That did the trick. The maniac collapsed as more Marines dogpiled him. Corpsmen and a security team finally showed up – the whole thing had taken maybe ten seconds, although it’d felt like an eternity – just in time to save the Marine with the chewed-up neck and to declare the other guy dead.
People were cursing and milling about. Lisbeth mostly just stood there, watching the aftermath unfold with an eerie sense of detachment.
That wasn’t someone going crazy. That poor bastard dragged something back from warp space.
Part of her knew those thoughts might be signs she was losing her own mind. But a bigger part was certain that she was right.
* * *
“They’re canceling the tests until they figure out what went wrong,” Fernando said as they tried to relax over drinks at the officers’ club.
“Yeah.” She’d gotten the same announcement he had. “Figured they would.”
“They’ve put three hundred pilot-trainees through the same process already; over six thousand warp drops with hardly an incident,” he went on. “They had a couple of psychotic breaks – both temporary; they’re back on duty after being treated – but nothing like this.”
She wanted to share her suspicions with him, but she was afraid he might think she was having a psychotic break.
“That was crazy,” was all she added to the conversation.
He nodded. “Well, that’s the dark side of trance states. It can lead to things like berserker rages, or the kind of thing people called spirit possession.”
Maybe that’s exactly what it was.
“Someone going stark raving mad out of six thousand warp drops isn’t the worst odds, I suppose,” she said. Except if they ever went out to fight, they’d be conducting dozens of jumps per sortie, and dozens of sorties per deployment. Six thousand divided by those numbers didn’t look like such a tiny chance after all.
“Not the best, either,” Fernando replied. “Hopefully they’ll be able to figure out why things went sideways and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
“Or they won’t and they’ll still send us out there,” she said.
“What, you thinking about dropping out?”
A few people had asked to leave the program, and after some counseling to decide how serious they were about quitting, they’d been allowed out. They were now working alongside the washouts on other specialties. The new Marine Aviation branch needed logistics clerks, space traffic controllers and cockpit-wipers, too.
She shook her head. “Getting blown up into plasma or going batshit crazy or breaking your neck stepping out of the shower, we all got to go sometime.” Even the longevity treatments didn’t guarantee immortality. Actuarial studies based on other Starfarers’ statistics predicted that sheer bad luck would kill before you made it very far past the eight-century mark. No human had had the chance to live that long yet, of course, but plenty of geezers had kicked the bucket long before that. Lisbeth had seen enough death to know that your time could come at any moment.
Only one thing you could do about that. Live your life like it all could be over tomorrow.
Speaking of that… She finished her drink and grinned at him.
“How about we move this somewhere more private?”
He smiled back at her.
Later, as they drifted off to sleep in her compartment’s bed, she felt able to share the truth with him.
“I looked into the guy’s eyes, Nando. They weren’t normal. I think there was something inside of him, some thing he picked up in warp space.”
A soft snore was her only answer. Figures.
Already regretting the thankfully unheard outburst, Lisbeth curled up next to him and closed her eyes.
Cambridge, Ohio, 164 AFC
The drive between the Columbus Interplanetary Spaceport and the McClintock ancestral home took a little over half an hour. Nobody met her at the airport, which suited Heather fine. She didn’t mind the alone time.
The Hertz rental whirred merrily down the interstate, a sporty two-door Camaro Coupe. She’d picked it up as much for its bright red coat of paint as for its sporty electric engine, which allowed her to barrel down the self-drive lane at a good ninety mph; she passed dozens of autopilot cars along the way, their passengers watching movies, reading or surfing the web, except for a couple engaged in some back-seat loving. Heather could have easily engaged the Coupe’s autopilot and done something other than driving, but that would have been less relaxing than pushing the car for all it was worth. If all she wanted was a short trip, she could have rented an aircar for an extra thirty bucks a day and gotten there in five minutes. Driving helped dispel the tension growing inside her as she got closer to home.
Well, her parents’ home. And to some degree her siblings’, since neither of them had left Earth or even Ohio. It wasn’t her home, though. Not for a good long while.
I wish I’d gone to New Jakarta instead.
Heather shook her head. The timing wouldn’t have worked out. After making it back to Earth and finishing her debrief, she was between assignments and really had no excuse to avoid visiting her parents. She wasn’t sure where her lords and masters would send her next, but it could well end up being the place where she earned a posthumous star at the CIA Memorial Wall in Langley. This Thanksgiving might be her last.
Her parents had sounded happy enough about the visit. Dad had offered to pick her up at the spaceport, but she’d talked him out of it. She needed the quiet drive to get ready for the family gathering. A copious amount of alcohol would help even more, but her family wouldn’t approve, and they already had plenty of reasons to be disappointed in her, starting with her career choices.
She drove past the new Mosser Glass factory after she got off the exit. The company was the biggest employer in the region, and had kept growing steadily over the years, turning Cambridge into one of the wealthiest cities of the state. Her father had been the Mosser’s chief executive for over forty years; he’d retired a few months before Heather officially joined the State Department after being unofficially inducted into the Central Intelligence Agency. Retirement wouldn’t last very long, not with private pensions only lasting fifteen years and anti-aging treatments growing steadily in price the longer they kept you alive, but for the last seven years he’d been putzing around the house with nothing to do. Which hadn’t improved things at home; her last visit, three years ago, had made that abundantly clear.
Well, at least Peggy and Donald will be there this time, along with their better halves. It’ll be nice to see the kids, too.
That thought helped, a little. By the time she pulled up to the pre-Contact ‘McMansion’ and parked in front of the six-car garage, she felt a little better. Walking up to the kitchen door brought back several memories, good, bad and indifferent. She let herself in.
Mom was in the kitchen, subvocalizing something while she poured herself a glass of Pinot. Her Norwegian-immigrant servants – Heather didn’t recognize either of them; her mother never kept the help around for very long – were busy at work. Mom was in their way, but they just stepped carefully around her.
The tall, platinum-blonde woman looked thirty-something, about the same as she had all of Heather’s life. She smiled at her.
“There you are,” her mother said. Her eyes weren’t fully focusing on anything in the real world. Heather’s suspicion that she was split-screening was confirmed with a quick check of her mother’s Facetergram profile, which included her current status: half of Mom’s attention, if not more, was focused in a Regency Romance MMO. Bernice McClintock had always preferred to spend her time in assorted virtual realities. Legally, you couldn’t be in full VR for longer than six hours a day; most people got around that limit by eschewing total sensory immersion and simply switching back and forth between the real world and whatever fantasy they preferred to live in.
“Hi, Mom.”
The women exchanged a dutiful hug and pecks on their cheeks.
“You look healthy,
at least,” the McClintock matriarch said. “We were so worried when we heard you were caught in that horrible thing out in the colonies.”
Jasper-Five wasn’t technically a colony but rather a free-associated system, but Heather saw no point in correcting her mother, who turned away for a moment and subvocalized something only her fellow gamers could hear. She poured herself a glass of what her mother was having and the two women made their way out the kitchen, past the still-empty dining room, and into the den where the rest of the family awaited.
The room was filled with a full hologram of today’s game, the Jets versus the Vikings. Montana was up by three. Watching the massive shapes of the players reminded Heather of the muscle-enhanced SSEALs she’d recently worked with. She’d attended Jürgen’s funeral, watched as they lowered a ballast-filled coffin into the ground in lieu of the corpse nobody would ever find. Warp space never gave back its victims.
“Heather?”
She blinked; Dad had paused the game and everyone had greeted her – and she’d somehow spaced out through all of it.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said lamely.
“Great to see ya, Hetty.” Peggy McClintock said; her welcoming smile was genuine enough. Heather’s sister looked happy but also a little tired; she taken two decades off to raise her children, and she was only on her seventh year of motherhood. “Been too long.”
“I know. How are things?” Peggy hadn’t been home last time Heather came to visit; she and the husband and kids been on vacation in the wilds of mostly-uninhabited Great Britain.
“You know, the usual. Sometimes I think we should have podded the kids and went on with our lives.”
“I know you’re kidding,” Peggy’s not-so-better half said, moving to stand by his wife’s side and shake Heather’s hand. Howie Dupree was, much like Heather and Peggy’s father, a big, broad-shouldered guy with the aggressive can-do attitude that had led both men to great things. In Howie’s case, it’d helped him become Senior Vice President of Orbital Manufacturing. The job took him to Mosser’s facilities in Low Earth Orbit and the Moon far more often than Peggy liked, not least because she suspected Howie was having an affair with someone during his frequent off-planet trips. Heather had heard the tearful story five years ago, the last time she made the mistake of spending some face time with her sister. They were still together, so Heather assumed they’d worked things out, one way or another.
Peggy beamed at her husband. “Of course I’m kidding. I wouldn’t pod our kids. It’s not natural.”
Heather could agree with her on that much, at least. The current fashion among the well-to-do was to place their newborn babies in a sealed life-support pod and raise them via virtual-reality interface, ensuring that their little darlings weren’t exposed to any actual dangers while they grew up in the strictly-controlled environment. Podding was expensive and controversial; the process had only been around for twenty years or so, and the first generation of pod-babies just beginning to emerge from their fake reality into the new one, with mixed results.
She shook her head at the thought of children growing up in a constant state of hibernation, never risking a skinned knee or elbow, their only inputs being what their parents chose for them, their only friends other pod children linked through a virtual network that strictly managed their interactions while their bodies rested comfortably in a fluid solution and nanobots ensured they remained in perfect health until they were finally decanted on their eighteenth birthday, when their parents no longer had the legal right to keep them inside the artificial wombs. That just couldn’t be good for anybody.
“So how’s life treating you at State?” Howie asked her.
“You know, it’s pretty busy, what with a war going on and all.”
“I know. We’re working three shifts just to keep up with the military contracts. A bunch of our people got reactivated, too, so they’re back in uniform and we’re having a heck of a time trying to replace them. We’re getting retirees coming back, but they want more money to interrupt their vacations from life. It’s a big mess.”
A soldier jumped into the trench; Heather barely deflected his bayonet thrust with her Iwo and countered with a kick to the balls and a brutal blow with the gun’s butt that broke the alien’s jaw and spun him to the ground, where a point-blank burst finished him off.
Heather forced herself to nod and smile politely. You have no idea what a big mess looks like, Howie, she didn’t say out loud. The big guy, just like her father, had done his four Ob-Serv years on Earth, his only hardships consisting of sore feet and back during Basic and having to live under military discipline while taking college-level courses.
“Dad’s thinking about coming out of retirement, too,” Peggy added, gesturing towards the elder McClintock, who was hovering nearby and dividing his time between looking at his prodigal daughter and glancing at the frozen game, clearly wondering if it’d be rude to switch it back on.
“Good for him,” Heather said, turning towards him. “Good for you, Dad.”
He looked at her and shrugged. “Guess we all have to do our part for the war effort.”
Yeah, because going back to work at a hundred and fifty grand a year plus bonuses is the same as venturing off-planet where you can get your ass shot off.
That wasn’t entirely fair, of course. Without civilians producing the beans and bullets the armed forces needed, the war would be lost as surely as if nobody fought it. But it wasn’t the same. She looked at her brother Donald, a near-clone of Howie and Dad, and his wife, currently working as a college professor and saving up for her turn at maternal leave. They all seemed as alien to her as the natives of Jasper-Five. More alien, perhaps: the Kirosha had understood what war meant. She downed the rest of her pinot, and got ready to go back for seconds. It was going to be a long holiday.
I should have gone to New Jakarta.
Six
Parthenon-Four, 165 AFC
“Another column is on the move, sir.”
Fromm’s imp marked the hostile formation on the virtual map hovering on one side of his field of vision. He opened another display next to it; this one piped in the visual input from the recon drones orbiting the area, and it showed a few hundred armed natives. The war band was moving in loose order through the relatively open spaces between the massive old-growth trees that dominated the forest. The dense canopy that made satellites nearly useless did little to stop the swarm of insect-sized robots at his command from spying on the enemy.
The Big Furries on the vid-feed were armed with a mixture of trade rifles, medieval weapons and a handful of Viper lasers. They were large humanoids, covered in shaggy gray-white pelts, averaging seven feet in height and weighing over four hundred pounds; their body plan resembled a bear more than a hominid, and their hunched postures suggested they’d only recently become full bipeds. The marching warriors were clearly angry, if their body language was at all similar to humans; every once and again they stopped walking and howled at each other, working themselves into a good frenzy. They had good reasons for their rage: Fromm had condemned their people to death or exile. This particular clan had chosen death, just for the chance to take some of the hated invaders with them.
He’d done what he had to. His company’s mortars and the Army artillery assets in his sector had laid out several carefully-targeted fire missions. In a few days, he had destroyed the crops and food stores of every Big Furry village within a week’s walk of the Terraforming Center he’d been tasked to protect. Casualties among the tribesmen had been minimal, but now the locals had three stark choices: travel away from the human facilities to beg, borrow or steal food from untouched villages further out, starve, or march towards Fromm’s forces, where they could be slaughtered in a series of set-piece engagements. Most of the natives had gone for the first option, and they were no longer Fromm’s problem. The die-hards moving forward were.
He sent the grid coordinates to Lieutenant O’Malley, who was overseeing the mortar section person
ally. “Fire when ready.”
“Roger wilco. Anti-pers on the way.”
A few seconds later, the three 100mm mortars from Charlie Company’s weapons platoon began their fire mission. The self-propelled anti-personnel bomblets took longer than they would have in a simple ballistic trajectory, but they maneuvered through the forest quickly enough, detonating over the Furries and showering them with a lethal downpour of shrapnel. Dozens of locals fell, their greenish blood spattering everywhere. The survivors pressed on at a dead run. The mortars fired a second volley, a third, each set of air burst scything down a tenth or more of the aliens.
The fourth and last volley struck the leaders of the band, who had foolishly clustered around a war banner of sorts, the skull of some great beast mounted on a pole and painted bright green. The mortar bombs tore the banner apart, not that there was anybody living to pick it up once the barrage was over. Of the three-hundred-strong war band, less than half remained, most of those wounded. Those hale enough to run away did so. The rest bled and called for their mothers or begged for water, as dying warriors had since the beginning of time. Fromm didn’t need to hear their words as they writhed on the green-covered ground to know that. Alien or human, some things never changed.
“Check fire,” Fromm ordered before the mortar section could exterminate the runners. It would waste ammo, and hopefully the remaining warriors would head home and spread the word that advancing towards American territory was nothing but suicide.
He could have slaughtered every village in range, but then the Viper operators would have simply contacted their neighbors further out, and they would have moved into the vacant territory and resumed hostilities. The Big Furries generally didn’t fear death in battle. Now, however, the tribes would spend their time warring against each other for food and territory instead of hampering the evacuation process. The Vipers would find very few volunteers for their proxy war.
No Price Too High (Warp Marine Corps Book 2) Page 9
