VOR 04 The Rescue

by Ellis, Don

  “Very,” Raedawn said, not missing a beat.

  “Good. We’ll need that if we’re going to convince the Neo-Sovs here.”

  Raedawn lost her cool for a moment. “Convince the Neo-Sovs?” she echoed.

  “David’s been explaining his idea for placing EMP bombs around the planet and blowing them all at once to attract the anomaly again.”

  She looked at David, then at Lamott, as if they were both completely insane.

  Lamott seemed not to notice. “It just might work, but we can’t do it without everyone’s cooperation.” To David he said, “This is all assuming you can get us some proof of concept, of course. Our own people won’t go for it without that, much less the Sovs. Nobody will go for it unless we can send something else back home first.”

  David grimaced. “They’ll have to, because we’re only going to get one shot at this. The process involves destroying the anomaly, and there’s only one of them now. We can probably show proof of concept for drawing it toward the Earth again by detonating a few EMPs in a line between it and here. In fact we probably ought to do that just to make sure it doesn’t close up again before we’re ready to go, but as far as the actual transition goes, they’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  Perry tapped the side of his glass with a fingernail. It made a soft ding, ding, ding while he thought, and went silent when he spoke. “Look, David, you know as well as I do that no one’s going to be willing to take a risk like that without proof that it could actually work. Not to mention that the Neo-Sovs will probably think it’s a ruse to get them to lower their guard.”

  David thought without tapping. “We’ve got the star pattern we saw through the explosion when Gavwin accidentally touched off the Kalirae missile. If that’s recognizable, it’s proof that we opened a hole back into the solar system. Then there’s the light spectrum from the anomaly itself. If it’s sunlight coming through from the other side, then the spectrum ought to match the Sun’s. That should prove there’s still a connection to the other side.”

  “That’s something, but it might not be enough.”

  “It’ll have to be. We don’t want to blow up our only escape route in a test shot.”

  Raedawn looked incredulous. “Plenty of people aren’t going to want all those bombs going off around the planet for a live shot, either. They’re weapons, remember? Designed to wipe out unshielded electronics. You’re going to fry every computer and microwave and idiot box in the world.”

  “People can build Faraday cages around their electronics,” David said.

  “Most people can’t even spell ‘Faraday,’ ” Raedawn countered. “Anyway, why do we need to put them in Soviet territory in the first place? Why not just on our side of the planet?”

  David said, “Because we don’t know the anomaly will envelop the whole Earth a second time. Shoving only half of it back into normal space might be kind of a Pyrrhic victory.”

  The three of them sat for a few seconds, thinking it over. Perry’s soft tapping joined the rattle of ice cubes as the other two sipped their drinks, then he said, “You sure we can’t create another anomaly when we need it? You were able to do it once.”

  “From the other side,” David said. “The missiles we shot at the Kalirae and at the Neo-Sov ship had plenty of magnetic pulse in them, and they didn’t open anything up. You can stretch an anomaly around from this side once they’re formed, but I think creating them has to happen from normal space.” He took another swallow of scotch, then added, “Besides that, I have no idea how to direct where an anomaly goes even if I could open one up. This universe is obviously a lot smaller than ours; if we punch a separate hole into normal space a kilometer away from the old one, who’s to say it would even be in our own solar system on the other side? It might be somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy.”

  Lamott was silent for a moment, nodding to himself. “For now, the next step is to see what else can be learned from this Kalira of yours. If it’s true what he says about a constant state of warfare in this place, I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to be present.”

  “Harxae,” said Raedawn, setting her glass down on the end table beside the couch. “We should go see how he is.”

  Lamott shook his head. “Not yet, Captain. What else do you know about his telepathic ability?”

  “Not much, other than that he’s got it.”

  David said, “I suspect he was using it from ship to ship while he and Gavwin were learning our language. That was a distance of maybe two hundred meters, but there were no other minds around to confuse things. I don’t know how much range he’s got. We’ll have to ask.”

  “And we’ll have to test his answers. In the meantime, I’d better stay away.”

  “Right.” David hesitated, then said, “We do know that pain keeps him from reading minds, even when he wants to.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to act on that knowledge, but it’s useful to know he can be shut down without killing him.” Lamott stood up. “All right, go ahead and check on him. He’s going to want to see a friendly face. In the meantime, I’ll get on the horn with the Pentagon and bring them up to speed on the situation here. We’re going to have to convince a few people your theory holds water, but if you’ve got the data you claim you do, I think it’ll be possible.”

  “We should bring the shuttle here before something happens to it,” David said, also standing.

  “Already happening.” Lamott offered his hand to Raedawn. “Good landing, by the way. Anytime you want to apply for a pilot position under my command, you’ve got it.”

  “Thanks,” she said, accepting his hand and rising to her feet. She gave him a slight smile, not enough to be encouraging but not enough to shut him down, either. David found himself wishing she would be less mysterious for once and just tell the guy to bug off, but he supposed it was none of his business.

  * * *

  The hovercar took them back across the base to the hospital, where they found both Boris and Harxae in an intensive-care room with two guards—still in full battle armor—at the door. The room’s interior, at least, was more friendly. Its only windows overlooked the nurses’ station, but it was brightly lit and had a huge entertainment screen on the wall. At the moment the screen was displaying a forest scene, either recorded or one of the live feeds from Yellowstone Park that had become so popular in recent years.

  Boris, encased in an ultrasonic tissue regenerator from waist to neck, looked a little like a barrel-chested robot stranded on his back. Harxae lay stretched across two beds set end to end on one side of the room. His color had returned, even in the injured leg, which bore an oval patch anchored down with high-strength filament tape.

  “How you guys doing?” David asked.

  Boris rapped on the metal case around his chest, careful not to hit any of the controls or blinking red indicator lights. “Three broken ribs and dislocated hip, but good as new in week, they tell me.”

  “Good. Harxae? Can you understand us again?”

  The alien nodded his long head. “Yes. I brought my own medication. My thanks for the rescue.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think we’d have made it if you hadn’t flamed those missiles. That talisman of yours is a neat little gadget.”

  “Was,” said Harxae. “I let go of it when I was hit.”

  “Hopefully you won’t need it anymore anyway. The commander here is an old friend of mine, and he thinks our plan to shove Earth back through the anomaly could be worth the risk. He’s trying to get approval right now. With any luck, we’ll be out of the fighting from now on.”

  Harxae made the lip-smacking sound that Kalirae used for laughter. “With any luck we wouldn’t be here.”

  17

  Harxae claimed a telepathic range of less than a hundred meters when there were other minds about. Trouble was, nobody could figure out a good way to test that statement. They could disprove it if he was ever found with information he couldn’t have gotten from someone closer b
y, but they couldn’t think of a test that would produce positive proof of a negative condition. After all, as David was fond of saying, absence of evidence was not evidence of absence.

  Lamott therefore declined to meet the Kalira until such a test could be found. He called to extend his best wishes, covering up the camera on his end so Harxae couldn’t get a mental image of him to help focus on, but Harxae claimed he could barely understand him without the telepathic link to give his words meaning. He gleaned enough information from David and Raedawn to answer, but it was like looking up every word in a bilingual dictionary. His response was fluent, which David thought was proof that he was scamming them, but Harxae picked up on his thought and said, “I’m addressing him with thoughts I find in your mind. If I had to make up everything from scratch, I would be just as slow at that as I am at translating what he says to me.”

  David tried to think of a way to test that, but even if Harxae could read his mind halfway around the planet, the alien could always hold back when not in the same room and it would look like he couldn’t.

  Lamott assured the alien that his caution wasn’t personal, and that as soon as they could confirm Harxae’s abilities and intentions, he would be glad to meet him. They left it at that, but David had barely disconnected when Harxae suddenly sat straight up in bed and said, “We are in danger.”

  “What?” asked David. “From whom?”

  “Someone is approaching the building with the intent to kill us all.”

  David instinctively looked toward the window, but it only faced the nurse station. The two on duty were busy entering patient data into the computer system and answering the phone, oblivious to any danger. He could see one of the guards beside the door, too, but the soldier merely stood at parade rest watching the interior of the room, not looking for trouble from outside.

  “Are you sure?” David asked.

  “Positive. His name is Rick Stockwell. A sergeant, serial number 32956583. He was instructed by General Lamott himself to assassinate all four of us because we pose a security risk to the Union. He is carrying a ‘pitbull’ assault rifle with exploding bullets in a hundred-round magazine. He also has a ‘pug’ hand pistol with exploding rounds and two fragmentation grenades. He dislikes the thought of committing murder and actually hopes to die in the assault rather than live with the moral repercussions of it, but he will obey his orders. He has just entered the elevator.”

  “Shit!” David said. “The son of a bitch was just stringing us along until he could get us all together. And he called to make sure, but he didn’t have the stomach to listen to us die.”

  Raedawn bent down as if to hide behind Boris’s bed, and Boris started poking frantically at buttons on his regenerator, trying to find the one that would release him from its confinement, but David grabbed the door and yanked it open. “We’re under attack!” he said to the guards. “Somebody heard there was a Neo-Sov here. He’s in the elevator right now!”

  “How do you know that?” one of them asked.

  “The alien’s telepathic, remember?”

  Just then the elevator door opened, and an armored soldier stepped out.

  “Halt!” cried the guard David had been talking to. Both of them leveled their weapons at the newcomer.

  The armored soldier halted, then slowly raised his helmet visor and said, “Sergeant Stockwell here to replace whichever one of you wants to take a break. By the sound of it, maybe that ought to be both of you.”

  “We . . . uh . . . we haven’t gotten any orders to take a break.”

  “That’s because I’m bringin’ ’em. Here.” Stockwell reached beneath his armored vest.

  “Slowly,” said the first guard.

  David heard Raedawn come up beside him. In her hand was a slim tube with wires running from it to the heel of her shoe. He recognized it immediately: a pulse laser, and the heel was the battery. It would be good for maybe ten shots before the tube melted, but unless that battery had more zap than it looked like, there was no way she could punch through battle armor with it.

  He moved aside to give her room anyway. Harxae came up beside him to stand next to the window in full view of the assassin.

  The assassin pulled a piece of paper from his vest pocket and unfolded it. He stepped closer to hand it to the door guards, but then stopped suddenly, saying, “Yes, sir” into his headset. Just then the nurse who had been talking on the phone swung the arm-mounted screen out to the new arrival. David glimpsed Lamott’s face on the flat screen as it swung around.

  “Sergeant Stockwell,” said Lamott. “You are to stand down. Do you understand?”

  “No, sir. I mean, yes, I acknowledge the order. I don’t understand it, sir.”

  “It was just a test. I never wanted anyone killed, but you had to approach the alien thinking I did. David, are you within earshot?”

  David squeezed between the two guards and came up next to Stockwell, who backed away a step. “Right here,” he said.

  Lamott grinned at him. “Sorry for the melodrama, but it was the only thing I could think of. When did he become aware of the threat?”

  David took a deep breath and vetoed what he wanted to say, saying instead, “When the sergeant entered the building.”

  “Did you notice any unusual behavior beforehand? Anything that would indicate he was aware of the danger?”

  “You were talking to him yourself right up to the moment he picked up on it.”

  “I’m asking for your impression.”

  David looked over at Stockwell, who didn’t seem any happier than he did, then back at the phone screen with Lamott’s disembodied head in it. At that moment he would gladly have disembodied the head for real, but he just said, “I didn’t notice anything unusual until Harxae said my old friend had betrayed us.”

  Lamott frowned. “Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve got national security to think of. You’re asking me to try to get the brass to commit our entire planet to the riskiest thing we’ve ever done mostly on the strength of your word. I’m trying to verify what parts of your story I can.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t, or you wouldn’t be so pissed.”

  David reached out with a lightning-fast finger and rapped the phone screen. Sure enough, Lamott jumped back, because on his side it looked like David was going for his throat. “You sent an armed soldier into the building with orders to kill me and my friends and you don’t expect me to be pissed? What if you hadn’t caught him in time?”

  Lamott said, “He’s got a direct command link in his helmet.”

  And if that had failed? David glanced over at the intensive-care room. Harxae still stood behind the window. Raedawn was in the doorway with her hands on her hips, the laser nowhere in evidence. Behind her, Boris’s regenerator stood open like a clamshell, Boris himself out of sight. It took David a second to realize that one of the bed rails was missing. Not much of a weapon against an assault rifle, but he still wouldn’t want to walk through that doorway just now even so.

  Lamott said, “Look, it worked, okay? And now we know Harxae’s range.”

  “And now we know what kind of person you’ve become, too.” David rapped the screen again, but this time Lamott didn’t flinch.

  “Get some rest,” Lamott said. “It’s been a long day. Things will look better after a good night’s sleep.”

  “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  Lamott opened his mouth to say something more, then apparently thought better of it. He looked down at something on his desk, then back at the screen. “I’ll have someone show you to your quarters. We can talk again tomorrow.”

  “Sure.” David turned away before the screen went blank. He gave Sergeant Stockwell a questioning look, then shook his head and went back to the door. “Boris, you can put that down now.”

  Boris dropped to the floor; he had apparently been standing on one toe like a rock climber on the door’s middle hinge pin, holding his entire body up above bullet level for someone standing in the doorway w
ith a gun. And he had done that in Earth gravity with three broken ribs and a hip that had been dislocated just a couple of hours ago. Boris set the chrome bed rail against the wall, then climbed onto his bed again and rolled into the regenerator. “Could someone get nurse to check settings before I turn it back on?” he asked. “I think I disturb them when removing.”

  “Right,” said David. He beckoned one of the nurses over.

  Raedawn said to Harxae, “You promised to teach me how to kill anything. Let’s start with Lamott.”

  Harxae said nothing, but David saw the corners of his mouth curl upward. So Kalirae could smile; that was another piece of information about them that Lamott didn’t know.

  * * *

  David and Raedawn were given adjoining rooms in the VIP barracks. It was actually more of a hotel than a barracks, with comfortable furniture, a well-stocked bar in each room, and big windows overlooking a garden full of flowers and manicured ornamental trees.

  David immediately stripped off his clothing and showered, then dressed in fresh pants and an aloha shirt from his duffel bag and went down to the restaurant. The closet held a dress uniform in his size, but he’d be damned if he would wear it after today.

  He had a great meal of steak and buttered vegetables, savoring the first beef he’d had since going to Mars. He also savored the chance to relax by himself for a while. Raedawn and Boris were okay company, he supposed, but he wasn’t used to having companions for an entire day at a stretch, especially not a day like this one. He needed the time alone to decompress.

  Apparently so did Raedawn. He half expected to see her in the restaurant, but she didn’t show up, and when he got back to his room he could smell some kind of curry from next door. She had ordered room service.

  He lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling as the nebulous “Tkona” went down and the sky darkened. He turned sideways and looked at the disk of planets trapped here in this pocket universe, more an airy scattered line of bright dots than a disk from Earth’s point of view. The Moon was the only one that showed any detail. So much to study and learn and no time to do it in. Not if he was going to make good on his vow to bring Earth home again.