Dirty Job

by Felix R. Savage

  “They’re assholes,” she said to Dolph. “I mean, they’re my oldest friends. But they’re also assholes.”

  She had ended their verbal scuffle over the weapons systems by telling Dolph about her history as an Iron Triangle agent. She also told him that the commander of the Rogozhin was none other than Major General Akira Smith. That changed Dolph’s mind about blowing the Rogozhin away. He considered that Smith deserved to die. He had no idea that Martin, Robbie, MF, and I were on the ship, too.

  All the same, he felt terrible about the troopship’s complement of Marines. “Target the bridge, not the drive,” he told Sophia. “Give the grunts a chance to reach the lifeboats.”

  “Oh,” Sophia said, “because they’re just following orders, which makes them innocent?”

  “Close enough.”

  “I already killed four Marines on Valdivia, and funnily enough, I don’t feel bad about it.”

  “What happened on Valdivia?”

  Sophia raised her face from the optical telescope. “All right, we’re just waiting for them to come closer now. So, Valdivia. It was my debrief after the Ponce de Leon fiasco. Aki didn’t come himself, of course. It was this woman called Ingrid. Your typical fanatical female groupie. Aki attracts those like navel lint. She started ticking me off in her usual high and mighty style. She said Aki wasn’t happy with what I did on Ponce de Leon. I said, a) I failed anyway, and b) if the Transcendence is as bad as I’ve been told, doesn’t that justify doing whatever it takes to destroy it? And actually, I said, what is the Transcendence, anyway? Has anyone figured that out yet?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No one knew. I’d stolen some DNA from Ijiuto, way back at the beginning of the op, and had it analyzed, but we still couldn’t figure out exactly what we were dealing with. It looked like an extreme longevity mod. That made it a priority target for technology control operations. But there were suggestions that it might be something more than that … Anyway, when I asked that question, Ingrid’s eyes got all shiny. She said that after the Ponce de Leon fiasco, Aki had taken the gloves off. He’d got at Ijiuto in police custody and interrogated him.”

  Dolph could picture that interrogation. He almost felt sorry for ol’ Rafe.

  “Ijiuto spilled everything. This is still Ingrid talking. The Transcendence turns out to be Shifting plus. What Shifting could have been, but isn’t.” Sophia had her targeting solution. She powered up the railgun. The familiar whine seeped through the ship. “Picture it. We’re standing in a circle of scorched grass, way out in the Trevasse, at night. Her ship looms over us. Her Marine escort are standing with their backs to us, with their helmets sealed and white noise playing in their ears, ‘cause they’re not allowed to hear this stuff. You feel tiny out there, you know? The sky is huge. I’m looking up at all those stars, which I’ve had to accept that I’ll never reach. And stupid little team player Ingrid says, this is immortality in a DNA patch. It could destroy humanity as we know it. Blah, blah, blah. And I just kind of snapped. I said to her, I just came this close to committing genocide to eliminate this mod. But you know what? I accept that I was wrong. Oh good, she says. It’s great that you’re acknowledging your mistakes. And I say, yeah. I was wrong to try to eliminate it. Immortality in a DNA patch? I want that.”

  The lights dipped and came back up.

  “So I killed her. The Marines, too. Shot them in the back. Those dumb jocks never knew what hit them. Then I took their ship and went looking for the Transcendence.”

  She fired the railgun at the Rogozhin.

  “Goodbye, Aki. Goodbye, Jon. See you in Hell. Except not, because I’m not going there. Ever.”

  56

  The Rogozhin’s all-hands klaxon sounded. Halfway back to my seat, I froze, fingers locked around a handhold. “Incoming. Incoming.” The ship shivered like an animal in its sleep. If that was a hit, we’d be dead, so I knew the point defenses had destroyed the incoming missile. There had been so little warning that the attacker must be right on top of us.

  “Who’s attacking us?” I yelled. “Is it the Travellers?”

  Smith flew out of his office. His face was purple. “It’s your fucking ship! You gotta talk to her!”

  “To who?”

  “To your wife!”

  It fell into place. The St. Clare was attacking us. Sophia was attacking us. She was on the bridge of the St. Clare.

  “Dolph?” I said numbly.

  “Figure she flipped him,” Smith said.

  Brown took my arm in a friendly grip. “She tried to flip me, too,” he murmured, amidst the organized chaos of officers separating to their battle stations. “I played along for a while, trying to bring her back into the fold, but you see how well that worked. You try.” He maneuvered me in front of a comms station.

  I slid my feet into the toe straps. The deck quaked. The Rogozhin was returning fire.

  Half-convinced that I was talking to the void, I said, “St. Clare, come in. This is Mike Starrunner on the Rogozhin.”

  “Mike.” Sophia’s voice wafted out of the comms headset. “They turned you, huh?”

  Smith listened in on another headset, a vertical line deepening between his eyebrows.

  “Let me speak to Dolph,” I said.

  On the bridge of the St. Clare, Dolph was fighting to reach the comms, yelling my name, while the maintenance bot restrained him with its tentacles. But Sophia was using the headset with atmospheric noise cancellation, so all I heard was her voice. “Dolph says no. You rolled over for the Iron Triangle, Mike. You’re dead to him.”

  “I had no choice!”

  “There’s always a choice. You fucking idiot.” Now I could hear Sophia’s fury. “Why would you give the Transcendence to them? They’ll only destroy it! Jesus Christ, what a fucking waste!”

  Smith frowned suspiciously at me.

  Oh, shit.

  “You used to at least have balls,” Sophia raged. “Now you’re sucking Aki’s dick. Why not? Everyone else does.”

  “I don’t have the Transcendence!” I was trying not to look at Smith and Brown. “Pippa and Justin got away, and they took it with them.” My lies sounded limp and implausible.

  “Oh, so I guess I should just lie down and die,” Sophia shouted, “like every other human being in history? You fucking wish. If I can’t have the Transcendence, you can’t, either.”

  Screens lit up all over the bridge. The klaxon blared.

  Let no one say that space battles are decided by Newtonian physics. The Rogozhin could have swatted the St. Clare out of the sky at any time in the last half hour. But Smith and Burden had not wanted to kill their old friend. They had half-assed it with warning shots, which Sophia took as a sign of weakness. They had tried to talk her down. And now we were reaping the consequences. I fumbled the stability harness attached to the comms station over my shoulders—

  The deck jumped up and smacked me. An explosion of darkness swallowed the front half of the bridge. I had not finished fastening my harness. It tore off me, wrenching my left shoulder. As I flipped out of control through the air, I glimpsed a fire where the forward bulkheads used to be. But this fire burned cold and white. It was the Core, peeking through the twisted remnant of the front end of the truss.

  A blizzard of loose papers and electronics and furniture whirled around me. As the decompression boom hit, I slapped my helmet seal shut. Gasping in the sudden silence of my helmet, I tumbled helplessly out of the sheared-off stump of the Rogozhin’s hull, while pieces of the ship spread out in a ragged corona across the bright clouds of Mittel Trevoyvox’s dayside.

  *

  Dolph shouted, “That was Mike!”

  “So?” Sophia said.

  “Mike was on that ship!”

  “So?”

  “You killed him!” Standing off from the wreck of the Rogozhin at a distance of five klicks, Dolph maxed out the zoom on the optical feed. Debris sprayed into the void. Some of those clumps of pixels were people. One of them was me. Horr
or overwhelmed him. He had sat there and let me and Martin and Robbie die. “Lucy,” Dolph croaked. It was hitting him in waves. If I was dead, he was responsible for Lucy, as he’d promised.

  “Oh yeah,” Sophia said indifferently. “We’ll pick her up after we get the Transcendence.”

  Dolph realized in that moment, he told me, what it must feel like to be a father. It put the situation into perspective. Nothing now mattered more than that little girl back on Ponce de Leon. Self-destruction was no longer an option. He had to survive to get back to her. And even more importantly, he had to make sure that she had a universe to grow up in.

  “Guardians will show up soon,” Sophia said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I would’ve been tempted. I won’t lie. I would have seen visions of having it all, again. Sophia could always make me feel that way.

  But Dolph was a better man than me. He smiled at Sophia … and enabled the override sequence he’d covertly programmed into the ship’s computer.

  It took Sophia a minute’s frenzied rummaging through the torrent of error messages that ensued to see what he’d done.

  “Oh. Oh, Dolph.”

  She sank into her couch and gestured dully.

  The maintenance bot pounced on Dolph and plunged its injector into his neck.

  *

  It took me endless seconds to straighten out my spin. The Marine suit’s mobility system had wrist panel controls to vector the cold gas jets integrated into the life support backpack. Once I had my orientation under control, I flew back to the wreck of the Rogozhin, shouting, “Marty! Robbie! MF! Come in!”

  It was hopeless. Crosstalk drowned the suit radio frequencies. The survivors must have numbered twenty or more, and they were all trying to reach the lifeboats. Several spacesuits, Fleet-blue like my own, clustered under the Rogozhin’s belly, crawling in and out like rats raiding the garbage. An oval lifeboat dropped out of the ship, scattering the survivors, and spurted away.

  “Who was that?” voices shouted.

  I didn’t know or care. I just wanted to find Martin and Robbie. Instead, a flurry of snow found me. It blew out of nowhere, spattered on my faceplate, and dispersed past me. I wiped my faceplate and stupidly gaped at the powdery white residue on my glove. Snow? In space?

  I looked up.

  The St. Clare’s silver belly shone in the sunlight.

  Hope ignited. I wasn’t thinking about Sophia anymore. I just wanted to get back to my ship. I’d tell Dolph what happened, make him understand that the Iron Triangle hadn’t really flipped me.

  “Marty! Robbie!” I bawled into the radio. I couldn’t leave them—

  A rooster tail of blue flame crossed the terminator of Mittel Trevoyvox, and faded to plasma wisps as another ship decelerated to match the Rogozhin’s orbital velocity.

  Fleet markings glittered on the raked-back wing of an atmosphere-capable picket ship. Smith’s backup had arrived. The survivors flocked towards the newcomer. A second delta-wing vectored in as I watched. Loud orders and Fleet jargon overflowed the suit radio frequencies. It was no use shouting for Martin and Robbie anymore. Nor did I have any hope of visually distinguishing them from the other blue suits.

  A third ship dived in. This one swept past without stopping.

  The second Fleet delta-wing fireballed.

  The explosion caught the hulk of the Rogozhin, and tore the two ships apart, the delta-wing burning—must’ve hit the LOX tanks—the Rogozhin limned by curling blue lines of fire, consistent with electric arcs sparked by contact of the attacker’s exhaust plume with the hull.

  The light of the explosion cast a fleeting glow on the attacker as it fled into the darkness.

  Revealing the stylized pictures of maneating gods on its hull.

  The Travellers’ reinforcements had been lying in wait for the Fleet.

  The delta-wing’s antimatter containment exploded in a white-hot star so bright, it blinded me for a moment. My vision came back, blurry, as microscopic pieces of debris sleeted past me. I had been far enough from the antimatter explosion. I was not dead. I couldn’t say the same with any certainty for the spacesuits tumbling past amidst the debris.

  One of them was shaped funny. Its legs seemed too short. The feet of its spacesuit flapped.

  I seized it by the arm, twisted its faceplate to the sun.

  The face of a terrified wolf looked out at me.

  Robbie had Shifted inside his spacesuit, an instinctive response to danger. His jaws moved, but I couldn’t hear him. He had been closer to the explosion. It had fried his comms.

  “Die, motherfuckers, DIE!”

  A single Fleet spacesuit clung on top of the Rogozhin’s hulk, riding the handlebar-style controls of the troopship’s Gauss gun. The muzzle flashed, spurting lead.

  “Marty!” I yelled, waving. “Leave it!”

  A second Traveller ship, diving in for the kill, met the stream of hot lead from the Gauss, and went into a tumble.

  “Run, you dumbass!” Martin howled at me. “Don’t let them have it!”

  I sobbed out curses, gripped Robbie by a suit-swaddled forepaw, and oriented us towards the St. Clare. As we flew across the void, accelerating from a relative standstill, another, and yet another, Traveller ship swooped down. They clearly perceived their opposition to be limited, and hoped to claim their prize: the undamaged Fleet delta-wing. Acolytes in black spacesuits jumped out of the airlocks and went hand-to-hand with the surviving Marines.

  They hadn’t seen us. We were two klicks from the mayhem around the wreck of the Rogozhin. We just looked like drifting corpses. In fact, there was another one, close behind us …

  “Starrunner! Give me the TrZam 008!”

  Smith.

  Heck with playing dead. I opened the throttle of my mobility thrusters all the way.

  The St. Clare came closer.

  But so did Smith.

  He was cutting the corner. He’d reach the ship at the same time we did.

  I switched my grip on Robbie’s suit to the other hand, putting myself between Smith and the young wolf.

  The St Clare’s head grinned down at us, in a sort of curtsey that turned into a slow somersault.

  Why was she tumbling?

  And what were those glittering specks clinging to her flanks?

  “Stop! Starrunner! Stop or I shoot!”

  Smith was right beside me. His faceplate was in shadow, so it looked like he had only half a head.

  He aimed a machine pistol at me.

  Those babies have no issues working in vacuum.

  I was only a hundred meters from the airlock of the St. Clare. Maybe thirty seconds. My breath rasped heavily. I could smell my own sweat. I was a prey animal running for cover, with my prize in my stomach.

  But there is no cover in space.

  Smith shot me.

  The bullet tore through my spacesuit and the meat of my left calf.

  Pain flared up my nerves.

  A mechanical voice said urgently, “Decompression alert! Decompression alert!”

  Smith shot again.

  The bullet struck me in the back, but by that time I was Shifting.

  You can’t hit what isn’t there.

  A typical Shift, for me, takes fifteen seconds. There are a few seconds in the middle of that process, maybe five, when the man has gone away but the animal isn’t there yet. That’s when we go blurry. We are here but not here: our minds are here, but our bodies are in a state of quantum uncertainty, waiting for the probabilities to be resolved. The way they teach it to us in school on San Damiano is that on the quantum level, everything’s made of energy. A human being is essentially a being of energy and vibration, radiating a unique energy signature. That unique signature is the part that never goes away. Everything else can. Mass can be converted into pure energy. So in the middle of a Shift, we are energy without mass.

  And as Rafael Ijiuto had demonstrated in the bunker, a bullet can’t hit that.

  So I Shifted, and at the moment when
my wolf’s chest pushed out against the human-shaped pressure garment, I Shifted again.

  Bullets punctured my suit and helmet. I felt them go through me—the oddest feeling, like a ghost walking on my grave, not painful. The air rushed out of my wrecked helmet. I was in vacuum.

  But energy doesn’t need to breathe.

  I Shifted again.

  Tiger.

  Jaguar.

  I even did my zorilla, I think.

  Lion.

  Bear.

  Sabertooth tiger.

  Then back to wolf again.

  I hit the side of the St. Clare, tumbling. The port side airlock was a mile away. I had no hands to crawl with. I had no feet. Robbie, back in human form, grabbed a handful of my shredded spacesuit and towed me to the airlock, while the appendage inside his grasp changed from a hand, to a paw, to a hoof.

  The airlock slid open.

  Someone wearing my own spacesuit somersaulted out and flew away.

  Robbie pushed me into the airlock, crawled in after me, and slammed the hatch in Smith’s face.

  I fell into the trunk corridor, still Shifting. I had passed the point where I could control it. This was what used to happen to me when I was a kid. I’d start Shifting, and I wouldn’t be able to stop. It takes on its own momentum, and with every additional form, you leave your humanity farther and farther behind. That’s how Chimera Syndrome kids die.

  I’ve recovered, I always insisted.

  But it wasn’t true. I had only learned to live with CS. Learned to control it. And now, by voluntarily embracing it again, I had plunged back into the nightmare.

  I floated in the trunk corridor of the St. Clare, but for all I knew, I might have been lying on the forest floor on the hillside behind my parents’ house on San Damiano. The air felt like a bed of dry leaves. Distantly, I felt hands pulling my spacesuit off, just like they used to pull my clothes off in the old days, so that I would not get trapped inside them and get even more panicky. I twisted and snapped at the interfering hands with jaws that no longer resembled any terrestrial animal’s. I had a snake’s tail, a lion’s claws, a walrus’s body, a leopard’s head. All of it was me and yet none of it was me. None of it was human.