Honor Bound

“Roger, Decatur,” she responded in her professional, clipped tone. “Commencing one gee burn… now.” She hit the control and was pressed back into her acceleration couch by the acceleration from the shuttle’s boron drive. “Assault one will cross the event horizon in 32.5 minutes.”

“Copy that, Assault One, ignition in exactly 30 minutes.”

“Jesus,” Vinnie said quietly from seat to her rear right, between her and the copilot. “That’s awful damn close to be flying behind a fusion bomb going off.”

“Ground pounders” the copilot muttered with a snicker. Vinnie glared at him. He was a young Lieutenant named Orton with all the cockiness you’d expect from an assault shuttle pilot and blond hair a millimeter from being longer than regulation. It was bad enough that Vinnie already felt out of place and constrained wearing the same armored space suit as the two pilots, its helmet secured to the side of his acceleration couch.

“There’s no shockwave in a vacuum,” Villanueva reminded him. “All we have to worry about is radiation, and this is a very ‘clean’ bomb. Plus we’re pretty well shielded in here, anyway.”

“You know,” Lt. Orton commented, “I know why they’re here,” he nodded back toward the trio of armory techs who occupied three of the six acceleration couches in the passenger compartment behind the cockpit. “They have to place the bomb to get us back through the wormhole. But why are you here, Captain Mahoney?”

“Let me ask you something, Lt. Orton,” Vinnie bit off, “let’s say this is all a trap and when we get on the other side, there’s a shitload of Protectorate warships waiting for us… what do you plan to do?”

“Fight them,” Orton replied, looking at him as if it were a stupid question.

“Well, once they blow out your drives and disable your weapons, Lt. Orton, someone is going to have to hit this control,” Vinnie fished a small remote trigger out of his pocket, showing it to the copilot, “and blow up that fusion bomb back there before the Protectorates can get their hands on us and figure out what we know.” He smiled. “That’s why I’m here.” What he didn’t tell him was that he had volunteered for the job, mostly because of Esmeralda. You’ve got it bad, Vinnie boy, he admitted to himself.

Scowling, the younger man turned back to the viewscreen, where the starfield was overlaid with a computer map. The twin bulks of the Decatur and the Sheridan hung in space in the gravitational shadow of the system’s largest gas giant, balanced between the pull of the Saturn-sized planet and its largest moon, concealed from passive sensors in case the whole experiment was a Protectorate trap. The wormhole was represented on the map by a stylized whirlpool nearly half a million kilometers from where the star cruisers were hidden; while a blinking red icon positioned next to it represented the jury-rigged fusion trigger.

“What I’d like to know,” Villanueva asked pointedly, first making sure that the intership comms were switched off, “is why that Russian engineer isn’t in here with us, putting his ass on the line.”

“Because if we don’t come back,” Vinnie answered her rhetorical question, “they want him there to answer for it. And so they can try again.”

“Well, aren’t you just a wellspring of sunshine and cheerfulness?” Orton cracked.

Vinnie had to laugh. Maybe the guy wasn’t so bad after all. “Hell, Lieutenant, why do you think military retirement is so generous?”

“You look like an expectant father, McKay.” Patel commented quietly as the two of them stood on the bridge of the Sheridan, watching the video feed from the shuttle on the main viewscreen.

“I feel like an expectant mother,” McKay muttered back, eyes glued on the screen. The shuttle had flipped end for end and was now decelerating, bleeding away their velocity so that they would be moving at a more controllable speed when they went through the gate. Mironov had told them that the ship would retain its pre-jump velocity when it emerged on the other side, and they wanted to be able to get back through in a hurry if there was a threat on the other side.

“I am sure there will be no trouble,” Mironov told him, reading the tension in his face. The Russian was a couple meters in front of the command couch, hanging on to a handle by the Tactical station. “This gate is used not much. It would be very strange for a ship to be coming there.”

“I hope you’re right, Konstantin,” McKay replied in Russian. “But I still worry about my friends.” The Russian looked at him strangely. “What is it? Is my Russian not correct?”

“No, it’s perfect,” Konstantin said, shaking his head. “It’s just that… it’s been a long, long time since I had any friends to worry about. The only people I could talk to were the crews of the patrol ships and cargo ships, and they rarely came back twice. They would tell me things… things about the General and what he was doing on Novoye Rodina.

“He’s a madman… he would experiment on our own people. He was trying to find more ways to use the replicator vats as a weapon against you. They said he was trying to make viruses, trying to create smarter troopers… what you call ‘biomechs.’ I even heard that he was trying to find a way to make exact duplicates of people, so that he could have more than one of our most valuable officers.”

McKay glanced at him sharply. “Jesus, did he ever do it?”

“I heard no,” Konstantin said, shaking his head. “They told me he could duplicate the bodies, but they would be like babies… no memories. I pray to God he never found a way to make it work: there should never be more than one of him, eh?”

“If you two wouldn’t mind,” Patel interjected. “I don’t speak Russian.”

“Sorry, Admiral,” McKay shifted back to English.

“Two minutes to detonation,” the transmission from the Decatur‘s Tactical station came over the bridge speakers. “Assault One is on target to enter two minutes and thirty seconds later, right in the middle of the five minute window.”

McKay pulled out his ‘link and keyed in a private text to Colonel Podbyrin, who was still back on the Decatur-he thought it was best that Konstantin not find out about him yet.

D’mitry, he typed quickly, Konstantin told me about experiments in duplicating people. Said they turned out as babies, no memories. Ever hear of this?

It was nearly a minute before he received a reply. Heard stories. Never worked on it myself. Everything was compartmentalized.

Did they ever make it work?

Don’t know. Never heard they did before the war. But I don’t know.

Not satisfied but wanting to see the wormhole jump, McKay put his ‘link away and turned back to the screen as the countdown continued.

“Detonation in ten seconds… nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… we have detonation.”

In the view from the shuttle’s exterior cameras, he could see a sun-bright burst of light far too close to the small aerospacecraft, a light so bright that it washed out the picture in a haze of pure-energy white that was replaced almost immediately by a blank screen.

“The fusion burst is interrupting their transmission,” the voice from the Decatur explained. “Sensors are overloaded too… it’ll just be a couple minutes.”

What they did have was a view from the ship’s forward optical telescope, which showed a slowly-shrinking globe of white far in the distance but nothing of the shuttle.

“Thirty seconds to scheduled transition,” Decatur announced, “but we’re still not getting the video feed back from Assault One. Gravimetic sensors are picking up… static of some sort.”

“It’s the wormhole,” Konstantin explained. “It’s distorting the local space-time… all electromagnetic and gravimetic signals are warped around it.”

“That means we won’t be able to tell if they make it through,” McKay said, frowning. “Until they come back, anyway.”

“Wonderful,” Patel muttered.

“Scheduled transition time is past,” the voice from the Decatur told them. “Still no signal, sensor readings still unclear.”

“The gate will close by itself after another minute,” Mironov said. “We never knew if it was designed that way