The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (17 page)

“A diet is definitely in order,” Jeanine said. I grunted agreement.

The passage widened considerably as we continued to zigzag our way into the interior under O’Connor’s guidance. We were in a stomach-shaped room when we were drawn to one side with enough force that it became “down.”

A white hole,
Jansons had said,
could lead to controlling gravity.

“O’Connor, is the station activating itself?” I asked. “Jeanine and I seem to be in the presence of a weak but very noticeable gravitational field.”

“Negative,” O’Connor said. “You are experiencing deceleration as the derelict passes through the outer edges of the atmosphere. It will cease soon.”

In fact, it was already diminishing. I floated away from the side.

“However, our updated program shows your orbit to be decaying more rapidly than originally forecast. You have no time to waste.”

“Roger that,” I agreed.

“Jeanine,” O’Connor said, “the next leg of your journey is through the meter-wide opening just above your head. It will lead you immediately into a chamber larger than the one you are currently in.”

“Uh, there is no opening above my head,” Jeanine said. “Are you sure you have my correct orientation?”

“Say again?”

“There is no opening above my head. In fact, there is no opening at this end of the room at all. Take a look.” Three rovers floated around her, earnestly searching for the missing opening.

“Let me check—” O’Connor’s voice stopped. There wasn’t even static. The rovers drifted in random directions.

Jeanine and I turned to each other. “Now what?” she asked.

I accessed the rovers. There should have been signals from fifteen. Only ten showed up on the display. The image from the one farthest back showed a collapsed tunnel. None were under control.

“We will suppose that we have not sprung a trap,” I said hesitantly, “because, if we have, our situation is likely to be hopeless.”

Jeanine took control of the rovers. They darted through tunnels and chambers seeking a way out.

“Let’s think this through,” I said. “A nuke or something similar blasts out that crater above us. The remainder of the station looks solid enough, but in fact it has been shattered. You can’t tell immediately because everything is at rest. But if sufficient force is applied, like plowing into the outer fringes of the atmosphere, the parts will shift into a new configuration. Old tunnels will close. New ones will open.”

“Yes!” Jeanine shouted.

“Have you found a way out?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I have found a way in.”

We went back about fifty meters. There, a narrow slit opened onto a passageway that seemed to have formed from interconnected bubbles. At their end, we came out on a cleft which must have extended all the way to the center of the derelict. And there, scattered across a surface which curved away to a rocky floor, were the field distributors—or whatever they were. A jagged rectangle of sunlight crept down the wall. Looking up, I saw far above a long opening one to two meters wide. Except for the brightness of the sunshine, I would have been able to see the stars marching by.

Jeanine bounded ahead of me and pried up one of the units from its substrate.

“Ow!” She dropped the unit. It settled to one side and began drifting slowly up the wall. “Minibots. One stung me!” She grabbed the unit and stuffed it in her backpack.

The shaft of sunlight swept over her and I could see dots swarming around her. Not swirling like insects, but zooming in straight lines broken by sharp turns. I unholstered my Otee and fired a test pulse at Jeanine. A green light flicked on, assuring me that it recognized Jeanine as a friendly and would not fire when pointed directly at her. I told it to define anything moving as a legitimate target and, pointing in Jeanine’s general direction, squeezed the trigger. A dozen minibots exploded all around her.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“One of them got me,” she said. Pain was in her voice.

I examined her arm. A metal ovoid about the size of the nail on my little finger was embedded just below her elbow. Her suit was trying to seal itself over the wound. As I watched, the ovoid pushed itself further into her flesh.

I set my Otee to its lowest cutting power and narrowest beam. “This is going to hurt,” I warned. I immobilized her arm between my left arm and my side. Then I put the short barrel directly on the ovoid and depressed the trigger. The minibot twisted violently as if trying to hide in Jeanine’s arm. I depressed the trigger further, increasing the strength of the beam. The minibot blackened and ceased moving. I flicked a short blade out of the Otee and used it to dig out the pieces. Jeanine moaned and tried not to fight me. Her suit sealed itself when I was done. My hand was shaking. I blinked away a combination of tears and sweat. By the time I could see clearly, Jeanine had lost consciousness.

I wrapped her around my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I would have removed the unit from her backpack except that it had surprisingly little mass. Tentatively at first, I began to climb out of the cleft. The farther out, the greater the effect of centrifugal force. I had to be careful. If I lost contact with the wall, we would be ejected into the void.

I used the rovers to scout ahead for handholds. Near the rim, I sent two rovers over the top to look for the Specter. It was nowhere in sight. Instead there were three Eternal vessels about five kilometers out, making a cautious approach.

While Jeanine and I and the rovers were sending out a steady stream of signals. I shut down our communications network and pressed myself against the side of the wall. I had no idea what to do. The Specter had vanished and, under the circumstances, I could not blame Jansons. There was no way she could fight Eternal warcraft.

A decrypted message displayed itself inside my helmet.
Jump. Now.
I blinked, then resumed my climb, going faster and faster until the derelict threw me into space. I had just enough time to wonder if I had misunderstood the message when stars above me vanished and I collided with the interior of an airlock. The outer hatch sealed behind us. The inner hatch slid aside and Shakeel helped us into the Specter’s interior.

“I’ve got them,” he yelled up the companionway. Heat washed over my skin, the feeling you get when you make a quantum jump and the suppressor fields aren’t precisely aligned. Five seconds later we were back in normal space.

“Eternals,” I said as I opened my helmet. “What were they doing?”

“No idea,” Shakeel said. “They just appeared fifteen minutes ago and seemed as surprised by the derelict as we were at first. They were moving in slowly, as if they thought the station might come alive and fire at them. When the Lieutenant realized that, she figured she could wait a few minutes to see if the two of you would make contact. She really wanted a white-hole unit and did not want either of you ending up in an Eternal interrogation facility.”

Jeanine was still unconscious. I explained what had happened to her as Shakeel retrieved the unit from her backpack. “”We’ll keep her in a cold-sleep capsule until we can reach a medical installation. You were lucky,” he said. “A well-designed system would have overwhelmed both of you. Or maybe you just ran into the only one that had not been knocked out of commission.”

I have a lot of beliefs that are considered odd by some people, but I do not believe in that kind of luck. And why should the Eternals have been so cautious about approaching a station they had already defeated?

Jeanine stirred. Her hands went to her helmet.

“Don’t open that!” I said. She turned in my direction, but gave no indication that she recognized me or understood a word I said. Her fingers found the release switch.

“I said, don’t open your helmet!” My Otee was in my hand, pointed at her.

“Wait a minute,” Shakeel said. “What—”

I pulled the trigger and put a hole right through her heart.

Jansons was almost obscenely pleased with herself. “The entire crew will get medals, but that’s arguably the least of it. If you re-up, you will be eligible for a five-year rejuve treatment.”

“The white-hole unit was a fake,” I said. “There is no such technology.”

“Well, yes, and knowing that is valuable information by itself. But in discovering that, we also discovered a real TransHuman weapon, one that might have done incalculable damage if we had no warning of its existence. We have that warning because you were able to put loyalty to the Dominion above your personal feelings.”

I had just sufficient self-control to turn away from her. Punching a superior officer is still frowned upon in the Space Force.

“Look, I understand that you are emotionally distraught right now. All I’m saying is that now is not the time for rash decisions. Give it time and I’m sure you will make the decision that’s best for both of you.”

I finally said something ambiguously positive just to get her to go away.

Jeanine had been put in stasis immediately in a cold-sleep unit and kept that way for the ten weeks it took us to get back to Dominion space. There she was delivered to a quarantined Space Force medical unit. All her blood was removed and strained, harvesting a crop of nanobots that made all the Intelligence techs
ooh
and
ah
. Her heart was too badly damaged for repair. The surgeon snipped it out, dropped in a standard heart for a woman her size from the refrigerator section, and zipped her up. They had also primed the heart with her DNA. Those cells would spread, replacing the standard cells over the course of a year, at the end of which she would truly have her heart back.

I was allowed to visit the third day after the surgery. Her room looked like a regular bedroom. Sterilized air, scented like the ocean during the day and like mountain jungles at night, blew through a fake window. This was done, not because she had ever lived in either habitat, but because her psych profile indicated that she wanted to and so would be most comfortable imagining herself in those surroundings. Circuits imprinted on her nightwear monitored her condition at all times. All surgical and resuscitation mechanisms were hidden in the walls.

I sat in a chair by her bedside, impatient for her to awake and afraid that she would do so.

“So, they say you shot me.” Jeanine had opened her eyes while I was sunk in my own thoughts. Her voice was weak but clear.

“Technically speaking, I killed you,” I said.

She stared at me dispassionately from her pillow. “You are sure you had a good reason, but you are not sure I will agree.”

“Being shot by your fiancé might put a damper on romance for some,” I allowed.

“This better be good,” she said.

I took a deep breath, and it was like running up the side of the cleft and jumping into space.

“From the beginning, I was afraid the derelict might be a trap. I was just thinking of the kind that snaps shut and kills you. Not until it was almost too late did I think about traps baited with poison to be brought back to the nest and kill all the creatures exposed.”

I shook my head, trying to order my thoughts. “Jansons said how lucky we were to have discovered the derelict when we did because it would burn up in the atmosphere in a day. That bothered me when I heard it, though I couldn’t say why at the time. Subconsciously, though, I was remembering the astronomers’ postulate that we do not occupy a specialized place in the universe. All apparent coincidences are suspect. And what could be a greater coincidence than discovering an abandoned station stuffed with secret technology a day before it would be destroyed?

“Then Shakeel pointed out another coincidence. You had been attacked by the one remaining active defense system. A system active enough to make us run with our loot but not active enough to stop us.

“There were other things equally strange. The way we were run like rats in a maze that kept opening some paths and closing others. The way the Eternal strike force approach the station so cautiously. Yet the Eternals were the ones who supposedly had defeated it. Why should they be cautious?

“The pieces didn’t come together until we were back in the Specter. It had been no coincidence to find the station in a decaying orbit and no coincidence that you were attacked the way you were. The station was not a derelict at all. It was functioning as designed. It would always shift its orbit to appear a day from destruction. It would always attack raiders but let them go after injecting them with nanobots to take home and spread. We triggered a trap set for Eternals. If I had allowed you to open your helmet, they would have spread through the entire ship.”

“So you shot me to keep all of us from becoming cyber-zombies,” Jeanine said.

“Jansons prefers the story that I chose the Dominion over you,” I said. “I would never have done that.”

“Yet reasonable as all that is, you are worried that I may not forgive you,” she said.

I gave a slight nod.

“Good,” she said. “I needed something to hold over you. Guilt! You must be partly Jewish. Or Otho-Catholic. Whenever I want something in the future, and however compelling your reasons for saying no, all I will have to do is wail about the cruel brute who broke my heart and you will wilt immediately.”

The talking had tired her out. She turned on her pillow and smiled, for all the world looking like a sleepy cat. “I think . . . this is the beginning . . . of a beautiful . . .”