Chapter Forty Four

Aaron

After the initial shock of deciding to set off to Mars starts to wear off, Aaron starts to concentrate on what kinds of supplies the others in the battle shuttle might be able to spare. As far out, and as long as he and Arma will be gone, situations of desperation start coming to mind. Sy has promised that resupply shipments will be a guarantee, but other things are on his mind. Arma is being rather quiet about it all, and she’s definitely not in the best mood. He puts his helmet on and gets back to Sy on a private line, one she can’t hear. He doesn’t want to stress her out any more than she already is.

“Look Sy, I know you think this is ok and all because we’re supposed to be immortal, and we have time for this kind of stuff, but it doesn’t quite work like that. We were scanned about a month ago, sure, but we’re probably gonna be gone for a couple years. If something happens, we could lose it all. We could make a life for ourselves out there, and then lose all of it.”

“You’re right Aaron, and I feel for ya bud. You remember what it was like to be alive, like the rest of us? Well… don’t die. It’ll be like old times.” He pauses, trying to make sure he doesn’t sound like he couldn’t give a shit less. “The two of you have something to live for, and that’s a good thing. It makes me happy for you. Now, Aaron, try-n remember that you’re getting to go to Mars. Don’t spoil it. Those folk heading there with you will die, we know that much, and so do they. For their sake, please don’t let them hear either of you complaining about it.”

He lets out a deep breath, knowing Sy is right. “Yeah, I know. It’s not gonna be easy watching that go down. I should at least get those two little coolers of Five’s from the other shuttle then huh.”

“Might be a nice gesture Aaron. Just be careful who you save. They’ve already given up their old lives, but this stuff isn’t for just anyone who happened to die.”

When Arma looks back, to see that he has his suit and helmet on, she goes ahead and puts hers on too. He adds her to the channel he and Sy are on, as well as the other SSS shuttle. “Alright, I know you guys have a real journey home ahead of you, but we’re gonna need a couple things if you can spare it. We’re all out of cannon shells, but I’d understand if you want to keep em for the way back. We’ll take any small arms you’ve got though. Ammo is my main concern. Also, I’ll grab those brain boxes Five gave you.

“Arma finally speaks up, a little more enthusiastically this time. “Oh, and any kinds of tools you can make it home without, we’ll take em.”

Vaun comes across, sounding a little reluctant. “Well, I don’t want to be a jerk, but we honestly don’t have much for any shells we can let go of. We’re pretty low, and it’s going to take us a while to get all the way back home on Ion drives. We used our solids towing the crew ship. There’s a lot between us and home. I have a feeling we’re gonna need em.”

“No that’s fine. You’re probably right. What about some rifles and stuff. We’re gonna be out there for quite a while, and the colonists aren’t armed either.”

“Yeah, we’ve got enough for a full crew over here. We’ll bring em on over.”

Over the next hour, while he and Vaun work on loading up all of their supplies, Arma coordinates their trajectory with the Mars crew. Their massive ships, even with the engines they have, will be taking a while to get to Mars. She and Aaron should be able to hold about the same pace as them with their Ion engines alone. If they wait till the last minute to reverse in with their solids, they could beat the colony landers there by weeks. Even with the extra weight they’re bringing on from the other shuttle, they’ll still weight less than when they started out. They dumped a good four hundred pounds of ammunition on the space bugs.

As soon as everyone is strapped in and ready to launch, the massive Mars colony ships and landers gently float free of the massive old-world space dock and initiate their second launch. Arma pushes their own shuttle onward as well, leaving their previous lives behind them. While they slowly accelerate, the behemoth procession of white ships ahead of them gradually disappear into the darkness. Eventually the soft glow from their engines disappear amongst the rest of the stars. The farther out they go, the less there is to see, and the feeling of how alone they really are starts to set in.

It only takes about eight hours of being stuck in their seats before they’ve flat had enough of it. With over a month of the same ahead of them, Arma starts considering what options they have. She wonders if they might want to try taking shifts on duty while the other is turned off. They don’t have a boot module with them, but they can unplug their batteries directly if they get desperate. All it takes to get her to drop the idea, is a reminding that she’d be completely alone while he were off. While they’re complaining, and out of their seats, the traffic monitoring system starts flashing red and bleeping an alarm at them. Vaun comes in over the com all freaked out.

“Hey, you guys you’ve got incoming! Someone’s sent a missile up, and it’s moving fast!”

He leaps to his seat and peers at the monitor that’s lit up. Whatever it is, it’s still a ways out. “Shit. Looks like we were right to follow after the colonists.”

Sy is pretty sure he knows what it’s really for. “I don’t think this one’s for them, you guys. It would swing wide of you if it were going for the colonists.”

Arma isn’t surprised. “The colonists are already on borrowed time. Everyone knows that. We aren’t tho.”

He’s starting to get a little fed up with space life, and it’s only begun. “Why would they send up a missile like this? Don’t they know we can just shoot them down? They couldn’t possibly know we’re out of ammo, could they?”

Vaun doesn’t have the best news for them. “I don’t know, but they might. Or, it’s not the kind of missile you can shoot down. All I can say is that you’re gonna have to deal with it Aaron, one way or another. I’m sorry. If somehow, someone has been able to listen in, and they knew you were out of shells, then I probably can’t advise you on exactly how to handle this. It’s kind of up to you now.”

“No, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it the hard way, my damn self.”

Vaun knows exactly what he means. “That’s what I’m talking about. I told you there was a reason for all the stupid things we do in training. Show em how it’s done bud.”

While the others are talking, Arma is tracking the missile. From what the system shows, they have about twenty minutes before it reaches them. Luckily, its finally stopped accelerating, but it’s already moving faster than anything she’s ever heard of. They need their solid rockets to drop down to Mars. If they use them to evade, it could cost them another month or two of travel, or worse, end up stranding them in deep space.

She almost wishes they could just die, and wake up back at home already. They could end up stuck on mars forever. She thinks of all they’ve done since her and Aaron’s memories were backed up. It’s only been a short time compared to the years they stand to lose, but she still can’t trade them in. She’s scared to lose the first time, she told him she loved him, and him saying he loves her back. She can’t lose that, or any of what they’ve done in the last few days.

In frustration, Aaron is crouched down at the munitions cabinets again, leaning over with the face of his helmet up against one of them. It’s either him or the missile now. As he sees it, it can go down one of three ways, and two of them are really bad. Either he takes the missile down, it kills him, or it kills Arma and destroys the ship, leaving him adrift. It’s the most pressure he’s ever had on him.

With no time to spare, he shoves the bulky flight pack and the three rifles into the small space between the two airlock doors door and climbs in after the gear. He’s upset and makes every move grudgingly. Inside the small puck-shaped chamber, he considers punching the door hard, but he already knows from experience that it never quenches even a hint of his anger. While he forces himself to hold onto his wits, he evacuates the nitrogen atmosphere. As the door opens, he looks outside into the darkness. For some reason, he feels afraid, as if he were standing at the very edge of a bottomless cliff.

Arma’s voice is unsteady when she says his name. “Aaron.”

In his mind, he can see the tears on her face. It cuts his anger down like nothing else ever has. “It’s gonna be alright babe. I love you.” He can hear it in the change of her breathing that it means the world to her.

“I love you too.”

Without a tether, he leaps off the back of the shuttle as hard as he can, putting a wide and expanding buffer between him and the shuttle. He expects the missile is either the type that detonates at a distance and spreads shrapnel out into a large pattern, or the type that gets close and explodes like a bomb. The first is harder to evade, so it’s what he plans for. After ten minutes of drifting behind the shuttle, he can’t see it anymore.

For a moment, a wave of panic flashes through him. When he looks around himself, he loses all reference of direction. He could be completely turned around and not even know it. It feels like drowning in the ocean at midnight, with no way to know which way is up. He doesn’t even need to breath with his sealed batter installed, but it[s got him huffing and puffing nonetheless. Abruptly, he stops and forces himself to stay still, like floating on the water before a dive.

He remembers that he’s not alone, and that everything he has is connected to the ship, and Arma. The flight pack he’s wearing can return him back to the shuttle all on its own if he needed it to, and the two bigger rifles have integrated tracking systems on them too. The same as Vaun showed him during training, he turns the flack cannon’s target system on and links it with the shuttle.

Arma sees something change on one of her displays. “Aaron, somethings going on with my system, something is locking onto the missile, and using our system.”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

In the large window of the flip-up machine gun reflex sight, the tracking bar on the edges shows him which direction to point himself. In his helmet, he can hear it say “target locked”. The missile is a thousand miles away, yet the ship is capable of lining him up with a perfect shot. The ship knows which gun he has, and compensates everything for him. The little red triangle in the sight points him at the missile, and the HUD in his helmet gives him more options. Every time he toggles the munitions selector witch on his rifle, it cycles the menu on the lens of his helmet.

With the missile closing in as fast as it is, he sets the distance delay charges on the rounds he’s using to explode one thousand yards ahead of the missile. He has to click the button a hundred damn times to get the proximity distance that far out. Normally, it would only be ten or twenty yards. He’s ready to shoot, but then remembers it’s a thrity millimeter shells he’s about to start shooting. Muzzle brake or not, they are going to throw him around quite a bit.

He commands his flight pack to hold orientation and then shoulders the big gun. While he positions the mass of his body in the perfect way, to take the recoil without spinning, his booster pack keeps him as steady as a rail. He toggles the fire-on-lock function and holds the trigger down. Every time the rifle lines up perfectly on the missile, the rifle kicks a round downrange. Even in a vacuum, the huge muzzle flashes blot out the darkness in front of him. There’s only a faint thump of a sound reverberating through his body each time.

As soon as the first five rounds are sent downrange, he pockets the spent magazine and slams a fresh one home, all without letting the target marker leave the window of his sight. As afraid as he is to be hesitant, he still waits a minute to see if the missile will react to any of the first shells.

Arma comes in over the com in a panic. “Aaron, you’ve got less than a minute!”

“Shit! I know I know! Has it moved any?”

She already has the shuttle turned back around, so she can face him and the missile. “It’s coming right for you!”

He’s watching the yellow target distance readout on his reflex sight, and it’s dropping even faster. The numbers are changing so quickly, he can only count down with the first hundred mile digit at a time. All he has left is seconds. Making it one big combined weapon system, he slings the standard rifle around and snaps it into its mounting clips on the side of the flack cannon. Without needing to use another target system, he unloads the whole extended thirty round magazine around the red triangle in a tight spiral pattern, then cranks out the next five thirty millimeter shells from the big gun in the same circular group.

He can’t imagine the missile being able to avoid everything he’s sent downrange at it, but for some reason it hasn’t exploded yet. At the combined velocity between them, any one piece of shot should be able to go through more than a foot of steel. After everything he’s shot at it, it still hasn’t moved off course.

In a last couple seconds he has, he reaches for the lightning cannon and pushes it out front of himself in a panic, turning it on before he can even shoulder it. Even with the fold-up sight still in its down position, the lens in his helmet automatically lights up with it already locked on target.

“Use current active target lock, yes or no?”

He shouts back at it. “YES” and holds the trigger down.

When nothing happens, it feels like his heart collapses in on itself like a tiny black hole. In a split second, the tiny red locking triangle on his helmet races in at him and becomes huge. In the middle of the triangle, a fuzzy grey spot appears for an immeasurably short spec of time, and then is gone. As he instinctively closes his eyes and winces, his vision whites out, fades to a glimmer of pink, and then goes black again.

When he opens his eyes again, he remembers Arma yelling his name. For some reason, he was expecting to be waking up in the lab, but he’s not. Somehow, he has his helmet on, and is still alive. He drags in a sharp deep breath and tries to look behind himself, but he can’t, not till he turns of his booster pack’s position hold.

“Wha… what happened? Arma?”

“Aaron! Oh my god! I don’t know. It just went right by you. I saw you hit it with the arc gun, and that was it.”

He’s never been so freaked out in either of his lives. Despite being a robot, he feels like he needs a nap or something now. All he wants to do is get back to the shuttle, lay flat on the floor, and stare at the ceiling. The neurotransmitter solution that’s been raging him on is suddenly starting to filter back out, dropping him like a rock. After letting out a measured breath, he taps the return button on his flight pack and lets it scoot him back to the shuttle on its own. He stares blankly into space as he drifts, the same way he used to float on his back in the water.

With the volume on low, he lays slack in his suit and closes his eyes as he drifts through the nothingness. Arma and the others chatter over the com link, confirming that the missile is no longer active. They’ve already rewatched the video from his helmet and are going over it in slow motion again. It feels like all Sy wants from him anymore is cool combat footage. All he can think about for the moment is continuing on with a solid month of nothing but Arma’s incredible smooth long legs to contend with.