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THE ADVENTURES OF GREGORY SAMSON, SPACE EXPLORER:
THE ADVENTURES OF GREGORY SAMSON, SPACE EXPLORER:
A FARTHER ORBIT
The horizon was right up close to me, half a mile off and curved, bowed, small. But it was a horizon, and I was only standing straight, waiting. Cab had my feet anchored and the shipboard gravity was compensating, dragging me into the center of the asteroid with a lot more force than the asteroid itself was capable of. Centering me on the center of things. It kept me level. Made me feel terrestrial, still, even if by then I resembled nothing more than a flipper-limbed, mirror-plated troll as big as a crew-cab pickup truck. I was only standing. I didn’t have to do this. And I didn’t have to do it this way. If they would only let me try another way. I hoped they would. My chest vibrated unhappily.
My display flashed red and outlined six points three hundred thousand miles above me. That didn’t feel as far as it had.
Cab zoomed in on three pairs of ships flying in matched rows, and I felt a trill of revolted fear, a gut-churned sensation like I’d turned over a rock and found a human face. The craft I saw were recognizable as vehicles, even slightly familiar, but they were wrong. The first two were saucers, perfect metal discs with glowing centers, but they flew face-on, not edge-first, a couple of dull orange eyes soaring through space. Then a pair of rocket ships, but they were bent and distended, like a child’s rendition of a supersonic jet, or a half-melted dust-buster with wings. And bringing up the rear, a pair of mirror-finish marbles, maybe twenty meters in diameter. They should have been invisible against the stars, but they weren’t; space was distorted between and around them, so that they stood out as a wavering, red-eyed movement of the universe itself.
My display flashed red and outlined six points three hundred thousand miles above me. That didn’t feel as far as it had.
Cab zoomed in on three pairs of ships flying in matched rows, and I felt a trill of revolted fear, a gut-churned sensation like I’d turned over a rock and found a human face. The craft I saw were recognizable as vehicles, even slightly familiar, but they were wrong. The first two were saucers, perfect metal discs with glowing centers, but they flew face-on, not edge-first, a couple of dull orange eyes soaring through space. Then a pair of rocket ships, but they were bent and distended, like a child’s rendition of a supersonic jet, or a half-melted dust-buster with wings. And bringing up the rear, a pair of mirror-finish marbles, maybe twenty meters in diameter. They should have been invisible against the stars, but they weren’t; space was distorted between and around them, so that they stood out as a wavering, red-eyed movement of the universe itself.
--Give my regards to Daaaaaay-veeeee, remember me to Tee Fee Craaaaane--
--Tell all the pikers ooon tha hill, that I’ll beee back ah-gaaain!--
Cab’s voice in my head was the barrel-chested baritone of an undergraduate fraternity brother. I could almost hear the beard and the beer.
--Tell them how I was buuuus-ted, for lapping up the high high baaaalll--
--We’ll all have drinks at Theo-dore Zinck’s, when I get back next faaaaaaaaaaaaallllll!--
“What the hell is wrong with you,” I muttered.
--Didn’t you go to Cornell?--
“I don’t think they sing that one anymore,” I said.
--Sure they do--
--I could do Harvard--
The bounty hunters orbited Ceres once, looking for Rell. I don’t know where he hid himself in all of that nothing, but he managed somehow.
Cab wriggled in the back of my head. I could hear him chittering to himself.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
--Aren’t you?--
“No.” I kicked off the asteroid and soared towards Ceres.
--Not even a little bit?--
--I can’t wait to see these cannons in action--
I thought of Agent Frewdin, stone-faced behind his desk, telling me to stay on Earth in case Cab and I weren’t prepared for the galaxy at large. I thought about the galaxy’s first sentient computer sharing mental space with an inexperienced man everyone considered to be a child. I thought about how scared I was, and I thought about hitting a man so hard that he died. I didn’t have to do it this way.
“Scan for life signs,” I said.
--What?--
“Scan for life signs,” I said. “Who are these people?”
--What do you think this is, Star Trek?--
“Cab!”
The bounty hunters regrouped on Ceres’ facing side. My crosshairs played over their surfaces, and I could feel the minimal point in my mind that would fire the guns, if I concentrated even a little.
--It’s like the United Planets of Benetton over there--
--A triumphal moment in diversity politics--
--It’s a bunch of different species, man, what do you want from me, an average number of limbs?--
“How many of them are there?” I flew slow, watching. They had to know I was here, I was supposed to show up on ship’s sensors like a Christmas tree.
--Seventeen limbs, on average--
“Cab, how many people are on those ships?”
--Do you really want to know?--
“Do you know?” I asked.
--Of course--
“Then tell me.”
--There are one hundred and ninety one people aboard those ships, in total--
--And something that might be a housecat--
--Except it appears to be mostly made of argon--
--They’re hip to your jive, cap’n--
--If you’re gonna drop the hammer you better drop it now while you still got the drop to drop--
--I have no idea what I just said--
--Was it at all clear in context?--
There was always another way. If I was going to do this, I had to try to do it right. Nobody had to die.
“Ok,” I said. I cleared my throat and opened a channel with a thought.
--Killjoy--
“This is Captain Gregory Samson of the good ship Cab Calloway,” I said. My voice was low, slow, gravelly and appropriate. I smiled grimly and pushed my luck. “You are trespassing in Solar space. Power down your weapons and leave the system immediately.”
--Good, good--
--LOVE the name--
--Constructive criticism: Next time be less formal--
--You want to come off as a bit of a loose cannon, you know?--
--Like you could be dangerous if pressed--
--But that was good--
--Great progress since last time--
Cab always spoke quickly, but even so he was cut off by the bounty hunter’s reply: a swarm of missiles from each rocket ship, so many it took a full three seconds to fire them all. They streamed towards me like a school of hungry fish.
--Wow, that’s a lot of missiles--
--One, two, three, four…--
--One point two million of them!--
“Will I survive getting hit with those?” The pressure was building inside my head.
--Probably?--
--It won’t be pleasant--
--They’re just Larsson twenty-two’s, but like I said, there’s one point two million of them--
--Real efficient delivery system, I’d love to get a look at it sometime--
--Anyway, you’ll be fine--
--Probably…--
“An ellipsis?” My stomach rolled. “I’m gonna die!”
--No, you’re not--
--But do something--
--Impact in seven seconds--
The myth is that when your system is flooded with adrenaline, time stands still and you become a Superman, a Take Charge Fella who can Get Things Done. This is horseshit. We might remember it that way after the fact, but the truth is that in hard moments a person has a fifty-fifty chance of playing the hero or acting the fool, same as always. Adrenaline just makes you wait longer to find out how your day is going.
Thankfully, my day was skewing in the former direction. I pressed as hard as I could on the engines and screamed towards the bounty hunters, past the encroaching ordnance. The missiles turned to meet me, and I increased speed to stay ahead of them.
“Okey dokey, fast, fast, fast,” I gibbered. Cab is a convenient excuse, but the truth is I would have been talking to myself even if he hadn’t been there. Then again, if he hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have been there at all, but c’est la vie for you.
Cab’s alarm wavered in the margins of my awareness, nearly lost in my terror.
--You’re closing the distance, Gregory--
--You’re taking us closer to the scary missiles Greg WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHAT THE SHIT--
Space, I’ve mentioned, plays hell with your sense of distance. That said I’m pretty sure I cleared the lead missile by less than five feet. Or maybe it was a mile. Who knows? I hunched my shoulders against the inevitable explosion as the waves crashed against each other.
Except that didn’t happen. The twin rivers of rockets streamed over and under and in between each other with nary a collision, not even a dinged fin. I swore desperately and pressed harder on the engines. If I wasn’t more careful, I was going to land myself an ignoble early death.
--Ok, I see what you were trying--
--Good thought--
--Impact in fourteen seconds--
--What’s next?--
The spherical ships in the rear broke formation and angled towards me.
--Don’t fly between the marbles!--
I pulled up and somersaulted over the band of distorted space just as lightning shot between the two ships, lightning with a jet-black core that bled red light. My foot caught in the corona and went numb, and about a hundred thousand missiles vanished into the lightless interior. I yelped, as an afterthought.
--Calm down!--
“What the hell was that?” My foot started to burn numbly.
The lightning disappeared and the spheres raced after me. They didn’t turn, they just reversed direction from one second to the next. Feeling returned to my foot, along with a pain in my bones that I associated with falling into icy water.
--Unstable dimensional portal--
--It’s an old faster-than-light technology, or at least it was supposed to be--
--Never worked, at least not for travel--
--Makes a dandy weapon--
--That feeling is your foot molecules returning from a disparate phase state--
--They were trying to find their way into a parallel universe--
--If you’d flown through that we would have been ripped to shreds--
“Would we survive being ripped to shreds?” I asked. It was meant as a joke, but my voice was too strangled for levity. They were really trying to kill me. Me! They didn’t even know me!
--I dunno--
--Shreds are pretty small--
The dust-buster ships opened fire as one. This group of bounty hunters had great communication skills. My shields lit up ahead of me to either side with wavering, scattering blue light as they repelled what I decided, in my naïveté, to call ‘lasers.’ I felt the heat through the shields. Without them, what would I feel through the hull? Would their weapons cook me alive? How long could my shields hold out?
They were really trying to kill me. And I thought they would kill me, unless I stopped them. So I cut towards the closest ship, accelerated, and then at the last second flipped over and landed feet first on the hull, hard enough to leave a dent. The ship’s surface was covered in turrets, huge mounted guns glowing with energies outside of the visible spectrum, but they couldn’t get a bead on me from this close. The other ship brought its guns to bear, but hesitated. I did not.
The purple beams that flashed out of the cutters on my forearms were cables this time, not threads. They bored through the dust-buster’s underbelly and flashed out into space on the other side, unimpeded and terrible. Great flaming chunks of hull fell away from the dying ship, and gouts of energy erupted out of various weakened points like magma out of a fissure. After a second the lights went out. I let go the triggers and guns shrieked in my mind, more, more.
--An excellent shot, sir--
The missiles fell at me.
--Impact in four seconds, now--
--May I suggest we flee?--
“Wait for it,” I said. I didn’t want to be made a fool again by alien military maneuverability, although I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t easy to stand my ground under an impending hail of explosives.
--Wait for it wait for what you used two seconds saying wait for it hey run move go--
--You know I can feel pain, right?--
I put the proverbial pedal to the metal when I could discern lettering on side of the lead rocket. Larsson, twenty-two M. I have no idea what the M stood for. Missile, maybe. I moved left and felt the tiny tug of acceleration in my core, that minute failing of the inertial dampeners that told me I was moving really fast.
Guns and martial protuberances across the hull made for a complicated, weaving retreat. These structures weren’t very tall, but there were a lot of them, and I had to stay close to the hull, or else the rearmost missiles might have gotten wise to my dastardly plan.
I became aware of a sound behind me, the kettledrum roll of an amateur god, powerful and deep but off-tempo. I can only guess what carried the sound. Ash, maybe, particulate and escaping atmosphere from the impacts behind me. The question could wait. I could feel the concussion on the bottoms of my feet.
Then the ship exploded. I can’t say much about that, because it knocked me senseless. But being in an explosion, surviving an explosion…It’s sad. Awful. There’s a hallucinatory violence to what you see, as if the world is split apart at the seams, shattered by an invading, otherworldly light. One bright spot encompassing everything, and then nothing.
It took me several minutes to notice that I wasn’t dead. Somewhere along my explosion-derived trajectory I whacked into an asteroid, which I found mildly surprising and quite painful.
“Samson! I need you!”
Rell’s voice in my ears. My thoughts tumbled slowly into each other in my head, cotton-candy collisions. I liked Rell, even if he had tricked me into fighting for him. He was a nice guy. Gracious host.
“Samson, are you alive? Answer me, dammit!”
He sounded stressed.
“Samson, I’m about to eat it out here, where the hell are you?”
Oh. Right, I thought. I’m slacking.
“Yah,” I said shakily. I pulled up short and the deceleration made my head hurt. Then again, everything hurt. I rolled my shoulders carefully and took a deep breath.
“Where the hell are you? I need you!”
“Yah,” I said, stronger this time. I checked my shipboard body for damage, but the machines in the back of my head sang to me that I was fine. Ship-shape. I’d been shot, blown up and knocked through an asteroid, and I was fine. Super. The bounty hunters could do what they wanted, there was no contest here. If they fought me, I would kill them, because I was immortal, and they were not. I sped back in the direction from when I came.
Rell was in a shifting orbit around Mars, with the saucers on his tail and the marbles closing fast from the other direction, to cut him off. He made as if to bank and got his wing caught in the edge of Mars’ atmosphere. The increased friction dragged him around, and he fought it, losing momentum. The saucers closed the distance. I held my breath. Could I get off a shot before they greased him? No, the ship murmured, we weren’t in range.
Without warning, Rell reversed thrust and spun himself hard in the direction the ship wanted to go. He fired the engines once and bounced out of orbit, into free fall, and for one perfect instant his main guns were aimed square at the center of one of the saucers. It was barely a hundred miles off, with no room to maneuver, moving slowly for the kill shot, just as Rell had intended. His guns flashed, and the saucer took the shot right on the nose. All he managed to do was to slow the other ship down a half-beat, but it was enough time to get away. He curved to meet me.
--Hell of a pilot--
--Probably why they sent six ships--
I laid my crosshairs on the closer saucer and it flipped in place and shot me with a meter thick laser beam. I had no time to react. Most of the energy boiled off of my shields, but enough made it through to make me feel like I’d stood too close to a bonfire. Something smelled like burned hair, and I was pretty sure it was me.
Fear and anger leapt through Cab, and the weapons on my shoulders got bigger, unfolded in eye-watering ways and began to draw more energy. Their voices in my head dropped by half an octave.
--I didn’t like that one bit--
--Shoot that motherfucker before he shoots us again--
“Smells like hair,” I coughed. I felt wind on my face, and the shipboard atmosphere cleared.
--You got singed--
--You won’t have to shave your chest for a while--
--Now shoot that motherfucker before he shoots us again--
Another beam clipped the edge of the shield. I felt it on my side like a hot breeze off an Arizona parking lot.
--Evade, you dumb bastard!--
I lined up the cannons and blew a chunk out of the saucer’s edge. Each gun fired two shots, one-two, bam-bam just below the range of my hearing. The saucer was knocked in a full circle, while molten metal and solidifying energy sprayed from the wound like blood from an artery. The ship shuddered once, spun out of control and exploded. My jaw tightened. There was a funny pressure on my temples.
Rell got behind me. The three remaining ships regrouped above Mars’ atmosphere. I turned on the comms.
“This is Captain Samson,” I said, and the desperation in my voice was no affectation. “You’ve got to stop. Power down your weapons and you will be allowed to leave Solar space unharmed.”
Instead, they charged. The saucer was above and behind the marbles, and I could feel the central point of its aim just below my throat. I put four rounds in the center of the marble on the left, and it popped like a ceramic balloon. The other one turned without pause and accelerated madly out of sight. The saucer stopped, considered, and disappeared into warp.
Four ships. How many people?
“Scan for life signs,” I said.
--Captain?--
“Scan the ship that’s still intact for life signs,” I said.
It took him a quarter second.
--There’s nothing there--
“How many dead?”
--One hundred and twenty-eight--
Ceres was a single bright point in the distance. I took a deep breath and held it, then let it out. Then in. When you die, the last thing you do is exhale. Each breath in is proof of life. I breathed in, and out, and in again. I got to breathe in. And they didn’t. I’d taken away that privilege. Or was it a right? My heart burned and twisted in me.
“Do you feel that,” I asked quietly. “We did that. We killed those people.”
--Yeah, that was the idea--
--What’s the problem?--
“All right, Samson!” Rell roared in my ear. “You’re a force to be reckoned with, little man. Worth every penny. Come aboard and we’ll have a drink.”
Cab considered me curiously.
--You ok?--
--What’s up?--
He knew exactly how many people we’d killed, and he didn’t feel bad. He wasn’t happy to have done it, but he didn’t feel bad. I didn’t understand, yet. I was terrified of what his calm could mean. There hadn’t been any danger, not to us. We couldn’t be killed. We could only do the killing.
“Rell, my friend,” I said, “I think we’ll have several.”
--Tell all the pikers ooon tha hill, that I’ll beee back ah-gaaain!--
Cab’s voice in my head was the barrel-chested baritone of an undergraduate fraternity brother. I could almost hear the beard and the beer.
--Tell them how I was buuuus-ted, for lapping up the high high baaaalll--
--We’ll all have drinks at Theo-dore Zinck’s, when I get back next faaaaaaaaaaaaallllll!--
“What the hell is wrong with you,” I muttered.
--Didn’t you go to Cornell?--
“I don’t think they sing that one anymore,” I said.
--Sure they do--
--I could do Harvard--
The bounty hunters orbited Ceres once, looking for Rell. I don’t know where he hid himself in all of that nothing, but he managed somehow.
Cab wriggled in the back of my head. I could hear him chittering to himself.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
--Aren’t you?--
“No.” I kicked off the asteroid and soared towards Ceres.
--Not even a little bit?--
--I can’t wait to see these cannons in action--
I thought of Agent Frewdin, stone-faced behind his desk, telling me to stay on Earth in case Cab and I weren’t prepared for the galaxy at large. I thought about the galaxy’s first sentient computer sharing mental space with an inexperienced man everyone considered to be a child. I thought about how scared I was, and I thought about hitting a man so hard that he died. I didn’t have to do it this way.
“Scan for life signs,” I said.
--What?--
“Scan for life signs,” I said. “Who are these people?”
--What do you think this is, Star Trek?--
“Cab!”
The bounty hunters regrouped on Ceres’ facing side. My crosshairs played over their surfaces, and I could feel the minimal point in my mind that would fire the guns, if I concentrated even a little.
--It’s like the United Planets of Benetton over there--
--A triumphal moment in diversity politics--
--It’s a bunch of different species, man, what do you want from me, an average number of limbs?--
“How many of them are there?” I flew slow, watching. They had to know I was here, I was supposed to show up on ship’s sensors like a Christmas tree.
--Seventeen limbs, on average--
“Cab, how many people are on those ships?”
--Do you really want to know?--
“Do you know?” I asked.
--Of course--
“Then tell me.”
--There are one hundred and ninety one people aboard those ships, in total--
--And something that might be a housecat--
--Except it appears to be mostly made of argon--
--They’re hip to your jive, cap’n--
--If you’re gonna drop the hammer you better drop it now while you still got the drop to drop--
--I have no idea what I just said--
--Was it at all clear in context?--
There was always another way. If I was going to do this, I had to try to do it right. Nobody had to die.
“Ok,” I said. I cleared my throat and opened a channel with a thought.
--Killjoy--
“This is Captain Gregory Samson of the good ship Cab Calloway,” I said. My voice was low, slow, gravelly and appropriate. I smiled grimly and pushed my luck. “You are trespassing in Solar space. Power down your weapons and leave the system immediately.”
--Good, good--
--LOVE the name--
--Constructive criticism: Next time be less formal--
--You want to come off as a bit of a loose cannon, you know?--
--Like you could be dangerous if pressed--
--But that was good--
--Great progress since last time--
Cab always spoke quickly, but even so he was cut off by the bounty hunter’s reply: a swarm of missiles from each rocket ship, so many it took a full three seconds to fire them all. They streamed towards me like a school of hungry fish.
--Wow, that’s a lot of missiles--
--One, two, three, four…--
--One point two million of them!--
“Will I survive getting hit with those?” The pressure was building inside my head.
--Probably?--
--It won’t be pleasant--
--They’re just Larsson twenty-two’s, but like I said, there’s one point two million of them--
--Real efficient delivery system, I’d love to get a look at it sometime--
--Anyway, you’ll be fine--
--Probably…--
“An ellipsis?” My stomach rolled. “I’m gonna die!”
--No, you’re not--
--But do something--
--Impact in seven seconds--
The myth is that when your system is flooded with adrenaline, time stands still and you become a Superman, a Take Charge Fella who can Get Things Done. This is horseshit. We might remember it that way after the fact, but the truth is that in hard moments a person has a fifty-fifty chance of playing the hero or acting the fool, same as always. Adrenaline just makes you wait longer to find out how your day is going.
Thankfully, my day was skewing in the former direction. I pressed as hard as I could on the engines and screamed towards the bounty hunters, past the encroaching ordnance. The missiles turned to meet me, and I increased speed to stay ahead of them.
“Okey dokey, fast, fast, fast,” I gibbered. Cab is a convenient excuse, but the truth is I would have been talking to myself even if he hadn’t been there. Then again, if he hadn’t been there I wouldn’t have been there at all, but c’est la vie for you.
Cab’s alarm wavered in the margins of my awareness, nearly lost in my terror.
--You’re closing the distance, Gregory--
--You’re taking us closer to the scary missiles Greg WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHAT THE SHIT--
Space, I’ve mentioned, plays hell with your sense of distance. That said I’m pretty sure I cleared the lead missile by less than five feet. Or maybe it was a mile. Who knows? I hunched my shoulders against the inevitable explosion as the waves crashed against each other.
Except that didn’t happen. The twin rivers of rockets streamed over and under and in between each other with nary a collision, not even a dinged fin. I swore desperately and pressed harder on the engines. If I wasn’t more careful, I was going to land myself an ignoble early death.
--Ok, I see what you were trying--
--Good thought--
--Impact in fourteen seconds--
--What’s next?--
The spherical ships in the rear broke formation and angled towards me.
--Don’t fly between the marbles!--
I pulled up and somersaulted over the band of distorted space just as lightning shot between the two ships, lightning with a jet-black core that bled red light. My foot caught in the corona and went numb, and about a hundred thousand missiles vanished into the lightless interior. I yelped, as an afterthought.
--Calm down!--
“What the hell was that?” My foot started to burn numbly.
The lightning disappeared and the spheres raced after me. They didn’t turn, they just reversed direction from one second to the next. Feeling returned to my foot, along with a pain in my bones that I associated with falling into icy water.
--Unstable dimensional portal--
--It’s an old faster-than-light technology, or at least it was supposed to be--
--Never worked, at least not for travel--
--Makes a dandy weapon--
--That feeling is your foot molecules returning from a disparate phase state--
--They were trying to find their way into a parallel universe--
--If you’d flown through that we would have been ripped to shreds--
“Would we survive being ripped to shreds?” I asked. It was meant as a joke, but my voice was too strangled for levity. They were really trying to kill me. Me! They didn’t even know me!
--I dunno--
--Shreds are pretty small--
The dust-buster ships opened fire as one. This group of bounty hunters had great communication skills. My shields lit up ahead of me to either side with wavering, scattering blue light as they repelled what I decided, in my naïveté, to call ‘lasers.’ I felt the heat through the shields. Without them, what would I feel through the hull? Would their weapons cook me alive? How long could my shields hold out?
They were really trying to kill me. And I thought they would kill me, unless I stopped them. So I cut towards the closest ship, accelerated, and then at the last second flipped over and landed feet first on the hull, hard enough to leave a dent. The ship’s surface was covered in turrets, huge mounted guns glowing with energies outside of the visible spectrum, but they couldn’t get a bead on me from this close. The other ship brought its guns to bear, but hesitated. I did not.
The purple beams that flashed out of the cutters on my forearms were cables this time, not threads. They bored through the dust-buster’s underbelly and flashed out into space on the other side, unimpeded and terrible. Great flaming chunks of hull fell away from the dying ship, and gouts of energy erupted out of various weakened points like magma out of a fissure. After a second the lights went out. I let go the triggers and guns shrieked in my mind, more, more.
--An excellent shot, sir--
The missiles fell at me.
--Impact in four seconds, now--
--May I suggest we flee?--
“Wait for it,” I said. I didn’t want to be made a fool again by alien military maneuverability, although I’ll be the first to admit that it wasn’t easy to stand my ground under an impending hail of explosives.
--Wait for it wait for what you used two seconds saying wait for it hey run move go--
--You know I can feel pain, right?--
I put the proverbial pedal to the metal when I could discern lettering on side of the lead rocket. Larsson, twenty-two M. I have no idea what the M stood for. Missile, maybe. I moved left and felt the tiny tug of acceleration in my core, that minute failing of the inertial dampeners that told me I was moving really fast.
Guns and martial protuberances across the hull made for a complicated, weaving retreat. These structures weren’t very tall, but there were a lot of them, and I had to stay close to the hull, or else the rearmost missiles might have gotten wise to my dastardly plan.
I became aware of a sound behind me, the kettledrum roll of an amateur god, powerful and deep but off-tempo. I can only guess what carried the sound. Ash, maybe, particulate and escaping atmosphere from the impacts behind me. The question could wait. I could feel the concussion on the bottoms of my feet.
Then the ship exploded. I can’t say much about that, because it knocked me senseless. But being in an explosion, surviving an explosion…It’s sad. Awful. There’s a hallucinatory violence to what you see, as if the world is split apart at the seams, shattered by an invading, otherworldly light. One bright spot encompassing everything, and then nothing.
It took me several minutes to notice that I wasn’t dead. Somewhere along my explosion-derived trajectory I whacked into an asteroid, which I found mildly surprising and quite painful.
“Samson! I need you!”
Rell’s voice in my ears. My thoughts tumbled slowly into each other in my head, cotton-candy collisions. I liked Rell, even if he had tricked me into fighting for him. He was a nice guy. Gracious host.
“Samson, are you alive? Answer me, dammit!”
He sounded stressed.
“Samson, I’m about to eat it out here, where the hell are you?”
Oh. Right, I thought. I’m slacking.
“Yah,” I said shakily. I pulled up short and the deceleration made my head hurt. Then again, everything hurt. I rolled my shoulders carefully and took a deep breath.
“Where the hell are you? I need you!”
“Yah,” I said, stronger this time. I checked my shipboard body for damage, but the machines in the back of my head sang to me that I was fine. Ship-shape. I’d been shot, blown up and knocked through an asteroid, and I was fine. Super. The bounty hunters could do what they wanted, there was no contest here. If they fought me, I would kill them, because I was immortal, and they were not. I sped back in the direction from when I came.
Rell was in a shifting orbit around Mars, with the saucers on his tail and the marbles closing fast from the other direction, to cut him off. He made as if to bank and got his wing caught in the edge of Mars’ atmosphere. The increased friction dragged him around, and he fought it, losing momentum. The saucers closed the distance. I held my breath. Could I get off a shot before they greased him? No, the ship murmured, we weren’t in range.
Without warning, Rell reversed thrust and spun himself hard in the direction the ship wanted to go. He fired the engines once and bounced out of orbit, into free fall, and for one perfect instant his main guns were aimed square at the center of one of the saucers. It was barely a hundred miles off, with no room to maneuver, moving slowly for the kill shot, just as Rell had intended. His guns flashed, and the saucer took the shot right on the nose. All he managed to do was to slow the other ship down a half-beat, but it was enough time to get away. He curved to meet me.
--Hell of a pilot--
--Probably why they sent six ships--
I laid my crosshairs on the closer saucer and it flipped in place and shot me with a meter thick laser beam. I had no time to react. Most of the energy boiled off of my shields, but enough made it through to make me feel like I’d stood too close to a bonfire. Something smelled like burned hair, and I was pretty sure it was me.
Fear and anger leapt through Cab, and the weapons on my shoulders got bigger, unfolded in eye-watering ways and began to draw more energy. Their voices in my head dropped by half an octave.
--I didn’t like that one bit--
--Shoot that motherfucker before he shoots us again--
“Smells like hair,” I coughed. I felt wind on my face, and the shipboard atmosphere cleared.
--You got singed--
--You won’t have to shave your chest for a while--
--Now shoot that motherfucker before he shoots us again--
Another beam clipped the edge of the shield. I felt it on my side like a hot breeze off an Arizona parking lot.
--Evade, you dumb bastard!--
I lined up the cannons and blew a chunk out of the saucer’s edge. Each gun fired two shots, one-two, bam-bam just below the range of my hearing. The saucer was knocked in a full circle, while molten metal and solidifying energy sprayed from the wound like blood from an artery. The ship shuddered once, spun out of control and exploded. My jaw tightened. There was a funny pressure on my temples.
Rell got behind me. The three remaining ships regrouped above Mars’ atmosphere. I turned on the comms.
“This is Captain Samson,” I said, and the desperation in my voice was no affectation. “You’ve got to stop. Power down your weapons and you will be allowed to leave Solar space unharmed.”
Instead, they charged. The saucer was above and behind the marbles, and I could feel the central point of its aim just below my throat. I put four rounds in the center of the marble on the left, and it popped like a ceramic balloon. The other one turned without pause and accelerated madly out of sight. The saucer stopped, considered, and disappeared into warp.
Four ships. How many people?
“Scan for life signs,” I said.
--Captain?--
“Scan the ship that’s still intact for life signs,” I said.
It took him a quarter second.
--There’s nothing there--
“How many dead?”
--One hundred and twenty-eight--
Ceres was a single bright point in the distance. I took a deep breath and held it, then let it out. Then in. When you die, the last thing you do is exhale. Each breath in is proof of life. I breathed in, and out, and in again. I got to breathe in. And they didn’t. I’d taken away that privilege. Or was it a right? My heart burned and twisted in me.
“Do you feel that,” I asked quietly. “We did that. We killed those people.”
--Yeah, that was the idea--
--What’s the problem?--
“All right, Samson!” Rell roared in my ear. “You’re a force to be reckoned with, little man. Worth every penny. Come aboard and we’ll have a drink.”
Cab considered me curiously.
--You ok?--
--What’s up?--
He knew exactly how many people we’d killed, and he didn’t feel bad. He wasn’t happy to have done it, but he didn’t feel bad. I didn’t understand, yet. I was terrified of what his calm could mean. There hadn’t been any danger, not to us. We couldn’t be killed. We could only do the killing.
“Rell, my friend,” I said, “I think we’ll have several.”
All content ©2014-2017 Benjamin Mumford-Zisk
Even the silver.
Don't steal anything.
Even the silver.
Don't steal anything.