Contagion

by David Ryker

  “My whole life is filled with stress.”

  “And that’s not going to change. You need to learn to manage it without relying on medical intervention. Have you considered taking up yoga?”

  I burst out laughing. After a moment I realized he wasn’t joking. Controlling myself, I said, “No, Doctor, I haven’t considered taking up yoga.”

  I pictured myself in Lycra in some incense-filled studio with Indian music droning in the background, doing all sorts of weird stretches, and laughed again.

  “It’s very calming and good for flexibility,” Dr. Stark said. “I recommend it to many of my older clients.”

  “Oh, I’m an older client?”

  “The rest of your body may be in peak physical health, but your heart is in its seventies, and not a healthy seventies, either.”

  Wonderful. He’d told me all this before, but having him repeat it on a regular basis wasn’t exactly helping my stress levels.

  “I don’t have time to take up yoga.”

  “How about meditation?”

  I gestured impatiently. “Doc, I have a war to win.”

  He looked at me. “Commander Ayers, when you woke up you had to face the Biospherists alone. I appreciate the situation you were thrust into and I am grateful for your service. But ever since, you have been acting as if you’re still running around alone surrounded by enemies. You are not alone, Commander Ayers. You have an entire team working toward the same goal.”

  “I value my team, Doc. Qiang has saved me more times than I can count. Iliescu is a miracle worker. And I appreciate what you—”

  “Yes, you appreciate those around you. And yet you still think you have to do all the big jobs yourself.”

  I was about to object again, but then I remembered all those times when I was in command of a platoon isolated in some hellhole seeing their eyes turn to me for guidance, and those years I worked for Leo Franzetti, taking orders from a big organization but always doing the job by myself. And now here I was, commander of security for the last surviving Ark Ship, running around on personal missions like I was some civilian with a death wish.

  Dr. Stark finished the rest of the examination in silence. As I got up to go, he gave me a stern look and said, “Learn to relax. That’s an order. You’re no good to us dead, and that alien fighter ship isn’t going to be there for you 24/7. Take yoga. Learn Zen meditation. I don’t care. Just learn to relax.”

  “How about long backrubs from a beautiful woman?”

  Dr. Stark’s face softened in a smile. “That would help. But she’s just as busy as you are.”

  “Don’t I know it, Doc,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “Don’t I know it.”

  20

  The next few days were ones of constant activity. I drilled and drilled my squadron in VR simulations, trying to get them ready for the next battle. We’d gotten off easy, I warned them, and the next fight might not go so well.

  I hated hurting their morale like that. While they mourned the two fliers we had lost, they were buoyant at having survived their first encounter and having done some damage to the enemy. I needed to bring them down to earth and let them know the seriousness of what they were up against.

  Iliescu divided his time between the drone factory and helping Valeria with analyzing the close-up scans we had gotten of the Centaurian ships. The best minds of all the races in the fleet were working on this. Communication probes flitted between the ships to deliver messages. Thanks to one of the weird tricks of warp travel, we couldn’t communicate with radio.

  Slowly a picture emerged. The ships were biological, just as we thought. Even those huge ones that hung in the distance had once been some natural creature. How the Centaurians had grown them to such massive sizes—the biggest of them at least five kilometers long—I had no idea. Dr. Conti said that a creature of naturally that size was biologically impossible, even in a low-gravity world.

  The scientists wasted a lot of time theorizing about what these creatures had originally been like and how they had been adapted so radically. Commander Loftsdóttir got them back on track. She wanted to know two things—how to neutralize them and how their warp drive worked.

  For the first question all they could come up with was massive physical trauma. Considering how tough their fighters were, I didn’t want to think how much hate we’d have to throw against the main ships.

  The second question got answered within a couple of days, and the answer came from one of the Subine scientists. The warp drive used some obscure principles of physics that I didn’t even pretend to understand and that human science hadn’t discovered yet. So once again we got reminded that we were the primitives in the pack. Anyway, even though the Subines didn’t know how the warp drive actually worked and estimated it would take years before they figured that out, let alone replicated it, they did share with us how to trace the warp signature.

  And Commander Loftsdóttir had been right; the enemy was headed for the Chordatid home world. It had been the commander who convinced the rest of the fleet commanders that it was their most likely destination. General R’kk’kar, who was in overall command, agreed. It said a lot about him personally and the Dri’kai in general that they’d listen to someone who had been blowing their ships out of the sky a couple of months before.

  “That’s what I suspected,” she said when the news came in. “Theirs is an ocean world, and the Centaurian ships all look like sea creatures.”

  “Maybe they want to colonize the Chordatid home world,” I said.

  “Or harvest their sea life for artificial evolution,” Valeria said, “or even just refuel and reprovision. We know so little about them, or about anything in this part of the galaxy.”

  I could hear the frustration and fatigue cutting through her words. We were all overworked and we were all confused. There had been virtually no time to rest and certainly no time to wrap our heads around the new situation.

  But she’d hold up. She, like everyone else, had been picked to be on the Ark Ship because she was strong. Even weak links like Foyle had amazing talents that could really help the mission if used correctly.

  I leaned back in my chair. “The problem is, they can reach there before we can.”

  There was silence around the table for a moment. Everyone had seen what the invaders had done to the Ofran planet.

  Finally, Foyle spoke up. “They’re going to use it as a base of operations. Remember the Ofran planet? Hardly any water. And none of the planets on the inner rim of the Orion Arm have large amounts of water either. The Chordatid homeworld is the first planet on their route that’s an ocean world. They’ll stay there until they’ve done whatever they need to do, and then branch out looking for more planets with large bodies of water.”

  I nodded. The guy was right.

  “That’s a sound strategic assessment, Executive Officer Foyle,” the commander said. “The question is, why did they go there first and not make a serious effort to destroy us? Considering their advantage in speed, why not dance circles around us, picking off our weak garrisons and undercutting our strength?”

  I let Foyle speak. He needed to have his voice heard. He needed to get back on the team, and maybe learn some teamwork in the process.

  “Maybe there are shortages in their fleet. They’ve been on a long journey, after all. At least a hundred years. Who knows? Maybe it’s been a thousand. Maybe they’re driving into our part of the galaxy with their engines on fumes.”

  “It would explain why they got so rattled when we destroyed two of their spheres,” Barakat said.

  “It doesn’t explain why they exposed them,” I said. “We still don’t know much about what we’re up against, as Dr. Sanchez says.”

  I kept using her last name in command meetings, even though our relationship had become an open secret. It’s not like we were the only people pairing up. When you could die tomorrow, you want to live today.

  “And we don’t know what we’ll find when we get to their destinati
on,” Commander Loftsdóttir said. “In the meantime, keep doing what you’re doing. Commander Ayers, work with Executive Officer Foyle on a strategy to fight the Centaurians, factoring in the chance that they might have bigger reserves of energy this time and more of a willingness to hold their ground. Send a report to the Dri’kai general within twenty-four hours. He wants strategic assessments from all the species commanders.”

  “Yes, Commander,” we said in unison, glancing at each other warily.

  As the meeting broke up, I suggested we work at the dedicated security touchscreens on the command deck. I didn’t want to be stuck alone in a room with him because I knew he’d start some awkward conversation, either pushing me to get him on a Shadow Fighter or talking shit about the commander behind her back.

  To my surprise, he agreed, and we worked on strategy and tactics until exhaustion pulled us both down and we went to sleep.

  The next day we got back to work, and the next, and the next. We slapped together a rough plan of battle that General R’kk’kar combined with those of the other security leaders into a plan that looked halfway decent, and “halfway decent” was all we could expect when we had so many unknown variables.

  That was pretty much the only information that came from our fleet commander or any other Dri’kai. They had taken care to clean up all their Shadow Fighters after the battle, and I had seen them collecting a couple of Centaurian fighters and a sample from one of those giant spheres. It would have been smart for them to share the data with all the other species, but they hadn’t.

  “It’s like at the end of World War Two,” Qiang told me. “The Americans and the Russians got into a competition to grab as much technology from the collapse of the Third Reich as possible. The Americans got most of the scientists, but the Russians got a lot of the German nuclear development program. They knew they would be facing off against each other after Germany fell, and they both wanted an edge.”

  I was about to object that R’kk’kar wouldn’t do that to us, that he was a “friend and comrade in arms” as the Dri’kai put it, but then I remembered the general obeyed a higher authority. Yes, we were fighting a common enemy, but if we survived that war we’d be in a new situation with new security issues.

  Great. Does this shit ever end?

  Morale got a boost when a fleet of Vlern ships joined us—small, fast cruisers that looked like they could pack a punch. The sand-dwelling slugs lived on a desert world and had the least to fear from the Centaurian invasion, but they came just the same.

  Two nights before we were due at the Chordatid home world, I called in all the security people to the Nansen’s lone bar for a drink. Everyone was invited—the fighter pilots, the new draftees, the drone pilots, the Nansen’s gunners, everyone.

  And everyone who wasn’t on duty came except for Foyle.

  I think a lot of people were actually glad he didn’t come. I sure as hell was. At the same time, it bothered me. He was as much a part of this as anyone. Nobody fights alone and lives. That was something I needed to drill into these people, most of whom didn’t have a military background. Dr. Stark had been right about teamwork. It was something I had forgotten temporarily. I needed this get-together as much as anyone. We needed to unwind and talk and let off steam for a night. Be a group of friends as well as coworkers.

  This was just as important for preparing troops for battle as running through yet another simulation.

  They’d had plenty of those. A chance for camaraderie and remembrance was long past due.

  I sat at the head of the table and Qiang sat at my right hand. Colonel Chen sat on my left. She had helped save the Nansen when it got infected with a Centaurian virus, and while she didn’t have the reflexes to make a good fighter pilot, she had a level head and a good attitude. I planned on promoting her as soon as she’d seen some more combat duty. That would probably happen soon enough. I had a feeling the Nansen wouldn’t get off so lucky in our next fight.

  Everyone was drinking and chatting away like they didn’t have a care in the world. That mood was only skin deep, I knew, but it was good to see. We were already on our second round, and the bar’s limit was three. Wise move from the standpoint of crew discipline. I waited until everyone was starting their third drink before I stood up.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I hate speeches, so I’m not going to give you one.”

  “That’s a relief!” Qiang called out. Everyone laughed. I grinned and punched him on the shoulder.

  “I’m proud of each and every one of you,” I said. “The security people have done their duty exceptionally well under very trying conditions, and the new recruits have gone above and beyond expectations. You are a credit to the security corps, a credit to the Nansen, and a credit to the human race. I toast you.”

  I raised my glass.

  “Terviseks,” I said.

  Qiang looked at me. “What?”

  “Terviseks,” I repeated. “It means ‘to health.’ It’s how the Estonians say ‘cheers.’ Rasmus Tamm was Estonian. Probably the last Estonian.”

  Qiang’s face fell. He lifted his glass. “Terviseks.”

  Everyone else lifted their glasses too. “Terviseks!”

  “A good way to remember him, sir,” someone said. “We need to remember them all.”

  One of the gunners spoke up, a thin man named Hennings I didn’t know well.

  “Shelly always used to talk about the competitions she did on Earth. She wanted to start a gymnastics school for kids on Terra Nova.”

  I blinked. The way he referred to her by her first name made me think they had been more than colleagues.

  And Shelly Avram, despite being woken up in the middle of a warzone and forced to be something she had never trained to be, had still managed to look forward. She had plans. She had even been thinking about the next generation. It made my off the cuff fantasizing about a bar and doing some fishing seem lame by comparison. When Valeria had asked me what I wanted to do, I had simply answered with the first thing that popped into my head. I hadn’t given the future much thought. Even back on Earth I had been so concerned with surviving the present that I hadn’t devoted any of my time to planning ahead.

  “She sounds like a hell of a woman, Hennings. She was a good fighter, I know that much. I wish I had known her better. Do you know any gymnastics?”

  “No,” he said.

  “What’s your sport?”

  “Football and swimming, mostly.”

  “I like both of those. I’m pretty good at racquetball too. Tell you what, Hennings, when we get settled on Terra Nova and the next generation is growing up, we’ll start the Shelly Avram Sport Camp for Kids. You in?”

  His eyes welled up. Clearing his throat before answering, he stood up and said, “We’ll make it the best camp the human race has ever seen.”

  We shook on it as the table burst into applause.

  We partied and talked long into the night. Everyone talked about their dreams and plans for Terra Nova, what each of us would do and what we would build. It made me feel good, but I also felt a nagging sadness knowing some of these people, maybe all of these people, wouldn’t make it.

  Because we had a whole lot of shit to get through before we landed on Terra Nova.

  It started the next day.

  21

  “The Subine ships aren’t responding,” a technician on the command deck said as she checked the scanners. “The Dri’kai command vessel has sent over several communication drones and not received any in return. Some of the other ships have too.”

  Our ships were all close enough that we were contained in the same warp field, their individual golden shells melding into one shimmering halo, so moving from one ship to another posed no problems.

  “Try sending one of our own,” Commander Loftsdóttir ordered.

  The technician recorded a brief message and the fist-sized ball of steel shot out from our ship to theirs. It came alongside and plugged into the Subine ship’s comm system.

 
; And just sat there.

  Normally, a message would be recorded onto that drone and sent back to us.

  “What are the scans showing?” the commander asked.

  “Normal activity,” the technician reported. “Their engines haven’t shut down or changed their power output. All regular systems that we can detect appear to be working. They’re just not replying.”

  “They couldn’t have had a communications malfunction all at once,” Foyle said. “I think they got infected with an enemy virus.”

  “Maybe, but how?” I said. “They know about that trapped box that nailed all of us. They wouldn’t have fallen for that trick.”

  “Then they must have fallen for another one,” Foyle said with a shrug.

  “But how?” I asked again. “They didn’t take anything on board after the battle.”

  We had scoured the video looking for evidence of that. Everyone had obeyed the general’s orders not to scavenge anything. I was sure the Subines had been just as tempted as we were, but they had obeyed orders.

  After several more minutes of trying to get in contact with the Subine ships, General R’kk’kar sent us a messenger drone. His face loomed on the screen. As much as I had become accustomed to seeing the Dri’kai since that first time we made contact, I still found them ugly and a bit intimidating. Especially when their head and shoulders were four meters tall on a big screen taking up the whole wall.

  “Commander Loftsdóttir, send over a probe to the Subine main battleship to see what the problem is,” he ordered.

  “We’ll get right on that, General.”

  General R’kk’kar nodded and cut off.

  “Why do we have to be the ones to risk contamination?” Foyle said.

  “Because the humans only have one ship in the fleet,” Commander Loftsdóttir said. “The other species have constant communications between their own ships. Less of a chance of an outbreak if we do it.”