We All Died at Breakaway Station (13 page)

It was dim in the cabin, light came from a lamp that sat on a distant table, and the lamp was turned down to its minimum, but even then Hybeck could see the form of the girl who lay sleeping beside him, naked and lovely in the dimness, everything that he had ever wanted in a mistress. Naha Hengelo was quite a girl. How could he have ever thought of her as puritanical? She was anything but that, once she lowered her distant and reserved mask.

Hybeck lay back on the bed beside her, supporting his head with his hand, his elbow sinking deep into the softness of the pillows, smiling to himself in the darkness. In his other hand he held a cigar, its glowing tip moving through the air, making abstract patterns that vanished as quickly as they came.

Under him, through the bed and the bulkheads and deck came the throbbing of the ship, quieter even than Naha’s breathing, but still perceptible. Air circulated through the ship, temperatures remained constant, atomic engines fired shattered nuclei into the blackness, and the pseudospeed generators hummed in their strange way, flickering the starship into and out of reality. Hybeck could feel the microjumps if he thought about it, but by now he had grown used to it again, and rarely thought about it unless the ship was just going into or out of star drive.

What he had begun to think about now was what was behind them. God, what a fight that was! Something to tell his grandchildren about, if he lived that long. That was a space battle to go into the history tapes‌—‌people’d be talking about it for a long, long time‌—‌if the three human starships that had survived the battle ever got back to tell their story.

Three ships! Hybeck reminded himself of that. Three out of twelve. One fourth. That’s all that survived. The
San Juan
, the
Hastings
and the
Chicago
. The others were gone now, just floating wreckage. But the Jillies had lost a fleet too, damn them! Ten or eleven ships had been destroyed or disabled, and that made Hybeck feel a little better about it all. The Jillies had suffered just as badly as the humans, and they might think a little bit before they hit Mothershed again.

The admiral didn’t
seem
to think they were being followed. At least nothing had showed up on the scopes, but the FTL detection was a tricky and undependable thing. It just might be that Jillie ships were trailing them, but with any kind of luck at all, the humans could stay ahead of them all the way back to Adrianopolis‌—‌though that was a hell of a long way off. Weeks away even at top speed.

Still, Hybeck wasn’t too worried. There was no point in worrying anyway. The
San Juan
wasn’t hurt that badly. She was still in very good shape, considering what she’d been through.

And Lieutenant Commander Kamani Hybeck had something more pleasant to think about right now anyway. Lieutenant Naha Hengelo.

Dropping the cigar into the asheater beside the bed, he rolled back over, placed his hand upon her flat stomach, held it there for a moment, then slowly crept upward toward the great fullness of her breasts.

Naha stirred uneasily for a moment, then nestled closer to him, sighing. “Hy?”

“Yes?” he said softly in the near-darkness. “Do you love me?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“Yes.”

Her hand found his and held it close to her breast.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I really don’t know for sure.”

“You are being honest, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m glad. I wouldn’t want you to lie.”

“Why?”

“I just wouldn’t. Not now, anyway.”

“Why not now?”

Naha was silent for a long while before she spoke again. “Hy, do you really think we’ll make it back?”

“Why not?”

“It was bad back there. The Jillies very nearly got us.”

“But they didn’t,” he said firmly.

“What if they come again?”

“They won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” he said.

“You don’t know. You just hope they won’t. Are you being honest now?”

“I’m trying to be.”

“I’m scared, Hy. I don’t want to die.”

“We’ll make it back to Adrianopolis. We’ve got to.”

“I know.”

Then she was silent, letting Hybeck’s hands rove across her body.

“Hy,” she said after a while, “I want to spend all my free time with you until we get back.”

Hybeck smiled to himself and pulled her closer to him if that was possible. “I’d like that.”

“I hoped you would.”

She turned her head around so that he could kiss her, and when he did he tasted a saltiness on her cheeks. She had been crying. He wondered why, and then told himself that she was a woman, and women were like that.

“Hy, I want you to make love to me again,” she said so softly that he could barely hear her.

And he did, though while he did the thrumming of the ship sounded less smooth to him than it had before, and he wondered why.

Three and a half hours after his conversation with Captain Bracer, General Crowinsky contacted CDC HQ on Earth. He patched Bracer into that circuit‌—‌and fifteen minutes after that, Absolom Bracer had gained the permission he had requested. The ships would stay‌—‌and Earth would send relief as quickly as she could. Perhaps in less than five weeks, perhaps only four.

Only four!

What was the reaction of the other officers and the crews of the starships when Captain Bracer made the announcement that they would remain at Breakaway Station until the relief ships arrived from Earth? That would be hard to describe. There were too many individual reactions, too many personal feelings, thoughts, hopes, fears, horrors, memories. No one wanted to
stay,
and as Absolom Bracer had asked himself so often, “Haven’t we done enough?”

In any war before, they would have, most of them realized. But this was like no war that mankind had ever fought before. In this war there was no surrender, no possibility of settlement, for the Jillies would accept no settlement on any human terms. There were only two alternatives: victory or death. It was that simple. If mankind lost this war, mankind would cease to exist, every last soul. No, they knew the answer to their question, most of them. As long as the Jillies stood a chance of winning, no man had done enough if he was still capable of doing more.

They would stay. And they would fight, if it came to that. Most of them.

There were some, though, who would not or could not accept it. One painful death was enough for any man, they said. No one had the right to ask for two, not for any reason in the universe.

And what were the reasons, when you boiled it down to that? To aid Breakaway Station in case of attack. Aid how? they asked. We can stand up here, the three of us, two crippled warships and a hospital ship, and pretend to put up a fight. We might even kill a Jillie or two
if
we’re lucky. But there’s no “might” to what they’d do to us! They’d slaughter us like cattle, and
then
go on to destroy Breakaway Station. Oh, we might delay them for a while, but what damned good is that going to do Breakaway or us? It’s just plain and simple suicide, and no sane man is asking that of us.

But what could they do?

The ball of thermonuclear flame above the mountains was tremendous, swelling and rippling, searing the dwarfed trees and brown grasses, roasting alive the goats and corbeasts. Then it slowly, very slowly lowered through the air and began to dim, to die.

Most of this Commander Glenn, Guardian Culhaven could not see, for the tanks of his patrol ship, the
Messala Corvinus
, assigned to temporary duty on Cynthia, had darkened until they showed hardly more than the fireball itself against a sea of blackness. The peaks of the mountains were faintly visible, glowing now as they melted and flowed under the star-hot temperatures. Still, Glenn did not stare long at the holocaust that moments before had been a Jillie warship. It had not been the only one in the sky.

At his command, the
Corvinus
angled up above the fireball, climbing toward the limits of Cynthia’s atmosphere, following his squadron as they chased the Jillies who had begun pulling back, upward and outward away from the planet. They had broken through the human defenses once again and fired a few missiles and energy beams and destroyed a little more of the planet, and they were satisfied‌—‌if Jillies felt satisfaction‌—‌and they could retreat now.

The LPS
Corvinus
and her companions chased the two surviving Jillie warships up out of the atmosphere and as far as a thousand kilometers out. There the Outer Patrol would take over the chase, having rallied now from the initial attack that allowed the Jillies into the planet in the first place, and the patrol ships assigned to Cynthia’s atmosphere fell back toward the planet.

Now that it was over and he was still alive, Glenn, Guardian Culhaven shook with barely controllable fear. The fear had been there all along, though now it showed in the shaking of his hands as he stood on the bridge of his patrol ship, staring with sightless eyes at the tri-B tanks. I’m a coward, he told himself. I’m a worthless, Goddamned coward. I don’t even have the guts to…

And he remembered Anjenet back on Adrianopolis, living within the great hall of Culhaven with half a dozen servants and her sister Tisha, now with a full marriage contract and Glenn’s child growing within her, telling him that for the first time in her life she was happy, really Happy. And he knew that he could no longer allow himself to be a coward. He was a Culhaven and he would soon be a father. And no Culhaven was a coward. None that he’d ever heard of.

Forcing his eyes to see again, Glenn focused them on the tanks before him where Cynthia was swelling, a blue, brown and white ball, beautifully banded with clouds, not an unpleasant planet when you took it all in all, though it was hardly an Adrianopolis. Still, Glenn found himself thinking, perhaps a bit irrationally, when the war is over a man could buy a few hundred square kilometers near the Breshov and start himself a ranch. A ranch would be a good place to raise children; and Anjenet‌—‌the
new
Anjenet, not the one who had stripped herself naked in the Assembly on a dare‌—‌cared more about children than the social life of Holmdel. Yes, a man could find himself a good life on Cynthia, once the war was over‌—‌if he lived through it.

“Shall we return to base now, sir?” asked Glenn’s first officer, a man only slightly younger than himself.

“What’s that?” Glenn asked, having hardly heard the man. “We’ve been relieved, sir,” the first officer replied.

“Oh,” Glenn said. Then, for no reason that he could have explained, he said, “No, Mr. Englewood. The Jillies lobbed a missile into one of the Tribal villages in the plain near the Breshov. We’ll go back and look for survivors.”

“Yes, sir, but‌—‌” Englewood said hesitantly. “But what?” Glenn asked.

“Well, sir, the local Civil Rescue has probably already sent aircars and ambulances in.”

“Yes, I’m sure they have,” Glenn said, almost absently. “I’ll see that we don’t interfere, and perhaps we can be of some assistance to them.”

“Yes, sir,” Englewood said doubtfully, and began to give the orders that would return the ship to near the spot where the first nuclear missile had scorched the Cynthian plains.

The Jillie missile had exploded fairly high in the atmosphere and ground zero had been some distance from the village itself. Most of the buildings still stood, though roofs had been tom off and windows shattered, and the western side of every building was a scorched blackness. Apparently there was nothing living in the village, for the Cynthian Civil Rescue squads had made a run through it in their lead-shielded ambulances, looking for survivors, and had gone on to another village, several kilometers farther from the place where the fireball came closest to the planet’s surface. The Civil Rescue men had not stopped to pick up the bodies of the villagers who lay in the park before the village’s largest building; there would be time enough to do that after the radiation cooled off some and the isotopes were given a little time to decay.

The
Corvinus
hung silently above the village on grav beams, and her commander peered down at the village through the ship’s tri-D tanks. And as he did, he felt something very strange stirring within him, though he could not have told anyone what it was had he even wished.

“Bring her down over there,” he said suddenly to his first officer. “Sir?” the startled Englewood asked.

“I said land the ship over there.”

“Yes, sir,” Englewood said, still not quite understanding, but doing as he was told.

“You’ll be in charge,” Glenn went on once Englewood had relayed orders to the crew. “I’ll be going ashore for a few minutes.”

“Yes, sir,” the first officer said, his face blank.

“Allow no one else to leave the ship,” he went on, “and, ah, notify the base where we are and that I am checking for survivors. We should be back there by‌—‌” he glanced at his watch, “‌—‌fourteen thirty.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The bridge is yours, Mr. Englewood.”

The unfamiliar spacesuit was awkward and uncomfortable, but it was protection against the hard radiation that still filled the unfortunate village. He could endure the discomfort of the suit for a few minutes, he told himself, if he wanted to see things that badly.

As he cycled out of the air lock and stepped down the ramp to the dry, dusty earth of the Tribal village, Glenn asked himself why he wanted to see this place. And he could hardly give himself an answer. He just knew that, whatever the reason was, he had to see.

The dust stirred under his feet as he clumsily walked away from the ship, the weight of the spacesuit greater than he had thought it would be. He had never walked with one on for any distance under nearly a full gravity, and Cynthia’s rating was .94 EG.

It was not far to where the bodies lay, two hundred meters or so, just outside of the building that Glenn assumed was the Tribal meditation hall, and even before he neared them he could see that they were not going to be pleasant sights.