Chapter Three
Caine trailed two fingertips along the bulkhead as, up ahead, Dora slowed her forward drift in a similar fashion. She glanced into the commons room, then gestured for Caine and Ayana to follow her in. Caine had come to a halt as he reached the opening; hand on the hatch’s coaming, he pivoted into the ship’s largest compartment.
For months, it had been where he and the Crewe had eaten, groused, laughed, and ultimately held coded confabs as they plotted to take the bridge. Now, everything that could be removed had been: a necessary precursor for its coming transformation into a combined assembly and equipment-inspection area.
Dora’s shrug indicated she had nothing to add to the sitrep she’d given as she led the other two forward from the air lock. “That’s the state of our preparations for descent, boss.”
“Sounds like it’s well in hand.”
“Huh: sounds boring, more like. Particularly compared to your news! A city on the surface!” She shook her head ruefully. “You gotta stop this first-contact stuff. Earth has more than it can handle, as it is.”
Riordan drifted to a handhold. “This time it might be first contact with a graveyard. And even if it’s not, there’s no way of knowing if they’d ever see us as anything other than hideous otherworld invaders.”
Veriden rolled her eyes but smiled. “Always the optimist, hey?”
“Always the realist,” Caine replied with a shrug as Ayana completed her flawless zero-gee entry with a balletlike pirouette. It gave her just enough impetus to snag the first handhold beyond the hatch.
“Realist or not,” Dora persisted, “sometimes you worry too much—boss or no boss.”
Caine replied with a grin. “Guilty as charged.” He couldn’t resist adding a semiserious coda: “And if you hadn’t followed me into Dornaani space, you’d not only be safer right now; you’d be less annoyed.”
“Hah!” she laughed, her chin rising. “For once, you’re right!” She shook her head. “You’re a funny guy, boss . . . particularly when you don’t mean to be. And hey: you’re not the only one with big news!” She glanced at Ayana.
Tagawa nodded. “Shortly after you commenced your EVA, we detected a visual anomaly just beyond geosynchronous orbit: a bright object with an irregular signature.”
Riordan leaned forward. “A structure of some kind?”
Tagawa nodded. “A structure of the most interesting kind. Using the targeting scope on Hsontlosh’s coil gun, we were able to confirm that it is a slowly tumbling spacecraft, at least a kilometer long. The resolution was insufficient to observe any details beyond its general configuration: large engine section at the stern, a radiation shield just forward of it, then a long keel trusswork leading to a large bow section. Almost certainly an STL ship.”
Caine had to keep his mind from racing out along the spider web of possible implications. “You’re sure it doesn’t have a supraluminal drive?”
She nodded. “The engine decks are too small, even if the shift drive was as compact as Dornaani models.” She smiled knowingly, anticipating Riordan’s next question. “And no evidence that it was disabled in battle: no gross damage nor the typical debris cloud.”
Riordan shook his head. “Damn, if we’d seen it before committing to descent—”
“And get to it with what thrust?” Dora exclaimed, then shook her head at her own outburst. “Sorry, boss. I’m just frustrated. If we could get to it, we might be able to salvage everything we need.”
“Even if we had thrust, our life support would have run out before we could make intercept,” Ayana corrected calmly. “And there is no assurance that any of that ship’s components or contents are in usable condition, nor that they would be compatible with ours.”
Riordan nodded reluctant agreement. “And what about the thrust we do have left? Are you happy with the burn you’ve plotted?”
“Judging from all the preliminary data, I am as happy as I am going to be. Between the fuel in the restart tanks and the other five missiles currently rigged to provide an auxiliary boost, we have just enough delta-v for the necessary maneuvers.” Although her report was crisp and assured, Ayana’s eternally youthful eyes and perfect skin were slightly haggard; it had been a brutal thirty-six hours. Sleeping in shifts, and using pills to do so, the Crewe couldn’t risk using any of their limited supply of stimulants to help stay alert. They had to be saved for whatever might follow, either during or after the descent.
Riordan’s reflection upon the need for peak performance triggered another concern. “Dora, is Bannor favoring the side injured by Hsontlosh’s first proxrov?”
“Can’t get him to stand still long enough to find out,” Veriden answered with a futile flap of her free hand. “Green Beanie let Newton examine him for twenty seconds. Maybe thirty. No broken ribs, but the doc doesn’t have a way to detect hairline fractures. He’s watching for signs of a damaged spleen, too.”
As if on cue, Rulaine appeared glide-walking past the compartment’s hatchway, attention fixed aft. “Bannor!” Caine called after him.
Startled, his friend turned abruptly—and his face underwent a sudden and baffling transformation: from complete surprise to grey-faced dread. “I thought you were with the sleepers,” Rulaine muttered, looking away. He did not enter the compartment.
And suddenly, Riordan understood Bannor’s reaction: because he hadn’t expected to encounter Caine yet, he hadn’t groomed his tone and his face into easy affability. Into an easy, casual demeanor behind which he could have concealed what Caine now realized with grim certainty: “Eku found something. About Elena.”
Bannor still could not meet his gaze. “Yeah.”
Caine could only ask the obvious: “It’s not good news, is it?”
Bannor’s silence seemed to press inward on him, toward implosion—until he shook it off. “Eku’s got more digging to do. There are too many files, too many cyphers.” He looked down. “But Hsontlosh’s last report is . . . well, it’s not promising.”
Riordan repeated the awful euphemism before he could stop himself: “‘Not promising’?” His tone had said, “utterly hopeless.”
Bannor’s eyes rose. They were as hollow and anguished as any Caine had ever seen. Rulaine’s mouth started moving, but it was several seconds before two words came out: “I’m sorry.”
“You’ve no reason to be.” Riordan leaned toward his friend. “Hsontlosh was always finding another way to locate or save Elena, always dangling another improbable hope in front of us, keeping us on the hook.” He shook his head. “He never intended to deliver her. He just needed to keep us believing it was possible.”
Ayana shuttered her eyes in Dora’s direction and drifted smoothly out of the compartment; somehow she managed to keep it from looking like a hasty withdrawal. Dora stopped in the hatchway a moment, hand against the coaming as she looked back at Caine. Her eyes still large and sad, she followed Tagawa with long, gliding strides.
Head almost hanging, Bannor looked up at Caine. “You okay?”
Caine did what a commanding officer was supposed to do; he nodded and resolved to ignore the ball of ice where his stomach had been. He pushed away from the bulkhead, gave his best imitation of purposeful vigor. “I’m heading back to check on the sleepers. Tag along?”
“Sure,” Bannor said miserably.
***
Caine heard Newton Baruch’s clipped diction well before he entered the storage room in which three of the Crewe were recuperating from their rapid reanimation out of cold sleep. The tall, taciturn, IRIS agent was also a physician and, in that role, was quietly yet savagely chastising his charges for poor compliance with his recovery regimens. He straightened when Caine and Bannor drifted in; the movement set him floating slowly toward the overhead.
“I am happy to see you are safely back from your EVA, Commodore. I am also relieved that you have taken the time to visit this sorry lot of soldiers.” The glare he sent across them became histrionically agitated as it finished upon his old friend Peter Wu: a fellow IRIS agent who was anything but a “sorry soldier.”
Liebman, one of the two so-called Lost Soldiers who’d accompanied the Crewe, sat up, struggling to keep himself from floating off the thin mattress lashed to the deck. “Now wait a minute, sir—”
Baruch turned sharply. “Sergeant Liebman, did I ask you a question? Or give you leave to speak freely?”
“Well, no, sir. But what gives? It’s no fair, you accusing us of—”
As Liebman fell silent before Newton’s withering stare, Riordan tried to recollect the expression, “what gives?” Like Liebman, it was well over a century and a half old and had largely fallen out of use before half of those years had elapsed.
Baruch, however, didn’t react to the bygone idiom, probably because he hadn’t even listened to Liebman. “Sergeant, if you do not exercise when and as I instruct, and then rest when you are told to, you will not be fit for duty when we descend in six hours.”
“Four hours,” Bannor added, leaning against the coaming.
Newton raised one long, thin eyebrow.
Caine shook his head. “Solar weather isn’t behaving as predicted. The worst of it is coming later, now.”
Baruch nodded. “And we cannot wait it out, given the vector to which we are committed.” He pushed himself toward a small container moored near the translucent lockers lining the wall opposite the entry. “I will have to give these three another dose of the emergency revival cocktail.”
Katie Somers, the third person who had been in cryostasis when they commandeered the ship, rose to her elbows. “What do you mean by another dose, Lieutenant? How many have we had?”
“Two,” Newton replied as he sorted through the vials in his makeshift drug kit. “Administered within the first hour of your reanimation. Eku shared the protocols for its use. In desperate need, the basic dose can be doubled if a subject must be conscious within twelve hours, and mobile in twelve more. But a third dose?” He stared at the three mismatched vials he had selected. “It should not be harmful, but you may experience difficulty focusing for several hours.” He glanced at Caine. “They should be fully recovered by the time we commence descent.”
Caine nodded, frowning. “What about the preliminary briefing? They’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
Newton sighed. “I cannot assure you that all the side effects will have worn off by then.” He gestured to the open-lidded Dornaani container which held the vials. “The revival compound is typically infused while a subject is still in a cryocell. But since these three are already being revived faster than protocols allow, the effect of a third dose is uncertain.”
“In that case, Commodore,” Peter Wu said calmly from the third mattress, “perhaps it is best to tell us what happened while we were asleep. Before Newton administers the third dose, that is.”
Bannor glanced at Newton. “You haven’t told them?”
Baruch shook his head. “Their ability to retain new memories only returned twenty minutes ago. An update would have been pointless.”
A new voice—that of the other Lost Soldier, Craig Girten—came from the corridor behind Bannor. “Colonel Rulaine, Chief O’Garran is asking if you could lend a hand rigging for the descent.”
“Coming,” Bannor answered. He turned toward Caine as he pushed back from the entrance. “I’ll make sure they’ve got the new time-hack for planetfall.”
Girten’s exclamation made it clear he hadn’t. “What’d you say . . . er, sir?”
Rulaine’s chuckle was sardonic as he drifted out of sight. “I’ll explain on the way.”
Caine didn’t glide toward Peter until Newton was secured to a handhold alongside Katie, syringe in hand.
Wu sat up slowly. “I presume our circumstances have changed.”
Caine smiled. “You clearly retain your gift for irony.”
“When that is gone, you may pronounce me dead. I presume we were correct in our suspicions regarding Hsontlosh?”
“And then some. He wasn’t just lying to us; he was going to sell us to the Ktor.”
“So you took the ship.”
Riordan nodded. “No choice, even though the drive was already ticking down toward a fail-safed shift. If we had tried to stop it, the drive chamber’s magnetic containment would have shut down.”
Wu nodded back. “And the antimatter would have vaporized us. Very thorough,” Peter concluded. “And very foresightful.”
“Not entirely,” Caine corrected. “He assumed that if he stood in front of the navigation controls, we’d back down for fear of a stray bullet hitting them and causing a mis-shift.”
“A serious miscalculation,” Peter agreed, then looked around meaningfully. “Of course, mis-shifts are fatal.” His statement ended on the rising tone of a query.
Caine shrugged. “Well, that’s always been the theory, since no one’s ever returned to report otherwise.”
Wu folded his hands. “So: where are we, and how did we get here?”
“No idea, and no idea.” Caine indulged in a rueful grin. “The first mis-shift triggered a cascade of other ones as the ship tried to return to its initial coordinates. In the process, it burned its drives and all the antimatter.”
“What a great outcome,” groused Liebman.
“Better than the alternative,” Katie snapped as Newton’s needle entered her arm.
The G.I. put up his hands in surrender.
Peter’s nod of agreement was slow, philosophical. “Well, I suppose things could be worse.”
Liebman turned back sharply. “How so?”
“We could all be very, very dead.”
“That,” Newton muttered darkly, “is not yet beyond the realm of possibility.”
Peter smiled toward his saturnine friend. “So I gather.” His gaze returned to Caine. “Skipping over any details and caveats, Commodore, what is our current situation?”
“We have four hours to get down to the planet beneath us. If we don’t, we’re dead.”
Peter’s eyes widened slightly. “I take it back; a few more details and caveats would be welcome. Starting with what Sergeant Girten meant about ‘rigging for the descent.’ I assume that without power, our landing is likely to damage the hull, and us, quite badly?”
Riordan shook his head. “He wasn’t talking about rigging the hull; he was referring to rigging the parachutes.”
“The what?”
“We are not using the ship to make planetfall. We are using emergency descent frames. The Dornaani use them to drop supplies on worlds where they cannot land.”
“We are . . . are parachuting down? From orbit?” Peter tried, but failed, to prevent the last word from emerging as an incredulous squawk.
Caine nodded. “It’s the only option. Without power, there’s no way to generate the thrust and vector control needed to keep from tumbling and burning up. The descent frames, on the other hand, each have an automated descent package; they’re being fed the necessary data now. Each one is rated for five metric tonnes and has thrusters to make vector and attitude adjustments. Since none of them will need to carry a full tonne, that leaves plenty of extra thrust potential, which means a greater margin for error.”
Peter’s eyes were wide. “Commodore, you will forgive me if I do not find any of this information especially . . . reassuring.”
Caine nodded, patted the smaller man’s shoulder. “It hit us the same way.” He didn’t mention the initial nausea. “Frankly, we were lucky there wasn’t much time to think about it. We had to complete a lot of tasks if this plan was going to have any chance of working.” If it does.
The other two sleepers had overheard. Liebman was staring at the overhead, swallowing rapidly. Katie, on the other hand, frowned. “So, Commodore, where were these, eh, descent frames?” She skipped to the logical conjecture: “Did you get into engineering, somehow?”
He smiled at her. “If we’d found a way to do that, we would have been able to restore power.”
She grinned back, chortled. “Och, don’t mind me; I’m a dullard.”
“No, you’re just coming out of cryodaze. Actually, the frames were in this compartment.” He pointed at the lockers lining the rear bulkhead. “They were stuffed underneath the emergency packs.”
“How many?”
Riordan glanced at the dozen Dornaani cryocells, stacked against the wall facing them. “Twelve. One for each of the ancient human factotums in those ’pods.”
Katie frowned, her speech slowing. “Who are they? ’Zon’losh’s crew?”
“No,” Newton answered as he prepared to inject Liebman, “they were his cargo. For the Ktor.”
“Whatta sleekit bodach,” Katie hissed unsteadily, yet venomously.
“So there are only twelve frames,” Liebman muttered tensely. “But there are thirteen of us.”
“Fortunately, Hsontlosh had a personal kit secreted in his quarters.”
“Okay, but what about space suits?” Liebman pressed, cheeks taut. “We’ve only got ten: eight Dornaani-made and the two we brought with us from Zeta Tucanae. What will happen to the three who—?”
Newton’s interruption was a terse grumble. “All of us, including Yaargraukh, brought duty suits with EVA shells.”
In answer to Peter’s stare, Caine added, “We won’t go spaceside until the ship dips under one hundred kilometers altitude. So we’ll spend less than ten minutes in hard vacuum. And there’s plenty of Dornaani ‘magic tape’ to reinforce the seals.”
Peter frowned. “Why not have the ship take us deeper into the atmosphere?”
Caine shook his head. “Same reason we can’t land it: not enough thrust. Any lower and we’ll lose it and everything we’ve left aboard.”
Peter’s eyebrows elevated as Caine uttered the words “left aboard.” “Wait: you mean to save the ship? Why bother, with all its systems burnt out?”
“The only systems we lost were those carrying current when we mis-shifted,” Riordan amended. “The fusion engine and its dedicated capacitor were off-line. Part of Eku’s wizardry was going through Hsontlosh’s personal computer to send timed commands to the engine through its test-fire circuits.” In response to Peter’s quizzical expression, Riordan expanded. “Some Dornaani ships spend centuries in depot storage. So they have a separate set of test circuits that don’t require much power and a stand-alone tank with just enough fuel to cycle through reactivation.”
Peter’s face was expressionless. “Still, igniting a fusion thruster requires somewhat more electricity than emergency lights.”
Caine smiled. “There’s also an isolated battery for powering short tests. Typically, would expend its full charge in a few seconds, but Eku rerouted the power conduits so that the auxiliary capacitor will recharge the battery until the engine burns through the fuel in the cold-start tank.”
“And that will return the ship to a safe orbit?”
“For a while, yes, but—”
“But?”
“But the numbers are derived from data gathered by suit sensors,” Newton answered. He pushed away from Liebman’s mattress toward Peter’s. “The values pertaining to local orbital mechanics are woefully imprecise.”
Riordan wondered how long it had been since he had heard someone use the word “woefully.” If he ever had.
Peter settled back as Baruch slid the needle slowly into the Taipeian’s very round bicep. “I think I will rest, now, Commodore.”
“About time you did, you stubborn old mule,” Newton grumbled.
“I am two years younger than you,” Wu observed.
Riordan pushed off the deck with a smile. “Will he at least be ready to sit in for the final debrief?”
“I suppose he has to be, Commodore,” Baruch muttered.
Peter nodded over his friend’s shoulder. “I shall be there, Commodore.”
“Good. You’re one of our few Low Orbit High Opening jumpers, so we need your experience front and center.”
“I understand, sir. You can count on me.”
Riordan nodded, pushed toward the hatchway and thought: Now, if only I could count on myself.