Contagion

by David Ryker

“It’s just a matter of scale, plus a massive leap in technology. What I don’t understand is where they got the extra mass.”

  “Extra mass?”

  “If you got hit by a meteor that big, some of the wing must have been knocked off. What did they replace it with?”

  Good question. I shrugged. “The ship looked just the same when I got out, and I don’t think there’s room for storing raw materials. And the speed that it repaired itself! It’s hard to believe the Dri’kai are so high-tech.”

  Iliescu ran his hand through his shock of blond hair.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “That is hard to believe.”

  He looked at me suddenly, and the intensity of that look startled me.

  “Can you get me on one of those fighters?”

  “I doubt it. They’re only letting fighter pilots on.”

  “Claim I’m a fighter pilot, then,” he said like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “But you’re not.”

  “So what? You said they wanted you to pick out people to test. Well, test me.”

  “It’s not like driving a car, or even a shuttle craft.”

  “I don’t have to pass the test. I only need to get in there for a bit.”

  “I promised R’kk’kar not to make any close scans or take anything from them. You saw how he reacted with Foyle.”

  “I won’t do anything like that.”

  “This is serious, Iliescu. The Dri’kai are a warrior race. From what Valeria tells me, in a culture like that there’s nothing more important than one’s word. It was the same in the army.”

  Iliescu cocked his head. “Don’t worry, I’m not Foyle.”

  I let out a slow breath. “No you are not.”

  The chief engineer looked about to say something, but then thought better of it.

  I studied him for a moment. Iliescu was a bit like Valeria. He had the same insatiable curiosity. He was even willing to go through a dangerous flight test just so he could get a good look at some advanced technology. Taking a sample or making a scan would be a huge temptation for someone like him.

  But he was also a decent guy and, more importantly, not a self-obsessed idiot. No, he wasn’t Foyle, and he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the mission.

  But he still wasn’t going to get what he wanted.

  “Look, they know you’re our chief engineer. No way they’ll let you aboard one of those things as a prospective pilot.”

  Iliescu slumped, looking as dejected as a kid who rushed down to the ice cream shop with some hard-earned money in his hand only to find it closed.

  “Well, I suppose we could send one of my team they haven’t met,” he moaned.

  I laughed and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, buddy. I know how much you want to do this yourself.”

  “You’re right, though,” he said with a sigh. “It’s impossible for me to go. We’ll send someone else. I have an impulse engine repair technician who has a shuttle pilot’s license.”

  “If we’re given the chance. There’s no guarantee that they’ll even let us stay in this solar system.”

  “They will,” the chief engineer said. “They have to. Although we haven’t had much time to study that astromap and encyclopedia they gave us, it’s told us a lot already. We’re sort of on the fringes of known space here. Between the Ofran planet and us there’s a big swath of uninhabited space, with no intelligent life and no habitable planets. Then come a couple of home worlds, including those of the Vrimjlens, which as far as we can tell is one of the major powers. Those worlds will be at the forefront when the Centaurians arrive in a month’s time. The allied species can’t retreat to regroup, that’s politically impossible, and it will take too long to assemble a decent sized fleet here. They need every ship they can get, and that includes us. They’re being hard cases about Foyle to put us in our place. Once we show we’re sorry in a way the Dri’kai can accept, they’ll let us back in.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Not a bad strategic assessment for someone who’s not a soldier.”

  Iliescu smiled. “Chess helps with that. You should learn the game.”

  “Yeah, in my copious free time. Talk to your shuttle pilot. Make sure he understands the situation and doesn’t get tempted by all the pretty technology. Got it?”

  “I will.”

  “Now we just have to hope the aliens will see reason and let us stay.”

  An hour later, they did. I was on the command deck when the transmission came through. The viewscreen showed one of the Vrimjlens who ran the space station. General R’kk’kar stood next to it.

  The Vrimjlen spoke first.

  “All parties are satisfied with the steps you have taken to make amends. You are welcome to remain in your current position.”

  “We are honored by your invitation,” Commander Loftsdóttir said. “There will be no more such incidents.”

  Now R’kk’kar spoke. “Bring a selection of your eight best candidates to the station tomorrow at the same time as today’s training. Commander Ayers and I will take the other two fighters.”

  “I look forward to it, my friend and comrade in arms,” I said.

  “Until then,” he said. The transmission switched off.

  Well, that had been rather curt. The Dri’kai must still be angry.

  A technician spoke up. “Commander, the space station is sending over a data transmission. It looks like more analysis of the Ofran probe.”

  “Alert science and engineering. Commander Ayers, select eight people to send over tomorrow.”

  There had been no mention of Foyle continuing with the training. That was a shame. He was a hell of a pilot and at the helm of one of those babies he could have done some serious damage.

  Oh well.

  I went to the security center and found everything was calm. Qiang told me Barakat was taking a softly-softly approach with that Biospherist, Juan Carlos Garrido. Fine by me. We didn’t want to spook him. We’d just bide our time and wait for him to make a move. So far he hadn’t done anything suspicious.

  I told Qiang about the fighters and put him on the training list along with Iliescu’s candidate and a couple of other shuttle pilots.

  The rest of the list took longer to fill out. We couldn’t spare all the shuttle pilots, and other than Foyle, Qiang, and me, all the qualified fighter pilots were dead or disabled. I found a scientist who had trained for terrestrial aviation but hadn’t taken the flight exam, then threw him off my list because his supervisor had written him up for badmouthing the Dri’kai. He had lost his best friend in one of our battles with them.

  Damn, that could be a problem. I’d seen the logic of putting our differences aside—the battles had been a mistake and a misunderstanding, after all—but some of the crew wouldn’t see it that way. They’d hold grudges.

  Not sure what I could do about it, I set that in my constantly growing “Problems I Can’t Fix” file in my brain and got back to filling out the list.

  I ended up having to take people who had scored high on dexterity and reaction time during the training period back in our own solar system. One woman was a gymnast. Another was the Nansen’s star racquetball player. Neither of those things qualified them to fly a fighter, but it was the best I could do.

  “Don’t lose her,” Qiang said, pointing to the gymnast’s name, Shelly Avram. “She’s the only person who’s studied gymnastics at the competitive level.”

  “So?”

  “I was having a drink with Barakat the other night and he really laid one on me,” Qiang said. “You know how part of the selection process included getting points for skills other than those in our job description? The Global Government wanted to represent as much of Earth’s culture in our new civilization as possible. I got points for speaking Thai. We have a couple of other Thai kickboxers, but I’m the only person who speaks Thai on this ship. For all we know, I might be the only person left who speaks Thai anywhere.”

  “Fucking hell.”

>   “Barakat has assembled a list of all those one-of-a-kind skills. While a few rich kids took gymnastics at school, there’s no one who knows the sport like Shelly Avram. She’s the only one who is qualified to teach it. Lose her, and you lose an entire sport.”

  “Lose you, and we lose a language. Oh, crap. Like my job isn’t hard enough!”

  Qiang nodded, his usually jovial face turning sober.

  “Thanks to the Biospherists and the Dri’kai, we’ve lost a lot. No one knows how to play the saxophone anymore. No one on board speaks Swedish. No one knows bookbinding, or wood carving, or sailing. A lot of those old skills that had become specialist hobbies on Earth might have been useful on a new world.”

  I rubbed my eyes. When would this work day end?

  “How long is this list?”

  He looked away, slumped, and shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

  13

  The recruits stood at attention in a line in front of me, and I have to admit I had my doubts. Not about their eagerness—they had all quickly volunteered when I got in contact with them—but about their ability to pull it off. Qiang I had no worries about. He was almost as good a pilot as I was. One of the shuttle pilots would probably be all right, but the other was a hesitant, quiet guy. A bit of a loner. Not the right personality for a fighter pilot at all. Then there was Iliescu’s stand-in, who didn’t even expect to pass the test. The others were a mixed bag of women and men who had never sat in a cockpit before.

  But they were all athletic, they were all eager, and they were all we had.

  As I gave them a rundown of how to behave themselves and what would be expected of them, Iliescu came to the doorway and watched. What was he doing here?

  When I finished my little speech, I turned to him. A mischievous smile spread across his face.

  “I have another man who wants to sign up,” he said.

  “We’re already full. What are his qualifications?”

  “Eight years’ fighter pilot experience.”

  “Huh? We don’t have anyone like that on board.”

  “Yes you do, Commander,” a familiar voice said.

  In walked First Lieutenant Elijah Mabaso. He had been badly hurt in a fight with the Dri’kai and had been laid up in Medical ever since. The poor guy had lost both arms.

  But now he had them back.

  I jerked in surprise, and then noticed the hands poking out of the sleeves of his black security jumpsuit were too smooth for human hands, and the sleeves dangled slack, as if there wasn’t a full arm inside.

  “Check this out, Commander,” Mabaso said with a grin.

  He flexed his arms and made a full range of motion, grinning all the while. He wiggled his fingers, made an OK sign, got down and did some pushups, and stood again. Then, growing more serious, he pulled up one of his sleeves to show a thin latticework of steel and wires.

  “A side project I’ve been working on in my spare hours,” Iliescu said with a modest smile.

  I shook my head in wonder, not able to find the words.

  “He’s a miracle worker,” Mabaso said. “I’m still not a hundred percent. The folks at Medical said my body went through a huge shock. I fatigue easily and I’m sure my reaction time has slowed, but I’m eager to get back to active duty. They say that the month we have to train will be enough for me to fully heal. What do you say, Commander?”

  I pointed to one of the people in line. “Lawrence, you’re out. Report back to Engineering.”

  “Yes, Commander.” Lawrence looked disappointed, but how could he object? Mabaso was being offered a new lease on life.

  Lawrence left with a smile on his face, giving Mabaso a high five. My chest swelled with pride. This was the kind of crew an officer wants. As far as I knew, Lawrence and Mabaso had never met until this moment, but the camaraderie was already there.

  On the shuttle ride over to the space station, I looked at the recruits again, lined up on the seats that ran along either side of the shuttle interior and facing each other. My eyes rested on Shelly Avram, the gymnast. A pretty young woman, early twenties, and obviously fit. She noticed me looking, gave one of those uncertain smiles women give when they think you’re checking them out, and looked away. I looked away too, not wanting to give her the wrong impression.

  I wasn’t looking at her body. I was looking at her life.

  Gymnastics. One of the most challenging and complex sports humanity had ever come up with, and if this raw recruit couldn’t be made into a warrior in a month, she’d get blown out of the sky by the Centaurians in her first battle. That had happened with some others already—shuttle pilots and asteroid miners I had drafted into helping with the fight against the Dri’kai. One of those poor bastards didn’t even get a chance to fire his weapons. What had we lost when we lost them? A language? The rules to some game? Barakat’s list could tell me, but I didn’t dare look.

  My gaze moved across all the other recruits—all excited, all nervous, all eager to do well—and I knew for a fact that most wouldn’t make it to the end of this war. Two tours of duty back on Earth had shattered any illusions I had held about getting all my people back alive.

  And it wasn’t just these people who would die in the upcoming war. We’d lose a hell of a lot more.

  So what else would we lose? French? Checkers? How to tie a slipknot? The folk songs of Mabaso’s tribe? Of course a lot of this stuff was in the massive database the Nansen had carried with it into deep space. It could be relearned, but learning from text and video wasn’t the same as learning from a human being. Despite all our automation, the scientists had never come up with something better than a human teacher. There was a connection when you got taught by another human being, an insight they could impart that you couldn’t get from a computer screen or holographic image.

  And then there was all that stuff that wasn’t in the database—jokes, superstitions, anecdotes about neighborhoods and schools and workplaces, songs that hadn’t become hits or classics. So much got lost with every person who died. There was some old saying about how every time a person dies a library burns. We were going to lose a world of libraries.

  Hell, I’d burned some of those libraries myself. I looked at my feet, suddenly wanting to avoid the faces of my fellow pilots. I’d killed people all over the deserts of the oil-producing regions and the plains of North America. I’d gunned down mobsters and petty hoods for Leo Franzetti. I’d killed a bunch of Biospherists, and three men who had sexually assaulted a Biospherist. The ashes of a million pages of lost learning were strewn in my wake.

  I shook myself to move off those thoughts, ignoring the curious looks a couple of the recruits gave me. Yes, I had killed, and I had killed a lot. But most of that killing had been done in service of the Global Government, which had been our best chance of pulling back from the brink. They hadn’t managed it, but I couldn’t be blamed for that. And the Biospherists had brought it on themselves—slaughtering our crew while they lay helpless in stasis. And those three security personnel under my command? Predators. They deserved to die because they would almost certainly have done it again.

  I had saved more lives than I had taken.

  You keep telling yourself that, Mitch.

  I looked at the viewscreen and saw to my relief that we were just about to dock. Good timing. It didn’t pay as a soldier to think too much.

  After we docked, the bay doors closed and the Vrimjlen atmosphere cycled in. We donned our respirators and got out. I felt a prickle of worry. The welcoming committee that entered the shuttle bay did not include General R’kk’kar. In fact, there were no Dri’kai at all.

  “Where are the Dri’kai? Preparing the fighter ships?” I asked the Vrimjlen at the head of the crowd.

  “They will not be coming today,” the Vrimjlen replied.

  “Why not?”

  “They did not say. General R’kk’kar told me earlier that he wasn’t inclined to go on a practice run today.”

  “Those were his words
?”

  “Yes.”

  I bit my lip, stumped. So we had been accepted back, but not forgiven. What could I do?

  “Can you relay a message for me?”

  “Yes. He is still on the station.”

  “Tell him that as the best fighter pilot here, it is essential to the war effort that he joins us.”

  That got him out, and proved I didn’t need a beautiful Mexican scientist to understand warriors. He didn’t look happy, though.

  Without greeting us, he spoke on a private translation channel to the Vrimjlen. I could hear the Vrimjlen’s translator speaking in that species’ wheezing, hissing language, but my own translator attached to my shoulder strap remained silent.

  I had never dealt with automatic translators before, but that seemed to me to be a serious breach of etiquette.

  The Vrimjlen motioned to another of his kind, who approached us with a small hand scanner. The little guy then proceeded to scan each of us. I tensed as he came to Iliescu’s man, letting out a sigh of relief when he turned up clean.

  When the alien got to Mabaso, who towered over him like an obsidian mountain, it paused, then said something to his boss.

  “You wondering about these?” Mabaso asked, and rolled up his sleeves to show the thin steel arms.

  The aliens stared. R’kk’kar walked over.

  “How did you lose your arms?” he asked. Dri’kai could be a bit too direct sometimes.

  Mabaso looked him in the eye. “Fighting you.”

  If I had keeled over with a heart attack at that moment, I don’t think you could blame me.

  It felt like everyone in the shuttle bay held their breath.

  R’kk’kar studied the arms.

  “Nicely made, considering your level of technology and how quickly your engineer must have worked. We have better. I will order you a pair.”

  “I’ll earn them first. Give them to me after I kill my first Centaurians.”

  R’kk’kar looked him in the eye. “You’ll have that chance, my comrade in arms. Let me show you the fighters. After that we can drink.”

  I started breathing again.

  We headed out in the fighters, an adrenaline rush coursing through my veins now that I knew what to expect. That crazy run through the fragmented moon wouldn’t be any easier the second time.