With Our Dying Breath Read online

  "Roger that, Aux." All departments checked in. Oswald remembered his own reaction from the last jump and wished he hadn't taken that sip of cognac. Mathesse reported all warheads and laser arrays were eager. The reactor was critical and stable and the LANTRn was ready for burn. Remaining deltaV was well within the flight package.

  Oswald wasn't expecting another Centauri ambush. Even if their jump transmission had been intercepted and deciphered, and no jump information had been transmitted. Getting spacecraft on station would take time. Not to mention that Earth Force jump destinations were not quite as accurate as those of the Centauri. So even if they did have the planned coordinates, the Roland might not pop in where they expected.

  Still, Oswald thought it would be nice to have an escort anyway. Had they survived, Charger and Triumph would have been nearby. Oswald wondered if Anahita managed to scrape together some replacements to do the job. It might be an interesting run if she hadn't.

  The clock counted down, its numbers growing slightly larger with each passing second. McFarran gave the final warning in his excited French accent a minute before jump.

  "Ten," Breen began the final countdown.

  Oswald felt the usual urge to scratch his nose. He eyed his visor screens for any new red indicators, ready to abort the jump if needed. All clear.

  He suddenly grew very nervous, more so than he'd been in years. He was in an inexplicable near panic seconds later. Still all clear. Oswald had only suffered a "combat evacuation" in his vacc-suit once, long ago. As junior pilot on an old chemical reaction patrol rocket, CPR-33 Barrgos, they were struck by a Centauri penetrator. That penetrator blasted right through the auxiliary control compartment he was manning. There was a bright flash and Lieutenant Oswald was stunned by the same shockwave that killed the aux officer and navigator. When he woke, the only thing visible from his visor was the big black. Thinking he'd been blown out of the space craft and left to drift, junior Oswald evacuated his bowels. It turned out he was still strapped into his crew station, hanging halfway out of the damaged airframe, and unable to feel his limbs. Fortunately the suit he was wearing now had a liner that cinched shut when such bodily releases were detected.

  Oswald felt itchy all over his skin and started squirming inside his suit. His bowels were liquid, gurgling painfully. Thoughts were processing slowly and Oswald struggled to check his displays once again. A row of cheery green teeth smiled back at him—all systems still go. Someone grunted in pain in his headset.

  Three... Had he finally cracked? Combat had broken better men than he.

  Two... If someone else was in pain, there was probably some bad food he rationalized. Maybe even the booze he'd shared? He'd never heard of good booze going bad. Bad rocket-tub gin was something else, but certainly not Delamain. Someone on the net whimpered softly.

  One... Oswald was not going to let a case of food poisoning or nerves keep him from Misty, Mara, Mary, the baby, and what's-hisface. Even if the entire senior staff crapped themselves.

  Jump! Like so many men before him, Oswald's hopeful rationalizations would carry a heavy price—for him and for Earth.

  A deafening clang echoed through the ship that was audible even through the heavy vacc-suits. A split second later a spike of pain flared in the middle of his spine. It reminded him of a time when five year old Mara had jumped on his back knees first while he napped. The injury had almost taken him of space status.

  He screamed in pain then, and now, but now his mind was taken from that pain as a scream burst right in his ear. Oswald tried futilely to cover his helmet-enshrouded ears with his hands. The scream sounded familiar—it was the hum of the alien artifact amplified to terrible levels.

  The cheery green lights on Oswald's display suddenly swirled together, melted, and coalesced into a sparkly whorl of wondrous color. They shattered into lonely embers and flew away angrily. Or they might have been happy. The visor to his helmet wavered and poured away like liquid. McFarran's super-fat face was forcing its way into Oswald's helmet through the breach, yelling "Sir! Sir! Sir!" in an endless but cheery loop. The man's breath smelled like loud thunder. Oswald's screaming did not drive his Aux away. He thought about telling McFarran to get back in the kitchen, but neither one spoke Swahili.

  The fat face was pulled away suddenly, struggling to keep its purchase by hooking a long, purple tongue on the edge of Oswald's visor. But the visor slammed shut, severing the tongue. McFarran's face was stretched out impossibly towards Roland's nose, and Oswald could see two starfish in vacc-suits randomly pushing buttons on the control panels. They ignored his screams because the front of the control pod was so far away, at least a million kilometers or so. Oswald had the sense that people and animals he couldn't quite see were walking from the front to back and back to front of his rocket ship. He could see the two laser arrays, their protected domes extended and flashing in tune to some stupid song that one of his stupid daughters liked to listen to while she shaved pigs.

  The red lights began flashing brightly together at Oswald. The two split into four, and into eight. Their red blinking had gone on for years and years but was somehow still very urgent. He could feel the heat of them on his face. His hands flailed wildly trying to wave them away. The lights grew more insistent and were now accompanied by the alien hum.

  Another jolt rattled Oswald's teeth and painfully jarred his spine again, bringing a loud cry from his mouth that sprayed spittle on the inside of his visor. The red lights were growing clear. They were alarms, a lot of alarms, on Oswald's visor. There was something familiar about them.

  He could not stop screaming or pounding on his helmet, even as his mind was slowly waking. Others were screaming over the net, as incomprehensible as he. It was hot, very hot and that wasn't good. Part of Oswald wanted to rip the helmet off, as if he'd been buried alive in it for a lifetime. But Roland's critical heat indicator was flashing, the central heat sink and external radiators reading max. Systems were starting to go off-line and people were screaming.

  Oswald tried to call out to the net, to order the Flight Engineer to jettison the heat sink and scram the reactor, but his own throat would only issue the same warbling, insane scream. He issued the commands himself, struggling to make his hand respond where his voice would not. The interior heat level dropped slightly as the overloaded heat sink flew away from Roland.

  The reactor would not respond to the shut-down commands Oswald was trying to issue. Some internal comms failure was preventing it. He still could not articulate anything but a scream and got nothing back from the reactor crew. The main power failed as Oswald was trying desperately to remove his helmet and the reactor scrammed on its own when the safety protocols kicked in. The emergency battery indicator blinked on; at least the battery was yellow instead of red.

  Part of Oswald was still struggling to remove his helmet. He fumbled through views of some crew compartments. The only ones who weren't kicking and flailing were those who had managed to get their helmets off.

  "Life Support! Sedate! Sedate!" Oswald was starting to recognize his own voice amidst the noise bubbling out of his mouth. "Life Support! Sedate! Hines! Sedate everyone!" He was only sure that the doctor had heard him when chemical induced bliss washed over him.

  "Sir?" McFarran's voice was hoarse and slurred. "What if Centauri...?

  "Then we're dead any..." Oswald croaked back before darkness blotted out the angry red lights.

  Chapter 13 Thirteen vacuum sealed body bags were lashed against the wall of the cargo compartment, a final charnel formation for Roland's lost children and the slain Rangers. The bags were thick and black but the vacuum process left the bodies pressed tightly against the outer skin, looking as if they were trying to make a post mortem escape. Freezers were a luxury not afforded to spacecraft. It was trusted to chemical means and vacuum sealing to store those killed in action until a station could be reached. The system worked well enough, especially since it was rare to need them; a ship that started taking casualties due to batt
le damage usually didn't have any survivors. But given enough time it was not unknown for a decaying body to pop, its liquefied putrescence left quivering in place in the zero gravity.

  Oswald slowly shifted his eyes to the other side of the cargo bay at the shattered safe that once held the artifact from DPV. It was now in a message canister, ready to be jettisoned at a moment's notice. The air was still uncomfortably warm and Oswald had given permission for the crew to operate in their skivvies. He and Hashi remained in their flight suits, though unzipped to the waist.

  "That thing is like those old stories about cursed diamonds." Oswald shook his head and looked to McFarran. "It’s a curse to whoever gets it. It doesn't look like it helped the aliens on DPV and I know I've had my fill of the freakin' thing."

  "Sir, Agreed." McFarran rubbed his hand on his flight suit. It was covered with black smears and smudges from Roland's scorched interior. The Aux stared contemptuously at the residue that refused to come off.

  Nearly every compartment inside the rocket had some blackened scars. The Rangers body bags had melted and the first desiccated, now roasted, bodies had to be reinterred in their polymer sarcophagi. Fortunately the locker that held the supply of body bags kept them from harm.

  Nine of Roland's children were dead. Three of their hearts failed to recover after the jump despite the suit defibrillators efforts. The most notable of these was Engineer Bowens. Life Support logs indicated ten others had been jump-started successfully. It was a high number. One died from a broken neck and others' bones were being set in the flight surgeon's room right now. Oswald's back protested sharply at every twist; he suspected he might have a cracked rib.

  Two had asphyxiated on their own vomit, spewing and inhaling uncontrollably in their throws of insanity. One of those had possibly asphyxiated after being sedated.

  The worst were the four who had managed to get their helmets off in the inferno. One had been his favorite pilot, Lieutenant Chun. His heavy suit gloves had clawed at his face while it split and charred in the heat. Doctor Hines was sure to tell Oswald and McFarran that those who got their helmets off probably died from breathing the superheated air and didn't even feel their burning skin. Oswald stared flatly at the doctor, remembering his own failed attempt to pop his top.

  All in all, it was the worst jump Oswald ever experienced or even read about. There had not been a total loss of a spacecraft due to unexplained jump failure in over a decade. Unstable jump tunnels simply didn't form long enough to allow an accident or mis-jump. The ones that worked as planned were bad enough.

  The emergency lights cast a bloody hue over everything. Oswald looked nose-ward through the main passage and was immediately reminded of the inside of chimney. He could only guess at the strain being put on the oxygen recyclers. Conduits were loose and the insulation on several pipes had peeled away.

  "That was very close, Hashi. The whole frame almost failed." Oswald imagined he had seen what Gryphon saw right before Charger died.

  "Sir," the Frenchman's voice was still hoarse and cracked. "You saved us."

  "I should have aborted the jump," Oswald sighed. "That would have saved everyone."

  "Sir, there was no way possible to know." McFarran followed Oswald into flight control. "That was... very strange."

  "That thing," Oswald waved angrily towards the cargo pod, even though the UXA wasn't there anymore, "changed everything we know." He swung his small flashlight around and reached out to tap the juggler, a cluster of three oil suspended balls, still visible behind the scorched instrument panel at the front of the flight command pod. Six needles etched spikes on a slowly moving glass plate behind a magnifying lens to record acceleration along three axes as well as any pitch, roll, and yaw.

  The traces were used in conjunction with the manual flight computer that was pegged nearby. It was essentially a complex, circular slide rule where acceleration along each axis was input and velocity output could be found. Each star system had its own navigational variables and required a separate plot card to help those flying blind. They were there for critical nav computer failures but Oswald insisted everyone in the flight department, including himself and Hashi, knew how to work it. Plots were charted and compared with the computer's reckoning. The pilot with the closest average for a month got a duty free day.

  Unfortunately those cards had not survived the heat and had melted into a useless clump of polymer.

  "Look at that. There are two acceleration spikes. We're moving." Oswald tried scraping some residue off the panel. "Maybe wobbling a bit.

  "Sir, how is that possible?"

  "I don't know, Hashi. We should have zero momentum.” Oswald's voice carried his bewilderment. "I've never seen the like, but we're moving at a pretty good clip. That thing must have spit us out of the jump tunnel somehow."

  "And the longer it takes to get the computers up, the longer we are flying blind."

  "Exactly." Oswald pulled the flight computer from the console; it was made of metal and survived with only a little warping. He spun the circle and slid it carefully to match what info he could get from the accelerometer traces. "Not much help until we get our eyes back, but it's going to take a chunk of our deltaV to stop." He showed the slide rule to McFarran and the Aux shook his head.

  The main lights suddenly flickered on. Oswald pulled his tablet from his flight suit and watched as it gave the progress of the main computer rebooting.

  "Thank God," Oswald sighed. "It looks like Danner got things started again. Glad he was paying attention while Bowens was alive."

  Oswald looked over at his couch. The edges had curled and blackened in the heat. His vacc-suit was stowed beneath, also covered with burn marks. The screen indicated the reboot had completed.

  "C'n D, this is Command." He waited and got no answer. "Comms and Data, this is Flight." No answer. "C'n D! Someone pick up down there!"

  "Go, Command." Specialist Marcia Tracy replied. She sounded as if she'd been running laps.

  "We need the nav systems, especially the nav radar software up first priority."

  "Roger that, Colonel. I'll pass it along to the Lieutenant."

  "Tracy," Oswald said coolly. "I need you to tell him now, regardless of what he's doing. We are flying very fast and have no idea where we are."

  "Sir?" It took a moment for young woman to grasp the nature of what she'd been told. "Jumps are supposed to null—"

  "That wasn't a normal jump. Carry on, please. Now."

  "Yes, sir!"

  Oswald issued a similar demand to the sensors department, to get their portion of the navigation radar up. Space was a big place and jump tunnels wouldn't form too close to a gravity well. Since they hadn't hit anything so far, Oswald knew the chances of hitting anything, even Jupiter or Sol, were slim. But it'd be a shame to have fought off the Centauri, defeated the foul aliens of Delta Pavonis Five, and survive a near cataclysmic meltdown, only to lawn-dart into Luna.

  +++ "Operations net twenty-one has commenced," Oswald announced. McFarran was very ill and had been sent to the flight surgeon. The main systems were being restored. Once again Oswald was amazed at the Roland, it was a fine crew. A tough crew. A tough crew was needed for tough times.

  The departments sounded off on the net as present, but no one gave Oswald the go he was used to hearing. There was still just too much red on the screens.

  "Alright, fellas. This is more of a working staff meeting than a real ops net, since we aren't very operational." Oswald was glad to at least get a few cursory laughs. "While you have been working hard getting Roland back together, I've been trying to piece together what happened.

  "For those who don't know, Roland lost nine children in that jump. Including Lieutenant Chun and Engineer Bowers." Mutters of surprise and shock rolled back from the net.

  "What the freaking flame-all happened on that jump, Colonel?" Mathesse sounded pissed. His left arm had been broken in the jump. "The only thing I can say about the cause is that it was that thing we

&nb
sp; picked up from DPV. I don't know exactly what but it somehow changed

  what we know about the way jump works. Some of you may not know

  it, but we jumped in and got thrown out. We are speeding along as we

  speak."

  "What?" Gresh sounded incredulous. "That's not possible." "He's right," Breen added, wonder in his voice. "I saw it on the

  juggler. Verified the time stamps—as best as possible."

  "Which is why," Oswald added, "we need the nav radar on line Mr.

  Gresh. We've been flying blind and we're not even exactly sure how

  long. With our dramatic and fiery entrance, everyone in Sol probably

  saw us. I'd like to get things running and see who, if anyone, is taking an

  interest in us."

  "Reactor and LANTRn are up and ready," Danner stated. "Main

  battery one is down; I think it took some heat damage and won't hold a

  charge now. We can fire up whenever you like, but without the heat

  sink we'll have to be extra careful with the thermal control system." "I want to see who's about before burning. We might actually be

  going in a direction we want to go." Oswald doubted it, but it was a

  possibility.

  "Nav and targeting radars should be up by the end of the net,"

  Gresh offered cheerfully. "Most of the damage seems to have been

  power connections instead of system hardware. We've gone through

  most of spares that weren't damaged though. That was quite some

  heat."

  "Yes it was," Oswald said. "That is some good news. When the nav

  system is back on-line you let the net know. Kirsk, I want a plot right

  away and a T-3 report. Once we know that we're not going to smack

  into someone or something, we need to figure out exactly where in Sol

  we are and start plotting."

  "Assuming we're in Sol," Mathesse offered. "I still feel jittery after

  going through that jump." Others on the net agreed.

  "Doc, you on here?" Oswald asked. "Have any thoughts on those