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  Delphine grinned. ‘Yes...and while we’re on a roll...my name is Delphine.’

  ‘Kiyoko,’ said the Admiral. The lieutenant looked away for a moment because he had the good sense to know when something was none of his damn business.

  36.

  Break Through

  Vidar Dawes

  Imagine the clever minds of the world coming together willingly, what they could achieve.

  This – seventeen huge ships.

  I didn’t understand much of it. I didn’t need to. Point, shoot; that was my job. Their job was making impossible things.

  One thing I was sure of?

  That 90% of what they told us would happen when we breached the portal was guess work. Mathematics, physics...when it came to dimensions, portals, wormholes...it was theoretical. Hell, even I knew half of what they spouted was theoretical and that was the same thing as a guess, wasn’t it?

  They could never predict what was ahead of us. These were the places where physics became hazy and insane.

  And that’s how it was – the portal. It was a house of mirrors at a circus swirling on a Ferris wheel inside a tumbling kaleidoscope while on psychedelic fumes that smelled of burning plastic.

  Not one part of it pleasant.

  I didn’t see the portal when we went through (no one did, because there was one viewpoint on the bridge and no other, and that would have been shielded as we entered), but I knew exactly when it was. Gravity was disabled around an hour before. Something to do with spin, and pushing, pulling, angles. All I knew was that we were a great big ship trying to get through a comparatively tiny hole.

  We were strapped into our bunks. Everyone aboard was given a mild sedative which made me feel like I cared about nothing, a stronger sense of detachment than was usual for me. They gave us strong anti-emetics, too, so my tongue felt like sandpaper and the roof of my mouth like a scab I couldn’t stop worrying.

  At the moment we breached the Cephal’s portal I had the strangest feeling. Lightness, not of body, but of mind. A sense of nothing at all. Sight, but distance, almost as though consciousness were separate from body. Not like some fairytale astral projection, or lucid dream, but a very distinctive feeling that something fell away beneath me so I dropped. Where? No idea. I could have dropped an inch, like when a chair you lean back on goes a little too far, or a thousand kilometres down into the mouth of a pit.

  I heard sounds in those moments. Or, was it only one moment which overlapped each other moment? That seemed more accurate – that many instances laid atop others, so that all possibilities were seen at once. Varied realities all drawn on separate panes of glass and laid down so they made something you couldn’t see until they came together.

  Maybe the Cephal experienced this differently to humans. I wondered, later, what the Cephal’s biomechanical weapons might have felt. The chelon, for example, those great turtle-like war machines, were not smart. What would a simpler beast than man feel in the heart of everything? A dog? A cat? Would it matter?

  Should it?

  I saw only the bunk above me, where my bunk-mate Cartwright was strapped down, but I smelled and heard and felt far more. The rancid reek of vomit, of course, but ozone and fire and oil and that sickly, cloying sense I was standing in the smoke of a bonfire burning plastics. I imagined (must have) that I could smell the fibres of our rough green blankets, and the strong smell of sex on not just my blankets, but those within fifty feet of me. I thought I could smell the heat of steel grinding, stretching, expanding. I heard it, I’m sure of it. A sound like the whole ship groaned, almost ecstatic. I felt pressure in my groin, like I had an erection, but an ache in my bones, too. Not my joints, my actual bones, like I was a teenager growing in the night. Growing pangs, but instantaneous growth...

  Or endless.

  Time? Time was nothing at all, but the tick of clocks dissecting it, too. Perhaps it was what time looked like if a mind might be able to take it apart and see what it was made of.

  I heard screams and sobs and inane rants and words. I thought I heard a woman’s voice speaking on a PL, but could not have because we had no PL-Coms in space. I heard someone offer ‘pancake tyres for nine’, which made more sense than many of the other words and phrases and songs and mad noises in those overlapping sliced moments.

  For how long? None of us knew. Even time ceased to hold any import within that portal and whatever that space between one and the other gate might have been. Perhaps Death held us and let us go again. Perhaps something else; the ineffable.

  We lost no one on the way but every single one of us spent the first six hours of our victorious travel to another star system cleaning every conceivable fluid from blankets, bunks, and the cold steel floors...but the ceilings, too. We’d puked into zero gravity, and the slowly increasing spin was dumping the shit everywhere, literally.

  But we were through, without doubt. It wasn’t an illusion. Couldn’t be my imagination, either. I was cleaning up a ton of puke, mine and others, and that’s not the kind of fantasy life I’d lead out of choice.

  More, though. I felt as though something – I don’t know what – was lifted. It wasn’t that I cared any deeper, but that I was seeing, feeling, sensing in some different way. Maybe it was like taking a trip abroad, when you suddenly remembered to look up on occasion. Or where the air was subtly different, the humidity, or precipitation, or something...just...off.

  Not bad off, but weird and unsettling. Like I was feeling. I didn’t like it at all.

  I was knee deep in muck when I heard a newly familiar voice and I was grateful for the distraction from my unusually pensive mindset.

  ‘Lieutenant Colonel Dawes?’

  With the gravity and spin re-established, I turned easy enough and smiled. She was the reason for tenderness in my nose that hadn’t been there before, and for the whistle when I breathed, but it wasn’t the kind of deviation I’d be stuck with.

  I wondered if I could get a better pension. War wounds; whistling nostrils and tinnitus and memory loss.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Same over on Starboard?’ I asked, which was where the majority of Armoured were billeted.

  I wasn’t sore with Alante Brockner for messing up my nose and knocking me down a peg. I’d deserved it, and even if she hadn’t smacked me in the face, how could I be sore at Alante Brockner, the one they called the Hard Dog (I knew...I’d asked around)? She was good-looking, tough, sensible, but not only that – she was smiling, too.

  ‘How’s the pain?’

  ‘Had worse,’ I said honestly. ‘The...jump? Is that what we call it?’

  ‘I guess,’ she shrugged.

  ‘That was way worse than swallowing my pride. How about you?’

  ‘Enough muck for a lifetime, yeah. I feel okay, though. Do you want a break?’

  ‘Almost always,’ I said and put down the mop and bucket.

  ‘Well, we’re in a different galaxy, or star system, or whatever. Seems a shame to waste it. Admiral’s calling up groups to see. Do you want to come and see a different sun?’

  ‘Damn right,’ I said.

  I stood shoulder to shoulder with Brockner when the Admiral let us up to the bridge and the wide window there. Our ship was turning in a gentle burn toward the only inhabitable planet in the system, but we couldn’t see the planet yet, only the sun.

  ‘The first sun other than ours to be seen with human eyes,’ said the Admiral, a proud, straight-backed woman I’d already met – she didn’t mention our meeting and that was cool of her.

  We looked out through the bridge view window, a heavily shielded aperture so we didn’t blind ourselves. The sun was a darker red than Earth’s own. I had no idea of size, or heat, or even how a sun worked. Science wasn’t my forte at all. I’m not sure I had a forte but I had a strong right index finger.

  Fortunately, there were plenty of bright people on the ship, and bright people had made the Boston, and the AI systems controlling most of the ship’s functions so it was kind of like a body �
�� those functions controlled by the AI autonomic, with the Admiral and the crew being something like white blood cells, maybe, just going where they were needed when something didn’t work right. I didn’t like the idea of even the greatest AI making decisions for humanity, though I guess the reality was that the 3rd generation Global Net and those StratInt suits probably already had a fair say in human affairs over and above what even the brightest of us – like Admiral Kiyoko Jones – were even privy to.

  I didn’t like it, but you have to adapt. I didn’t like aliens, I didn’t like flying, and I didn’t like the idea of being a billion light years from anything familiar.

  Sometimes though, I think things can be more astounding when you don’t know how they work. Science brought us here, but it was with primal wonder that I gazed through those shielded windows, and that was right and good, too.

  ‘It’s big,’ I said.

  The Admiral gave me a pitying smile, and Alante nudged my shoulder as she laughed.

  Good enough, I thought.

  No one on the bridge ridiculed any of the inane things I said, or the thousands of others who passed up to the bridge in groups when they were called. I don’t think anyone who stood for a moment in the light of that miracle did anything but stare, full of awe. It wasn’t funny.

  ‘Be safe down there,’ said the Admiral as I, Brockner and eight others on the bridge at the time made to leave.

  Later, I found she took the time out to say something nice, thoughtful, and truthful to everyone. That spoke volumes about her character to me. She was all right.

  37.

  The Fall

  Vidar Dawes

  I have no shame admitting I was shaking when I buckled into a five-point harness beside seventy other Patriots in one of the Spartan fall ships. Each of the Boston-class carriers held roughly three thousand troops and equipment. Though drives took up the majority of the ship’s capacity, the lowest deck was for fall ships like the one I was in. I didn’t like the name. It sounded very final. You fell, you landed. Thump. I wasn’t far off.

  They seemed more like cargo containers than a vessel. We were crammed in, shoulder-to-shoulder, in our armour, with those arms, ammunition and supplies we could carry. Armoured and Cavalry would drop in fewer numbers, because of the weight of their machines. The box (it really wasn’t much more than that) was hot just because of the proximity of so many scared soldiers. The light inside was an unpleasant and dim shade of green which made everyone look ill, which most of us felt anyway.

  There were no announcements. If you needed a piss at that point, you were going in wet. I only held my bladder because when the ship dropped I was too scared to piss, or move, or speak.

  Gravity was gone before the fall as the Boston quit rotation when she settled into orbit over the planet waiting for us to hit it. Drips of sweat floated in the heavy air of the fall ship. Spit, too. Probably some of it mine.

  I waited for someone in charge on the fall ship to tell us to engage Sergeant Pain, then, realised that was me.

  ‘Time to let Pain in, boys and girls,’ I said, trying for levity. Failing.

  Light tones weren’t easy. Drones might have made it to the surface, but I wasn’t a drone and I didn’t care about drones. I cared about my internal workings, not a robots.

  There was a thunderous clanking sound that drowned out everything and startled everyone. The gravity well grabbed hold almost instantly. We slammed down, then, up against the harness. We were on a curving vector into the planet’s atmosphere, but we couldn’t tell that, or see outside. There wasn’t a pilot, or a steward or stewardess like a commercial jump flight.

  My breath was squeezed out and my spine flat against the seat.

  I didn’t know if gravity would hit, or wouldn’t. The ablative shields heated up the box, like a cargo container in the sun. I could’ve sworn the metal interior glowed at one point.

  As we hit atmosphere my teeth jammed together, intense pressure through the spine even though we weren’t standing, but at a forty-five degree angle. A wait, interminable. Waiting for something to shoot us from the skies above this odd new planet, or for nothing at all. We’d just smash into the dirt, or rock, or crust.

  The ships didn’t even have pilots. Just autonomous systems, so we’d get close, thrust against the air, slow. Six ‘chutes deployed and my neck cracked painfully as my chin hit my chest and my sore nose yowled out at me from the jolt. I couldn’t scream or cry out. I was winded, and damn near going in with brown DTCs.

  After that, my spine got a break. Instead, it was my sternum and ribs that got acquainted with the five-point harness. My balls, too. Fleet said it was going to be a hell of a bump. They didn’t say shit about my balls.

  We’d trained for drops since San-D. I’d never virtually tasted my own testicles before.

  This wasn’t San-D. That was clear enough.

  I swallowed.

  The impact knocked damn near everything about huge steps for humanity right out of my mind. No thoughts in there about Zoa, or Fleet, but a reversion to simple things like a child might take up an old habit like sucking their thumb when the parents went at it.

  ‘Deploy,’ said Pain.

  I might not remember what I was about, but there was always Sergeant Pain to remind us poor grunts exactly what we were.

  The box opened and air rushed in and I jammed a breather into my mouth, clamped between teeth.

  All across alien red skies hundreds of fall ships were in various states of about-to-hurt. They came lower, repulsion thrusters bright comet-trails pushing against the planet’s sucking gravity, then six huge chutes would splay out in a final attempt to not crush the cargo.

  The might of Earth descending.

  It was hardly mighty. I looked up before I looked down, or around, because it often was the first place I looked. As it turned out, we were the lucky ones. So many ships hit each other. Some veered wildly away from our drop zone. Some spun as they collided to finally come down too hard on corners with one or more of those essential chutes torn away in mid air collisions. I saw more than one with an escort of specks way up there – fall ships that’d failed, or been smashed open, spewing out soldiers or equipment into the atmosphere to fall, and fall...until they stopped falling.

  I took a knee and brought my LMG to bear on what looked like a crazy person’s imagining of a jungle.

  ‘Establish perimeter at site,’ said Pain, reminding us of our objectives in case we’d forgotten. I kind of had. I was thinking about my crushed balls.

  ‘Fuck you, Pain,’ I muttered, wiping spit from my beard, but she didn’t talk. She just told us what to do.

  I stood up, finally. It took me and the rest of Patriot who I’d dropped with a good few minutes to even consider moving anywhere. The site was mess.

  ‘Wow,’ said Cartwright, stumbling toward me. ‘We screwed that.’

  38.

  Made a Mess of It

  - Vidar Dawes

  The first battle we fought on Zoa wasn’t against Zoans, or their Cephal overlords, but against ignorance.

  Something about the landing site the brains up above picked for us was fucked up. They chose flat terrain on a continent with no observable conurbations, plenty of forestation (but not with trees, not exactly, or at least not what I would call a tree). There were rivers, low mountains around 500 km north and east of our location, but nothing to trouble or divert us. We were heading west, to the only object of interest to us other than the planet itself, and we didn’t plan on leaving much of that behind.

  The planet, I imagined, was like Earth might have been a million years ago, when trees ruled, like the Devonian period, maybe. Different, but at a similar evolutionary stage.

  We were expecting creatures like the Cephal and the chelon. We really had very little idea as to what to expect outside long range scans and scout drones fired into the planets’ surface before our fall. We knew it was heavily forested, that the air was breathable and that background radiation wouldn’t
kill us. As for hostility and the constant, imminent threat of death? Well, that seemed a very reasonable assumption to me. It was all guess work and estimations.

  Or, maybe, some idiot in the Boston just thought it’d be fun to sling a bunch of metal boxes at the big round thing.

  I don’t even know what they failed to account for, if anything. Maybe it was just dumb luck that I survived the fall and so many were kilometres distant, down in the forest somewhere, or others smashed into each other. I think it was quite likely, though, that sending a first wave of hundreds of fall ships to an alien planet in the first wave was fucking remarkable.

  We’d come through an alien portal, to an alien sun, been tossed from a ship unlike anything humans had ever constructed...and I was still alive.

  I didn’t think I had any right to complain about aching balls when humans had done all that, and when plenty of soldiers hadn’t survived the fall at all.

  I shut up. Sometimes, that’s the best and only thing to do, soldier or human.

  *

  The myriad things which kept us alive weren’t only guns and bullets and luck.

  Whatever we might use that would fit in a fall ship, we’d brought. The great minds up above had made contingencies upon contingencies. We’d brought enough of so even with the loss of over thirty percent of ships in the first wave we couldn’t lose all of it.

  Soon, the strange red glow of the planet was filled with blue arcing lights of weld-guns as AI turrets and comms stations were set into the rock and work on assembling other equipment broken down for the fall was assembled.

  Stunned marines were stumbled around, or bled, or didn’t move at all. Some, like me, stared at the landscape and stood around like dumbasses when our sole job was literally to not be a dumbass.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Cartwright, finally breaking my torpor. I think it was fair, though. It was an alien planet.