Whistling Past the Graveyard

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “My family?” Daniel asked, and his voice cracked. “Serene? The three children?”

  “We don’t know. Everyone is shut up in their homes, doors and windows sealed. It’s the best we can do. We try to watch out for one another.” He sucked a deep breath through the cloth over his mouth. “Not many of us are strong enough to make the rounds anymore.”

  In his decon suit, Bjorn collected specimens from the ripened sporeflowers. As he plucked one of the pods from a drooping stem, it burst in his hands, spraying spores everywhere. He scraped some into his portable scanner, running the first round of analyses.

  Daniel bolted off to his home where the windows were shuttered. He pounded on the door, shouting through the muffling facemask. “Serene, I’ve come back!” Knowing that none of the homes among the neo-Amish possessed any sort of lock on the door, he shoved against the wood, pushing aside wadded rags his family had stuffed around the cracks.

  The interior was dim, but he saw people moving about, Serene and one of his boys … Enoch. His other two children, Ruth and Malachi, were stretched out on beds, moaning and shivering, their faces a horror of bloated swellings, running mucus. He could barely recognize them.

  A bucket of well water sat next to their beds, its surface scummy with drifting spores. So weary she could barely move, Serene drenched a rag in the bucket, then mopped Ruth’s face, smearing the thick mucus oozing from the girl’s eyes and nose. Ruth moaned and squirmed.

  “You’re alive!” he cried as he burst inside. “Are they all alive?”

  When Serene looked up at him, he reeled. Her face looked as bad as Rickard had when he’d staggered in from the upper meadows. “Malachi’s barely breathing,” she said, then sighed.

  He embraced her, though she had little strength to respond. “Look, I brought help, just as I promised. The Roamers brought medicine, equipment, supplies that should protect us against the spores.”

  “We’ve been praying,” Serene said. “Some of us will survive. We are all strong.”

  “You’ll be stronger with help,” Daniel insisted as he wrestled with his own contradictory feelings. He had been reluctant to bring miracle cures or easy solutions from the Confederation, knowing how these people would resent it. But one look at his dying son changed his mind.

  Serene could barely recognize Daniel, with her eyes so swollen that her vision must be blurred and uncertain. When he touched her forehead, it was burning hot. On the bed, Malachi squirmed and coughed; his breathing was just a thin, difficult wheeze burbling through mucus.

  Olaf, appeared at the doorway in his full decontamination suit, carrying his medical pack from which he removed a sealed envelope. With gloved hands, he cracked open the envelope and unfolded moist, disinfectant towels. “Use these to wipe their faces. There’s an anti-inflammatory. It’ll feel soothing, at least until I receive word from Bjorn about the best drug to use.”

  Daniel mopped Serene’s face with one of the cloths, clearing the mucus and perspiration so he could see and remember how beautiful she was. His heart ached, knowing the pain and sickness she had endured from this scourge that Happiness itself had thrown against them. She seemed afraid and resistant, but as he lovingly cleaned her, she relaxed and sighed. “It’s a blessing,” she said.

  Daniel took another of the cloths and bent over Malachi in the cot. The young boy seemed to respond, relaxing as his face was cleaned with something better than the spore-thickened water bucket.

  Next, Daniel tended to Ruth and then Enoch, who was helping his mother, though the boy seemed in a daze himself. Olaf touched the side of his head, listening to a comm transmission in his ear. Daniel could hear Bjorn’s words from the comm speaker. “Four of our broad-spectrum anti-allergens should let them breathe better and reduce the swelling. I’ve already administered it to the workers out here, and it’s done wonders.”

  Olaf opened his medical kit, asking Bjorn to identify the specific drug to use. Without asking, he injected Malachi first. Serene moved protectively closer, grumbling. “What is that? What are you doing to him?”

  “We’re saving him,” Olaf said.

  Daniel offered the next injection to Serene. She tried to turn him down, but he insisted. “Our children need their mother.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  “Yes, you will be,” he insisted, and injected her.

  When his family members had been treated, Olaf said, “Let them rest. Daniel, we have all the rest of your people to save. We need your help”

  When Daniel took a longing look at his family, they seemed better already. The fast-acting anti-allergen was used for emergency rescue, and this was indeed an emergency.

  “I will be back shortly,” he promised Serene. He made her lie down on their bed. “Don’t worry, the children are taken care of. We’re all taken care of.”

  * * *

  The two Roamer men stayed to help, as the neo-Amish began to turn the corner after the spore storm.

  Seventeen of the suffering people vehemently refused any outside help, and after trying to convince them, Daniel let them have their way. Of those seventeen, six died—exactly as the percentages should have been.

  No, not as they should have been, Daniel thought, because they should all have been saved with a simple, obvious treatment. Olaf Reeves said he understood their reasons and their resistance, but that did not make Daniel feel better.

  He kept shaking his head. “They didn’t need to die. It was such a simple thing. Face masks, anti-allergens, filters, seals. All so easy …” He thought of how many conveniences and wonders of civilization the Confederation had to offer, but he blocked those thoughts. “It’s all so tempting,” he said.

  Nodding, Olaf crossed his arms over his chest. After taking the anti-allergens themselves, he and Bjorn had eschewed the decontamination suits, although they still wore face masks to minimize the exposure.

  “There’s a fine line between temptation and necessity,” Daniel said.

  “Not a fine line at all,” Olaf replied. “If your beliefs are strong enough, you do what’s right. And what is right is to save your people. You did that.” He snorted. “Dead people can have firmly held beliefs, but do no one any good. Saving them doesn’t mean you throw away everything you are.” He set his jaw. “As long as you set boundaries and remember your core.” He seemed to be thinking of himself rather than the neo-Amish.

  Daniel was overjoyed just to know his family had been saved. The village cemetery had more graves now, but would have been expanded far more if Daniel hadn’t brought help.

  He frowned, though. “Next time it will be easier to ask for assistance ... for good or bad.”

  He stared across the valley floor at the neo-Amish settlement. Most of the grieka spore flowers were withered now, their pods burst, the spores in the air. Carrying targeted incinerators, he and Olaf, and any neo-Amish volunteers, would cross the valley floor and torch the spores. The flames already crackled high, and Bjorn seemed happy with the useful destruction he was causing.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Rlinda Kett

  As the black robot ships swooped out to intercept her, Rlinda’s hands reacted instinctively, working over the Curiosity’s controls. “Here we go again.” With her big palm, she swept up the capsule of BeBob’s ashes and tucked it safely in her pocket, then punched her engines and accelerated upward in a high-G curve.

  At the half-dismantled Solar Navy warliner, more robot ships ignited their engines and raced after her. Rlinda knew the black robots could endure far higher accelerations than she could, and she already felt the giant hand of gravitational forces pressing her back against the expanded seat. “This reminds me too damned much of the War.”

  Rlinda and BeBob had flown many missions together, fleeing hydrogue warglobes or faeros fireballs, dodging black robot attackers and even obnoxious EDF battleships trying to intercept them, but she’d had the last nine years to get rusty doing business as Trade Minister, making milk runs, rebuilding civil
ization.

  But she remembered her stuff quickly enough.

  The black ships closed the gap and opened fire before they had achieved a target lock. Even though Rlinda could barely lift her hand against the extreme acceleration, she put the Curiosity into a corkscrew, spinning and looping with evasive actions.

  She knew she could not outfly the robots. Since they were obviously dismantling the Ildiran warliner for components, no doubt they wanted to neutralize and then salvage the Curiosity as well—and Rlinda vowed not to let them have that.

  Barely able to breathe through gritted teeth, she moved a heavy hand to the comm controls and broadcast an all-spectrum distress beacon, knowing that it would do her no more good than it had Qul Loar’nh, but at least someone would learn what had happened to her, if she didn’t manage to fly out of this.

  “I have located a derelict Solar Navy warliner, all crew dead. Coming upon the wreck”—She paused to take a deep breath against the gravitational boulders on top of her chest—“I found it crawling with Klikiss robots who were dismantling the ship for some purpose. You can bet they’re not donating all proceeds to charity. Now the damned robots are after me. Trying to remember my dogfighting skills from the War.” She tried to think of anything brilliant or memorable to say, since this might well be her last transmission, but she came up empty handed. “If there’s any help available in the neighborhood, I’d appreciate it. Don’t wait too long.”

  She dramatically altered course again, looping back and cutting speed. The pursuing robots streaked past her, accelerating too quickly to react in time. As the black ships flashed past, she fired her aft jazers and damaged one of the pursuing craft, more through luck than skill. It spun, tumbling out of control.

  Now, all she had to do was worry about the rest of them.

  She launched another scattershot of jazer blasts, and one energy beam scored the underbelly of a black ship, breaching the hull plates. But the vessel kept flying, even with the severe damage.

  “Damned robots,” she muttered.

  Her only chance was to dive into the Dhula system, straight for the gas giant. With all those moons and a partial ring of scattered debris, she might be able to play hide and seek. Worst case, she could plunge into the clouds of Dhula itself.

  The gas giant lay ahead of her. Rlinda increased speed until she couldn’t even breathe, but she endured. If the bugbots caught up to her, she wouldn’t be breathing any longer.

  The Curiosity dove toward the gas giant’s equator. Dhula had at least seven major moons, and her scanners showed bounce-back images from several hundred pieces of space debris. In similar systems, she might have expected to find some uncharted Roamer base, asteroid-mining operations, or even cloud harvesters. But Dhula genuinely had nothing of interest from a commercial perspective. No cavalry was going to come to her rescue.

  Cutting in as tight an orbit as she could calculate, hoping to use a slingshot maneuver with the gas giant’s gravity, the Curiosity skimmed the planet’s upper atmosphere. Unfortunately, her ionization trail among the highest clouds only gave the black robots an exact route to follow. Her ship vibrated and shook, and the robots kept shooting. Four black craft were behind her now, and she punched down into the layers, hoping to use the thick clouds as a smoke screen, but the relentless pursuers had her locked into their sensors.

  As a last-ditch effort, she ejected an ekti canister and detonated it an instant later so the explosion rippled through the clouds, scooping out a void in the mist. She hoped the bugbots would assume her ship had exploded.

  As the light and shockwave faded, she deactivated the Curiosity’s engines and her emissions, playing possum. The ship drifted under its own momentum, sinking like a stone. Everything was quiet except for the atmosphere buffeting her hull.

  Swallowing hard, she patted the capsule in her pocket. “We’ll just hang here and stay quiet.” She kept her voice to a whisper, though it was ridiculous to think the bugbots might hear her. Thick clouds masked the view from her windowports. Her stomach lurched with panic as the Curiosity kept sinking deeper, and she desperately wanted to power up her engines, regain altitude. She would just fall and fall until she reached an equilibrium at some depth, and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. She could hang down there for a week and then sneak back out. Alas, the black robots would not be departing anytime soon, and they would detect her as soon as she tried to leave.

  She would worry about that later.

  For fifteen minutes—fifteen long, agonizing minutes—the Curiosity simply plummeted. Rlinda could barely breathe, though she was under no acceleration at all. When she saw no sign of the robots, a spark of hope began to flicker inside her heart.

  A looming black shape appeared in the clouds in front of her, an angular robot attack vessel cruising through the area. Spotting her, it instantly flared its running lights, powered up its weapons. Rlinda didn’t bother to set a course, simply launched her ship forward and plowed away through the clouds.

  The robot’s blasters ignited fireworks inside the mists, and Rlinda raced up and out of the clouds again, following the curvature of Dhula and careening non-stop through the turbulence. She ricocheted off the high-pressure wall of an atmospheric super-storm, used the deflection to angle upward in a direct trajectory to orbit.

  She didn’t look back, but the occasional potshots streaking past told her that the robots were still there. Finally, pulling high-rising mists with her, the Curiosity shot out of the atmosphere and up into space. She didn’t slow, just kept racing toward the scattered moons and debris.

  The robots came after her. And she saw more of them ahead, black ships rushing to intercept her.

  Rlinda removed one hand from the piloting controls to touch the capsule in her pocket. She’d always imagined—in a sappy and romantic dream—that her ashes and Bebob’s would be shot out together into space, mingling among the stars.

  As the robots closed in, she realized that might actually happen, though not in the way she had wanted. And much sooner than she had imagined.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Elisa Enturi

  Cloud Nine continued to tear itself apart in a cascade of malfunctions. Given a competent engineering crew and adequate resources, any one of the weak links could have been patched up, Elisa supposed … but her engineer had been sucked out into the clouds, competent or not. She herself was the only competent one left, and she certainly couldn’t hold the remaining modules together.

  This was a disaster.

  The two intact modules shook and vibrated. Some of the seals were breaking open, and she could see they would not last long. Moments after any breach occurred, they would plunge into the clouds.

  She had worried about the slim possibility of a hydrogue attack, but she had not worried about flawed materials or workmanship on these well-proven Iswander modules. They should have been perfectly reliable. She couldn’t believe Mr. Iswander would tolerate unsafe equipment.

  He had warned her as soon as he learned of the flaw, but too late, and she had been unable to fix the problem in time. Now, they were all going to die—she was realistic enough to assume that—and Lee Iswander would be ruined.

  If only it had been a real hydrogue attack, then no one would have blamed him for the damage. The deep-core aliens had destroyed numerous helpless structures during the Elemental War.

  Anil and Shar ran into the main chamber, flailing their hands. “What should we do? How can we help?”

  “Old Bessie,” suggested Kipps. “We can climb aboard and ride this out.”

  “That old wreck won’t survive any attack,” said Fourth.

  Kipps knotted his fists. “I haven’t seen any evidence of attack. Where are the warglobes? Where are the blasts? This place is just falling apart. That skybus might keep us alive until the retrieval ship comes in two days.”

  Elisa knew they might be able to huddle together aboard Old Bessie, and if they were rescued, the survivors would tell everyone how Cloud Nine had simply b
roken into pieces, that the Iswander modules were unreliable and dangerous—the very modules that had made the company’s fortune. A backlash against Iswander Industries would ripple across the Confederation. There would be an uproar.

  She couldn’t have that.

  “I’ll see if the bus is still intact.” She staggered across the swaying deck over to the external controls. “It may have broken loose.”

  Tel Robek’s scout ship was still anchored on its platform, but Old Bessie had been attached to a lower egress port, where the passengers could climb aboard. She found it, but she had to keep them occupied. “Go to the main chamber, over by the egress hatch.” Elisa worked the controls, and before anyone could see what she was doing, she quietly disengaged Old Bessie. The skybus broke away from its anchoring cradle and dropped off, gently spinning away into the winds.

  As the skybus disengaged, the survivors felt the sudden lurch in the remaining modules. “What happened? Did we get struck again?” cried Shar.

  “I still didn’t see any hydrogues out there,” said Fourth.

  Kipps went to the lower egress hatch. Though it was dark, he could still see the large shape tumbling away. “Bessie just disengaged! The skybus broke free.”

  The others groaned and wept. “That was our only hope!” Anil said.

  Elisa kept busy with her work. “The docking clamp must have been unstable. Everyone remain here—I’ve got an idea. I need to seal this module. I’ll do a separation countdown so that it remains intact.”

  “And then we’re just going to wait here until rescue comes?” Fourth asked.

  Without levitation engines, the modules would be crushed within hours, but she didn’t tell them that. Elisa downloaded files from the main wallscreen, took the small data crystal with her. “Everyone stay calm. There’s still a chance this will all turn out right, but you have to do exactly as I say. Remain together.”

  Though terrified, they listened to her. They trusted her.