We All Died at Breakaway Station

Ballantine Books    
•
   New York

Copyright © 1969 by Richard C. Meredith

A shorter version of this story appeared in Amazing, copyright © 1968 by Ultimate Publications, Inc.

First Printing: November, 1969

Printed in the United States of America

BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

101 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003

Cover Painting: John Berkey

To Kira, Jeff, Derek and Rand

who will understand someday

and to Joy

who suffered the destruction of
Breakaway Station
not once, but a thousand times

You’ve heard of Breakaway Station of course. Who among us hasn’t been told the story of the planet that men call Breakaway, dry, dun-colored, barren, cold, lifeless, larger than Mercury, but smaller than Mars, with a trace of vapor that could be called an atmosphere only by the most generous. It was the second planet outward of a feeble yellow dwarf, a star with no name, only a number on the astronomical charts, UR-712-16, Breston Catalogue, a set of coordinates, a place in time and space that made it essential to the survival of the human race.

It was twenty-seven light-years from Earth, a link in the tenuous FTL communications chain to the colonial worlds of the Paladine, a link in the chain that defied the Einsteinian universe, and in that lay its importance.

You know the names of the ships, those three starships that limped to Breakaway from the Paladine. The huge, cumbersome
Rudoph Cragstone,
hospital ship, carrying within its metal gut the thousands of half dead who had barely survived the fighting in the Paladine, now in cold-sleep, most of them, but some of them crewing the ship, aware of their agony, aware too that in the hospitals of Earth enough of them might be put back together to be sent out again into the Paladine, back out to face the Jillies, to fight again, and die again, perhaps.

And escorting the hospital ship were the two heavy battle cruisers, or rather what was left of two heavy battle cruisers, half dead like most of their officers and crews, patched together just enough to get them across the blackness to Earth, there to be put back together, to be sent again into the Paladine, the League starships
Iwo Jima
and
Pharsalus.

And you know the names of the men and women, the half dead who manned those ships, for their names are now a part of our heritage and rank along with those of Leonidas and his Spartans, and Horatius of the bridge, and Barrett Travis and Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett in Texas, and the lost Battalion in the Argonne. And you know the name of the man who led them‌—‌man, half-man, half-prosthetic, little more than a nervous system, heart, lungs, some bone and muscle and flesh, and the rest machine, but for all that a man‌—‌the name of Absolom Bracer.

But what do you know of the minds and hearts of those men and women, those half dead who met the Jillies at Breakaway Station? What fears and hopes and pains were within them when the squat, ugly alien warships came down on Breakaway? How badly did they want to live when they died?

And what were the thoughts of Absolom Bracer when he met the Jillie warships
there
? How can
you
know?

Don’t ask me who I am, how I know. We all died at Breakaway Station.

The tri-B sensors that served as the eyes of LSS Captain Absolom Bracer regarded the projection in the tank, the view of space before the starship, a great, endless blackness speckled with stars, one, a yellow dwarf, standing out far more brightly than the others, sharp and distinct, a tiny disk now, a disk that grew perceptibly as he watched.

…captain… said the starship’s Organic Computer, its “voice” sounding within his mind, …star drive will be cut in exactly ten minutes in accordance with your instructions…

…very good… Absolom Bracer replied, the shifting electromagnetic fields of his brain being detected by sensors, then amplified, then used to modulate a radio carrier transmitted by a tiny unit within the artificial cavity of his prosthetic skull, ultimately received by a similar unit that was a part of the make-up of the thing-that was
Roger,
the Organic Computer. CEMEARS, it was called‌—‌Cerebral Electromagnetic Emission Amplification and Relay System‌—‌call it artificial telepathy, if you like.

…all stations check normal… Roger said.

Normal, thought Absolom Bracer, pain from a nonexistent thigh slowly, sadistically creeping up his spine. Normal for what? Where? Normal for this wreck of a starship. On any other ship the
Iwo Jima’s
norm would be interpreted as disaster.

…very good… he replied. …keep me posted…

Ten minutes and we’ll be back in normal space. We’ve gotten through this much of the voyage safely. I wonder if there’s any news from Mothershed. Breakaway ought to know. How are things at Breakaway, I wonder. Any more Jillies? It seems like they’d come back after pulling a stunt like that. Can’t understand why they’d attack in the first place if they didn’t mean to really finish the station off. But who can understand anything the Jillies do?

Bracer was torn from his thoughts by the artificial voice of astrogation officer Bene O’Gwynn. “Captain,” she was saying, “we’re picking up something on the scanners.”

“Subspectrum scanners?” he asked automatically since the ship was still under pseudospeed.

“In normal space, sir,” the astrogator replied, and gave him the coordinates of the object in reference to the imaginary celestial sphere at whose center lay the
Iwo Jima.

“Put it in my tank,” he said, turning to his command console and keying its controls.

“Yes, sir,” the astrogator replied.

…roger, what do you make of it?… Bracer asked the Organic Computer as the image appeared in his tank, distance and mass distortions due to star drive compensated for.

…impossible to tell as yet, sir…

…can you make a guess?…

…well, sir… the OC answered hesitantly, …i believe we’re too far out for it to be any of breakaway’s defenses…

“What’s the mass?” Bracer asked aloud.

Moments later letters appeared within the tanks, spelling out: “4.77 TONS.”

…does that help any?… Bracer asked.

…i was aware of its mass, sir… Roger answered, perhaps slightly offended. …as i was about to say, captain, from its mass and distance from breakaway, i would venture to guess that it is probably nothing more than a missile left over from the jillie attack…

For a moment Bracer looked at the swelling image in the tank, then scanned the bridge and caught half a dozen pairs of eyes‌—‌some real, some artificial‌—‌looking back at him, the minds behind them waiting to learn what they were encountering.

“Miss O’Gwynn, Mr. Darbi,” Bracer asked of his astrogator and weapons control officer, “do either of you have any conclusions?”

“As a wild guess, sir,” Akin Barbi said, glancing up from his weapons control console which he had been studying carefully, “from the trajectory and the mass of the thing, well, I’d lay odds that it’s a Jillie missile that got lost. Their RB-17 has a mass of 4.77 tons and it has enough sub-light speed to have come this far from Breakaway since the battle.”

…roger?… he asked silently, hoping that the OC would confirm Barbi’s opinion. He needed all the confidence he could gain in his crew.

…yes, sir, i concur…

…is it any danger to us?…

…i doubt it, sir, though i would suggest raising screens until we are well beyond it. either that, or the launching of a nuclear missile of our own to destroy it…

…i think i’d rather destroy it… Bracer said to Roger, though he did not tell Roger why he wanted the Jillie weapon destroyed. Nor was he absolutely sure himself. It would be something, a very tiny thing, to destroy this artifact of the alien civilization against which mankind waged war, a very tiny thing to soothe the pain and hatred within himself and within those who were his officers and crew.

“Mr. Barbi,” he said aloud, “as soon as you have absolutely confirmed that the object is a Jillie weapon, destroy it.”

“Yes, sir,” Barbi said, with a flicker of something across his face that might have been a smile.

Bracer stood silently before his command console for a while, watching Weapons Control Officer Barbi as he consulted the ship’s central mech computer, flashed a facsimile image into the tank of his console, adjusted the new image to match the old, and then looked up with satisfaction. “Computer agrees, sir,” Barbi said. “It’s a Jillie RB-17.”

“Destroy it, Mr. Barbi,” Bracer said, sharing some of Barbi’s satisfaction, still knowing it was a small thing, a terribly small thing, and one hardly worth feeling emotion about.

“Miss Cyanta,” he said a few moments later, “contact
Pharsalus
and
Cragstone.
Tell them about this in case they’ve sighted it and are wondering.”

“Yes, sir,” the communications officer said in reply, and touched controls on the board before her.

Very little time had passed before a nuclear missile burst from one of the
Iwo Jima’s
launching tubes and out into the darkness. Ship’s scanners followed the missile as it increased in velocity, propelled both by nuclear energy and by the microjumping of the tiny pseudospeed unit within it.

Now Bracer’s tank showed two images. His own missile and the Jillie’s, and the distance between the two grew smaller with great speed. Then, suddenly, the two became one, and the image of discrete objects in the tank became that of an explosion, a swelling ball of flame.

“Hit it, sir,” Darbi said, smiling.

“Very good, Mr. Darbi. Carry on.”

The Jillie weapon was destroyed, and that was the most exciting and perhaps most significant thing that had happened so far on this voyage. And in a way Bracer was very glad of that.

Bracer glanced at the chronometer of his console and saw that five minutes had elapsed since the sighting of the Jillie weapon. That left five minutes to go, he thought. Five minutes and we’ll be out of star drive.

Darbi did all right, he told himself, though it was nothing but shooting fish in a barrel. Still, it gave the weapon control officer something to do, something to show that he could still function in his assigned capacity.

But then Bracer’s thoughts went back to his second officer, his inexplicable emotional outburst that morning when the master-at-arms casually mentioned something about his own nerves not being what they used to be. Reddick had flushed in anger, called the master-at-arms a dozen vile names and might have struck him had not First Officer Maxel ordered him to his quarters. Reddick will have to control himself better in the future, Bracer thought. I can’t afford another scene like that one. Got to maintain discipline on the bridge. Dammit, I know he’s in pain‌—‌but who on this ship isn’t? He’s a good officer; I need him on the bridge. I just hope he can hold himself together until we get home. I hope we all can. Dammit, I do!

Around him his bridge officers had returned to their normal duties, observing their instruments and controls, maintaining a shallower contact with Roger and the mechanical computer
he
supervised, counting down the minutes, the seconds until the starship came out of star drive.

The little toe of my left foot itches like hell. But how can it itch? How can you be bothered by something you don’t have? Damn those doctors! Seems like they could have done something about that. It’s bad enough not to have those parts; it’s bad enough to remember how it was to have them; but it’s worse to be fooled into thinking you still do by blotched-up nerves. It’s like wanting a woman, or thinking I do. Can I really want sex without a penis, testicles, glands, whatever-the-hell? Or do I just intellectually
think
I do? Do I just remember how it was and
want
to feel that way? Want to feel like‌—‌like a man… God, am I losing my mind? No, I can’t! That’s about all I’ve got left. I’ve got to hold on to that. We’ve all got to hold on. Oh, Lord, it’s just two more weeks to Earth. We can hold out that long.