement.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” says Bird, glancing at Brice to make it clear he’s on Brice’s side of that argument. “But maybe we can do more.”

“What?” I ask.

“Remember those nukes you collected from Guam?” asks Bird.

I do. Of course. We tried to drop them on Trinity Base with zero success.

"We have over a hundred,” he says.

“Were there that many there?” I ask.

“Where are they now?” asks Brice. Clearly the better question.

“Some of them are here,” says Bird.

“Why?” I ask.

Bird doesn't answer that question, but I see a flash of old despair on his face that makes me guess at why he doesn't answer us. It's not good. "Most of them are stored on another of Saturn's moons."

“All thermonuclear devices?” I ask.

Bird nods. “Hydrogen bombs. Most of US manufacture. We have nearly twenty old, high-yield soviet nukes and more of the B61s like you took out to 61 Cygni. Those all have yields in the megaton range. We scrounged up thirty-some tactical nukes with yields of just fractions of a kiloton.”

"A nuke can destroy one of those cruisers," says Brice, "if we could get it close enough. However, I guarantee you, that'll only work once. Back out at 61 Cygni, I don't know if the Grays guessed how lethal those bombs were that we dropped, or if they just got lucky when they pulsed their grav fields. We didn't score a single hit, not on the base and not on any of those cruisers."

“How are you planning to use the nukes?” I ask.

“Same tactic,” says Bird, “only we drop them on the resupply bases here in the solar system.”

Brice shakes his head.

“If we hit the bases when there aren’t any cruisers there to pulse a g field,” says Bird, “then we can score some hits.”

“Okay,” I agree. “That could work, but you’d have to come in close to do it. If you dropped the bombs on a ballistic arc, the gunners on those bases would probably shoot them out of the sky. If you have nukes mounted on chemical rockets, you’ll probably get the same result.”

"Use the Turd II," says Bird. "You could dive bomb the base using your grav lens for protection. Our engineers could set the bunker busters to detonate a minute or two after impact, so you'd have time to get out before the blast."

“That could work,” I say, as I glance to Brice for confirmation.

“And a million things could go wrong,” says Brice, because it’s obvious and he’s right.

“That’s just war,” says Bird. “It’s what we all signed up for.”

Brice shrugs his surrender.

“And by hitting the bases,” I guess, “you’re thinking we can knock out the Trogs’ supply infrastructure here.”

Nodding, Bird says, "It won't neutralize their fleet immediately. It leaves them with only one load of ammo and no way to refuel.”

“I think they’ll work out the H problem,” I say. “No doubt they’ve got H skimmers running on Jupiter right now. We just haven’t found them yet. But taking out their ammo supply makes the cruisers useless. Slowing down their refueling supply does hamper the fleet in a major way. At the very least, it buys us time on earth to build some ships to counter them.”

“It could force them to negotiate,” says Bird.

“If we’re going to talk peace with the Grays,” says Phil, “it has to be me and Nicky who communicate with them. Nicky can tell them what we did at 61 Cygni—all of it. They’ll have to believe her, and then they’ll understand that they’re cut off with a fleet of Trog rebels blocking their only escape.”

“They’ll start doing the math,” I say. “They may think they can win this war even without reinforcements, but stinging from a fresh fifty-percent loss, the Grays will have to be thinking they might lose everything here. They’ll start thinking about ways to get back to their home world and rebuilding their strength, or fighting the Trog revolution that might arrive before they do. They might not make peace with us, yet an armistice might work out. Or they might tell us to go to hell and make a threat to come back and kick our ass but leave anyway. Whatever they do, I think our odds are good we can bring the war to an end.”

“It’s worth a try,” says Bird. “You have to remember, when the Grays first showed up in our system they had no interest in talking to us. They gave us their demands, and they dropped railgun slugs on the planet until we surrendered.”

"Back then," I counter, "we didn't have the ability to speak to them as equals."

“They won’t see us as equals, now,” says Bird.

“Doesn’t matter,” I argue. “We’ll have plenty of bugheads who can talk to them in their language by then, and we have Nicky. We can assert equality, by force of arms. They’ll listen to that.”

“I don’t think anybody has to do anything,” says Brice.

“We can give them an incentive,” I say. “When we capture the battle stations, maybe we don’t kill all the Grays. Maybe we kill enough of them that the weaker ones in the pods surrender. We could do the same down on earth. We might end the battle with a few thousand Gray prisoners. Offering to return those alive would be enough to bring the others to the negotiating table.”

“You just wanna let two thousand Grays go?” asks Brice. “For a chance to talk to a bunch of Ticks who won’t listen anyway?”

“The number of Grays doesn’t matter,” I argue. “Not militarily. It’s the number of Trogs and the number of cruisers that matter. That’s their power. If a cruiser has ten Grays on it or a thousand, it makes no difference. The Grays are valuable to them and worthless to us. Killing them neither gains nor loses us anything. So trading them for a ticket at the negotiating table is a good deal for us.”

“Not completely,” says Brice. “If those cruisers out there are underhanded, one might deduce that they don’t have enough Grays to target their guns effectively. Giving those Grays back to them makes their cruisers more powerful.”

“He’s right about that,” says Bird.

“Then we’ll figure something out,” I say. “We need to be able to talk to the Grays if we’re going to make this work.” I look around at them. “I think we have to try to make peace. I don’t see another way to win this. Do any of you?”

Chapter 13

When the meeting breaks up, Colonel Bird takes Phil to meet the bugheads on his staff. Bringing the bugheads up to speed on communicating effectively with the Grays is the lynchpin to making the whole plan work. Training needs to start immediately.

“Where are we going?” asks Brice as he walks beside me, letting me lead the way.

“I need to find Punjari,” I answer.

“I thought Punjari was with the cruiser, finishing up the repairs.”

“I heard he was here for a few days taking care of loose ends or something.”

“Why do we need to see him?” asks Brice.

“I need a reference.”

Brice laughs. “You applying for a job?”

“No. You and I need to modify our suits.”

“How’s that?” he asks.

“If this works out like we plan,” I say, “then I’m guessing we’ll be stuck in a face-to-face powwow with the Grays and their Ghost Trogs. Remember when we put the deal together with Prolific Man Killer, he wouldn’t sign on until he met us face to face. I’m guessing that’s a behavior passed down to him from the Grays. Tradition or something. I mean, it makes sense, right? Who would want to make a treaty with somebody they’ve never met in person?”

“Why don't you ask Phil or Nicky? The Tick’s gotta know, right?”

“Phil can’t hear about this.”

“Phil already knows we’re meeting up with the Grays at the end of this.” Brice reaches over and raps his knuckles against my skull. “You okay in there?”

I dodge away. “I’m fine. Phil can’t know what we’re up to with suit modifications.”

“Why’s that?”

“If Phil knows, then Nicky knows. If Nicky knows, then the Grays we meet up with will be tipped off. I don’t want them to know anything about it.”

“So, whatever you’re keeping secret here, Phil can read it from your mind, right?”

“I know how to hide things from him now,” I say. “It’s like hiding things from the Grays, only harder.”

“And me?” asks Brice. “Phil’s a nosy bastard. He can read me, right?”

“He’s not as bad as you think,” I say. “But just to be on the safe side, avoid Phil. And the hard part will be when you’re around him, concentrate on other things.”

“Like baseball?” asks Brice. “You’re kidding, right?”

“We’ve got plenty to keep our attention. It shouldn’t be hard.”

“So what is this I’m supposed to keep a secret?” asks Brice.

“Prolific Man Killer is a warrior,” I say. “He let us meet him with our weapons in hand.”

“They had weapons, too, if I remember right.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “We all did. My point is that I don’t think the Grays will let us meet them with our weapons in hand. For starters, they don’t live by the same honor code they impose on the Trogs. Besides, we won’t be meeting them from a position of strength. I don’t think they’ll see it that way. I think the strongest card we’ll be playing is human unpredictability. Despite what I’m sure will be our relative weakness, we’ll want to sell our unpredictability as the reason we can beat their fleet. If they believe that, then they’re not going to want a couple of unpredictable monkeys with guns in the same room as them.”

“Makes sense in a backward kind of way. So what is it you’re planning?”

“I promised myself a long time ago I’d never kneel to a Gray again and I’d never face one without a weapon in my hand.”

“I think I like where this is going,” says Brice. “You want to rig our suits so we can sneak a little lethal something along in case we find ourselves meeting the Grays and they take our weapons first.”

“Exactly,” I say, “only I’m thinking a lot of lethal somethings. We need to brainstorm with Punjari and anybody he has who’s good with weapons and suit mechanics so we can be prepared for whatever they try to pull with us.”

“I suppose we can try,” says Brice.

Chapter 14

After an hour of tracking, we catch up with Punjari in the hangar bay, where he’s ensuring the right items are loaded onto a waiting freighter.

“You got a minute?” I ask.

Punjari nods as he scans a list on his d-pad. Once he reaches the bottom, he looks up and smiles broadly. “You’re back. Finally.”

“We did a bit more scouting while we were out,” I say. “We’re working on a plan for the war. How are things going with the cruiser?”

“Three more weeks.” He wobbles his head and adds, “Always three more weeks.”

“Are you heading out with this freighter when it goes?”

Punjari shakes his head. “Why do you ask?”

“Bird will want to meet with you and probably any project leads you have on hand.”

“About?” he asks.

“I’ll let Bird summarize it for you,” I say. “Nothing’s set in stone yet, but I’m guessing Bird is going to be meeting with his officers to work through the details.” I look over to Brice. “What do you think? Is Bird on board?”

“Yup,” he says. “Unless someone talks him out of it, which I don’t think is likely, we’ll go with what was discussed.”

“There are probably improvements to be made,” I say. “So until Bird decides for sure exactly what we’re doing, I don’t want to spread rumors.”

Punjari is cautious, but goes on to ask, “What do you want with me, then?”

I say, “I need to know if you have some creative engineers who can make some modifications to our suits.”

That piques his curiosity. “You realize that I’ll need to know what you hope to achieve if I agree to provide any valuable input, right?”

I look at Brice, and he shrugs. Turning back to Punjari, I say, “Me, Brice, and a few others might have to meet face to face with the Grays and Trogs at some point.”

“Like you did with Prolific Man Killer out at 61 Cygni?” Punjari guesses. “Diplomacy? Are you thinking we can end this war with a peace treaty?”

I’m not sure how much to say. “Well— ”

“What’s changed?” he asks, letting excitement wind him up. “What happened on your trip to earth?”

I raise a hand to stop him. “You’re heading down the wrong path. Nothing special happened. The bottom line is we gathered some intel we think we can turn to our advantage. We believe it’ll help us win back the battle stations, earth, and the moon.”

“Probably not the moon,” says Brice, “although we think we can neutralize it.”

“We don’t have a way yet to defeat the Trog fleet,” I say. “Remember, this is all just between us, for now.”

Punjari confirms with a nod.

“If we can pull it off,” I say, “and I think we do it in a lightning-strike move—”

“Drama,” mutters Brice.

I ignore him. “If we can do it quickly enough, I think we might be able to contact the Grays and sue for peace, which means a face-to-face meeting.”

“And you think they won’t allow you to meet them with your weapons in hand,” guesses Punjari.

“Exactly,” I say.

“And you don’t trust them,” he guesses again.

“That’s right,” I say.

“You trusted Prolific Man Killer,” says Punjari. “You carried weapons in to meet him, but there were so many Trogs there you wouldn’t have made it out alive if he’d decided to have you killed. So you had to trust him.”

“Yeah,” I admit, “that’s right. This is different.” I glance at Brice, because I know he’s not going to agree with what I say next. “The Trogs are like us in a lot of ways. They’re slaves, yet they have an honor code they live by. Grays are evil to the core.”

“That’s probably not true,” says Punjari. “They’re living by a set of rules that precludes treating humans and Trogs as equals. You may not realize that in their system of beliefs they’re probably acting morally.”

"And that's exactly it," I tell him. "In their system of beliefs, humans aren't their equals. So we need to take steps to protect ourselves if things go bad when we meet them."

“You know it’ll probably be just like when you met with Prolific Man Killer, only more so. The Grays won’t take a chance with you. You might be surrounded by hundreds of armed Trogs, and with any move you make, you risk being killed.”

“If it comes to that,” I say, “my only goal will be to kill as many of them as I can.”

Punjari looks at Brice. “And you’re okay with this, going on a suicide mission?”

“They’re all suicide missions,” he says.

Punjari frowns. “That sounds like something you’ve practiced.”

“I’ve had lots of opportunities,” says Brice. “To answer your question, I’m with Kane on this. I know meeting the Grays is a gamble that probably won’t work out, but if it does, we win big. If it doesn’t, we only lose a few lives. Most of all, we need to kill Nicky.”

“Nicky?” asks Punjari.

“She and Phil have to come with us,” I say, “to facilitate communication. However, we can’t let Nicky fall into Gray hands. She knows too much about us. About our bases and colonies.”

“Then you shouldn’t take her at all,” says Punjari. “In fact, none of you should go. You all know too much.”

“Hence the enhancements,” I say.

“You want to make a suicide bomb,” says Punjari. “That’s what you want to build into your suits.”

"Only as a last resort," I tell him, though the truth of it is that this is the first time I've thought through the argument this deeply, and I see he's right. Brice and I both need to be wired with suicide explosives. "Ideally, we'd like to have weapons we can hide in our suits, so we'll still be armed after they take our railguns and disruptors."

“If they’re smart,” says Punjari, “they’ll take any extra magazines you’re carrying, as well as your cal packs and your H packs. Maybe even your helmets.”

“If they’re smart enough to take the rest,” asks Brice, “then why not our suits, too?”

I laugh.

“What?” asks Punjari.

“That pretty much leaves us with C4 suppositories.”

Brice grimaces.

“If it’s the only choice we have,” I say.

“It doesn’t have to be unpleasant,” says Punjari. “We could probably snake a good deal of C4 into your lower intestines. We'd just need to find a way to detonate it."

Brice doesn’t like the idea at all.

“As a last resort,” I say. “But what else can we do? Can we rig up an internal H source in our suits in case they take our H packs?”

“That wouldn’t be hard,” says Punjari. “I have a guy who could make the change in a few hours.”

“Will it be reliable?” asks Brice.

“We have some time to test it,” says Punjari. “Nothing we’re talking about is happening soon, right?”

“We have to ship the cruiser off to the colonies before we make any offensive moves,” I answer. “I don’t know how long it’ll take to put all the pieces in place. It could be anywhere from four to twelve weeks out, but I’d bet on four. Are you going with the cruiser when it bubbles out?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” says Punjari. “Perhaps I’ll wait until after I talk with Bird about your plan.”

“Then let’s call it four weeks,” I say.

“I’ll set you up with my people,” says Punjari.

Chapter 15

The clock ticks through one day, and then another. We spend endless meetings finalizing our plan, which ends up being pretty much what Brice and I proposed to Bird on our first day back. Nevertheless, the details and contingencies need work.

As the weeks draw on, platoon-sized units start to ship out. The biggest hole in our plan was pointed out in the first meeting with Bird’s staff. We had nearly four thousand troops ready to fight and we were going to add another four. Unfortunately, we had the ability to transport at most a tenth of them. The success of our intended assault on the battle stations depended on all of them arriving at their objectives at about the same time.

The solution we came up with was novel and dangerous. It involved stationing troops on pieces of space junk, broken cruisers and Arizona Class ships, the remnants of the hundreds of battles fought around the solar system through three years of war. Using one of our freighters, jury-rigged as a tug, pieces deemed large enough for our use were accelerated toward earth and put on meticulously calculated paths at precise speeds. Each was loaded up with one or several platoons, depending on the size of the piece of debris.

The troops were to sit in space for three to six weeks with nothing between them and the void but a piece of space junk careening toward earth. Not on a collision course, but instead on paths designed to pass through the battle stations’ orbits.

With so many pieces of so many destroyed ships flying around the solar system, having a few hundred pieces falling toward earth wouldn’t likely raise any concerns. It was the kind of thing that happened every day and would probably continue to happen for decades as the derelicts either fell into orbit around the sun, or were caught by the gravity of the solar system’s nine planets and pulled down to the surface.

Though that part of the plan afforded us a way to have nearly eight thousand troops show up in near earth orbit all at the same time with absolutely no warning they were coming, the risks were significant. Any mistake in the calculations could crash a platoon into earth’s atmosphere for a fiery death. An error in the other direction might zip them past the earth at a distance too far to cross on suit grav alone. In that case, everyone in the platoon would eventually die when their cal packs and H packs ran dry.

If the piece of space junk wasn’t accelerated to a high enough speed, the platoon might suffer the same fate, arriving only after they were long dead. If they came in too fast, their suits might not be able to decelerate enough for them to match the speed of their intended targets. Again, death.

Then there was the psychological burden of having to sit with our backs to a piece of metal and stare at the endless void, thinking about all the ways things could go wrong. That kind of shit wears on even the most stable mind.

Guesses on casualty rates we’d experience before ever landing a troop ranged from five to fifty percent. I understood the logic, but disagreed vehemently. I explained to Bird’s officers that I’d survived the same ordeal I was sending the troops into. Brice and I both had zero guarantee we’d ever come close enough to a gravitational body to feel solid ground under our feet again. We had the mental resilience to survive. The troops we were sending, I argued, had all survived through the tunnel battles with the Trogs. They were tough enough to make it.

On another subject, the waking of the people in the pods was hard. They’d expected to open their eyes on a future date on a far away world under sunny skies with little to worry about but trying to pick the grassy hill where they’d build their new huts.

News that the pod people were right back where they started, and they were being thrown into the war, didn’t sit well. Fortunately, most adjusted to the idea as they slowly regained their strength. And that was another unanticipated delaying factor; none of them came out of the pods ready to rock. Recovering from stasis sleep was like recovering from a bad bout with pneumonia. Even after a few weeks of rehabilitation, none were at one hundred percent.

The only truly good thing to come out of our planning and logistical phase was that the cruiser to the colonies finally did leave. It was a bittersweet departure. The ship represented a huge hope for the future of humanity, but every one of us understood the cruiser was headed to a future we wouldn’t participate in. For the rest of us, we’d win our future through brute force, or we’d die.

Chapter 16

“It’s time,” says Phil.

Lenox pushes power into the Turd II's grav plates, and it glows blue as it lifts off the hangar floor, sliding silently toward the bay doors.

Phil is in his spot at the nav station with Nicky strapped into a seat beside him made just for her. Silva is at the comm station and Peterson working the radar console. Only Brice doesn’t have a bridge assignment. He can back up Silva or Peterson in case one of them is killed. Or he can captain the ship if Phil and I take an unfortunate hit. As for Lenox and Phil, I’m their backup. We’re the ship’s full crew, though we have a Lieutenant Clark in what remains of our platoon compartment. He’s in charge of five techs who will manage our bomb load. On the munitions pylons on the hull, we can mount six thermonuclear devices like the ones we took with us to 61 Cygni. At the moment, the pylons are empty, and our internal storage is full with six nukes.

Much of the rest of the space inside the Turd II has been converted to hydrogen storage, enough to keep the Turd II flying in combat conditions for months. We won’t need that much. We have less than two weeks before the assault on the battle stations commences. Our job is to raise hell through the solar system, running as many hit-and-run attacks on supply bases as we can manage. We anticipate taking plenty of hits, not at first, but once the Trogs catch on to what we’re doing and start leaving crews posted by their guns, waiting for us to pop out of bubble. That’s the primary reason we carry so much spare fuel, stored in a honeycomb of tanks filling the forward spaces. We expect to lose most of it long before we burn it.

Out ahead of my ship is a stealth scout flown by the same pilot who took me, Phil, and Brice on our scouting trip of the earth system when we sent Blair off on her mission. Captain Chikere is piloting again. The scout ship has been put under my command.

A freighter is leaving behind us. It’s captained by a woman named Leroux. She’s carrying more nukes, stores of H, all manner of supplies, and anything any of the three ships is likely to need on our expedition. She also carries three platoons of soldiers, all cramped in there together. The nukes we intend to use. The troops are along just in case, because as Brice loves to point out, nothing goes as planned.

Together, the three ships make up the task force I command, though the phrase task force seems like it was coined for some group of ships much larger than the ones I have at my disposal.

The canyon we cruise through on the way out from the base widens meter by meter, and the ragged ribbon of sky above invites us to blast into open space. Our ship wasn’t built for creeping along the ground between constricting canyon walls, it’s an angry iron spear with a grav-lens tip, wrought to blast through space at blinding speeds and kill Trog cruisers.

The crew is anxious to do just that. We’ve spent too many long months planning and preparing, cooped up in Iapetus’s tunnels.

“Keep her steady through the canyon?” Lenox asks, sensing my impatience.

“Yeah,” I answer. “Once we’re out, follow the cliff face for a hundred kilometers or so, then do another couple hundred across the plain before you head for space.”

“Can’t let any snoopy Trogs know where we came from,” she says.

“Peterson,” I say, “once we’re out of the canyon, keep an eye on the space up there. I don’t want any surprises.”

“Will do, sir.”

“Phil,” I ask, “anything?”

“I would have told you already if we sensed something.”

I know. But it feels good to be back in the captain’s chair, with enough time behind me that thoughts of all our dead friends have stopped reminding me of what waits for the rest of us if I fuck up.

Soon enough, we’re out of the canyon with Iapetus’s plain spreading out to our right. The scout is heading straight out across the rolling terrain. The freighter is heading along the cliff face in the opposite direction as us.

In an hour, we’ll break free of Iapetus’s gravitational pull and run on sub-light acceleration in any random direction that drives us away from all the local orbital masses. Six hours later, we’ll bubble out of the sun’s orbital plane to a spot one astronomical unit above Ceres. The freighter, having taken its own path, will meet us there at the first of many rendezvous we’ll be making over the coming weeks, all at different randomly chosen coordinates. The stealth scout will not be there. It won't arrive until later. Its first destination will be our first target, the biggest Trog supply base in the solar system, not counting the earth. Chikere will take an undetectable pass over Ceres and let us know if there are any cruisers refueling, or if it's vulnerable.

Chapter 17

The last leg of our trip takes a little less than two minutes. As soon as we pop out of bubble, I tell Silva, “Send a message to Iapetus to let them know we’re in position.”

“Round trip time will be twenty-four minutes,” she says. We’re both telling each other things we already know.

“Peterson,” I ask, “is Leroux here yet?”

“No,” she answers. “We don’t expect them for seven more minutes.”

I turn to Phil, “What do you think?”

He knows what I’m asking, and it’s not anything about Leroux’s arrival. “It’s a solid plan. At least for Ceres.”

“It’s a big base,” says Brice. “Making three runs to drop three nukes is the right move.”

“If all goes according to plan,” says Phil, “we wait for the squadron already there to leave. Intel says another squadron won’t show up for twelve hours to two weeks.”

“It gives us a wide window,” I say. “Way more than we’ll need.”

“It’s how they operate all their bases,” says Phil. “At least for now. That’ll change once we start bombing them.”

“They’ll start keeping cruisers stationed closer in for protection,” says Brice.

“We have a plan for that,” I counter. “And even if we didn’t, it pins part of their fleet to the bases after the assault on earth starts. Maybe half their fleet. They have seventeen bases we know about. Most small, some big. None as large as Ceres. They only have sixty ships. What’s that, like three or four cruisers per base, if they hold them all out for defense of the bases?”

“Don’t forget the Arizona Class ships they have now,” says Phil. He doesn’t need to add that it was one of those that destroyed the Rusty Turd on our salvage run to pick up the Trog cruiser we just sent out to the colonies.

“About that,” says Silva.

We all turn to look.

“I just received a message Iapetus beamed out here for us. Intel from earth.”

“Blair?” asks Brice, “What’s the scoop?”

Silva looks at me as she answers. "The attempt to contaminate the cruiser's supply of hydrogen was a bust.”

“Shit,” says Brice. “I knew Blair would let us down.”

“But,” adds Silva, “three of the seven hydrogen refineries suffered catastrophic explosions. The other four have suffered some level of damage.”

“Blair?” I ask.

“The message doesn’t say,” answers Silva.

“I’ll bet it’s the UN’s earthbound intel gathering network,” says Brice. “Bird said he was going to try and repurpose them to engage in espionage.”

Probably. I don’t say it out loud, though. “Doesn’t matter. It makes what we’re doing out here that much more important. Anything else, Silva?”

“Maybe the best news,” she says. “The Trogs only had seven other Arizona Class ships in the fleet. They loaded them all into a cruiser three days ago and sent it back to their home world. So, we don’t have to worry about Arizona Class ships for the time being.”

“They’re still building them back on earth,” I ask, “right?”

“The message says ‘for the time being.’”

“That’s probably what that means,” says Phil. “The Grays are consolidating their control of the population through the MSS, and I'm sure they're ramping the shipyards back up. That might be why they feel comfortable loading up those seven and sending them back to their home world."

“So they’ll have plenty to reverse engineer,” sneers Brice.

“If Prolific Man Killer holds to his word,” I say. “That cruiser will never reach its destination.”

“If,” says Brice.

I ignore that comment. “Luck is with us, then. We’re starting our attack at the right time.”

“Unless they’ve already ramped up the shipyards and they’re rolling Arizona ships off the line by the dozen,” says Brice.

“No more negativity,” I pronounce. “Why don’t you review the target coordinates with Phil.”

“Done that already,” says Phil. “Four times. Once with Colonel Bird’s intel team. Once with operations— ”

“Stop,” I tell him.

“Every target coordinate on every base is pre-planned. You know that. If you want to give Brice something to do, why don’t you send him forward to make sure the team up there is making sure the nukes are properly mounted.”

"Fine." I turn to Brice to ask him to go forward, but he's already on his way. "See if we have any extra optimism while you're up there."

As he steps down the stairs to the central hall, he replies, "I like you better when you're a pessimist like me."

"No, you don't," I call after him. Well, not exactly call. It all happens over the comm link. I turn to Phil.

“I know what I’m doing,” he says. “Find someone else to pick on.”

“I’m not picking on anyone.”

“You’re antsy,” he tells me. “Why don’t you take a nap or talk to Silva about making babies on a farm out in the colonies or something. We’ll receive the message when it gets here. Until then, we have to wait. And that’s it.”

I turn to Silva.

"Don't start on me," she says. "I'm monitoring the frequency for an incoming signal."

“All you have to do is listen for it,” I say. “It’s not like you’ve got to play with the dials or anything.”

“I think Phil’s right. You’re antsy. Why don’t you do some breathing exercises or meditate?”

Ugh.

“Wait,” she says. “I’ve got something coming in.”

I wait and watch Silva sitting at her station, listening intently. A moment passes, and she replies. She looks up. “There are no cruisers at Ceres. They’ve already left.”

“Brice,” I say, “I need an ETA on completion of mounting the nukes.”

“One sec,” he tells me. “I just got up here.”

All of us on the bridge wait for the reply.

“Eight minutes,” he tells me.

“That’ll work,” I say, though I’d have preferred to take off that very moment. “Phil, calculate an ETA for us at Ceres. Silva, as soon as you get it, send the info to the scout and the freighter. Lenox—”

“I know what to do,” she says. “Phil already has the course dialed in. I’m just waiting for the word from you.”

Chapter 18

Just like on the jump out to the rendezvous point, the trip back goes quickly.

One moment, the ship is awash in the scintillating bubble jump glow, and the next moment it’s gone. But that barely registers as I feel the Turd II surge under max g and see the mass of Ceres suddenly coming up in front of us.

“Phil?” I ask.

“We popped out exactly where we planned,” he tells us, rushing through his words.

“Target lined up,” says Lenox, eyes drilling holes in her monitors, hands gripped tightly on the controls. “We’re coming up to bombing speed.”

“We’ll be at the drop point momentarily,” says Phil.

“Silva?” I ask.

“Already sent the arrival signal,” she tells me, not mentioning the morbid purpose of what she’s just done. The other two ships in our small fleet, both millions of miles away from the action, will know we arrived. If they hear nothing else, they’ll deduce we were destroyed in the attack.

“Five,” says Phil. “Four. Three.”

“I’m good to go,” says Lenox.

“Two,” says Phil. “Release.”

Lenox reverses our grav field, the change so smooth I’d have bet Penny was still flying.

With my grav sense, I feel the mass of a nuclear device separate from the ship, and then I see it appear to accelerate ahead.

Lenox nudges the ship toward the horizon as the distance between us and the nuke rapidly expands.

A railgun round shoots up from the surface, small, but bright, fired wildly, with no chance of hitting anything.

“More grav,” says Phil as the nuke shrinks away from us.

The ship lurches harder as Lenox follows Phil’s instructions.

“The nuke is a thousand meters away,” says Peterson, using radar to track it precisely.

“Accelerate,” orders Phil.

Lenox shunts power into our drive array, and we accelerate with a noticeable surge in our inertial field.

Another burst of railgun rounds shoots up from the surface.

“Are we on target?” I ask.

“Within a hundred meters,” says Phil. “Thirteen seconds to impact.”

“Are they targeting the nuke?” I ask.

“Not yet,” Phil tells me.

“Lenox,” I say, “Max grav.”

"Yes, sir." Lenox hits the power hard, and the Turd II shoots toward Ceres's horizon. Our plan is to have most of the mass of the spherical asteroid between us and the detonation.

“We’ll make it,” says Phil.

“That nuke?” I ask, turning to scan Peterson’s radar screens to see where it is.

“It’s fine,” says Phil. “More railguns are starting to shoot. All aiming at us.”

“They don’t see it?” I ask, knowing any answer I get will be speculation.

“Almost there,” says Phil as the Turd skims down close to the surface, passing below the line of sight to the base. “We’re in the clear.”

“Can you still make out the nuke?” I ask.

“Not with the mass of the asteroid in the way,” he answers.

We knew that was going to happen. Still, I had to ask.

Phil starts to say something, and then pauses. “Detonation. I feel it.”

I feel it, too, millions of tons of rock, blowing away from the surface, a shockwave, tearing through Ceres, shifting a billion tons more. The fluctuation in the local grav field is so sudden and sharp, it stuns my implant and spins my equilibrium so far off kilter that I feel the urge to puke.

I close my eyes and draw a deep breath.

“You okay?” asks Phil.

“What the hell?” I ask.

“What’s up?” asks Brice, suddenly beside me, a hand on my shoulder as he looks over at Phil.

“The blast,” I say. “It messed with our bugs.” I turn to Phil. “Is Nicky okay?”

Phil’s looking at her, but nodding.

None of the rest of the crew seems to have been affected, just us bug heads and Nicky. I say, “Lenox, bring us around for our next run.”

We’re already pulling hard g’s to follow the curve of Cere’s surface.

“Do you see the course on your monitor?” asks Phil.

“I have it,” Lenox says as the Turd II starts to pull away from Ceres, still using the asteroid’s mass to reshape our orbit while our grav plates push into a wide swing.

“We need to figure out how to handle the blast flux,” I say.

Phil nods, but says, “We’ll be positioned for our next bomb run in just under three minutes. We’re taking a wide arc that’ll put us on track back toward the base.”

“Clark,” I call over the comm. “Is everything good up there?”

“A little bumpy,” he says. “But no problems.”

“As soon as we come out of bubble at the other end of this,” I say, “I want that team loading nukes into our six mounts as quick as they can.”

“No waiting?” asks Clark. He knows the plan calls for us to attack the next base on our list after we’ve had time to assess the damage on the first, regroup, and scout the second, a series of steps that could take hours.

“I want to bubble out to target two as soon as we’re ready.”

“Aye-aye, captain.”

“Silva.” She’s next on my list. “Comm the scout. Tell them to go on to target number three. We’re going to hit number two blind.”

“Blind?” she asks.

“We’ll pop out of bubble at the target,” I tell her. “If no Trog cruisers are present, we’ll make a run. If they’re there, we’ll move on to target three and hit them.”

“That’s a bold change in the plan,” she says.

“The Grays will need time to react to what we’re doing here,” I tell her and everyone else on the bridge. The more targets we can hit before they understand what’s happening, the safer we’ll be.”

“I like it,” says Phil. “When we bubble in, I can have nav set up to either bubble right back out or start our attack run, depending on whether cruisers are present. With the scout staying one step ahead of us and not going back to evaluate damage, we might hit five for six bases before the Grays react.”

“That’s what I’m hoping for,” I tell him. Back to Silva, I say, “Get them on board. Let Leroux know what we’re up to, and keep her informed on each of our destinations, so she can jump to the corresponding resupply points we planned.”

"Will do," she says.

“Coming around for our next run,” says Phil.

I turn back to see Ceres looming in Lenox’s screens again. Geysers of fire are blasting out of the hole left by the detonation of our first nuke. A huge plume of broken rock is expanding into space around it. “Phil?”

“I see it,” he tells me. “The grav lens will protect us.”

I say, “I’m worried about us. I’m thinking of the nuke we’re dropping.”

“Think of the debris like an expanding soap bubble,” he tells me as we race toward a curtain of broken rock. “The blast threw it all out, but once we’re inside the bubble, the space is clear. That’s where we’ll release the nuke.”

“Good.”

“Another thirty seconds,” says Phil to Lenox, as I feel the mass of all that debris slide past our hull with barely a bump against our grav lens’s powerful field.

“Lining us up on the target,” she tells him. “Hitting the undamaged sector of the base.”

“It doesn’t look like it,” says Phil. “But it’s all damaged.”

“But not destroyed,” I remind them. “That’s our goal.”

“Twenty seconds until release,” says Phil.

“No railgun fire, this time,” says Lenox. “You think we killed them all?”

“Doubtful,” says Phil. “They’re probably stunned from the first shockwave, though.” He glances at me, because we’re thinking the same thing: if we felt the blast from where we were, the Grays and Trogs, down so close to it, must be so dazed they don’t know which way is up.

Ten seconds later, Lenox releases the second nuke. Just as we did on the first run, she eases off the power until we gain some separation from the falling bomb, and when it's far enough away, she leans into the power, and we shoot for the horizon. We painlessly burst through the other wall of the expanding debris bubble and put Ceres's bulk between our ship and the explosion.

“That was easy,” I say, as I start to worry. “I hate it when things go that smoothly.”

“Agreed,” says Phil, as Lenox powers us into another tight trip around Ceres.

“You didn’t sense any cruisers bubbling back to rescue the base?” I ask.

“No,” says Phil.

“Peterson?” I ask.

“Nothing on my screens,” she tells me.

“I doubt anyone down there knows what happened yet,” says Phil, “let alone being able to get their head on straight enough to call for help. Those nuke shockwaves have to be murder on the subterranean levels.”

“Let’s hope so.” Still, I can’t help but worry. I keep my eyes on Lenox’s forward-facing screens and Peterson’s radar monitors. “Phil, keep me a bubble solution on hand, just in case we need to jump.”

“I’m two steps ahead of you.”

“Good,” I say, dreading the detonation of the nuke we just dropped, but not faltering from the course. “Lenox, get this last run around Ceres done, so we can drop the third nuke and get the hell out of here.”

Chapter 19

After reaping our destruction and getting away clean from Ceres, we bombed our second target, another outpost in the asteroid belt built on a giant lump of rock, but smaller than Ceres and not massive enough to have rounded itself into a regular sphere. It still took three nukes, as its facilities were spread more widely across the surface, not clustered and deep, like they were at the huge Ceres base.

Target three, was a pass, as the info the scout ship picked up on its flyby showed a full squadron of Trog cruisers on hand. Targets four and five weren’t so lucky for the Trogs. We pulverized each, one with two nukes, one with a single, though two would have been better. After that, we were out of bombs and had to rendezvous with the freighter, which we met a few AU's below the orbital plane. The scout ship came out with us, and I had Silva set up a real-time debrief over the ship-to-ship comm system. With all three ships sidled up close for the transfer of H and nukes from the freighter, there’s no distance delay in the comm signal.

I run through a quick list of what we’ve done so far and ask, “Any questions or concerns?”

"How was the targeting?" asks Chikere. Under the original plan, it would have been his role to do the after-action flyby for a damage assessment. “How close did we drop them?”

"We didn't see any of the nukes impact," says Phil. "As you all know, we had to be on the other side of the orbital body, so the mass was there to protect us when the detonation occurred. The last time we saw each bomb, it was on track to fall on target, though I'd estimate a hundred meter spread for human error."

I don’t say that I disagree with Phil’s overly generous allowance for error. My guess is that each nuke hit exactly where he wanted it to go, with one exception, and Phil brings it up. “One bomb was deflected by a glancing hit from a railgun round fired from the surface,” says Phil. “I estimate that one came down within five hundred meters of our intended impact point.”

“Where was that?” asks Leroux.

“Target number two,” answers Phil. “It was our first drop on the target.”

“The last nukes were on target?” she asks.

“Yes,” Phil tells her. “As Kane explained, after the first detonation, the bases pretty much go dead. Me, Nicky, and Kane all felt a grav pulse after each explosion. Since the B61 is a bunker buster, it’s designed to penetrate deeply underground before it explodes. Because it’s under so much rock, the detonation vaporizes or blows away millions of tons, while sending a shockwave through the entire asteroid. The sudden shift in so much mass causes a pulse that disorients us because of our implants. No doubt, the Grays and Trogs suffer the same effect, only to a greater degree, being so much closer to ground zero than we are at the time of detonation.”

“Interesting,” says Leroux. “I’ll be sure to include that in the status report we send back to Bird. His people may have a use for it.”

“Every advantage helps,” says Chikere.

I continue with my report. “Target number two had the widest spread of impacts, so it has the highest likelihood of survivors and intact facilities.”

“I’ll work a flyby into our schedule,” says Chikere.

"We may have to take another run at it," says Leroux. "That asteroid has very high concentrations of metallic ores. Of the top five on our list, it needed accuracy more than any of the others."

“Agreed,” I say.

“How long do we plan to stay here?” asks Chikere.

I look at my d-pad. “We’ve been at this for seventeen hours. I don’t want to, but we need the rest to stay sharp. I say we take six hours for sleep for anyone who can get it. We’ll do a quick conference afterward, and then step off on the next targets on the list. Same plan as today.”

“On my ship,” says Chikere “We’ve been rotating.” The way the scout ships normally operate is with a crew of three, rotating one of the three into the small cargo bay for rest, so the ship can stay online around the clock. We can head out as soon as we finish up. We can run through most of the target list and be back here by the time you’re ready to leave tomorrow.”

“If you’re up for it,” I agree.

“It’s the kind of work we do,” he says.

“Keep in mind,” adds Leroux, “the intel will all be old by the time we act on it. So you’ll need to be careful when you come out of bubble, Kane.”

“Noted,” I tell her. “We should probably expect a response by the time we start bombing again. Today, we got away with it because surprise was on our side.”

“Which is why we shouldn’t repeat yesterday’s tactics,” says Leroux. “Maybe it’s time to go back to the original plan, and attack on a random schedule.”

Phil turns to look at me, and I don't need to read the thoughts he's pushing my way to know he agrees with her. I say, “You’re right, Leroux. Chikere, run by target number two and get us the intel on our hit there. Visit all the others if you can squeeze them in, and tomorrow morning we’ll decide which targets offer the most enticing kills. Best case, we can locate the majority of their fleet out here and have a good idea which bases they aren’t at.”

“I wouldn’t pin my hopes on that,” says Chikere. “The Grays will be back on a war footing by now. They won’t have squadrons languishing at resupply bases. They’ll get in, load up as quick as they can, and get back out, with four or five ships stationed nearby, ready to pounce an any attackers that make the mistake of coming in for an ambush.”

“But,” I say, “they will be sticking together. How often do the Trogs do anything in units smaller than a squadron?”

“Through most of the war,” says Chikere, “their fleets seldom fell below six ships, though it seemed there were always singles, doubles, and triples out there.”

“We should expect them to lay traps for us, now,” says Leroux. “If not on the next few runs, then on those coming up. If they haven’t deduced it already, they’ll figure out pretty soon that we’re attacking their supply capability. They’ll figure out that it’s only one ship doing the bombing. And the more we go at it, the more information we’ll give them. They’ll soon realize that we have a resupply ship somewhere, because even though they’re Grays, they’ll see the number of nukes we have onboard changing, and not always just going down. So they’ll start hunting. They might look for us, or they might start looking for a base, like Iapetus. They’ll start to pull cruisers away from the earth-moon system to do it. That’s a lot of firepower coming our way.”

“Nearly half of their force is there, now,” says Chikere, “and it’s been that way since the capitulation.”

“Earth is the prize in the system,” says Leroux. “That’s what they came here to get. It’s what they’ll do the most to hold onto.”

“Maybe we flip the script and take a run at the moon,” I say. That leaves everyone silent. “Instead of waiting for the guns from the battle stations we capture to hit it, we fly in, nuke ‘em and get out. It could give us a big head start on winning this thing.”

"The number of railguns on the moon is mind-boggling," says Chikere. "If you go there, you'll need to come out of bubble super close to the surface—dangerously close. That’s the only way to limit the number of guns that can be aimed at you. You’ll need to drop the nuke from very close, so they’ll have less time to shoot it out of the sky, and you’ll have to bubble back out before you get shredded.”

“Pretty much what we’re doing now,” I say.

“Only they’ll be ready for you there,” he says, “and they have a lot more guns.”

“Probably mostly armed by humans,” I counter, “who won’t want to hit us. Not really.”

“Not until after you drop the first nuke,” says Chikere. “And for all you know, the gunners are MSS loyalists. They might be manned by Trogs and targeted by Grays, for all we know.”

“I think,” says Phil, letting one of his dramatic pauses catch everyone’s attention, “that if we do run at the moon, and we do it right, we might be able to drop five or six nukes in the space of ten or twelve seconds, and destroy most of their largest-caliber weapons, the ones the Grays used to hold the earth hostage. I don’t know if any of you remember this, but the largest railguns the original Grays built before the siege, the city destroyers, were all constructed near the original landing site. All the other railguns built on the moon were built for targeting Trog cruisers. So if we drop a handful of nukes all over that one area, we can destroy them in one pass.”

“Do we have the ability to drop that many nukes that quickly and put them all on target?” asks Leroux.

“I can work it out,” says Phil. “It’s all precision and ballistics. Out here in space, ballistics is nothing more than the study of gravity and momentum. No air friction to complicate things. I can do it.”

“That’s what we’ll do, then,” I tell them. “We’ll hit a few more bases. Chikere, make regular passes through the earth-moon system, okay? Add that to your schedule. As soon as the Grays pull some of their cruisers out to defend the supply bases, we need to zip in and pound the railgun installations on the moon. And I do mean, as soon as they do it. We don't have a lot of advantages in this war, so we need to maximize the ones we have. If we can make them think their decision to set up traps for us out here was a mistake, if we can make them believe we're one step ahead of them, it'll slow their collective thought process so much that it might actually paralyze them when it counts. And that could be huge, not just in the assault, but in the negotiations. If they always think we've got a sucker punch hiding behind our backs, they'll be more likely to give us a better deal than if they think they have us over a barrel."

Chapter 20

At the prescribed moment, according to the schedule of random time intervals we’ve laid out, we pop out of bubble near one of Uranus’s moons, a small, eccentric body named Margaret. Chikere and crew scouted the rocky blob less than an hour ago. No Trog cruisers were present then, nor are there any when we arrive.

Margaret isn’t the next most important base, according to how we’ve prioritized them after hours of reviewing all the information Bird’s scouts had collected on them over the past year. It’s on the small side and seems to only have the ability to service cruisers at the rate of one every three weeks or so. The limiting factor is how long it takes for the base to manufacture a full load of railgun slugs and process enough hydrogen to fill a cruiser’s tanks. Our choice to destroy Margaret isn’t based on any of those factors. Like the timing of our attack schedule, the order is randomized, as well.

The point where we exit the bubble is precisely mapped out prior to our arrival, in that we know exactly where we wanted to be. The thing that we’ve never taken the time to understand, because of the circumstances under which we always take the risk, is how greatly nearby gravitational masses affect our actual bubble exit point, relative to our calculated endpoint. So Peterson’s job, among her other duties upon arrival, is to get a fix on our position.

If we’re eventually going to make a run at the moon, we need to know what we can get away with.

We begin our attack run with a burst of heavy g, coming at the base from an oblique angle, perfecting a tactic that’s been working well for us, in that it keeps us out of the line of sight on most of the installation’s railguns.

From arrival to bomb release, we spend twenty-six seconds accelerating to the optimal bomb release speed, dialing the Turd II in on the attack angle, and reaching the release point. After that, we spend another seven seconds in the line of sight with the base before we put the bulk of Margaret between us and it. Three seconds after that, the nuke detonates, and we bubble out again.

We chalk up the run as a success and reduce the count of active Trog bases by one, leaving just twelve, of which the next on our list should receive our visit in fifteen hours and twenty-two minutes. Phil sets us up for a thirty-second bubble jump, and Lenox punches the drive array just hard enough to push us in the general direction of the next target.

Chapter 21

“Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em,” says Brice as he heads forward. He turns to me and inflects his tone just enough to let me know how pointless his upcoming task is. “I’ll make sure they get that next nuke loaded.”

“Thanks,” I tell him. “After that, do you mind walking the ship?”

“Visual inspection?” he confirms. “Got it.” He’s not excited about spending time on that either, but he appreciates the need to keep busy in the slow times. “I’ll recruit the nuke handlers up front and inspect every square inch, if you like. Make ‘em double check each other’s work, too. Then, I’ll make sure they get some down time.”

“I can always count on you.” I turn to Peterson. ”After you finish with your positioning data, get it over to Phil for analysis, please.”

“I’m already on it,” she says.

I look to Phil.

He rolls his eyes and sighs. “I’m already running diagnostics. We don’t appear to have taken any hits yet. No systems have malfunctioned. We’re still at one hundred percent.”

“That’s a miracle all by itself,” says Silva.

I reach up and pat Lenox on the back. “Good flying.” I look over at Phil. “And good nav. We’ve all done a good job.”

“How long do you think our luck will hold out?” asks Lenox.

I give it half a thought. “Brice would say we make our own luck.”

“No he wouldn’t,” she tells me. “On our first trip out, you, me, and him were sitting in the platoon compartment with our backs against the grav lens, flying out to the potato. You remember that?”

I nod. Of course, I remember.

“Brice told us that war is a matter of luck. Sometimes you just get hit. Sometimes you die, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Yeah.” I still don’t agree, though. Not completely. “We’ve taken some losses because of bad luck. I can’t argue with that. We may again. But we’re damn good at what we do. After all we’ve done, we wouldn’t still be alive if that wasn’t true.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” she says. “How long?”

“I think our luck will last long enough to win,” I tell her.

“Do you truly believe that?” she asks.

“If you didn’t believe it, too,” I ask, “then why did you stay? And I don’t say that to be combative. Seriously, why’d you stay if you believe our luck is going to run dry and we’ll all be killed?”

“Same reason as you,” she says.

“Are you having second thoughts?” I ask.

“Lay off her,” Silva tells me.

“I’m not picking on her,” I defend myself.

“It’s okay,” says Silva.

“Yeah, more than you know.” I look around at all of them. “It’s okay to talk about this kind of stuff. We all have our doubts, but we’re in this now. We need to accept that.”

“I never said I wasn’t in for the duration,” says Lenox. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Silva stops the conversation with her sudden attention to the comm panel. We all wait while she listens. After a few minutes, she looks up, urgency underpinning her words, “Message from Bird.”

“And?” I ask.

“Blair is set.”

“Everything?” I ask.

“The message said she’s met all goals. Details to follow.”

“It took a long time for them to tell you that,” I say.

“Bird also wants you to know he approves of the changes to the operational plan,” she says, “though they want us to be careful with our attack on the moon. It might be the best defended real estate in the solar system. Their words, not mine.”

“Noted.”

Phil looks at me with expectant eyes.

“Yes?” I ask him.

“They’re right about that, you know,” he says. “It’s not just the big railguns, designed for hitting the earth, they also have hundreds in batteries nearby, for defense from attacking ships.”

“We’ll go in fast and get out fast,” I tell him. “The number of guns won’t be a factor.”

Phil disagrees. “The number of guns is always a factor.”

“Do you think the plan is a mistake?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I’m reluctant to say what I think.”

“Why?” I ask, looking around the bridge, wondering what I’ve done along the way to have put this distance between me and the others. Was it my behavior, or the deaths of our friends?

“I think it’s a brilliant plan,” says Phil. “But I don’t want that to go to your head, because as much as I agree that it’s the best move we can make, I think we’re underestimating the risk.”

“By how much?” I ask.

“I can’t put a number on it,” he says. “I think it’s good that we’re proving the tactic with these attack runs on the outer bases, but the moon is a different animal. I don’t know that success out here translates to success against a target like the moon base.”

My first instinct is to argue and defend my plan, but I don’t. I take a patient breath, and think it through. “If we don’t attempt to nuke the moon base, we still have a plan to neutralize it with the guns on the battle stations. There’s plenty of risk in that part of the plan. You were in those meetings back on Iapetus, Phil. We talked endlessly about the hundreds of things that could go wrong.”

“We did,” he says. “I’m not going to say it’ll take a miracle for us to pull this off, considering how many things have to go right for us to win, but the odds are against us once we start the assault on the battle stations.”

“Worse than if we make a bombing run on the moon base?” I ask.

"Yes," says Phil. "On that, I agree."

I’m getting frustrated, because I feel like Phil is jumping from one side of the issue to the other. “I don’t understand. Are you against bombing the moon base?”

“No,” he says. “I think the risk is higher than we’re accepting, but I think the intangible element, that of making the Grays believe we can strike them at will at their weakest points, is valuable at the end game, when we go to negotiate with them. I just don't know that we'll live long enough to get there. It's like we're depending on a coin flip to come up heads for us ten times in a row."

“But that’s the only way we win this war,” I say. “Isn’t that right?”

“I believe it is,” says Phil. “We need to get lucky.”

“Or we need to execute perfectly,” I say.

“Brice wouldn’t agree with you on that,” says Lenox.

Chapter 22

Hours turn to days. Raid follows on raid, with the Trogs doing nothing at all to stop us. And then they start to get smart.

I mentally kick myself, and remind myself that the Grays and Trogs are already smart, in their way.

And in some ways, they're much smarter than I'll ever be. Having babbled my way through that little bit of logic, I kick myself again at the realization that the Trogs may have been setting traps for us since our first day of bombing their supply bases. Maybe we didn’t notice the traps because they’d always failed. Who could know?

By the thirteenth day of the operation, we’re aborting more attacks than we’re completing.

The Trogs are trying everything they can to destroy us. They leave their railgun crews on high alert, ready at a moment’s notice to unload on anything that pops out of bubble in close proximity to their bases. The days of swooping down on sleepy, slow responders have ended. On every attack run, we fly through a sky that is streaked red over black with defensive railgun fire. And because we can't keep our grav lens oriented toward the bases through the full run, we take hits, at least a dozen altogether, most of them through the ship's midsection, costing us a quarter of our hydrogen supply.

Trog cruisers, first in full squadron strength, and then in half-squadron, start lurking close to the bases, or at least most of them, as the Trogs don’t have enough strength to leave a full squadron at each base unless they pull everything they have in the earth-moon system and give up the effort to search the solar system for us and our base of operations.

They start bubble jumping from base to base on random schedules, perhaps learning from us. They foil several attacks using that method, as we show up to destroy outposts that Chikere has only just scouted, to find that in the time between when he leaves and we arrive, the Trogs have shown up, too.

And then they get really smart and start lingering at a distance, where we won’t see them upon our coming out of bubble to make our attack run. But they aren’t so far off that a telepathic alert can’t be sent from the Grays on the ground to the Grays in the cruiser waiting to ambush us. The tactic that almost works for them more than once is to bubble out right along our escape vectors, dropping out of space at a standstill, with guns blazing. Each time, it costs us time spent on evasion, time in the range of gunners from the ground, time leaving us too close to the nuclear blast, leaving Phil, Nicky, and me to wonder what permanent damage we’re doing each time the detonation leaves us disoriented and shaky.

Still, we manage to slide seven more bases onto the kill list.

Unfortunately, the more bases we bomb, the more likely it grows that we’ll encounter Trog squadrons. That is just the mathematics of success working against us.

"Just one more run," says Phil. "That’s all we have time for, unless you want to go for carelessness and hop through the last five stations in rapid succession, trying to kill them all. The assault on the battle stations is slated for tomorrow. We have just over nineteen hours.”

Most of the crew is resting. I’m in the pilot’s chair. Brice is on the radar console with his comm off to anything but urgent messages. He’s enjoying his quiet thoughts, or tormenting himself over what he could have done differently the day Penny died. Phil is in his usual seat.

“Of the five,” I tell Phil, “the Trogs only have one base of any significance. That was what, number two or three on our target list? We missed it the first day. It’s the only base left that’s large enough to resupply more than one ship at a time.”

“And every time we’ve made a run at it,” says Phil, “there have been cruisers there."

“We have to hit it,” I tell him. “If we get that one, then the Trogs’ supply infrastructure will be too crippled to sustain their fleet.”

“It’s already too crippled,” says Phil.

“This one base represents over half their resupply capacity.”

“Which is why they keep it guarded,” says Phil. “The Trogs aren’t so stupid that they’re going to leave it alone for us to bomb.”

“Doesn’t matter at this point,” I tell him. “We need to find a way to get it done. You and me, we need to figure it out.”

“There is no way that doesn’t involve us taking too much risk.” Phil sighs. He stretches. He has other things on his mind.

“What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

“Phil, c’mon. Really? Why don’t you just tell me?”

Phil sighs again. Brice looks up, but doesn’t join the conversation. He turns back to watching the radar screens, or daydreaming. Or whatever. We’re six AU’s below the orbital plane. Nothing’s bothered us out here since we started this mission. I doubt anything’s going to find us today.

But, I remind myself, that’s how complacency works.

I lean back far enough to see Brice’s screens, too.

“The crew is frazzled,” says Phil.

“I know.”

“And?”

“Phil, you understand them better than I do. You can get in their heads if you want. Tell me what I should do about it.”

“The only thing we can do,” he says. “Stop bombing. Everyone knows the odds of success are getting worse.”

“They know the assault on the battle stations starts tomorrow. Things are what they are. I don’t have control over them. Nobody does. The pieces are in motion already.”

“The long anticipation of the upcoming battle is wearing on them,” says Phil.

“We all have to deal with it.” Then something occurs to me. “Phil, are you telling me the crew can’t handle the stress? Do you think they’ll crack?”

“We’ve all been through a lot together,” says Phil. “People weren’t made to endure the ongoing stresses of battle.”

“Maybe back in the days before the siege, I’d agree with you. People are mentally tougher now. As much as I hate to minimize it, people are used to the idea of death. Before they even reach kindergarten, everybody knows someone who has died. We all know a dozen before we get out of school, and I’ll bet you can’t name a person who hasn’t seen the MSS beat the shit out of somebody in the street by the time they were in third grade. War is a brutal thing, but if the MSS did nothing for humanity, they raised us in a brutal world, and made us tough.”

“In theory,” says Phil. “The crew is still having a hard time. I think the losses when we got back from 61 Cygni were the final straw for us.”

“You mean for Silva and Lenox?”

"For me and you, too," says Phil. He glances over at Brice. "Even him."

I reach up to massage my temples and bang my fists on the sides of my helmet instead. “Sometimes I hate wearing this thing so much, I want to peel it off and dive into space.”

“That’s what I’m talking about.”

“I’m just yammering,” I tell him.

“Maybe it’s a Freudian thing.”

“Phil, stop it. Give me your opinion, is the crew going to hold together through tomorrow’s fight?”

“What do you think? What does Silva tell you?”

I groan. “Silva barely talks to me, now. She’s not avoiding me.” I look around the bridge. “That’d be kind of hard in what little interior space we have left.”

“Does she cut your comm when you try talking to her? Is she mad? Did you do something?”

“No,” I say. “Nothing like that. Everything’s fine as far as I know. It’s just… I don’t know. We don’t talk about anything anymore except the mission. The next bombing run. The ship-to-ship comm. When she tells me she loves me, she doesn’t sound like she means it. She sounds like Claire used to.”

Phil nods. “Sydney said it the same way. It sounded like a recording.”

“Then, you know what I mean.”

“Have you asked her about it?”

I shake my head.

“It’s probably nothing. It’s the situation.”

I shrug.

“You should talk to her. My bet is you’re making something out of nothing.”

“Neither of us has time for that. I need to figure out how to destroy that base.”

Chapter 23

Sometimes, inspiration eludes you. The imagination won’t produce anything brilliant, and all you have left to do the job that still needs doing is audacity. And courage. Phil doesn’t agree. He says the two virtues left when you’ve got nothing else to give are stupidity and stubbornness, my two most prominent traits.

However you label it, we have a full load of six nukes mounted on the pylons outside, ready to drop. We have another six crammed into the space in the forward compartment. We won't need to rendezvous with Leroux until after everything's done, though we have one more drop scheduled.

“Thirty seconds,” says Phil.

Over the crew comm, I tell everyone, “Be ready for anything.”

“Like a dozen cruisers all emptying their railguns at us?” guesses Brice.

“We’ll be fine,” says Peterson.

“We’ve taken on worse odds,” adds Silva.

I glance back at Brice to emphasize that he’s alone with his cynicism, but mostly I’m reassuring myself. I know the crew’s words are masks for their trepidation. “Keep an eye on those monitors with Peterson,” I tell him. “We need to know where they’re going to be.”

“Ten seconds,” announces Phil.

I count ticks slowly in my head as I watch the digits silently slide off the corner of Lenox’s screen. Our success depends on how fast we’ll be able to do what we need to do.

“Five. Four,” says Phil, for everyone to hear. “Three. Two.”

The scintillating blue seems to get sucked into the vacuum, and the tense seconds begin.

We’re oriented so that the rough sphere of the asteroid is below us. A full squadron of cruisers is spread in the space above and around us, always a startling sight, no matter how much you expect them to be there. Five of the cruisers are in no order that I can identify. They’re scattered across space, each standing away from the base by five to twenty kilometers, all looking massive as hell.

“That one’s right in our path,” says Phil, winding up the tension as the sky starts to sparkle with red dots. Dots, not streaks, because the railgun rounds are coming right at us. You know, one of those things you learn from being shot at so often.

Lenox amps power through the drive array, and we accelerate.

The grav lens pulses brightly in front of us.

“The cruisers are off our port side,” shouts Peterson.

Shit!

“They just popped out of bubble,” she says.

“Incoming fire,” adds Brice, pointing at hundreds of pinprick lights running across Peterson’s screens. “They didn’t waste any time.”

“This is the shit,” I tell them, smiling through my adrenaline.

“Powering up defensive grav,” says Phil. “We don’t need all the power for acceleration, anyway.”

He's right. Even during the seven seconds in which we plan to accelerate toward our target, we can get moving too fast for our nukes to survive the impact. We have to govern our speed.

“Where do you want me to go?” asks Lenox, “That cruiser over the base is right in our path.”

“There’s no way around it,” says Phil. “We’ll have to break off. Come back another time.”

There's no time to debate this further, and there'll be no coming back for this one. I make the call. “Ram it.”

“What?” shouts Phil. “What about the nukes?”

“Same run as before,” I tell him. “Drop them on the way in.”

“All of them?” he asks.

“Use ‘em or lose ‘em,” says Brice, knowing that if we ram, we’ll lose every nuke attached to our hull and some, if not all, of the mounting pylons.

“Drop them all,” I reiterate.

The sky is bursting red with dots still targeting us accurately, and streaks heading for where we were, or where we’re headed.

The ship rings with the sounds of two hits. No major systems seem to be damaged, as we continue on course.

Everything is happening fast.

The cruiser in front of us is pulsing its grav field, positive and negative, twisting and creating waves, all in hopes of deflecting us and our bombs.

The base is coming up below us as volleys of half-ton slugs fired from railguns, built for pounding cruisers, are hurling past us, not hitting us, but blasting through our defensive grav field and jostling us off course.

“Nukes away!” shouts Phil.

“Max grav,” I tell Lenox, and she hesitates because the cruiser is looming in front of us.

Phil doesn’t flinch, though; he knows what’s coming and shunts all of our power into the grav lens.

Blue flashes bright.

Internal g strobes and bends as the sound of tearing metal screeches through the ship.

We come to a stop. Wind is howling outside the hull.

We’re alive.

Still a surprise, though we’ve rammed our share of ships.

We’re lodged in the dorsal spine of a cruiser, right above the reactors, if I’m guessing right. The atmosphere from inside the hangar bay is venting through the hole we’ve made in the hull.

“Time until detonation?” I ask.

“Not enough time to get away,” says Phil, guessing what I’m hoping, too. “Everybody hold on!”

The grav picture outside suddenly turns chaotic, and a shock rips through the ship, overpowering our compensating g field, killing internal power, and sending everyone sprawling.

Chapter 24

Chaos greets me as I try to pull my scrambled brain back into line to form coherent thoughts. Grav is a mess. Nothing around me is stable. No direction is down. Light flashes and disappears. The sound; even that isn’t right. The tornado howl of a dying cruiser, a sound I’ve come to love, is weak and fading fast.

“Status?” I call into the darkness as I turn on my suit’s outer illumination.

Voices over the comm seem lost, not just Phil, everyone.

“Brice,” I call, as I turn to see him tying to get his feet beneath him, only he’s not on the floor, he’s on the ceiling. The field is reversed, and I guess through a series of groggy deductions that we’re under the influence of the cruiser’s g.

“I’m good,” says Brice, though he doesn’t seem much better than me.

“Go forward,” I tell him. “Check on Clark and his crew.”

He hops across the ceiling, and disappears into the hall.

Things are clearing up fast.

“Phil, Lenox, Silva, Peterson?” I ask.

“Fine,” Silva tells me, first to speak.

Phil is already trying to figure out what happened to our power. Lenox is working her controls, trying to get a response out of the ship.

Peterson seems dazed, and I reach out to shake her shoulder. “You okay?”

She nods, but she’s not sure.

“Get those guys ready at the assault doors,” I tell Brice. “We’re going to have to start shooting Trogs as soon as the escaping atmosphere is done blowing out.”

“Not there yet,” he replies.

“Phil?” I ask. “What’s wrong with our ship?”

“We were too close to a nuclear blast,” he tells me, perturbed that he has to explain it.

“What specifically is wrong?” I ask.

“I’m trying to figure that out,” he snaps. “Jesus Christ Almighty, dammit!”

I notice Nicky then, strapped into the seat beside Phil, looking every bit dead. I can still sense the presence of its mind generating weird Gray thought patterns, but I don’t sense much strength. “Is Nicky all right?”

Phil shakes his head. “Let me work. Find someone else to boss around.”

“Silva—”

“I can’t do anything here,” she says, unstrapping from her seat and deftly flipping to put her feet on the ceiling. “I’m going forward to help Brice.”

“Is Nicky okay?” I ask again.

“Goddammit!” Phil shouts, as tears spill from his eyes. “I don’t know! I don’t know!” He continues to struggle with the ship, doing maybe the most selfless thing I’ve ever seen. Nicky, the love of his life, in her and Phil’s weird inter-species way, might be dying, and he’s doing all he can to save the lives of the crew.

He’s a better man than I ever gave him credit for.

Better than me.

I unstrap from my seat and spring across the bridge. Without a thought as to our internal atmospheric situation, I unclip the retaining ring on my glove, slip my hand out and lay it on Nicky’s rubbery skin.

My suit’s internal air rushes past my wrist. My ship is leaking its atmosphere, too.

“Is it dead?” asks Peterson.

I shake my head, because I don’t know. “Try and get your machines rebooted.”

“It’s the grav switches,” Phil tells me, frantic-fast, as the internal lights come back on. “The grav. Something about the flux.”

I reach out with my mind and try to probe Nicky’s brain, looking for anything familiar, anything that’ll tell me she’s not dying. “You think when the nukes shifted so much mass so suddenly—?” I stop myself. I don’t know what the fuck I’m even talking about. Was it finally too much?

“The reactor’s coming back online,” says Lenox.

“The modifications,” says Phil, slipping into a dispossessed rhythm of words. “The mechanical and electrical switches… Underlying everything, there are still grav switches.”

Nicky jerks.

I resist the urge to pull my hand away. I push telepathic questions into its head, Are you okay? Are you alive? Can you move?

Nicky’s eyes shift.

Phil’s head swivels for a look. “Nicky?”

Nicky reaches out for him.

Phil reaches over and touches her hand. “I think she’s okay.”

“You sure?” I ask.

He nods through a flood of tears and blubbers his way through telling me the nuke blasts did something of a reboot on every grav switch on board.

“That means all the Grays on board the cruiser,” I speculate. “The ones on the bridge. They were stunned, too.”

Phil nods.

“And on the other ships?”

He shrugs and works feverishly on his panel.

“My system’s up,” says Peterson. “I can’t pick up anything in here, though.”

I slip my glove back on and lock it into place before I lose all my suit air. I jump back to my seat.

“Grav systems coming back online,” Phil announces over the comm.

“How soon will we have power to pull out of here?” I ask.

“Looks like ten minutes,” answers Lenox, eyes glued to her power output gauges. “The reactor needs to go through its entire startup procedure.”

“Is it damaged?” I ask.

“Can’t tell.”

I turn to Phil.

“I can’t, either. We’re going to have to hope our luck holds when we power up.”

“Brice,” I call over the comm. “How are things up there? Do you have the assault doors open yet?”

“A smidge,” he tells me. “Open just wide enough to shoot from. The cruiser is full of holes. Most of the atmosphere is gone. The Trogs are busy trying to save themselves.”

“Let me know if they organize for an attack.”

“ETA on our exit?” he asks.

“Ten minutes, is the guess. Reactor problems.”

“Great. I’m sure we have all day.”

“You know sarcasm doesn’t always carry over the comm, right?”

“Apparently, it does.”

Chapter 25

“I’ve done all I can do,” says Phil, as he turns to examine Nicky.

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“All systems are online. Everything’s acting a little squirrely. Once the reactor is producing enough power for us to dislodge and bubble out, we can go.”

“So we’re just waiting on the reactor.”

“I just said that.”

“I’m just confirming.”

Phil’s eyes never leave Nicky’s. “I don't know what's with you lately, but you need to lighten up."

Lenox turns and puts a hand on my arm, as a way of telling me to shut up and let them have their minute.

And she’s right.

“Brice,” I call “if the Trogs aren’t attacking you yet, have the techs set a timer on one of those nukes for eleven minutes and slip it out the door. You know, a going-away present.”

Brice grumbles. “I thought you said we’d be ready to leave in ten.”

“Not now,” I look at my d-pad. “Maybe five.”

“Five? Are you positive?”

I turn to Lenox.

She nods. “Five. Maybe six or seven, but probably five.”

“Did you hear that?” I ask.

“So if anything goes wrong?” Brice isn’t pleased. “Then what? We nuke ourselves?”

I sigh. “You’re right. Set the timer for five minutes, but don’t start it until you roll it out the door just before we take off.”

“Five minutes is all we’ll need to get out of range?” asks Brice.

“Phil says all systems are a go,” I answer. “Mostly.”

“He said they were all squirrely, right?”

“They’ll work well enough to get us away from here,” I tell him. “Besides, if we can’t hit max grav and bubble, wouldn’t you rather this ship blows up behind us to cover our low-speed escape?"

“I’m going to set it for seven minutes.”

"Do you want to be floating around out there in space, trying to get up to speed for seven minutes, getting pounded into metal shavings while we’re waiting for the nuke to detonate?”

“Five, then. Brice out.”

“Thank you, Brice.”

“You see?” he asks. “Right there, the sarcasm came through just fine.”

Chapter 26

Silva comes back on the bridge, just as our reactor timer is ticking down through the last minute.

“Strap in,” says Lenox. “I’m going to hit it hard as soon as I get a green light on the reactor.”

“Just a moment,” says Phil, his attention off of Nicky and back on his console.

“You ready to go over there, Peterson?” I ask.

“Ready,” she tells me.

“Silva,” I ask. “How were things up there?”

“The Trogs never came for us. They could have, but they didn’t. Like they couldn’t decide what to do.”

“I think the Grays on the bridge are still recovering,” says Phil.

“You sure about that?” I ask.

“I sense them,” says Phil. “It’s hard for Nicky right now. There’s no way to describe it well, except that maybe it’s like a really bad hangover. That’s what I’m sensing from the bridge.”

“Is Nicky going to recover?” I ask.

Phil nods, but he’s not certain.

I press him for more. “Can you sense anything from the other cruisers?”

“Maybe if we pass close by on the way out, I can— ”

“We’ll have to leave that little bit of science for another day,” I tell him. “Lenox, keep us as far away from those cruisers as you can.”

Phil looks back down at his panel. “We’re ready.”

“Brice,” I call, “ditch the nuke. We’re bailing out of here.”

“On it, boss.”

Before I can respond, Brice calls out, “Go! We’re a go!”

“Assault doors closed?” I ask

“Don’t wait for us,” he says. “Closing now.”

“Phil,” I say, “punch the grav lens and break us free. Lenox, goose it.”

Blue grav fields sizzle bright all around us as the Turd II lurches. Lenox jiggles the controls and pulses the drive array, and suddenly, we break free.

Peterson starts scanning for the other cruisers. “They’ve backed off,” she announces.

“I see two over there,” I say.

“Something’s not right with those three,” says Phil. “Their grav fields are down.”

The cruisers at a distance start to fire on us, but with no enthusiasm for it.

Lenox has the ship spun around and she's accelerating for the asteroid's horizon, the shortest line to put us in a safe place, where no cruiser will have a shot at us.

As we pull away from the vessel we rammed, I get a full view, and it looks like the lower half has been mangled by the nuclear blasts. Another of the cruisers in the distance is missing half of its drive array, and a third disabled ship looks nicked up. Beyond that, the black of space has been replaced by a rapidly expanding bubble of blasted rock, plenty of pieces still glowing red. Below, where the base was, there are only craters and rubble.

Lenox pulls the ship down toward the surface and skims close to get us over the horizon, and just like that, we’re safe. So close in, we can’t see any of the Trog cruisers on the other side. The debris plume, though, is large enough to cover half of the sky behind us.

“How soon can we bubble?” I ask.

Lenox is pushing the g’s, and I see the asteroid start to shrink behind us.

“Thirty seconds,” says Phil, “for a safe jump. With the way the controls are at the moment, I wouldn’t want to go sooner than that.”

“Make it so.”

Chapter 27

Four hours and a dozen misdirection-jumps later, we come out at our rendezvous point to see Leroux’s freighter there, waiting, and Chikere's scout ship floating nearby. Silva opens the ship-to-ship to pass along the results of our latest mission, but she stops in mid-sentence and looks over at me.

“What?” I ask.

“I’m receiving an update. The Trog fleet bubbled out an hour ago,” she says.

That gets everyone’s attention.

“No cruisers near earth or the moon?” I confirm.

Silva shakes her head. “Chikere arrived with the news, just ahead of us.”

Phil looks at me with the question in his eyes.

“We go,” I tell him and the others on the bridge. “This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

“Leroux wants to conference,” says Silva. “She says Bird wants to update our plan.”

My temper flares, but I hold it in. We have to attack the moon. "Arrange it," I tell her. "Get Chikere on the line." To Lenox, I say, "Pull us in close to Leroux's ship. We need more nukes and an H refill." I turn to Brice. "Get—"

“I know,” he grumbles, as he goes forward. “Put a fire under their asses. Check the mounting pylons outside and see if any are still there.”

“See how many are too damaged to function,” I tell him, trying to spin it to the positive.

“That’s what I said,” he tells me.

Peterson is the last one I can spare for the moment, “Grab one of the techs up front, go outside, and do an inspection of the hull. I don’t need a full report right now. I just need to know if there’s anything out there that might cause us a problem when we get underway.”

“Any more than the hinky grav switches?” asks Phil. “None of the them have returned to functioning like they did before those nuclear explosions blasted us.”

“They didn’t blast us,” I tell him, like it’s a point worth arguing. “If they did, we wouldn’t be here.” I turn to Silva, looking for an escape from an argument in which I don’t want to engage. “You have Leroux yet?”

“Just a minute, she tells me.”

“We took a lot of damage,” says Phil.

“This is war,” I counter.

“A degraded ship shouldn’t—”

“Phil,” I stop him. “We have to make do. Bottom line simple. That’s it. Work with Peterson, now that we have some down time. Figure out the grav switch problem. Figure out what we can do a quick repair on. Calculate any loss of speed or defensive grav we’ll have.”

Phil manages to pout and glare at me at the same time.

It works. I feel guilty. Using a softer tone, I ask, “How’s Nicky? She seems like she’s getting better.”

Phil shakes his head, caught off guard by my sudden change. “She’ll probably be okay.”

“And the egg?” I ask.

The question strikes Phil deep. “It seems normal. No ill effects that we can identify."

“So we dodged a bullet,” I say. “We didn’t expect to be so close when those nukes blew, but everything turned out okay, right?”

"We don't know about long-term effects," says Phil. "And it's not just the grav effects on Nicky and the ship. What about radiation? For all we know, we've taken a fatal dose, and we'll be dead by this time tomorrow."

“If we’re all dying of radiation sickness,” I ask, “is there anything we can do about it?”

Phil doesn’t answer.

“No,” says Lenox. “Our hair will fall out, and we’ll get an awful case of the bloody shits as our bodies break down.”

Silva grimaces. “That’s disgusting.”

“We all have catheters,” I say. “We won’t even notice.”

“You will,” says Lenox. “At some point—”

“I know,” I tell her. “I get it. None of it matters, though. Like I said, if it’s going to kill us, the damage is done.”

“I have Leroux and Chikere on the line,” says Silva.

I say, “Patch Phil in, as well.”

A moment later, we run through the niceties and Leroux gets down to business. “Bird wants to coordinate the attack on the moon with the beginning of the assault on the battle stations.”

"Why?" I ask, disappointed because I'm still married to the idea that hitting the moon base at the first chance will do the most psychological damage to the Grays.

“If you go in now,” says Leroux, “what’s to stop the Grays from reacting by pulling their fleet back, which they’re sure to do? Even though the hydro plants on Earth are offline, the earth-moon system's value eclipses the sum total of the rest of the solar system.”

“Then why send the fleet out?” I ask.

“The battle stations,” says Leroux. “The Trogs know by now that we have one attack ship. Alone, the Turd II doesn’t stand a chance against the stations.”

“Unless we nuked them, too,” I say. “Not that we’re going to, but they have to know we have that ability by now. They have to know we’re using a weapons system they aren’t familiar with.”

"They're familiar," says Leroux. "They don't use chemical or nuclear weapons, because they're able to achieve similarly scalable effects with high-velocity kinetics."

“Let’s not go down that rat hole,” I argue.

“The moon,” says Leroux. “The Grays don’t think we can do significant damage, or they believe we're afraid to attack the earth-moon system, because of the defenses. Bird believes they sent the fleet out to hunt us down because they think they're safe. Once we run a successful attack on the moon's planetary siege batteries, that illusion bursts, and the Grays have to recall their fleet, maybe all of it. Having sixty cruisers arrayed in defensive positions around the earth and moon when the assault starts could be disastrous for us."

Probing into my thoughts, Phil tells me, “The assault has to be top priority.”

And he’s right. I know he is. I knew it before we started the conversation. I was hoping to find a way to get all I wanted out of this.

“It gives us nearly fifteen hours to do what we can for the ship,” says Phil. “We need the time.”

“Chikere, Leroux,” I ask, “you’re both in agreement with Bird on this?”

“Of course,” says Leroux.

“Did we change our command structure to a democracy?” asks Chikere.

I roll my eyes. All I need is another smart-ass. “I’m just looking for your opinions before I decide what to do.”

“My opinion,” says Leroux, “is that we should follow Colonel Bird’s orders.”

“I’m with Leroux,” says Chikere, “It’s the smart thing to do.”

“I agree, as well.” I don’t, but it’s the smart play. “See to your ships and crews. Rest now, if you can. In fourteen hours, we’ll do a quick meet up, and then step off on the main assault. Any questions?”

None. We all know our roles.

Chapter 28

Down to five hours before we take off on our moon assault, and I’m standing on the hull, looking at a long scrape where a mounting pylon used to be, and a where a new pylon has been welded in its place. The half-assed look of the new one doesn’t inspire confidence.

“And that’s the deal,” says Brice. “Leroux’s people have been out here for hours trying to get this one and the other to work. It’s not just the metal part you see here on the outside, it’s the grav switches and linkages back to the bridge. All of it. We can mount a nuke and get it to lock in, but they can’t get the release to work.”

“So we won’t be able to drop anything from this armament pylon?” I clarify. “That’s where we’re at?”

Brice nods. “Both of the pylons we lost in ramming the cruiser are offline.”

“And the other four?” I ask.

“They function as well as they did before.”

“So we can drop four on the moon.” I’m disappointed. Dropping the nukes over an area as wide as the planet-killing railguns cover was always going to be a bit of a shotgun approach. Six nukes would have been preferable to the four. “I wish we still had the Rusty Turd.”

“My kingdom for a horse.”

“What?”

Brice shrugs. “Just something I read once. A contraband story from before.”

“And what’s it supposed to mean?”

“I don’t remember,” says Brice. “A king wanted a horse to win a battle, or run away, or something. It was a long time ago.”

“What happened when he got the horse?”

“Like I said, it was a long time ago. I think he died.”

I sigh. “Maybe you should keep your motivational anecdotes to yourself.”

“Why wish for the Rusty Turd?” asks Brice. “Why not wish for the whole fleet we had back at the Arizona shipyard? Why not wish for the magic space ferries to come and save us?”

“Brice, you need some sleep.”

“I’m just saying, wishing is a waste. Don’t turn into a whiner on me.”

“Got it,” I tell him, looking back down at the mounting pylon.

Brice says, “We have five more hours, but I think the time is better spent resting for what’s to come.”

“If they haven’t been able to get them to work yet,” I say. “Let’s not waste the time. We’ll go in with four mounted, and six loaded up inside. If we have to, we’ll make two runs.”

“A second run at the moon might be murder,” says Brice.

“Or it could be a cakewalk, if we bubble in close enough to the first blast zone. You’ve seen how the explosions rattle bugheads.”

Phil climbs out of the open assault door and deftly flies over to land by Brice and me.

“That’s it for me,” says Brice. “I’m going to get some shuteye.”

I turn to Phil. “Where are we at with the grav controls you were looking at?”

“I don’t feel comfortable with them.”

“You’ve tested them?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“They all work fine,” says Phil. “Now, they do.”

“Isn’t that what we hoped for?”

“Most of the switches were sporadically failing when we arrived here. Some, once in every ten tests, some once out of twenty.”

“I thought you said they were fine.”

“Grav switches are organic in nature,” says Phil. “It’s as if they’re healing from the effects of the blast.”

“I didn’t know they could do that,” I say.

“Me, neither.”

“But we’re good now, right?”

“We’re on uncharted ground,” says Phil. “They might all perform fine now. They might fail the next time we bubble jump. There’s no way to know. As much as we need to bomb the moon base, you need to know that it might be the end of us. All of us. We have no way of knowing— ”

“We can’t know everything, Phil.” I snap the words, but I need sleep, and I’m tired of people lining up in front of me with problems that can’t be solved. I don’t need one that’s only imagined. “Look, we blasted off from Earth knowing that the ship might blow up around us— ”

“Let’s be clear about that, Dylan. You knew that, because Blair told you, and you kept it to yourself until after we’d already jumped, until after we had no choice but to move forward. Is that what we’re doing here? Risking everyone’s life on a gamble because you can’t admit to losing?”

“We haven’t lost.”

“We don’t know the ship will work, either, do we?”

“We jumped all the way out here,” I argue. “How many hops, six? Eight? And nothing went wrong.”

“Nothing was accurate. All of our end points were off.”

“But they got better the more we jumped, right?”

Phil huffs. “That’s not the point.”

“We have seven jumps planned between here and Earth,” I say, looking for some middle ground. “If the ship’s controls don’t perform, we’ll abort the attack run on the moon base. Will that work for you?”

“I suppose it’s the best I’m going to get.”

“Not only that,” I tell him, “but you better start squeezing your imagination for how we’re going to take out the moon base if we have to abort our bombing run, because no matter what the outcome is for us, that moon base and all those Grays hiding in the complex beneath it need to die.”

“What about the freighter as a bomber?” wonders Phil.

“You know it can’t produce a defensive grav field that’ll stand up to railgun fire. It wouldn’t last ten seconds over the moon.”

“Maybe the stealth scout.”

“Even if we could work out a mounting system for the nukes,” I say, “they’d be outside the hull, outside the anti-grav field generator that makes it invisible to the Grays. It would be a sitting duck.”

Phil sighs and looks toward the freighter, floating large and powerful, just a hundred meters off our starboard side. “The problem with us practicing our bombing technique on the supply depots is that we’re making the mistake you keep warning us against.”

“Phil, you tell me that when I get stressed, I micromanage. When you’re stressed, you talk in random circles. What are we talking about?”

“We’re doing the same thing over and over,” he says, “and expecting the Grays not to guess what we’re going to do next. We’ve gotten better each time, but so have they.”

How did we not see that?

“Stress,” says Phil. “We’ve been doing this for a long time. We've been through a lot. We've seen most of our friends die, and none of us has taken the time to grieve. We put it aside and push on. Not even on that trip out to 61 Cygni. You were busy falling in love with Silva, and most of the rest of us were getting into our own relationships."

“Phil,” I say, “stick with one thing. I can’t keep up.”

“Band-Aids,” he says. “We’re not fixing anything underneath. We’re just hiding our problems under new emotions.”

I don’t want to spend any more time chasing Phil’s bullshit. “After tomorrow, I’ll have plenty of time to find my way back to normal. So will the rest of us. What’s the status of the ship?”

“That’s it?” asks Phil.

“That’s what?”

“We’re not going to talk about this anymore?”

“Repressed feeling?” I ask. “There’s nothing I can solve tonight. Nothing any of us can do. Another day under the rug won’t make anything any better or any worse.”

“I disagree.”

“I know.”

“What about the bombing run?” asks Phil. “We’re going to do the same thing, even though the Trogs are there, waiting for us to bubble out just over the horizon? They probably even have their weapons on every base and on the moon trained at the horizon, so they don't have to spend the time re-aiming them."

“We’re back to that?” I growl. “Phil, go get some sleep. You and Nicky both need it.”

“We need to do something different when we attack.”

“You’re probably right,” I say, “but it doesn’t matter. Nothing can penetrate the field generated by our grav lens. It won’t matter if the Grays fired every gun on the moon at us. We’ll slip right through."

“Until they shoot at us broadsides,” says Phil. “How many holes do we have in the ship already? I forget. Is it twenty or thirty? Or is it forty, now?”

“I don’t know. I asked you for the status report. I’m still waiting for it.”

“So that’s the way this is going to be?”

“Phil,” I drag in a long slow breath, trying to dramatize my patience. “We can do something different if you come up with a better idea, okay? Or you can poll the crew. Maybe one of them has a genius insight they haven’t suggested yet. But nobody has, have they?”

Phil glares at me. It's the kind of hateful look two friends can share when they have enough history that one dirty look won’t kill the relationship.

“You’re closer with them than I am,” I say.

“Just Peterson and Lenox,” says Phil. “Bird’s people up front think I’m a freak, and Brice hates me.”

“Brice is just Brice.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing at all. Phil, what are we doing this for, picking at each other? Can’t we just focus on the mission? Can’t we just do that?”

“And the plan?” asks Phil. “We’re just going to go with it?”

“Unless we can think of something before we get there.”

Chapter 29

The hour arrives. I meet with the Leroux and Chikere one last time. The latest report from Blair is that the Trog fleet is still gone, and most of the Grays are still on the moon.

Phil, apparently still not having slept, has our flight plan ready. We’ll bounce through seven bubble jumps, the last bringing us out dangerously close to the moon, all lined up for Lenox to push on a max grav accel right over our targets, dropping our nukes on the pass, followed by a fast bubble out to the other side. Phil has the maneuver planned for us to spend six seconds over the target or in the sights of the railgun batteries. And that’s the only change to our tactic that he and I were able to brainstorm into existence: we’ll do the same damn thing we’ve been doing, but we’ll try and do it even faster.

So, we go with it.

Chapter 30

We pop out of our sixth bubble half a million miles from the moon, much closer than I’d have preferred. We’re at a range from which a Gray might detect us, but Phil isn’t comfortable with making our last jump down to the moon from more than a few light-seconds away.

“Phil?” I ask, as seconds tick by.

He doesn’t answer.

Our bubble jump computer could have made this last break between jumps strobe past, but Phil isn’t letting the computer control everything on this trip. After each jump, he’s been manually checking our position against where the computer said we’d be. So far, so good, but once Phil gets an idea in his head, it takes a long time for his interest to find a new problem to nag.

“Even if a Gray sees us,” says Lenox, “we’ll be there before it figures out what we are.”

“And before it has time to commune with its pod on what to do about it,” adds Silva.

“The assault started seven minutes ago.” Brice’s gaze comes to rest on Phil; Brice wants Phil to know he’s not pleased. “If they’re on schedule.” It’s a rare, double dig. Phil worked through the math on the orbital dynamics that put our assault forces on their intercept paths with the battle stations. If they didn’t arrive on schedule or came down out of sync, it would be Phil’s fault. As for our delay, Brice puts the blame unequivocally on what he saw as Phil’s unreasonably cautious approach. “The war is calling.”

I look at my d-pad to confirm the time. We’re close enough, though I’d have preferred to arrive before the assault started. Now every gunner on the moon will be at the ready, or already shooting, if the Grays figured out that they can pelt the battle stations with their small-caliber railguns and kill off our assault teams before they get inside.

“Won’t work,” says Phil.

“What?” I ask, pissed. “The jump?”

“No, shooting at the battle stations. At max velocity for their small-caliber guns, it’ll take hours for the rounds to cover the distance from the moon to the earth. The troops will all be inside by the time the rounds impact.”

“Phil,” I tell him, “stop reading my thoughts and concentrate on what you need to do.”

“We're ready now," he says, turning to me for the final go.

I don’t hesitate. “Jump.”

The ship flashes bubble blue.

One Mississippi.

Two Mississippi.

Why am I counting?

The blue sizzles out.

“Shit!” cries Lenox. Nothing is showing on her screens but gray lunar rocks.

Before Lenox’s shout fades from the comm, Phil pushes every amp of ship power into the grav lens, just as we impact.

Chapter 31

Steel squeals as it wrenches apart. Vaporizing rock explodes, as the ship’s internal fields lose the fight to compensate with the chaotic forces tearing at us.

Failure blasts, loud and obnoxious, through my head as I realize I’m losing another ship, more people, the last of my friends, and it’s happening too goddamn slowly, because I’m stuck in that slow-motion, adrenaline-rush brain mode where every microsecond seems to stretch to infinity, giving me all the time I need to blame myself for every mistake that put us here.

And I think of Silva, and all that our relationship will never grow into, hating myself over the faith she put in me, for letting her down.

Blackness mercifully washes the painful chaos away and takes my last breath with it.

Chapter 32

It’s the howl of a titan-sized banshee wailing in my ears that tells me how wrong I was.

I’m alive.

Disoriented.

And in pain.

I gasp like I've forgotten to breathe for nearly long enough to kill me.

Blue grav fields spasm in webs across the floor.

Sparks blast around me.

The comm crackles with the cries of the dying.

How many did I kill this time?

The flames of a blast furnace spasm to life and disappear again in the howl of the wind.

Where am I?

I steady my breathing, force calm through my shaking fingers, over my racing heartbeat. I run through an inventory of my body parts, something I’ve done too many times, of late. Wiggle the fingers and toes. All present and functional.

Sharp pain digging into my shins.

My ankles work. My knees move, a little.

Arms seem to function, but I’m pinned.

I push myself away from a wall that’s right in my face, as I realize I’m still strapped to my chair. But the chair has broken away from the floor, and it’s on top of me. I’m jammed into a corner between the wall and the floor.

I turn on my suit light for steady illumination as I push myself up, unlatch my restraining belts, and look around. Nothing is square. Nothing is where it should be. Up and down can’t agree, or I can’t decipher the mixed mess of what I see with what gravity is telling me is true.

If I had any hope that the Turd II had survived the impact, it disappears. A crack exposing jagged steel shreds is running through the ceiling, from the corner of the bridge over Phil’s nav station, all the way back to the rear bulkhead.

Outside, in the dark of a tunnel, a fire ignites and burns like a tornado before losing its spark and dying out, only to come to life again. I see moon rock, and a million bits of debris blasted by the wind, and it makes zero sense.

How much air, how much H, could my ship hold that it could blow for so long?

My God, how did I survive this?

That’s when I see Nicky, halfway out the tear in the hull, skewered by the sharp metal, one arm flapping in the wind, one arm gone, head smashed open, orange goo spraying into the vacuum. I don’t need to reach out telepathically to know that she’s dead. That’s the moment that I realize the banshee moan that brought me back to consciousness isn’t only the wind outside. It’s Phil, and he sounds like he’s dying.

He's still strapped into his chair, but the supports have bent backward, and he's not moving. He’s only staring up at Nicky, crying out loud, without a thought for shame or pride. His pain is so powerful, it hurts me too.

I look around the bridge. Brice is a few moments behind me in coming back to the world of the living. He’s shaking his head, and trying to get up. Lenox is drooped over the helm controls. Silva is in her chair, but like mine, hers came disconnected from the floor. She’s in a jumble of computers, legs, and chair pieces, piled against the far wall. Blood is spraying into the thinning air.

I fly across the bridge to Silva and start pulling away pieces of junk. In the light g, it’s not difficult. Not physically, anyway. The blood sprays me red as the haze blows past. When I lift the back of Peterson’s chair, I find the source of the bleeding. Peterson has a ghastly wound across her chest. If not for being strapped to the chair, she’d likely be in two pieces. Tossing Peterson unceremoniously to the side, I lift Silva’s chair and turn her around to face me.

She blinks. “I thought we were dead.”

“Are you okay?” I ask, trying to keep my voice on an even keel.

“I think I lost consciousness.”

I toggle her d-pad to life and click to the med function screen.

“I think I’m okay,” she tells me. “You’re covered in blood.”

I wipe a hand across my face plate to drag the crystallizing corpuscles into a more translucent smear.

“Are you hurt?” she asks, as I read her d-pad. It says she lost consciousness for nearly four minutes. No concussion. No broken bones. No internal injuries. Can I trust it?

“Your suit seems stable,” I say, as I look her up and down. “No leaks.”

“Are you hurt?” she asks.

I unlatch her. “I need to check on the others.” I point to Lenox. “Help me with her, when you can.”

I spin, see that Brice is up and looking around, but his eyes aren’t quite locked into reality. “You okay?” I ask.

"Peaches and pussy," he mutters. "I need a minute."

I jump over to Phil, ignoring his wailing, or trying to. The closer we are, the more his grief is leaking through the bugs in our heads that link us so closely. Tears fill my eyes. His or mine? I can’t tell. I access his d-pad’s med functions as I blink away the annoying saline.

No bleeding. No punctures. Consciousness lost for two and half minutes. I move on to his stim screen and see that he’s never taken advantage of his suit’s performance-enhancing drugs. I punch a button and pump a max dose of suit juice into his veins.

“Phil.” I rap on the side of his helmet. “Phil!”

He looks through me, as if I’m invisible. He’s reaching out with his grav sense and his telepathic connection to Nicky. And slowly, his eyes turn from utter pain to mania. “What…what did you do?”

“Phil,” I say, “hate me now or hate me later. I’ll accept it, but right now, I need to you find a way to put all this shit aside. I need your help. The people still alive on this ship need you. Help me save them.”

“I’ll never forgive you.” Phil shoves me away with strength I didn’t know he possessed.

When I bump the back wall of the bridge, I use my suit grav to bring myself to a stop.

“He’s pissed,” says Brice.

I point at Nicky’s flapping body. “He hurts.”

“Pain and anger,” he says. “Same emotion. Different dicks.”

“Good God,” I say. “Are you okay?” I reach out and take his arm, getting no resistance from him. I access his med functions, and get nothing of use.

“I got the wind knocked out of me,” says Brice.

I grab his helmet by the sides to steady his face in front of mine as I examine his face and eyes. “You seem kind of loopy.”

“I think I bumped my head.”

“Stay here,” I tell him, as I turn to the others. Silva is with Lenox now, accessing her d-pad, looking into her face plate, talking, but on a different comm link. I open up my comm on all channels, find the one she’s on, and ask, “Is Lenox okay?”

“Seems to be,” says Silva.

“I’m all right,” says Lenox. “What happened?”

I look up at the tear in the hull. Atmosphere is still howling past. “We hit the moon. Probably. I think we breached the tunnel system.”

“You wanna check on the nuke techs, up front?” asks Silva.

“Yeah,” I tell her. She seems to have more of her wits about her than anyone else on the bridge. “Make sure everyone gears up. With every ounce of ammo they carry. I think we’re getting ready to step into some shit.”

“We already stepped in it.” She smiles past her pained eyes. “Go check on the people up front. I’ve got this.”

Chapter 33

I cut out the bridge crew, so that I’m only linked with Silva. I push my way past a metal plate to get out of the bridge and into the central hall.

“Stay in contact,” says Silva.

“Will do,” I tell her, as I look down the length of the hall and see nothing but sparks and fire. “Get Phil or Lenox to cut power going forward. Broken power cables are sparking hydrogen as it mixes with air coming out of the tunnel system.”

“I think we’re in one of the moon’s tunnels,” she says.

“I think.”

“Can you get to the platoon compartment?” she asks.

“Not this way. Not until we kill the fire.”

“On it,” she tells me.

I work my way forward, trying to gauge the heat of the fire, thinking about making a run through it, wondering if H burns hotter than my suit can resist. But what would I be running to? Is the whole front section of the ship engulfed in a hydrogen-fueled inferno?

“Just a moment,” says Silva.

I peek through a doorway into a room now filled with H tanks, looking for another hull breach, one wide enough for me to shimmy through.

“It’s a wonder the reactor is still online,” says Silva. “Given the damage.”

“Yeah. Is Phil calming down?”

“He’s working at his console,” says Silva. “He’s still sobbing, though, and muttering.”

“He and Nicky were closer than humans can get,” I say. “They’re wired tight, like a single organism with two bodies. It has to hurt.”

“Closer than us?” asks Silva.

“Closer?” I’m not sure how to respond. She’s barely talked to me in days.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” The lights in the hall go dark. The shower of sparks from the broken power lines ceases. The fire still burns. “The metal up there is still hot enough to ignite the H,” I tell her. I need to come back to the bridge and see if I can get out through the airlock. “Tell Phil to override the controls, if they still have that atmospheric equalization bug.”

“Will do.”

I make my way up the angled deck, and pull hard on a broken sheet of metal to squeeze my way back to the bridge.

“I resented you,” she tells me. “When I chose to stay, I’m not sure I was a hundred percent on board with it, even though I thought I was.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her.

“That’s why I stopped talking to you,” she tells me, as I step up to the bridge. She comes over and wraps me in a tight hug. “We’ll get out of this. And if we don’t, I won’t hate you for it.”

“Thanks,” I tell her. “Thanks for standing by me.”

I pull away, turn to the airlock door, and swing it open.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you, too,” I tell her as I step inside. And then I laugh. “Not very romantic, is it?”

“No,” she answers, “but it’ll do. Be safe.”

I step through to the outer door and push it open. Wind is still blowing past the hull, but it’s diminishing. I make a guess that I can stand in it and I step into darkness.

Above me, through a giant hole in the rock, I see the sparkly blackness of outer space. I’m standing in a gap between the Turd II’s hull and a curving wall that was obviously hewn with tools, confirming what I suspected: we’ve crashed into one of the moon’s tunnels.

What are the odds?

Setting my suit to autograv, I clamber over loose rock, not wanting to fly, with the wind swirling and gusting, mixing with hydrogen and still flashing to fire above me.

“Can you hear me?” asks Silva.

“I’ve still got you,” I tell her, as I make my way past the wreckage of our drive array. I can see down the hall in one direction. It’s wide, and lit in the distance. The floor where it isn’t covered with impact debris is smooth, and wide enough for a few lanes of traffic. We’re definitely in one of the transit tunnels. How far from the moon’s main batteries?

Turning to move up the starboard side of the Turd II, I walk wide around the flashing flames, which are mostly overhead, anyway. “Silva?”

“Yeah?”

“The front half of the ship is gone.”

Chapter 34

“No front of the ship means no nukes,” says Silva. Despite everything around us, she’s thinking of the mission. The Gray leadership has to die. The planet-killing batteries need to be vaporized. The Earth needs hope before it rebels. We have to succeed.

“The rest of the ship can’t be far,” I say.

“We hit pretty hard,” says Silva. “I don’t know how fast we were going, but it could be a hundred miles away, for all we know.”

I look up and down the length of tunnel and can see maybe a half mile, in total. “It’s not down here, that’s for sure. See if you can get the ship-to-ship up. We need to contact Bird.”

“What should I tell him?”

That we failed?

No. Not yet.

“Give it to him straight.”

“Will do.”

“I’m going up top.” I don’t wait for a reply. I punch my suit grav and fly out with the remains of the atmosphere escaping into space.

For a few seconds, I feel free. I’ve got a disruptor on my back, a pistol on my hip, a railgun in my hands, a full ammo load, four fragmentation grenades, and two C4 charges. Nostalgia bites me with year-old memories of war when it seemed simpler, when all I had to do was kill Trogs with the weapons in my hands and lead my troops to do the same.

At a hundred meters up, I’m looking in the wrong direction. The moon batteries are firing, and red-hot railgun rounds are streaking off in every direction, filling the sky, no doubt aimed at every piece of space junk big enough for a human to hide behind. A dozen kilometers away, a small fleet of grav lifts is accelerating toward the Earth. They’re carrying Trog reinforcements for the fight underway on the battle stations. If everything worked out, our troops landed on every one of them.

I hope they’re winning.

Spinning around, I search the landscape and quickly spot a cloud of moon dust dirtying the black void with glittery whites and grays. Beneath the cloud, a rocky crest is cratered from a fresh impact, the front half of my ship.

“Silva, I’ve spotted the crash site. I’m going to it.”

“Where?”

“A kilometer or two. I’ll be out of comm range in a few moments. As soon as the rest of you are ready, come to the surface. Fly up ten or twenty meters. You’ll see the dust cloud over the horizon. If the nukes survived the crash, that’s where they’ll be.”

“And if they didn’t,” she asks, “will the radiation kill us?”

“I’ll let you know about that before you get close. Call in when you’re a half klick out.” I punch my suit grav, shoot down close to the surface, and skim toward the crater.

Chapter 35

Radioactivity?

Unless I see a nuke broken open and spilling its radioactive core on the ground, I have no way of knowing whether the site is hot. By then, it’ll probably be too late for me. The hope I’m running on is that the nukes we’re carrying, the B61s, were built to be tough enough to slam into rock at terminal velocity, using momentum to burrow through before exploding. I have every reason to believe that they survived. Not the least of which is that Phil activated the grav lens to full power just before impact.

Putting on my amateur forensic scientist cap, I guess that the Turd II must have come out of our bubble jump course tangential to the moon’s surface, but instead of coming out at five hundred meters up, we exited ten or twenty meters above the moon’s rocky surface, our bad luck, compounded by the crest of rock standing right in our way.

Whether it was the mass of the moon combined with our choice to roll the dice once too often, bubbling in and out close to significant gravitational bodies, or whether it was our hinky grav switches, none of it matters now. We are where we are. Nicky and Peterson are dead.

I don’t know what we’ll do when we face the Grays at the end of this without Nicky.

Will they on even talk to us without our own Gray to facilitate the deal?

And what about Phil? Can he pull his shit together long enough to communicate or will we have to use one of the bugheads he trained back on Iapetus?

I sigh.

I can’t fixate on any of that shit. Two dozen obstacles stand between me and meeting the Grays, and like Phil told me before, our side needs to have luck turn its way at every step for us to eventually win.

I follow the debris scattered back toward the rock crest through which we busted. The gouge at the base of the rock face contains what I’m searching for.

I come down at the edge of the oblong hole, looking inside. It’s easily two hundred meters long, a hundred wide, and blasted all to hell at the terminus. I don’t know at what point the stresses bending the hull broke my ship half, or why the physics buried the nose here and the stern a few kilometers behind me. All I can tell for sure is, we hit pretty damn hard.

In the bottom of the hole, ragged metal fingers reach out, thick steel railroad tracks, bent and broken. The reactor, thank God, didn’t fail when we collided. It kept power running through the grav lens and the hull plates. Otherwise, I and everyone else onboard would have been smashed jelly inside our suits.

Not seeing any nukes in the hole, I hop into the hole and float down to the bottom, coming to rest on the shifting ground where the railroad tracks are sticking out from the dirt. I step between a pair of them and peer into the ship’s central hallway, now a dark hole angled into the ground. My suit light illuminates the dark. At the other end, the bulkhead separating the platoon compartment is sealed tight.

“Clark.” I float a hopeful call over the comm. “Lieutenant Clark.”

“Colonel,” asks Clark. “Is that you?”

“It is. What’s your status? Are you still in the forward compartment?”

“We are. Most of us passed out from the rapid deceleration of the impact, but we’re all good to go.”

“Have you been outside?”

“We were just talking about that,” says Clark. “I took a look out the door a few minutes ago and noticed that the back half of the ship was missing.”

“Injuries?” I ask

“Like I said, we came through it just fine up here. The grav lens protected us.”

“The nukes?” I ask.

“We have six inside. All still in their racks, like nothing happened. Well, they’re a bit bent. The racks, I mean. But the bombs look untouched.”

“The four in the mounts outside?”

“They’re buried, as near as I could tell,” says Clark.

“Come on out,” I tell him. “I’ll be at the rim.”

I engage my suit grav to fly back up to the edge of the crater. When I land, I’m facing the crash site for the front half of the ship. There’s a cloud of debris is growing in the sky above it, but it’s shaped like a long jet exhaust and tons of rocky debris is flying away at orbital velocities, driven by the escaping air from the breached tunnel.

I don’t see Silva or the others coming my way, yet.

We still have nukes. We’re on the moon. All is not lost. The planet-killer battery isn’t that far away. I just need a delivery system.

Brice!

He was stationed on the moon. He fought the Trogs in the tunnels when the war started.

I figure I can make that work for us.

“Clark,” I comm, as I seem him emerging from the broken nose of the ship. “Have your people load up on as much ammo as they can carry. Pull the nukes out of the bow compartment and—”

“They weigh seven hundred and fifty pounds each,” he tells me.

“We’re at one-sixth g here, on the moon,” I remind him. “So, one-twenty-five each.” Still a hell of a load to wrestle. “We have a window of opportunity, here. Trogs may arrive at any minute to investigate the crash. We can’t let them have the nukes. I’ll bring the others to help.”

I jump off the ground and max grav back toward the bow section’s crash site.

Chapter 36

I’m slowing down and descending, following an arc that’ll put me through the hole and onto the floor of the tunnel beside the back half of my ship. A familiar chatter in my head startles me. I realize what it is I’m picking up, and it’s not good.

I blaze a straight line for the dirt just beyond the edge of the hole. Once my feet touch down, I flop onto my belly and peek into the stark shadows inside.

Two grav lifts are on the floor of the tunnel. I recall Brice telling me that they used lifts inside the tunnels where no rail was installed. In front of the parked grav lifts, some twenty orange-suited humans are standing, armed with nothing but tools for digging and salvaging. In front of them, fanning out around the ship, are twelve Trogs.

“Dammit!”

All twelve Trogs turn as one and look right at me.

“Double dammit!” Having spent so much time with Phil, using my bug to communicate, and having spent hours with Prolific Man Killer, getting comfortable relaying thoughts the way Trogs are comfortable hearing them, I didn’t think to mask my thoughts from them. I committed the sin that, among Trogs, makes surprise a moot endeavor. Even before I’m finished chastising myself, two of the Trogs lift off and fly to get up to my level. Another four, the rest of their pod, scramble toward me over the rocks.

What to do? Take them on here, or wait for them to trickle up out of the hole?

Option two is safest for me, but time is not on my side, and I don’t know whether Trogs are already inside the ship, killing the last of my friends.

Decision made.

I flip my rifle to full auto and rip a stream of high-velocity steel at the nearest Trog's face plate. His head explodes as I adjust my aim and kill the second flyer with a patter of rounds through his chest that leaves him with little more than sinew holding his torso together. I turn my aim toward the climbers as they wise up. Defensive grav fields blossom bright from all the remaining Trogs, and they rush the rubble pile, climbing up to get me.

I wound another pair before the remainder of the Trogs bunch up to ascend together, using their combined defensive fields and the rocky face of the rubble pile to thwart the penetrating power of my weapon. I manage to kill another by overpowering his defensive field with a long stream of hot rounds from my railgun, but I can do the math in my head quickly enough to know they’ll get to me before I can kill them all.

Deciding whether to roll out of the way and go back to plan B, leaving a C4 booby trap behind to even the odds as they crest the crater’s edge, I suddenly don’t have to.

Several streams of railgun fire hit the Trogs from the flank, and three go to pieces in a bloody haze.

A few of the remainder turn to defend themselves from my friends, on the ship, and open their flank up to my fire. They die before they understand their mistake.

A few more seconds is all it takes before the Trogs are all dismembered and dying.

I jump off my perch and grav over to land in front of the stunned workmen.

Brice and Lenox zip past me, flying fast toward the grav lifts.

As my feet touch the ground in front of the workmen, Brice and Lenox are making sure the grav lift pilots understand that they’re not to move.

Broadcasting over all frequencies, I tell my orange-suited prisoners, “Line up against the wall.”

One guy jumps, gravs hard to turn, and fly up the hall.

Silva fires and destroys him, sending a spray of blood and exploding organs over the other workmen.

The rest need no more convincing to comply. The two grav lift pilots join them.

Chapter 37

I give Silva a nod of thanks as she moves toward me, but the halo of happiness I project around her is eclipsed by Phil’s black octopus of a mood, growing like a monster from the shadows as he trudges forward. The weight of Nicky’s death is bearing heavy on his heart with the rapturous power of the suit juice amplifying every ounce of his pent-up anger into lethal thoughts.

“Face to the wall!” Phil yells at them.

“Phil?” I ask.

He ignores me. I can feel his anger, restrained under heavy chains, wanting nothing more than to pummel me with telepathic fists that will turn my mind to bloody mush.

“Jesus,” I mutter, as I step back. I didn’t realize how much power he had under the hood.

Phil strides down the wall behind the men and women, pausing for half a second behind each, tapping some and commanding them to go stand in an area apart from the rest.

The workmen get nervous, but the business ends of our railguns keep them obedient.

Silva looks at me for direction, as does Lenox. For once, I’m at a loss.

“What’s going on?” one of the workmen asks, as he steps away from the wall.

“Go!” Phil yells, as he spins on the man.

The man starts to yell back at Phil, but he collapses as though punched.

That’s the truth of Phil’s power, right there in front of me.

He’s kept it hidden, very well. It’s surprising and frightening. More so, because I can see that he’s stronger than a Gray. Or more attuned to the human mind. Either way, I’m worried. I destroyed Phil’s faux marriage, and he blames me for killing his soul mate.

I’m afraid a showdown is going to come between us, and I don’t know if I’ll survive.

When the sorting is done, seven of the workmen are standing apart from the others. Three of them are MSS. The markings are clear on their suits.

“What now?” asks Silva, over a crew comm link.

“Kill them,” says Phil, pointing at the seven.

“What?” shouts Silva.

Phil, carrying a railgun, and gripping it in hostile hands for the first time ever, levels the barrel at the seven and sprays them until his magazine is empty.

It happens fast, too fast.

We’re all too stunned to react.

And now we’re watching as body parts fly float through the vacuum and blood slowly vaporizes into crystals.

“What the hell was that?” shouts Brice.

“Expeditious action,” Phil tells him in a cold voice. “Those seven had loyalist tendencies that ran too deep.”

“Loyalist tendencies?” shouts Lenox. “Tendencies?”

Phil turns to me. “Tell them, Kane. We don’t have time to fuck around here, do we?” He throws a thumb at the remaining sixteen. “They hate the Grays and Trogs as much as we do. They’ll join the rebellion. They’ll help us.”

I don’t doubt that Phil is right about the sixteen; at least, he was right until he shredded their friends with his railgun. But would all of the other seven have fought against us? Were they all that loyal?

“We don’t have time for half measures,” says Phil. “Our comrades are dying down here and back on Earth. You and me committed to this, Kane. You and me are going to see it through.” He’s not suggesting. He’s daring me to defy him. It’s like something in him ruptured when Nicky died, and it’s infecting his brain with every manner of vileness that can warp a mind rotten.

Silva, Lenox, and Brice are all trying to open private comm links with me to ask the same questions: What do we do about Phil? The murder of seven civilians? What the hell is going on? Did we risk our lives for this?

“Phil,” I command, as I point a finger at the sixteen, “figure out which ones know the layout up here best. I need them and the lift pilots. Send the rest back to their holes. Tell them to tell their people that it’s time to take up arms against the invaders. The revolution is here. Shit’s gonna come down hard, and it’s gonna come down fast.”

Brice’s manic, black laugh puts a seal on the atrocity.

Chapter 38

With eyes that won’t settle back into the rational world, Phil goes to work, cajoling and scanning.

“What the hell?” asks Silva, as I finally let her, Silva and Brice on my comm link.

“I’m putting together a plan,” I tell her.

“I mean, what the hell with Phil? I think he snapped. I think him and Nicky were too tightly connected—mentally, I mean—and now he’s not all there.”

I shake my head, not because I disagree, but because I don’t see a good end to the situation. “Let’s give Phil some time and see what comes of it.”

“And?” she asks.

“No ands,” I tell her. “I’ll deal with him as we go. I’m just as new to this mess as you are. We all know Phil. This isn’t him. He’s crazy, right now.”

“What if he doesn’t stop being crazy?” asks Brice.

“No what-ifs,” I tell them.

None of them like my answer, but I can sense enough about normal human non-verbal communication to know that none of them have any better ideas. None of them wants to commit to anything.

“What about them?” I ask Lenox, glancing at the dead workmen.

“We’ve all seen worse,” I tell her. “We’ll see a lot more, a lot worse than this, by day’s end.”

“They were innocent,” say Lenox.

God, I don’t want to make Phil’s case, because I think what he did was an act of insanity. “They were the enemy. This is war.”

“They had loyalist tendencies,” says Lenox. “They were not the enemy.”

“Phil evaluated them,” I answer. “He can do it better than any of us.”

“He’s going nuts,” she tells me. “You don’t need to watch him murder anyone to know that. Just look at him. Listen to him. He snapped.”

“He’s what we have,” I tell her. “You and Silva, put some of those guys to work cutting the uniforms off dead.”

“Why?” she asks.

“We need to fashion some slings to carry the nukes that survived the crash.”

“What?” I can’t tell if she’s mortified by stripping the dead or fashioning slings to carry the nukes.

“I told you, I’m putting together a plan.” I turn to Brice, because I know that, as much as he didn’t like what just happened, it won’t keep him from pulling the trigger on the rest of our prisoners. Not if becomes necessary. “Hang back. Keep all of these guys in sight, until we have a better idea what they’re going to do.”

“If we’re going to pretend Phil was right about those seven he killed,” says Brice, “then we need to buy that he’s right about the rest of them, right?”

“Oh, fuck me, Brice. Just do it.”

Brice’s grin is malevolent. “Yes, sir.”

“Phil,” I call. “Which of these guys knows what’s what up here? I need somebody who’s on the same page as us.”

Phil glares at me.

“Like you said,” I snap. “People are dying. No half measures. Do it now!”

Chapter 39

“Frank Massey,” says the guy, sticking a hand out to shake mine, but glancing at Phil, who’s standing off of his left shoulder, scrutinizing him.

“What do you know about the tunnel systems, the layout of the subterranean facilities, and the deployment of Trogs and MSS?”

“You want a lot,” says Frank.

“I don’t have time dick around, Frank,” I tell him. “The war for your freedom is here, and too goddamn many of my friends died getting it here. So you can jump on the bus and give me your enthusiastic help, or you can get out of my face.”

Frank is taken aback, but recovers quickly. “I been up here nigh on twenty years. I started out a digger, running a tunnel boring machine.” He waves a hand at the missing ceiling and walls. “I was on the crew that dug this one. I worked my way up to foreman supervisor before the new bunch showed up.”

“Foreman supervisor,” I ask, “what’s that?”

“A lead foreman. I had three pods of foremen below me, and each of those foremen had three pods of workmen below him. Some three hundred and fifty people. We built out most of the base around this part of the moon.”

“Any parts you don’t know?” I ask.

“The new grays have been expanding the their domicile retreat down to a thousand feet.”

“What’s that?” I ask, as I see Phil take a keen interest. “A domicile retreat?”

“It’s their idea of Eden,” says Frank. “The original bunch built out these massive caverns down around five hundred feet, full of bright lights, pools, and gardens. They spend most of their time down there. We were always expanding it to accommodate more and more of them.”

“That’s what I sensed when we did our moon surveys,” says Phil, talking about the concentration of Grays he told us about when we were gathering intel a few months back.

“I’ve never heard of these,” I tell him.

“No reason you should have,” says Frank. “Working in this section of the moon base was a one-way ticket, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” I say, “I don’t know what you mean. Did they kill the workers after a time?”

“No,” says Frank. “People up here died the same as everybody else. Just, once you were assigned here, you never got reassigned. Here was here. This was it, until you died.”

“And your families?” I ask.

“Used to be, they had family dorms down below the main batteries, over on the other side of the MSS compound.”

“But now?” I ask.

“No humans live in this section anymore. They’ve all been moved out.”

“That’s good,” I tell him.

“Why’s that?”

“Because this part of the moon isn’t going to be here, pretty soon.”

“How’s that?”

“You let me worry about that,” I tell him. “Are these new Grays living down in the thousand-foot deep Eden yet?”

“About half of them, from what I heard,” he says. “I didn’t work on it. After the new bunch showed up, I lost my job as foreman supervisor. I’ve been on a maintenance crew ever since.” He looks over his shoulder at the survivors of Phil’s handiwork. “With this bunch.”

“But you know how to get down to the lowest level?” I ask.

“I know most of the guys who did the building.” He reaches over and taps his d-pad. “I got updated maps of the whole complex. My d-pad was wired for it a long time ago. The new bunch doesn’t understand computers, so they don’t know how we use ‘em. So when the plans got updated in the MSS system, all the changes flowed down to me, and nobody said boo about it.”

“Can we get down there?” I ask.

“All the way down to the thousand-foot Eden?” he asks.

“Ideally, we need to place the weapons around seven hundred and fifty feet, someplace smack dab in the middle of all of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve got a thermonuclear weapon,” I tell him. “I don’t know what size. Maybe nine megatons. I want to put it where it’ll kill every one of those bastards.”

Frank’s grin is real and it’s mean. “Why didn’t you start with that? There’s a vertical utility shaft that runs from a hangar not too far from here, all the way to the bottom. I know a back way to get to it. I can take you right there.” He turns and points out one of his coworkers. “We should bring along Skip. He was SDF down here for a lotta years. Manned one of the batteries up top. He’d have a good idea of where we might run into some Trogs or MSS along the way.”

I turn to Phil. “Can Skip be trusted to come with us?”

Phil shrugs. “Won’t matter. He’ll die either way.”

Frank grimaces.

“Don’t pay him too much attention,” I tell Frank. “Phil’s wife just died.”

“My soul died,” snaps Phil and he turns and stomps away.

Chapter 40

Above us, hardly any railgun rounds are lighting up the sky as they tear off into space. Instead, grav lifts are accelerating away from the moon, not in any kind of order, ones and twos, dozens, all headed for the earth.

Brice and I are standing on the edge of the crater with the front half of the Turd II buried at the bottom. He checks the time on his d-pad. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on, the moon is sending reinforcements to the battle stations. That’s where those lifts are going.” In the absence of a reply from me, he goes on to say, “That’s bad for our marines down there. Reinforcements might turn the tide against ‘em. Good, though. The assaults are going so well that reinforcements need to be sent. Don’t you think?”

“I suppose that’s one way to look at it.” I glance into the hole. We have more bodies than we need jimmying the nuclear devices out of the bent racks.

"I hate to even think it," says Brice, "but it thins out the herd here on the moon, and makes what we have to do easier.”

I turn my eyes to the sky, toward the blue dot of my home planet. A quarter-million miles away, yet it still seems odd that the eighteen orbiting battle stations aren’t visible.

“Big as those things are,” says Brice, guessing at my thoughts, “you think you’d see ‘em from here. Or at least the flashes of railgun fire. They gotta be fighting now. Ya think?”

“Yeah.” I check my d-pad for the time. “They were all supposed to arrive just as we nuked the moon base, coming up on an hour ago.”

“You think Blair got those nukes Bird gave her in position to level Pyongyang?”

I shrug. “Those nukes won’t do any good unless we detonate the ones here. The last message from Bird said her people wouldn’t glass Pyongyang and launch the coup unless the moon base was taken out first.”

“And Blair’s not going to stick her neck out for the rest of us,” says Brice, “no matter how many Free Army marines are dying down there.”

"She's a piece of work." I turn my attention to the crater.

Both of the lifts are hovering above the sloping sides near the bottom. Most of the surviving workmen are down there, doing what they can. Four of the workmen are skipping across the surface, heading back to the hole where the back half of the ship lies in the tunnel.

“You sure you trust those guys?” Brice raises his railgun to his shoulder and looks down the sight. “I can kill all four of ‘em from here. It’ll happen so fast they won’t even feel it.”

“We talked about this,” I say. “We need these people to fight for us. They’re headed to the worker dorms to see how many of these people still have the will to stand up for themselves and die for their children’s futures.”

“Dead,” says Brice. “That’s what you call a soldier with no weapons.”

I’m already only paying half attention to him. I’m looking at Phil. He’s sitting on the edge of the crater with his comm links turned off. That doesn’t matter, though, I can hear him sobbing through the telepathic link between us. It’s too overpowering to tune out. I think he’s doing it on purpose, willing me to feel his grief.

“He shouldn’t have a weapon,” says Brice, following my eyes.

“I know.”

“I can take it from him.”

I shake my head. “Let me deal with it.”

“He might shoot you.”

I shrug.

“You two,” starts Brice, and then he shakes his head.

“I told Clark to set a timer on the last nuke.” I check my d-pad again. “There’s will be a timer set on every one of them, right from the beginning. We’ll be on the clock once this thing kicks off. No fuckups. No tactical retreats. No looking for a better way. It’ll be bull-rush-with-guns-blazing or die.”

Brice pretends to startle awake. "Wait, were you saying something about how this was going to be different? ‘Cause it sounded a lot like the same shit we've been doing for over a year." He finishes with a chuckle.

I chuckle, too. “Same shit, I guess.”

“You like living on the edge. I’ll give you that.”

“If we’re killed trying to deliver the bombs,” I say, “I still want them to detonate. Then Blair’s people will have their signal and start the coup. Besides, these weapons can’t fall into Trog hands.”

“Even with a nuke,” says Brice, “reverse engineering one, if that’s what you’re thinking, would require a mountain of science the Grays don’t possess. They’d be better off starting from scratch.”

“They’ll have plenty of time,” I tell him. “The Grays have been around for thousands of years. If they can’t figure it out, there are still plenty of scientists on earth who I’m sure could be convinced to help the Grays ramp up their tech.”

“Or they could fly down to earth and find a nuke all on their own. I’ll bet the MSS still has a few dozen lying around they’d happily share with the Grays for the right price.”

“Well,” I tell him, “they aren’t getting these.”

Chapter 41

Everything is set. I wish Clark all the luck in the world. I do the same for each man and woman in the work party who has chosen life over slavery. Some of them are going with Clark, others are headed into the moon’s population to share with them what’s going on, and to stir up the revolution. Frank and Skip are coming with my team. Based on the efforts I’ve seen from all of the work crew survivors, I think Phil’s probing assessments of them was correct. Which means the four with loyalist tendencies probably did need to die along with those three MSS types.

The timers on the nukes are synced and double-checked.

“At least five kilometers,” I tell Clark as he steps into the crowded grav lift, one of the two he’s taking, each carrying two nukes.

“Godspeed,” he tells me as one of his crewmen slams the lift door shut.

I give Brice, Silva, Lenox, and surly Phil a nod. Skip, Brice, Silva, and Lenox have the nuke hanging between them in a sling fashioned out of suit cloth taken from the bodies in the tunnel. Together, they can fly using suit g with each carrying the equivalent of thirty-five pounds of extra weight from the nuke. Frank, my guide, will fly out front with me. Phil doesn’t have a job—not exactly. He just needs to stay with us. I need to keep an eye on him, and I need to keep him alive. He’s my endgame.

“Let’s go,” I tell everyone as I lift off the surface and pick up speed.

Phil, to his credit, seems to have little trouble with the suit controls, yet he has a more intimate relationship with gravity than any human I’ve ever known.

Frank lifts off and hurries to catch up with me. As for the four handling our weapon, it’s awkward going, but only at first. They soon become more coordinated and pick up speed.

Inside of a minute, we’ve passed the gaping hole in the tunnel system and the front half of our ship. We’re skimming over the surface, staying two to three meters off the ground and making speeds upwards of two hundred kilometers an hour.

Frank has worked his way up beside me, and he points to the right. “That’s the rise I was telling you about.”

“The one with the gun emplacements on the other side?” I confirm.

“Anti-personnel railguns,” he says. “They defend one of the hangars over there from ground assault. The Grays wised up a month or two back and forced ex-SDF troopers to train some of their Trogs on using the guns. You can bet with what you’ve got going on up on the battle stations, the Trogs will have those manned.”

I point to the left. “Is that where the depression starts?”

“We’re on course,” he says. “What’s our time?”

“Six and a half minutes.”

To our right, past the rise holding the railgun bunkers, a line of lifts accelerate into the sky, pushing hard g’s and glowing bright blue grav fields off their plates.

“There goes another couple hundred assholes,” says Brice over the comm.

“Just for another six minutes,” I tell him, “and the parade stops.”

Chapter 42

We come to a stop in the open, as Frank checks the detailed map on his d-pad. He points to a grid square. "They're a kilometer apart, those gridlines. We should be ten kilometers away right here."

I know that's plenty far. I know it in my head, mostly, and in my heart not at all. With the moon's horizon only two and a half kilometers away, ten kilometers should be plenty of distance for us to be well below the horizon with respect to the crash. Still.

I look farther down the length of the depression. "How far is that rock mound?"

“Two kilometers,” Frank guesses. “Maybe less.”

I look at my d-pad. “We still have nearly two minutes.” I glance at the others. “Who’d feel comfortable having that mound at your back when the timer hits zero?”

All raise a hand, except for Phil. He’s glaring up at the earth, anger boiling over in his brain.

Frank points to a row of broken boulders, each maybe the size of a travel trailer. They’re maybe a half-kilometer to our right. “That’s our entrance point over there. On the other side of those big rocks.” Looking toward the mound I’ve selected two kilometers away, he asks, “You wanna be that far when it blows?”

I nod as I lift off.

The others show their agreement by rising with me.

In moments, we’re all flying as fast as we dare so close to the ground. The clock is ticking, and destruction like we’ve never experienced, so close and personal, is coming.

Chapter 43

When we hit the ground, we lay our nuke in the softest pad of gray dust we can find within a few meters of the rock mound. We each sit down and put our backs to a large stone that seems to be firmly planted in the ground. Lenox and Silva have to wrangle Phil into place as his mood isn’t allowing him to care whether he’s safely down with the rest of us.

I check my d-pad, and see that we still have nearly thirty-seconds to spare. “Everybody ready for this?”

“How long do we wait?” asks Lenox.

“You mean after?” I ask.

She nods.

“Until most of the rocks have fallen,” I say.

“It’s not going to happen like you think,” says Phil in a weird robotic voice, like he’s trying for all he’s worth not to show one more shred of emotion. “There’ll be no end.”

He’s probably right, yet I don’t want to say anything one way or the other. I can still feel his anger at me flowing out like a salty tide.

Another flight of grav lifts—nearly twenty of them—pass overhead, maybe a thousand feet up, all heading toward earth.

“You think they’ve taken any of the battle stations yet?” asks Brice.

I check my d-pad. “Five seconds.”

That ends the conversation.

Everyone braces.

I don’t hear it, although I feel it shock the ground below my hands so hard it hurts. I see a burst of vaporized matter expanding across the sky. Our first nuclear explosion on the moon.

It feels like it detonated inside my head. My bug goes into spasms.

The big rumbles come in waves that feel like they’re going to liquefy the ground, and the sky fills with glowing rocks of every size. And it’s all happening so fast, and so unending, it feels like the moon is breaking at the seams.

And then calm.

I try hard not to puke as the world spins before my eyes. Every nuclear blast is worst than the one before. With us being so close to this one, I’m starting to think, I’ve damaged myself permanently.

Remarkably, Phil is the first to stand as the ground seems to shiver from the nuclear hammer blow it just took. He looks up at the growing cloud of debris covering the sky. “That’s all coming back down. And it’s all radioactive.”

“Oh shit.” Why wasn’t that the very first thing I thought of?

Chapter 44

Above us, the debris is glittering orange and red from sunlight bouncing off the particles. An eerie glow colors everything around us.

“The moon’s escape velocity,” says Phil, taking on an absent way of talking, like he’s reciting something memorized to bore himself into sleep, “is five thousand, two hundred, and ninety-four miles an hour.”

Everybody’s on their feet, shaking off the effects of the shockwave, and marveling at the fact they’re still alive.

"You think Clark’s squads made it ten kilometers?" asks Silva.

"They did,” I say, as my head starts to settle down. “There's no reason he shouldn't have in the grav lifts."

“In a vacuum,” says Phil, still staring at the sky, “gravity pulls everything down at the same speed it went up.”

No one is paying him any attention.

Brice is urging Silva and the others to help him with the nuke. Frank isn't saying anything, but his eyes are full of doubt and an urge to run somewhere far away.

“Some of it will be ejected,” says Phil, not moving from the spot he’s claimed. “Some of it will go into orbit. Most of it—the boulders, the pebbles, and the dust—will come back down. It’ll cover the whole moon in radioactive particles.”

“We need to go now,” I tell everyone. “We need to get underground.”

“Clark and his people don't know that," says Silva.

“They have both of the lifts,” says Brice. “The steel will protect them while they’re inside.”

“At first,” says Phil. “Then the particles will irradiate the metal boxes and they’ll become death traps.”

“We’ll be long done with our business before that happens.” I lift off, hoping I’ll feel steadier afloat than on my feet.

Frank rises as well.

The four with the nuke manage the sling and lift it off the ground.

“Phil,” I say, “stop staring at the pretty colors. We gotta go.”

He takes that as a reminder I'm still alive, and his eyes drill me with hate as he comes off the ground.

I spin in the air, confirm the direction with Frank, and go.

I feel the others follow. As we pull away from the false safety of our rock mound, I pour on the speed.

The sky from ground to zenith is filling with dust. Rocks start to impact the ground around us, most falling slowly. They don’t seem like a danger, but some are as large as basketballs, a few are the size of dishwashers.

Before I realize it, we’ve crossed the two kilometers, and Frank urges me to slow down. He points out the row of huge stones that mark our destination.

I brake hard and drop boots-first to the ground. Frank comes down beside me, and we hurry to the edge of a tall hunk of rock to look out onto the plane above the spaceport.

“I can’t see anything,” I tell Frank. “Just the haze.”

He’s looking at the map on his d-pad. “It’s getting worse, but I know where we are.”

The others come up behind us.

“How much protection will these suits give us from the radiation?” asks Silva.

“More than we’re getting right now,” Lenox tells her, recalling information from her days when she was instructing recruits on the features of our fine, orange terrariums. “We need to get inside, though.”

“We will,” I tell them.

“With no air resistance,” says Phil. “Only gravity will act on the particles, and they’ll be moving at the speed of a railgun round when they come down straight on the top of our heads. Billions of them.”

Lennox looks up. So does Frank.

I elbow Frank hard in the ribs. “Don’t worry about that. Everybody, amp up your defensive grav. The high-speed particles aren’t coming down yet, okay? Anything moving that fast away from the moon will take a long time to get back here. And it’s going to be all over the surface—right, Phil? That’s what you said, right?”

“All over,” he tells us. “You wouldn’t want to be out here anytime in the next thousand years.”

Lennox looks at him with a sneer. "A thousand years?”

“Plenty will be falling sooner,” he says.

“C’mon,” I tell them as I point. “About three hundred meters that way. See that bump? You can barely make it out in the distance. That’s a bunker. We’ll take to the air and come down on it from above. The bunker contains anti-personnel guns. The guns inside won’t be pointing up. The Trogs inside won’t be pointing that direction, either.” I look down at my suit. It has a thick covering of moon dust, providing the perfect camouflage against the background. “They won’t ever see us if we’re fast, and neither will any of the other gun emplacements.”

Brice peeks out from behind the rock to get a good look at the spaceport. “You can’t even see all the way across right now.”

“We’ll leave the nuke here,” I say, “and come back to get it after we take the bunker.” I look around to make sure we’re all on the same page with my flimsy plan.

Everyone nods except Phil.

“Let’s go.”

“Wait,” says Phil. “You’re making it too complicated. Let’s do this my way.”

Chapter 45

Moments later we’re spread out amongst the rocks, using the irregular ground for cover. Phil is standing beside the big stone we’ve been using for concealment when I give him the nod.

Instantly, I feel it—pain in my head that I know isn’t real, yet it wants me to believe it’s searing into my synapses, running up the nerve bundles from my hands, feet, and heart. It’s a familiar sensation, and when I realize that, I grit my teeth against it. I felt it all those years ago when Phil and I saw that Gray being run over by the truck. I felt a hint of it every time I gunned down a Gray, and especially when they didn’t die right away. I received a full dose of it when I murdered most of Nicky’s pod back on the Potato.

I also understand it’s not just a Gray’s way of punishing the lowly creatures, it’s their cry for help, their demand for it.

A few hundred yards away, I know the Trogs in that bunker feel it, and they’ll do what good Trogs everywhere do—they’ll come to assist an injured Gray in need. That’s what Phil is doing with his mind, he’s producing the Gray distress call, and for all I can tell, he’s doing it perfectly.

I take a place beside the stone, drop to a knee, and ready my rifle. Over the comm’s static, I call to my crew, “Wait for the word from me before you open fire. I want to hit them all.”

With no respite from Phil, I grit my teeth and suffer the assault on my senses, knowing it’ll end soon enough.

Moments pass.

And then minutes.

“Phil?” I ask.

They’re out of the bunker. It’s a telepathic response from Phil. I don’t complain. They’re coming.

I relay the information to the others.

How many? I ask.

One pod. All Trogs. All coming to help me.

“I see one,” says Brice, just as I see shapes materialize from the thickening haze.

“There’ll be six,” I tell them.

“I count three,” says Silva.

“Same,” says Lenox.

“Patience,” says Brice. “We’ve all been here before.”

At ninety meters, the last of them comes into view.

Phil raises his railgun and takes up a position beside me. His Gray distress call doesn’t relent.

“Everybody got a target?” I ask.

All do.

The Trogs are stalking toward what they believe is a Gray in jeopardy, yet they don't have their defensive grav fields on. Why? The only reason that makes sense to me is their logic centers are still muddled from the nuclear explosion.

“On three,” I say. “Three, two, shoot!”

The haze illuminates with red spears of light blasting out of our gun barrels. We mercilessly blow the Trogs to pieces. Legs, arms, and heads rocket away, driven by blood and suit gasses expanding into the vacuum.

It’s over in seconds.

Phil’s distress call ceases.

The artificial pain ends, but its aftertaste lingers on my nerves, rasping the edges. “Anybody get a count?”

“All six went down,” says Brice. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?” asks Lenox. “I saw six kills.”

“They didn’t go down,” Brice laughs. “Some pieces are still going up!”

“Sometimes, you’re so sick,” says Silva.

“Let’s take that bunker while it’s empty,” I tell my people.

Chapter 46

“Craptastic,” says Brice.

We’re all standing on the floor of the bunker. The view outside is collapsing as the sky continues to fill with dust. That's not what has our attention. We're looking at the airlock. The outer door is open. Inside, there's room for a pair of us and no more.

“There’s no way we’re getting that nuke through,” says Brice. “Not unless we blow the doors.”

I look at the time on my d-pad. Our schedule is too tight to search for another way in. Still, I hate to alert every Trog in the area to our presence. “We can’t wait twenty minutes for the air to empty out.”

“We won’t,” says Brice. “If this battery is built like the ones my crews manned, it’s designed with breaches in mind. That happens in a fight. The tunnel system for this bunker is linked to five others. You know the goddamn Grays, six of everything. That system is linked into the main corridor system through a larger airlock. The nuke should fit through.”

“It will,” Frank concurs. “The halls below us are narrow and not that long. If we blow these doors, the air will escape in less than a minute.”

“Any other way to get to the utility shaft?” I ask, looking to Frank for the answer.

“This is the back way,” he replies. “If we go down here, and reach the service tunnel level, then we can get to the shaft without seeing any Trogs. Probably.”

“Is there another way?” I ask.

Frank points out at the spaceport. It's a giant, rectangular hole in the ground, with doors that double as roofs that slide open when grav lifts are coming or going. The light from eight or nine open doors glows on the dust floating above each. As we watch, two lifts ascend. "We can go that way,” says Frank, “yet there’s no telling how many Trogs are in there staging to load up.”

Decision made. “Blow the door,” I tell Brice.

Everybody piles back out of the bunker except for Brice and Lenox. They set the charges.

Once outside, using the bunker’s thick walls to protect me from the coming blast, I turn to Frank. “After we place the nuke, I need an exit path that takes us by the MSS radio room.”

“We won’t have time for that,” says Frank. “You and your man Clark should have put more time on the timers.”

“Frank,” I tell him, “we’re already an hour behind schedule. Can we get to the MSS radio room?”

“We can get there if the Trogs don’t wise up to what we’re doing, if we don’t run short on time, if the nuke doesn’t blow up in our faces.”

“Figure out how long it’ll take us to get from the drop point to the radio room.” I try to tell myself Frank is risking everything for a revolution he didn’t know was coming when he was having his coffee this morning. “It’s important. We’ll decide whether to try for the radio room after we see how much time we have left after we drop off the nuke.”

“What’s the point?” asks Frank. “Everybody from here to Mars is gonna know when those nukes blow.”

He’s exaggerating because he’s not handling the stress well. “Frank, I need to make a call before we go, if we have time.”

Brice and Lenox hop out through the bunker’s wide gun ports and come down on the ground beside me. “Ready,” Brice tells me.

“Blow it!” I order.

Chapter 47

Six precious minutes later, and we’ve climbed back into the bunker, hauled our bomb through the destroyed airlock, climbed down the stairs, and flew the length of the hall.

Now we’re all squeezed into the airlock that’ll give us access to the maintenance tunnel system one level deeper. The air pressure inside the lock is equalizing.

“Trogs,” says Phil.

I sense them, too. Six, of course.

“Where?” asks Brice.

“And humans,” adds Phil. “Another work crew.”

"How close?" Brice is reading the pressure gauge, and he knows we're only seconds from opening the inner door.

“There’s a long ramp outside the airlock that slopes down another ten meters,” says Phil. “At the bottom, a transit corridor runs right and left. The work crew is to the right another twenty or thirty meters down.”

“Going away, or moving toward us?” asks Brice.

“Coming this way,” says Phil. “Trogs in front, humans marching behind.”

“Can you do that Gray distress call again?” asks Brice.

“No,” says Phil, “I— ”

That’s all I need to hear of Phil's explanation, because we don't have time for all the irrelevant details he wants to school us on. "We take ‘em at the bottom of the ramp."

A light flashes green over the inner door, and it automatically unlatches and swings open.

“Mind your thoughts,” Phil tells me, “or they’ll hear you.”

Lenox and Brice are through the door first, followed by me and Silva. Phil plods along after. Frank and Skip stay in the airlock with the nuke, keeping the door propped open, effectively making the airlock unusable for anyone trying to enter from the outside.

In seconds, we four shooters are arrayed on the ramp, all with clear lines of fire down to the hallway intersection ahead. Phil is standing in the middle of the ramp, looking down, communicating some kind of Trog gibberish so fast I can’t understand what he’s trying to say.

Lenox asks, “What are you doing, Phil?”

He flinches back, and I sense a change in the minds of the Trogs nearing in the hall. “Get ready.”

A moment later, the Trogs burst around the corner in a tight mob, disruptors out, defensive fields maxed, charging up the ramp.

There’s no need for orders, we fire.

Nobody aims at the center of mass. We’ve done this before. All rounds go low, aimed at ankles and knees.

Every Trog falls, but none are dead yet.

I jump to my feet and hurry down the ramp to gain a better angle for finishing off survivors with shots through the tops of their helmets or into their backs.

Brice is right there with me doing the same.

Lenox is taking a different, tried-and-true approach, firing long streams of rounds on them to overwhelm their defensive grav. The combined effect is lethal. In moments, every Trog is dead.

Down at the bottom of the ramp, men and women in orange suits are peeking around the corner to see what’s just transpired.

“They’re running away,” says Phil. “Most of them.”

I reach out with my mind to pick up what I can from the people still down there, recalling that I can't sense non-bughead human thoughts the way Phil can. Through the rock, I can only sense vague blurs of human-sized masses moving. Across all the standard channels, I comm a message to those I can see, We mean you no harm.

“Who are you?” one asks.

“We’re the revolution,” I tell him, as I glance down at my d-pad. “In thirty-seven minutes, there’s going to be a smoking hole three miles wide right here. Tell every human you can find to move as far away from here as they can.”

“But the Trogs— ”

“If you don’t go,” I repeat. “You will die. Do whatever you have to do, but get away. Now, go!”

I turn to Frank and Skip who are wrestling the nuke out of the airlock. Neither has yet armed himself. “Grab a disruptor off one of the Trogs, you two. You may need it before this is over.”

“Are we done with the motivational speeches?” asks Brice. “We need to get moving, because this place will be swarming with Trogs in about five minutes.”

Phil looks at us with wide, lost eyes. “Less than that.” He points to the dead Trogs on the ramp. They passed a message. Soon every Trog within a mile will know intruders are down here.”

Skip—Frank’s buddy—finally makes himself useful. “There’s a big barrack complex down to the right about a half a klick. Maybe a thousand Trogs bunk down there.”

I turn to Frank.

I can tell by his face I’m not going to like his answer. “About halfway down to those barracks is where we can access the service tunnel to take us over to the utility shaft.”

“We can’t,” says Phil. “The Trogs are already coming.”

“From the barracks?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Hundreds. Maybe all of them.”

I look at Frank. “What’s the fastest way to the hangar?”

“Bottom of the ramp and go left,” he says. “One turn and a hundred meters down puts you at the hangar airlock. We can be there in a minute or two.”

I weigh the risk of running the tunnels against going back out into the radioactive slurry settling over the landscape. “The tunnels, that’s where we’re headed. Somebody put a C4 charge on this airlock. Set it for five minutes. Let’s go!”

Chapter 48

We’re flying down the corridor following Frank’s directions. He’s helping to carry the nuke now, as I need shooters out front with me.

I have my railgun pointed up the hall, ready to fire at anything that steps out in front of us. Phil, to his credit, isn’t lollygagging at the rear anymore, he’s flying beside me, weapon at the ready—only I can’t tell if he’s looking to shoot something or if he wants to be the first one to die when we run into the Trogs. Just below and between us, Brice is skimming along the floor, railgun up, ready to kill.

“The left turn is up here," pants Frank. "About a hundred meters." Frank reduces his speed to make the corner, and so do the rest of us. We're there in a few seconds, and have to slow to nearly walking speed to make the turn before we start racing again.

I can’t help but look back down the length of the corridor. I can’t see the Trogs down there, but I feel them.

“At the end of the hall,” says Frank, “it spreads out into a staging area for the hangar.”

“This is the only way?” I ask.

“The vertical utility shaft is accessible through the loading dock on the other side of the hangar bay. Crossing the hanger is the only way that won’t run us through half the Trog army.”

“Let’s clear it.” I amp up to max grav and race ahead. Brice is right on my heels, and Phil is right behind him.

“Trogs,” says Phil, as we close in.

And that's all the time we have. I spin feet first and brake hard. It takes all of a half-second for the staging area to open up in front of me. I come out of the hall facing left to see three pods of Trogs, loitering and looking at one another, like they’re shooting the shit while waiting for their lift assignment. I'm already firing on full-auto before I come to a stop. With my finger holding down the trigger, and my weapon blasting out rounds by the hundred, I have to grav tight to the floor and lean into my fire. I'm spraying back and forth across the mass of Trogs, not aiming, not trying to pick out any target, just letting my gun do its nasty work on enemies who weren't expecting me to show up and ruin their day.

When my magazine runs dry, I pop it out and slam in a replacement as I scan across the place in the staging area where eighteen Trogs had been standing just a moment before. Now there’s nothing but the carnage only a high-velocity railgun slug can bring down on unprotected flesh.

All my Trogs are dead.

I scan, looking for anything moving on my end of the staging area. Nothing.

“Clear,” I call, as I turn to see if Brice and Phil need help.

Even more dead Trogs are scattered on the floor. Brice and Phil fired together and devastated the waiting Trogs.

I ask, “All clear, Phil?”

“No more in here.”

“Lenox,” I comm, “bring the nuke.”

“There,” says Brice.

I glance around to see him point at a large airlock close to one corner of the staging area.

“That’ll take us out to the hangar.”

Phil soars across the staging area to look out one of the many windows opening up to the hangar. He laughs. “Too many. Too many.”

I look up and realize there's a background noise under my thoughts. Trogs. At first, I think it’s the horde coming up behind us, but then realize it’s coming from another direction.

“Out there loading into grav lifts,” says Phil. “Maybe two hundred. Maybe two-fifty. They know something just happened, but they don’t know we’re here yet.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” says Brice. “Every moment is more fun than the last.”

“Brice,” I say, “You have another C4?”

He smiles. “Two.”

I look at the others. “Grav tight. Things are about to get exciting.”

I jump and fly to the airlock’s massive door in a flash. I heave to pull the heavy door open and squeeze inside as soon as the gap is wide enough. Brice tries to push in after me. “No,” I tell him. “I’ll put two charges on the outside door. You put your charges on these two. I’ll see you on the other side.”

“What?” he looks at me like I’ve gone suicide crazy. “On the other side?”

“On the other side of the hangar. I’m headed out there.” I look myself up and down. I’m caked in blood and moon dust. No orange color is visible on my suit. “You’ll know when to detonate.”

Chapter 49

The airlock, large enough to handle sixty Trogs at a time, cycles faster than expected. But then again, emptying an airlock to vacuum always seems to go faster than filling it with atmosphere.

As soon as the pressure reaches vacuum, the outer door automatically swings open.

Filling my head with the most Trog-sounding thoughts I can copy from my time spent in the company of Prolific Man Killer and his captains, I walk fast without looking around. I’m headed toward the nearest lift I see.

I feel Trog eyes on me, and I feel suspicion in their thoughts as telepathic questions come at me. Who are you? What’s your clan? Why are you alone? What’s wrong with you?

And they’re coming. I feel them, so I look up.

Twenty or thirty, not a dozen meters away, are starting to move toward me. Through the grime, they can see the magazines mounted on my chest, the pistol in its holster, the railgun I’m trying to keep hidden behind my body.

Shit!

The grav lift I’m heading for is still forty meters away.

I can make it if I fly. I think.

A pain hits me, ripping right through my thoughts, and grating on every nerve. I stumble, but catch myself, as I see every Trog head in the hangar bay turn as one, all of them looking at the glass windows to the staging area.

Phil!

It’s him and his Gray distress call.

I jump and max grav toward the lift.

Out in the hangar, I know my grav pulse caught the attention of more Trogs than I care to guess.

Thankfully, the cockpit door on the grav lift is open, and as I reach it, I swing around feet-first and slip right into the seat. I skip the seatbelt and swing the door shut instead. Setting my suit grav to keep my ass pinned to the seat, I flip the switch to power up the lift, and thank God the reactor was kept purring while waiting to load up and lift off.

I raise the lift off the ground by a meter and look back toward the airlock. I shove the power lever to max grav as I tilt the lift hard to port to race across the hangar’s vast open space, right at the Trogs who’d been casting their suspicious eyes at me. Defensive grav fields plume bright as I plow into them, sending their bodies flying in every direction. That’s when the airlock charges blow, and airborne bodies are swept up through open doors and into space.

I cut a hard right and slam my grav lift into another lift, half-full of Trogs who are too stunned to do anything but watch the collision crush the shipping container around them.

I don’t stop, instead powering on through, shoving the lift out of the way as I bump into two more before the floor clears in front of me, except for forty or fifty Trogs with boot grav locked to the floor to avoid being thrown around by the air rushing out of the inner tunnels and through the broken airlock.

I plow through them, maiming and killing, as I race through to bump my way down a row of grav lifts just starting to lift off to escape the mayhem. The first one accelerates hard to move out of my way as I clip its drive array, throwing it off-kilter, as it smashes into one of the open hangar doors. Ramming my way through three more collisions, my shipping container is coming apart and pieces are falling off with every bump.

“Brice,” I call over the comm. “Can you hear me?”

“You’re crazy,” he tells me.

“Now’s your chance,” I reply.

“Already working it,” he says.

I come around to work my way down the other side of the hangar and see Brice and all the others at the far end. With suit grav to keep them glued to the ground, they're trudging through the wind rushing out of the airlock and trying to cross the hangar. "I can keep these bastards busy until you make it past."

“They will figure out how to take you down,” says Brice. “Don’t push your luck.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I tell him, as my lift reels from slamming broadside into one that powered down and slid across the floor.

A handful of brave Trogs take advantage of my loss of speed to jump onto my left, looking for handholds, as I accelerate toward a wall to scrape them off.

The impact is hard on my machine, and the controls start to get splashy. I lose two of my hitchhikers.

“We’re moving faster now that we’re avoiding the wind,” Brice calls to me.

“ETA?” I ask, as I slam another lift and kill another of my riders. I accelerate hard for the roof and mash the two above my cockpit.

“A minute,” Brice tells me.

“I’ll meet you there.”

Chapter 50

I’ve ditched my demolished lift, and I’m flying at a reckless speed through the destruction on the hangar floor, tossing my hand grenades out behind me.

I spy the cavernous loading dock and rip through in a flash, cutting hard as the floor opens up below me, exposing a shaft punched through the rock, forty meters in diameter and a thousand feet deep. Dim lights illuminate spots on the wall at semi-regular intervals all the way down. They mark the landings outside the airlocks at each level. My feet tingle as I look down a shaft and the natural fear of falling momentarily grips me. Still, I angle toward the bottom and power into the hole.

A hundred feet below me, I see my crew, descending rapidly, staying in the shadows close to the wall.

“Brice,” I call.

“You made it.” He sounds genuinely surprised.

I accelerate to catch up with them.

Lenox congratulates me on pulling off another death-defying feat. Silva won't comment on it. Frank says I'm fuckin’ crazy.

“Let’s pick up the pace,” I say and push the speed down. “Frank, let us know which airlock we need to exit through.”

Brice spins over onto his back and aims his rifle back up the shaft. “In case anybody saw you come this way.”

I roll on my back as well. Our most likely source of danger is from above.

“I feel them,” says Phil, as he stares at one of the airlocks we’re passing.

“That’s five hundred,” says Frank.

“They’re in there,” says Phil. “They’re frightened.”

“The Grays?” I ask. “Was it the nuke that frightened them?”

“They felt it,” says Phil. “Though they were protected by five hundred feet of rock, they were closer to the blast than we were.”

“Have they recovered yet?” I ask, as we sink deeper.

“Some,” he says. “Not all.”

“Do you feel the Grays down below?” I ask.

“Yes,” answers Phil. “They fared better, but not well.”

“Almost there,” says Frank.

We start to slow.

“Phil, how many Grays are down here?” I ask. “Can you tell?”

“Thousands,” he says. “Maybe half the Grays in the system. The heads of the big clans.”

No doubt in my mind. “This is where we need to be.”

Frank guides us to an airlock landing, and we all step out of the shaft on the stone floor and wait for the lock to cycle.

“Anything beyond this airlock we need to worry about?” I’m looking at Frank and Skip.

Frank shakes his head.

“No military down this deep,” says Skip. “Leastways, no SDF ever came down here.”

“The corridor is empty,” says Phil.

The airlock door pops open, and we all pile in.

Brice pulls the door shut and Lenox hits the button to cycle it full of atmosphere.

I look at my d-pad to check the time.

Up on the surface, Clark has divvied his people into four squads. They’ve each taken a nuke, and they’re spread out as evenly as they can over the area where all the planet-killer batteries are nested. Each team has a particular railgun in a particular battery selected. At a time of Clark’s choosing, one Marine in each squad will slide down the barrel of one of the railguns and spike it with as much C4 as they have. Once the squad is clear, they’ll blow the charge, destroying the base of the gun, and hopefully killing every Trog in the bunker below. That’s when the squad will come back and slide their bomb down the open railgun tube where it’ll drop fifteen or twenty meters into wreckage below. That’s where each bomb will sit until it goes off. My orders for Clark were to drop the bombs down the tubes just three minutes before detonation. I figured the three minutes would give his squads just enough time to move to a safe position while minimizing the time any live Trogs below had to figure out that the bomb is a danger, and then do something about it.

Back on earth, if Blair’s insurgents didn’t nuke Pyongyang when our first bomb blew up here, then they’ll do it when the rest explode. From there, it’s a crapshoot as to whether her coup will work.

On the battle stations, if the workers rose up to fight with us, then there weren’t enough Trogs on the stations to stand against them, and they’re all in our hands. If the workers didn’t rise up, then I don’t want to think about how badly it went. Our whole army could be dead already.

Unfortunately, all of those things are out of my hands. All I can do is accomplish my mission.

We’ve gone seven hundred meters down a straight, poorly lit hallway when Frank stops us, spends a moment examining the map on his d-pad, and says, “This is it. This is the most central place between Upper and Lower Eden. You put that bomb here, and nothing will survive.” He spreads his hands in an expansive gesture over his head. “This whole part of the moon has been drilled with so many tunnels, caverns, and shafts, it’ll all collapse. Nothing will survive down here.”

I look up and down the hall. “Is there a closet or something nearby? I don’t want to drop this thing here in the hall where anybody might notice it.”

“A tool room.” Frank points. “Twenty meters that way.”

“We need to make this quick,” says Brice. “The clock is running down.”

“Follow Frank,” I tell him. “Put the nuke inside.” I grab Skip by the arm. “Stay with me. I have questions.”

“About?” he asks, as the others hurry the bomb down the hall.

“I need to radio out before the bombs detonate.”

Skip is already shaking his head.

“I mentioned the MSS radio room to Frank. He doesn’t think we have time to get there, make a call, and then get out alive.”

Skip is still shaking his head. “Even if every corridor and vertical shaft between here and there was clear, you probably couldn’t make it.”

“You’ve seen how fast I can fly through these halls.”

“I’m taking that into account.”

I curse under my breath. “What about the SDF? Do they have any radio equipment? Anything they used for coordinating the moon’s defenses, for communicating with the fleet when we had one?”

Skip is nodding. “It’s not close.”

“That’s okay,” I tell him with a smile. “We’re not staying in the area anyway.”

Chapter 51

Given the few minutes left on the clock, we don’t have time for subtleties. Once we clear the airlock to move back into the utility shaft, I tell them, “Max grav up, cut the corner as fast as you dare to get into the hangar, and then pray to God the roof doors are still open.”

“If they’re not?” asks Skip.

“Like you said before, we don’t have a lot of time.”

“Keep on eye on each other,” I tell them. “We’ll max grav as far as we can get before the detonations and gather up somewhere outside. Go.”

Everybody jumps off.

“Lenox, Silva,” I tell them, “take the lead, show us how it’s done.”

I comm Brice privately. “Stay with them. I’ll hang back with Frank and Skip.”

“Don’t,” says Brice. He’s pragmatic. He’s already seen how rusty Frank and Skip are at flying in their suits.

“I’ll make sure they go fast.”

In seconds, Silva, Lenox, Brice, and Phil are already more than a hundred feet above us.

I open a link to Frank and Skip. “You guys need to fly like your lives depend on it.”

Frank says, “I’m not used to this kind of—”

“Frank,” I say as I come in close to him, “grab onto me. Clip your belt carabiners to mine. Skip, you do the same. Do it quick.”

It's not dignified, but they do it, and we accelerate as one clumsy clump.

"Don't let go," I tell them. "If you fall off, I'm not coming back for you."

Several hundred feet above us, the other four have already made the turn into the hangar.

“Is it clear?” I ask over the comm.

“Trogs everywhere,” says Brice through raging static. “We made it out. Be careful.”

“Oh, shit!” hollers Lenox.

“Lenox?” I call, but I hear only static and garbled voices. “Lenox, can you hear me?” No response I can understand. “Silva? Phil?”

I point my railgun out ahead of me. “You hear that?” I ask Frank and Skip.

“Yep.”

Coming to the top of the shaft, I slow for the turn, not wanting to lose one of them to momentum, as I burn hard g’s cutting through the loading dock to get into the hangar. Brice wasn’t lying, Trogs are everywhere, and plenty of them are carrying railguns, which they shoot at us as I spray wildly with every round that’ll fire out of my magazine while accelerating through the open hangar doors above.

Once I’m out in the enveloping dust, I see trails blown through where Brice and the others have already flown. I pile on the g’s to catch up. “Can anyone hear me?

I see eight or nine blue grav halos up ahead, and know immediately they’re not right. Trogs—Trogs pushing hard g’s to catch my crew. In a way, it’s a relief, because it tells me my crew is alive. At the same time, my protective instincts redline and I amp up my grav to catch them, but something else isn’t right, and it’s not right in a big way. The bug in my head is trying to figure out what it is.

“Holy shit!” hollers Frank. “Look!”

I barrel roll while I accelerate for a full look at the sky above us. How do I know that’s where I need to look? Hell, I don't know. The bug? Intuition? Something in the way Frank said it?

Doesn’t matter. What I see scares the bejesus out of me.

Cruisers.

The Trogs recalled their fleet. And so fast.

Seven. Nine. No, twelve. Two squadrons of the behemoths.

Shit!

Three are settling in overhead, looming as large as colliding planets. They’re coming in close to protect the base from further attack. The other cruisers are arraying themselves above. Way too near.

For them.

Rolling over so I can see the Trogs ahead of me again, I tell Frank, “They’re not going to like it when those nukes blow.”

“You see those guys?” yells Skip. “Up ahead?”

“I got ‘em.” I keep pushing the g’s and risk everything by overdriving my plates.

The distance between us quickly shrinks.

I get in close to the nearest trio of Trogs, swinging a little to my right so I can fire at an angle. I pull my trigger and rip through thirty of forty rounds.”

One Trog rips apart as the other two tumble toward the ground.

I don’t bother to look and see if they’re dead as we zip past—I scored enough hits that it won’t matter. What my railgun slugs didn’t do, the vacuum will finish.

The other Trogs are looking back at me now and taking evasive action.

What they don’t know is that only makes my job easier. I’m not going to fire straight down our axis of retreat—any rounds that miss might hit my comrades further on. But once the Trogs swing off to one side or the other, I unload on them.

It goes quickly.

Four more chasers go down before the others swing wide to get away from me, giving up.

I amp down on the power flowing through my grav plates, knowing I just tumbled one more roll of the dice.

“They’re going back,” says Frank, as he watches the Trogs fall way behind us.

“Can we unclip now?” asks Skip.

“If you can keep up,” I tell him as I balance my suit’s power between speed and defensive grav to protect us from all the crap we’re flying through. “How are we doing for time?”

“Just passed thirty seconds,” says Frank.

“How far away are we?” I ask, knowing I have no more power to push, and no more luck to press.

“Nearly twenty klicks,” says Skip. “I recognize the ground station we just passed.”

I drop to a lower altitude and slow down. "We've got to make sure we're below the horizon when they blow," I explain to them. I comm to the others, “Brice, Silva?”

Nothing.

“Lenox, Phil?” I call.

Static.

“Did they make it?” asks Frank.

Recalling how difficult communications were through the static of all the charged dust particles around the Potato all that time ago, I tell him, “Yeah, we just don’t have much range with suit radios in this shit.”

Though we’d been expecting it, it’s still a surprise when it happens. A strobe of ultra-bright flashes illuminate every speck of dust in the sky above, leaving us in a stark shadow below.

At the same time, it feels like a fusion bomb is exploding inside my head. Colors mix in a kaleidoscope of gravity and light. I can’t tell up from down, in from out, alive from dead, and then everything snaps to black.

Chapter 52

“You fuckin’ pussy-ass spaghetti-heads,” says Brice.

“What?” I ask, for lack of an ability to come up with more than a single, simple syllable. My eyes are open. My skull feels like it’s three sizes too small for my swollen brain. Nothing makes sense when you don’t know where you are, how you got there, anything. “What?”

Brice is beside me, looking down with unreadable eyes.

Silva is on my other side, face anxious, eyes moist.

They aren’t wearing their helmets. I realize with a start, I’m not either. But it’s okay. We’re all breathing. I see a ceiling above us painted in institutional green. Electric lights illuminate the room in an uneven glow. Some bulbs must be out.

Why is that important? Why am I thinking of light bulbs?

“Are you okay?” asks Silva.

“You made it?” I ask, as though that doesn’t make sense. “Lenox?”

“She’s fine,” says Silva as she tries to smile through tears that won’t stay put.

As I see the tears roll slowly across her cheeks, a sliver of intuition tells me they’re not flowing right. It’s the g, that’s what’s wrong. It’s too light. The tears are too slow.

Because I’m on the moon. I'm in a room, not a tunnel. And we left five nuclear bombs in Gray Eden and in their railgun batteries.

I try to sit up. Too fast. My head punishes me by threatening to pop. I grimace and lay back down.

“Be still,” Brice tells me. “We’re trying to find a doctor.”

“I’ll be okay,” I lie. “Jesus, I’m so fucked up.” I try to look down at my body. I’m worried. Was I blown up? I wiggle my fingers, and then my toes. I rotate my ankles.

“You’re fine,” says Silva, following my eyes and looking me over. “You weren’t injured. It’s that nuclear thing again. You were too close.”

Her words connect with an idea I have stored, and a few pieces start to make sense. Like every piece of a chaotic everything, falling onto the table, flipping themselves over, reorienting themselves, puzzling their way into something consistent.

“The nukes all blew?” I ask. “We did it?”

“If we didn’t,” Brice laughs, “then I don’t know what happened, because it looks like half the moon is in orbit now.”

“Up there?”

“In the sky,” says Brice. “And the cruisers, too.”

“The cruisers.” I’d completely forgotten about those.

“Three of them were obliterated,” says Silva. “Just gone. The rest…” she shakes her head and smiles wickedly.

“There are a lot of cruiser pieces hitting the ground out there,” says Brice. “It’ll go on for a while, I suspect.”

“For a thousand years,” laughs Lenox, coming out of nowhere to kneel and look down at me.

And that reminds me of Phil. "Where is Phil and his thousand-year bullshit?”

Brice nods. “Over there.”

“Is he okay?” I ask.

“Same as you,” says Brice. “He came around about an hour ago.”

“An hour?” That’s a long time. I try to sit up again, and only manage to prop myself on an elbow. “How long have I been out?”

Lenox checks her d-pad. “Coming up on four or five hours.”

I heave a sigh. “Holy shit.”

Brice says, “Take it easy, Superman. The war survived without you.”

“We need to— ”

“Do nothing,” Silva tells me, as she presses her hand to my chest. “Take it easy a little longer. Trust everyone else to do their jobs.”

I don’t know that I can, yet at the same time, I don’t know that I have a choice. I lie back down and look at Brice. I can’t help but smile. “Obliterated? Three cruisers, just gone?”

“None of those twelve that showed up will be back in the war,” says Brice. “Throw in those six we knocked out of action a few days ago, and we’ve taken out nearly half the Trog fleet.”

My brain isn’t functioning enough yet to have made that deduction myself. “Damn. We’re good.”

“We caught some luck,” says Lenox, standing back up to leave me with Silva and Brice.

“That only leaves them thirty-five, maybe forty cruisers,” says Brice.

“That’s not enough,” I say. “Not enough for them to win here.”

“Let’s talk about it after the rest of your brain comes back online.”

I roll my eyes. “Where are we?”

“That communications room Skip told us about.”

“Skip and Frank,” I ask, “they made it okay?”

Silva points across the room. “Over there.”

“And Clark?” I ask. “His squads?”

“I was able to connect with Clark,” says Silva. “The radio gear in here is pretty decent.”

“He made it, then.” That’s a relief.

“One of his squads did,” says Silva. “The others didn’t. They didn’t get away fast enough.”

That sucks. It sucks a lot, but tallies start ringing up in my head, and there is simply no comparison. Our casualties compared to Trog and Gray losses are nothing. I feel guilty for thinking it. I start to get up again. My head protests. “I need to sit up.” I start to move up on my elbows.

Silva stops me.

Brice shrugs. “Phil’s up and around.”

She looks across the room, then glares at Brice.

I put my hands down to push myself up. It’s soft. I look down. It’s a mattress. “You got me a cot?”

Brice shrugs. “We thought you were gonna die, so wanted to do something nice.”

Silva punches him.

He laughs as he gets up to go.

Silva leans over and kisses me. As she sits back up, she says, “Phil wants to talk to you.”

I reach down to see if my pistol is still in its holster. “He’s not still armed, is he?”

Chapter 53

Sitting on my cot’s thin mattress, leaning against the wall, my head slowly clears. I’m in a pretty good-sized room. Radio equipment and radar stations sit atop tables along two walls. Silva and some people I’ve never seen are communicating with the outside world. A half-dozen desks have been pushed into a corner and hurriedly stacked.

Phil’s cot is empty, and sitting near the pile of desks. Phil is on his feet, standing behind Silva, talking in a low voice.

Through an open doorway, I see a larger room. It’s the door Brice and Silva both exited through after they left my side. Dozens of people are out there, talking and moving about. It’s quite the hub of activity.

I’m trying to deduce what it’s all about when Phil suddenly appears in front of me. “Dylan.”

I nod, afraid to say something that might set him off on one of his crazy little rants.

Phil reaches out for a nearby chair. “Mind if I sit?”

I nod again.

“Are the cobwebs clearing up?”

“Yeah.”

“I want to apologize.”

I shake my head. My brain rattles, and I flinch at the pain.

“It goes away,” says Phil, looking down at my d-pad. “A dose of suit juice will help.”

I don’t even think to argue the point. I reach for my d-pad and find the screen to give myself a dose.

“You know those romance vids from before the siege.”

I look up. Phil is still whacked. He must be. “Um, sure.”

“You know how when women lost their husbands, or whatever, you know, they’d say stuff like they felt like they died inside, or something like that?”

“Phil, what are you talking about?”

“People talk in metaphors, to try and make their friends understand what they’re going through. Movies are like that, too.”

“Okay.”

“I know nobody will ever understand how intertwined Nicky and I were. They’ll never know how deeply I was able to bond with a child who wasn't even born yet. Humans aren't wired for that kind of connection."

I finally understand what he’s getting at. “I’m sorry about Nicky.”

“What I’m trying to tell you, Dylan, is I know I went crazy, and when I say half of me died, for me, it’s not a metaphor. Half of me really did die.”

My eyes find my feet, because I know Phil is telling me the truth, not his version of it, but the explicit, demonstrable, complete truth. He and Nicky were as close to a symbiotic entity as any two beings could be. But all through a mental connection, not a physical one. “I’m sorry. I just thought you’d gone crazy.”

“I did for a while,” says Phil. “I wasn’t able to handle it.”

“Who could?” I say.

“Will you forgive me?”

I laugh at that. “Forgive you?”

“For saying I hated you. For wanting to murder you. For blaming everything on you.”

“We’re here because of me,” I tell him. “I deserve the blame.”

“This is war,” says Phil. “We knew what we were getting into when we joined up.”

Meeting his eyes, I say, “I’m sorry for what happened, I truly am.” I reach out and put a hand on his shoulder. “There should never be anything to forgive between brothers.”

“You see me as your brother,” says Phil, “after all I’ve done?”

“You know I could say the same thing.”

Phil nods and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Brothers.”

I look towards the adjoining room. “What’s going on out there? Who are these people?”

Chapter 54

“The SDF is reconstituting,” says Phil. “This is their command center. Brice and Lenox are coordinating it."

“No shit.”

“Thousands of SDF were traånsferred into the worker ranks when the new Grays took control of the moon. When the nukes blew, they killed all the Grays up here. They were all concentrated in those underground sanctuaries we destroyed. That left the Trogs with no Gray leaders, and you've seen how they react to that. Those that didn't kill themselves outright lined up in ranks, passively waiting for a human to take possession of them.”

“How’d that work out?” I ask.

“Touch and go,” says Phil. “The MSS tried to take charge, but that's not going well at all. Right now, it's the MSS against the remains of the SDF up here, and most of the workers are on our side."

“We’re going to take the moon?” I ask him.

“We control most of it already,” says Phil. “The armories where the Trogs stored the SDF’s and MSS’s weapons after the victory have been found. Both sides are arming, so things could get messy up here for a month or two, unless the two sides can work something out.”

I’m both for and against us taking the fight to the MSS. “The MSS can’t take control, but we have to win against the Grays and Trogs first. Do we know how the fight for the battle stations is going?”

Phil nods toward the radio operators. “We’re in contact with most everyone now. We took all the battle stations except for two. The fighting is still underway there.”

I smile, but at the same time can’t believe we achieved so many of our goals. “And the earth? Did Blair do what she told us she would? Did she nuke Pyongyang?”

“Gone,” says Phil. “Nothing left but radioactive rocks.”

“Holy crap,” I say. “She did it. She came through for us.”

“For all of us,” says Phil.

“Any word from her on the coup?”

"Once the base up here blew and Pyongyang was obliterated," says Phil, "the national governments on earth asserted control over their sovereign territories and turned on the MSS."

“Spontaneous revolution?” I ask.

“The Gray history you had the foresight to give to that work crew back on the derelict battle station we visited made its way to earth. A lot of people read it, and believed it. There was a lot of anger on earth.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s a bloodbath,” says Phil. “Anybody associated with the MSS is being hunted down and hung, or burned alive. There’s fighting all over the planet, but the MSS can’t win. They’re outnumbered a thousand to one, and both sides are armed.”

“Have we heard from Blair at all?”

Phil shakes his head. “Our expectation that humanity would join with the MSS to overthrow the Grays might have been too unrealistic after thirty years of MSS brutality.”

“I feel bad for Blair,” I say. “This can’t be what she wanted.”

“Maybe it was,” says Phil. “If anybody knew the depth of MSS ruthlessness, it was her. I know you never liked her, but maybe this is exactly what she planned. Maybe she made the biggest sacrifice of all.”

I nod, because I don’t know what to say.

“You haven’t asked about the Gray fleet,” says Phil.

“I’m almost afraid to.”

“What looks like the rest of it—thirty-nine ships—have formed up near one of the last supply depots.”

“And?” I ask.

“It’s the same thing we saw out in 61 Cygni once the Grays figured out they were on the losing end.”

“They’re not,” I say.

“They think they are,” replies Phil. “They have to think that. Chikere is there sending back real-time reports. The cruisers are loading what they can from the supply depot. Most of the others are offloading hydrogen from one cruiser to the other, transferring Trogs to the empty ships and moving Grays to the ones they’re topping off. Looks like they’re going to save six cruisers to take back to the home world. The rest, they’ll abandon here.”

I’m hearing it, but I can’t believe it. “It’s exactly what they did at 16 Cygni! You’re not bullshitting me? That’s really what the Grays are doing?”

“Yes,” says Phil. “You had the right instincts about this. We cut off most of their supplies. We took the earth and moon back. We destroyed a huge fraction of their fleet.”

“We got lucky with those last twelve cruisers,” I say. “If they hadn’t come in so close to defend the moon base… ”

“It was enough to convince them their war here was lost.”

“Delayed,” I guess. “They think they’re coming back. Eventually.”

Phil agrees with a nod, but says, “If Prolific Man Killer comes through for us— ”

“For his people,” I correct.

“For his people,” agrees Phil. “Then those Grays will be in for a surprise when they get to 61 Cygni. We won’t be seeing them again.”

“What’s the plan from here, then?”

Phil says, “Bird is on his way out here with one of the freighters. He wants us to go there and see if we can turn the Trogs who are left behind. Or just take their ships after they die.”

“I’m in. We’ve sacrificed too much for me to miss that.” I smile. “I guess that means I won’t need my backup plan.”

“You mean the C4 you have up your ass?” Phil asks me.

I laugh. “You knew?”

“Of course, I knew.”

“You read it from my mind?”

“You’re too closed-off when you want to be. I read it from Brice.”

“Figures.”

I stand up. I’m a little wobbly, but I think I can be ready to go in a half-hour. “We’re getting a fleet for free.”

“Not free,” says Phil.

I know. We’ve paid dearly for this victory. “We’re gaining some time, though. Maybe six months, maybe a few decades.”

"If humanity can get its shit together,” says Phil, “if we can finally unite, we'll be too strong to defeat when they do return."

“All of humanity has been enslaved for thirty years,” I say. “We’ve fought the most devastating war in the history of the world and we won our freedom. If that doesn’t bond us, nothing will.”

The End

Freedom’s Siege

The Prequel to the Freedom’s Fire Series

Chapter 1

Nobody ever expected a war like this.

Maybe some sad soldier in every army since the dawn of time has said that very thing. And as those words tumbled out—demoralizing the battered men around him—another thought came to that desperate soldier’s mind, shining there, just behind the eyes, stinging and certain, the next logical step.

We’re going to lose this war.

We’re all going to die.

And everybody I’ve ever loved is going to suffer.

The path to the bottom of despair’s dark hole is paved with logic and facts that make each step down seem like the only sane choice.

Billy Kane had been down that road before. He’d seen his friends killed. He’d known for certain he was going to die as well. But he’d found some things down in that black crater that shored up the weakness in his soul—some things that lit the path back out again, trite ideals with simple names like courage and determination.

To Billy Kane, they were the indispensable ingredients in the concrete that makes a soldier’s heart brave enough to raise his rifle and fire, to march forward into the slaughter. To fight, to win.

And that’s the thing those eighteen twiggy little gray bastards from Alpha Cen-Crap-Star, or wherever the hell they came from, will never understand about the people of the planet earth. No matter how dire the outcome looks, we find a way to win.

Because we’re goddamn humans!

We’re not a race that lets big-toothed monsters scare us. If anything, when we ran out of vicious critters to kill—saber tooth cats, woolly mammoths, giant bears, sharks in the oceans—we started slaughtering each other because we crave violence like a toothless corner-whore craves meth.

We have games about killing, songs about killing, and movies about killing. We have pretend killing, practice killing, and real killing—lots of real killing—because that’s what humans do.

It defines us.

It culls the weak and makes the species strong.

All that crap sounds good in Kane’s head as he sits in the back of a semi-tractor trailer that used to haul ore down from the mine up in the mountains north of Leadville. The trailer is covered with a painted tarp that when seen from above—way above—makes it appear empty. It’s camouflage for the platoon inside, doing everything possible to keep their transport secret as they ride ingloriously to war.

In a way, it feels like a cowardly thing, skulking like this, but maybe covert operations always feel that way. Or maybe it’s that the platoon is part of a nine-battalion force of highly trained soldiers headed to the moon to root eighteen bulbous-headed aliens out of an unwelcome starship parked there. Six thousand of earth’s most skilled killers exterminating frail creatures that probably don’t weigh forty pounds each doesn’t seem fair.

But then, humans aren’t just vicious. They’re clever. Secrecy and surprise can be just as effective as brute force in subduing an enemy.

Such are the boredom-spawned thoughts that lollygag through Kane’s head after sitting for three hours in a metal bin designed for hauling ore.

Like him, most of the other men in the trailer are quiet, drifting through their thoughts, maybe replaying memories of their last time naked under the sheets with a girlfriend, maybe seeing the smiles of their children in the sunshine of the front yard, watching with proud eyes as daddy strides away in his uniform.

Maybe the men are thinking of their first trip into outer space, a venture into the unknown. Until this day, a rare privilege for people from the planet earth.

Perhaps they’re thinking about the battle that awaits them on the moon.

Will victory come easy?

Kane’s fingers play across the metal of his M4. It’s a calming ritual created out of nervousness in just such a situation some years ago. Maybe it started in Afghanistan, maybe Syria. He doesn’t remember. Kane first became aware of the habit when it was pointed out to him by a corporal who got himself shot by a sniper twelve hours later. Since then he let his fingers busy themselves when they needed to, not thinking anything of it, except that it tended to help pre-battle stresses simmer down to calm.

His fingers graze the handle and trigger guard. They’re oddly shaped, made to fit the thick gloves he’ll be wearing once it comes time to put the weapon to use. The trigger guard is just one example of the thousands of little things the scientists and engineers have been obsessing over to make sure humanity’s first military adventure in outer space will end in victory.

He finds the modification comforting.

Chapter 2

The semi’s diesel rumbles as it climbs the steep grade. Its destination, a molybdenum operation that’s been strip-mining a few peaks at nearly twelve thousand feet on and off for over a century.

Sitting high in the mountains between two nearby ski resorts, the mine goes unnoticed, just as three tall, tin-covered buildings stand invisible in plain sight—unremarkable structures among a dozen others that serve no readily apparent purpose.

Relatively few people on earth understand the workings of a mining operation. Not one alien on that interstellar cruiser parked up on the moon has a clue what any of the buildings holds. Throw in the remote location and a steady flow of large trucks both in and out, and the mine became one of the hundreds of spots chosen across the globe to hide a launch site.

Kane and the platoon have been up the road to the site at least a dozen times. The generals running the show know they’re sending their soldiers into a theater of war in a place no human has ever fought before, a place that can only be roughly simulated on earth. They chose to familiarize the men with the bits they could.

“Here’s what I don’t get, Sarge.” It’s Harney talking, First Squad’s sergeant.

Kane looks up from his busy nothings.

“It’s just the eighteen Grays up there, right?”

Kane nods.

“Eighteen Pinocchio-size aliens, right?”

Kane nods again, though nobody knows the number for sure. “You saw the video just like everybody else. But then again, that ship’s pretty big, a kilometer long. Could be a million of ‘em sardined inside, I suppose.”

Harney shakes his head. “They’re telepathic, right? That’s what the scientist said.”

Kane knows who Harney is talking about, but he asks anyway. “The one in the video?”

“One of the ones they sent up there last year,” says Harney, clarifying. “With those others, after the ship landed there, the ones the Grays captured.”

Lieutenant Garcia, sitting across from Kane against the wall of the trailer, nudges Harney. “You never get when he’s yankin’ your chain, Harney. He knows there aren’t that many. Or they’re telepathic. I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” says Harney. “I know. I’m just saying, they’re telepathic, and telepaths can’t lie.”

Kane takes a moment before he responds. “I’m telepathic, and I lie.”

Harney ignores Kane’s response. “I saw on TV. They were saying the aliens read minds so they can’t hide a secret from each other, so they won’t know what a lie is. That’s all I’m saying. So if they say they’re only eighteen of them up there, then we have to believe them, right?”

“I think you watch too much TV.” Kane looks over at Garcia for help.

Garcia says, “It doesn’t matter if there are eighteen Grays or not. The Grays said they have some other species for slaves up on that ship. They’re the ones the Grays have been forcing to build those weird structures. Might be a thousand slaves up there—maybe ten thousand. We don’t know, but I can tell you one thing, it’ll be the slaves we need to worry about.”

“Slaves don’t count,” says Harney, turning his attention to the lieutenant. “Nobody gives a weapon to a slave and tells him to go fight the war for them.” Nobody responds to that, so Harney shrugs like he’s been asked a question. “Put a gun in a slave’s hand and the first thing he’ll do is kill his master.” Harney looks back at Kane. “Right, Sarge?”

“Is that what you’d do?” Kane asks.

“In a heartbeat,” answers Harney. He glances at Garcia. “You?”

“If you’ve already killed the master in a heartbeat,” answers Garcia, “I don’t see I’d need to do anything.”

“That’s not the point,” Harney tells him, looking back at Kane. “Right?”

In a bored tone, Kane agrees. “Right. That’s not the point.”

“No,” argues Harney, but his attention is glued to Kane now. “Would you kill your master if you were a slave?”

“I suppose,” says Kane. “But it’s complicated.”

“Not for me it isn’t,” says Harney. “It’s simple.”

“That’s because you’re a killer,” says Kane, thinking maybe it’s time to lighten the mood before Harney goes too far into the oddball theories he picked up from the Internet. “That’s why LT likes you best. After he gets killed by a gray Pinocchio, and I’m busy pissing in my space suit while I hide behind a moon rock, you’ll take over the platoon and lead them in.”

“The platoon?” Harney asks, thrown off balance.

“Yeah,” says Kane, just starting to smile. “Me and Garcia talked about it with the other sergeants last night. We all agree. You’re like a little trailer trash Napoleon. I’m proud to know you. Hell, I might even name my kid after you.”

Garcia laughs.

Harney gets it. “You’re messin’ with me.”

“You think?” Kane smiles for real.

“When’s that baby due?” asks Garcia, changing the subject.

“Next month,” answers Kane.

“Does she know we’re launching into space today?” asks Garcia, referring to Kane’s wife.

“She thinks I’m a miner,” answers Kane. “I never told her I was in the military. They told us this was top secret, so I haven’t said a word. You tell your wife?”

“Didn’t have to,” answers Garcia. “We’ve been married for six years. She reads my thoughts.” He nudges Harney again and smiles. “I think she’s telepathic.”

“Top secret is probably stupid for this,” says Harney. “Does anybody think the Grays have spies down here?” He looks at Garcia and grins. “Besides your wife, I mean.”

“It’s not about spies,” says Garcia. “If it gets out on the radio or TV, who’s to say the Grays won’t pick it up? I bet they’re monitoring us. They’d be stupid if they weren’t, don’t you think?”

Harney nods noncommittally, turns back to Kane, and goes back to the original question. “So what would you do? Would you shoot your master?”

“Of course,” answers Kane. “But nothing’s ever as clear-cut as you imagine it’s going to be.”

Harney thinks about it for a moment before replying, “So that’s why we’re sending up a few hundred rockets and six thousand men?”

“Where’d you get those numbers?” asks Kane, knowing that his tone is implying that those are the top-secret figures. At least those are the numbers everybody’s whispering.

“Rumors,” answers Harney, defensively.

“Did you hear it,” asks Garcia, “or pass it along?”

“Just heard it,” Harney answers without taking enough time to recall one way or the other.

Kane glares at Harney, but softens his gaze after a moment. The information is out there, that much is sure. If the Grays know, then there’s nothing that can be done about it now. The attack is on. The rockets will be launching no matter what.

Kane smiles at the irony of that expression.

No matter what.

Ever since the alien ship blipped out of hyperspace two years ago and floated in a geosynchronous orbit over the Atlantic for a few weeks before settling into a seemingly random spot on the moon’s surface, everybody’s idea on the size of the realm of possibility had expanded.

Harney’s not done with his point. “All I’m trying to say is if we’re sending up all these ships, and all these men to kill eighteen little aliens and their unarmed slaves, it seems to me like we’re overkilling to the max, unless there’s something about this whole operation we don’t know.” He pauses as he casts a knowing look at both Kane and Garcia. “Or there’s something they’re not telling us.”

Garcia laughs out loud. “Are you kidding me with that?”

“With what?” asks Harney, defensive again.

“There’s an alien ship on the moon,” Garcia pauses and then repeats, “an alien ship that’s three times the size of an aircraft carrier. Until a couple of days ago, when the aliens broadcast the video with the scientists they captured, we didn’t know anything about them or their ship except it could fly faster than the speed of light and—”

Harney cuts in. “We don’t know that.”

“Know what?” asks Garcia.

“That it flies faster than the speed of light.”

“What?” Garcia is looking for a way to counter Harney’s point.

“We don’t know for sure it flies that fast,” says Kane, “but we can guess. The ship appeared suddenly out of nowhere. That means it spontaneously created itself twenty thousand miles out in space—not likely—or it somehow traverses through higher dimensions of existence and decided to stop for a visit in our three-dimensional space—mathematically possible, I guess, but also unlikely.”

Harney looks confused but Kane pushes on to make his point, “Or they devised some method to travel faster than the speed of light, maybe a wormhole or something. They seemed to appear from nothing because we saw them after they came out of hyper-light travel. Heck, for all we know, they’re so far ahead of the light reflected from their ship while they were traveling here, our telescopes will still see them coming for years after they’ve already come and gone.

Garcia laughs now. “Is that possible?”

Kane shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. I’m a soldier.”

“Fine,” concedes Harney, “They fly faster than the speed of light. What’s your point?”

“My point is,” says Kane, “a couple years ago, we didn’t know that was possible. We didn’t know aliens existed. When we sent that probe up there with those six scientists, we didn’t know the Grays would shoot at it. We didn’t know they’d keep those scientists hostage for a year. We didn’t expect the Grays to put one of them on TV and tell us they were going to be our new slave masters and that our only choice in the matter was to decide how long it was going to take us to get the hell over it. I’d say there’s plenty of evidence to support the idea that there’s a lot up there we don’t know anything about.”

“Yeah.” Harney slumps as he sits, looks up at Kane, and absently says, “You think we’ll get killed? Most of us? Maybe all of us?”

Kane shakes his head and lies, because Harney’s question isn’t the kind you answer honestly in front of men on their way to war in the unknown. “I’d say we’re sending up a force so overwhelming none of us will get killed. We’ll scare the piss out of those little gray bastards. We’ll free the scientists, put the Grays in a cage, and take their ship.”

“Really?”

“Of course,” says Kane. “We’re sending up so many guys because it’s all about capturing the ship, right? Technology to travel the stars is sitting on the moon for the taking. That would be huge for humankind. That’s Star Wars kind of shit right there. If this were only about winning, the generals would send up a few nukes and leave nothing but a dirty spot on the moon where the aliens’ ship used to be, and we’d watch the whole thing on a big HD screen while we got drunk and ate bratwurst.”

Harney turns to Garcia and asks, “Is that true, LT?”

Lieutenant Garcia backs up Kane’s version with a nod.

Kane only hopes he’s right. Everything he said could be true. The stickler in the whole thing is the point that nags at him and everybody who’s been paying any attention since the Grays’ ship showed up two years ago.

Twelve months after the arrival, nearly a year after the alien ship found its spot on the moon, earth’s space-faring governments launched six scientists in the company of a few military types. They hoped to greet the aliens to the solar system and offer them earth’s friendship.

That didn’t work out.

The Grays disabled the scientists’ lunar lander and captured them.

A year later, a few days ago, the aliens set the invasion in motion.

They broadcast a video of one of the scientists standing with eighteen silent Grays arrayed in a semicircle behind him. At the invader’s behest, the scientist told earth’s people to accept the role as slaves for the next twenty thousand years so the Grays could shepherd humanity to a transcendent state of being. If earth didn’t want to accept that, then the little bastards would take humans as permanent slaves by their right of conquest.

Conquest?

There were just eighteen of them with one ship and some number of slave creatures.

No world leader, not one politician at any level of any government considered surrendering to the Grays.

The Grays were arrogant. They were bluffing. That’s what everyone thought.

All that message did was unite the world in anger at the diminutive creatures on the moon.

The nagging question bothering Kane was what if they weren’t bluffing? What kind of weapons were they hiding? What if they do have the power to subjugate the entire planet?

Chapter 3

The truck parks beneath a pavilion and the men groan as they unload.

Kane stretches his legs and back as he walks around in the thin, cold air. He looks west at the sun sinking toward the horizon. Fateful thoughts cross his mind. Is this my last breath of air on earth? Is this the last sunset?

The useless crap that goes through a man’s mind before he’s off to war.

If death finds me, so be it.

Kane won’t cower. He won’t throw his life away, but his mission is much bigger than him, more valuable than the lives of the men and women launching tonight. The little gray aliens on the moon are proof the universe is a hazardous place, and earthlings are a technologically backward people.

That needs to be remedied.

Garcia walks up. “I just talked to Captain Chamberlain. He’s switching spots with us.”

“What do you mean?” asks Kane.

Garcia points to the nearest of the three tall structures. “He’s taking Alpha.” Garcia then points to the third tin-covered structure a half-mile away. “We’ll take his ship, Charlie.”

Kane shakes his head. This ship. That ship. It shouldn’t make a difference. But a last-minute change makes him feel like something’s being taken from him. “Our pilot and copilot?”

“Jensen and Dorsey stay with the ship.”

Kane stifles a curse. The platoon has been drilling with Jensen and Dorsey for nearly eight months. “Why?”

Garcia shakes his head and looks away.

Kane suspects something. “You know. Tell me.”

Garcia grits his teeth and leans in close. In a voice just above a whisper, he says, “Jensen made the best score through the simulations, didn’t crash once. At least not when the ship wasn’t so damaged it couldn’t fly.”

“And?” Kane asks. He never bothered to ask any questions about pilot performance. He always figured the simulator runs were more about getting the platoon accustomed to the rigors of a moon assault.

“Howard and Booker,” says Garcia, “the captain’s pilot and copilot, killed the whole platoon at least once a week.”

“You’re shitting me.” Kane says it, but he already believes. “And Captain Chamberlain can take our guys, just like that?”

“Nothing I can do about it,” says Garcia. “It comes straight from Colonel Knox.”

Kane mutters a curse. The Army should have never put a colonel in charge of a company, no matter how important the mission.

Garcia taps his watch and points to the furthest tower again. “Thirty minutes and we need to be down there. Give the men a few more minutes, and then get them moving that way.”

“Yes, sir.” Kane’s fuming.

Another ore truck pulls up beneath the pavilion and stops. More soldiers climb out, Second Platoon.

Three ships will be launching from this site, each with one platoon inside. Each of the ships is standing inside one of the tall buildings that hide them. All of the ships’ components were manufactured offsite in airliner assembly plants or on factory lines producing fighter jets when the Grays’ ship showed up and reprioritized much of the world’s thinking.

Despite that, Kane knows there are only so many rocket scientists in the world, and they’re spread thin. The rushed design and construction of the peaceful ship that took the men to the moon to greet the aliens consumed much of earth’s limited resources where scientists were concerned.

The parallel process—to design and manufacture the assault ships the generals started cawing for the moment the aliens showed up—took the rest.

The end result is Kane knows he’ll be getting into a ship that was fast-tracked through design and never flight-tested. Worse, it was built mostly by people who’ve never been involved in the construction of a rocket or space vehicle of any type.

It’s their first time.

The odds don’t stack up well for a safe return.

Kane listened carefully to the details when he’d volunteered. In fact, he’d spent a good deal of time thinking about those details.

The thing about traveling to the moon and back is weight. You have to build a rocket that can take off, make the trip to the moon, land there, make the trip back, and then decelerate enough on the way down through earth’s atmosphere to protect anyone inside so they won’t be killed. You’ve got to bring along enough fuel for each of those segments of the mission. Then you’ve got to bring the payload—the soldiers, weapons, and enough air, water, and food to keep them alive.

Back in the Apollo days, they broke the task into two launches—one to bring up the astronauts, one to bring up the lunar lander. They didn’t need to get to the moon in a big hurry, so they used a little fuel and a lot of earth’s gravity to slingshot them along their way. Everything was about efficiency of resources, and getting the most benefit for every ounce of payload.

To NASA, in those days, the benefits were scientific in nature. And maybe a little glory-hounding.

The benefit of Kane’s mission came down to one thing: Maximizing the number of soldiers the earth could deploy to the moon, ready to bring the war to the Grays sitting up there on their ship, thinking themselves unassailable.

The generals did a little math and figured out if they didn’t budget for return vehicles, reentry vehicles, or fuel to get home, they could launch two or three times more one-way payload, two or three times more boots on the moon.

To make that math work, all they had to do was assume most of the soldiers they sent up wouldn’t need a ride home, because they’d be dead.

Nobody had anything but guesses about the types of armaments the Grays had on their ship. They’d all seen the shot that disabled the craft the scientists landed near their ship a year ago. The most popular idea was that they possessed a type of hyper-velocity railgun, hyper even compared to the experimental railguns being built on earth.

And then there were the odd constructs. The aliens were using their slave labor to burrow beneath the moon’s surface, creating circular depressions, each centered on a small round hole. But the holes only looked small from earth. They were all sizes, anywhere from seven or eight inches in diameter up to several meters.

Guesses were all over the map about their purpose, but most figured them to be some type of weapons system.

So, it was decided the more soldiers the generals sent up, the more likely it was humanity would prevail. And this was a war earth absolutely had to win.

Kane looks at the sky. The launch is less than two hours away. Transit time to the moon is thirty-six hours. In two days’ time—Kane figures—he’ll be dead.

But he’s got a new bride at home, pregnant with his first child. He won’t let the world be one where that boy grows up a slave to big-eyed aliens.

Chapter 4

Sitting inside, it’s hard not to think of the rocket as a bus. The men sit in ten rows, three abreast, soldiers in astronaut suits on their way to war.

The cockpit is packed with a dizzying array of buttons, gauges, toggles, joysticks, lights, and video screens. Pilot Howard and copilot Booker are busy with those buttons and toggles, checking and flipping, going through their lists, and sounding as competent as Jensen and Dorsey, the flight team Captain Chamberlain stole.

Because Chamberlain is a sissy-spit waste of a uniform.

Kane, of course, keeps that thought to himself.

He’s still stewing over the last minute change.

At least he didn’t lose his assigned seat in the first row, with Lieutenant Garcia in the middle, Sergeant Harney on his left, and Kane on the right. From here, Kane is able to look through the wide, wraparound cockpit windows.

It’ll be a hell of a sight, shooting off the earth and out toward the stars.

At the moment, the only interesting thing outside the windows is the other two rockets, Alpha and Bravo, both preparing for launch. Both look every bit like spacecraft welded together from an airliner fuselage, four ICBMs, and a trio of solid-rocket boosters. They make Kane think of giant bundles of dynamite painted white instead of cartoonish red.

That’s a thought he keeps to himself as well.

The tin walls have been lowered to the ground as they were designed to do, and tractors are nearly finished dragging the sections away from the launch pads. Those walls will be re-erected after the ships take off so evidence of the rockets’ origin can be hidden.

Just in case.

Just in case the lunar expeditionary force fails.

His thoughts turn to his pregnant wife and the son he might never meet. Dylan. They had just chosen the name weeks before. Tears ambush him like they always do these days when he thinks about the helpless boy whose fate rests in his father’s ability to make war on a faraway cold orb. That boy might possibly grow up without a father to teach him and protect him.

He glances around to make sure the others don’t see his weakness.

Kane pushes all of that out of his mind. He’s spent enough thought on the inevitability of his death. He needs to stay focused on the mission. Mostly, he tells himself Howard and Booker only need to get him to the moon. Kane needs to plant his feet in that barren gray dirt, and then he and his men will do whatever is necessary.

They’re armed. They’re trained. And they’re goddamned determined.

It doesn’t matter if eighteen puppet-sized Grays are up there or if a million are crammed into that ship. Kane will twist every one of their spindly necks and make a mountain of their hairless heads. No little extraterrestrial goblin is going to take his son’s freedom.

The anger keeps his sad thoughts from turning to embarrassing tears.

Not that it matters. He’s wearing a spacesuit helmet. His outbound comm is muted. None of the men behind him can see anything but his back. Howard and Booker are too busy to look back into the cabin. And Garcia is staring through the cockpit window at the black, star-sprinkled sky, probably thinking about his own wife and three kids.

The comm crackles with new activity. “Listen up, men.” It’s Captain Chamberlain. “Colonel Knox has something he’d like to say.”

Kane listens. It’s nothing special. Exactly what you’d expect to hear at a time like this. Do your job. Sacrifice is the price of freedom. We’re the pride of a people, the best of the best, blah, blah, blah.

Kane’s heard a thousand versions of the speech, halftime motivational bullshit. Such drivel has never been for him, though. It’s for men who can’t find enough drive in their hearts to put themselves in the right frame of mind to do what needs doing. Never been a problem for Kane.

Finally, the last of the words crackle through the connection.

The men cheer.

Why not?

Except that they haven’t blasted off yet and they’ve got a day and a half to passively sit strapped in a chair while eleven hundred tons of rocket fuel explodes beneath them.

Kane guesses most of Knox’s babble will be forgotten about three seconds after that first rocket ignites.

A flight controller comes over the line. “Three-nine-Alpha, prepare to count down on my mark.”

Lieutenant Garcia glances at Harney and Kane. “We go third. Get ready.”

Kane looks out the window to his right, seeing Alpha and Bravo rockets bathed in floodlights, each trickling white smoke from beneath, the high dark mountains behind. Alpha goes in ninety seconds. Twenty seconds later, Charlie rocket will take flight.

Voices from the flight control channel bleeds over the comm from the cockpit crew’s helmets. It’s the kind of launch chatter played during the simulations. It means nothing to Kane, except that the bone-jarring part is coming soon.

One of the screens in the center of the cockpit dashboard goes suddenly black. Booker curses.

Howard, Howard, leans forward and pounds it with his fist.

Does that ever work?

He pounds it again as somebody from Launch Control comes over the comm and says, “T minus thirty seconds.”

The pilot and copilot look at one another as Kane sees them toggle their comm switches. They’re talking between each other but leaving the platoon out.

A moment later, Howard looks over his shoulder and says, “To hell with it. We don’t need that one anyway.” He settles himself back in his seat.

“What does it do?” asks Lieutenant Garcia. His line is always open, so he can communicate with the flight crew.

Booker looks back. “Nothing important. Nothing to worry about.” He grins. “We’re going up, too, and we don’t want to die, either, right?” He laughs.

Garcia laughs too, but it’s forced.

Sergeant Harney laughs, like he truly thinks it’s funny.

Kane says nothing.

“Ten. Nine…

Seconds pass.

Kane hears a rumble start to grow. The mountainsides are splashed in yellow light. Alpha’s engines are starting to burn.

“Twenty seconds for us,” says Howard as Alpha’s engines go to full burn, shaking Charlie rocket, the air inside the cabin, and the earth beneath.

And that rocket’s a half-mile away!

A huge plume of smoke flows out and hides the mine and all its buildings. Alpha’s engines spew sunlight fire, pushing it skyward, slowly—too slowly.

That’s just Kane’s guess.

A handful of seconds pass and Alpha isn’t yet up to a hundred meters. But it’s climbing.

“Heavy load,” calls Booker over the comm. He’s watching Alpha, too.

Kane flips his tinted visor down over his faceplate so he can watch without blinding himself.

Alpha seems to get stuck in the sky, glued to the clouds billowing beneath.

Kane starts to say something, but stops.

Alpha leans sideways just as the second countdown reaches zero. Bravo fires its engines to full burn, and it lurches out of Alpha’s smoke.

Huge plumes of gray roil in the fire of the rockets’ engines.

It looks like high noon outside.

Kane can’t feel his breath or feel his heart. Every sensation in his body is thrust-rumble, shaking him down to his bones.

One of Alpha’s solid boosters jerks loose—just the lower support.

The booster twists on the upper mount.

Kane shouts.

No one hears.

Not a human in the universe could do anything if they did.

Booker’s head jerks right as he sees what’s happening. He shouts, too.

Howard looks. He says something loud and unintelligible.

Alpha is falling.

Bravo, blazing white flame, passes Alpha on its way into the heavens.

Howard is shouting, “I’m going now! I’m going now!”

Kane feels Charlie’s main engines and solid boosters fire.

The rumble from the other rockets was nothing compared to this.

The simulator was a kiddy ride.

Smashed into his seat as g’s start to pile on, it sounds like the thrown-together rocket is coming apart.

Kane pulls his head around to look forward in fear that his neck will wrench off from trying to see Alpha’s fate.

But he knows what’s coming.

A shockwave hammers Charlie rocket sideways in the air and Alpha’s fireball washes past the window.

Kane knows he’s going to die.

He closes his eyes and utters a prayer for his son.

But Charlie rocket’s g’s still push.

Kane is trying to breathe, but it feels like an elephant is stepping on his chest.

The fire in the windows slips past.

Bravo rocket is above, blazing into the black sky.

All the world below is fire and smoke—Alpha’s violent, sudden death.

Someone is cursing over the comm and Kane realizes he’s yelling nonsense.

He grits his teeth, happy to hear voices of living, shouting people.

“We’re gonna make it!” prays Howard out loud. “We’re gonna make it.”

Kane takes it up. “We’re gonna make it.”

Lieutenant Garcia sings the chant, as does Harney.

We’re gonna make it.

The ship starts a slow roll, and then Kane is upside down. Just like in the simulator. Normal.

Howard and Booker are tense, but working the ship, driving it into the void.

They’re following a curved column of glowing smoke, Bravo’s trail.

The nighttime world spreads out beneath the ship, and Kane looks up to see down to the earth’s surface.

The lights of cities spread across the globe.

“Fifteen miles up,” says Booker over the platoon comm. “Twenty-six hundred miles per hour. The fastest you boys have ever moved.” He laughs again.

Kane decides he likes Booker and stoic Howard.

An explosion shakes the ship.

Harney shouts a curse.

“Solid booster separation,” calls Howard.

“Nothing to worry about,” confirms Booker. “Totally natural.”

Kane knows that’s true. That part was just like the simulator.

“Thirty-six hundred miles per hour,” Booker tells them.

“Nothing damaged in the explosion?” asks Garcia.

“We’ll know soon enough,” says Howard.

The g’s are letting up. Kane’s guessing they’ve made it. He opens the platoon’s command comm link. “Sergeants, report.”

Each of the platoon’s other three sergeants takes a moment to check on their squads.

Everyone is fine.

“Tank separation coming up,” says Howard.

“Cutting engines now,” says Booker.

The rumble stops. The g’s disappear. Something bumps.

“Main tank separation,” confirms Howard.

The copilot laughs and looks over his shoulder. “I can’t believe we lived through that.”

Nobody else laughs.

Chapter 5

The failure and subsequent explosion of Alpha rocket wasn’t a surprise to those in charge. It was only a surprise to Kane and the other soldiers riding the ships into space.

With the moon rising on the day side of the planet, the launches started on the other. Russia, Japan, and Australia rotated into night and went first. As earth slowly spun to hide more of its landmass from the aliens above, China, India, and Europe sent their soldiers into the sky. The Americas launched last.

By that time, the rocket flaws were manifesting themselves in a consistent fashion. One in seven failed on liftoff, and each of those ships turned into a huge ball of fire.

Of the sixty-eight support and decoy ships, only six exploded. Thirty-two of the two hundred troop carriers slated to go up never made it out of the atmosphere. Seventeen percent of the six thousand troops who’d been trained for the mission were already dead by the time Kane’s ship took flight.

A thousand lives were lost because earth was forced to rush production of space vehicles that existed at the foremost edge of its engineers’ technological abilities.

A thousand souls immolated on the altar of complacency.

Staring at the stars through the windshield, Kane sees bright flares, and toggles the flight crew’s comm. “What’s that?”

“The other ships are starting their burn,” answers Booker, unlocking his chair and spinning to face Kane, Garcia, and Harney. “Like us, they need to escape earth’s gravity and get on a trajectory to the moon.” He points out the window. “See how they’re spread all over the place? We’re all going to be coming in at slightly different angles. That’ll put lots of space between us, so we’ll be harder to hit when the Grays start shooting.”

“Hey, hey,” says Harney, perturbed and pointing at Howard. “Is that okay, letting him fly it by himself?”

“I’m just a backup system,” says Booker. “I drive when he gets tired.”

“Or killed,” adds Howard without turning around.

Booker laughs. “It’s how you get promotions in the astronaut biz. The guy ahead of you gets toasted.”

“That sucks,” says Harney.

“That’s how you’ll get my job.” Kane laughs. “And that’s how Corporal Bishop will get your job.”

Lieutenant Garcia elbows Harney. “If you wanted to wait for the guy ahead of you to retire, you should have stayed in school and become an accountant.”

“You guys are wrong,” sulks Harney.

Garcia looks down at the big-faced watch built into the sleeve of his suit. “How much longer are we going to burn?”

Checking his own watch, Booker replies, “Thrusters should fire for another hour or so. That’ll get us scooting on up to the moon in record time.”

“I thought the flight was gonna take thirty-six hours,” says Harney.

“That’ll be the record,” says Booker. “Two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles is a long way.”

“Unstrap from your seat,” Garcia tells Harney and Kane. “Get your helmets off. Organize the men. Have them do the same. Get them out of their seats two or three at a time. I want them moving around so they can acclimate to the low g while we have it.”

Booker says, “After this burn, we’ll do about thirty-three hours of zero g before we kick the engines back on for a deccel once we get close to the moon. Nobody knows what kind of defenses the Grays have up there, but I’d expect them to start taking pot shots at us eventually. You’ll want the men strapped back in once that happens. We wouldn’t want a bunch of bodies bouncing around inside the cabin once Captain Howard decides he’s the Red Baron and starts taking evasive maneuvers.” Booker laughs. “Know what I mean?”

“Just let us know when,” Garcia replies with a grin.

Kane releases his strap and pushes himself out of his seat, turning around and hailing the other sergeants to get the men moving.

Chapter 6

“Wake up.”

Kane jerks to attention and sees Lieutenant Garcia leaning over him. Kane says, “I dozed off.”

“Boredom.” Garcia floats himself back into his seat.

The ship is still in zero g.

Kane looks over his shoulder at the rows of soldiers behind. Some of them are asleep. Others are talking quietly. Some are putting their helmets back on. “Something wrong?”

“We’re almost there.”

Kane looks at the large-faced watch on his wrist. The time confuses him. He tries to piece together when he went to sleep.

“We’re about an hour out.”

“God,” says Kane. “How long did I sleep?”

“As long as you needed.”

Kane shakes his head to knock the cobwebs loose. “I guess.”

Garcia straps himself into his chair. “We’ll start our burn pretty soon.”

Kane checks his belts. Still secure.

“You’ll want to get your helmet back on,” says Garcia.

The helmet is attached to a clip on the seat, just beside the line that feeds his suit oxygen and power from the ship. Kane detaches the helmet, and pulls it deftly over his head, connects the neck ring to his suit and locks it in place, just like he’s done a thousand times in training.

Using the crude controls on his wrist, he runs a diagnostic on the suit’s systems, a habit drilled into him during training. The story the instructors like to tell was that more than one hard-nosed dumbass, “just like you,” skipped the diagnostics and jumped into his exercise, assuming that because he could breathe, everything was fine. The problem is, the empty spaces in the suit hold enough air to sustain a man for a few minutes. So it’s easy to think the air system is running when it’s not.

Once the air in the suit turns toxic with carbon dioxide, the dumbass collapses. The lucky ones passed out close to someone who understood what was happening and knew what to do about it. Most of the dumbasses weren’t lucky. They died or caught a bad case of brain damage.

“For you idiots who don’t know it, brain damage is incurable.” The instructors were never kind.

Early on in lunar assault training, Kane’s unit took a tour of the ward where the Army kept the brain-damaged soldiers who’d made one mistake or another. Most of them looked like they’d been poured into their wheelchairs every morning, only to spend the day fumbling and drooling. The visit made an indelible impression on Kane. He always ran his system diagnostics, and he regularly checked his O_2 and CO_2 levels whenever he had his helmet on.

Harney, already awake, in his helmet, and strapped into his seat on the other side of Garcia, points out through the cockpit windows. “That’s earth, right?”

“Yep,” says Booker.

Kane is more interested in what Howard is doing. Howard is actively checking his instruments. He’s tense.

“Why are we headed toward earth?” asks Harney.

“We spun the ship ten hours ago,” says Booker, who busies himself with some toggles on the ceiling that cause a bank of monitors to swing down from above. He glances at Howard. “Good to go.”

Howard spins his chair around and orients himself at a set of controls Kane hadn’t paid any attention to before. Now Howard and Booker have their backs to the cockpit windows, using video feeds to fly the ship backward.

Garcia glances at Harney and says, “They pointed the rocket nozzles toward the moon.”

“So we can decelerate,” adds Kane. He paid attention in training when they were explaining all of this. Harney hadn’t.

“I see the other ships,” says Harney, “just like when we left earth.”

Booker looks over his shoulder to see out the window. “Yeah.”

“We’ll be there first?” asks Harney.

Garcia thumbs over his shoulder. “I’m sure there’re plenty out there we can’t see.”

Just then, one of the ships behind them explodes in a spray of silent fire.

“Holy shit!” shouts Harney.

Kane tenses. He comms the platoon. “Helmets. Now!”

Howard glances back to see the fiery explosion dissipate into the void. He looks at the rows of men sitting in front of him now. He focuses on Lieutenant Garcia. “I’m muting you guys now. Going to fleet comm. The Grays are awake. Hold tight. It’s going to get rough.”

Over the platoon comm, Kane orders, “Cinch up those straps. We’re starting evasive maneuvers. Expect to get jerked around a bit.” He looks over at the lieutenant, who is talking with someone, probably their new commander on another of the ships. Harney is on the comm with his squad, talking fast enough so they won’t have time to think about the incoming fire.

Kane switches to the platoon command comm, just him, the other three sergeants, and Garcia. “Keep a close eye on your men. Make sure nobody panics. We’ll be in our own pile of dog shit soon enough. Right now, there’s nothing we can do except relax and trust our pilot to get us there. Clear?”

“Clear,” they respond in near unison.

Kane takes a few slow breaths to maintain his calm. Just like his men, he doesn’t like being under someone else’s control.

Booker leans a little to the left of his monitor bank and catches a glance at Kane before opening a connection. “Howard says I should leave a line open to you three.” He points a finger across the front row. “You know, so you can keep the platoon informed, so they’ll feel better. It doesn’t seem like it, but he’s all touchy-feely that way. Ask questions when you have them, and I’ll answer unless I’m busy flying the ship and saving your life or something.” Booker chuckles.

“Thanks,” says Garcia. “Kane, can you pass along info to the platoon, so we’re not all three talking.”

“Yes, sir.”

Booker says, “We’ve got incoming, and the captain is going to start his crazy pilot shit here, any second. Hope you boys had your Dramamine.”

“Evasive maneuvers!” Kane announces.

The ship’s engine rumbles and the ship pulls hard to the right, but just for a moment.

“Expect more of that,” says Booker.

“Like riding a roller coaster,” says Kane into the platoon comm. He can hear the men. He’s got them turned down to barely audible, but if anything gets out of control he’ll know right away.

“Deccel burn in ten seconds,” says Booker.

Kane relays the information.

Out in the space behind them, another ship explodes.

Two streaks of light slip past, just missing the hull.

“Tracers?” asks Kane.

“Lasers,” Harney tells them, tension in his voice.

“You only see lasers in the movies,” says Garcia.

Harney turns toward Garcia, ready to argue. “There was this experiment my science teacher—”

“You don’t see laser beams in space,” Garcia tells him with enough finality that Harney stops talking.

“They’re shooting some kind of super high-velocity projectiles,” says Booker. “They’re not tracers. They’re glowing because they’re hot as hell from the acceleration.”

“Railguns?” asks Kane.

“Confirm that,” says Garcia. “It’s coming over the company line now. They’ve got forty or fifty of them mounted on the ship.”

“Shit,” says Harney.

“Their fire rate is slow,” says Garcia. “Like they’re hand-loading them one shot at a time.”

The ship pulls hard, upward this time. Metal groans.

A light streaks past the cockpit windows, close enough to reach out and touch.

Some of the men shout and curse. They all saw it, too.

The ship pulls hard to the right.

“We’re in good hands,” says Booker, reaching over to pat Howard on the shoulder, making a show of it for the enlisted men.

Between the monitors, Kane sees Howard’s face. He’s focused on his monitors, still tense, but determined.

The ship jukes, then swerves into a long arc. The rocket engines stop burning.

“What’s that?” asks Garcia.

Booker glances at them between his monitors. Kane sees his humor is slipping. “Don’t pass this bit back to your guys. At least I wouldn’t. The first wave is getting shredded.”

Harney mutters something.

“We’re not going straight in,” says Booker. “We’re going to slingshot around the moon and deccel as we come around the other side.”

Garcia nods.

Harney asks, “Why?”

“So we won’t be an easy target,” answers Kane. “If we slow down to landing speed coming directly at the Grays’ ship, the slower we go, the easier we’ll be to hit. If we decelerate behind the moon and slide in over the horizon, we won’t be a target for long.”

Booker laughs. “That’s right. Tell you what, Sergeant, after Howard bites it, you can be my copilot.”

Another projectile flashes light into the cockpit.

More and more glowing projectiles are in the sky.

Garcia says, “For single shot weapons, the Grays are throwing up a lot of ordnance.”

Chapter 7

The black sky is filling with odd, shimmering shapes, the shattered remnants of ships. Some are still venting flaming gases. Others are spreading like poorly wrought fireworks.

The pilot jerks left, and then right again.

Another miss.

The hull sounds like it’s being pelted by hail and chunks of metal big enough to feel through the seat’s frame.

The men in the platoon are straining to keep their brave faces on, but they’re all afraid.

Most are keeping it to themselves.

A few others are starting to lose it. Kane directs their sergeants to mute them off the platoon comm and calm them down. Even Garcia has gone silent, eyes closed, hands gripped tight to his armrests, lips mouthing a silent prayer.

Trying to keep his voice on a level tone, Kane asks Booker, “What’s the story?”

“Busy as hell,” he answers, as he points to one of the large screens.

Howard turns the ship in response.

Kane finds the end of Booker’s humor worrisome. It underscores the impotence he feels being stuck in the rocket, unable to take a shot at those little gray shits in their interstellar cruiser, mercilessly pounding the fleet with their railguns.

He hates them even more now that he realizes his one consoling hope—through his training, the launch, and what might soon be his death—won’t work. If the fleet doesn’t make it through the hailstorm of defensive fire, no nuclear-tipped missiles will either.

No backup plan.

The rapidly shrinking lunar expeditionary force is the earth’s only hope.

“Most of the ships are damaged,” says Booker, seeming to breathe a little easier, all of a sudden.

That doesn’t sound like good news to Kane, so he doesn’t understand.

Booker seems to sense Kane’s misunderstanding and adds, “We’re the lucky ones.”

Seeing so much debris out the windows, Kane silently agrees.

“A few more minutes,” says Booker, “and we’ll be out of the line of fire.”

Howard pulls on the controls and Kane is mashed into his seat as the ship is pummeled again.

Debris from another ship flies past the windows.

Howard curses, losing his cool for the first time.

The ship swings in another direction.

Up. Down.

It barrel-rolls, and Kane is disoriented. He sees the earth. And then the edge of the moon. And then space again.

Heavy thuds pound the hull.

Kane closes his eyes and steels his nerves. It feels like the end. Out of the darkness, in his mind, he hears the gentle thump-thump of the heartbeat of his unborn child. The thought is broken by yet another impact.

But the ship doesn’t come apart. It shudders and veers to the left, long and consistent.

“We’re trying to get an orbital angle,” Booker shouts. “We don’t want to overshoot.”

The rocket engines start to rumble loudly.

“We’re burning to slow down,” shouts Booker over the noise.

Kane feels the g’s again, just like liftoff.

The noise of the rocket engines is all he can hear. His bones rattle so hard it feels like they might jiggle right out of his flesh.

“We made it!” Booker’s shout somehow carries over the noise of the engines.

Chapter 8

It feels like twenty, maybe thirty minutes, burning the rockets to slow down, but Kane sees out the window they’re passing behind the dark side of the moon.

The orbital maneuver is working.

The Grays can’t see the ship.

The men in the platoon are feeling their confidence return. They’re joking, and talking about getting even.

Kane links in and tells his men, “Get yourselves ready, boys. The worst is past. We’ll have our turn soon enough.”

“Gonna stomp on a little gray fucker’s head,” jokes Harney. Some of the men laugh.

“We’re about fifteen minutes out,” Kane tells them. “We’ll land two or three clicks out and go in on foot.”

“How many ships made it through?” asks Harney.

“Don’t worry about that,” Kane replies. “You make sure your giggle-girls are ready to fight.”

“Hey,” says Harney, “nobody in my squad’s a giggle-girl.”

“Nobody but you,” laughs Garcia. He opens a private comm link between Kane and Booker. “I can’t raise anyone on the tactical link. I think the booster antenna on the hull was broken off in the descent. Can you guys raise the other ships?”

Booker talks quietly, even though he’s on the comm link. “Just between us, we’re not getting contact with anyone either.”

“What does that mean?” asks Garcia.

“It could mean we’re behind the moon and it’s blocking line-of-sight transmission.” He points to his screen. “I don’t see anyone in front of us. He glances back through the windows. “You guys see anyone else out there?”

“No,” answers Kane.

“Don’t tell me we’re the only ones that made it,” says Garcia.

“Can’t say,” Booker tells him. “Maybe we’re the only ones who took this maneuver around the moon, and the rest of them are on the other side giving the Grays what-for. Maybe we’ll be late to the party.”

Kane doesn’t like that idea. In fact, he almost likes it less than the helpless feeling he had when they were under fire and other ships were being blown to pieces. Like every soldier in the cramped cabin, he’s ready to kill the murdering little gray monsters.

Chapter 9

The ship spins one last time. Having shed its excess speed with the power of the engines, it can move in the moon’s light gravity with its maneuver thrusters.

Now skimming the surface, a few hundred feet up, moving slowly, Howard is having trouble keeping the ship moving in a straight line. He’s talking to Booker in a private conversation.

Kane gets that the damage to the ship is making it hard to fly. Red and yellow streaks are coming off the moon from somewhere over the horizon. The Grays are still shooting. The sky is so full of debris, it’s impossible to tell what the aliens are shooting at.

That makes Kane anxious. Too many good men are dying.

Howard only needs to coax the ship a little closer.

“We need to move this thing along,” Garcia tells Booker, echoing Kane’s thoughts. “Get us some speed. Lose the caution.”

“Caution?” Booker shoots Garcia a harsh look and the laugh that follows is anything but happy. “You’re lucky you’re not outside pushing this thing right now. The main engines are still good, but maneuvering thrusters aren’t working worth a damn.”

“Go faster, then,” Garcia tells him, not backing down.

Booker grits his teeth, takes a second to respond calmly and says, “If we put on too much speed, we’ll overshoot and probably fly right over the damn ship at point-blank range. That won’t end well.” He closes out Garcia’s request with, “We’re doing the best we can.”

“We’re just anxious to get into the fight,” says Kane. “Know what I mean?”

Booker nods.

In a more peaceful tone, Garcia asks, “What’s the plan, then?”

Booker says, “We can’t get a fix on how far that Gray ship is over the horizon. I think we’re close. Our plan is to fly at this altitude—we’ll speed up if we can—and as soon as we spot the Grays, we’ll drop down below their line of sight. The horizon will keep them from shooting at us.”

“How far will we be?” asks Garcia.

“Not to go all scientist on you,” says Booker, “but standing flat-footed on the moon, you can see maybe a couple kilometers to the horizon. At this altitude, maybe we’ll see ‘em fifty kilometers out. It’ll give us a chance to sneak in close. Maybe two or three clicks.”

Garcia seems satisfied with the answer. “You and Howard should come with us.” His eyes scan across the ship’s control panels. “I don’t think the ship is going to get us back to earth.”

“We need to stay with the ship,” says Booker. “We need to see what’s damaged. We need to know what she’ll do. Besides, if you guys don’t pull this off, we have our orders.”

“Your orders?” Kane asks. He’s suspicious. “You’re not talking about returning to earth, are you?”

Booker shakes his head. “Just like you guys, we volunteered for this. We knew what we were getting into.”

Garcia makes the guess first. “You’re going to go kamikaze?”

“If you guys don’t capture that ship… “ says Booker, but he doesn’t finish the thought. Instead, he says, “All those railguns that destroyed our fleet, those were fired from their ship. That’s a lot of firepower from one ship, but you know what?”

“Is that rhetorical?” asks Kane.

“Yes,” answers Booker. “All those weird underground structures the Grays have been building, the ones with the little holes in the middle. Do you know how big those holes are?”

“A few feet?” guesses Kane. “A few meters?”

“Ten meters across,” says Booker, “The biggest ones are that large. Fleet command now thinks those are railguns. It came across the comm back when we were getting hammered up there.”

“Why would they need guns that big?” asks Garcia, too stunned by the revelation to make the deduction himself. “They did just shoot most of our ships down with the small caliber batteries?”

“They aren’t for shooting down our ships,” says Booker. “Command thinks they’re going to use them to bombard earth.”

“Christ,” mutters Garcia.

“Exactly,” says Booker.

Kane is running through the scenario in his head, and it’s immediately clear to him that if those big railguns can fire a projectile at anything near the speeds of the smaller variety, then earth is in trouble. The Grays will be able to rain a meteor storm down on earth’s cities, and there won’t be a thing any human can do to stop it.

Those eighteen Grays don’t need an army. They’re going to lay siege to an entire planet that won’t end until enough people die to break humanity’s resolve. And earth will surrender itself into slavery.

Damn those little gray bastards!

“Those larger caliber railguns,” says Booker, “they’ll hit with the force of a small nuclear device. The Grays will be able to take out small towns with a single slug. A few dozen hits might obliterate New York or London. We don’t know if those guns are operational, but you can bet they eventually will be. We need to stop them, no matter what.”

“No matter what,” echoes Kane.

“Got ‘em,” shouts Howard over the comm, just as he sends the transport into a dive.

Chapter 10

Booker says, “The Grays’ ship is about twenty clicks out.”

Kane is watching the moon’s surface come up fast. He says nothing, but squeezes his armrests and tenses, hoping they’re not crashing.

The pilot levels out a dozen meters above the dusty surface.

“Any idea how you’re going to get in?” asks Booker. “It might be just you guys making the assault.”

Thumbing in the direction of the platoon, Garcia says “We’re all carrying C4, enough to split that ship in two. I think we can make a hole big enough—”

“Shit!” shouts Harney.

Kane blinks instinctively as a glowing projectile arcs over the horizon and streaks past.

“How the hell did that happen?” shouts Garcia. “They can’t see us.”

Booker doesn’t answer. He’s fully engaged again. He’s pointing to the right where an ancient meteor left a depression in the moon’s surface, several miles across.

Howard veers.

The engines rumble.

He’s going to goose it.

“They’re using the moon’s gravity,” says Kane, “to curve their shots over the horizon. They saw where we were before we dropped down. They only need to guess our altitude.”

Another projectile streaks past.

Two more go by, high.

“They’re really after us,” says Booker, like he’s trying to find a joke where there isn’t one.

The ship picks up speed under the influence of a familiar rumble.

Kane sees another flurry of projectiles come over the horizon and grow in size.

Harney spews a string of curses.

The projectiles seem to be coming right at the ship.

And in the last second, right before everything goes black, it looks like one is coming right at the ship’s windshield.

Chapter 11

“Hey, you all right?”

Kane looks up to see Garcia standing over him with the black sky above. “What happened?”

“We got hit.”

Kane realizes he was unconscious. He struggles to sit up but can’t.

“You’re still strapped in.”

Kane looks down and pops the clip in the center of his chest with his fist to loose the constraining straps.

Around him, he sees the ship looking like a giant ripped it open lengthwise with a can opener. Soldiers are in their seats. Parts of them, anyway. Most look dead. Some are up and moving. Debris is scattered across the pristine gray surface in every direction. “Jesus.”

“Yeah,” says Garcia. “We took one right through the bow.”

Kane sees Booker’s seat sheared at chest height. He sees Booker’s legs sticking beneath the remains of the instrument panel. It’s an easy guess that the top part of his body went with the rest of the seat. Howard’s seat is completely gone. Harney’s is empty. “Sergeant Harney?”

Garcia shakes his head. “He’s like a cockroach. Unkillable.”

Relieved at that bit of news, Kane looks at the metal hull, completely gone just above the top of his seat back. He realizes if he were two or three inches taller, he’d be missing half his skull now. “How many?”

“Dead or alive? What are you asking?”

“Alive?” It’s always better to sound like an optimist.

“Seven and you?”

“And me?” asks Kane, looking down at his arms and legs for wounds. “What does that mean?”

“We’ve got seven who can make the attack.” Garcia reaches behind Kane and pulls on an umbilical, and shows it to Kane.

Kane shrugs. It looks just like the one he connected to when he was seated, only it’s longer. It has to be the one from the ship’s emergency kit, there in case anyone needed to go EVA and make a repair en route to the moon.

“Your breathing apparatus took a hunk of shrapnel,” says Garcia. “You can’t unplug.”

“What?” Kane reaches around to feel the bulky backpack integrated into his suit. He finds a fist-sized hole through the left side.

“You were lucky.”

“No, I wasn’t.” Connected to a broken ship. Forever, or so it seems.

“You were.”

Looking around at the remains of the ship, Kane asks, “The life support system still functions?”

“The tanks you’re connected to weren’t punctured. With the rest of us off the system, you’ll have enough to keep you alive for three or four weeks, I’ll bet.”

Kane shakes his head. “Whatever you’re getting at. I’m not going to sit here and… ” He looks around again, not knowing what the and is, and sees that the ship has come to rest beside a hunk of stone as big as a house.

Garcia points at the outcrop. “About a click that way on the other side of this pile of rock is the alien ship.”

Kane starts doing the estimates. He can probably go five minutes unplugged before his suit’s air starts to turn toxic. If he does it right, he might cross a click in low g in three or four minutes. Then he’d have a minute or so in the fight before he started to suffocate. It’s a crap plan, but it’s better than waiting in the company of frozen corpses, staring at a black sky and waiting to die. “Did any other ships make it this far?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” says Garcia. “Get a repair. Switch suits.”

“Yeah.” It doesn’t take a genius intellect to make that leap. Kane looks around for a man in the platoon who might have sustained a head injury, someone who can donate a functioning suit. “If I can get inside an airlock or something. I just need to get out of the vacuum for five minutes.”

“I don’t know if anybody made it but us,” says Garcia. “You can tune into the fleet channel on the ship’s system.” He shakes his head. “We can listen. We can’t send.”

“What does that mean?”

“Some other ships are still in the fight, but we’re the only ones on the surface.”

“Out of two hundred?” Kane witnessed the carnage coming in, but he can’t believe it was that bad. He looks up. “How many are out there?”

“Five, six. Not sure.”

Kane looks at his feet and heaves a sigh. “Do we have a plan?”

Garcia slaps him on the shoulder. “Good. You’re not ready to give up just yet.”

Chapter 12

The umbilical that attached Kane’s suit to his chair was only four feet long. The one he’s connected to now is forty feet—long enough.

Kane is perched atop of the rock formation and tethered to the ship on the ground below.

A kilometer away, across a rocky plain pocked by circular depressions, each with the barrel of a railgun peeking out, sits the alien ship, enormous and unassailable. Its guns are still firing at the few assault ships still up there.

For that—for every soldier they’ve killed, for the wicked plans they spin to enslave the people of the earth—the Grays need to die.

Before Lieutenant Garcia, Sergeant Harney, and the other five started out for the alien craft, they helped Kane search the ship’s wreckage to find one of the platoon’s machine guns and a grenade launcher. They also came up with seven or eight hundred rounds for the machine gun and a few dozen grenades for the launcher. The platoon brought a lot more ammunition with them, but most of it blew out into space when the ship got hit.

Kane doubts his tiny weapons will damage the alien behemoth, but that’s not his purpose. He’s the diversion, and when the moment comes, he’ll be the mosquito annoying the giant so the men on foot won’t be noticed.

Garcia and the other men are nearly halfway to the ship.

There’s no cover between here and there, so they’re spread out and bouncing across the surface in a low-g skip that's worked well on the moon since the days of the Apollo missions. It doesn't look dangerous, not intimidating in any way.

But looks aren’t important. The lunar expeditionary force—what’s left of it—isn’t here to frighten.

Each of those men is hauling enough C4 to blow a huge hole in the side of that ship.

And then, if the Grays do have an armed slave army in there, each soldier is carrying over a thousand rounds plus hand grenades. They’re prepared to kill their share.

A door opens on the side of the alien ship.

Kane has seen it before. After the scientists’ lander was disabled a year ago, that door opened, and it stayed open for two weeks. As those scientists slowly breathed through the oxygen in their tanks, they came to the inevitable conclusion, the same one reached by everyone watching from earth. The scientists left their lunar lander and entered as prisoners.

This time, though, the door is not empty and inviting. Humanoid shapes in space suits smeared in modern tribal war paint are marching out in ragged order. No, not marching at all. They’re a mob.

They don't look like the frail Grays from the video. These look like men, squat and thick.

They’re the Gray’s slave army, armed to fight.

Kane aims his machine gun, ready to shred the closely packed enemy.

He notices they don’t appear to be carrying rifles, not slings, not even bows. Not ray guns or anything of the sort. Their weapons look like broadswords, halberds, and axes, no two alike.

Over the comm, Kane asks, “You see this, LT?”

“Got it,” Garcia answers.

“Tell me when to shoot.”

“All I see are mêlée weapons,” says Garcia, “Hard to believe. Let’s hope this is exactly what it looks like.”

Other men chime in on the channel, ready for some little gray fucker abuse, itching to fight, wanting it to be a slaughter.

“Here’s how we’ll play it,” says Garcia. “Ronson, Mitchell, you’re with me. We’ll start shooting, single shots, not enough to scare them. Just enough to piss ‘em off and make ‘em come at us.”

Garcia, Ronson, and Mitchell are the three on the left flank of the soldiers.

Garcia says, “Harney, you four lay low. When the aliens charge us, you take your four behind them and rush that open door. Once you get inside, blow that ship to hell.”

Kane nods to himself. He approves of the plan.

“Kane,” says Garcia, “once that big bunch of assholes gets close, you unload on ‘em.” Then he laughs darkly. “But don’t shoot any of us, okay?”

“Not a problem.”

Garcia stands tall and fires his weapon. Ronson and Mitchell do likewise.

It’s strange seeing the flash of the M4s without hearing the report. In fact, not hearing anything but the sound of the platoon’s survivors over the comm, breathing as they move, and talking in curt phrases to coordinate as they get down to the business they trained for.

Kane levels his gun, and stabilizes his position. Those alien slaves are a kilometer away. Easily in range with no air to slow the rounds, but he’ll have to aim high even with the moon’s light gravity. He doesn’t want to accidentally shoot any of the three soldiers standing between him and his targets.

“Ronson,” calls Garcia, “fall back. Run if you can. Make a show of it.”

Ronson retreats a dozen meters, stops, fires a few rounds, and then falls back again.

The alien slaves are coming. They’re taking the bait.

Kane wants to mow them down, but he’s got to be patient and let the plan play out.

More slave soldiers pour out of the alien ship, bringing the total to maybe three hundred. They efficiently bounce across the moon’s surface, moving faster than Garcia, Ronson, and Mitchell are retreating—much faster, in fact.

“LT,” calls Kane, “the ones in front will be on you in another thirty or forty seconds.”

Garcia stops, evaluates for a moment, and says, “Ronson, Mitchell, take a knee and fire. Kane, let ‘em have it. Harney, as soon as those last ones clear out of the door, go.”

Kane fires a short burst, and the tracers fly high.

He adjusts, pulls the trigger again, and finds his mark.

Some of the alien slaves fall.

Some of the tracers veer into space.

“What the hell?” Ronson shouts over the comm.

Kane fires two more bursts. More aliens go down. More tracers veer off.

Some of the downed aliens get up.

“They’ve got some kind of field,” Garcia deduces right away.

Garcia is standing and looking through the scope on his weapon, not firing. “Kane, keep shooting!”

Kane rakes a long burst across the mob of charging slave soldiers.

“Whatever it is deflects the bullets,” says Garcia. “But the shield is only in the front. Mobbed together like that, some of the bullets ricochet into their guys from the side. Keep shooting!”

Kane lets loose.

“Spread wide,” Garcia tells the others, “Shoot ‘em from the flanks.”

Harney and his three men have covered half the distance to the open door on the side of the ship.

It doesn’t appear the mob attacking Garcia’s position knows they’re being flanked.

Kane’s M240 runs dry.

Damn, those bullets went fast.

At least half the alien slaves are down.

He lifts his grenade launcher, aims, and fires at the remnants of the mob.

Like the bullets, the grenade is deflected and disappears into space.

Kane aims at the aliens’ feet and fires again.

The round explodes and cuts a swath of death through their ranks.

Garcia’s rifle is flashing at a steady pace. Ronson and Mitchell are firing, roughly from the mob’s left. Their fire is effective.

Harney and his men are nearly at the ship’s door, but they come to an unexpected stop.

“Harney,” Kane calls. “What’s up?”

Looking for the cause, he sees movement through the wide door on the side of the Grays' ship.

Another mob of alien slaves, armed just like the first ones, comes rushing out.

Harney’s men start shooting.

Into the comm, Kane says, “LT, Harney’s men are under attack. I’m going to redirect fire toward the door.”

“Do it,” Garcia tells him. “We got this bunch.”

Kane shoots the next grenade toward the ship’s open door, right into the midst of the horde massing just outside it.

The grenade finds its mark and explodes with full effect.

Slave soldiers are down by the dozen. Others are up, but with tears in their protective suits, spewing precious oxygen into the void.

They won’t last long.

Kane rapidly fires twice more, and then carefully aims a fourth, trying to get it inside the open door.

He pulls the trigger.

The grenade deflects into the mob outside.

That damn field again.

Kane takes another shot just as he sees a familiar streak erupt from one of the behemoth’s batteries.

Before he can think to duck, it blazes past his head and impacts the ground somewhere behind him.

He feels heat through his helmet, and the rock beneath him shudders.

Kane takes a wild shot at the battery that fired on him. The round goes wide.

The aliens shoot again. The streak comes at him at impossible speed and impacts the stone under his feet.

Chapter 13

Kane opens his eyes and sees a black sky dotted with a billion tiny stars and thousands of twinkling shards, all that’s left of earth’s mighty armada.

He’s on his back.

His comm is silent.

Pieces of shattered ships move across the sky, every one in a different direction at a different speed. Some spin and shimmer like jewels in the sun’s stark white light. Others are dark, and only reflect enough light to cast hints of their size.

In the next days or weeks, those artifacts of humanity’s last grasp at freedom will be caught in the moon’s gravity and fall. Others will burn up in the earth’s atmosphere. More might slip into solar orbits and follow an elliptical path around the sun for a million years.

Earth is out there in the void, a quarter million miles away, half-blue, smeared with white clouds, half-black, with continents traced in artificial, gossamer light—earth’s cities, sewing life in the darkness.

Kane sees the twinkling outline of the California coast, and sees the country’s eastern seaboard just crossing into morning. Dawn’s early light crawling across the world.

Soon, his wife will be up. She’ll be getting ready for work, and she’ll be watching the news. Every channel will be talking about only one thing, the fleet that went to the moon, and the brave few who took the journey, sacrificing all they had for the freedom of earth’s people.

Kane talks into his comm and gets no answer. The ever-present static tells him it’s functioning, but no human voice carries on the electromagnetic waves.

He tries to move, and realizes he’s pinned beneath the wreckage of the ship that brought him to the moon. Scattered around lay the bodies of his men, many of them.

He wonders if Garcia and Harney killed enough of the Grays’ slave army to get inside the behemoth and detonate their explosives.

They were close. The numbers looked bad, but the battle was going their way.

Kane can’t move his arm, so he can’t see his watch to see how long he’s been out. He can’t even check his oxygen to know how long he has left to stay alive. It might be minutes. It might be days. Garcia might have succeeded and he might be coming to the rescue.

Or I might be the last of the armada.

Kane struggles against the weight pinning him and realizes it’s not the weight keeping him down. The problem is worse than that. He can’t move his arms or his legs, and he can’t feel them.

Not like this.

Please, God. Not like this.

A rescue he hoped for just moments ago, he now doesn’t want to come. A life of paralysis is unbearable for a soldier.

Kane’s doesn’t want his son to grow up pushing his father’s wheelchair and changing diapers.

Despair comes easy now.

Kane chokes on tears.

He curses himself for his weakness.

In truth, he’s not likely ever to leave the moon alive. He won’t face his end like a coward.

He breathes deeply and accepts the fact that everything is out of his hands. All he can do is watch the beauty of earth so far off in space, and pray that his wife and soon-to-be-born son—Dylan—will live free.

The dawn is past the Appalachian Mountains now, and the sun is edging its way over the Mississippi.

A light flashes in the dark part of the country where Kane guesses Montana should be.

The light is bright and sudden, disappearing like a flash of lightning.

But it doesn’t go away completely.

At its center, a circle of fire, yellow-orange, shrinking down to a blot of red.

Kane prays he’s just witnessed the eruption of a volcano, but he knows even as the thought materializes in his head it’s a wistful lie.

As if to confirm the lie, the ground beneath him shivers.

A streak of red shoots into the sky.

It’s a shot from a railgun, one of the big ones the Grays built into the moon’s rock.

Kane watches the enormous projectile shrink as it speeds away, growing dull as it cools. As large as it is, as fast as it’s moving, it’ll impact earth with the power of a nuclear bomb. And it’ll look just like the one that hit Montana a moment ago.

Earth’s first great space armada is now only sparkly space junk.

The lunar expeditionary force has failed.

Kane failed.

And earth is being bombarded in a rain of artificial meteors that will continue to fall until the Grays have killed enough innocent people to break earth’s will.

Then the planet’s governments will surrender.

Seven billion humans, arrogantly sitting at the pinnacle of their achievements, are soon to be the conquered slaves of just eighteen effete Grays who parked themselves on the moon with a few technological advantages in their possession.

My son will grow up a slave.

Kane wants to cry out in rage.

How could we be so self-centered-stupid?

Had earth just prepared, had people stopped killing one another for just awhile, they might have seen this coming. They might have done something.

Even in high school, Kane knew there were a septillion stars in the universe.

A septillion, a number so large it’s beyond comprehension.

To imagine it, Kane has to think of stars like eggs, a million to a carton.

If he took a billion of those cartons and put them on a really big pallet, and then put a billion of those pallets in a warehouse, then he’d have one septillion.

A billion, billion, million.

With so many stars, and so many planets orbiting them, how could anyone believe earth to be unique—life, unique.

The universe had to be teeming with civilizations.

Another spot on the earth flashes bright and slowly shrinks to a pool of red.

It was never a question of whether the aliens were coming. They were always coming.

The End

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Silly Things Tend I Add to the Ends of My Books

Book 1 Silliness

“Dude,” says Brice. “Do you feel that?”

“What?”

“That?”

“Are you high?” I ask. “Drunk? Too much Suit Juice? Brain tumor from too much solar radiation?”

“No,” answers Brice. “Look around. Things are different.”

I do look around. “Holy shit! Where’d everything go?”

“I think we transcended.”

“We’re dead?” I can’t believe it. “After all the shit we just went through, now we’re dead?”

“No” Brice is awed. “It’s a weird limbo state. Purgatory. Not dead, but not alive.”

“You’re freakin’ me out, man.”

Brice closes his eyes and inhales deeply. “You feel that?”

“Are you asking me to touch...”

“No, dumbass.” Brice points into the air at nothing I can see, just dark that’s not really dark, gray that isn’t gray, light that doesn’t glow.

I shiver. “This place gives me the fuckin’ creeps.”

“Close your eyes,” urges Brice. “Feel it.”

“Fine.” I do because I know how hardheaded he can be. I wait. I breathe. I do feel it.

“Holy shit!”

Brice grins. “See what I mean?”

“What the hell is that?” I’m looking around. “It feels like somebody’s spying on me only I can’t figure out where they are.”

“You know what that is?”

If I did, I’d have guessed already. “Why don’t you quit being cryptic and just tell me?”

“That’s the reader.”

“Fuck you.” I roll my eyes. “There’s no such thing as readers.”

“Man,” says Brice. “How can you not believe in readers? Our whole existence depends on readers. In fact, they say that every instance of existence in our great two-dimensional plane proceeds at the whim of a reader sitting on some great cosmic couch, turning pages, sipping wine, and ignoring his kids in the other room.”

I make a jerk-off motion, exaggerating as I always do the size of my invisible tool.

“I’m totally serious,” says Brice, he’s getting excited, like maybe Santa Clause is nearby with a bag of surplus Christmas toys. “Here’s the kicker, the reader controls time itself. Our moments flow from one to the next when she turns a page. When she’s not turning, we’re not—”

“Not what?” I interrupt. “Not alive?”

“Not that exactly.” Brice says it calmly, not rising to my argument. “We’re in a gooey nothing limbo land. Like this place. Not existing, really, just waiting for something to happen.”

“That sounds like a shitty metaphysical system.”

“Dude, you can’t talk that way.” Brice is mortified. “You’ll offend people. They might put the book down and never pick it up again, and then you’ll cease to exist.”

“I did say, shitty, right?” I huff. “Shitty! I mean who wants to live in a world where they have no control over whether they live or die? Not me. I don’t want anyone controlling my life any more than I want those damn Grays running it.”

“Oh, it’s worse than you think,” Brice tells me.

“How could it be?”

“There’s also an author?”

It all sounds like hokum to me. I try to come up with a gesture that’ll express my derision more forcefully than that last juvenile hand motion.

“He’s like a middleman between our world and the reader’s world.”

I sigh.

“Really. I’m serious.”

Looking for a way to get through to Brice’s rational side, I suggest, “Fine. Let’s go talk to him.”

“We can’t.”

“Of course.” I laugh. It’s mean. I want it to hurt. I want to embarrass Brice back to reality.

He doesn’t take the bait. “The thing you need to know about authors is they tend to be antisocial. They hide in dark rooms and make shit up all day. And they don’t like being around other people. So if they see you coming, they’ll run away.”

“Poplar at parties, I’ll bet.” I’m getting exasperated. “Why don’t we make an appointment, or send this author dude an email or something?”

“That’s the other thing,” says Brice. “We can’t. He lives in the three-dimensional world with the readers and exists in a separate temporal space.”

I look around again at the ambiguous nothing of where we’re floating and realize, not only is everything around me undefined, but I am too. I have no body. I’m just a disembodied voice. That scares me.

Brice senses my fear. “You’re finally looking. You’re feeling it, aren’t you?”

I don’t want to admit it, but the words slip out. “I’m worried.”

“So you finally see what I’m talking about.”

“Not really,” I admit. “I don’t like this place. Maybe the Grays and Trogs weren’t so bad. I want to get back to our universe?”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” says Brice. “We’re not in control. It’s the author and the reader. Lots and lots of readers that control our fate.”

“Can’t we get off this shit?” I argue, “Do you really believe that we float here in the gray nothing until some reader comes along? We can’t do anything to change our fate?”

“Well,” says Brice. “There are theories.”

“Lay them on me, man.” The nothingness is getting to me. I’m willing to listen to any ideas.

“First off, the author is probably living under a bridge, eating rat-flavored ramen from the clearance bin, and drinking coffee brewed from used grounds filtered through a hobo’s underwear. Life as an author is hard.”

I shrug. “Sucks for him out there in three-dimensional-land. What’s that got to do with us?”

“The only way the author’s life can improve,” says Brice, “the only way he can write more books is if readers take an active role in his welfare.”

“This sounds like the beginning of a multi-level-marketing pitch. I’m out.”

Brice laughs.

“What are you laughing at?”

“You said you were out. But you’re still here, stuck in the limbo with me.”

“Shit.”

“Listen to me,” says Brice. “It’s not an MLM. All a reader has to do to make our lives full, and long, and eternal, is read the book and then go to a party, get drunk and dance on a table while shouting to everyone who can hear that this is the greatest book they ever read.”

“Sounds like a commitment,” I grumble. “Nobody’s going to do that. Is there anything easier?”

“Well, they could tell their friends, I suppose. Maybe on Facebook or social media or something?”

“Facebook?” I ask. “What’s social media?”

“It’s what people do on the internet when they’re stuck in a line somewhere and bored or when they’re at home and they’re tired of trying to play smoochy-smoochy with the wife.”

“Ah,” I say “So that’s it. We’re afterthoughts to their sex lives.”

“Well, they could leave a review where the bought the book, just tick some stars and save it, or even say a few kind words, you know, like ‘This book was a tolerable string of syllables that kept me distracted while I was waiting in the dentist’s office. But seriously, buy it. It ROCKS!’”

CLICK HERE TO LEAVE A REVIEW (P.S. GOOD KARMA!)

“Okay. Is that it?”

“Not really?”

“What else?”

“Well,” says Brice, “there’s the email list. If readers sign up, the author can spam them from time to time when he as a new book out. Or maybe when his friend (or anybody who buys him lunch) has a new book out.”

“Eh, I’m not sure I’d give up my email address just for a notification about a book.”

“It’s not just that,” says Brice. “There’s a free book in it.”

CLICK HERE FOR A FREE PREQUEL, FREEDOM’S SIEGE!

(Extra note to the readers: This prequel was already included above)

“Tell me more,” I’m interested. “Are we in it?”

“No,” says Brice. “It’s about the Grays’ siege of the earth before we were born. Your dad’s in it.”

“My dad?” I ask. “He died in a mining accident before I was born.”

“That’s what you think,” Brice reveals. “He was a sergeant in the assault force earth sent to attack the Grays on the moon.”

“I thought they were all blown out of the sky.”

Brice shakes his head. “That’s what the MSS wants you to believe, dumbass. You can’t trust those bastards.”

“So, it’s the story of my dad.” I’m having a hard time believing it. “I’d like to read that.”

“Sign up for the email list,” Brice tells me. “And leave a review and tell your friends so the author can stop drinking hobo coffee and write some more books.”

AND OH, WHAT THE HECK…COME JOIN THE FUN ON FACEBOOK!

Book 2 Silliness

Please, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Beverly Blair, but you know me as Colonel Blair, perhaps derogatorily as ‘Queen of the Potato.’

I just want to say, I greatly resent that one, and want to express in no uncertain terms that Dylan Kane is an immature dunce. He’s got a third-grade boy’s cruel heart and I can assure you, he’ll lead this whole endeavor to ruin.

So please, pay attention when I tell you, don’t encourage him by reading this terrible compilation of half-truths and self-indulgent absurdities. I’m a good person and he makes me look like a total bitch. In truth, I think he has mommy issues. In fact, I’m certain of it. I could tell you some things. I know one he didn’t tell you—among other things, he’s afraid of flying monkeys.

I know!

Flying monkeys. Can you believe it?

Who the hell’s afraid of flying monkeys? And that’s just the first on a long list. He’s a total sissy.

The point I’m trying to get to is this. We don’t want Dylan Kane to torture us with any more of this sophomoric swill, am I right? So let’s all agree, whatever we do, we won’t follow this link and buy the next book in the series:

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE FREEDOM’S FRAY
(Note from Bobby for this edition: Book 3 is included. You already read it)

We won’t follow this link for a free prequel and email list signup:

CLICK HERE FOR A FREE PREQUEL, FREEDOM’S SIEGE!

(Note from Bobby for this edition: The prequel is included. You already read it)

We absolutely won’t leave a review. I mean, really, do I even have to tell you this?

CLICK HERE TO LEAVE A REVIEW (P.S. GOOD KARMA!)

And of course, we won’t Like Bobby Adair on Facebook.

OH, WHAT THE HECK…LIKE HIM ON FACEBOOK.

Let’s be honest, if Dylan Kane had a shred of self-respect he wouldn’t need the ephemeral adulation of social-media-centric cyber relationships. Kane should buy a goldfish. They make good pets and are like training wheels for the immature men in our lives who need a dependable starter relationship.

Thank you for your time,

Colonel Beverly Blair
Ministry of State Security

Book 3 Not-So-Silliness

I used to write one of these for every book, but I haven't done one in a while.

As she always does before a book's release, the other half, Kat, asked me this morning if I was going to write a Foreword or Last Word for Freedom's Fray. I said no. However, since that whirlwind cruise and unconventional stingray-themed exchange of vows in 2015, I think she’s contractually obligated now to nag me about this. And like any good wife, she asked me to explain why. So now, I've been thinking about it all morning long.

Bottom line, I stopped after I received one too many bad reviews, not based on the story in question, but based on something I said in the Foreword or in the Final Word section where I took a moment to tell any interested readers my thoughts about the book I'd just created and published. I used to proudly put this in the front of my books. One of my favorites was the intro to Slow Burn 7, where I talk about how what started out as “just a zombie series” turned into something more than I ever expected. I had no idea that my writing had actually changed lives, helping people rekindle a love for reading, and in a few cases giving confidence that led to a reader going back to school to finish.

I guess after talking about it with her, I realized I was being kind of a whiny bitch about the whole thing.

Overall, all of my readers have been very generous with praise and criticisms. And I've taken much of it to heart. It's helped me become a better writer of the kinds of stories you want to read. After twenty-five books, including several bestsellers, I feel like I’m a better writer than I’ve ever been. But who am I kidding? We can all become better at our passions if we strive to learn from both our successes and mistakes. My readers have certainly taught me a lot about that.

The truth is, I value the connection I have with you all, and it’s why I keep writing. The overwhelming response about these personal messages has been ‘put it back.’ People are going to be who they're going to be, they're going to behave how they're going to behave, regardless of what I do.

However, all of this does make me wonder about us as a culture.

Many of you have grown up with the Internet and email, social media, constant connection, public platforms in the digital realm both transparent and anonymous. Many of us were raised in a world where all of these things were concepts that existed even beyond the imaginations of our sci-fi writers at the time.

This type of communication has altered the foundation of our culture, how we interact with one another and how we behave in public. I believe it's the fastest, most all-encompassing cultural shift humanity has ever experienced.

Now every single one of us needs to decide how we fit into this new global culture, and not only who we're going to be in this cyber-enhanced world, but in which directions our multi-dimensional civilization is going to evolve.

Are we going to lay the underpinnings for a nasty, vicious dystopia, or will we reach high for a dreamy utopia? Will our culture be a mirror that amplifies our venal instincts, or will it be the light that illuminates a path to our better selves?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. Perhaps I'll explore them in a book I write one day. Either way, the world will be what we make it. And I’m committed to make it better.

I hope you enjoyed Freedom's Fray. If you have feedback, positive or things that you’d like to see handled differently, please leave a review. Or, if you want to express yourself simply, tick off the number of stars that matches your feelings about the book and hit submit. I appreciate it all.

Thanks, Bobby

(And Likes on Facebook bring good karma!)

LIKE BOBBY ADAIR ON FACEBOOK

Book 4 Not-So-Silliness

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

(And Likes on Facebook bring good karma!)

LIKE BOBBY ADAIR ON FACEBOOK

I didn’t add anything for books 5 or 6

Amazing people who made this happen…

Cover Design

Alex Saskalidis, a.k.a. 187designz

Cover Illustration

Illustration © Tom Edwards
TomEdwardsDesign.com

Editing, Proofreading, Book Formatting

Kat Kramer Adair

Super Special Thanks

Mike Kramer

More about Bobby’s other writing…

Slow Burn Series (9 books), a best-seller!

Slow Burn is Bobby’s flagship post-apocalyptic zombie series, but so much more than a zombie book. Follow the adventures of Zed as he wakes up one morning to find that something’s a little different in the world. As the world is going to shit, Zed meets up with Murphy, and they try to navigate their new reality through a world of the “slow burns” before they are completely consumed by the virus. Great reviews, with over a million books sold, readers LOVE this one.

The Last Survivors Series (6 books)

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.

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
History of The Grays: Part 1
History of The Grays: Part 2
History of The Grays: Part 3
History of The Grays: Part 4
History of The Grays: Part 5
History of The Grays: Part 6
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

Chapter 13

- Silly Things Tend I Add to the Ends of My Books

- Book 1 Silliness
- Book 2 Silliness
- Book 3 Not-So-Silliness
- Book 4 Not-So-Silliness
- I didn’t add anything for books 5 or 6

- Amazing people who made this happen…

- Cover Design
- Cover Illustration
- Editing, Proofreading, Book Formatting
- Super Special Thanks

- More about Bobby’s other writing…