Trent exhaled a breath he had not known he was holding and bounced to his feet. He waved an arm toward the spot where the other three were waiting, and trotted forward to where the rolligon was trying to drive its way through the side of a hill.
Trent cycled through the rolligon's airlock, into pressure. In the forward cabin a young Peaceforcer, male, was slumped forward over the instrument panel. Trent turned the engine off and went back. In the rear passenger cabin were six Peaceforcers, and Trent had to suppress a quick wave of relief; the one thing he'd found no good way to plan for had been an extra passenger being sent along in the rolligon at the last moment. In the back cabin a pair of bench seats ran down the long axis of the rolligon. The long spike through which the fadeaway had been sprayed hung straight down through the roof of the rolligon, still dripping very slightly. Three of the Peaceforcers were sitting on the seats in their scalesuits, restraining straps holding them upright. The other three were sprawled on the rear cabin's floor; one of those three, face down in his scalesuit, holding a maser in his fist, had stayed awake long enough to get his scalesuit's helmet on; with his maser set to wide dispersion he had heated the roof of the rolligon until Trent had had to leap off.
Trent pulled him up with one hand, and stared into the very same face that looked back at him in the mirror these days.
Trent felt an unreasonable degree of pride in the man whose face he was wearing; to the unconscious Peaceforcer named Benny Gutierrez, Trent said, "Good try."
Trent heard the airlock cycle open behind him; Callia cycled through, bounced over to Trent and grabbed Gutierrez from him without waiting for Trent to release the Peaceforcer.
Trent picked up another Peaceforcer from the floor of the rolligon, dogged the man's helmet into place, and followed her.
Inside the rolligon, Yevgeni wore his pressure suit with the gloves removed; he also wore a pair of plastiflesh gloves Trent had given him. In Trent's line of work they were useful because they left no fingerprints, but allowed tactile sensitivity nearly as good as bare skin--and were impermeable to fadeaway.
Yevgeni was undressing Peaceforcers and dressing corpses. Benny Gutierrez was propped up in a corner of the passenger cab; he was the only Peaceforcer who was not being stripped of his clothing and scalesuit.
Yevgeni checked the name patch on the outside of a scalesuit, compared it with the assignment papers found inside the unconscious Peaceforcer's coat. "Henri Charbonneau!" Yevgeni called out. Callia turned off the stasis field enclosing the seven forms, selected one of the corpses by an ID tag on its toe, and without flinching, without apparent distaste, pulled the nude form out, turned the stasis field back on, and pulled the corpse back to where Yevgeni was undressing PKF Officer Henri Charbonneau. Trent watched while the dead man's body was dressed and stuffed into Charbonneau's scalesuit. The procedure left him with an emotion he was not able to name; he shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck against the helmet's uncomfortable damn rear seal, and cycled back through the airlock to go get the rest of the bodies.
It took longer than Trent had hoped and longer than he had feared.
It was nearly two o'clock before they were done. Trent worked up a heavier sweat in those forty-five minutes than at any time since coming to Luna. The inside of his scalesuit hummed with the sound of the airplant struggling to cool and dehumidify the air Trent was breathing. At any moment Trent expected to see headlights coming from either the east or the west. By a quarter of two they had switched the corpses for the live Peaceforcers; Trent put the black and silver rolligon back in gear, pulled back from the side of the hill, and drove another quarter kilometer down the crevasse. He drove slowly; he had difficulty controlling the vehicle with the thick scalesuit gloves on, but the interior of the vehicle was coated with fadeaway, and he did not dare take them off. The corpse that had been substituted for the driver sat on the seat at his side.
Lan was waiting, sitting in his scalesuit atop a large boulder. He waved Trent to a stop, pointing to the place where he wanted the rolligon parked. Trent stopped the rolligon, left the motor running. He pulled the corpse into place in the driver's seat; the corpse resisted as all the corpses had resisted being handled, as though, in death, they fought a silent battle to retain some shred of dignity.
Outside Trent went around to the back of the rolligon. Lan was there already, placing a small charge on the rear axle. He motioned Trent back, touched a stud on the charge and then bounced back himself. He had timed it closely; the charge went off soundlessly in the vacuum, with a sharp flash that came so quickly that the glassite in Trent's helmet could not darken in time to compensate. When the dots faded from his vision, the rear axle was snapped cleanly in half, and the rear third of the rolligon sagged backward.
Lan touched helmets with Trent. "You're supposed to be outside to find out what's wrong with this sucker. We blow it away through the front, demolish the driver so there's no way to ID him, burn up the rest of them pretty good. The artillery I'm using, there's no real way you'd survive if you were really standing back here when I hit the rolligon. Even so it's going to be tough. I want you to stand back a good twenty-five meters, right over there, so it'll look like the shock wave picked you up and threw you. It's going to knock you down even at twenty-five meters, but unless you catch shrapnel you're okay."
"Am I going to catch shrapnel?"
"No. I don't think so."
"All right."
Lan hesitated a moment, helmet still touching Trent's. "Callia said to tell you she'd pray for you."
"Tell her I said thank you. For everything. And Lan?"
"Yeah?" Even through two layers of scalesuit Trent could hear the nervous impatience in the boy's voice.
"Think about what I said." Trent could barely see Lan's features. "There's better ways to do things than by killing people who never harmed you."
Lan stared at Trent for a long moment. "You are," he said finally, "the smartest idiot I've ever met."
"I like you too, Lan."
Lan snorted loudly enough for Trent to hear him, and took two long bouncing steps away. The boy froze after the second step, stood motionless for an instant, then bounced back to Trent and touched helmets. "You're boring in bed, but you snuggle good. It's been real." He bounced away again before Trent could reply.
Trent walked back to the spot Lan had pointed out, stood in the Lunar sunshine, waiting. Nothing happening, not here, no sir. After about ten minutes had passed Trent checked the time in his inskin and found it had only been ninety seconds since Lan had left him.
He found himself trembling slightly inside the scalesuit. I'm standing here in death pressure, Trent thought, twenty-five meters from an explosion that's going to completely destroy a Peaceforcer troop transport.
This is crazy.
The universe blew up in his face.
* * *
28.
Throughout the long nightmare he remains aware. The flesh is unmoving, insensate. Eons tick away as he waits, nanosecond upon nanosecond. One eyelid is half open; the other is shut. Through the half-open eye he sees vague forms moving around him. He is unable to focus. The forms, he is sure, are those of Lan and Callia; neither one comes anywhere near Trent's unconscious form, not even to assure themselves he survived the explosion. Though he cannot see them clearly enough to tell, Trent/Johnny Johnny knows that they are spraying artificially darkened Lunar dust everywhere either one of them has stepped, and that they will walk back to where Nathan's crawler and the rolligon full of kidnapped Peaceforcers awaits them. The third chameleon, the one Lan drove out in, is rolling away on autopilot from the supposed scene of the attack. That portion of Trent that is aware right now has programmed the autopilot; a cursory search of the area around the rolligon will find the chameleon's tracks, and the Peaceforcers will follow it for at least a day before catching it and finding it empty. With any degree of luck, nobody will backtrack far enough to find the place where the Peaceforcer rolligon was actually stopped.
&
nbsp; Silence now.
A complete lack of motion.
The scalesuit gets very hot. He is aware of this as he might be aware of something happening to someone else.
Over two hours pass.
There is a sudden glare of light, so intense and unwavering that he ceases to pay attention to the information from his optic nerve even before the scalesuit helmet darkens to protect the flesh inside from the too-bright light. He waits in the electronic nothingness, waits in the stasis of datastarve.
Not quite an hour.
The insensate flesh is touched, moved, lifted.
He dwindles into the silence of datastarve, of nothingness.
The sharp, stinging smell of ammonia roused him.
A voice spoke in French, something about how Trent felt.
Trent blinked. "What?"
The Peaceforcer paused, spoke again in English, slowly. "How are you feeling?"
Trent looked around slowly. The edges of things were blurred. He was lying on the long bench seat in the back of a rolligon. The rolligon bounced slightly as it moved. The Peaceforcer crouched next to him stared at him with a furrowed brow.
Trent said, "I'm not--I--"
The Peaceforcer said urgently, "What happened?"
It was no effort to make the world go away again.
It was just before 7:00 p.m., January the third.
Trent was more or less undressed, wearing nothing but his shorts, face to face with the first doctor he had ever met who looked like his conception of what a doctor should be.
"Look into the light, please. Don't blink."
Trent stared up into the small penlight the PKF doctor shone into his left eye. Doctor Grissom was visibly old, with wrinkles around his eyes and black hair streaked with silver. He grunted after a moment, and said gruffly to Trent, in French laced with a thick German accent, "We're going to do the right eye now, hold still." He held the light on the right eye for just a moment, clicked the penlight off and put it in his coat pocket. He glanced slightly to the side, to the holograph of Trent's skull that hung in midair next to Trent's skull.
There was a PKF captain standing at the door to the infirmary. The infirmary was not large; four beds, hospital equipment that Trent largely did not recognize. Only one door.
The glowpaint was pure white, harsh and officious.
The captain, a pair of armed junior PKF standing immediately behind him, had watched Doctor Grissom's examination of PKF Officer Benny Gutierrez with clear impatience.
Doctor Grissom asked Trent only one question in the course of his examination, after running Trent through a full-body MRI slowscan. "What is this, with your knee?"
"What's what?"
"Scar tissue, recent. Your file shows no knee problems."
"I was skiing, on vacation. A medbot took care of it the same day. I guess that's why it's not in the file."
"Hmm. Looks like it's been injured twice?"
Trent shrugged. "Only once."
Doctor Grissom nodded thoughtfully, turned to the PKF captain. "He has a slight concussion, probably due to his inskin. Not serious. Also a large bruise on the back of his skull, also not serious."
"And a headache," said Trent.
"And a headache," the doctor agreed. He handed Trent a small glass of water with a pill. "Drink this, and then go with the nice captain." To the nice captain, Doctor Grissom said, "He sleeps here tonight, where I can keep an eye on him. The slowscan does not show any internal bleeding, but that may be meaningless."
The captain, who had not introduced himself to Trent, said stiffly, "Very well." To Trent he said, "Officer Gutierrez, please come with me."
"Can I get dressed first?"
The man had been turning away; he turned back in surprise. "Certainly. Be quick."
The uniform stank of stale sweat.
Trent followed the captain down a series of long underground corridors and up a long ramp, paying attention to the route he traveled, checking off what he saw against the map of the DataWatch base that he carried in his inskin. The infirmary was on Level Two, which was actually the first level beneath the surface of the regolith; Level One was the only level of the base that was above ground.
The corridors were full of bustling Peaceforcers. Trent saw perhaps forty people, mostly young, on his way to the briefing room. All were in PKF uniforms, either dress or combat fatigues. All were in a hurry. A very few of them had visible inskins; none of them had the characteristic stiff skin of PKF Elite. Most of them did not even glance at Trent as he walked through the corridors behind the captain, in front of the two armed guards.
The glowpaint throughout the base was white. Nowhere did Trent see the yellow glow of sunpaint.
After a three-minute walk they came to a point where the corridor widened slightly. Above closed double doors was the legend Briefing Room. On the map that floated in the back of his mind, Trent placed them: one hundred forty-six meters south of the north airlock. The nameless captain stopped before the door to the briefing room, placed a palm flat against the doorpad, and marched through once the double doors had rolled up, not so much as glancing back to verify that Trent had followed him.
Seven Peaceforcer officers in uniform and one Elite Sergeant were assembled around one half of a long oval table made of something that resembled aged beechwood. An empty chair sat at the side of the table where all the officers were seated and a single unoccupied chair sat on the other side of the table. Without being told Trent stopped behind the unoccupied chair facing the officers, came to attention and saluted. He held the salute for not quite five seconds, staring straight ahead, until a gentle female voice said, "At ease. Please sit down, Officer Gutierrez."
Trent did so, found nine pairs of eyes staring back at him. The woman who had spoken to Trent, a mature, plain-featured woman whose age Trent could not have guessed, continued. "I am Colonel Brissois, Commanding Officer for the Verne Farside DataWatch. My apologies to you, young man, for what we are about to put you through. But it is necessary." Commander Brissois seemed uncertain for just a moment. "If you do not already know, Officer, your companions aboard the rolligon were all killed. You are the only survivor."
You are the only survivor. Trent was shakier than he had thought; the words struck him like a blow. For an instant he was eleven years old again; he had watched Malko Kalharri die at the hands of an Elite cyborg and he had watched Suzanne Montignet kill herself, and in the midst of the riots as the Troubles began, had learned that everyone he had ever known as a child had died in nuclear flame.
He did not have to fake his reaction much. "I'm sorry? What did you say?"
"Officer," Colonel Brissois said sharply, "control yourself. We have a great deal to get through and not a great deal of time in which to do it."
Trent stared down at the surface of the oval table. "I'm sorry, Colonel. It's just--" He shook his head abruptly, looked up to meet her gaze, and found the Elite Sergeant studying him with a curiously detached expression. "I'm ready, Colonel."
Perhaps she smiled; the edges of her lips moved very slightly. Perhaps not. "Very good. Let's start from the beginning."
Trent said slowly, "We were--I would guess three hours from Tsiolkovsky. The rolligon--we thought it had broken down. There was a loud noise and the rolligon jerked to a stop. The rear end rode very low. I was sitting nearest the airlock, so Officer Deremè--he was driving--he asked me to go take a look and see what was wrong with the rear end. I--"
The Peaceforcer Elite interrupted. "Why didn't Officer Deremè call in at that point?"
"Sir?"
The Elite said patiently, "Why didn't Deremè call in to notify us that he was being delayed en route? It's standard procedure, Officer Gutierrez."
Trent had not known that. "Sir, I don't know."
The Elite nodded. "Go on."
"I sealed my helmet, cycled through and went around back. I remember thinking--" Trent paused. "Never mind. I--"
Colonel Brissois interrupted him. "What was it?
"
"Colonel--" Trent took a breath. "Colonel, I noticed that the horizon was very close. I--"
There was a chuckle from someone off to Trent's left, a snort of disgust from someone off to the right. Trent did not take his eyes off Colonel Brissois. "Colonel, I am new to Luna. I'm sorry."
"You've nothing to be sorry for," the woman said quietly. "Go on. You won't be interrupted again."
"There's not much left. At the back of the rolligon I looked at the rear axle and saw that it was broken. I think--" Trent paused, as though struggling with memory. "There was something wrong with the way it was broken, I'm not sure what. I was standing up and then...." Trent's voice trailed off. "I woke up here."
There was a moment of brief silence. Then the Elite Sergeant leaned forward and said in a voice heavy with disbelief, "You saw nothing else?"
"No, sir."
A Peaceforcer off to Trent's right said, "What time was it when this happened?"
"Sir, I don't know. I guess we were three hours out from Tsiolkovsky, but I'm not sure. I slept for a while."
There was another moment's silence, and then Colonel Brissois did smile at Trent, a smile lacking warmth, and said, "Let's begin again. At the top."
It went on for many hours.
He lay in the dark of the infirmary, unable to sleep. He'd had a chance to shower, and had been issued a clean uniform; without making an issue of it Trent had managed to hang on to the boots he'd worn in, claiming the boots they'd offered to substitute did not fit well. Between the boots and the handheld, the two items he had managed to bring into the base, Trent had everything he would need for the boost.
Pickup was between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. tomorrow.
At sixteen minutes after midnight the door to the infirmary opened; Trent assumed it was Doctor Grissom. The man had promised to check in on Trent and awaken him every hour or so through the night.
Then the lights came up.
Trent sat up slowly in bed. Standing in the doorway, wearing a holstered hand maser and dressed in PKF combat fatigues, a young female Peaceforcer with her face turned away from Trent said to somebody in the corridor outside, "Not long, I promise." She turned to Trent, cool and unsmiling, as the door shut, and switched from French to English. "Hello."
The Long Run Page 35
