CHAPTER ONE
Win gazed into the hologram, absorbing its emptiness. Static. He knew where they were going, and why, but preferred the lies because truth guaranteed a gruesome death by their enemy where lies promised victory—a chance that at least some of them would return from this excursion instead of being sliced open. There were slower ways to die and Win clung to another lie as if it were a buoy: If caught, he and the crew would die quickly by rifle fire, not by one of the slow methods, the ones reserved for cowards. There was nothing more offensive to the Sommen than gutlessness.
His captain, Markus, glared. Hatred splashed over Win’s mind and he tuned it out, doing his best to ignore the acidity, a fluid kind of anger that threatened to soak the fabric of his thoughts and weaken them with distraction. What did the captain matter, or his name? This man is corpulent. It would be easy to spear the captain with one of the legs from Win’s servo harness—one of the two things that made Win look different from the Higgins’s crew. The other was his head. With the drugs come physiological changes; with the changes come sight and power—the power of Sommen thought, the greatness of war and corpses. Elongated after so many treatments, the shape of Win’s skull attracted looks wherever he went and even after months in space nothing had changed; his body’s muscles had continued to wither and without the armored servo harness he’d be immobilized. The crew thought him disgusting; their thoughts washed over Win too, a sewage that wouldn’t drain.
I am a weapon. Through the absorption of hatred and aversion I power my thought, and with thought I will cut my enemy’s throat.
“Captain, we couldn’t reconstitute the recording at all,” an ensign said; the man “sat” next to Win, suspended in zero g. “Its base files are lost and we had to move on. But the metadata is there and there are E-M spectra consistent with Sommen patterns. My guess? They slaughtered our people.”
The captain nodded. “How long ago?”
“Like Win said: just before we arrived at Childress transit.”
The captain pinched the bridge of his nose and Win studied the signs; the man had taken off his suit helmet to reveal a bald head, its muscle tremors screaming that exhaustion made him less human, more zombie than anything else. The man feared war. Win imagined war was coming whether the captain wanted it or not and that conflict would be the life of their offspring, prayers a poor method for preventing destruction. Sommen invasion fleets were still decades away, but they would come.
I am a weapon and war is my promise.
“What’s the damage to the signal buoy’s shell?” the captain asked. “Can we get anything from that?”
“Outer shell vaporized, and the rest of it pretty much scorched. The only thing operational was the locator beacon but it lost power almost immediately. Standard missile damage, propellant and warhead consistent with Sommen weapons signatures.”
“I want intel working on this around the clock,” the captain ordered. “We make our transit into Childress in three hours, so get as much information as you can. Meeting’s over, I need the conference room.”
Win was about to release the straps keeping him in his seat when the captain waved.
“Stay put.”
The others unhooked from the table and pushed themselves off, drifting toward a door. One at a time, they glided from the room.
“Zhelnikov,” said the captain, “is safely aboard the station and we move into an area where we know the Sommen are now operating. I’ve got orders to do what you say. But I won’t move this ship another meter unless you tell me about the mission. Now.”
“I can tell you this, Captain: Zhelnikov wants us to pop into the Childress system, reconnoiter, and return to him with any remaining research data that the Sommen haven’t destroyed.”
“Data? Like what?”
Win cleared his throat. “I can’t answer that.” When he saw the captain begin to speak, he added, “Zhelnikov was clear. We pop from Childress wormhole and then make for the research station. Get in and get out. But what I’m to do at the station is classified and not for you. Not yet.”
“I don’t like it. Zhelnikov wants the Higgins for a high-risk mission; okay. I accept that. But to not give me the details as we enter what could be hostile territory where the enemy is active? Unacceptable.”
“Understood, sir. I’ll pass your thoughts on to Zhelnikov.”
The captain’s glare faded.
“That . . .” he stammered, “that’s not necessary. Forget what I said. What’s your full name, anyway?”
A sucking sound rang through Win’s helmet when the suit’s automatic systems began their periodic removal of saliva that had begun to run from his chin. “I’m Burmese. My father named me Win and nothing else. His last name was Kyarr. My mother died when I was little and I never knew her.”
“How the hell did you get drafted into Zhelnikov’s little show, and what the hell did he do to you? To your body?”
“I am a weapon. Zhelnikov put me in charge because he and I know how scared you are, and that you’ve no concept of what we face. But I do. I’ve seen it. You will hide under rocks and mountains on that day.”
“Your father,” the captain said, pointing first at Win’s head and then gesturing at the rest of him. “He agreed to make you into this?”
Win held himself back, wanting to push off the wall and strangle the man, killing him in micro-increments to see the fear of death as his eyes’ lights dimmed. It would have made everything right. A burst of memory blinded him, a picture of his father in the Charleston slums with the other Myanmarese playing backgammon in the street while they squatted and pulled on cigarettes. Many of them had no teeth. Some stumbled, drunk and with emaciated leg muscles that somehow held the men up. His father grinned at Win; then he held up the dice and threw them on the board.
“My father disappeared when I was young, Captain Markus. I chose to do this to myself.”
“You’re either insane, or the stupidest son of a—”
Win cut him off and unhooked from the table, pushing toward the hatchway. “Captain, I don’t have time for this. You will hear from me when we get closer to the transit point.”
I am a weapon. He moved through white corridors, making his way toward the ashram. Zhelnikov hid in the safety of a hollow rock; he would not be taking the risks that Win did in visiting the scene of a Sommen massacre. A distant ship’s voice warned of imminent evasive maneuvers upon entering the wormhole and Win strapped into an emergency couch sunk into the ashram’s floor. After turn upon turn, the gees dislodged deep memories and pushed Win into a twilight place where there was just enough light to see but not enough to chase the shadows. Soon they’d be locked into a fight; conflict was almost here and the instant the Higgins crossed over, they’d be outside the zone permitted to humans—an act of war.
The wormhole grew with every second and Win watched, fascinated, examining the silvery orb that hung in space as if someone had placed it there like an orphaned Christmas ornament. He squinted, zooming in, to try and see what kept the wormhole alive.
“Our guys salvaged a message.” The captain’s voice crackled in Win’s helmet. “The buoy is from a Fleet drone carrier, the Majestic. Go ahead and play it over coms.”
Win whispered at his faceplate so that when the message began, a spectral analyzer danced across his heads-up, forming a series of jagged green lines blurred with static.
“Contact at fourteen-thirty-three hours Earth time, Zulu. Patrol reports multiple unknowns coming from, we think, an uncharted wormhole in the direction of the Orion arm. I sent half our squadron of fighter drones to intercept and the rest are falling back to carrier patrol. Weapons research was successful and installation complete on one vessel. Doctor McCalister seems to have . . .”
The recording ended in a hiss.
“That’s all we recovered, sir,” someone said. “Nothing from the base itself and our semi-aware calculates an eighty-seven percent chance that all Fleet vessels, including the Majestic, were destroyed. Doctor McCalister was Childress’s lead scientist and the head of the Childress mission.”
“One of Zhelnikov’s?”
Win broke in. “Yes.”
“Thank you, Win. That’s confirmation; it looks like Childress fell to hostile forces. Likely Sommen.”
“Captain,” Win said, “it was the Sommen. I have seen this. And you have no idea what they’ve done to your Fleet comrades.”
Win’s spectral analyzer continued to dance, its lines reacting to the soft sound of static but coming to life at occasional pops in the noise. When the captain spoke, the spectrum and his tone indicated he was furious.
“Battle stations. Have the computer plot an evasion course beyond the hole, post transit; we can’t do high g because our passenger isn’t engineered, so if we get hit, thank Win. Once we determine Childress space is safe, one of our shuttles will make for the research station. That is all.”
Win shut the analyzer off. Soon the wormhole would fill his helmet’s screen with white light and he closed his eyes before pressing a button on his forearm; inside his suit, a tiny needle jetted out and buried itself in his neck, just long enough to push green fluid into one of his veins. He suppressed a scream. The liquid burned, coursing its way towards his brain which it soon entered. He shed a tear at the agony as new neural masses grew, forcing connections and firing electric pulses. This is the price of sight, the promise of victory, he decided, just before passing out. Win came to in a few seconds, his eyes open but his vision focused elsewhere, beyond the wormhole and into Childress space; he may not have been engineered for high-g maneuvers, but Win had been engineered by Zhelnikov for this.
I am a weapon—not a timekeeper. I am not the clockmaker, or the keeper of dreams. There is one who sets the time, one who draws the pictures, and one who calls out the minutes and seconds. I ring the alarm of war. It is in war that my mind awakens. It is in war that the mind settles into its killing course where neurons spark and blood flows. It is in the death of enemies that I am reborn . . .
The ship melted away. An illusion of acceleration shifted his insides as he popped into the wormhole, the slide through mirrored space making him nauseous. As soon as he popped out the other side a blinding darkness surrounded him, filled with Sommen whispers; their tongues clicked and he heard the gurgling of their throats when the things got angry, spitting insults while Win did his best to penetrate but it was as if he had been immersed in an ocean of ink. Nothing worked. No matter how hard he concentrated, the mantras ran empty and useless, the darkness impenetrable. A few seconds later he woke; Win’s arms and legs trembled and his undersuit stuck to his skin, soaked in sweat.
“System—this is Win,” he said. “Get me the captain.”
A second later the captain’s voice responded from the wall panel. “What?”
“The Sommen hit Childress and are somehow blocking my readings. I’ve never seen this.”
“High-g maneuvers in ten seconds. The Marines are staged in acceleration couches so that when we stop maneuvers they’ll move to the docking airlock for station boarding. With you. Now would be a good time to tell me everything, Win.”
The Higgins pitched and yawed, throwing Win into the couch and then against his straps in a random series of movements. His suit’s servos whined. A warning light flashed red on his heads-up, alerting him to the fact that his harness’s structural integrity was in danger of failing. It frustrated him that the captain could operate under these conditions while Win had to marshal his resources, scraping just enough breath to speak.
“You and your ship are to stay here near the wormhole transit point, Captain, and not approach the station. I and the Marines will dock with Childress using the shuttle, scanning for enemy along the way. If we see them, the shuttle turns runs back to the Higgins and then we drop passivated nuclear mines on this side of the hole and the other; passive mines are hard to detect. Then we wait. If the Sommen enter human space, we accelerate from transit to transit, rejoining with the main group—the Jerusalem and the Bangkok.”
“And if we don’t see any Sommen?”
“We head for the station, investigate, retrieve relevant information, and then fall back. The station computer contains plans for a weapon that will change everything. If possible, Zhelnikov wants the base nuked. Nothing is to remain.”
“If the Sommen have already taken it, it’s too late to retrieve a damn thing.”
“The Sommen don’t care about our tech. They came here to make a point: We broke the treaty. Zhelnikov was a fool to put this base here in the first place.”
“Why the hell is there a base out here?”
“To avoid Fleet curiosity while Zhelnikov’s people work, something that might help him retake control of Fleet and win the coming war. I can’t give you the details but it’s based on Sommen tech and we had to test it. Someone up there thought that a demonstration outside our territory—that we were already capable of matching their weaponry, and didn’t give a damn about their rules—would also be a good idea. But we were betrayed. Zhelnikov’s enemies contacted the Sommen and alerted them.”
“Let me see what we have so far. We just punched through; the Higgins is now outside human territory.” Win heard the click of someone else joining the conversation.
“Finished first scans, sir. There are still a few sweeps to go, but sensors are clear.”
“They’re out there,” said Win. He didn’t need the ashram to tell him that; every nerve in his body hummed. “The Sommen are watching.”
“Stop evasive maneuvers,” the captain ordered. “Take us back to the wormhole and hold on this side.”
The ship stopped its violent movements and Win breathed a sigh of relief, taking a deep breath and almost missing the captain’s next words. “Win, meet the Marines at the shuttle; take them in and let’s finish this. Get your ass back here if there’s trouble; if we detect any Sommen and they close on the Higgins, you’re on your own.”
Marines loaded onto the shuttle, the men ducking under a tight hatch just large enough for them to squeeze through in battle kit. They wore blaze orange suits. Each had multiple layers of polymer armor that shone under the ship’s hover lights and their facemasks were similar to Win’s: A curved plate filled the space where their face should be, its surface coated with banks of sensors sending pictures to an internal screen. Win wondered if the Marines ever got claustrophobic—sealed into an armored sarcophagus for hours on end. After the last one pushed in, he followed, strapping himself to an empty couch.
The shuttle launched with a bump. Win closed his eyes and willed himself to stay calm, meditating in an effort to fight the panic that rose from not being able to see anything except the bulkhead next to him, and not being able to hear anything except his own breathing. The pilot called out the distance. Win knew what had happened at Childress Station: Zhelnikov had sacrificed an entire scientific team so that he and his allies could start a civil war. His thoughts spun downward in a vortex of prediction, imagining what would happen at each step of Zhelnikov’s plan, the moves and countermoves after the religious within Fleet discovered the plan. Win soon thought himself to sleep, his helmet clicking against his chest until an adjacent Marine elbowed him awake.
“We’re here, sir.”
Win punched out of his seat harness. He waited for the airlock to open then followed the group out the main hatch, filing through and onto Childress Station.
“Jesus,” someone said. “Look at this place.”
A cylindrical chamber stretched before them for almost a hundred meters, and papers and equipment spun in microgravity. Scratch marks covered the walls. Deep gouges punctuated smooth rock where Sommen warriors had dragged their knives against it, and Win noted the depth to which their blades had penetrated; whatever material comprised Sommen knives, Fleet hadn’t yet duplicated it. And the strength it had taken—to bury their blades into hard rock . . .
“Set the nuke,” Win said. “Time it for three hours and put it someplace hard to find. The rest of you on me. Move.”
Win led them through the cylinder’s center and then turned into a side passage, a map of the station outlined in green on his suit’s heads-up. The project had worked, he told himself again. Zhelnikov assured it. There was no reason for the Sommen to have any interest in the system, which was one reason it had been chosen. No resources, no gas giants, nothing. A worthless star orbited by a tremendous field of rock and ice that alone shouldn’t have attracted Sommen attention.
Win reached the door to the science section and punched in the access codes, forcing it open.
“Stay here,” he said. After his sensors adjusted to the sudden increase in brightness, Win surveyed the horrors his new surroundings contained: Men and women had been split almost in half so that over a hundred bodies hovered in midair, bloated from having been dead for some time, and Win sighed with relief that he couldn’t smell the odor. The cuts fascinated him. Win grabbed the nearest body, brushing aside clouds of dried blood, and his servos hummed when he pushed his hand through, his fingers visible on the other side when they protruded from a dead man’s back.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The Marine lieutenant had ignored Wilson’s order, entering behind him where he locked to the deck and scanned for threats.
“They are perfect.”
“What?”
“The Sommen. This is what they do: destruction perfected. These are Childress scientists and each knew that they were to avoid being captured; they died with honor. And I told you to wait outside.”
“You’re telling me they killed themselves, sir? Suicide?”
“Not at all. I’m telling you the Sommen gutted them from chin to groin and these men and women sacrificed themselves for a mission. If our scientists are this brave, maybe we’ll win this war after all.”
The lieutenant said something else but Win ignored it and moved further in, where he activated his harness’s leg magnets so he could clamp onto the metal grate floor. He clanked his way toward an area with no handholds. Droplets of blood—dried into jagged brown shapes—rose from under the grate and crept upward as he walked. Win barely noticed it, instead centering on hundreds of computers ahead that ringed a huge spherical object, over a hundred meters in diameter, and which rested on a tripod in the middle of the compartment. It took a minute to reach. Win scanned the object and found its data ports, yanking out a series of tubes that he stuffed into a bag until the last one slid free.
“Contact,” the captain said, his voice buzzing over Win’s helmet speakers. “Vessel inbound, maybe more than one, a million klicks out. Sommen.”
Win made sure the bag was sealed, shouted for the lieutenant to get moving, and then deactivated his magnetics to travel faster. He pushed off toward the door. His servo harness hadn’t just been designed to support his withering frame, but had been altered to facilitate rapid movement in zero g, the controls wired to hookups in his skull so that Win just had to think and the suit reacted. Small jets of gas puffed. Within seconds he screamed through the air and out of the research lab, where the main group of Marines grabbed Win by the arms and began pulling him through the empty station using their suits’ own gas jets.
“Come, sir!”
“The Sommen are close,” said Win. “I can feel it. If we die, die with honor and they may forgive this second incursion outside human space.”
“Sir?”
“War. Die bravely and we may avoid an early start to it.”
“We’re here, sir.”
The Marine pushed him into the airlock where another one grabbed Win and ushered him into the waiting shuttle. By the time Win re-strapped himself in, he had already felt the gravity increasing as the craft accelerated out of Childress docking, and the communications net erupted with activity.
“They’re trying to lock on us,” the Marine pilot announced.
Win’s mind raced. He glanced at the bag that he’d filled with data storage tubes, resting in a webbing harness at the shuttle rear.
“Arrival at Higgins in twenty minutes,” the pilot continued. “Hard lock. They’re going to launch.”
“At least they aren’t close enough to use that plasma,” another Marine commented; a few others chuckled.
“Launch detected. Approximately three hundred targets inbound, probable enemy missiles. Impact in fifteen minutes.”
Win burst out of his couch and a nearby Marine tried to grab him, screaming something about evasive maneuvers and that g forces would smear him across the bulkhead. Win slapped the Marine’s hands away. He grabbed the bag, ripping it out of the webbing storage space, and then pushed off the wall toward the shuttle’s engine bay where he opened a small hatch to expose the craft’s emergency data buoy. He yanked a cable from his suit’s chest compartment. After jacking the cable into the buoy, several panels sprung open; as fast as he could, Win began stuffing the Childress data tubes in. He sealed the missile-shaped object for flight, punching in Zhelnikov’s coordinates so it would arrive at the right location on the safe side of the wormhole.
Win detected movement out of his peripheral vision. Two Marines jetted toward him, yelling to strap in, but he punched at his forearm keypad again, cursing. The buoy was too small to have enough fuel for the entire trip, but Win hoped it would go far enough that a Fleet ship would pick up its beacon.
He hit the launch button and then ripped his cable out. The interior panel slid shut at the same time the Marines grabbed him by the arms, and the pilot announced that an emergency buoy had been dropped to burn toward transit. Win sighed with relief; at least now there was a chance Zhelnikov would get what he needed.
The two Marines forced him into his seat and then strapped him down, cinching the harness as tight as it would go. A moment later they began evading. Win screamed at the g forces, which threw him from one side to the other and crushed him into the acceleration couch as if the pilot wanted to suffocate them all. Win blacked out several times, coming to in a stupor where, for just a second, he thought maybe they’d dodged the missiles.
“Higgins docking bay, five minutes,” the pilot announced.
The computer clicked in. “Missile impact thirty seconds.” Twenty seconds later, Win closed his eyes and prayed.
I am a warrior; this is a fitting end. I go willingly for this is my purpose and this is my role. I am a warrior . . .
He hadn’t imagined this would ever happen, not two months ago, and certainly not years ago when he had first been tapped for service. Zhelnikov, he thought. Win hated even the name and remembered the first time he saw the man, when he got his first look at the scarred face that now haunted him at death.
“New launch detected,” the pilot said.
“Where from?” Win asked.
“The Higgins. She’s continuing to launch, expending her entire missile store and sending them on an intercept trajectory. It’s a good thing there’s no atmosphere in space or we’d feel what’s about to go down. This will be close; brace yourselves, in case a Sommen warhead gets through.”
Win switched his view to the shuttle’s optical sensors, just in time. Over a hundred missiles detonated a kilometer beyond the shuttle, expanding into clouds of metal and plastic that screamed in the direction of the incoming Sommen warheads, protecting the Higgins’s shuttle with a wall of debris. It worked. All the Sommen weapons detonated prematurely, and the Marines shouted with joy when their shuttle screamed into the hangar bay, slamming to a stop after its front end buried itself in a bulkhead. The maneuver crushed the pilot and copilot, but the rest of the men scrambled out of the hatch, and Win heard the Higgins’s alarm claxon scream; a voice over ship’s speakers warned everyone to get into acceleration couches.