The Drift Wars (17 page)

The
projection zoomed in on a sphere, revealing thousands of stars
inside.

“It’s
a much bigger area than it looks,” Chiang San continued. “And it
looks pretty big. It’s a lot of ground to cover, gentlemen—too
much for probes alone. Which is why we’re sending you.

“You’ll
be the first men in history to cross into the Riel universe. And,
once you’re there, you’ll be completely cut off. You’ll be
self-contained, which means specialized training and a lot of it.
You’ll learn to triangulate radio signals, to perform spectral
analysis on light, and a bunch of other crap that I can barely
pronounce.

“You
men are the cream of the crop, with a combined experience of a
thousand battles. But you are not a combat force, not this time. You
are a survey team. Your mission is to locate the homeworld, to
catalog its defenses, and—by far the most important—to bring
this information back.

“This
will be tedious, low-brow work for fighting men like yourselves. It
will take weeks or months, during which you’ll be trapped on your
ship with little to do. Nevertheless, you must remain vigilant at
all times—if you are caught, you’ll die. That far into space,
we’ll never even find your bodies.”

—   —   —

The
ship’s oxygen generators had been breached, and the bacteria
inside were dead from exposure, but the reserve tanks were full.
With only Peter left to breathe it, the air would last months. And
he had plenty of food, though it would be feeder-tube only—there
wasn’t an intact compartment in the ship, no room that could hold
air or heat, and that meant he was stuck inside his combat suit for
the duration.

Peter
filled up his air tanks and went to assess the rest of the damage.
The probes were all destroyed. The ship’s bridge had disintegrated
without a trace, taking with it both the four pilots and the ship’s
computer. The Riel knew exactly where to strike—the computer held
the homeworld survey, the chart of their solar system, everything.
Weeks of work, more than enough to plan an attack, all gone.

Gone
except for what Peter remembered. He might not know much, but
Command knew even less. They weren’t even sure there
was
a homeworld.

He
had to get back and tell them. And that meant getting the ship
online—somehow—and flying it back to the Drift.

—   —   —

It
was two weeks of training before the team embarked for the Riel
universe. Their ship, specially procured for this mission, was twice
the size of a regular transport, but the extra room was filled with
equipment, leaving the men tightly packed. What really bothered
Peter, though, was the lack of windows; he had hoped to finally see
the Drift boundary for himself.

In
preparation for the crossing, the main cabin floor was cleared, and
the men were strapped down flat, feet-first. The ship was tossed by
violent waves of radiation, then slammed against something hard. An
invisible force passed through cabin, crushing Peter on all sides as
if he were being forced through a narrow pipe.

The
hull screeched like it was being shoved through steel nails. The man
lying next to Peter stretched and distorted, then grew as
transparent as colored glass. The ship’s walls sputtered and
disappeared; Peter was alone, naked, the orange boundary hurling
past like lava. It was terrifying and it was calming. He tried to
close his eyes and realized they were already shut.

Suddenly
the noise stopped and the ship was back. They were through.

Peter
was too sore to move. His face and body were coated with a white
crust, the salt frost of his own dried sweat. The ship’s furnace
kicked on, blasting hot air, and the men coughed to life.

There
were no fatalities. One man had a broken leg and most had
lacerations. Some suffered stranger ills—aches and stiffnesses
that never went away—but, overall, they came through better
than expected.

The
ship fell back into routine. Nothing was noticeably different about
this new universe until Peter made his first EVA. He was assigned to
go outside and inspect the hull for damage, but the moment he
stepped from the airlock, the thick blanket of stars
overwhelmed him. After so many months in the
near-empty Drift, he had forgotten what a full sky could look like.
And out here, in the pure dark, it felt like the heavens themselves
embraced him.

He
let himself float, his duties momentarily forgotten.

—   —   —

Peter
finished his assessment of the ruined ship by taking a walk around
the hull. The Riel universe had no fewer stars now than when he had
first arrived, but his interest had narrowed to one in particular,
the homeworld’s sun.

He
stared at the painfully bright dot and then at the statistics
scrolling rapidly down the side of his visor. He learned nothing.

Using
his suit’s tracking system, he aligned the emergency solar panel
to the distant sun and felt it hum to life. The panel would provide
some power—enough to recharge his suit.

The
ship’s power core had been hit during the attack. While the damage
looked minimal, Peter had no idea how to restart it or even whether
he should. Technically speaking, there wasn’t much difference
between a ship’s power core and a missile’s warhead.

He
locked the solar panel in place, connected the power output to the
ship, and walked to the back of the hull to inspect the engine. The
engine appeared intact, but with the bridge demolished, he had no
way to operate it. He queried his suit, which brought up the ship’s
manual.

Since
the expedition was self-sufficient, the computer in each man’s
suit was loaded with manuals. Peter had step-by-step instructions
for any situation imaginable, from mining an asteroid for conductive
materials to generating electricity from his own methane emissions.

Given
enough time
, Peter thought,
I
could re-create civilization from scratch.

Peter
found a section titled “Running the Engine’s Self-Diagnostic,”
which pointed him to a small control panel on the bottom of the
engine housing. The engine was mounted on a fin, leaving just enough
room for Peter to slide under it.

Opening
the panel’s cover required a special ten-point screwdriver, but
the ship’s toolbox was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, in its
unerring completeness, the manual had instructions for making new
tools.

Peter
needed both a duplicate of the screw and a metal rod that was thin
enough to fit into the cover’s recessed housing. The screw was
common but the rod was not. He had never before noticed how much of
the ship was made from molded plastic.

Peter’s
search was exasperated by an electrical short in his suit’s
heating coils that caused his batteries to run low every couple of
hours, which meant he would have to stand at the charging station
for thirty minutes at a time.

He
didn’t like having to stand around, not with so much to do. His
idle mind obsessed over the odds of success and wondered why he was
still striving to complete a mission that had so obviously failed.

In
some ways it was a curse that he had survived the Riel attack. If he
had died, he would have just woken up on base as he always did.
Maybe he wouldn’t remember any of this—Linda said he didn’t
always—but what would that matter?

The
problem was that he had survived. And if he, the version of himself
that was here right now, wanted to get back, then he had no choice
but to press on.

His
batteries finally charged, Peter was relieved to get back to the
search. But it took him half a day and four more charge cycles
before he located a metal rod inside the latch of a door.

Making
the screwdriver was straightforward. Peter heated the tip of the rod
with an impulsor rifle until it glowed red; then he hammered it into
the screw’s head, molding it to shape. He repeated the process a
dozen times, until the rod slid all the way in. He bent it for
leverage. It didn’t look like much, but Peter was proud of
himself. He had never really made anything before.

“Works
like a charm,” he said as he unscrewed the cover, though no one
was around to hear.

The
control panel was about an inch square, and its buttons were so
small that he had to press them with the screwdriver. Following the
manual, he typed in the code to start the self-diagnostics. The
indicator light was supposed to glow green if the engine was intact,
blink a code in yellow for a known problem, or turn red to indicate
a problem that it couldn’t identify. Peter waited two minutes; it
remained dark.

With
a sigh he turned to the next step in the manual.

—   —   —

The
ship had suffered minor damage from the boundary crossing, requiring
a two-hour delay while the crew effected repairs. From there they
took a circuitous route, steering well clear of the three enemy
bases. It was a boring, weeklong journey capped by disappointment:
they detected nothing at the spot where the probe had indicated.

“Likely
it’s just planetary revolution,” one navy pilot said. “If the
homeworld has orbited to the far side of their sun, the solar
radiation would block all transmissions.”

The
four pilots conferred, deciding to hide nearby and check back at
regular intervals. Their plan didn’t sit well with the marines—it
might take months for the planet to come back into range—but this
part of the mission belonged to the navy, leaving no room for
debate. And the marines, having spent five idle weeks parked
on a barren planetoid, had run out of patience.

Boredom
in a crowd is far worse than boredom alone. While company helps to
pass the time at first, conversation quickly grows stale and the
small irritations of others are magnified to intolerability. Peter
longed to get outside, to escape the cramped ship and lie under the
stars, but the pilots forbade it. Everyone had to remain onboard,
they said, in case the ship had to make a fast escape. It was a
sound policy but, in practice, inhumane.

There
was no physical interaction between the marines and the navy. The
latter remained sealed in their cockpit, communicating only by
video. The navy seemed unaffected by their containment, maintaining
a callous cheer as the weeks crawled on.

“Two
men and two women,” one sergeant grumbled. “Probably feels like
a party in there.”

Though
the comment was made in jest, the image of it stuck. Morale
deteriorated rapidly. Returning from its sixth weekly expedition,
with no sign of the Riel homeworld, the ship was in open mutiny. The
marines demanded that they go deeper into the Riel universe to
search for the planet, but the pilots refused, insisting it would be
an unnecessary risk. The marines were getting ready to take a
cutting torch to the cockpit door when the proximity alarm sounded.

Discipline
returned instantly. The navy killed the ship’s power to avoid
detection, and the marines strapped in for evasive maneuvers.

A
ship was passing at the very limit of their sensor range. Its
profile didn’t match anything in the UF’s records, and its
transmissions were uncoded. Peter’s team had lucked onto some sort
of civilian cruiser, and judging by its weak engine signature, a
short-range one.

—   —   —

“Build
electrical generators from rocket packs.”

“Fuse
missile to ship’s hull.”

Peter
read aloud from the manual’s list of “alternative ways to propel
a disabled spacecraft.” It was a depressing inventory; every
option required either something they hadn’t brought or something
the Riel had destroyed.

“Build
chemical thruster by mixing oxygen with hydrogen” had promise,
until he read the details. Not only would he need several hundred
times more oxygen than what was in the tanks, but, with the expected
top speed, it would also take several thousand years to reach the
Drift boundary.

His
only real hope was to somehow produce enough electricity to fire the
ship’s engine. Five minutes would be enough—he could coast the
rest of the way—but the emergency solar panel didn’t even have
enough amperage to heat the preignition chamber. Most ships, he
read, were equipped with backup batteries, but this one was not. In
case of power core failure, Command had determined that the men on
board could simply stay in their suits while they repaired the ship.

That
was it
, Peter realized.
Every
suit had its own batteries.

He
quickly searched the manual, compiling information about how much
power the engine needed and how much each suit could provide.
I
can do it
, he thought, calculating.
He needed eighty suits’ worth of batteries, and there had been
ninety-six marines on the mission. Most were still out there,
floating in the debris. All he had to do was get them back inside.

—   —   —

Stumbling
upon the civilian cruiser meant they wouldn’t need most of the
equipment that was crowded into the storage bay. They just swung
into the ship’s wake and it led them straight to the Riel
homeworld.

Tachyon
drives created a blind spot at the back of the ship, but just to be
sure, the men remained on alert for the duration of the two-day
journey. Marines lived in their combat suits and the navy kept a
finger on the ship’s main breaker, ready to cut the power at a
moment’s notice. The trip was uneventful until, just as a
disk-shaped solar system appeared in the distance, the alarm
sounded.

Peter
linked to the bridge’s video feed and watched a hatch open at the
back of the Riel cruiser. It released a puff of gas, followed by a
few dozen cube-shaped objects. The gas dissipated and the objects
just floated there, doing nothing. A moment later, the computer
returned its analysis: trash. Disposal was common before a ship
entered the gravity of any populated system. They had arrived.