VOR 04 The Rescue

by Ellis, Don

  The enormity of the project threatened to overwhelm him whenever he thought about it all at once. He had to take it a piece at a time in order to believe it was possible. But he had to believe it was possible. If he didn’t, then where did it leave him? Stranded back on Earth—a planet that hadn’t much suited him the first time around—in a place that wasn’t even part of the same universe where he was born. All he wanted was a place to call home, a place that wasn’t caught up in war or overpopulated with indifferent idiots too busy eking out their miserable existence to look up at the night sky. Earth would never be that place, but it could support colonies that might be if he could put it back where it belonged.

  If. Tomorrow he would try to convince the right people that he knew what he was talking about, but tonight he would relax. He would be useless if he didn’t get some rest.

  He heard little noises coming from Raedawn’s side of the wall. Music, occasional footsteps, running water. The connecting door between their rooms drew his attention, fueling a brief fantasy. What if he were to open his half of that door, knock on Raedawn’s half, and invite her over? They had a million good excuses to talk. They should plan their strategy, both for the project and in case Lamott tried something else to test them. Talk. Or not talk.

  He snorted in self-conscious derision. The odds of that happening were about as slim as the odds of moving the Earth. If Raedawn knew what he was thinking, she would laugh herself silly. Or use that little spy laser of hers to cut him to shreds. Not that she would need to. She could do the job just as well with her tongue.

  Wrong image. He got up from the bed, embarrassed now, and paced the length of the room and back. Why had Lamott given them adjoining rooms, anyway? The answer was obvious: he didn’t know if they were sleeping together or not, so he’d given them the option if they wanted to. How considerate of him.

  The sneaky bastard.

  Before he could talk himself out of it, David snatched open his half of the door and rapped on Raedawn’s side.

  “What?” came her muffled voice.

  “Can I come in for a minute?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  Dare he say it out loud? He didn’t see that he had much choice. “Because we’re probably being monitored and if this door doesn’t open at least once tonight, Lamott is going to think we’re not an item, and he’s going to hound you like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  He almost closed his door, but instead took a deep breath and said, “I know you can. But did it ever occur to you that I may not want Lamott to think we aren’t an item?”

  She was silent for a long few seconds. Then the door opened and she stood before him in a soft blue sweat suit, her hair freshly washed, face freshly scrubbed, and her green eyes as wide open as he’d ever seen them.

  “Just what do you mean by that?” she asked.

  “What do you think I mean?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me what you mean?”

  “I thought I just did.”

  “I must have missed it. The double negative was kind of confusing.”

  Raedawn admitting to confusion? Impossible. That left only one other interpretation, which seemed equally impossible, but he was in too deep to back out now. “You’re saying you want me to try something more positive?”

  “I think so.” She tilted her head to the side, a little smile playing across her lips. “Yeah, sure.”

  He hadn’t been aware how hard his heart was beating until now. His skin must be bright red. He felt like he was going to burst into flame at any moment, but he leaned forward to kiss her.

  He expected her to meet him halfway, but she just stood there, that damnable smile on her face, while he drew closer, waiting for her to say something snide. She said nothing, but she was going to make him go the whole distance.

  So he went the whole distance. At least she didn’t back away. And when their lips met, she finally relented and kissed him. She slipped her arms around his waist and pulled him against her, running her hands up and down his back.

  “Do, I, um, do I make myself clear enough now?” he asked softly.

  “Mmm,” she said. “I don’t know. Better repeat yourself just to make sure.”

  So he did. It turned into quite a statement. In fact, it quickly became a two-way conversation, without a doubt the best one he’d ever had with her. Her tongue turned out to be not nearly as sharp as he’d expected. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a rough spot anywhere on her body.

  The door remained open the rest of the night.

  18

  Morning arrived far too quickly. David heard the shower running when he woke, briefly considered joining Raedawn there, but decided against it. If she’d wanted company, she’d have asked.

  She certainly hadn’t been shy about asking for things last night. Not just physical requests, either. She seemed to think that baring his body to her also meant he should bare his soul, and she had worn him out with questions. When he’d complained she’d said, “I’m an intelligence officer. I want to know what makes you tick.”

  “So do I,” he’d replied. “If you figure it out, clue me in, okay?”

  She had proceeded to tell him what she already knew. He was driven by an urge to learn everything he could, probably because he sensed his own mortality and couldn’t bear to die without knowing how the universe worked. He was offended by stupidity, impressed by ambition, and attracted to eccentricity. He thought of himself as painfully mundane and hated himself for it, but thought that cultivating an unusual lifestyle of his own would be an affectation. His extreme rationality made him feel like a misfit wherever he went. He wanted desperately to belong, but thought it was probably impossible to do so. Therefore, feeling no sense of truly belonging anywhere, he had gone to Mars when ordered to, even though he had secretly wanted to do it all along. And he had admitted his feelings for Raedawn only when he had been afraid of losing her to someone else.

  “No,” he’d said, “I admitted them the moment I realized I had them, which was about a millisecond before I knocked on your door.”

  “Bullshit,” she’d said. “You’ve had the hots for me since you first met me. You didn’t act until you thought Lamott might intrude.”

  Not liking the direction the conversation was going, he’d tickled her in the ribs. That had worked wonderfully, though one of his feather pillows would never be the same again.

  Nor would David. In the clear light of day, he was forced to realize that her assessment of him was essentially true. She’d hit the mark on what drove him, and it was a wonder he hadn’t realized all this himself before now. What he would do with the information now that she had set him straight was still a mystery, but at least he’d no longer be acting in ignorance.

  He heard the shower turn off, and a moment later Raedawn came back into the room, toweling off but making no special effort to protect her modesty. He was amazed at what a night of intimacy could do. Yesterday he would have been tongue-tied in her presence, but today he merely smiled and said, “So do I want to move the Earth because I need the external validation of my genius, or do I want to do it because I’m such an altruist?”

  “Neither,” she said. “You want to do it because it’s a scientific puzzle.”

  “Oh.”

  “And because you want to impress me.”

  “You think?”

  “Possibly. Why else did you invite me along?”

  “I think it was Kuranda’s idea, actually.”

  She shrugged and began rubbing her hair dry. “Huh. Well, so much for that theory.”

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She eyed him appreciatively as he walked toward her, but when he tried to kiss her she backed away and said, “Let’s make one thing very clear right from the start. If I wanted little smooches in the hallway, I’d have gotten married years ago. I’m not a hold-your-hand, sit-in-your-lap kind of person. If you want to play airlock, I’m a
ll for it, but there’d better be some promise in it, okay?”

  “Okay.” He put his arms around her, lifted her off the ground, and kissed her in the air, but in his disoriented afterglow he had forgotten the gravity and nearly dropped her.

  “What was that supposed to be?” she asked, catching herself on the door frame.

  “Romantic,” he said. “Let’s call it a promise of romance instead. Once I get used to weighing three times what I should, I’ll do that right.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  She turned away, so he went into his own bathroom and showered. When he came out she was dressed again, once more in black. Her leather jacket with its little silver zippers and chains flashed under the overhead light when she moved, and her short, dark hair that fell almost but not quite into her eyes gave her an air of casual indifference that made her at once irresistible and unapproachable.

  “How do you do that?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “Project that ‘don’t touch’ look.”

  “It’s an art.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  She shrugged. “I like to keep people off balance.”

  “You manage that. I don’t know whether to haul you caveman-style back to bed or run for my life.”

  “Good. There should always be a little mystery in life.”

  He was still trying to decide whether he should advance or retreat when there was a knock at the door. Raedawn immediately stepped into her room and closed her half of the adjoining door, then popped it right back open, snatched up her sweat suit from the chair by the door, and closed it again.

  David closed his side and said in a loud voice, “In a minute.”

  “It’s Lamott.”

  “In that case, it’ll be an hour or so.” He unzipped his bag and found a pair of shorts.

  “Very funny. Open up.”

  “Oh, all right.” David did a little dance step climbing into his shorts on the way to the door, unlocked it, and stepped back as Lamott pushed his way in.

  The general was not in a good mood. “You lied to me.”

  “I probably did,” said David. “Which one did you catch?”

  “What? How many lies did you tell?”

  “There wouldn’t be much use in lying if I revealed ’em all the moment you ask, now, would there?” David grinned. He was playing for the audience on the other side of the door as well as for Lamott. Apparently a little of Raedawn’s attitude had rubbed off on him during the night, and he was surprised to discover that he liked it.

  Lamott stood with his legs slightly apart and his hands behind his back as if addressing a platoon of soldiers. “Shortly after the Change, a Neo-Sov ship crash-landed on the Moon. Its pilot, one Brygan Nystolov, followed Earth through the anomaly all the way from Mars. He says there was no alliance with your forces in the works at the time he left, and no indication that there would ever be one. In fact, until he left Mars, his orders were to find and destroy your secret base.”

  David shrugged nonchalantly and reached into the closet for the uniform there. He could tell he would need it today. “If this Nutsonov guy left Mars before the anomaly hit, of course he wouldn’t know about the alliance. It didn’t happen until after Earth had disappeared.”

  “Who proposed it, and under what authority? How did you negotiate the treaty? Did you bring the document with you? What about—”

  “Colonel Kuranda called General Shtavyrik at the Baskurgan base on Ascraeus Mons because we believed Earth had been destroyed. We staged an attack on Tithonium Base to prove we were still a threat, then sued for peace from a position of strength.”

  David dressed as he spoke. The uniform was a surprisingly good fit; apparently someone had looked up his size rather than just guessed. “They resisted at first, so we shut down their communications satellites, effectively isolating their colonies from one another. When we put them back online a few minutes later, they were ready to talk.”

  Lamott wiggled his fingers nervously. “Documents?”

  “They were still being drawn up when we left. We intended to wait until we received them before following Earth through the spatial anomaly, but we were sucked in before that happened.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it.”

  David adjusted his tie. He hated the constricting things, just as he hated lying like this. “Of course you don’t believe me, but that doesn’t really matter, does it? It makes a good story. It provides an excellent excuse to cooperate. Does it really matter if it’s true or not?”

  “Of course it matters! If we try to make peace with the Soviets here based on a fiction, the whole thing could fall apart in an instant.”

  “And exactly how would we be any worse off afterward than we are now?”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re at war with them now. Any reason for a cease-fire is a good thing, isn’t it? Especially if it lets us do what we have to do to put the Earth back where it belongs.”

  Lamott said, “You’re not much of a strategist, are you? We’ve got at least a dozen separate operations under way in Neo-Soviet territory. We’re taking out their munitions depots, power plants, military bases—you name it. We’re not going to propose a cease-fire until it’s in our best interest to do so.”

  “So you’re saying you’d actually rather not have evidence of a peace treaty on Mars.”

  “Not right away.”

  “Hmm.” David knocked on the door between his room and Raedawn’s. “Hey, are you decent in there?” he called out.

  “Yeah.”

  “The general’s here, and he brought us a present.”

  He opened the door just as both Lamott and Raedawn said, “A present?”

  “A wet blanket.”

  Raedawn opened her door and stepped into the room. “How thoughtful. What kind of . . . fire are we dousing with it?”

  “Now wait a minute,” Perry blustered. “You’re the ones who lied to me. You didn’t really expect me to accept your story without checking the facts, did you?”

  “I don’t think the facts have much to do with it,” said David. “You got orders from above not to interrupt their little war, and this is your way of laying the blame on us so we won’t protest.”

  Lamott blinked. His eyes shifted to Raedawn and back to David again, just a little flicker of motion, but it was enough.

  “Hah! Guilty as charged. All right, now that we’ve established the truth in this conversation, let’s talk reality. How long before you can propose a cease-fire?”

  Lamott leaned back against the wall. “Maybe a week.”

  “We don’t know the anomaly will stick around for a week.”

  “Well, you’ll have to make sure it does. Like I told you yesterday, we need proof-of-concept anyway before we can sell this idea to either side. You’ll have to go back out there and show us you can manipulate that thing. Stretch it out toward Earth, get a spectral analysis, see if you can split it in two, all that stuff. We’ll try to finish up what we need to do here as quickly as we can, but we’re not backing down while we’re winning.”

  “Amazing,” said David. “The Union would rather fight a war than negotiate a fragile peace.”

  “You attacked Tithonium before you negotiated with Shtavyrik,” Lamott pointed out. “At least you said you did.”

  “We did,” David said. That part of his story, at least, was true. “But I argued against that, too.”

  “No offense, but I’m amazed anyone ever thought you’d make a good scientific leader in occupied territory.”

  “No offense, but I’m surprised anyone ever thought you’d make a good leader, period. You should have stuck to blowing up physics labs.” David picked up his travel bag and started stuffing his belongings into it, including his dirty clothes. One sock was dangling from the bedside lamp; he saw Lamott roll his eyes when he noticed it there.

  “You really haven’t changed much, have you?” Lamott said.

  David wasn’t about to tell
him how that sock had really gotten there. Let him think what he liked.

  Lamott turned to Raedawn. “He used to be the sloppiest lab tech on campus. Total quark head. Couldn’t keep track of his tools, busted half his equipment before he even switched it on, spilled reagents all over the floor—but he always got the best results of any of us. We all thought he fudged his data, but he could repeat everything within half a standard deviation anytime you asked him to.”

  “Is there a point to this homey little reminiscence?” she asked.

  He sighed. “Look, I’ve managed to piss both of you off, and I’m sorry. I’d like to back up and start over again, but it would wind up the very same way because my responsibilities would still be to the same people. The point I’m trying to make is that I trust David. Not the story about some happy little alliance on Mars, but I trust his science. I mean that, David. If anybody could do what you’re proposing, you can. I’m behind you on that all the way.”

  “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

  “And you’ve got a funny way of asking for help. If you had approached anybody else, you’d have been laughed right back to Mars.”

  “You are sending me back into space again,” David noted, hefting his travel bag.

  “To prove to everybody else that this will work. While you’re doing that, I’ll lay the groundwork down here. When you get back, we can make it happen.”

  “That’s—well, that’s more encouraging than before.” David looked to Raedawn. “So, um, you want to come with me or stay here?”

  The question seemed to hang in the air for hours. Her eyes met his, and he saw the glint of malice that a mouse sees when the cat knows the mouse is cornered. He saw her nostrils flare and her pale white skin turn just a tiny shade redder. He saw her lips move an infinitesimal fraction of a millimeter and he knew she was going to laugh; he could hear her voice say, Hah! You think I’d go back into danger for you?

  Sure enough, when she finally spoke, she said, “Are you kidding?” He felt the knife blade slide into his chest, but the wound healed without a trace when she finished her thought: “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”