Magnet Omnibus I (Lacuna) Read online

  Lightheadedness took over. I didn’t have a radio system as I floated in space, just the emergency locater beacon I couldn’t hear. Piggyback would no doubt have a lock, though, by now. I imagined the crew confirming their data as they fought their way towards me. I watched with something approaching a mixture of idle curiosity and apathy as the gunfire flew back and forth in the distance, the seemingly endless dance between the big ugly Broadsword and the three smaller Badgers. Through my eyes it seemed beautiful, serene even, a fireworks display just for me.

  My concern for the battle I no longer had a part of faded. I needed to know where I’d been hit and to find out, I needed to be free of the ejection seat. I struggled, reaching around for the release clasps, yanking them with both hands. I had expected them to be hard and unyielding to prevent accidental activation but they came off effortlessly. The excess force sent me tumbling out and away, and as the ejection seat and I separated I saw the damage. Blood splattered the seat, thin wisps of exhaust trailing from the end, slowly expanding and diffusing to nothing.

  The blood on the seat was focused around my abdomen. I reached down, feeling gingerly, trying to find the hole in me.

  And then there it was. About the size of a coin, smaller perhaps, through my lower chest. I wiggled my finger inside and found it fit quite snugly. It also helped stall the rush of escaping air from my suit. What organs were in that area again...? Kidney? Liver? A hole in one of those would be bad. Organs were important for long term survival. I’d had them all my life, so there was a kind of emotional attachment there. I pressed my finger in a little deeper and hoped that, if I passed out, there would be enough friction to keep the digit lodged in.

  A fairly morbid way to spend a Saturday.

  I blinked away another wave of drowsiness. Without an outlet the suit began to fill with blood. Droplets rose in front of my helmet, my breath enough to suck them towards me, then away as I exhaled. For some strange reason I tried desperately not to swallow any, preferring to see them splattered against the thick glass of my helmet.

  I thought of my girlfriend, back on Earth. She was the sweetest thing, hotter than a chili bean, funny, smart—she had a PHD in theoretical physics—and legally blind.

  The fact that she couldn’t see was very important to me. People say attractiveness doesn’t matter in a relationship, but it does. It does.

  Some thought of fighter pilots as sky knights, charismatic gentlemen fighting it out amongst the stars, but I didn’t match the picture. My face wasn’t smooth and perfect.

  At age fifteen, my face picked a fight with the propeller of my family's boat, on a shoal near Broome, off Western Australia. The boat drifted onto a sandbar and I got out to push. I slipped and fell right onto the blades, cutting my face up real good.

  I don’t really remember much of what happened after that, but my dad said the coast guard flew out a helicopter to pick me up. He’d never seen so much blood before and he was certain I wouldn’t make it. All I remember is trying to see, and just having blood in my eyes, my vision a crimson haze. And screaming.

  Turns out not only did I pull through, I managed to keep both my eyes too. The same couldn’t really be said for most of the rest of my face, though, no matter how many times the plastic surgeons tried to repair it. I always looked as though I had some kind of fake featureless mask over my “real” face, and even the extensive surgeries couldn’t eradicate the half-dozen or so slashes going right from my jawline to my temple.

  Penny knew I wasn’t as beautiful as she was. She’d touched my scars, run her fingers along them, felt the indentations. But they were not something she had to look at every day.

  I wondered how she’d react to the news that I’d bought it in my first real combat. I didn’t want her to think that mine was a painful death; despite the obvious injury I felt no pain, not even when I blocked the hole with my finger.

  At age twenty six I felt a little too young to be given the twelve gun salute and tossed in the ground to become fertiliser.

  I’d never gotten to propose to her, either. I fumbled, reaching into my chest pocket, retrieving the thin strip of metal I’d stowed there. An engagement ring, a cheap one, nothing fancy. Nobody could afford any luxuries these days, a simple steel band would have to do. We couldn’t afford diamonds; the ring was adorned with a simple heart-shaped red ruby.

  The moment I saw it I knew it was perfect. With hands for eyes Penny wouldn’t be able to see the colour, but she would the shape with her fingers. She would love it.

  Well, she would have loved it.

  I clasped it in my fingers, unfurling them awkwardly, watching as the metal floated up from my palm, spinning lazily in space. Light refracted off the gem, creating thin strips of white on the otherwise dark red gem’s surface. Spots of blood appeared on the metal and without thinking I reached up to wipe them off.

  I missed and knocked the ring tumbling away from my grasp. In the gravity-less vacuum of space I could do nothing but watch as it slowly drifted away.

  Blast.

  The loss of my ship, and the injury, didn’t hurt me as much as the loss of that ring. It was cheap, but it was something. There was an emotional attachment that surpassed its value in notes and coins.

  Like I said, she would have loved it. Penny was a Buddhist; I'm not sure what exactly they did for marriage. Maybe I should have asked her before I bought the ring.

  My air was almost gone. Breathing became difficult and my helmet’s perspex screen began to fog up. Some part of me realised my finger must have slipped out of the hole and I tried, blindly, to reinsert it. But now my hands were numb, my whole body was, and I couldn’t see to find the hole. After a few moments of futile struggle, which probably made the oxygen situation worse, I gave up.

  A bright light behind me. I twisted around, looking over my shoulder, a gesture awkward in my heavy suit and thick helmet, holding up a bloodstained glove to try and shield my eyes. At first I thought it might be the metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel, a great white wave of energy coming to sweep me up and take me from this life to the next, to carry me to my seventy two virgins or whatever.

  With my luck, they’d be pimple faced nerds bitching about pointless nerd things. Not that it mattered since I was probably going to the other place anyway.

  It wasn’t an angelic choir, however, but the lights on the outside of Piggyback’s cargo hold. Like some hungry beast the Broadsword Piggyback glided toward me, their cargo door open like a great mouth to devour me whole. No less salvation, I supposed, but one brought by the hands of man.

  I drifted inside the cargo hold as Piggyback scooped me up. My body felt suddenly heavy as gravity reasserted itself. I crashed to the metal deck with a scraping thump. Gasping, I weakly flopped onto my back, scratching at my helmet, my lungs trying to fill themselves with the fleeting gasps of air that remained inside my suit.

  To my infinite relief, the cargo door slid closed and the whole chamber flooded with oxygen. Four arrays of jets, one from each edge of the room, pumped sweet air into the empty space. I fumbled for the helmet latch, the perspex still fogged, my numb fingers somehow able to find the catch. I yanked on it, half tugging the helmet off my head; a second rough shove was enough for it to tumble to the deck, forgotten as I struggled to breathe.

  Everything was grey. All the colour had been drained out of the room, my vision a tunnel through a ring of black clouds. I knew I was close to passing out, and I felt my eyes drift closed. I just had to hang on a little while longer... a little while longer...

  I looked forward to Halloween every year.

  It’s sad and ironic that, back when I was a kid, Halloween was the only time the world felt normal, when I felt I fit in. Halloween felt like a day when everything was backwards, where I could be myself and people would think I was cool. It was a day when the ugly was inspired and the good was boring. My face made a good mask... imported from America, or something, if strangers asked.

  School wasn’t easy f
or me. Kids could be merciless in ways adults were too polite to be. I got through high school with a mixture of dogged determination and the charity of my teachers, then enrolled in the Air Force. I’d always wanted to fly and, let’s face it, being a model was now a little bit out of the realm of even extreme possibilities. I learnt to fly and life was good.

  The Air Force was a big break for me. I found friends, found Penny, found somewhere I belonged.

  Then the Toralii attacked Earth life got interesting. It turns out that a few places on Earth—Sydney, Tehran and Beijing were developing some kind of teleportation device. A jump drive that could transport a spaceship around. It was going to change everything.

  It also turned out that the technology is inherently dangerous and the Toralii had some way of detecting it. They obliterated the three cities, transmitted a warning in Chinese, then vanished.

  Humanity had two choices. Be little bitches and give up all hope of having this technology, or build it anyway and fight for our right to use it.

  The major world powers formed Task Force Resolution. This group built three ships, naming them after the three cities that were destroyed. The Australians crewed the Sydney, the Iranians got the Tehran and the Chinese manned the Beijing.

  Although it was the second ship off the line, in the beginning the Beijing saw the majority of the action, including the first real confrontation with the Toralii. It was in that confrontation we discovered against conventional thought at the time that the Toralii used little fighters as companions to their larger ships in space battles.

  Military intelligence thought strike craft would be too slow and too weak to hurt the larger ships but, shock and horror, military intelligence got it wrong. The unexpected and effective presence of those little birds, pecking away at the Beijing’s hull, convinced the task force we should have them too.

  A space craft was hurriedly designed and built in a global effort. The airframe was designed by the Iranians, who based it on the F-4 Phantom. When they had a working prototype selection began amongst the world’s best air forces. The Israelis eventually claimed the prize. The Iranians protested, of course, especially since it was their airframe and insisted on providing their own pilots for the Tehran. The Australians went with the Israelis, but wanted to have at least one of their own pilots on the Sydney just to maintain an Australian presence.

  They picked me. Lord knows why. Something about “representing the nation”.

  Also, I really like seafood. Crab was my favourite.

  These are the kinds of things a mind remembers when it’s dying. Things that were, things that could be, things that really didn’t mean much. A big jumbled mess of nothing that barely makes sense. Like your mind is running through your life just to make sure all its affairs are in order before it expires, then throws in some random junk just to fuck with you.

  Oxygen deprivation is weird.

  “Wake up! You’re not dead yet, you ugly mother fucker!”

  I slowly creaked open my eyes, and was expecting to see the dark hull of Piggyback. Instead, I was assaulted by the bright white sheen of an infirmary.

  “Air...!” I gasped, grabbing at my suit—but instead, I was grabbing at a hospital gown and my body was covered in a sheet.

  My hands flailed and my legs kicked in a panic. Strong hands grabbed me, keeping me from tumbling out of bed.

  “Woah, easy there, champ. Easy there. You’re okay, you’re back on the Sydney...”

  I fell back against the bed, unable to struggle any further, panting and gasping. I reached down to my chest with hands that barely moved, trying to find the hole, searching. I had to plug it, I was running out of air. My chest was tight. I was going to asphyxiate.

  “It’s okay, mate, it’s okay. Doctor Richards bandaged the wound. You’re okay, you’re fine... you’re fine. You’re going to be fine.”

  Slowly, slowly, my conscious mind began to catch up to where I really was. I gave a weak groan. Shaba, Piggyback’s pilot, stood at the edge of the bed, grinning at me with those blue eyes, her expression a mixture of jockish laughter and relief.

  “... you’re fine.” Her smile widened and she lifted her hands up off my arms. “Gave us quite the scare, though.”

  I’d read somewhere that there’s sometimes a very profound confusion one experiences when waking up from a prolonged unconsciousness. That’s true, but it’s both more and less than that—impossible to communicate for someone who’s not experienced it for themselves. Only seconds ago been laying on the inside of Piggyback, still struggling to breathe, to get my helmet off before I died. Being shot by the Toralii fighters, making the decision to eject from my crippled craft, launching the mission itself… they were were all fresh memories, vivid and raw as though they had just been made. It’s like waking up from an intense dream. Your brain has to take a minute to sort out what’s real.

  “Oh really?” I coughed, searing pain stabbing me directly in the abdomen. Pain, now, for the first time. I could feel bandages gripping my chest, feel the faint tickle of stitches beneath.

  Shaba rolled her shoulders, putting her hands together and cracking her knuckles. “You owe me money, from poker.”

  I think I did, too. Change of subject time. I pointed down my body with a finger. “How bad...?”

  “Terrible,” she answered as her eyes flicked down to my crotch, “short, shrivelled, always hanging to the left... barely gets up when you want him to, burns when you pee-”

  “I meant the fucking-” Another wave of pain. Now that the shock had worn off, everything hurt. “The wound. Not...” I was not in the mood for this. “Urgh. But it’s fine, right?”

  Shaba rested her hand on my gut. Pain. “Don’t worry, Mags, Penny’s little joystick is just fine. You won’t believe this, but... basically that bolt of Toralii energy went straight in and out, missing every single vital organ on the way. Couldn’t ask for a cleaner injury. You’ll be right as rain in no time, but you’ll have one hell of a scar.”

  I coughed again, wincing slightly as the effort stretched my wounds, forcing myself to lay still. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Can’t say the same for your fighter, though,” remarked Shaba, her tone conveying an impish glee that I simply didn’t have the energy to go along with. “Looks like you broke your precious little baby. Captain Knight had a salvage team look at the dust that was left of the explosion. There wasn’t even enough to bring back a souvenir for you.”

  “That’s a shame. I blame Viper.”

  “Hah. Still, you got your Martin Baker tie waiting for you when you get back, so that’s something at least.”

  Whenever anyone successfully employed a Martin Baker ejection seat and survived, the company sent them out a special pin and a tie. Some pilots, especially test pilots, made it a point of pride to collect them. I wasn’t exactly planning on starting a collection, but if you flew planes long enough you eventually got one.

  “How did we go after you picked me up? Did we extract the prisoners?”

  “Got all the poor bastards, yep. We didn’t score any other kills, the furballs retreated when they realised we were playing for keeps.” She idly stared down at her fingers indifferently. “So we got one of theirs, and they got one of ours. Nobody can say that we’re not scrupulously fair.”

  “Fair. That’s great.”

  “Well, we try.”

  I reaching out with my hand, resting it on Shaba’s arm. “Thanks for coming to collect my arse,” I remarked, hoping that the sincerity I felt carried through on my voice.

  “Hey, any time.” She winked. “How could I resist the chick magnet?”

  I snorted. “Bullet magnet more like. Did anyone else get hit?”

  She laughed. “Nope. Just you. Not a single hit. The paint on Piggyback isn’t even scratched.”

  “Figures.”

  There was a moment’s silence as I closed my eyes. I felt intensely weary, as though I’d been awake for days. “How long have I been here?”
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br />   “Four hours, post surgery. About six total. It’s about two o’clock in the morning. Sunday.”

  “Ah.” I nodded, wrinkling my nose. “I guess I missed dinner then.”

  “Believe me you didn’t miss it. It was some kind of meat, that’s all we knew, but it looked like puke. I’d rather eat shell casings. We broke open some MREs from Piggyback’s stores instead. Chicken A La King. Mmm, mmm.”

  MREs, or Meal Ready to Eat, were the bane of my existence. They were essentially foil-wrapped “food” that could be torn open and eaten with a minimal amount of preparation or fuss and came packaged with a hydrogen based chemical heater. An MRE was intended only as field nutrition when kitchens or normal supplies were not available. They came in two flavours: cardboard and vomit.

  Shaba kept insisting that I just needed to try the right flavour to find one I liked, but I’d have to be a lot hungrier than a single missed meal to try it. I made a game of calling them all kinds of things: Meals Rejected by Everyone, Meal Ready to Expel or Morale Reducing Elements among many others. The best thing I loved about them was that each package was helpfully labelled “MEAL” in giant letters, as though some bureaucrat somewhere had assumed that the morons the military entrusted with heavy weapons would be unable to distinguish food from ammunition.

  Shaba’s comment about shell casings floated back into my mind.

  “Blech. I can’t believe you eat that crap.”

  “It’s a gourmet meal fit for a king, my friend, the stuff of-” Her eyes widened. “Wait a second, hang on, I nearly forgot...” she dug around inside a small plastic bag, fiddling for a moment before withdrawing her hand, closed into a fist. She held it in front of me teasingly. “Guess what we found rattling around the bottom of the cargo hold. Figured it belonged to you.”

  She opened her hand, revealing the thin steel band that I thought I’d lost, the red heart shaped gem still splattered with blood.

  “You didn’t even clean it?” I remarked dryly, although I couldn’t stop my face from lighting up in a bright grin.