His ship amounted to two missiles, minus the warheads he’d detached from them. To the missiles, he’d welded several damage control vehicles. Those he had cut apart and re-welded, gutting some to make room for a medical unit, supplies, computers, radar equipment and the like. What his ship amounted to was a seat and toilet for him and a medical rack for Omi, who would remain in his Suspend condition. Unfortunately, Suspend wasn’t cryogenic sleep. It was meant for temporary suspension of cell death until a doctor could repair massive bodily damage. The longest anyone dosed with Suspend had been kept under and brought back to normal was three months. Marten figured his trip would take at least a year, and that would merely bring them to far Earth orbit. From there…
He refused to think about then. One problem at a time was all he could deal with. A year sitting in one spot—He blanked that out too. Survival, the refusal to quit was what drove him. Social Unity hadn’t broken him. He wasn’t going to let the Highborn kill him.
The time finally came to get Omi. He used an engine core-lift with detachable controls, normally used to go into the Fusion Drive and repair damage. From outside the beamship he controlled the core-lift, which drove to where they had put Omi. Under Marten’s guidance, the vehicle picked up the motionless Korean and carried him to an outer lock. There the core-lift deposited Omi, who still wore his battlesuit and helmet. The inner lock closed and the outer one opened ten seconds later. Marten couldn’t know it, but Vip had removed the bug that Kang had put on Omi as well as shut off the alarm rigged to him.
After a long wait, Marten picked up Omi and carried him to his ship, which like a lamprey was clamped to the side of the
Bangladesh
. His craft’s airlock took up half the free space of the escape vehicle. Inside the ship, he pried Omi out of the battlesuit and hooked him to the medical unit. The battlesuit he stored in the same locker where he’d put his own. Then he settled into his chair and activated the bombs that he’d put on this particle shield’s struts. They blew, and the busted shield detached and floated from the
Bangladesh
. Marten flipped switches and released his ship’s magnetic locks. He too floated from the beamship.
The mighty
Bangladesh
braked at two-Gs, although such was its velocity that it still moved from the Sun.
Marten used the hydrogen burners he’d taken off several Zero-G Worksuits and welded to his Joe-Magee capsule. Slowly, he moved toward the floating particle shield and then up and over it and then behind it. From there Omi and he were shielded from the
Bangladesh
.
Marten stared at the stars. One year sitting in this seat beside his only friend in the medical unit was how long this was going to take.
“Here goes,” whispered Marten. He fired the first missile, and was slammed back into his chair as the rocket burned and accelerated them.
Marten traveled five hundred kilometers from the
Bangladesh
when the missiles ordered by General Hawthorne slammed into the vast beamship. The missiles had been fired from the missileships that the experimental beamship had been en route to meet—from the flotilla the beamship was to lead to Mars. The nuclear explosions vaporized much of the mighty structure and radiated everything else. More missiles arrived and detonated, chewing up the mass into finer debris.
Marten had fled far enough so that the heat and blast from the explosions had no effect upon him or his ship. The electromagnetic pulse however blew his main controls, prematurely detaching the living quarters from the two missiles. Marten and Omi tumbled end over end as the welded missiles sped in the direction of where Earth would be in a year.
Openmouthed, shocked and uncomprehending Marten stared at the spinning stars. Finally, numbly, he used the hydrogen burners to stop their endless spinning. He wanted to scream, to rave at the injustice and futility of life. Yet he wasn’t vanquished. So he refused to surrender. They still had air and could survive for a long, long time.
In order that he wouldn’t cry and so he didn’t go berserk, he began to sing the songs his mother had taught him in the Sun Works Factory.
A Mighty Fortress is Our God
by an ancient called Martin Luther was the song he remembered best. He sang until his throat went raw, and as a lunatic absorbed in his dull witlessness, he stared at the vast star-field the entire time.
Sometime later Lycon’s intersystem shuttle sniffed through the
Bangladesh
’s
debris, which maintained their velocity and heading. Scanners searched the junk for signs of life.
Lycon had studied the shock trooper transmissions sent from the
Bangladesh
, at least before it had been destroyed. Those who had stormed aboard the beamship had clearly taken losses. Highborn training had given them strict procedures for dead or dying shock troopers. Such individuals were to be injected with Suspend and battlesuited with fully charged tanks and their vents opened to ship air. When the beamship had been destroyed, the air vents would have automatically closed and the battlesuit would have switched to tank-air. Those suits were the best in the Solar System, able to take incredible damage. Lycon’s hope was that a few such premen had survived the nuclear explosions. He needed live shock troopers as examples of the success of his idea.
A day’s search garnered exactly nothing.
To go home empty-handed meant at the very best that he would become a trainer of the Neutraloids. Lycon loathed the idea. “Increase the range of our circuits,” he ordered.
“At once,” said the training marshal acting as pilot.
They searched a second day and then a third. On the fourth day, the pilot turned to Lycon.
“I’m picking up a distress call.”
Lycon lurched to the com-board.
“I can’t make anything out of it,” said the pilot.
“Go there,” said Lycon.
“Are you certain?”
Lycon laughed harshly. “I grasp at straws because we have nothing else.”
The pilot set course for the weak distress call.
First, Marten saw the braking jets, a bright smear in the darkness of space. Then Marten watched the shuttle visibly grow from a dot to that of a discernable spacecraft.
A beard covered his face and his muscles had already grown slack. He couldn’t describe his emotion. Birth was indescribable. To float alone in space, drifting, hopeless, rethinking conversations and actions repeatedly, it was a hellish experience. He shuddered and made a sound that many do after crying for a long, long time. He would walk again, talk to people, eat, think, and have plans, hopes and dreams, and fight.
He tried to concentrate. Training Master Lycon came. Lycon was Highborn. The last time they had spoken Lycon had been unhappy with him. Marten couldn’t marshal his thoughts. Instead, he wiped tears from his cheeks. Oh how he wanted to live.
“But not on their terms,” he croaked.
He sipped water from his bottle and shook his head. The stirrings of hatred returned. To be born afresh, that’s what he experienced. Life! What an incredible word it was. What a gift to breathe, play, eat and meet women. Life!
“Hurry up,” he whispered, his heart beginning to race.
The shuttle eased beside the tiny life-pod, dwarfing it, belittling its crudeness. An emergency tube of flexible plastic snaked from the shuttle and glued over the pod’s airlock. Soon air was pumped into the tube. After a time the pod’s hatch slid up and Marten Kluge floated an inert Omi toward the shuttle.
Marten peered at the vastness of space surrounding him. He used the plastic railing attached to the inner tube, pushing Omi and pulling himself. The shuttle airlock opened and Lycon waited at the end, his angular face impassive, but his strange energetic eyes filled with questions and it seemed to Marten traces of wonder.
As Marten pushed Omi to Lycon, the powerful Highborn nodded. Marten nodded back as one would to an equal. They entered the shuttle’s airlock. As the inner hatch opened, Lycon removed his vacc helmet.
“He has a plasma burn on his chest,” Marten told a waiting Highborn, a seven-foot fellow with a medical tag on his shirt. “If you have any medical facilities—”
“We do,” said Lycon.
“Good,” Marten said. He took Omi from Lycon and pushed him to the other Highborn. “Let’s get him hooked in and brought around.”
The two Highborn exchanged glances. “Yes, a good idea,” Lycon said a moment later. Together the three of them floated Omi to the medical center. There the second Highborn took over, stripping Omi of his filthy clothes, tsking at the sight of the ugly plasma burn across his chest and then securing him into the medical cradle. Drugs, blood and special concentrates surged through the attached tubes and for the first time in weeks Omi’s body quivered.
The Highborn checked his medscanner. Then he turned it on Marten, sweeping it over him. To Lycon he said, “He should shower, change into clean clothes and take an injection I’ll prepare.”
Lycon turned to Marten.
“I heard him,” Marten said. “Just point the way.”
Lycon hesitated before pointing toward a hatch.
***
Apparent gravity returned to the shuttle as it accelerated at one-G for Earth. Marten relaxed in a chair, sipping coffee. He wore a clean jumpsuit with the shock trooper skull-patch on his right pectoral and left shoulder. The beard was gone and his hair cut to the short buzz of blond hair. He was thinner, with his cheeks gaunt. His eyes had changed. They were hooded, guarded, wary. It seemed too as if part of him still floated alone in space, as if not all of him had returned to the land of the living.
The exercise room had padded walls and ceiling and several isometric machines. Lycon sat across from Marten. The seven-foot Highborn, with his legs crossed, doodled with a stylus on a portable comp-screen.
A door opened and the Highborn acting as medical officer poked his head in and reported to Lycon. “It looks like it will be a full recovery.”
“When can I talk to him?” asked Marten.
The Highborn scowled, although he said, “Two days, two and a half at the most.”
“Thanks. I appreciate what you’ve done.”
The Highborn lifted his eyebrows before he withdrew, closing the hatch behind him.
“Your experience was no doubt horrifying,” said Lycon. “But you must use correct protocol procedures when addressing us.”
Marten smiled, but more the way a gang leader would to a cop than with any genuine pleasure. “Yes, Highborn,” he said, saluting him with the coffee cup.
Lycon frowned. Then he sat a little straighter and tapped the tip of the stylus on the portable comp-screen. “I’m curious how Omi and you found yourself in such a makeshift escape pod.”
Marten crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. He didn’t stare at the Highborn. Rather, he picked a point on the wall to examine.
“The
Bangladesh
’s
pods had already been jettisoned, Highborn.”
“Yes. But how did you come to make your spacecraft?”
“From an intense desire to leave the beamship, Highborn.”
“You knew that the missiles were coming?”
“To my knowledge, Highborn, the shock troops never fixed the beamship’s radar pods. Yet the enemy missiles did seem like a logical move on Social Unity’s part. Logic then demands one find a way to avoid the missiles.”
“Your craft only has what appear to be hydrogen burners taken off Zero-G Worksuits.”
“The EMP blast from the enemy missiles wreaked havoc on my controls, Highborn. Because of mixed signals the missiles I’d attached to my pod dropped off and rocketed away.”
“Your heading appears to have been toward Venus or Earth.”
“To Earth, Highborn.”
“Shock troop headquarters is on the Sun Works Factory.”
“The Sun is also much hotter there, Highborn. Among other things I feared radiation poisoning.”
“What did the others think about your escape plan?”
“I didn’t ask all of them, Highborn.”
“They didn’t try to stop you?”
“For awhile they did, Highborn. Then they said they wouldn’t try to stop me anymore.”
“What convinced them that what you did was correct?”
“I worked hard to persuade them, Highborn. I can only think they finally fell to the force of my arguments”
“Your answers are evasive, Marten. Why is that?”
“I’m merely stating facts, Highborn.”
Lycon tapped the stylus once again. “Facts as you deem them or the truth?”
“Highborn… You consider me a preman. How am I supposed to discover truth?”
“You
are
a preman, Marten.”
Marten remained silent.
“Ah. You don’t believe that, is that it?”
“I fought in the FEC ranks, Highborn, and was among the first to storm the merculite missile battery in Tokyo. Because of it, I received a medal and entrance into the shock troops. As such, I led the experimental assault upon the
Bangladesh
. We conquered the beamship as ordered, but it was destroyed. Omi and I are the only survivors, at least as far as I know. Given these facts it is difficult for me to think of myself as just a preman.”