“We’re connecting to the ComSat,” Deke said, and this time it was clear he’d overcome his mad and was talking to the two of us. “You got anything you want to say, Colonel?”
The glare he gave me could have peeled paint, but it was nowhere near as threatening as the talons.
“Hit record,” I told him. He tapped a control and motioned invitingly to me. “Munroe,” I said, “this is Alvarez. We have a problem. The colony at Hudson Bay has been wiped out, and from the testimony of one of the survivors, it’s a good bet it was done by the Unity. We need the Ellen out here to pick us up and start running patrols to figure out where they are and where they’re heading. Their drive works kind of like the one on the Ellen, which means they’ll likely be heading for…”
I froze in mid-sentence and turned to Deke, making a throat-slashing gesture.
“It’s paused,” he said. “What is it?”
“Bring up a star map.”
His scowl showed exactly what he thought about me giving him orders, but he did it anyway. I shook my head impatiently as a Transition Line diagram came up.
“No, a map of real space. Straight-line distances.”
The scowl softened into a thoughtful frown, and Deke scrolled through a menu before trying again. The image shifted, and so did the positions of the populated systems. Transition Lines didn’t follow the normal curve of spacetime, and while a physicist might have been able to explain the way the gravito-inertial lines of force they did follow related to real space, I couldn’t. At least, I couldn’t since I’d lost my connection to the Network. But even I could see the straight-line distance between the Hudson Bay and the nearest habitable system.
Hausos.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Vicky hissed.
“Get me back on,” I told Deke, and this time he didn’t question it, just un-paused the recording.
“Get the Ellen out to Hausos as quick as she can go. We think the Unity is heading there. Cram every fucking Drop Trooper, Force Recon Marine, and mercenary soldier you can into her, along with every heavy weapon you have. If we don’t stop them here, they’ll roll up every single inhabited system and wipe out what’s left of the human race.” I had to pause because I’d run out of breath, the reality of what I’d told them hitting me all at once. Forcing myself to pause and calm down, I tried again. “Don’t bother sending anything that can’t fit in the Ellen, because it would take a couple weeks to arrive and this is all going to be over long before that. Keep everything else there, pull your cruiser and all your other warships back to Demeter. And pray.”
I nodded to Deke and he stopped the recording. He shook his head as if he had to compose himself before he hit the control to send the message, as if the contents wouldn’t be real until he did. We all waited until the return signal came from the ComSat, the cheerful ping telling us that the transmission had been sent through to the next jumpgate, the next relay, before anyone looked away from the panel.
And found Luke staring at us, his face pale, eyes wide.
“Is that really what’s going to happen?” he asked, a quaver making its way through his attempt to keep his voice steady. “Those… bug things are going to kill everyone?”
No one wanted to answer him at first, but another thought struck me, an idea that I’d heard long before the Marines, all the way back to my first group home. There’d been a teacher there, one of the few people who’d actually shown real interest in making my life better. Mrs. Calhoun. She hadn’t been enough, hadn’t been there when classes got out and the bullying started, but she’d given me a good piece of advice once.
If you have one problem, you have to solve it. If you have two problems, sometimes they can solve each other.
Jim, I said, please tell me that when you communed with Illyana, before you split yourself off, that you got some information first.
She was quite insistent that I not share that data with you or anyone else, Jim said.
Jim, you either share this with me or I’ll go back to Demeter and have you ripped out of my fucking head, and I don’t care if it lobotomizes me.
The AI sighed.
Very well.
And I knew. He didn’t have to tell me, I just knew.
“Not if we can help it,” I answered Luke’s question. “Deke, get this boat ready for Transition.”
He shot me a vexed glare.
“You know we can’t jump back to the wormhole. It works the same on this side as it did on the other.”
“We’re not going back to Hausos,” I told him. “Not yet. The Ellen by herself isn’t going to be enough. We have to get help.”
“And who the hell is going to help us?” Deke demanded. “There’s nobody out there! There’s nothing else left!”
“There’s the biggest fleet in the entire Cluster left,” I corrected him. “And we’re going to go get it.”
“How the hell did you find this place?” Deke asked, shaking his head.
I didn’t answer right away because I figured the question was rhetorical, and because this was the tenth time he’d asked it in the last three days.
“It’s pretty,” Luke said, floating behind us, one hand anchored on the back of Vicky’s chair as he stared at the fearsome purple visage of the gas giant in the cockpit viewscreen.
“You need to strap in,” Vicky scolded him. “What if we have to maneuver?”
“But it’s fun!” the kid protested. He’d taken to space travel and free fall like a natural and hadn’t even minded sleeping on a fold-down cot in the utility bay. I thought maybe the strangeness of the whole thing had been good for keeping his mind off his family. “Is this really the place where you met the machine lady?”
“Cyborg,” I corrected him. “And yes, it is.”
“I still haven’t got a good answer as to how you managed to find this place the first try,” Deke said insistently. “I had it narrowed down to four different possible systems, and the odds you’d pick the right one on the first try…”
“Four to one?” I guessed, offering him a grin. “That’s not that bad odds, is it?”
“You wouldn’t guess,” Deke said, utterly confident. “Not about something like this.”
