One Good Soldier

July 1, 2394 AD

Tau Ceti Planet Four, Moon Alpha, a.k.a. Ares

Separatist QMT Facility

Friday, 2:53 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

Friday, 7:53 PM Madira Valley Standard Time

"Owww, goddamn that hurt!" Jack came to screaming in pain as he tried to shake himself back to consciousness. There was severe pain everywhere in his body. He could still wiggle his toes and fingers, but his neck and back and ass hurt so bad there was no way he was going anywhere for a while. He carefully, very carefully, brought his right hand up to a breast pocket and pulled out a medipen. He slid the armored access panel up on his neck and then activated the pen. The needle slid out, arming itself, and then he jammed the thing through the seal layer of his armored flight suit into his neck. That hurt, too.

Candis, how long was I out?

Three minutes and fifty-one seconds.

Oh, well, not as bad as I thought. How am I? He could feel the adrenaline, pain meds, and immunoboost rushing over him. The pain had almost completely vanished.

I wouldn't try to move for about five more minutes. The immunoboost should be getting you back on your feet safely by then.

Roger that. What about Dee?

I'm not sure how she is, but I can still detect her AIC's emergency signal. You should try contacting Penzington, perhaps.

Good idea.

Jack was afraid to move his neck yet, but he could survey his predicament fairly well with his peripheral vision and by having his DTM mindview rotate about the axis of his head. His suit and helmet had limited sensors without his fighter, but he could still get simple optical and IR imagery.

He had come down about ten meters from where his mecha had hit and exploded. The gravity on the hull of the Seppy supercarrier must have been along similar protocols as that of the U.S. fleet ships. He felt like he was sitting on about one half of an Earth gravity. That's why his ejection couch hadn't simply bounced off and floated away. He could tell that he had bounced several times until his couch finally lodged itself into a niche in the hull plating. He had barely made it through the QMT gate in time, had barely managed to slow down enough, and had barely managed to eject at just the right time to not get himself killed. He'd have been of no use to the president's daughter dead.

As it was, he needed to let the immunoboost do its job for a few more minutes, figure out where Dee was, and then figure out how to get inside the ship. He was hoping that his CIA buddy on the inside could help him out with that one.

Candis, connect me to Penzington.

Hold on, Jack, she said into his mind. Okay. Got her.

Penzington?

Boland, you made it! Where the hell are you?

I crashed into the hull of the ship. I'm sitting in my ejection seat somewhere, uh, I'd guess near the aft end about midway up the port side.

We've got to move fast. They are about to teleport the president's daughter to the New Tharsis Capitol building.

What? Why there?

Elle Ahmi lives in the penthouse. You want to make a guess?

No. Shit. We've got to get off this ship and down there. Any ideas? Jack would have rubbed his chin in thought if he weren't still afraid to move and in an e-suit on the exterior hull of a spaceship in space.

Well, it's worse than that. We were just given word to go to battlestations and prepare to QMT back to Arcadia. I hope more than just the Madira is gonna be there, because the entire Seppy fleet is headed there!

Shit, I've got to get off this ship and to the planet, fast. Jack hadn't gone through damned near killing himself just to end up getting teleported back to where he started. He had to think of something. He had to get to Dee.

Well, with the SIFs up, you are not gonna get inside. Your best bet would be to get to the QMT facility and go from there. Maybe steal a ship, sneak onto the QMT pad, or something.

Jack decided he felt good enough to move, so he did. He unstrapped himself from the ejection-seat harness and stood up. The Tau Ceti QMT facility was directly over his head about five kilometers. The ship had moved off center of the QMT pad, probably from standard protocol to get out of the way in case some other ships came in from elsewhere. He looked at the ejection chair briefly and scrambled through the inventory of things he had in his suit's webbing. At one-half gravity there was no way he could jump and reach an escape velocity to get off the ship. Hell, that would put escape velocity somewhere around five kilometers per second. In other words, it would be like standing on the surface of Mars and trying to run and jump off the planet into orbit. That wasn't going to happen. He'd need a rocket. On the other hand, the gravity only lasted a few meters above the hull on most ships. Maybe the trick would be to just manage to get above the artificial gravitational metric of the ship and then somehow push himself toward the QMT facility. Slowing down before he hit the surface of the QMT facility would be another problem to deal with. But first things first.

Can you get off the ship, Penzington? Can you come and get me?

I don't know. I think I can get onto a shuttle that is leaving in a few minutes for the QMT pad, but that is about as good as it gets. Maybe from there I can get out to you. But you'd have to get off the ship first.

Shit, that ain't gonna work. I've got to get above the ship's gravity well somehow. Any way he thought about it, he was screwed. Jack couldn't think of anything to get him off the ship. He'd need some sort of propulsion system to manage that.

He went through his webbing and again took inventory of his gear. He had some HE, a handful of grenades, ammo for his railpistol, a couple knives, first-aid gear, about a hundred meters of nanotube filament rope, a few carabiners and clips holding things to his webbing, some duct tape, and whatever he could scavenge from a slightly used ejection couch. He looked the seat over and figured there was little there he could use. The propulsion system for the seat was dead because he had used it all up to keep from plummeting to his death a few minutes before. The QMT facility was right there. It hung just five kilometers or so above his head. If he could get there, he'd figure out a way to the planet.

Jack, I'm on the shuttle, and we are leaving now. You've got maybe five minutes before the ships get here and they all start moving into position to jump. If you're gonna think of something, do it quickly, Penzington warned him through the DTM link.

I've got no idea. Can't you take the shuttle by force and come get me?

Well, no. Not yet. I'm in an e-suit in a storage compartment stowed away on it.

I see.

By the time we land and I can get back to you, it would be too late.

I get it.

Good luck.

You, too.

There was a way to do everything, Jack had always told himself. He jumped twice to get to his crash site. His ship had done minimal damage to the hull. There were no material pieces of his fighter left that were larger than a meter long. Sooner or later they would just fall off into space. Maybe a work crew would get out to remove it on the next exterior-hull maintenance shift. But for now, he had a few chunks of armor-plated fighter plane that he might be able to use for something. He wasn't sure just what.

Time is ticking, Jack.

I know, Candis. You have any bright ideas?

No.

We need propulsion somehow. What could give us that? Jack thought about it, and then he had a very, very bad idea. I got it. Maybe.

What?

Run some sims for me. How much HE would I need to lift the ejection chair with me in it out of the gravity well of this ship with a little extra velocity left over?

How far does the gravity well extend? The Madira's goes ten meters.

Okay, use that. This ship looks like a knockoff of her anyway.

All right then. According to spec the chair has a mass of five hundred kilograms. You in your suit and gear are another one fifty. To get to a height of ten meters you would need a minimum energy of thirty-two point five kilojoules. The HE is ten megajoules per kilogram, so you need a minimum of three and a quarter grams to reach escape height with no velocity left. You need less than four cubic centimeters. Like four dice worth.

Okay, got it.

Jack pulled three chunks of the scorched armor plating and piled them beside the ejection seat. Then he rummaged through his webbing and pulled out a bar of the HE. The bar was basically the size of a stick of butter and was sealed in a vacuum package. He guessed at about five cubic centimeters and then added a little extra just in case. He stuck a wireless detonator chip into it and then set the two armor fragments from his destroyed fighter on top of it. Then he began kicking and tugging at the ejection seat until he managed to free it from a piece of loose hull plating on the ship. He dragged the seat on top of the armor fragments—he was glad there was only half a g, or he might never have gotten the couch moved.

Jack looked up. The QMT facility filled most of his overhead view. There was no way he could miss it. He'd more likely kill himself with the HE than drift off into space. And by that time, if he did miss and was floating off into space, Penzington might be able to come and get him.

While Jack was looking up, four supercarrier class Seppy ships materialized out of hyperspace out in front of the ship he was on. Then several new battle cruisers and a couple of older haulers came out of hyperspace.

"Holy shit! The Madira is gonna be in it deep," he muttered.

You got that right, Candis agreed with him.

Jack adjusted the seat angle to what he hoped was somewhere near the edge of the QMT pad and not into the jump region. He needed to get moving. The ship could start moving into jump position at any moment. He sat down in the chair and strapped himself in. He made sure his feet and arms would be inside the shadow of the chair so no shrapnel or plasma from the explosion could damage him or his suit.

"This is really gonna fuckin' suck!" Jack pushed his body into the couch as best he could and tucked his chin into his chest.

Okay, Candis, trigger this thing.

Are you sure, DeathRay?

Yes, that is an order Lieutenant Commander!

Yes, sir. Going in five, four, three, two, one . . .

The high explosives went off from the wireless trigger signal Candis sent to the detonator chip. The stored chemical energy inside the solid material converted to kinetic energy in the form of heat and a plasma moving upward at over three thousand meters per second. The shockwave vaporized the first armor plate and slammed the second one upward into the ejection chair. The ejection chair blasted upward away from the hull of the Seppy supercarrier with about twice the force of a standard ejection seat. In other words, it went up pretty damned fast—fast enough that Jack was slammed into the chair with a force of about ten gravities for about a second. But DeathRay was used to high-g maneuvers that rattled his bones. It didn't hurt as much as he had expected, but that was probably because he had just taken a shitload of immunoboost and pain meds.

The chair crested the ten meters that he needed in order to clear the ship's gravity well, and it kept on going. It kept on going pretty damned fast. The acceleration was over within microseconds after the blast, and any deceleration was finished once they escaped the Seppy ship's artificial gravity well. DeathRay was in microgravity at this point and was floating freely along a constant velocity vector straight at the QMT facility. Jack could see the surface of the QMT moon starting to get slowly closer. The planet Ares filled his field of view off to his right. The Jovian planet Ares orbited was behind him now.

What is relative velocity, Candis?

Using objects on the surface for angular-size reference, I can approximate that we are moving at about fifty kilometers per hour with an error bar of about five kilometers per hour.

Okay, the seat was designed to take a fall at fifty-five kilometers per hour with no problem.

Yes, but that assumed it landed first. Jack, you do realize you are staring at the surface?

Holy shit! Is this fucking nightmare never gonna stop? Okay, we have to rotate the seat.

That would be advisable.

What can we use for a thruster?

You could always throw things.

How about my railpistol? There is a certain amount of recoil to it. Jack had blasted himself out of one predicament into another. But at fifty kilometers per hour or so and the surface five kilometers away, he had about six minutes to figure out what to do.

That might work.

He pulled his pistol out of the thigh holster and held it straight in front of him with both hands. The safety grip received the safety code from his AIC and unlocked the trigger and safety. Jack thumbed the safety and then pulled the trigger. He waited a few seconds to see if he could tell a difference in his angular orientation. He was moving at about a degree per ten seconds. He needed to move at one hundred and eighty degrees in less than six minutes. Doing the math quickly in his head, he decided that he was rotating five times too slow. So he quickly pumped out four more rounds. He and Candis both worked at calculating his angular velocity and decided that the chair would be as close to the proper orientation as they were going to get with the tools they had in hand. Jack reholstered his weapon and just waited.

Penzington?

Boland?

I'll be on the surface of the QMT facility in five minutes.

Really?

The Seppy supercarriers, battle cruisers, and haulers all moved into position directly over the center of the QMT pad. The big sphere of light formed and then turned into the two-dimensional–looking ripple in space. Then all the ships and the light show vanished. The Sienna Madira was about to catch hell.

Hang in there, Madira! Watch your six, Fish, DeathRay thought.

Amen, Jack. Amen, Candis agreed.