Mago

GLORIA TSANDI HAD worried about many things in her life, but never footprints. Each step on the moon’s blue-gray surface left a perfect impression of her boot. The soft sand—really a mixture of pumicelike rock and grit—compressed in perfect, airless clarity.

“Our boots are telling quite the story here,” she said to Xavi.

“We should spread out. Stick to shadows.”

They’d been traveling in a line, Vanessa at the lead and Gloria in back, in a path that snaked away from the wreck of the Wildflower. Gloria had yet to look back at her ship. She couldn’t quite bring herself to do that. Not yet. Not until the moment came when she would have to issue one final, fateful command to her.

Vanessa guided the team on a curved path that kept them roughly at the edge of a wide circle around the distant Scipio facility. The plan was to get away from the Wildflower first, then move in, but these footprints…Gloria shook her head. They couldn’t hop from rock to rock. The gravity may allow it, but not the unseen search parties that lurked all around them. Vanessa said as much when Gloria called a break to raise her concerns. They had to speak by putting their helmets together. “We just have to hope that by the time they find the wreckage it’s just a blackened crater, and all these prints have been wiped away.”

Gloria decided the choice of words was not-so-careful diplomacy. What Vanessa had really meant was “by the time you blow up your ship.” A small but appreciated bit of thoughtfulness, really.

“But Xavi’s right,” Vanessa added. “Let’s spread out a bit. Use shadows where we can. If I remember right there’s a large crater up ahead. Once we’re below the rim we can trace the lip in darkness all the way around to the other side. That’ll put us well away from the crash.”

The others all began to separate, save Xavi and Alex Warthen. Her navigator kept close to him by an order Gloria had delivered with a simple glance, acknowledged by a slight dip of Xavi’s chin as they’d exited the ship. He hadn’t let Alex get more than five meters from him since. If Alex noticed this, or cared, he made no indication. He seemed to be in shock, and she couldn’t blame him. Right side or wrong, the man had been through a lot.

Vanessa had been right about the crater. The hill they’d been slowly climbing turned out to be the outer rim. Near the crest, the immune slowed and began to carefully choose her path between exposed boulders and, at one point, a depression so low she had to crawl on her belly to maintain a low profile. No choice here but for all of them to follow her lead. Gloria held her breath when it came time for Alex to make the crawl. There was a moment’s hesitation, and for a second she thought he might have decided he owed nothing to her or any of them, that this entire endeavor was a suicide mission, anyway, and why drag it out? But he dropped to his knees as Beth had, lay down on his stomach, and pulled himself through the fine powder and loose rubble. Xavi didn’t wait for him to reach the top, he crawled right behind him. Gloria waited until they were both in the shadow of a cleft in the crater’s rim, twenty meters up the slope.

There they waited for her, silhouettes against the stars. Carthage hung high above, filling a quarter of the visible sky, its myriad of equatorial space stations glinting like jewels.

“Coming, boss?” Xavi asked.

“In a second,” she replied. “There’s something I have to do first.”

She turned and looked back toward the Wildflower. The ship was hidden from sight by all the boulders and dunes they’d just traversed, but their path, viewed from here, was blindingly obvious. She stared in the direction of her beloved vessel and executed the command they’d rigged way back when they’d first docked with the object that turned out to be Eve. The Chameleon, they’d called her ship form.

A bright flash lit up the craggy landscape, followed by a rapidly expanding cloud of powdered rock, boulders, and the unrecognizable chunks of the place that had been her home for so many years. The Wildflower joined the Chameleon then, in that afterlife for starships that was the memory of their captains.

“Hopefully they’ll consider that just another impact,” she said, aware of the emotion in her voice and not really caring.

“No,” Xavi said, “hopefully they were already there, crawling all over it.”

“Amen to that,” she replied.

Gloria turned and started her crawl. Halfway there the ground began to vibrate as the broken remains of the Wildflower rained back to the surface. She lay there, head turned to one side so she could watch, and waited for the storm to pass. Then she reached up and heaved herself forward, one more length. Then another. Again and again until she felt Xavi’s hands under her arms. He helped her to her feet and stared into her eyes for several long seconds before clapping her on the shoulder. “Let’s move out,” he said.

“Yes,” Gloria said, “let’s.”

The crater was several hundred meters across, more than half of it hidden in shadow as the system’s star hung midway to the horizon. It was only partial shadow, the light reflecting off Carthage filling in some of the blackness. Vanessa set off, barely visible until Gloria’s eyes adjusted.

“Think this will work?” Xavi asked.

Beth replied before Gloria could. “We’re assuming their eyes work like ours, and that they have yet to invent the flashlight. I’d say that’s a big assumption.”

Xavi grunted. “Better than nothing, mate.”

Gloria repeated her call for radio silence. They’d been so sloppy already that it seemed unlikely to matter, but the truth was she craved silence just now. Time to reflect, to mourn, and find within herself what resolve might be left for what may lie ahead. At least, she thought, the Scipios won’t learn anything from the Wildflower. A small consolation if there ever was one, especially considering the Lonesome may even now be hidden away in some distant corner of this solar system, being picked apart molecule by molecule for every last scrap of intelligence. She wondered if the Scipios were, at this very moment, assembling a factory to reproduce their own imploder. Her gut churned at the idea they could be on the cusp of folding their way to Earth in force, destroying everything humanity had fought so hard to regain. And here Gloria was, sneaking through this unnamed, unimportant crater to what would probably turn out to be a helium-3 mining station, one of thousands the Scipios likely had strewn about. Even if she managed to damage it, much less destroy it, it would amount to a minor blip on some Scipio spreadsheet, and they’d dispatch an automated construction rig to build a replacement within the day, if they even bothered.

She took another step, though, and the one after that. Because no matter how inconsequential their actions, it was another breath, another heartbeat, another chance that rescue might come.

The hike became a monotonous, quiet affair. She frequently glanced back, but the enemy had yet to show their faces beyond the initial sighting Vanessa made. They were out there, of that Gloria had no doubt, but as of yet they’d found no reason to investigate this particular crater.

Hidden in the last of the shadow, on the lip of the far side, Vanessa stopped and chanced a look over the edge. Almost immediately the woman ducked back down, turned, and gave an urgent hand signal demanding radio silence. The others gathered beneath her, waiting until Gloria caught up. They put their heads together so all their visors were in contact, allowing the vibrations of speech to pass between them.

“We’re right on top of it,” Vanessa said. “Less than a hundred meters.”

“Any kind of security perimeter?” Xavi asked.

“Not that I could see. Which is to say, nothing obvious.”

Beth Lee spoke up. “It’s possible they never expected to need one, this far in from the Swarm Blockade. No one’s ever breached that barrier.”

“That we know of,” Xavi corrected.

Gloria shook her head. “Not exactly true. There’s Captain Dawson, and the Lonesome.”

“Yeah, but who knows how far they got before the Scipios got them.”

“I’m just saying,” Gloria amended, “we have to assume the Scipios will be on edge, if for no other reason than the massive impact zone our arrival created so close to this facility. Speaking of, Vanessa, did you see anything that might imply its purpose?”

“No,” the immune replied. “Domed buildings, towers, a large warehouse or something near the center, connecting hallways. Plus all the various pipes and conduits and silos you’d expect.”

Beth Lee said, “Alien or not, some things are evidently universal.”

No one spoke for several seconds, and Gloria soon realized they were all waiting for her. Even Alex Warthen stared at her with the gaze of a soldier awaiting orders.

“What’s the plan, boss?” Xavi prompted.

She studied them all. Vanessa was by far the most heavily armed. Alex Warthen had the same armor, but none of the weapons. Never mind that his loyalties were suspect at best. Xavi carried the small pistol all spacecraft were required to have on board in the event of a crew member becoming mentally unstable. It was designed to be able to penetrate a helmet visor, but not hull plating. Beth and Gloria herself carried no weapons at all. Their burden instead was the supplies, the meager quantities of food and water salvaged from the wreck.

“Our goal is to figure out a way to destroy that facility. Given we’re somewhat lacking in the armaments department, my hope is we can find some kind of reactor or explosive supply of chemicals, and sabotage. With any luck the secondary explosion will be enough to do the job.”

“And what happens to us?” Alex Warthen asked.

Gloria met his gaze and held it. “One-way trip, I’m afraid. We don’t have the supplies to wait for rescue, or any way to call for one even if we did.”

Warthen held any reaction he had to this in perfect check. He just stared back at her.

Gloria Tsandi sighed. “Xavi?”

“Yeah, boss?”

“If anyone in this group tries to flee or otherwise survive this effort, I’m ordering you to shoot them dead. We cannot leave a survivor for the Scipios to interrogate.”

A cold silence fell over the group. “Understood,” Xavi managed, and she realized he didn’t like this much better than Alex. But there was no other option, and the last thing she wanted to do right now was get into a debate.

“Suppose we can’t do it?” Beth asked.

Gloria looked at her, an eyebrow raised.

“Suppose,” the engineer went on, “the base, or whatever, is solar powered. Or what if it’s a peaceful observatory. I mean, for all we know it’s a Scipio orphanage.”

Nobody said anything. The words were like a plug pulled from the bathtub, and Gloria could only watch as her vengeance-fueled drive drained away.

“She’s got a point,” Xavi said. “Okay, maybe not the orphanage thing, but we’ve really got no idea what we’re destroying. Hell, they could be part of some kind of resistance against the Scipios.”

The captain cast her navigator a dubious glare. “Doubtful.”

“Doubtful doesn’t mean impossible.”

“I…” Gloria allowed herself a long, calming breath. “I know. Okay, fine. I’m revising the plan. We’ll poke around first. Good enough?”

“Maybe I should go in and recon the situation,” Vanessa offered.

Gloria shook her head. “We can’t all sit out here, so no matter what, we’re going in. All of us. If we can find a—”

A painfully loud pop interrupted her. Gloria winced as the bright ring of feedback followed the sudden noise. She glanced down at herself, sure she’d been shot despite knowing how ridiculous that was. But there was no pain except for that in her ears. Xavi and Beth reacted similarly, but not, she realized, Vanessa or Alex.

“What is it?” Vanessa asked, barely audible. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” she managed. “I—”

Xavi’s hand gripped her arm. He was looking at the ground, at nothing, eyes darting back and forth. “Listen,” he said.

Listen? Gloria could barely hear anything. But Xavi’s strong grip served to steady her, and the ringing finally faded, leaving other sounds behind. Alien sounds. Muffled vocalizations, indecipherable. And something else, too. A groan of pain, and labored breathing. Both, to Gloria Tsandi’s ear, very human sounds.

“What is this?” Beth asked, whispering.

Gloria held up a hand. She listened and at the same time racked her brain to figure out what they could possibly be hearing. They’d all gone on radio silence. And who else was here?

Perhaps it was coming from far away, she thought. Quickly she summoned the comm portion of her suit’s interface. And then she saw it. A transmission on the emergency channel, slipping through because that had to be deliberately disabled, a separate action from radio silence. It wasn’t this that grabbed Gloria’s attention, though, it was the identifier displayed below. CAPT DAWSON.

“Dawson,” she whispered, and looked up at Xavi, then Beth.

The groans of pain flowing into Gloria’s ears turned into a shrill scream, quickly silenced.

“That’s a short-range channel, boss,” Xavi said. “Nearby. In that fucking base. What are the damn odds?”

Gloria looked into the eyes of each of them, and saw that, this time, no one needed to be told what the objective was.