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The lights were out for about ten seconds, then they flickered back on. I had Captain Sarin in my arms by that time. I don’t know quite how that happened, but we picked ourselves up and supported one another.
This was easier for me to do than it was for her. I weigh a lot, even without the battle armor. She almost buckled, but held on as I hauled myself to my feet.
The nanite arms that served us as crash harnesses in these situations were limp noodles on the deck. I frowned at that.
“A lot of good these damned things are when you really need them.”
“We haven’t had time to set up localized power sources,” Jasmine said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She didn’t have it cut to regulation length, but I’d never complained. As her only real superior, she’d gotten away with that for years.
Suddenly, I forced myself to stop thinking about Jasmine and her hair. We were still in a battle, after all.
“How long until the next wave hits?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “The operating console is still rebooting, and the holotank appears to be dead. The globe cracked, I think.”
I rushed to Marvin’s table, where Commodore Miklos and a few staffers were desperately working to get back into the game. This was helm controls and weapons. I wasn’t interested in the strategic big picture any more. This was about survival.
“Have we got drive control?” I asked them. “How long would it take us to pull out through the ring?”
Miklos gave me a hooded glare. I knew he was thinking it was a bit late for that, but I didn’t care about his problems with authority right now.
“Answer me or stand down!” I shouted at him.
“I don’t know, sir. We were hit. The bridge was pretty much knocked out, as you can see. We can’t be sure of anything else.”
“What about the sensors on the exterior hull?”
“Still operating, but their view is blocked by all the dust and debris. The surface appears to be a mess, sir.”
I looked around at everything we had operating. Helm controls seemed to respond. Weapons controls…
“There’s nothing coming back from the weapons banks? We’re not charging the gens?”
“I don’t know—”
“Help me get this ship turned around, one-eighty. That’s an order.”
Miklos tapped at the controls. They were relatively easy to operate. I saw a central image of the sphere that represented Phobos. It was a wire diagram, really an app that Marvin had put together to look at the status of all the drive and weapons systems at once.
Miklos put his fingers on the sphere, began to move it gently in a circle and—
I lost patience. There couldn’t be but a few seconds left. I reached over, spun the globe for him and slammed my finger on the execute button repeatedly.
The world spun around me. People screamed, and the ship creaked like an old seagoing vessel in a bad storm. The aft wall of the tent suddenly became the floor, and we all slid toward it. A few seconds later, the ceiling of the tent was the floor, and every bit of equipment we’d failed to nail down was tumbling on top of us.
I was in a tangle of arms and legs. Consoles and tables crashed and popped like giant light bulbs. Coffee ran over my face, burning my cheek. I wished I’d thought to close my faceplate. I heard groans and agonized cries. The nanite harnesses were still dead, I realized, and hadn’t held down anything.
We were cast into semi-darkness. People howled under me, and I realized those of us in armor were crushing the Fleet types in their smart cloth suits. I did my best to roll off them and their cries of pain turned into streams of curses.
Miklos was one of the worst offenders. I didn’t realize he knew so many foul English terms. I pulled him out of the mess and propped him up. He glared at me in the hazy, flickering light of broken equipment and opened his mouth wide.
“Colonel, without a doubt, you are the biggest—”
He never finished the sentence. The impacts began again at that moment, raining down on Phobos. We squirmed and struggled to be free of the wreckage of our bridge, but by the time we were out of the pile, it was over.
“Only one more wave,” I said.
“What?”
“One more. We’re still alive, aren’t we? All we have to do is get the big gens working.”
“They’re below us, a mile deep.”
“Right. But the controls are on the wall out there. Let’s go see what we can do.”
I grabbed him and headed for the exit. There was quite a bit of smashed equipment in the way, but as the gravity controls had caught up with the ship’s new attitude, the generator controls were at least lying on the deck instead of the ceiling.
I rammed a pile of junk aside with my right arm and carried Miklos with my left. He was easy to drag with me, as he didn’t weigh much on Phobos. Nobody did.
Once out in the open, I was able to fly toward the controls. I could see we weren’t going to make it, but I had to try.
Before we reached the controls with their nanite arms, I saw the arms were slack—just like the ones back in the command center.
“No power,” I said.
“But the generators—the field is set up. It might—”
We felt it go live then. Every time the gravity field hummed into life, you could feel it in your teeth. Like a powerful, deep vibration. It was like a bass speaker so low your ears couldn’t hear it, but your bones could.
“I think its firing,” Miklos said.
I set him down on the deck so he could at least die with dignity.
We stood there, waiting for the impacts to begin. Our eyes were narrowed and our jaws were clenched.
But nothing happened.
I blinked at Miklos, and he looked just as surprised as I was.
“Four hundred missiles? Where did they go?”
It took us a while to answer that question. My own Fleet people transmitted the data over an hour later. The last barrages had almost finished our ship, but not quite.
When I’d spun the ship around, the enemy missiles had lost track of the damaged area they were targeting. They spread out, showering a stripe of destruction over the surface. It did a lot of damage, but the hull was not breached.
By the time the last wave came in and slammed into us, the primary generators had been working again and the field fired correctly, stopping them all. After all, the system had had two full minutes at that point to get its act together.
I was now the proud, surviving commander of a smoking ruin. Everywhere around me some kind of damage was visible.
I beamed with pleasure and clapped Miklos on the shoulder. He coughed.
“That was a battle royale!” I shouted, laughing.
“I can’t believe we’re still alive.”
“Damage control. That’s what it’s all about now. Get your people hopping, Commodore. There could be another attack coming at any time.”
While the giant ship licked its wounds and every automated repair-bot and crawler we had was busy replacing equipment, I headed for my private brick and broke into the liquor box.
It was only there for special occasions and official visits, of course. But to my surprise, a half-dead looking Gaines was already sitting in my office when I got there. He had my bottle in his hands, too.
“Major!” I laughed. “You made it after all. Those were some nasty cyborgs. Have you got all your limbs?”
He showed me his left hand—or rather the stump where it had once been.
“They had to take it off. They said the poison was too deep, and it was best I do a regrow. I don’t like it.”
“No one likes losing a limb,” I said, “but it does happen. Part of a marine’s life, I guess.”
“Do you know, sir, that I lost a limb before? A long time ago, before I even joined Star Force.”
I looked at him with mild curiosity. If the truth were to be told, however, I was more interested in the bottle he had in his one remaining hand than I was in his story.
“Hand that over and I’ll pour us both a drink while you tell me about it,” I said.
The ruse worked. He handed it to me and started spinning a tale of being on an island in the Florida Keys. He’d met his first Macro there and the monster had taken a slice out of him.
“Hmm,” I said, sipping and frowning. “I don’t want to doubt you, but if you hadn’t joined Star Force yet, how did you regrow that hand back then?”
“I was already nanotized at that time, sir,” he said, looking at me seriously.
“Really? You’re one of the original people from the Nano ships? I thought I knew everyone back then. I don’t recall your name on our earliest rosters.”
“It’s a little bit complicated, but I’ll try to explain,” he began. “I used to kill people for a living, I told you about that.”
“Yes, I do remember that.”
I looked at him without flinching while he repeated some of the details of his past. I realized I’d asked the wrong question. It was considered rude to bring up the past with anyone in Star Force. Usually, I avoided these topics like the plague. When people brought up their sordid histories unprompted, I always wanted to make a fast exit. Partly, this must be due to my natural discomfort at hearing anyone’s emotional baggage. Ask any woman I’ve ever dated—they’ll tell you I’m terrible at listening to that kind of crap.
But in Gaines case, it went further than that. One of the unwritten Star Force rules was that we forgot about past sins. We didn’t provide absolution, mind you. A man could feel just as guilty and haunted as he pleased. But we didn’t want to hear about it. Once you joined the Force, you were part of a new family. We liked to pretend the slate was wiped clean. No background checks allowed.
When Crow and I had started up this band of misfits, we’d adapted to the situation and come up with rules that allowed people to leave bad things in their past. This was for several excellent reasons: one, the world was on fire, and we were the only people who had ships to deal with it. The people in those ships weren’t pros, for the most part. They were random pick-ups, chosen by machine intelligence for their quick wits and almost animal-like reflexes. I’d lucked out, in my opinion, to have survived those tests.
We’d found out back then that the typical person who lived long enough to command one of these errant star ships wasn’t an eagle scout. They were as likely to be a burglar, a bum, or a twitchy guy who slept with guns under his pillow. We had to take whoever we could get.
There were historical precedents for our recruitment strategy. For most of Earth’s history, there have been mercenaries and armed rogues wandering around looking for work. France’s famed Foreign Legion still operates today, and their original recruitment practices were rather like ours. In the old days when you signed up, they forgot about what you did before, gave you a rifle and sent you out to man a desert fort in the Sahara. Legionnaires even served alongside organized penal military units made up entirely of convicts.
I liked to think Star Force wasn’t quite that bad. But there were any number of reasons why a fighting man might want to leave his troubles behind and join an organization with a good reputation that didn’t ask any questions.
Listening to Gaines talk about being a paid assassin, therefore, broke all kinds of rules. I squirmed a little, but I decided I had to let him talk. I’d asked the question, and he seemed to feel the need to tell me something.
“There’s another detail I have to talk to you about, sir,” he said, looking at his hand.
I frowned. This was a bad sign. Gaines was a straight-shooter. He always looked you in the eye and told you what he thought. Seeing him like this—it bugged me.
I sucked in a breath and let it out slow. I pasted on a smile and said: “Tell me about it.”
“Do you remember the few ships that didn’t follow you and Crow around? The ones that didn’t take orders?”
I frowned again. “Yeah…you were on one of those?”
“Yes sir. During the first Macro assaults on Earth, we broke ranks and didn’t always help out the rest of you.”
“I thought those ships were all destroyed or joined up with us in the end.”
“Most of them did,” he said. “But I abandoned my ship and left her once the Macros retreated. I wandered Earth in those days. I was unlike anyone else in the general population. While the rest of you flew around in your ships and had parties on Andros Island, I tried to live with the majority of humanity.”
“How’d that work out for you?”
“Not good. They sort of kicked me out…it’s a long story. Anyway, I ended up killing people for a living.”
“So you said.”
“But don’t worry, I didn’t have anything to do with the attempts on your life. But…do you want to know why I ditched my ship and became a mercenary?”
I didn’t, of course, but he had me now.
“Sure,” I said, hoping it sounded convincing.
He looked down at his hands again. “The Macros hit Earth and bombed it—when I was in my ship. And you and Crow—you guys called for us to come join you, saying you needed every ship to stop the invaders.”
I frowned, remembering those dark, terrifying days. Everything seemed more surreal back then. We were playing it by ear, and had no idea what we were up against.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking back to the South American campaign.
“I ditched you. Your fleet—I was one of the deserters. One of the few that didn’t answer the call.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. I could tell he was troubled.
“I’ve always wondered if I could have made a difference. We lost hundreds of millions of people down there. I didn’t go to defend them when you called. I’ve always felt bad about that.”
“Yeah…” I said thoughtfully. “I can understand that. But you know, you couldn’t have stopped them. We all did our best—and it wasn’t good enough. One more ship wouldn’t have tipped the balance.”
He nodded. “Thanks for saying that, Kyle.”
“It’s true.”
He took a big hit on the booze then, and I joined him. I looked at him sidelong. His story explained a lot. His drinking, his attitude. What haunts a man? We all have a secret ghost or two.
“What made you change your mind?” I said. “Why’d you join up with us, Bjorn?”
He lifted his arm and ran his finger around it in a circle. “It was severed right here,” he said. “But I beat the machines then. I figured fighting them was something I was built to do. You know, I think that’s what got to me: I realized the Nanos were right. Those little microscopic bastards. They knew who I was and what I could do. They’d believed in me, and had recruited me to defend Earth before Star Force even existed. It just took a while for me to give in and join up.”
I smiled and stood up, sensing an opportunity. I slapped him on the shoulder and nodded.
“They made the right choice—and so did you,” I told him.
He gave me back a thankful smile.
Then I got the hell out of there.