Lacuna: The Sands of Karathi (24 page)

Later

Liao didn’t want to wake up.

It was an odd feeling to slowly begin to awaken and then, realizing what it would mean, to try desperately to go back to sleep.

But the feeling was tempered by a deep-seated desire to
know
. She forced her eyes awake, revealing the dark room of the surgical ward where Saeed had put her to bed. Privately. He was as good as his word in that regard.

She had been drugged—she remembered that much—but she remembered as well that it was a necessity. She needed rest and she wouldn’t get any without help, so they both agreed the risks involved with putting her under would be outweighed by the potential benefits.

Saeed said he would perform the ultrasound while she was asleep, though he had been on duty for nearly twelve hours when she had arrived, so he could stay up no longer than necessary. Anxious to ask him how the procedure went, she sat up, which caused a previously unnoticed brown envelope to fall from her chest and fly to the floor. She watched despairingly as the thin envelope flipped and slid under a heavy steel cabinet.

“You have got
to be shitting me,” she muttered, her mind still dull from the sedatives. She clambered to her feet, staggered over to the cabinet, and crouched
beside the metal container. The slit where the envelope had fallen under was only a centimetre high— too thin to slip a finger under—and the cabinet looked too heavy to move on her own.

It took her several minutes, but she eventually found a long, thin strip of metal–possibly some kind of surgical device–and bent the tip around in a hook. Returning to a prone position she clumsily began fishing for the envelope.

She slid the metal towards the paper. The strip touched it, caught on an edge, and pushed it farther under the cabinet.

Liao uttered a curse in Chinese, essentially calling the pre-marital virtue of the paper’s maternal ancestor into question, before calming herself and trying again. This time the hook caught on the envelope’s fold, and she gingerly extracted it.

Eager hands tore the envelope open. Within was a single black and white picture from an ultrasound, dated yesterday. She took the printout in trembling hands, her eyes scanning over it.

A circle, drawn in red pen, was made around a small white speck on the black field. It was similar to her last, except the dot was slightly larger.

Her fetus was still there.

Emitting a gasp of relief, she clutched the paper to her chest.

The radio she’d left beside her bed crackled.

“Lieutenant Jiang to Captain Liao.”

Standing shakily, she walked over to the black device and pressed the talk key. “C-Captain Liao here.”

“Sorry to disturb you, Captain, but we’re ready to go up here. I hope everything went well with the checkup. Saeed told me you were experiencing some more trouble with your shoulder, and you were scheduled for a possible surgery today.”

She looked down at the ultrasound. Below the red circle, written in the same red pen, were two words in Saeed’s handwriting.

Your move.

She took a breath. “Actually, Lieutenant, my shoulder’s fine. I’ve discovered that I’m pregnant.”

There was a moment of silence. She could tell Jiang had the talk key held down by the slight hiss over the line and the faint sound of her breathing, but no other sound came through. Then, in the background, she heard Summer’s voice.

“Saeed got her pregnant?
Hey, did anyone else know the Captain was nail’n Saeed last night? How’d she know she was knocked up so fast? I suppose he
is
a doctor.”

Liao practically crushed the talk key into powder, her voice a furious hiss. “No,
you
idiot
, I’ve been pregnant for three months!”

“Really?
Oh, well, that explains it.
’Grats, Captain!”

A loud cheer rose from Operations, and Liao couldn’t fight a wide, joyous smile.

Operations

TFR Beijing

Two days later

The next two days passed in a flurry of congratulations, presents, and gentle pats on the back. It seemed everyone had a gift for her: Yanmei gave her a ribbon she’d worn as a child, Summer her first video game–a dusty old PlayStation controller that probably didn’t work anymore, which Liao didn’t have any hardware for, rendering it a moot point–and a small pocketwatch from Kamal. The Iranian explained it was supposed to be a gift for when they retrieved James, but since they already had “a little bit of him,” it seemed appropriate.

The rest of the crew gave her knickknacks, cards, and the occasional flower. Given how rare and expensive they were, she appreciated the latter more than the crew could have imagined.

It was completely the opposite reaction to what she’d
been expecting, which made her earlier refusal to share the information seem silly in retrospect.

To sweeten the moment, Jiang returned to duty as the ship’s Tactical officer, replacing Peng. Although Kamal had a soft spot for him, it was a welcome change for Liao, but she felt sorry for the young man. She wrote in her report, using the very pen that Peng had given her as a congratulatory gift, that he had not adjusted well to living so far away from home, and his particular skills would be better suited to one of the various defensive stations placed around the Sol system’s lone jump point. It would still be a prestigious posting and would, she hoped, give Peng ample time to improve his skills. And Kamal would be able to visit as often as time allowed.

But those days, as all things do, passed quickly.

Back in her uniform, she stood in Operations, the flowers and presents securely stowed in her quarters. They were ready to launch.

It was the moment she had been waiting for ever since James's disappearance. They were going to Cenar. They had a plan, and it might even work.

Liao reached into her breast pocket, withdrawing the simple steel key that would engage the jump drive, her eyes meeting Kamal’s as he did the same. Together, they strode over to the simple grey box that was the jump drive's activation console, glancing at Summer as she approached.

“Is the jump drive prepared?” Liao asked.

“Ready to jump, Captain,” the redheaded woman confirmed, giving her a reassuring nod.

Liao slid her key forward, as though in slow motion, pressing it against the keyhole and pushing it in with a soft click.

She watched as Kamal turned to Dao. “Disengage artificial gravity throughout the ship.”

She felt the familiar sensation of weightlessness.
Her heels floated up from the metal of the hull, propelled by the slightest pressure from her feet.

“Mister Iraj,” she took a breath. “Ready to turn the key on my mark. Three, two, one…”

Chapter XI

“
Assailing the Unassailable”

Operations

TFR Beijing

Initially, Liao had been taken aback by lack of fanfare in a jump. She expected a flash of light, swirls of energy, a strange warping sound, or some strange physics-defying phenomenon to occur when the jump was made, but the moment her key clicked into place, there was no noticeable sign that anything had happened. She floated above the console, feeling the gravity slowly returning.

When she had first came to space, the lack of gravity had made her nauseous–she threw up on the shuttle to the
Beijing
–but she had slowly become used to the strange sensation. That, or her nervousness and excitement were far too strong for her to worry about such a trivial thing as a little weightlessness.

“Navigation reports jump complete, Captain,” came Dao’s voice. “We are inside a gravity well. The jump drive is cooling.”

Liao steadied herself on the command console as her feet once again found purchase on the steel of the
Beijing
's deck. She withdrew her key from the console, placing it back in her chest pocket and glancing at her command console's readouts, then up to the Operations crew.

“Tactical report, Mister Jiang.”

Jiang's expert fingers flew over her console. “Aye aye, ma'am.” He frowned. “Strange. Uhh, the forward optical cameras show, well, nothing. There's nothing on long-range radar, either, just a whole bunch of weird reflections. The thermals are playing up, too. There’s something messing with our forward sensors, Captain. Maybe we’re being jammed, or it’s some kind of strange interference.”

Liao frowned, glancing down at her console. The forward-facing camera showed nothing but a dark grey blur, uniform in colour. The radar showed nothing at all, not even dust or sensor ghosts. The thermal camera was a thick white sheet of moderate heat, grey like its optical cousin.

“What the fuck's
going on? Did we misjump? Is there some kind of equipment malfunction?”

She didn’t vocalise the last question in her mind, but thought it instead.
Are the coordinates Ben gave us a trap?

“The coordinates appear to be accurate,” Dao said. “Based on our position… I'll check them again.”

Summer thumped her fist on her console. “We're right where he fucking said we would be, but there's just something wrong about our sensors.” She used a trackball to rotate the camera, spinning the device from side to side.

Liao could see the bearing change, but the grey wall in front of them didn't change until the camera moved past a hundred and sixty degrees, where the sea of stars that could be seen out the rear returned like someone pulling back a huge sheet in front of their cameras.

[“The constellations displayed by the rear cameras match those that would be seen from Cenar,”] came Saara's voice, [“but the forward cameras cannot see anything.”]

Liao didn’t like this one bit. She crossed her arms. “Launch strike fighters and hail the
Sydney
. Something's gone wrong and I want to know what that is.”

Jiang nodded, reaching up and speaking into her headset. “Strike craft away, Captain,” she called, then–focused, and frowning in confusion–received a transmission. She paused for a moment, listening, then turned back to Liao, her eyes wide with alarm.

“Captain! Jazz reports the launch process nearly flung his fighter into the station–we're right next to them. Cenar is directly in front of our bow, six hundred metres distant.”

“
Six hundred metres?”

Liao stared. The distances involved in space travel and combat were usually vast, measured in thousands of kilometers at the least; for something to be only
six hundred metres away was to be so close that the
Beijing's
sensors not only couldn't detect it, but couldn't differentiate between its hull and the hull of their own ship.

Summer spun one of the trackballs and the forward facing optical camera zoomed out, the grey blur shifting as it slowly come into focus, revealing the dull, grey metal hull of the Toralii Alliance station of Cenar.

The Toralii were right in front of the
Beijing’s
guns.

“Confirmed. One massive contact, six hundred and eight metres distant, showing up clear as day on short range radar!”

Summer stared blankly at her console. “What the fu—”

[“Captain, that is level sixteen–the command level. Ben's coordinates have deposited us directly in front of the tactical hub for the
entire station!
”
]

Liao couldn’t help but realize, in that split second while her brain processed Jiang’s words, that Ben’s precise, robotic mind had–naturally–placed them in the optimal position. A Human operator would have simply put them anywhere within range, and Liao would have accepted that without question, but Ben was something else. She had expected to be close to the station, but this was practically inside it.

Their course of action was clear.

“Fire!” Liao shouted, gesturing wildly at Jiang. “At this range we can do some serious damage.
Open up with everything we've got: railguns at maximum power, the strike craft–hell, even hit them with the point defense cannons if we can get a firing solution. Have the missiles target their guns: point defense, medium range, energy weapons—everything! The more we can knock out now, the better our chances will be.”

“Aye aye, Captain–firing everything at everything! Railguns charged—
firing!
”

Liao turned her gaze back to the command console, watching the forward-facing cameras with not only her military, analytical mind, but also her innate Human curiosity. She had not seen the effects of their weapons at such close range before. Normally, because of the vast distances between their vessel and their targets, the enemy contacts were always distant, disconnected entities that appeared merely as dots on their radar screen, like labeled pieces on a mah-jong board.
Hits and misses were determined through feedback on their radar or thermal cameras, the exact results of their efforts estimated by thermal buildup or debris field dispersion—information based entirely on extrapolation and guesswork.

This time, however, she had ringside seats to her ship’s destructive capabilities.

Liao felt the barely perceptible shudder of their railguns engaging, the ship's twin magnetic accelerators propelling two ferrous slugs out towards the station’s hull. The ludicrous speed they were launched at–a fraction of the speed of light–made viewing the actual projectiles in flight impossible, but the results of their journey were immediate. The instant the shudder ended, two showers of sparks—like the splash from a rock being dropped into a pond—burst forth from the Toralii station's hull as the two slugs smashed into the armoured metal at terrific velocity, instantly vapourising large chunks of the structure and sending out sparks of super-heated plasma.

Twin geysers of white gas, like two high-pressure fountains erupting from the ground, burst from the two entry points as the atmosphere of Cenar vented into space, taking with it clouds of debris and the occasional Toralii body.

It was beautiful, in a way, watching the gas cool and expand, the debris cloud meeting the
Beijing's
forward hull like fog rolling down a mountain, the occasional flash of a missile detonation elsewhere on the station casting a fragment of the
Beijing’s
colossal shadow on the hull of the space station.