Unfinished Business

Prologue

"You sure you want to do this, mate?"

Hamilton peered out through tired eyes and the scuffed, dirty lens of his antique spacesuit at the other man – his tone had been casual, almost jovial, but that belied the concerned look in his eyes. They were talking by pressing their helmet faceplates together to protect from eavesdroppers, which lent an eerie, hollow tone to his voice.

"Yessir," he assured, his tone dead and unenthusiastic. "I'm not going to make it much longer, Colonel. This is best for everyone."

"Me an' the lads, we . . . we appreciate it, Ham," the Colonel said, resigned. "I wish there was some other way."

"It's all right, Colonel. I'm not afraid. Kinda lookin'—" he interrupted himself with a hard cough that wracked his body. Colonel McNab winced inside his helmet as he saw tiny splatters of blood spray against Hamilton's mask. He was getting worse. In a few days they would have send him Below . . . and he couldn't let that happen to another one of his men. Hamilton recovered. "I'm kind of looking forward to it, actually. Maybe I come back as a billionaire, next time."

"Bah! You an' your damned Buddhist reincarnation. Tell you what, though. I'll look you up in Purgatory and buy you a beer." "Thanks, Colonel," Hamilton smiled, thinly. "It's been . . . it's been a pleasure to serve with you and the boys."

"Likewise," McNab agreed, nodding enthusiastically. "You see the Doc like we discussed?"

"Yessir. He gave me somethin'. Said it might buy me a little time. Make it painless, too, in the long run. Not sure I want to take the time, actually."

"Do it," insisted McNab. "It's a long shot – this whole bloody scheme is a longshot of a longshot – but can't give up, now, can we? Wouldn't be right."

"Not sporting," agreed Hamilton, weakly.

"Good man. You have the package?"

"Right here," Hamilton agreed, tapping his chest with a gauntleted finger. "Got it all. Reports. Letters. All of it."

"And the transceiver?"

"Gizu hard-wired it into my suit last night. Hooks into the solar panel, and the auxiliary battery. Should last . . . quite a while."

"Bloody amazing what that boy can do," McNab said, shaking his head in wonderment. "Couple of trashed intercoms and some wire and spit, could build a bloody battleship."

"Then whyinhell didn't he ten years ago?" complained Hamilton, light heartedly. "Wouldn't have to do this, if he had."

"Busy, I imagine," McNab said, which broke them both up with laughter.

"Attention EVA Detail," the flat, disinterested voice of the supervising guard said. "Thirty seconds to full loss of pressure. You got your longjohns open, this would be a good time to button up. Or not." All around them the others went through their final pressure checks. The suits were all decades old and prone to failure. Casualty rates on these EVAs were criminally high, and the guards didn't care one way or another how many came back. You checked your gear yourself, if you wanted to live.

"Bastard," spat Hamilton, still connecting his helmet to McNab.

"Their incompetence and apathy are the only way this scheme might work," reminded McNab.

"Yeah," Ham said, miserably. "Lucky us."

The light on the faded and peeling interior door shifted from yellow to red, blinked three times, then went out. "Pressure zero," the guard said, bored. "Leave any corpses and let's get this done. They're having meatloaf tonight, an' I don't want to miss it."

"God! He really is a bastard!" swore McNab. "When was the last time we had anything but Type one shit-inna-bowl?"

"New Year's" Hamilton reminded him, disgusted. "We got Type Two shit in cake form, remember?"

"Bloody bastard," repeated McNab. The airlock hatch screamed a tortured cry they could feel through their boots as it opened, letting the raw sunlight in to spash across their visors. Most of the helmets automatically went opaque, but there were plenty where the filters were broken or missing altogether. Those men raised their gauntlets to shield their eyes – there were plenty of their mates who only saw fuzzy blobs now because they hadn't been careful.

Enveloped in the silence of the Black the work detail stomped forward in magnetic boots and headed for the work site, the aft atmo processing tower. It had been damaged somehow a week ago, and they had relied on the back up and breathed stale atmo while the proper parts were assembled to repair it. Half of the men in the detail carried tools or parts. It was somewhat ironic, as an improvised explosive, carried there for the purpose by some of these same men, had damaged the tower.

"All right, get to work. Squad A, commence repairs on the tower. Squad B, you take the structural damage on the supports. We only got four hours of atmo, so shake a gorram leg!"

The two teams wordlessly split off to their assignments while the guard, in a dark green spacesuit and carrying a newly-made Karinkov submachine gun – specially designed for vacuum work – stood by and watched. While regular supplies had been scant, old, and of poor quality, the guards always sported the latest military hardware.

McNab followed Hamilton up the tower, where pressurized condensing tanks lay exposed to the black. They were to remove four of them, allow the technician to repair the burst main line, and then re-install them. Each tank was the size of a cow, which made them bulky – it took two men to wrangle one out, even in zero-gee.

"Yeah, this one still has pressure," Conrad said, pushing his helmet to McNab's. "Full pressure. Fail-safes must have kicked in like they were supposed to."

"You can get it ready?"

"In two minutes, Captain," the younger man assured.

"Good. Pass the word. We're a go."

Conrad nodded, then started down the side of the tower, stopping at every man on the way down to touch helmets with each one. After he had done so, the man would nod, then started unfastening his auxiliary atmo tank. That cut everyone's supply in half, but after this it wouldn't matter. McNab accepted each one and taped them securely on the opposite side of the big pressurized tank. When there was at least twelve hours worth of life-giving oxygen there, McNab looked down and gave Conrad the thumbs-up. He started back up.

McNab turned and shook Hamilton's hand one last time. "Godspeed," he added. "I'll make sure you get a medal for this someday."

"Save it, Captain," Hamilton said. "Just tell my folks how I went out. Dad wouldn't abide a coward. Make sure he knows."

"You have my word," McNab assured. "But you're still getting the bloody medal!"

"Whatever the Captain wishes."

"Won't that be a ruttin' first? Okay, time for the show. Make it good." He turned and made a cut-throat sign across the chin of his helmet, and a man positioned near to the structure moved into position to obscure the camera that watched them. Just as Conrad climbed back into position, McNab started down. When he reached the bottom of the tower he signaled to two other prisoners, and they moved into position.

"Sergeant Gupta, a word, if you please," he said over the intercom. The guard sighed heavily and turned to face him.

"What the hell do you want?"

"That's 'what the hell do you want, Colonel," McNab reminded.

"Yeah, filed a complaint. Speak."

"I was wondering if it would be okay to look on the other side of the tower. Its possible that the explosion punctured the other tiers, and I reckoned that while we were out here—"

"That is not our job," Gupta sneered. "Request, denied."

"Very well, then," McNab sighed, and turned to go back to work.

That was the signal. Conrad took a heavy wrench and opened the emergency valve on the tank, and suddenly a cloud of expelled atmo escaped into the Black. The tank immediately shot into space, and Hamilton – who had secured himself to the tank – was carried aloft at an impressive rate of speed.

"Oh, bloody hell!" McNab said, only partially feigning horror. It had been planned out this way, of course, but still, to watch a man he commanded go off to a near-certain death was still sickening. "Conrad! What the hell happened? Lee! Wong! Rescue party, quick! Get—"

"Belay that!" Gupta yelled through the intercom. "Belay that ruttin' order! Hu'un dan! Why does this shit always happen on my watch? Let the poor bastard go. That's an order!"

"Sergeant, I must protest!" McNab said, turning and glaring at the man – not that he could have seen it through his faceplate. "That man is still alive! The least we can do—"

"Oh, shut the hell up," Gupta growled, gesturing unmistakably with the Karinkov menacingly. "He's a goner and you know it. I'm not gonna waste time and resources retrieving his body. But I do see he's moving. I'm not without mercy," He said, sliding the safety off of the gun and began taking aim at the rapidly receding object. "If I can get a shot off, he won't suffer," he said.

"That is kind of you," agreed McNab, lightheartedly. He took a long, industrial-sized spanner from his belt harness. With his other hand he reached out and snapped off the guard's wireless antenna from the back of his helmet. Startled and angry, Gupta turned – and took the business end of the spanner across the face of his suit.

Unlike the antique industrial grade suits the prisoners wore, the guards' suits were military issue, designed for light combat and support. They were armored enough to take a glancing blow from most light munitions. But if you hit them just right, you might not shatter the transplex but you could damn sure break the seal around the edge. McNab was gratified at the puff of gas that started escaping instantly, leaving a fine sheen of artificial snowflakes as the water vapor in the atmo froze. Gupta's hands went immediately for the seal, leaving his gun to hang at the end of its lanyard. McNab was about to finish the job when he stopped and touched helmets.

"Sorry about this, Gupta," he said, sounding genuine. "You were always a bit of a bastard, but not as bad as some. I suppose I'm only somewhat sorry, though. You always kept forgetting my rank. You shouldn't have done so. It's against the Conventions, after all. You should know that."

"Oh my God!" the man was screaming, panicking and flailing around madly while the breath of life escaped his suit. "You—"

McNab pulled his helmet away and gave the other man's helmet two more punishing smacks, really putting his shoulder into it. He accidentally hit one of his gauntlets, crushing some fingers, before enough of the faceplate came away to end the struggle. Sergeant Gupta was dead in seconds, his eyes bulging and freezing from explosive decompression..

"I wish it could have been otherwise," McNab said to his corpse. He reached out and grabbed the floating gun, cradling it in his arms like a baby – he had dreamed of the moment he could get his hands around a real weapon for well over a decade. Now that he had one, he didn't want to turn it loose.

But they would track the gun, he knew. They wouldn't let that go. No, the only safe way out of this was to follow the plan. Everyone had to stay above suspicion. If they thought that they had stolen a weapon, they would crawl up everyone's ass with a microscanner until it was found . . . or send them Below, one by one, until it was produced. No, they couldn't take a gun back inside.

Bullets, on the other hand, wouldn't be missed. He removed the magazine from the gun, then pulled three more from the dead guards' pouches, before sending both into the Black with as great a shove as he could. He then distributed them to several men, who hid them among the tools. They didn't have a gun, but now they had bullets. You could make guns, if you wanted to badly enough.

When the body was far enough out, he tagged the command frequency and spoke to Control. "This is Colonel McNab. We have an emergency," he declared. "Some sort of accident. We've lost two men – one of mine, one of yours. Don't know what happened, but both are free-floating and showing no signs of life. Instructions?"

He waited until Control figured out what was to be done, and watched the shiny specks that were moving off against the starfield. He crossed himself reverently, the toggled the local intercom channel and spoke to his men.

"Lads, we have lost a hero, today. Let's send him off properly!" he said, and started singing the Rally Anthem across the open channel. He'd be censured for that later, but he didn't mind. A couple of days in solitary might give him a chance to figure out what to do next.

As they sang, they all started standing straighter. Morale was always low, but the pride in their cause and their units and their inherent patriotism brought to the cracked voices of the men a certain passion that made McNab tear up.

Damn the War, he thought to himself. Twelve years. Twelve gorram years they had been here. Twelve years the war raged, and they were stuck here, forgotten. Some even longer. His son would be near grown by now, and likely enlisted as he had. Perhaps even an officer – the idea overfilled him with pride. He could hold out. Even with the doctors and the lab rats, the bad food and the disease, the stale air, the nasty water, the poor sanitation and the daily humiliation and indignity, he could hold out. He had to, to see his boy again. And Mai. Always Mai. He could endure anything for that chance.

He hoped Hamilton had taken the Doc's pill. The starspecks were gone, now, too far out to be distinguishable from the real stars. That was fitting, somehow. Poetical, even.

"All right, lads," he said with a sigh as the Anthem ended. "Browncoats, assemble. Let's head back inside. The paperwork on this is going to be a bitch."