We All Died at Breakaway Station (4 page)

Bracer attempted as much of a nod as was possible with his present physiology. “How are conditions there now, sir?”

“In the Paladine?” Crowinsky asked. “About the same as when you left, apparently. The Jillies attempted a full-scale raid on Cynthia three standard days ago, but were halted. There were some pretty heavy losses on both sides, I understand.”

“They’re getting bold, aren’t they, sir?”

“They’ve always been bold, haven’t they, captain?”

Bracer reflected for a moment. “Yes, bold, but never foolhardy.” He paused. “Is there any word from Mothershed’s expedition?”

Crowinsky looked almost startled for a moment. “I’m surprised that you know about that, captain. It isn’t supposed to be exactly public knowledge.”

Bracer smiled bitterly below the gray globe that covered the upper half of his face. “I was originally scheduled to command the second unit, sir.”

“Oh?” Crowinsky said awkwardly.

“The Jillies made that impossible,” Bracer said slowly, caustically, painfully.

“I understand, captain,” General Crowinsky replied, something between pity and embarrassment in his voice.

“I’m sure you do, general,” Bracer replied, ashamed of himself, but still unable to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. How do you understand it, general? he asked himself silently. You in your nice, comfortable desk job out here in the middle of nowhere, safe and… Then he remembered the Jillie raid on Breakaway Station of three weeks earlier, the raid that had destroyed most of the station’s defenses and over half its personnel, that left it very open and exposed to another attack, an attack that would surely destroy Breakaway Station‌—‌and the so-called Faster-than-Light communications chain to Earth and the heart of the League. No, Absolom, he reminded himself, General Crowinsky isn’t as safe and secure as you might like to think he is.

“Anyway, sir,” he spoke aloud again, “Admiral Mothershed’s expedition
is
common knowledge in the Paladine now.”

“I should have known it would be. You can’t keep something like that secret for very long. But to answer your question, captain: no, we’ve heard nothing recently, one way or the other.”

“Then there’s still hope,” Bracer said, more to himself than to General Crowinsky.

“Of course there’s hope. As they say, captain, ‘no news is good news.’
 
”

“I certainly hope so.”

Crowinsky paused for a moment before speaking again.

“Well, Captain Bracer, you can have your astrogator give my people your anticipated orbits. We will want to start shuttling up our cold-sleepers at once.”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“If I don’t have another opportunity, please let me wish you, your officers and your crews a pleasant trip to Earth.”

“Thank you, general, and good luck to you.”

When the image of the commanding officer of Breakaway Station had faded from the tank, Bracer spoke briefly with Maxel, told him to instruct Astrogation Officer O’Gwynn to contact the other ships, confirm their anticipated orbits around Breakaway, and then inform the ground personnel of them.

Once he had relinquished functional command of the starship to his first officer, Absolom Bracer attempted to relax, leaning back against the cushion that rose from the rear of his body cylinder and provided a support for his shoulders and back. Then he looked at the main forward viewing tanks where the brown-gray ball of Breakaway was now growing, a parody of a world, a mockery of Earth and Adrianopolis, a leer on the face of the universe‌—‌a universe that continued to leer and mock at the fragile bipeds from Sol’s third planet.

A twisting, stabbing pain came up from some unidentifiable place below his waist, tearing through what was left of ruined flesh, and then inched up his spine, slowly, like a malevolent insect devouring its way to the soft, juicy tissues of his brain. Bracer bit his lower lip and tried to ignore the pain and cursed a sadistic universe for it.

What’s become of the convoy from the Paladine? He asked himself. Roger had given him a kind of an answer, in his calm, not-quite-human way: 72 per cent probability of enemy activity. Jillies! The Jillies‌—‌God eternally damn their souls, if they had a god, and if they had souls behind those inhuman faces‌—‌the Jillies had found the ships of the relief convoy from Adrianopolis somewhere out there in the darkness between the stars, had intercepted them, had swung down on them, blasted them with energy cannon and nukes and plasma torpedoes, and a lot of good men had died.

Died… died… died… There in the coldness and hell, in the darkness and blazing light, filled with hatred and fear, and then pain… pain… pain… They had died, shattered, broken, limbs tom apart, bodies ruptured by the vacuum, blood boiling away into the nothingness, eyes bursting… Out there, attacked by the Jillies, men had died in great agony.

And Absolom Bracer knew how it was to die that way, to die as those men had died‌—‌for he himself had died that way. Once he had died, his ship blasted apart by a rain of plasma torpedoes and nuclear missiles from an attacking Jillie warship; he had died in flames and vacuum. He had died, but not permanently.

Robots had salvaged what there was left of a dead starship commander, stuffed those mutilated fragments into a cold-sleep coffin and waited until another human ship found the wreckage, ferried the ruined crew back to Adrianopolis. And there, under the surgeons’ lasers and knives, Absolom Bracer had been brought back to life, what there was left of him.

He wondered whether it was worth it.

He looked up again at the image of Breakaway in the tank at the front of the starship’s bridge, the dun-colored world, and wondered why men had come there to live, and to die, there on such a barren and forbidding ball of stone as that‌—‌but he knew why, intellectually he knew why.

“Now, take this area of the continental land mass,” the senior intelligence officer was saying, his pointer plunging into the three-dimensional image that hung in the air beside him and probing toward the white, blue and green-brown sphere that grew larger as he spoke. “Notice the patterning here and here. Our first idea was that this was cultivated land, though upon closer examination it was decided that it represented some sort of industrial complex of an unusual nature. There are, you will notice, buildings. Enlarge, please!” The globe grew to become a section of the planet’s curved surface. “Notice the shadows. Shadow formations of this type could only be caused by a regular pattern of structures rising from the surface to perhaps a height of seventy-five meters. Now, if you will observe…”

Lieutenant Commander Kamani Hybeck shifted uncomfortably in the folding chair and wished that the old windbag would get it over with. He had been droning on for long enough, too long.

Hybeck’s feeling wasn’t from a lack of interest in what Commander Tandem was saying, but the dry, prolonged way in which he was saying it. Well, that and the fact that Hybeck had had a large part in gathering the information that he was hearing, and most of it was old hat to him by now.

Reaching into his blouse pocket, Hybeck pulled out a cigarette, looked around to see if anyone showed any objection to his smoking, then leaned back and puffed it to life. In the silence during which Tandem waited for a new tri-B slide to be shown, Hybeck could hear the swishing of air through the recycling equipment, being blown back into the
San Juan’s
huge briefing room; he could hear the thrumming of the nuclear drive that pushed the great ship at sub-light speeds away from the planets where he had risked his neck to gather the information that Tandem was talking about now. Hybeck sighed around the cylinder of his cigarette and looked over to where Admiral Mothershed stood, a few meters off to Tandem’s left, apparently only half listening to the intelligence officer’s report. Like Hybeck and the other scout pilots, Mothershed knew it all already‌—‌but then this was the admiral’s moment of triumph; his expedition had accomplished its mission. Let the Old Man enjoy it, Hybeck thought.

Hybeck found that he was proud of serving under old Mothershed; he was well on his way to becoming one of the heroes of mankind, and with good reason. If they made it back to the Paladine with the information they had, then, dammit! mankind had a good chance of doing something to the Jillies that would hurt them as much as the disaster at the Salient had hurt mankind. And maybe it would hurt the Jillies even more. Maybe even enough to knock them out of this damned war altogether. That was something to hope for!

Hybeck shifted in his seat again, and felt a sense of satisfaction within him despite “Tedious” Tandem’s droning voice.

Leaning back in his chair as far as he could without drawing undue attention to himself, Hybeck looked over to his right, toward the end of the row where Lieutenant Naha Hengelo sat quietly, apparently engrossed in Tandem’s lecture‌—‌well, it was all stuff she didn’t know, Hybeck told himself, and interesting despite the old windbag.

Lieutenant Hengelo apparently did not notice Hybeck’s stare, or if she did, she ignored it. And that didn’t bother Hybeck very much. Naha might be resisting, but sooner or later she’d come around, though Hybeck was hoping that it would be sooner. He had some celebrating to do after what he and the other scouts had accomplished, and he hoped that he could do that celebrating with her‌—‌in his cabin, preferably. But, he told himself philosophically, if Naha was going to be obstinate‌—‌why had he gotten hung up on a puritanical Creonite, anyway?‌—‌then there were always plenty of other girls around, though he admitted to himself that Naha was the one he really wanted now, and no other.

Half smiling to himself, Hybeck shifted in his chair once more, back to a slightly more comfortable position, and caught the reproving glance of a full commander who did not seem to approve of Hybeck’s constantly shifting about. Hybeck smiled back at the commander‌—‌whose name he didn’t know‌—‌and grudgingly turned his attention back to the lectern where “Tedious” Tandem seemed to be concluding his lecture.

“… from this point,” the intelligence officer was saying. “These planets are surprisingly Earthlike as a group and undoubtedly show an extremely high level of technological development. We can only assume, then, that we have found the planets for which we have been searching.” Tandem paused, looked over to where Admiral Mothershed stood, and then back at the assembled starship officers.

“That concludes what I have to say. Now I believe that the admiral has a few closing comments. Thank you.” With that, Tandem gave a slight bow, turned and walked from the stage. The tri-D projections faded from the air.

Hybeck sighed with relief and watched as Admiral Mothershed roused himself from his reverie and then assumed his position behind the lectern.

Mothershed’s age was a matter of conjecture, Hybeck thought, though not in those exact terms. No one seemed to know what it was for sure, though some guesses placed it close to a century and a half, and some even more. A hundred and fifty standard years was supposed to be the mandatory retirement age in the Armed Forces of the Galean League, though now, with the way things had been going since Culhaven’s disaster at Dehora and the Salient, anybody who could still do a job at all was doing it, regardless of age or condition.

Not that Albion Mothershed
seemed
like an old man, Hybeck told himself; there was a youthfulness about him that was independent of years. He was tall and slender and his hair was as white as hair could be, and his pale blue eyes sparkled with intelligence and perception that few men of any age could match. And though he limped when he walked, Mothershed’s movements were still quick and sure, and if anyone had asked, Hybeck would have said that Fleet Admiral Albion Mothershed still had a good half century of active life before him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the admiral began quietly, “I want to thank all of you for having come aboard the
San Juan
. I am aware that my asking you to leave your commands has been a great burden on you, as it is for any starship officer when his ship is on constant combat alert. And I wish that I could tell you that when you return to your ships that alert could be relieved. But I cannot. We are still very deep in enemy territory and we are still in great danger of detection by the Jillies. But now we
can
go home.”

Mothershed paused and smiled to himself for a few moments before going on. “Please bear with an old man’s ramblings for a few more moments, and then you will be allowed to return to your ships. I would like to sum up what we have accomplished.” After another brief pause, he went on. “We have investigated fourteen planetary systems in detail, and we have mapped five of them. These five planetary systems all show extremely high industrial development, as Commander Tandem has pointed out. In the five systems we have found eleven planets that are far beyond the colonial stage, and we must assume that they have been inhabited by the Jillies for quite some time, at least as long as we have been on Adrianopolis. And, considering the proximity of these systems to one another, I think, no, I firmly believe that we have found the center of Jillie civilization. I cannot believe that the Jillies have many more worlds like these‌—‌otherwise their strength would be far greater than we know it to be.”

After pausing again, Mothershed said, “With the data that we have gathered, the armada Earth is building will have the targets it needs. And I now believe that the armada has a very good chance of getting into these worlds and destroying them, especially if the Jillies continue to mass their forces in the Paladine. Ladies and gentlemen, in all modesty, I can say that I believe that we have given mankind a chance of winning this damned war.”

There was loud and prolonged applause in the
San Juan’s
briefing room‌—‌applause for Admiral Mothershed and for what he had led them to accomplish.

“Thank you,” he said after a while, when the applause had finally died away. “And I would like to particularly thank the scout commanders and pilots who risked even more than did the rest of us by going in as closely as they did to the Jillie planets to get us the information that we now have. As I call your names, would you please stand? Lieutenant Commander Abrams, commander of Scout Team One from the
San Juan
.”