conquered known space, by creating a transportation and communications highway that enabled him to travel tens of thousands of light-years in an instant.
“You ever done this before?” Freeman asked. Freeman’s voice was so low that it sounded more like a rumble than a voice over the speaker in my helmet.
“Have I ever done what, free-walked in space or salvaged parts from a broadcast disc?”
“Free-walked?” Freeman asked. He knew I had never salvaged parts from a broadcast disc.
“Yeah,” I said. Growing up in an orphanage—that was the term Unified Authority politicians used for the farms in which they raised military clones—we used to spend one week each year in a “summer space camp.” Instead of riding horses and swimming in a lake, we did spacewalks and sham battles.
“You ever been behind the scenes on a broadcast station?” Freeman asked.
“No,” I said.
I controlled the jetpack in the back of my suit using optic commands on a menu built into my helmet. This left my hands free for holding objects, using tools, and praying. Thoughts about floating forever in space ran through my head. I saw myself curled up in my suit and floating like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, but that was not a realistic concern. Nothing short of a laser shot would break my tether; and even if something did, I could control my flight using the jetpack.
Looking down the back of the glass, I saw the spindle that connected the sending and receiving discs like an axle between two wheels. All of the generator and broadcast equipment would be housed in that spindle. From up here, a half mile away, the hall connecting the two discs looked as narrow as a sewing needle.
“That’s where you need to go,” Freeman said.
“I know that,” I said.
What I would have given if I could have restarted the entire Broadcast Network from this disc. Not long ago, fleets of mile-wide naval ships traveled across the galaxy using the Broadcast Network. Then came the war. Enemies of the Unified Authority Republic took control of a self-broadcasting fleet and shut down the entire galaxy with a single shot. They destroyed the broadcast station near Mars, cutting the juice that powered the entire Broadcast Network. There would be no restarting the Network without rebuilding the Mars Station.
The Unified Authority still had the biggest and most powerful ships, but they were not self-broadcasting ships. Without the Broadcast Network, fleets that were ten thousand light-years from Earth would need more than ten thousand years to travel back. Without the Broadcast Network handling transmissions, messages sent from Earth to those ships would take ten thousand years to arrive as well.
Even though they were dormant, the size of the discs made me nervous. I floated down the gap between them slowly. As I descended, I saw that the discs were one hundred feet apart. From a distance, they seemed to butt right up against each other. Dropping between them, I felt like a diver entering a massive crevice. I dropped a good thousand feet and stopped. When I glanced in the direction I had come from, it seemed like the gap between the two discs had narrowed.
As I glided toward the spindle connecting the two discs, I wondered if the tether line would reach. Just for it to reach from the top of the discs to the spindle it would need to be a half mile long. It wasn’t. I was about halfway down the side of the disc when a message flashed on the visor of my helmet: “CAUTION. TETHER LIMIT REACHED.”
“YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF YOUR TETHER” would have been more accurate. Floating in space, with everything happening in slow motion and the obsidian depths wrapped around me like a blanket, things sometimes seemed the opposite of what they were. Emptiness felt smothering. Floating in a vacuum reminded me of swimming underwater.
With trepidation, I detached my tether line and watched it reel away. Had there been a loop or a stem on the back of the disc, I would have tied it on. The back of the disc was as smooth as the front.
“You there?” I asked Freeman.
“Yes,” he said.
Nervous about floating untethered, I had hoped for more pleasantries. Hearing his voice, I realized he would not chat with me.
The backs of the discs were black but not reflective. Looking into the backs of the discs reminded me of staring into a shadow. Looking out the gap between them, I saw stars. I stared at the stars for a moment, then turned my attention back to the discs. It was like having a black cloth draped across my helmet. Taking a deep breath, I continued on to the spindle.
I had not appreciated the size of the tube that connected the two sides of this broadcast station when I viewed it from the edge of the sending disc, a half of a mile away. From up there, it looked short and narrow. Now that I had floated down beside it, I realized it was the size of my boot-camp barracks—two stories tall and a hundred feet long.
It only took me a moment to figure out how to enter the broadcast station. The batteries inside this station might not have had the teravolts needed to keep the discs operating, but they did have enough electricity to power the lights marking the door.
I approached. The door was sealed, of course.
“We’re specked,” I said.
“Speck” was the Marines’ swear word of choice. During my time in the Corps, I used the word “speck” only slightly less than I used the words “I,” “and,” and “the.” Technically, “speck” was a noun. It referred to sperm. Most military men found other creative uses for the word. If you did not like someone, you told him to “get specked.” If you thought a brother Marine was in trouble, you might say that he was “specked.” Almost every serviceman used the word “speck” in one form or another, but Marines seemed particularly adept at it. On a daily basis, I heard speck used to describe bad chow, stupid officers, and a bad case of the runs. You might say that we Marines were specking geniuses at coming up with new uses for that word.
“Think I should blast my way in?” I asked.
Back on the transport, Freeman saw everything I saw on his monitor. “See the red circle?” Freeman asked. Beside the door was a six-inch red circle. “That’s the security panel. Press down on it.”
I traveled over to the circle and pressed three fingers against it. The circle rolled over, and a laser no broader than a spaghetti noodle shot into my helmet to perform a retinal scan. I started to pull away.
“What’s the problem?” Freeman asked.
“It won’t recognize me,” I said. “It will arm the security system.”
“Most of the techs who fix these stations are clones,” Freeman said.
“They’re a newer model,” I said.
“You think they updated the eyes?” Freeman asked.
I pressed the panel a second time and waited as the laser scanned my left eye. The door to the station opened.
“That was easy,” I said. I did not need to worry about Freeman saying he told me so, that would have been too many syllables wasted.
Once inside the station, I found the master control panel. I found the switches for sealing the door and starting the gravity generator. I did not bother turning on the oxygen. Though the station did have an environmental system, I preferred my suit. I turned on the lights. “Are you getting this?” I asked.
Ray did not answer. I suppose he would have said something if he was not getting a picture.
The inside of the station looked like a warehouse. Equipment of every shape and size lined the walls. There were lockers and storage compartments. There were oxygen tanks, laser torches, jetpacks, racks of environmental suits, boxes of tools, and a credit-operated vending machine filled with snacks for the maintenance workers who would repair this station when and if it broke down. We had just about run out of food on the transport. Seeing that machine with its candy bars and potato chips nearly brought tears to my eyes.
The moment I found the broadcast engine, my luck turned sour. The engine was fifteen feet tall. It was built into the wall of the station. Because of its size and mass, there would be no way to disassemble it and carry it out piece by piece as we had planned. “We’re specked,” I said. “It’s too big.”
Freeman did not respond.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“Cut through the wall,” Freeman said.
“What about the station?” I asked.
