Contagion

by David Ryker

  Foyle rallied. His set the whiskey glass down, leaned forward close enough to me that I could smell the booze on his breath. Looking me in the eye, he said, “Yeah, you could do that, but not before I spread the word that you were an assassin for a real nasty organized crime outfit. Oh, the file made clear that you were only killing other mobsters. Good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. But people aren’t going to think that. They’re going to be thinking that you were breaking the kneecaps of innocent shopkeepers and selling their daughters into prostitution. You won’t be everyone’s hero anymore. What’s that hot little scientist going to think of you then, eh? And your wingman? Is he going to look up to you anymore? And the security team? Everyone’s going to think you’re dirty, like Commander Loftsdóttir thinks you’re dirty. They’re going to think of all their friends and family who played the lottery to get on the Nansen and who didn’t get here because you cheated your way into their place. And how are you going to be the symbol of law and order when you’re a criminal? I can take all that away from you, you son of a bitch.”

  “I can take a lot from you too. I can take—”

  Foyle let out a bitter laugh. “Take what? My command? The commander shuts me out, everyone’s paying attention to the pilots on the Shadow Fighters, and I sit on the sidelines with second-rate Earth technology.”

  His face softened, and his eyes glinted, looking at something far away that only he could see. “But in one of those Dri’kai ships I can shine. I could be the ace of the fleet, famous in a dozen star systems. I’d have it all—fame, women, money, position.” His face hardened and he focused on me again. “And I deserve it. I deserve it a hell of a lot more than you. I’ve always done things by the book. Worked my way up through the academy and the ranks to be the best fighter pilot in the business. I’m better than you, Ayers, and you know it. I deserve to be in one of those fighters, not you. I deserve it, and I’m going to get it.”

  I leaned back, feeling faint, my heart pounding despite the sedative. He had me. He had poured out his feelings to me and showed me perhaps more than he intended. He had probably told me more about himself than he had ever told his best friend, assuming he ever had a best friend.

  Whatever he lacked in his life, whatever he was trying to compensate for in his past, he saw flying one of those fighters as the way to do it.

  And he’d crush anyone who got in his way.

  He’d crush me, or even himself, just as long as he got what he wanted.

  I was trapped.

  24

  I talked with R’kk’kar over encrypted video link the next morning.

  “Good to see you, my friend and comrade in arms. I am sorry we have both been too busy to have another drink together,” he said.

  “I’m sorry too. Yes, we are both busy. I’m sure you are spending a lot of time planning the attack to save the Chordatid home world. I won’t take up much of your time. I have a request to make. My squadron lost two Shadow Fighters and their pilots in the battle. One fighter was completely destroyed, but I’ve been told by one of your assistants that the other has self healed. I’d like to put that one back in my squadron with a new pilot.”

  “Certainly, Commander Ayers. Who is this pilot?”

  I took a deep breath licked my lips. “Executive Officer Tom Foyle.”

  Pause. “But he is in disgrace.”

  “I know,” I said slowly. “But I’m sure you noticed when you reviewed the battle video that he is the best pilot on board the Nansen. He would be a good man to put in a Shadow Fighter.”

  “He is not to be trusted.”

  No he is not.

  “I think it’s safer to have him doing what he does best rather than dissatisfied and sitting on the sidelines.”

  R’kk’kar grumbled, a deep-throated noise that sounded like he was chewing rocks. “He compared all the intelligent species to common animals.”

  My heart skipped a beat. I was hoping he had forgotten that, but of course the Dri’kai aren’t the kind of race to let that sort of thing pass.

  “He’s an arrogant fool and he deserved his castration.” I felt bad deceiving my alien friend, but it wasn’t like we really could cut Foyle’s balls off, could we?

  Could we?

  Setting that fantasy aside, I went on. “Now he has learned his lesson and is anxious to make amends. He wants to prove himself. I think in the cockpit of a Shadow Fighter he could do that.”

  That, at least, was true.

  “No, my friend and comrade in arms. He is unstable. A danger. If you keep him in a position of power, you will regret it.”

  I’m already regretting it.

  “While it’s true he’s a little unstable, this will give him a chance to become a whole person. And you’ve seen how he flies even the primitive human fighters. He’s a talented pilot. He’s born for the job. We’ll need all our best pilots in the battle to come.”

  R’kk’kar thought for a moment. I studied his face, trying to figure out what was going on behind those alien features. At last he said, “I will think about it as a favor to you, and give you my answer as soon as possible. But for the moment we have more important matters at hand. The Centaurians fight dirty, like cowards, and in a cowardly way they have taken down two of our allies. Our main priority is to find a cure for them. Until then, I can’t consider Foyle’s place in the fighter fleet. I’ll give you an answer once we’ve helped the Subines and Vlerns.”

  I didn’t get an answer for some time. Finding a cure for the two affected species was taking longer than anticipated. General R’kk’kar decided to send some spy probes off to the Chordatid home world. Tiny things with miniaturized warp engines and top-shelf scanning technology, they could check out what was going on with that ocean world and hopefully get away unseen. We programmed them to return to a different location than where we actually were in case they got followed. Once they were due back, we’d send another spy probe to check if there was an ambush. We were taking no chances.

  All this took several days, and by the time the probe came back to say the spy probes had made it to the rendezvous two light years away with no sign of Centaurians following, we had finally overridden the bioweapons that had affected the Subines and the Vlerns. A lone Dri’kai ship was sent to fetch the spy probes just in case there was an ambush we had missed.

  That meant more waiting. During all this time I applied gentle pressure on the Dri’kai to allow Foyle to fly one of the Shadow Fighters. Foyle’s pressure on me was not so gentle.

  “The commander thought of replacing you,” he told me one day after asking about my progress for the fiftieth time. “I saw her reviewing dossiers. I guess she decided to give you a second chance since you’re so popular with the crew. You won’t be popular for long if you don’t get me on board one of those fighters.”

  So that was it. Because I was flying a cooler machine and getting more attention, he felt left out. What a child. It amazed me that he had gotten so far in the military. But as he said, he had played by the rules, been a career officer, and a damn good pilot. All those things counted for a lot.

  And I guess that had been enough when all he had to do was put down rebellions and climb the ladder. But now he had vaulted up that ladder from major to executive officer of an Ark Ship, on the most important mission of his or anybody else’s life. The pressure was cracking him.

  I needed to get him into one of those fighters quick, or else he was going to crack in a very public way.

  The probes came back with their results, now two weeks old thanks to the delays in faster than light travel. The commanders called a meeting to plan strategy.

  The meeting was held aboard a Vrimjlen freighter carrying supplies for the fleet. The general had decided not to have it on one of the fighting ships, just in case. That certainly didn’t provide much extra security against contagion, but every little bit helped. Our lives had become full of such little measures.

  We met in what I supposed was the freighter’s common room.
It had been cleared of furniture to make extra space but we were still cramped. Each fleet had brought several representatives from security, engineering, and science. I was there with Commander Loftsdóttir, Foyle, Valeria, and Iliescu. I don’t know how Foyle got to come along. Maybe he was bugging the commander as much as he was bugging me, or maybe the commander decided to make a point that, despite his past mistakes, Foyle had been punished and now had to be accepted as her second in command.

  I had no way of telling. I was out of the loop.

  At least I knew why now. I found I could barely look at the commander when I talked to her.

  A stage had been set up with a large viewscreen on the wall behind it. To the side stood a large cylindrical tank of water with a Chordatid swimming inside. It really did look like a dolphin, although it was bright blue and had a wider mouth with highly developed lips that acted as hands. I watched in wonder as it manipulated a rod of strange purple metal covered with studs and levers, its lips moving like the waves of an oscilloscope.

  I felt a pang of nostalgia at seeing something so similar to an animal on Earth. I’d seen some dolphins at a water park once. Amazingly smart creatures, ones that some scientists had theorized might have evolved a civilization one day. None existed in the wild anymore, since the seas had gotten too toxic for them, but at least they had been saved from extinction unlike some stranger species like the whale and the jellyfish.

  For a little while, anyway. I supposed back on Earth all those sea creatures that only survived in captivity had gone extinct like the rest of them. They had probably been eaten by the starving hordes of city dwellers.

  We had DNA samples of all known species aboard the Nansen. I suppose we could genetically engineer them and bring them back to a viable population again, but we were headed to a planet that was already full of life. Where would we put them? There was no room for species from Earth anymore, except us.

  Maybe.

  The Chordatid turned to the crowd and fixed us with its liquid black eyes.

  As a hush fell throughout the hall, the Chordatid addressed us via our automatic translators.

  “Greetings, fellow intelligent inhabitants of the Orion Arm, from one of the last representatives of a dying species.”

  A cold wave washed over me. I knew from the alien’s words that the news from the probes was not good.

  “We have analyzed the information brought back to us from the spy probes,” the Chordatid said, “and it is with unutterable sadness that I must relate to you that my species is now all but extinct on its home world.”

  The different reactions in the crowd were bizarre to see. Valeria went pale. The Dri’kai standing nearby stomped their feet. The Subines wrapped themselves in their tentacles. The Vlerns disappeared into their sand beds. I was seeing how an entire section of the galaxy mourned.

  The Chordatid closed its eyes and hung motionless in its tank for a minute. No one spoke. When the intelligent sea creature spoke again, its words came out so soft we could barely hear them.

  “As the spy probes came out of warp, they captured some transmissions from our planet. Like the Ofrans before us, our people were able to send some final images of our planet in its death throes.”

  It used its mouth to press a stud on the metal rod it held. The hall went deathly silent as a video began. It showed a vast underwater city of what looked like coral. Elaborate growths of blue, green, and yellow reefs created archways, corridors, and chambers. They sat in a shallows of undulating underwater ferns, the sunlight illuminating the scene through crystal clear water. The rooftops all had holes in them or were entirely open to let in light. Through these swam innumerable Chordatids, large and small, as well as schools of other fish and strange things like looked like eels, but studded with eyes along their entire length.

  Soon the light began to grow brighter, and turn from a crystalline blue to a brilliant green.

  I and everyone else watching knew what was coming. We had all seen a light like that before.

  And then it hit. The shimmering green wall created by the Centaurian formations swept across the underwater city. The camera blacked out temporarily, and when it came back on, every living thing was floating motionless, obviously dead.

  “As far as we can tell, every settlement on our planet has been attacked in this way. The ray is entirely fatal. We have found no instance of anyone surviving its attack.”

  No, I thought, they couldn’t all be dead. That ocean is huge. There must be places to hide.

  The Chordatid swam in a slow circle, and then addressed us again.

  “While the entirety of the spy probe scans have been sent to all of you, I will show you some images to highlight the dangers we all face.”

  An image came on the screen. It showed the brilliant blue ball of an ocean world. Only in a few spots could I see the emerald dots of islands covered in lush growth. I saw no oil slicks, no smog. It looked like a beautiful world, clean and pristine. The Chordatids had obviously taken care of their planet better than we had.

  All that was over now.

  The Centaurian fleet hung in orbit over the planet. In a wide array around the planets orbited those clam-shaped fighters, in formation as always, although with their weapons powered down. For the first time we could clearly see the huge ships that made up the main portion of their fleet, floating in a lower orbit. They looked even more like whales up close. Huge and gray, the ships had a large, smooth front and a cigar-shaped body that tapered at the end. I thought I could pick out vestigial fins, but I got distracted by what was going on down at the surface.

  A dozen of those red balloon things floated on the ocean, visible as dots even from orbit. The scene shifted to a closer view by one of the spy probes that had managed to sneak into the atmosphere and flew above the scene from high in the stratosphere.

  The picture zoomed in. The balloons bobbed on the surface, separated from each other by several hundred kilometers. All around them the water boiled. The picture switched to infrared and we could see the balloons were intensely hot, as was the water all around them.

  “It is not clear just what they are doing,” the Chordatid said. “It appears to be some sort of energy transfer, perhaps nuclear fusion. The spheres are sucking up energy from our water, and no doubt killing all the life in the area. Our initial guess that the spheres were low on energy after the Centaurians’ long trip may very well be correct. These spheres, which were probably once marine life, have found a water world on which to restore their energy. They underestimated us in that first battle, and when they saw their power reserves were too low to destroy our fleet, they infected two of our fleet’s species as a delaying action and fled to our world in order to refuel. It is obvious, then, that we must attack as soon as possible.

  “This is what we could see of the enemy fleet. While all the settlements have perished, many of our people wander the World Ocean far from any population center. Hoping some of them had survived the attack, we sent one of our own probes under the water to search for survivors. I am dismayed to report that we found them.”

  The scene switched to a video of a few Chordatids swimming together. They moved slowly, sluggishly, as if the very act of swimming hurt them. Their black eyes had lost their luster, and their skin had taken on a sickly hue and hung slack with wrinkles. I spotted a couple of smaller Chordatids in the pod, ones I took to be children, but except for their size I wouldn’t have gotten that impression. They, too, looked tired and old.

  “Initial analysis shows that the Centaurians have introduced a quickly reproducing microbe that accelerates the aging process in our species. It has also affected some of the other species on our home world, those most closely related to us. The vast majority of species, however, have not been affected. We do not know if the Centaurians wish to harvest these surviving species like they have obviously done with others on other planets, or if they are simply overlooking them.

  “As far as we can tell, this aging process has affected every
single member of our species. We estimate that in less than five of our years every single Chordatid on the planet will be dead. There are a couple of hundred Chordatids elsewhere in the galaxy, either with this fleet or as ambassadors or scientists on other worlds. This is not a sufficiently large population to create a stable genetic base. Within a few generations there will be inbreeding, and in our species inbreeding rapidly leads to infertility. Within five or six generations, our species will be entirely extinct.”

  25

  The fleet dropped out of warp just a hundred kilometers above the Chordatid home world. We were already in battle formation. You usually can’t warp into a solar system because of the danger of hitting an asteroid or comet with disastrous results, but we had learned that all intelligent species in this part of the Orion Arm had cleared paths through their outer solar system to their homeworlds. It must have taken constant maintenance to get rid of all the asteroids and comets, but it saved days of travel on impulse power. These paths were a closely guarded secret. The Chordatids, desperate to save their world, had revealed how to make it safely into their solar system.

  The fleet got there without a hitch. We had planned everything perfectly, and didn’t want to give the enemy any chance to get ready.

  We were all sitting in our fighters in the fighter bay of a Dri’kai battleship. Foyle had the fighter next to mine. After the Chordatid had finished its grim presentation, General R’kk’kar had taken me aside and said, “You were right, my friend and comrade in arms. We need to use everyone to their maximum ability if we are to win this war. Otherwise it will be another homeworld, and another, until those monsters have snuffed out all life in the Orion Arm.”