by Shawn Jones
He looked up from the book he’d given Ceram. “Aren’t we past that, Salana?”
She looked at the half-burned cigar in an ashtray on the floor beside Cort. Next to it was a glass of scotch. She could forgive the sins, considering the loss Cort felt. The thought made her ashamed, as if she were God. It wasn’t her place to judge a mortal savior, as evil or good. Being a god is his thing, not mine. “I was going through Ceram’s notes in his flexpad. I found something you will want to see.”
Cort sat up, took the flexpad, and started reading. Before his death, Ceram was testing the adaptability and symbiosis of the exos. Of all the species on the Remington, the Jaifans were most suited for the parasites species.
“They targeted him.”
“It appears so.”
Ceram thought they were trying to communicate with him because they were vibrating at different intervals and frequencies. But the fuckers were really trying to figure out how to escape. “They are on the wrong side, Salana. They are a disease.”
“Yes.”
And they are still out there.
“I’ve lost too many friends.”
“It’s a double-edged sword. You have made friends who will die for you. Not many can say that. But with that gift, you have the potential for loss.”
Cort put the cigar in his mouth, and stood up with the drink in his hand. “You were right about me. I am evil. I think evil is more efficient.”
“Not evil. Just broken.”
“Broken?”
“Too much has been taken from you. But now you have Diane back. Maybe you can be whole again. I think she is your light.”
“Maybe.”
Her thoughts surprised him. She wanted to taste his scotch. Putting the cigar back in the ashtray, he took a sip and held the glass out to her. As their fingers touched, he felt something more than her skin; something akin to electricity and anticipation. He didn’t need to read her mind to know what she was thinking. The desire in her eyes said she felt it, too.
He looked into her dark eyes and saw a potential lifetime with a woman other than Kim. “Perhaps. In another life, and if I wasn’t Kim’s.”
She sighed and emptied the glass. Putting it on the table, she reached up and cupped his cheek, allowing her thumb to caress his bottom lip. “Perhaps. But you are a good man, and she is my friend.”
Cort smiled. They had both passed some unspoken test. He reached up and took her hand from his cheek, and kissed her palm. “Thank you, Salana.”
Klaxons sounded again. Cort tucked the book into his tunic and ran out the door, with Salana sprinting to keep up with him.
A dozen Marines were putting their CONDORs on in the armory. Kim was already suited, having been on the Erom ship when the alarms sounded. Jaifans helped the children into their armor, and as each CONDOR left the bay, it stood in a spray of the exo-synthetics. One was loose on the Remington.
Cort said, “Doc, will the synthetics hurt Jaifans?”
As Kim checked Salana’s helmet seal, then Cort’s, Salana said, “No. They won’t target anything but the exos. They are safe for all other species.”
“Tur, I want all your people soaking in the shit. Then spray the kids and get them to the shuttle bay.”
George said, “Father, I have the shuttle on the surface, ferrying Lieutenant Schwartz and his men to the final remaining infestation.”
“How long?”
“I can have it here in thirty minutes, but the exo infestation is spreading.”
Salana said, “The refugees!”
“George, show me the exos on a ship overlay!”
Cort looked at the hologram of the ship that appeared on his work table. The ship itself was gray, and looked very much like a blocky, double-barreled shotgun. Along both sides of the ship’s stock, the shuttle bays were highlighted. All were in the direct path of the exos. There appeared to be several hundred of them.
“How the fuck did that happen? Where did they come from?”
George reversed the progression of the attack. The starting point was one wall of Ceram’s lab. He zoomed in on the area, and converted the image to video. There was a hole the size of a dime in the wall. The lab appeared, and from the looks of it, the hole was in the same spot where an Erom sample had been.
I can do it. The exos solved the problem for me. And it’s not even a moral debate. We can’t travel through time in the Hellebore. I can build my own society on Solitude, and live out my life with the people I love. Fuck you, Universe.
A sudden thought occurred to him—The Erom. “Rai, get your people to the magazine. Get the Erom out of there. George, flood a path to the Hellebore with CO2 so the Erom can breathe.”
“The Hellebore, sir?”
“The Erom ship. I’ll explain later. Let me know as soon as they are secure.”
Cort activated a comm to Bloom, and told her what was happening. “We need your people to get that ship going now. Marines are on their way to evacuate you. I want to be able to engage the hull as soon as everyone is on board.”
—
Clem suited up his Neanderthals in the refugee area of the ship. He showed Rocky an image of the Remington, and they decided where to place their men to guide the other refugees to the Hellebore.
According to Cort’s orders, Clem and his cavemen hustled the several thousand refugees up the barrel of the ship, and to another deck, where they could board the Erom vessel. As soon as the Erom were aboard, Jaifans rushed onto the ship, with Diane and Dalek in their midst. When Clem received clearance from Tur, two Neanderthals boarded the Hellebore and directed refugees to the interior of the ship.
—
Cort watched as George moved the HAWC to the open, outer deck, of the Hellebore, where two Marines secured it to an outer deck. He turned to the Marines on the ship, knowing that Schwartz and his men were listening from the surface of Threm.
“The exos are in the Remington’s ventilation system. We can’t keep the ship, but we can delay them long enough to evacuate the refugees. Fight for time, not victory. Ares out.”
Turning to Salana, he ordered her to take up station near the Hellebore with Kim. Their job was to take over for Clem, and scan every living being that went aboard the ship, for exo contamination. He looked at them somberly. “I don’t have to tell you what to do if someone is.”
The two women relieved Clem, and he took his Neanderthals to the shuttle bay side of the ship, where they cleared bays and magazines one area at a time and set up fire blocks. George pumped accelerants into sealed areas and ignited them. Any exos that escaped the burning areas were incinerated by Clem and his Plio-Pleistocene warriors.
—
Rai reported in, telling Cort that the Erom were in place, guarded by two of his sixteen Marines. His new orders were to use his fourteen remaining CONDORs to sweep the crew’s quarters of the ship. A few minutes later, he commed Cort again.
“Ares, this is Rai. The bridge is clear, except for George’s gel core. Please advise.”
“Standby, Rai.”
Cort stood over the hologram of the ship, and spoke to George, who was supervising an Erom repair crew. His avatar was flying the shuttle, rushing to help Schwartz finish the final cleanup on Threm. “How much do you lose, if we lose your core?”
“I can keep recent memories with just my avatar, but the gel core has all the data from the Gryll universe, as well as…”
“That’s too much; we can’t lose it.”
“There is no way to move the core from the bridge, Father. It was built in place.”
Cort looked at the hologram. He had maybe a half hour to figure out how to save George’s auxiliary memory.
“Ares to Gramps. What’s your status?”
Clem said, “I’ve got twenty percent of the port side of the ship sterilized.”
“Split your team, give Rocky a squad, and send him to the bridge. We need to buy time for the gel core.”
—
Sun worked under the eyes of a CO
NDOR, making the last repairs to the ship Cort had renamed the Hellebore. Xe wasn’t sure if the humans or the parasites were a greater danger, but Bloom was clear—they would cooperate with the humans. For now. The warrior standing behind xyr asked a question.
“You don’t like us even though we saved you. Why?”
“We are trading one master for another.”
“Have we enslaved you?”
Sun looked up at the human. “You don’t trust us to work alone. You guard us.”
“There is more to it than that. I am learning, studying your work.”
“So you can steal our ship and dispose of us.”
“I am also protecting you. The parasites have escaped containment.”
“Then we are all dead. Your kind and ours.”
—
Cort jumped across the gap between the ships. He had enough air in his FALCON breather for two minutes. Two Marines disconnected his HAWC from the Hellebore’s deck as Cort climbed into its hatch and settled into the control couch. He quickly attached the Atlas interface, and locked his limbs in place. He activated the suit just as the CONDORs moved to give him room to maneuver. He crouched in the deck space, but as soon as he was at the edge, he rolled down and pushed himself toward the Remington.
In his HUD, he saw the overlay of the ship, and where Clem’s cavemen were. “Rocky, move your people behind the bulkheads.”
“Yeah, big boss.”
He searched through the hologram of the ship and ordered other teams to clear specific areas and seal hatches, so he could work his way to the bridge and to George’s gel core. When the area below the HAWC was clear and sealed, Cort pulled a five - meter bastard sword from his back and started cutting through the hull of the ship.
—
Salana scanned refugee after refugee, looking for any sign of exo DNA. A Marine approached them and said, “Captain Rai’s respects, Ma’ams. He wants you to know the crew area is cleared and sealed off, and the octopods have been secured on the Hellebore.”
Kim said, “Thank you, Corporal. Join your fireteam and buy us time. We still have over a thousand refugees to go.”
When the man was gone, Salana looked up. “I almost hate to bring this up Kim, but we might have a problem. Diane’s mother isn’t on the Hellebore yet. She should have been in the crew area.”
“Godsdammit.” Kim asked George to locate Diane’s mom. Once again, the bitch was causing her problems. He highlighted the location of her flexpad, and with the ship’s internal sensors, they found her in the Remington’s officer's mess. Kim looked at her HUD and swore again. Angela was in an area that was clear of exos, but they had surrounded the galley area, and there was no way to get to her.
“You could leave her. I wouldn’t tell.”
Kim looked at Salana for a long minute, not even able to scan the next refugee in her queue. “Could we? Could I?”
“That depends on how willing you are to lie to Diane.”
After another long pause, Kim went back to scanning her refugees. She opened a channel to Cort and said, “We have a problem.”
—
“That dumb bitch!” Cort swore. Five to one, the idiot was passed out drunk and didn’t even hear the alarm klaxons. “I’m getting George out first. He’s more important. If the area is still clean, I’ll try to get to her.”
Do I have to get her? Take your time Cort. Maybe the exos will solve that problem too. Do you hear that, Universe? Another enemy helped me. Fuck you twice.
He finished the first cut of the deck, a rough circle forty meters in diameter, and put his sword back in its scabbard. With a giant hand, he peeled back the graphene matrix that covered the ship and flung it like a frisbee toward the planet they were still orbiting. He dropped into the hole, and cut another, slightly smaller circle, in the dying Remington’s skeleton.
—
George’s avatar called Bloom to his side, and asked xyr about weapons.
“We are going to lose the weapons on the Remington. Our armor is running out of incendiary rounds.”
Bloom spoke to two Erom, and they moved quickly to another part of the ship. George decided the time for monitoring the Erom was over. They would e E ither t hey would work with his father to save all their lives, or they would all die.
—
Rai and Clem ran toward the last of the refugees. Behind them, spider like exos scurried along the walkway. “We’ve lost containment!” Rai yelled through his comm. “We’re out of time.”
There were still over five hundred refugees to be scanned, all of them packed into the same corridor that the Marines were retreating through. Clem turned toward the refugees and saw Kim and Biyadiq working their way toward the enemy, scanning refugees as quickly as they could. Two Neanderthals followed behind them, pushing cleared refugees into the port leading to the Hellebore.
“Buy us three minutes!”
Ten retreating Marines turned as one, and fired the last of their incendiary rounds into the mass of exos.
—
Cort made his last cut, and standing on the outer edge of the ten - meter circle, he lifted the last obstacle from his path and flung it into space. Below him, George’s gel core glowed a pale blue, inside a Formvar vat that reminded him of an oversized barrel.
He dropped into the bridge and said, “George, I’m here; turn off the gravity in this area, and disconnect from the Remington.”
The connections on five cables leading to the vat turned from green to red. Cort ripped them from the tank, and lifted it from its floor mount. He pushed it up the opening he had cut, and climbed out behind it. When he was back on the hull of the crippled vessel, he lifted George’s core toward Marines waiting on the deck of the Hellebore. Don’t work too fast, people. But they did. The Marines had an urgency Cort no longer felt. From that moment forward, he didn’t care what happened. So what? I still win. I beat you again, you worthless excuse for a cosmos. Then he went in search of an idiot.
—
Clem watched as two CONDORs and three Neanderthals were overcome by the swarm of exos, and prayed that Cort’s words did not turn into a prophecy. He didn’t want to have to kill one of his comrades because of the parasites. Turning to Rai, he watched the captain drop his MAT and start firing his sidearm at the mass of enemies with explosive rounds.
Behind him, Kim and Doctor Biyadiq scanned the last of the refugees. Then the women were in front of the Marines, firing their own weapons into the onslaught. Fire erupted everywhere the newcomers aimed, and the Marines retreated behind the women, pushing the last of the refugees into the Hellebore.
—
Cort stopped himself before he ripped through the hull of the ship over the galley. Exos were everywhere around Angela, but they seemed to intentionally bypass the room, as they moved in a flood toward the bridge of the ship. He had no idea how he was going to protect her from open space when he peeled back the last of the hull. He scanned the room, looking inside it, to find anything that might shield her, and hoped the exos would move quickly. Angela dying was the last piece of the plan.
The printer next to her had been printing vodka. No surprise there. Now, how am I going to tell Diane I couldn’t save her?
—
Schwartz couldn’t land the shuttle on the Hellebore. The outer decks of the ship were too short. And the shuttle bays on the Remington were overcome by the exos. He drifted around the latter, looking for someplace near the former, to offload his Marines. It was up to him to do so, because sometime in the battle, the robot had decided to abandon control of the craft, and leave them to their own devices. He saw the gel core on the deck of the Erom ship, and reminded himself not to lose his temper when talking to Cort. The General had obviously saved the computer, at the potential expense of Schwartz’s men and women.
As the shuttle moved around the Erom ship, Cort’s HAWC came into view. “Ares, this is Schwartz. It’s good to see you were able to save the robot. We nearly crashed, since we didn’t get a heads up.”
He saw Cort look up at the shuttle as it approached the Remington. “We’ve had our hands a little full up here, Schwartz. In case you didn’t notice, the Remington has uninvited guests. Glad you made it, though. Park near me on the hull. I have a passenger for you.”
—
The back of the shuttle opened, and Cort peeled back the last deck between him and Angela. Just one setback. The air escaped and he had seconds to move Angela into the shuttle and get its hatch closed. Cort cupped her body in the two great hands of the HAWC, and pushed her into the shuttle, where two Marines took her unconscious form from him. One of them put an oxygen mask over her face as another closed the shuttle and repressurized it.
