Dark Beyond the Stars Page 6

  Khemett had pulled himself up onto one of the consoles and had his sidearm out again, sitting in a way that he could keep watch on the sky through the shattered view port. Ilvic had to clamber sideways around the edge of the bridge to get to the main information bank. She curled her arm through a clot of wiring and braced her toes on what was left of someone’s chair, thankful that Fleet chairs were bolted securely into the floor even on ships with gravity generators. She used her free hand to pull the little black box out of its pocket in her vest and fire it up. Hair rose on the back of her neck, and she shoved the shivers away. Too much use of electronics, she knew. But she had no choice.

  When the device booted up, she keyed in a different code. A red light came on in the console above her, and then a silver cylinder about the length of her forearm and the thickness of her wrist slid free. She had to drop the little black box to catch the ship recorder, and the box crashed down into the piles of charred debris twenty meters below, its screen still lit.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. No chance of avoiding Spidren attention now. Best she could hope for was that they would be far away and there would be time to get to the ship and bamph before they arrived en masse. She jammed the recorder into a vest pocket, sealing it closed carefully.

  “Company, Commander,” buzzed Orujov’s voice in her ear. “Two bugs, half a klick out and coming in by air.”

  Fliers. They were smaller than their ground-based cousins and had soft spots under their wings in the back, but they spit acid with surprising accuracy over surprising distances. And where there were two, there would be more following soon.

  “Golden Egg acquired. Abandon stealth, kids. We’re going out hot.” Ilvic motioned for Khemett to head down, then followed him as quickly as she dared without risking injury.

  Qazi and Anders met them at the bottom, both looking to Ilvic for orders. Her heart sped up and the now familiar cold and runny feeling in her stomach and bowels twisted through her.

  “Orujov,” she hissed into the subvocal mic.

  “Sir?”

  “Do you have a shot on the bugs?”

  “One clear,” came the reply. “Two is on the ground behind debris. No shot, repeat, no shot on two.”

  “Take it, fire at will, we’re going to make a run for your position.” Ilvic motioned to her team. “Anders first,” she whispered aloud. “Khemett and Qazi bring up the rear. Protect the egg.”

  They all saluted, fingers brushing helmets.

  “Stay glacial,” she whispered.

  They broke from the cover of the ship at a dead run, guns sweeping the area around them as the sharp report of Orujov’s BFG 50c cracked and reverberated across the crater. A flier hit the ground just to Ilvic’s left, its head exploding in a mess of green and red chunks, its fuzzy wings still twitching.

  Another flier screamed behind them, but Ilvic didn’t look back. She smelled the hot ozone of Khemett’s or Qazi’s lazgun as one of them turned and fired. Another scream rang out, this one human, as she reached the edge of the crater on Anders’s heels.

  Despite herself, Ilvic turned this time, even as her instincts pulled her over the edge of the crater and had her ducking behind the mounded earth. Khemett dashed up beside them, running backward with his gun flashing as he pulled the trigger over and over.

  Qazi rolled on the scorched ground twenty-five paces away, his face and helmet covered in slick glowing acid, his screams now little more than pained gurgles. He was clearly still conscious. Ilvic raised her gun without thinking and took the shot. Qazi stilled and Ilvic swallowed bile, her hand shaking as she lowered her gun and dropped behind cover again. She added Qazi’s name to her nightmares and shoved the guilt away. He’d known the risks. And at least now he’d died quick instead of melting away from the acid.

  The thought didn’t help. It never did.

  The second flier veered away from Khemett’s shots and dropped down. Skittering sounds echoed from their left as cabin-sized Spidren raced over the yellow grass toward them and more fliers dotted the skies. Even from this distance Ilvic could make out their glinting red eyes and slick, hard shells.

  “Fuck fuck fuckity fuck,” muttered Khemett, and Ilvic agreed. More of the bugs had found them than she’d expected.

  “Run, Commander,” Orujov said, shifting her position on the ground to get a better angle on the approaching Spidren. “I will hold bugs back long as I can.”

  “Give me your sonics, sir,” Khemett said, crawling up beside Ilvic as she half rose, ready to run again.

  She saw his plan in his calm face and clenched her teeth against arguing. It was one thing to ask her soldiers to give up their lives for a cause; it was another to watch them die right in front of her. But she had no choice. She could hate it all she wanted as long as she acted. She had to do her job, and let her soldiers do theirs.

  Blinking away hot tears, she yanked her two sonic grenades free of her belt with a grimace and handed them over. Anders did the same with one of his two, and Ilvic nodded to him.

  “When Khemett goes, we go,” she growled, her throat tight, sour with bile and unshed tears.

  This time it was she and Anders who saluted Orujov and Khemett, Anders muttering for them to go with god.

  Khemett broke from their meager cover and charged off to the right, flipping the switch of the first grenade. The sonics wouldn’t kill a bug, but they disoriented and slowed them, making eye-shots easier.

  Forcing herself to turn away, Ilvic stumbled to her feet and set off on Anders’s heels again, the two of them running in a weaving pattern over the rocky ground for the Pigeon and their extraction team.

  The whir of wings warned her, and Ilvic dodged behind a boulder just as a glob of acid splashed into the ground where she’d been only a moment before. She turned and took a shot with her lazgun, punching a smoking hole through the flier’s wing and sending it crashing to the ground. Three more fliers zoomed toward her as the concussive waves of the sonics pressed in on her eardrums, followed by cracking reports from a sniper rifle. Orujov and Khemett were still alive, still fighting.

  Anders grabbed her arm and she resumed her charge over the rough ground, the river now in sight and the long shadows of the spires stretching dark fingers toward them. They reached the ropes before the fliers caught them, Anders turning and firing a covering pattern into the air with his lazgun, forcing the fliers to dodge and slow as Ilvic looped the line through her belt.

  Lazgun fire smashed into one of the fliers from above. Haasen and Jang were still alive too, providing cover. Ilvic swore in relief.

  “Anders!” she yelled, and he stumbled backward and grabbed a line. “Pigeon, take us up, got unfriendlies!”

  The motors kicked in, the mechanical pulleys yanking them upward. It was all Ilvic’s tired arms could do to hang on as she kept her feet out to protect against slamming into the striated rocks. Haasen’s strong arms pulled her over the edge of the mesa and she staggered forward.

  A flickering ball of hot acid slammed into Haasen’s chest, and the thin blond jerked backward with a scream. Acid splashed Ilvic’s left side; fiery pain and the sharp stench of burning synthetics froze her in place for a moment.

  “Commander!” Anders grabbed at her good arm, throwing her at the Pigeon and into Jang’s waiting arms.

  She jerked around as Anders yelled again, pulling away from Jang and knocking him and Ilvic back into the transport as Nazar started to lift off.

  “Wait!” she yelled, bringing up her sidearm to cover Anders. He was down on his knees on the dusty plateau, acid burning away one of his legs, blood oozing from his ruined thigh. He raised green eyes to hers, his face dirt-smeared and utterly serene. Two fingers touched his helmet brim.

  Then Jang dragged her backward and the transport door slammed shut.

  The air filled with the freezing chalkiness of the neutralizing agent Jang quickly sprayed on Ilvic’s acid-splashed side. The pain receded enough that she could think again, and she swallowed a moan.

/>   “Strap in, this is going to get hairy,” Nazar’s gruff voice said over the intercom.

  Ilvic shoved Jang toward one of the jump seats with her good arm and then pulled herself into the one behind her, yanking as much strapping into place as she could so the g-forces of leaving orbit didn’t throw her around the cabin. She closed her eyes as the ship dodged and weaved, sharp turns disorienting her until she wasn’t sure they would even make it into orbit, much less back through the web. The g-forces of acceleration made it impossible to tell when the weightlessness of open space hit, but Nazar let them know when they were free of the planet’s atmosphere.

  “Approaching web. Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” Nazar muttered over the com.

  Ilvic waited, holding her breath, to see if they would end up like bugs on a windshield.

  Nazar threaded the needle, her sigh of relief audible over the com. “We’re through,” she said. “No unfriendlies on the screen. Making for the edge.”

  Their command ship, the Lumitana, was hidden in the electrical storms of the outermost planet, a Jovian giant. They were almost out safe. Last stage of the mission. Golden Egg secure.

  Ilvic unsealed her vest pocket and slid her good hand inside. The smooth surface of the cylinder felt warm even through her glove. Inside was knowledge as precious and intangible as hope. She curled her hand around it and clung on as hard as she knew how.

  Q&A with Annie Bellet

  Where did this story come from?

  I wanted to write a military space opera kind of story, and I like the idea of the general who has to make sacrifices for the greater good.

  How does it relate to other books you’ve written?

  I write about this theme a lot, I suppose. I like to explore gray areas of morality and question what makes someone heroic or not. I write a lot of short fiction in this genre as well.

  Tell us something we might not know about you.

  The only time I ever called in to work late at my last job before I quit to write full time was because I was in the middle of beating a Final Fantasy XII boss and couldn’t save my game.

  How can readers find you?

  www.anniebellet.com is the best place to find me.

  Works in progress?

  I’m working on the next Twenty-Sided Sorceress book, which is gamer-oriented urban fantasy.

  Protocol A235

  by Theresa Kay

  As the viscous cryo fluid drains away, shivers travel down my body, mild at first, but growing substantially worse the longer I lie here. What’s going on? Where is the on-duty tech? They should have let me out of here long before now.

  I raise one arm, slightly shaky from the aftereffects of cryosleep, and bang twice on the translucent dome above me.

  “Hey.”

  My voice is hoarse and quiet. I clear my throat and try again, louder this time. “Hey! Is someone out there?”

  No answer.

  I bang my fist against the top of the cryo tube again. “Hello? Anybody?”

  Still no answer.

  Of all the training simulations I went through, being locked inside a cryo tube was one of the worst. If I were outside the tube, I could access the ship’s computer, but inside…?

  The unease brewing in my stomach becomes a stab of panic. What if I can’t get out? What if I spend the next month slowly wasting away inside this thing? What if…What if…

  Stop it, Beth. I give my head a brisk shake to clear the feeling of disorientation. The fear-tinged mental fog still lingers, but it’s more manageable now, and the procedures that have been drilled into me cycle through my mind until I land on the correct one.

  Find the damn internal release switch.

  I slide my hand along the metal to my right until I feel the small indentation near my waist. Click. The top of the tube slides downward and I sit up with my arms resting on the sides. Well, that was stupidly simple. A harsh exhale that vaguely resembles a laugh escapes my chest. Now I’m glad I’m alone so there’s no one to witness my idiocy. Months of training and extensive psych evals to get approved for this job, and I almost lose it before starting my first shift? I really need to get a grip.

  When the government proposed this last ditch effort to save the human race, most people were more than happy to sign up for spending who knows how long in the deep sleep of stasis. I, however, was not. They couldn’t really nail down the exact time frame, but the government claimed the nearest planet that could sustain human life, the one they named Xenith, could be reached within two centuries. The idea of spending at least decades and perhaps centuries in some artificial state… it bothered me. I signed up for deep space maintenance so that I’d get to spend some time awake every now and then.

  The Genesis is almost fully automated and able to function with a bare-bones crew. In fact, for the majority of the time, only a single person is on duty. Each member of the maintenance crew is awakened for a thirty-day shift, and it’s staggered so there’s at least twenty-four hours of overlap between shifts for exchanging reports and taking care of things that require more than one person. Out of the fifty thousand people on board, seven hundred and twenty of us were approved for Maintenance, so each of us does a shift only once every sixty years or so. It was arranged this way so that even if the Genesis takes every second of those two centuries to reach its destination, those of us who have been working will have aged, at most, only a few months. Quite important when we’ll be reunited with our loved ones at the end of it all. My family, along with everyone else who wasn’t assigned to Maintenance, is down below on the two lowest levels of the five-level ship, completely frozen in time as they wait for us to reach Xenith.

  I push myself up and swing my shaky legs over the side so I’m standing on the cold metal floor. Sticky cryo fluid drips from my skinsuit and pools around my feet. Ugh. The least the person on duty before me could have done was leave me something to sop this mess up with. I’ll be having words with whoever it is. I squish and drip my way across the floor to the wall panel and place my palm against it.

  “Hello, Beth,” says the ship’s computer.

  I lean forward. “Can you turn the heat up in here a bit, please? And turn on the bathing pod?”

  “Absolutely.”

  There’s a whirring noise as the vents open and begin circulating warmer air into the room. After a moment, my shivers abate and I strip out of my skinsuit. I speak into the wall panel again. “Contact whoever’s on duty and have them meet me up top on the Control Deck in thirty minutes for a report.” And a cursing out. I don’t hear the computer’s response above the noise of the bathing pod.

  Once the leftover cryo fluid has been washed off and a blast of hot air has wicked any remaining moisture away, I step into the simple gray uniform hanging on the wall. Time to find out what nimwit wasn’t paying enough attention to their job to remember it was time to come down and get me.

  I press my palm to the wall. The door slides open and I stick my head out into the hallway. It’s deserted. And dim. And… dusty?

  That’s unexpected. If everyone’s been doing their job like they’re supposed to, it shouldn’t be like this. The flickering lights should have been changed and the burnt-out ones replaced. I run one finger along the wall; it comes away covered in a gritty, black sludge. At the very least, the scrubber bots should have been running regularly.

  As I walk down the hallway, I see that two lights have been pulled from their housing and are hanging down from the ceiling. What the hell is going on? This state of disarray can’t be attributed to the incompetence of a single person.

  Breaking into a jog, I rush down the hall to the elevator. It’s programmed to automatically take me to the top level of the ship, the Control Deck, where the navigational and mechanical systems are—everything Maintenance is supposed to be keeping an eye on throughout the journey.

  The ride takes longer than it should, or maybe it’s simply my racing heart and jangled nerves that are making it seem that way. The elevator glides to
a stop, the doors slide open, and I release the breath I’ve been holding.

  This level appears to be mostly in order. A little dirtier than it should be, but all the lights are where they belong and working correctly.

  “Hello?” I call out. I take a slow step out of the elevator and look to my right. No one’s rushing to greet me. No doors are opening. Nothing. Even the air feels wrong, heavy and thick with silence.

  Acid curls in my stomach and anxiety skitters up my spine. It’s not so much the quiet itself that bothers me as the fact that this is a situation they never even suggested to me in training. I was prepared for the solitude of this job, but I’m not supposed to jump right into it like this. Someone should be here.

  I close my eyes and inhale slowly, pushing back the uneasiness that crawls up my throat and threatens to strangle me.

  Okay, Beth. So, things aren’t quite what you expected. I’m sure there’s an explanation. You can do this.

  The pep talk settles my nerves, and when I open my eyes my mind is calmer and clearer. I have a job to do. First step is to go to the main data port and check on the ship. Make sure it’s running smoothly and see if any course adjustments are necessary.

  Since the previous on-duty tech still hasn’t arrived, there’s time to check on things for myself before getting a report. I settle into the chair in front of the data port and move my fingers over the keypad. A three-dimensional hologram pops up, displaying the ship’s current location and course. Normal. Next I tap through the major areas of the Control Deck. I breathe a sigh of relief; it seems all critical systems are normal and operational.

  My shoulders relax. Everything’s fine. There was probably just a mix-up in the timing of my shift. I close down the hologram and tilt back in the chair to wait.

  Thirty minutes later, I’m still alone.

  This is completely unacceptable. I hate to jump to conclusions, but where is the lazy asshole? I rise to my feet with an irritated sigh. The shift records are on level two—where I just came from. I guess it’s back to the elevator for me. At least I can also find out who’s been slacking on the cleaning down there. That mess didn’t happen during a single shift and I’d like to know who to complain about when we finally land.