Here Be Dragons (27 page)

The car that had come for her was not the autotaxi she expected, but a sleek black sedan that had emptied three individuals in sleek black suits onto her lawn. Elena recognized the tall woman from Solstice Station, who for her part gave no sign of recognition. Instead she watched Ernesto from behind her black glasses, hand held loosely at the hem of her open suit coat. Elena had expected fellow officers of the Space Agency, or even soldiers from the Security forces or the national army, but Erasmus had sent members of his own guard.

Ernesto ignored their eyeless stares and walked his daughter to the car, one arm thrown around his shoulders. He leaned down to kiss his daughter goodbye as she slid onto the seat. Elena took him by the wrist, and tapped at his bracelet, an older model that lacked a holo projector. When she had finished he glanced at it with the mixture of gratitude and surprise that accompanies an entirely unexpected and not quite understood gift. She had marked his calendar, six months hence.

“April 10?”

“That is when we will fly behind Jupiter,” Elena said. “It’s called the diffraction zone, technically.
Gabriel
will be cut off from the Earth for the night.”

“Like an eclipse,” he said, and she nodded. “That will be a long night.”

“Will you remember to do me a favor on that day?”

“Anything.”

“Sing to me.”

Ernesto held his daughter by the hand, and when the tall woman came to close the door it was with a gentleness that Elena would not have expected. The three of them piled into the front seat, and left the back for her. When the car rounded the first switchback her father still stood at the top of the hill, in front of the home that was his now.

When she took her seat later that night, Elena knew that she could never again be satisfied aboard any ship that was not her own.

The pilot’s jumpsuit had said
Sanderson
, and his hair was as thatched as his name would suggest. He had come back from the cockpit to speak with her—once again, Elena was entirely alone within the fuselage. And of course he had shaken with her, cap in hand. Out of his mouth flowed a stream of greetings and honors, and Elena had listened to them all so often that now she did not hear them at all, but let them wash over her.

Sanderson had stopped speaking, but still he looked at her, and Elena realized that he was expecting a reply.

“Pardon?”

“You’re welcome to take the right seat up front,” he said. “There’s normally no co-pilot on this run, but my ship is your ship. Hell, you can have the left seat if you like.”

Elena shook her head. Sanderson was a civilian, and slightly overwhelmed

“It’s your ship, Captain,” she said, and his freckled smile grew wider. “I’m in good hands.”

“I’ll have you up there in no time, ma’am,” Sanderson said, and turned to walk up the aisle to the cockpit. He stopped short, and tapped the chair back before her. “The bag’s in here. Just in case.”

“After all that, I think you know who you’re talking to,” Elena said.

Sanderson flushed a bright red beneath his freckles.

“Sorry, ma’am. I have to say that. You know how it is.”

Elena leaned forward and pulled the air sickness bag from its pouch, and placed it in his hand. Then she sat back.

“I think we’re ready.”

“You know, I was at Phobos too.”

Elena kept her smile up. Beneath his peaked cap, Sanderson’s blue suit wouldn’t have been out of place among any civilian. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, and was probably a few years younger. Far too young to have retired from the Agency.

“I could tell,” she said, and he grinned as he took his leave.

As she waited for takeoff, Elena unwound her bracelet and straightened it into a pad. On its surface was a list of forty five names, forty five men and women who had been aboard
Gabriel
the day that
Victory
had fallen. Forty four of the names shone a soft white in the dim light of the cabin. The other had been printed in red. Pascal Arnaud was still awaiting the orders.

The rest of the crew had been informed earlier that day, and even now her people were catching flights all over the Earth and moon, just as she was. Elena had some idea that Erasmus would pull as many strings for them as he had for her. He seemed like that kind of man. And when they assembled at Glenn, there would be one missing name, and one new face. Next to her crew roster Elena had the list of forty five alternates, men and women who for the most part would never know how close they had come to being part of history.

“We’ve been cleared for takeoff, Captain Gonzales,” Sanderson said over the intercom. “Powering up now, it will be a few more minutes.”

She should do it herself. Elena regretted that she could not be there to tell him in person. Arnaud had worked many months for her, and it seemed cruel that he would learn of his exclusion through a routine personnel message. And he would have been the only other person on the ship who would have known why they were there. Without him, Elena would be alone with her secret.

It had been almost two weeks since Arnaud had discovered the plutonium, and as far as Elena knew, he had yet to speak a word. She had talked with him that night and asked him to keep it to himself, with the proviso that if questioned, he was to consider himself under orders to tell the truth. She would take the blame, if it came to that. But he was the
lowest ranking officer aboard
Gabriel
, and the least experienced. It had occurred to no one that he would know anything of value—and if they said nothing, it never would.

An incoming message window flashed on her pad.

“Hablando del rey de Roma,” Elena said. It was from Pascal Arnaud.

None of the investigators had debriefed him, or even asked him to submit a report. Even his own chief had spoken to him briefly, and then not at all. But that morning Elena—now officially reassigned as commanding officer of
Gabriel—
had ordered Third Officer Pascal Arnaud to submit a complete written statement describing his knowledge of the Overstar incident. It appeared that he had finished.

Arnaud described that night in detail—how he had retrieved the crate from a storage bay, checked the seals, verified the shipping information, and hauled it down to forward control. He had been recharging the ammunition racks, depleted by gunnery practice, when he noticed that one of the steel balls was far more massive than its size it would suggest. And, curious, he had taken out his scanner and performed a routine spectrometry.

He had left nothing out, as ordered. The radiological alarm had sounded, and his chief—the only other officer aboard the ship at the time—had come flying. She had taken the ball, studied it, and confirmed his analysis of a plutonium-239 pit wrapped in a jacket of silicon steel. But she had not initiated the fissile material protocol. She had placed the ball back on the rack, placed one finger on her lips, and drawn him in close to speak.

There was more than enough material in here for the Director, or a civilian inquiry, to build a cross and nail her to it. It could have even been twisted to imply that she had advance knowledge of the nuke. And Arnaud had implicated himself as well. He had failed to report the incident, in direct violation of Agency regulations. The statement was damning for both of them.

Elena smiled. He had said exactly what she had hoped to hear. Some would say that he had shown no loyalty to his commanding officer, his Agency, or even his Union. But he had proven to Elena that his first duty was to the truth, and for that he could fly with her any day.

She affixed her witness’s signature and date to the document, then broke the file into pieces, and scattered them across the globenet. There was no way to find and reassemble the pieces without her pass code, and the network’s records could disprove any charges of tampering. It would only be revealed upon her return—or her death. The Global Assembly inquiry would convene in Cairo in a few days, but they would not see Pascal Arnaud’s statement for another twelve months. When
Gabriel
returned Elena would give it to them, in exchange for Arnaud’s immunity from prosecution. They would testify about Overstar and Hyperion, and see through to the end the journey they had begun together that night in forward control.

“Counting down now,” Sanderson said. “You know the drill, Captain. We’ll be in the air in a moment.”

Elena tapped out a message on her screen.

Third Officer Arnaud: Your statement is witnessed. Please report to your permanent duty station aboard GSA-1138 Gabriel as soon as possible. And bring your uniform. You’re going outside. Captain Elena Gonzales Estrella.

“Takeoff.”

The plane fell from the surface of the earth and plummeted towards the clouds. Elena’s hair, tied behind her head and hanging to the nape of her neck, hung straight up from her scalp. The floor was now the ceiling, and if she hadn’t locked her legs and arms into place, they would have dangled in the air. She felt the blood rush to her head, and became dizzy.

The spinning coils within their gyroscopic cradle at the center of the plane had energized. Elena could almost hear them shriek from where she sat, suspended by her straps. When Moishe Avramovich had tested the first avram in St. Petersburg, he had expected it to hover a full centimeters off the table, or perhaps rise slowly and steadily, like a helium balloon. Instead it had shot off the table and smashed itself against the ceiling, and scattered chunks of itself across the lab. He had lost ten weeks worth of work, and had chained down the second device before he tested it.

“Altitude, ten thousand meters and climbing,” Sanderson said.

The avram’s effect weakened as the plane put more and more distance between the Earth’s center of gravity and its own, but it would never disappear. Elena could have picked any spot in the universe, and found a gravitational pull from some star—or push, as it may be. As long as the avram was active, it and anything within its field would be repelled by other matter. Her weight disappeared, kilo by kilo, and soon she no longer hung upside down, but floated.

“Hundred thousand meters. We are now above the line, thrusters on.”

A few centimeters of dense lead were all it took to block the high energy photons bled by a chunk of plutonium, as even those tiny particles would inevitably strike an atom and bounce off. And neutrinos were even smaller still, and could penetrate up to an entire light year of lead without meeting an obstacle. But as far as anyone could tell, gravitons were so small that one could pass through a neutrino unimpeded. They were infinitesimal, so tiny that for all practical intents they existed and did not exist simultaneously, not only massless but sizeless as well. That such an invisible force could govern her world, and conspire to drive her to places she had never dreamed, was something that Elena had never been able to truly understand.

“Two hundred thousand. We have now achieved low Earth orbit. Cutting the avram.”

The plane, in only a few minutes and without rockets whatsoever, had fallen so high that it could now circle the planet on its own. The avram effect was now so tenuous that if Sanderson hadn’t told her Elena would never have known that it was gone. She didn’t bother to wait for the seatbelt light to release her straps. Elena swam to the porthole and reached it just as the sun burst over the horizon and illuminated Glenn Station. Inside the dock,
Gabriel’s
pristine hull caught the light and shimmered beneath her folded wings. Her ship looked like a baby bird sleeping in her nest.

Elena had seen this view only once before, when she had returned from the moon the day after Overstar-12 had been destroyed. Her weightless heart had been heavy that morning, because she had been sure that the ship she was coming home to a ship that would no longer be hers. But tonight she smiled. Her crew would rejoin her within the day. And soon enough Elena would be falling once more, away from the sun and into the outside, and towards the unknown country that waited for her beyond the night sky.

The Face of Heaven

F
or a small moment, there was a second sun in the solar system. The hot white strobe flash seemed to fill the world in the blink of an eye, and it was gone an instant later. It left only a fleeting gleam like a hole burned in space. Trapped in a vacuum, the explosion was brief, dazzling, and completely silent, and afterward it was impossible for the naked eye to discern that it had ever occurred at all.

Gabriel
stood at the gates of hell. A tsunami of pure radiation crashed upon her, and invisible waves of fire broke against the hull microseconds apart. High energy photons penetrated the hull, struck the radiation shield, and coursed through the armor like sparks through a wire. Her surface temperature catapulted a thousand degrees, and her pearly gray skin shone the brilliant white of polar snow before it melted and boiled away.

Her hull buckled and twisted under the intense heat, and her
graceful lines warped and twisted as they cooled. The shock ripped chunks out of the bulkhead and sent them flying, and seams and joints between compartments burst and tore asunder. The port missile pod pulled free from the hull and hung by its brackets, and the what was left of the lower sail jutted from
Gabriel
crazily like a broken bone punching through skin.

Gabriel
was virtually paralyzed along one side. The starboard half of the ship, in the lee of the storm, had remained as perfect and iridescent as ever. The terrible beams of radiance had been far too rigid to bend around the curve of the armor, and had instead shot safely into space. But three of the four sails had been completely destroyed, and every telescope, every gun, and every thruster on that flank had been wrecked. The hull there was scorched black, and the bulkhead had cracked and split open nearly to the compartments beneath. The terminator separating the two halves was a perfectly straight line.

Inside the hull, pipes burst and power lines ruptured. Hatchways and corridors bent and caved under the stress, and sent eddies of hot air racing up and down the deck past the dull glow orange of the walls. Even the electronics, hardened against energetic attack and cocooned inside multiple layers of radiation shielding, overloaded and shorted out. In an instant the crew absorbed the maximum safe dosage for an entire year. They would shed hair, they would vomit, they would bleed, but they would live.

Those left alive and unhurt clung to their stations, listening to the terrible groaning that emerged from the hull, silent for so long, as the shock waves surged through the ship. They waited for the tiny popping sound that signaled a breach—the shrieking whistle, the dead quiet.

It never came.
Gabriel
was bruised, burnt, and bleeding, but unbroken.

Elena’s ears anguished beneath the wail of the radiological alarm. It was a sound she hadn’t heard in over six months, and had never expected to hear again.

The holo overloaded immediately and filled the center of the bridge with a blinding light that pierced her tightly shut eyes. Elena forced them open to the rivulets of sweat that fell from her forehead. The projectors shorted out one by one and flooded the room with sparks that burned holes in her retinas. A strange odor, smoky and cloying, filled the air.

Elena knew that a nuclear detonation had nearly destroyed her ship. She knew it, but she couldn’t believe it. The klaxon screamed so loudly that she could barely hear herself think.

“Alarm off!”

It continued to howl, as if the computer couldn’t understand her over the noise. Voice control must be down, somehow. Just voice control, if they were lucky.

“Someone shut that damn thing off!”

It was then that the alarm stopped to take a breath. Elena twisted in her chair, to her left, and the source of the howling. She blinked the spots away from her eyes.

Hassoun’s head was on fire. He writhed at his station, his jerking body held in place by the straps. The energy wave had ruptured the power system and flooded the bridge with voltage, and Hassoun’s overloaded touchscreens had erupted before his eyes. His clawed hands tore at his face and the bubbling wreath of flame that danced about it. The ruined monitors sparked and spitted, and balls of acrid smoke bloomed in the air around him. His eyes, nose, and lips were all gone, buried beneath a sheet of molten glass. There was only the black screaming hole that had once been his mouth.

Elena sucked in breath to scream for a medic, but Rivkah was already back on the bridge and at his side. She looped one arm through the strap of his chair, held it to his chest, and pinned him flat on his back against the chair. With her other hand she threw a sterile sheet over his head to smother the flames. The fire licked at the back of her hand, and she swore in Hebrew.

Hassoun bucked in his chair, every muscle strained to the breaking point. There was no blood—the torn vessels in his face and neck had been instantly sealed shut by the heat. Rivkah whipped the towel from his head and revealed what was left behind, and as it floated past her Elena could see blackened chunks of meat clinging to its fibers. Rivkah pulled a spraygun from her bag and flipped the cap with her thumb. She shot him up in the neck. The convulsions slowed, each one less violent than the last. Hassoun sat still at his station, body tensed, absolutely rigid. Rivkah remained at his side, but there was no sign that he knew she existed. The screaming had stopped. Instead Hassoun began to gulp and gasp, as if he couldn’t breathe. He was dying.

Elena tore her eyes away. One of her own monitors had shorted out also and stood mercifully dark, but the other two were still functional. The same could be said of her crew. Both Ikenna and Demyan were still strapped in at their stations, apparently unharmed, dripping sweat. The bridge was as hot and wet as a rain forest.

“Status report.”

“I cut the engines and went to thrusters,” Demyan said. “The ones we’ve got left.
Metatron
is coming about.”

“Heavy damage to the port hull,” Ikenna said. “No breaches reported. But everything on that side is gone, including three sails. Electronics are down, we’re running on optics.”

“Radiological?”

The moment it took Ikenna to absorb the readout on his screen was one of the longest she’d ever known.

“Nonfatal. We’re way outside the norms, and the hull will be hot for decades, but the dose wasn’t lethal.”

Elena let out a long, shaky breath. She closed her eyes, and immediately felt herself swimming. She grabbed her armrests and squeezed.

“Demyan, is she closing?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said. His blond hair was dark and wet against his scalp. “Maybe five minutes.”

“We’re limping.”

Gabriel
had lost her port thrusters, and with only one sail she could fire the engines only in spurts. Even with the avram online, there was no way she could outrun
Metatron
now. Elena wiped the sweat from her brow.
Gabriel’s
heat, with no way to escape, poured into the hull and baked the atmosphere. She closed her eyes and shook her head. Lightning bolts danced along her eyelids.

“The port flank is useless now. Have Mario evacuate everyone and shut it down.”

Demyan glanced up, and beads of sweat flew from his face and crossed the bridge between them. Ikenna spoke softly.

“Chief Montessori is dead, Captain.”

“Fuck.” So he was. Elena squeezed her armrests again and dug deep for the name. “Tehrani. Tell her to clear and seal it.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Captain.” A hand on her shoulder—Elena could see a white bandage out of the corner of her eye. Rivkah moved beside her screens so that Elena could see her clearly. “Captain, I have to go back outside. There will be others.”

Hassoun breathed heavily, rasping each one through torched lungs, his head twisted sharply to one side. Elena made herself look one last time, and remember the man he had been. She searched what was left of his face for the watchful eyes that had saved all their lives.

Elena nodded to Rivkah.

Nobody watched as the doctor reloaded the spraygun and drifted to Hassoun’s side. There was no floor to kneel upon, so Rivkah pulled her legs up beneath her. She took Hassoun by the hand, closed her eyes, and said a soft prayer. Then she injected him again.

Hassoun jerked twice. It looked as if the breath had hitched in his chest. He shivered suddenly, and his tensed muscles uncoiled and fell loosely. His hands clenched once, and opened. The gasping ceased. Hassoun lolled in his chair.

Rivkah left the bridge in silence.

Elena breathed deeply. The atmospheric filters had yet to eradicate the stench of burnt meat, and she could taste him in the air. Damage reports were flooding in from every corner of the ship—burst pipes, electrical fires, metal fatigue. The port corridor was so badly warped that it looked like a funhouse tunnel.

There was no point in trying to move Hassoun, or calling another crew member to replace him. The communications desk was shattered beyond repair, and she had a feeling that the decimated deck gang needed every hand they could find for damage control. She would just have to fight the ship with only three on the bridge. Or two and a half.

“Sons of bitches.” Elena had never heard Demyan swear, in English at least. “A nuke. Dirty sons of fucking bitches.”

There hadn’t been a nuclear detonation in the solar system for sixty years, and now there had been two in six months. Even this far outside, on this side of Jupiter, Belt based telescopes had surely noticed the telltale signs of an atomic bomb. Humanity would be in an uproar, convinced that the outsiders had crossed that final line.

The holo was a lost cause, but Elena pulled the watch display up on her swatch screen.
Metatron
was mere minutes out of effective range. It hurt her to breathe once more, and she had to fight to make each word heard.

“Engine room, this is the Captain.”

A deep lilting voice answered, so unlike Gupta’s alto tones.

“Officer Tollande here. The Chief is down.”

Another one. At least. Elena bit down on the first question that came to mind.

“Situation?”

“We have cracks in every fuel cell,” Tollande said. He must have been speaking to an intercom, and not a helmet receiver—Elena could hear shouting in the background. “Beta’s been flushed completely, we nearly lost that one.”

“We’re running on auxiliaries?”

Elena frowned—there were backup batteries stashed throughout the ship, but they weren’t meant to power
Gabriel
on their own for long.

“Alpha and Gamma could still run—they have serious stress fractures, but they haven’t gone critical. But Beta’s down completely, and if I light Delta up, it’ll go.”

“Thank you, Officer. Captain out.”

Elena tried to breathe in again, and winced. Jagged bolts of pain shot back and forth through her torso. The anesthetic was wearing off. She looked down at the tears in her stomach, the red patches that had leeched through her bandages. Elena closed her eyes, and the space of the bridge widened around her and left her floating alone in the void. She felt sick, and snapped them open.

“Auxiliaries only.”

“Thrusters on full, ma’am,” Demyan said. “That’s most of the battery power we have right there.”

“The remaining guns are unresponsive,” Ikenna said from the watch station. He tried them again. “They can maneuver and track targets, but the coils are unenergized. We can’t fire.”

“
Metatron
is out of missiles anyway. That was the eighth.”

“She still has her ballista,” Ikenna said.

Elena checked
Metatron’s
position—she was still far outside effective range for a sure shot.

“So do we.”

“But three of our radiators are gone,” Ikenna said. “If we fire the ballista, the heat will roast us alive.”

“We can still burn,” Demyan said.

“Not for long,” Ikenna said.

“Fight or flight,” Elena said. “We can’t do either.”

Elena leaned forward towards her control panel, and gasped as her abdomen flexed and tore. Tiny spots of blood bubbled out, and one struck her touchscreen and smeared it. She watched as
Metatron
slid closer and closer. Every time she blinked the black edges of her vision crept closer to the center.

“Captain, you are unwell. Perhaps I should call for—”

Elena broke into a cough, and her stomach felt as if it were going to tear itself open and spill her guts. More blood flecked her screens. She wiped her mouth with the back of her glove, and it came away darkly smudged.

“Captain, should we discuss surrender?”

“She won’t listen. We nearly beat her, she won’t give us another chance to get into the open,” Elena said. She realized that she had spoken in the past tense. There was a stabbing pain in her belly, and on a reflex Elena put her hand down to her torso. It came away wet with blood, and she knew that both of them had seen it.

“Is
Metatron
in range?”

“
Five minutes out. Half that for the ballista,” Demyan said.

“
If surrender is not an option,” Ikenna said, “then we should energize our own ballista.”

“But firing it will kill us,” Demyan said.

“Yes.” Ikenna looked to Elena. “She’ll close before she shoots. That will be our chance.”

Elena breathed heavily, eyes closed, and did not answer. A thin rill of blood ran from the corner of her mouth. She did not seem to hear them.

“Captain. We should energize the ballista.”

Her eyes opened.

“Yes,” she said. “Give me control. And prepare the main engines.”

“Captain, we can’t use both.”

“We’re not going to use either.”

“Elena.” She turned to Ikenna and stared at him without blinking. “We’re going to die. But we can still win.”

“We are going to win. And no one else is going to die. Not on my ship. Now do as I say.”

Ikenna went to work without another word, and Elena closed her eyes again.

“Find me the sun, Demyan.”

Metatron
crept closer and closer, unwilling to believe that this was not some sort of ploy, that
Gabriel
wasn’t playing dead. She could see that her sister
had been ravaged, crippled, burning herself closer to death with every second. Her only fear was that she would miss the shot. Her radio jammer had been destroyed, and
Gabriel
was only minutes away from a clear line of sight to Earth.