Floating in the dark, silent hull of our wrecked drop ship, there is no up or down. Without the chronometer of my helmet display, I wouldn’t be able to gauge the passage of time at all. I send out the same emergency broadcast every five minutes, but half an hour after the death of Banshee Two-Five, nobody has acknowledged our calls for help. My suit’s low-frequency data link to the fleet has stopped real-time updates, and my tactical display is showing only best-guess positions. Both our Linebackers are flashing emergency beacons, and the Hammerhead space control cruiser has disappeared from the plot entirely. The Manitoba has traveled beyond the range of my tactical map, along with the Lanky seed ship. We are alone in space above Sirius Ad.
The cooling elements in my suit are working overtime to keep my body heat from boiling me in my armor. My air is good for another two and a half hours, and the battery pack will run the suit for another day or two before everything shuts down. I wonder if I should leave a last message in the memory banks of my armor’s tactical computer, one final good-bye to Mom and Halley maybe, but then I decide it would be pointless. Sirius Ad’s gravity will snare the wrecked drop ship sooner or later, and then we’ll burn up in the atmosphere. Some bits and pieces of us might survive, but even if we ever retake the Sirius A system, nobody’s going to mount a search for a few dog tags and some charred memory chips.
Forty-five minutes after my initial call for help, another emergency beacon pops up on my screen, with a vector marking indicating that the ship in distress is far outside my display’s scope. Then the TacLink network connection drops altogether.
“Well, shit.”
“What’s the matter, Grayson?” the other sergeant wants to know.
“We lost the Manitoba. Her crash buoy just popped up.”
There are groans of despair from the other troops. The Manitoba didn’t make the Alcubierre chute in time. Nobody will know about our fate until our task force is overdue at Gateway and they send someone to look for us. Between the carrier and the three cruisers alone, we lost ten thousand people today, and another five thousand infantry grunts are trapped down in the dirt on Sirius Ad, waiting for their inevitable extermination by the new masters of the system. I have no idea how many civilians will be added to the total by the time the Lankies have finished the takeover, but it’s an old colony, settled half a century ago—a million or more settlers, third-generation off-Earthers at least.
I’m twenty-six years old. For the last five years of my life, I have served the Commonwealth wherever they sent me. I have lost count of the number of people I’ve killed—directly, with my rifle, or indirectly, by calling down air strikes and close air support on them. I’ve ordered nuclear strikes on Lanky towns, and I’ve shot our own citizens, in the welfare riots back in my TA days. All of it has steered me toward this fate—to suffocate in the wrecked hull of a drop ship, high above a second-rate colony we never planned to keep anyway, or to end it all with a quick rifle shot.
I think of Halley—the first time we met, on the first day of Basic, bunkmates by the luck of the alphabet—and I feel a profound gratitude for the interrupted, hectic, and strange relationship we’ve had, intense and exciting despite all the obstacles thrown into our path by an uncaring military. I think of Mom, and about the sadness she will feel at the loss of her only child, but I’m glad that we got to spend some time together just before I shipped out on this particular goat rope.
I conclude that I have no regrets, and that I’d do it all again, in exactly the same fashion, if I had the choice. If my life was short, at least I managed to live the last part of it on my own terms.
At the hour mark, when my air supply is down to a little over two hours, I turn up the transmitter again.
“All fleet units, all fleet units. This is Tailpipe Five, on Banshee Two-Five. We are dead in space, and running out of oxygen. Anyone left out there, please acknowledge.”
I don’t expect a reply, and when I hear a static-speckled voice responding to my distress call, I flinch so hard with excitement that I hit the back of my head on the hull behind my seat.
“Tailpipe Five…Nassau. Copy one by five. Say position.”
“Nassau, we are above Sirius Ad in a wrecked Wasp, and our suits are running dry. Sending nav data right now. Got anything you can send our way?”
“Tailpipe Five, that’s a negative,” the reply comes after I have sent the burst transmission with our coordinates. “We are forty-five minutes from Alcubierre, and there’s a Lanky between us and you. Sorry,” the comms operator adds.
The Nassau is the frigate escort of the minelayer that peeled off the task force right after our arrival in-system. She has her own drop ships, but if they’re less than an hour from the transition point, they are over four hours from our position. Even if they came about and headed our way at full acceleration, we’d be dead by the time they got here, and their captain is not going to go back where a carrier and three cruisers just met their end. I swallow my disappointment at having this new spark of hope extinguished.
Then there’s a new voice on the emergency channel, clear and loud and impatient.