Mechanical whirring broke the silence of the space station, sending the men scrambling into position around the nuclear device. Most sought cover and used the sights on their guns to look for any sign of enemy activity. Two men in particular climbed up the processing equipment to get a better vantage point. Their guns and optics were significantly larger than those of their peers, and they wielded them shamelessly high above the rest.

  The whirring stopped, and a massive thud shook the entirety of the station, almost sending one of the men sprawling into the air. He grabbed hold of a piece of piping and resecured his magnetic boots. After the thud, the whirring started back up.

  “Look sharp!” Staff Sergeant Hardy shouted out.

  The men atop the equipment bounded around as they looked around. The longer the noise continued, the more cautiously they moved around their posts. Despite their efforts, they couldn’t see any activity.

  “Lieutenant, how’s it looking?” Hardy shouted back, not daring to take his eyes off the entrance closest to the source of the noise.

  Lieutenant Bridges moved methodically around the nuclear device, taking care to inspect every element. With every press of a button, he moved back to the control screen and verified the output before continuing to the next step.

  He spoke quietly, barely above a whisper, into his microphone. His gun, slung casually over his back, reinforced the relaxed air he hoped to portray. “It’s a nuke, buddy. How do you think it’s going?”

  Glancing back, Hardy said, “Look on the bright side. If you screw up, you’ll be dead before you hit the ground.”

  “Wouldn’t he be vaporized?” asked a Corpsman.

  “The point is I’d be dead. And so would all of you,” the lieutenant said.

  The whirring and thuds continued in a consistent pattern with the subtle addition of clanking in the background.

  “What do you think is going on out there?” Hardy asked.

  With a friendly slap on the sergeant’s back, the lieutenant joined his team.

  “That,” he said, “is a fleet of dead aliens coming to join the party. If I’m right, their fleet is returning to the station for repairs.”

  “They don’t sound dead to me,” said a corpsman.

  Hardy turned around to see the nuclear device lazily floating higher off the ground and a device in the lieutenant’s hand.

  “They will be,” Bridges said.

  Hardy motioned to the lieutenant’s hand. “Dead man switch?”

  Though he couldn’t see his mouth through the helmet, Hardy saw the lines around the lieutenant’s mouth and joined him a laugh.

  “All things considered, going out in a nuclear inferno isn’t so bad.”

  “It’s quick,” the team joined in.

  “Painless.”

  “And pretty damn cool.”

  “Target!” shouted one of the men on top of the refinery equipment.

  As he shouted, he slammed his gun into his shoulder and held out his hand. With a flick of his wrist, he lit up the area of alien presence on the heads-up displays of the rest of his squad. They all turned their attention and watched as the steady pulls of his trigger released several carefully placed shots.

  Two of the three shots found their mark and penetrated the alien creature around its eye socket. Blue blood and a shrieking howl filled the air with the first shot. With the second, the howl stopped. More alien creatures entered the main chamber and spread out, bolting immediately for cover. The troops responded by targeting them and taking every clean shot that presented itself.

  One of the aliens, bleeding profusely from the shoulder, fiddled with a device around its risk that seemed too small for the creature to use. The troops managed to strike him a couple of times, but the creature shrugged off the damage like a wild hog.

  The creature stood up and stared blankly with its muscles relaxing. It took several more hits, but didn’t seem phased by them.

  Around the room, short cylinders stuck out from the walls and blinked rapidly. The alien creatures all adopted the same mindless gaze. The humans stopped firing and took notice of the devices.

  “Take cover!” Bridges shouted.

  The cylinders pulsed with a rainbow of colors, growing faster until they emitted a steady piercing light. Everything alive in the station burst into a cloud of dust before dispersing into a thick cloud in the gravity-free environment.

  Dust filled the lieutenant’s suit. As the suit went limp, the switch in the man’s hand drifted away. As the contacts separated, three quick red flashes confirmed the status of the signal. High in the air, two lights on the exterior of the nuclear device flashed.

  The device ignited with such fury that the air itself caught on fire. As the air expanded, so did the station. Every inch erupted in white flames that tore through the structures, through the hull, and slammed into every ship docked and every ship flying too near.

  Gravity grabbed at the bulk of the Culdarian fleet. With a weak, persistent call, it beckoned the wreckage into the thin, Martian atmosphere. Flames licked the remnants of the debris cloud before the scraps slammed into the red soil.

  23

  The video screens in the mess hall showed the destruction on loop. Despite the repeated viewings, new crewmen wandered in, watched the video, and celebrated. As she watched them, Asher made no attempt to hide her own smile. She grabbed a water pouch and a sack of oatmeal. The oatmeal was still warm to the touch, so she pressed it against the stiff muscles in her neck and pushed off toward the tables.

  A table of enlisted crewmen scrambled to orient themselves at her arrival, but she waved away the gesture before they got very far. Relaxing a bit, the men and women at the table gushed over their individual contributions to the battle.

  She nodded and smiled politely, but Asher forced her attention on her oatmeal. The more excited the crew became, the more distant she felt until she realized that she no longer even heard their words.

  “Admiral?” shouted a corpsman. He realized his volume was too high and adjusted to just above a whisper. “What was your favorite part of the battle?”

  “The part at the end.”

  “The station?”

  Asher smiled into her oatmeal before pushing the end of the pouch into her mouth and squeezing the last bit inside. “No. The part where we live to go home. I thought that was pretty cool.”

  At first, the corpsman clapped his hands together and threw them forward for a high five. The admiral stared past him to a man sitting at another table with a somber expression on his face.

  “Excuse me,” Asher said, leaving the man hanging.

  Asher pressed up from the table and maneuvered over to the man. When she forced her way into the seat across from him, her forced smile wilted into a more natural expression. He continued looking past her, as if she wasn’t even there.

  “You all right?” Asher asked.

  He didn’t respond, but the conversation brought him a step closer to the real world, and he pulled his breakfast pouch out from between his legs and he forced himself to take long, drawn-out pulls on his pouch. He chewed and raised his eyebrows in exaggerated interest in his food.

  “It’s good today.”

  “It’s the same as any other day,” Asher said.

  “Maybe. But today it tastes particularly good.”

  Asher took a sip of water. “If you think the oatmeal’s good, you should try the water. It’s out of this world.”

  The man looked up at his commanding officer. “You’re right. I know it’s stupid.”

  “Which part?” Asher asked. “You just made it through a battle. It’s normal to take some time to process.”

  “No, I—”

  “Try some counseling. I do on a regular basis. I’m not going to say it fixes everything, but I promise it helps.”

  The man studied the admiral’s face. “I don’t mind the fight. I just don’t like everyone acting like it’s a good thing. We lost a lot of people today. Why in the hell are they celebrating?”

  “Don’t worry about them. Worry about you,” Asher said. We all have our coping mechanisms. Some people cry themselves to sleep. Some people party like there’s no tomorrow. You don’t have to agree with how they process it, but you do have to accept that they’ll get through it in their own way.”

  With that, Asher pushed herself away from the table and out of the mess hall. With every push off the wall, she moved faster as she ripped through the ship. Along the way, she intentionally ran her hands along the interior walls of the vessel. Mostly, she felt smooth, flat surfaces broken up occasionally by cabling or connecting hardware. Other times she felt the subtle bubbling from a blast that occurred on the other side.

  At the first bubble, she paused. She overshot the large patch of metal, barely able to see its difference from the surrounding material. When she realized what she felt, she ran her hands along the outline of the swell and tried to recall from memory what was on the other side. She came up blank.

  Determined to figure it out, she pressed both hands against the deformed metal and leaned her head in with her eyes closed. The air displaced around her when someone passed behind and brushed over her back, but she continued.

  Scowling, the admiral slammed her fists into the metal and continued racing around the ship. This time, she only stopped because a set of closed blast doors blocked her way. The sounds of welding and hammering came through from the other side. She pressed her head against the doors to understand the scale of the battle. With closed eyes, she could picture the coordinated repair efforts happening on the other side. She knew the section beyond included the loading station for a missile launcher as well as crew quarters. She focused on the faces of the people she knew that worked in that section but found it difficult to place names with faces.

  Again she pressed away, a look of disgust growing across her face.

  A glance at her watch left her frustrated and she zipped around the ship once again.

  She entered the fitness center to find it full of people shouting and celebrating while working out. Three men by the squat racks brought a smile to their face. As the largest of the three went down inside the machine, he shouted, “Yeah, buddy!” He paused for a moment at the bottom of the rep before pushing through with a loud, “Whoo!”

  He locked eyes with the admiral, something they both acknowledged with a smile. As if suddenly inspired, he dropped his hips low again and shouted, “Yeah, buddy!”

  Asher laughed in sync with his shout of, “Whoo!” He seemed to enunciate particularly hard for her, so the admiral turned to the locker room to change and appeared a few moments later in an outfit that hugged her body without hindering her movement. Excited, he motioned to the squat rack available beside him. She stuck a hand in the air and shook her head before moving to the bench press.

  She strapped herself into the machine. Once she closed her eyes, it felt no different than a bench press on Earth. She focused on pulling back her shoulder blades, arched her back a bit, and drove through her feet for power. With every set, she increased the weight on the bar and diligently jotted down her numbers in a dog-eared journal that she habitually threw back into her bag after ever set.

  At the squat rack, she built up the weight through her sets in the same fashion. That is, until she saw the same corpsman watching her. Just for him, she shouted, “Yeah, buddy!” on the way down, and “Whoo!” on the way back up. The small crowd in the gym joined in a mixture of clapping and laughter before returning their focus to their own workouts.

  Asher turned up the music on her headphones loud enough to block out the sound of her deep breaths. During the song breaks, she broke out into a full sprint on the stationary bike. She pressed harder and harder until her mind finally reached the point of emptiness and clarity she sought for so desperately. Without the ability to focus on anything but the screaming of her legs and lungs, she focused her energy into overcoming those two obstacles. She watched the readings on the computer and pressed herself past one hundred rotations per minute. One hundred twenty. One hundred thirty.

  The harder she pressed, the more her lungs and legs screamed back and tried to disobey. The more it hurt, the easier she found it to focus. On and on she pressed until, at long last, the timer on the screen read one hour and initiated the cool down.

  The twist of her foot took considerable effort. Despite the sweat, her soaked shirt, and burning lungs, she stood on the pedals for a few moments considering if she actually should get off the stationary bike. A corpsman queued up behind her and provided the final justification she needed. With a quick twist of her foot, she unclipped from the pedals, pushed off the bike, and made point to reach over and dry off any lingering sweat from the machine. The corpsman following didn’t look at the bike to check for cleanliness and jumped on, pedaling before he successfully clipped in.

  The admiral moved to the locker room as slowly as possible with a gentle twist through the air. With no muscle use required once she started moving, she felt her whole body relax until she gently bumped into the door of the locker room. She pushed her way inside and moved to the showers.

  After undressing and discarding her clothes, Asher stepped into the shower stall. The crack between the curtain and the wall, she noticed a woman wincing as she showered.

  She shouldn’t have looked, but curiosity overcame her.

  Peeking through the curtain, she saw the woman delicately washing a thin red line crossing her back. Every time she brushed it with the wet cloth, her shoulders pulled up and she cursed quietly under her breath. More remarkable to Asher was the large grid-like pattern of scar tissue underneath the new injury.

  Asher looked down at her own body and pressed her head against the cool metal wall and shut everything out.

  24

  The admiral cleared her throat several times but couldn’t quite get it clear enough to speak. So she hit play on the short message one more time. Before her dad appeared on the screen, she pushed the mute button and just watched his face.

  More than anything else, his eyes drew her attention. She traced the lines around his eyes with her fingertips, causing some confusion for the touch screen. Once she sorted out the error message, she followed the lines around his eyes with her gaze. Where she once saw playful laugh lines, she now saw deep crow’s-feet that didn’t fade when he smiled.

  Reaching to her own face, she felt the lines coming from the corners of her eyes. They weren’t deep, and they weren’t obvious, but she felt the same laugh lines she saw in her father’s eyes for so many years.

  Asher pressed the record button.

  “Dad, I wish I could call you. The time delay is ridiculous out here. I don’t have much to say, honestly. Even if I did, I’m not sure there’s much I can say.

  “Just know that I love you, and I can’t wait to see you again. Keep safe.”

  She pressed the record button again to save the short video and then sent it off to her dad.

  For a while, the admiral floated in her sleeping bag, connected to the wall by a single strand of rope. It let her out until it grew taught and then drew her back in only to bounce her off the wall and send her back out again. She smiled as it happened and imagined an unseen wave rocking the ship.

  In her blanket, she wrapped her arms around herself and closed her eyes, accepting the embrace of sleep.

  A few hours later, a blue light lit the room accompanied by a soothing beep that became shrill over time. When the noise overcame her desire to sleep, she writhed out of her cocoon and pressed the light.

  “Admiral, we’ve found the signal. We’ll be at the rendezvous point in approximately an hour.” Lieutenant Card’s voice came through as a whisper.

  “Any word on the Culdarians?” Asher asked.

  “Negative. The sensor team keeps checking, but nothing yet.”

  “Have them keep an eye out. We can’t afford any surprises.”

  “Admiral on deck!” shouted Ensign Daly.

  The senior officers snapped to attention. Everyone else continued their work as if nothing changed. Asher looked over the heads of the approaching officers and smiled at the back of the busy crew’s heads.

  “I take it this is good news?” Asher asked.

  Lieutenant Commander Holt, the most senior officer, stepped forward.

  “Yes, sir. We’ve made contact with the resupply ships. Our maps don’t quite line up with the Chinese. That’s why it took so long.” He paused to enter some information onto his tablet and duplicated it on the largest screen in the room. “The automated control protocol didn’t respond to our initial access requests. We reached out to the Chinese, and they were quick to send us an updated key.

  “For now, we’re in a holding pattern. The supply ships are on the way, and we have a couple of the Guardian ships patrolling to ensure nothing followed us.”

  “And?” Asher asked.

  “So far, nothing.”

  Asher shook her head and stepped past her team and over to the diagnostics stations. “I wouldn’t expect that to change. The nuke was pretty devastating.”

  Stepping quickly, Ensign Daly entered the diagnostics area and threw some key data onto the screens around them.

  “It really was,” he said. “We weren’t able to get perfect visuals of the event, but it looks like the station took out most of the remaining ships when it exploded. Based on trajectory, most of it should have fallen to the planet by now. Some remnants will probably stabilize in orbit for a few days but will eventually drop out as well.”

  Asher motioned to the red lines in the feed. “What’s going on there?”

  “Nothing major,” Holt said. “The debris field around the planet is pretty dense. Some pieces managed to find their way out here. We’re still getting struck periodically. It’s not often enough to be of concern, but the pieces are nearly impossible to detect. The main hull deflects them well enough, but we’re having issues when a piece hits an exposed section of the ship.”

 

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