by David Adams
Captain Williams muted the line. “Not true,” he clarified. “Totally and completely untrue.”
“Oh, of course,” said Penny, barely able to keep a straight face.
Williams unmuted the line. “On occasion,” he said, “when her needs become too great. But for now, my dear Helvhara, we need help with this salvage…”
“Of course, of course.” Defeat saturated her words. “I will send that useless worm Belvarn the Undying, son of Vrald the Blood Soaked, to help you on the surface while we keep the Toralii bastards busy in space. You do remember that lump, don’t you?”
“Vividly,” said Williams. The levity was gone, replaced by something darker. “Are you certain that’s appropriate? He murdered my combat systems officer. Going to be honest with you, my dear, I’d much rather spend time with you than him.”
Penny didn’t doubt that was true at all. Her husband had told her about Gutterball, his crewmember who was murdered by a Kel-Voran. Suddenly, she didn’t find it funny either.
“I tire of his whining,” said Helvhara. “I just want him away from me.”
“Forever?” asked Williams, hopefully.
Penny didn’t like that implication and tried to signal no murder to him with her eyes. He deliberately avoided her gaze.
“Alas, my dear, no. Once someone is mine, they never cease to be mine. I will need him back when you’re done.”
“Tragic,” said Williams. “Very well. We will meet you at the crash site shortly. Rubens out.”
Williams took off the headset. Penny tried to force some energy back into her voice. “Well,” she said. “I’m glad I married you when I did.”
He swirled his finger near his head making a “cuckoo” gesture. “Yeah. No. She’d be great. Just a little crazy. There’s over a hundred other husbands, you know.”
“One’s just enough for me,” Penny said, leaning back in her chair.
“You’re hilarious.”
“Honestly,” said Penny, “I’m glad they’re here. They seem useful.”
Shaba shook her head. “The Kel-Voran are… useful but not that useful. Sure, they’ll keep the Toralii busy, which is good, but honestly, I’d rather they not be here.”
“How do you mean?”
Williams rolled his shoulders, arching his back and stretching out his arms. Crack, crack, crack. “It’s hard to explain. They stay to their ships, fight like the devil, and happily provide security escorts for salvage operations and patrols. They hardly need any encouragement to brawl with the Toralii—quite the opposite, in fact. It’s getting them to stop shooting that’s the trick. The more we learn about them, though, the more I’m inclined to just leave them be.”
Penny was no military strategist, but as far as she could see, they were in no position to turn away helpful allies. “Why?”
“The Kel-Voran sometimes go on something which Commander Wolfe, from the Washington, called a redneck road trip. They drive down the road with a shotgun, laughing and blasting street signs. Only these are planet-sized, spherical street signs teeming with developing life forms, and the shotguns are worldshatter devices.”
She pursed her lips. “Well, everyone’s got to have a hobby, I suppose.”
“That’s not really the problem, to be honest,” said Shaba. “It’s more… what happens when they get bored of driving around?”
“Or the car runs out of gas,” said Williams.
“Or we run out of shotgun shells, and they rip off our arms and beat us with the soggy ends,” said Mace.
Penny wanted to contribute something equally silly. “Maybe we need better friends,” she said.
Nobody laughed. There was too much truth in her joke. Penny refocused on her work.
The closer the Rubens sailed toward the planet—a blue frozen hunk of ice floating in a sea of void—the more agitated her husband became. Penny reminded herself that Mike was a well-trained career officer and a pilot. His kind had to remain calm under all kinds of pressure.
He was far from calm.
The others noticed it too. Penny could see them exchanging concerned glances. Soon they started talking—informally, casually, without regard to rank. Worse than usual.
They were trying to make him feel better.
“Vrald the Blood-Soaked, huh,” said Shaba. “I guess they didn’t mention that it was probably his own blood from all those knife wounds he carved all over himself. What a fucking idiot.”
Mace laughed. “Well, that’s how they do things, apparently. They cut themselves up, carve things into their own skin to prove their strength. Prove how much pain they can tolerate. It’s a display of their manliness.”
“I say again: what a fucking idiot.”
“Hey,” said Mace, “Kel-Voran chicks dig scars, I guess.”
Shaba snorted. “From what we’ve seen of their mating habits, they tend to like guys in weird dresses or whatever. Right?”
Everyone was waiting for the captain to join in. He didn’t. Every little gap where there was a chance for him to jump in but he stayed silent, the growing doubt inside her gained strength.
When she worried, he was less Captain Mike “Magnet” Williams and more Mike, her husband, whom she loved and wanted to be with forever. Away from war. Away from death. Away from whatever turned him from a nice, gentle, soft man into this hard, shaken parody of himself.
A lovely dream—not something she could make happen unless she joined in too, sharing the burden, the pain, the stress. Helping make him feel better.
She was making him feel better by being here, right?
Finally, Shaba maneuvered the ship into orbit. “We are geostationary above the Scarecrow crash site,” she said. “Shall we send down a team?”
Mike—Captain Williams, Penny forced herself to ignore the instincts screaming in her mind—hadn’t said a single thing in hours. He just stood there, staring down at the panel, watching the planet get closer and closer.
God, if you’re really out there, Mike could use some help right now. Don’t be stingy, Lord.
God didn’t say anything. Neither did Captain Williams.
“Mags? Magnet?” Shaba snapped her fingers in an entirely unprofessional manner. “Hey! Captain?”
He seemed to break out of whatever spell held him. “What?” And then, “Oh. Right. Good. Send down a team. I’ll meet them in the hangar bay.”
Wait—he was going down there? Penny shook her head. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Have our reptilian buddies said anything?”
“No transmissions from the Kel-Voran or anyone else,” said Penny. “But they’re a long way away. The two are exchanging fire, but the Kel-Voran are dodging pretty good. Did you want me to talk to them?”
“No.” He stepped down off the command dais. “Shaba, you have Operations. Ensign Williams, come down with me.”
A knot formed in Penny’s gut, clenching tightly. “Me? Why me? I’m barely qualified to be a communications officer, let alone a field agent or whatever.”
For a moment, Penny thought he was going to say something really stupid. Although Mike preferred a much more relaxed atmosphere than most other commands, there were lines that could not be crossed. Everyone else evidently thought the same—a hushed, unspoken awkwardness swept over Operations.
“Field agents are spies,” he said. “As it happens, I technically only need your eyes. They can record things, right?”
She felt a little relief—not much, just a bit. “That’s right. Saeed said it’s about twenty minutes worth of footage per eye at half the theoretical max resolution, which is pretty good, from what I’ve heard. Half that if you want me to get everything. Half again if you want 3D footage for some reason. You’ll have to give me some time to figure out how they work. I’ve never switched them on before.”
“Can’t you pack a fucking camera?” said Mace. Penny wasn’t sure if that was directed to her or not.
“Ten minutes it is,” said Captain Williams, ignoring Mace’
s jab. “Walk with me to the hangar bay.”
Keeping her eyes away from anyone else—she felt a churning unease in her belly, knowing she was receiving special treatment—Penny said nothing and fell into step with him as they left.
The moment the door to Operations closed, he became Mike and nothing else. Penny gripped his hand.
“Hey,” she said. “What the heck?”
He squeezed her hand pretty hard. “I need you right now,” said Mike. “Not any stupid camera eyes you might have.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I figured that. Me and the whole crew.” There wasn’t any point denying it. “Pretty sure they’re worried about you.”
“They’re right to be worried,” he said. “I’m a mess.”
“We’ll get through it.” Penny squeezed tighter. “Show me this Scarecrow. I promise you, it’s really not scary.”
“I changed my mind,” she said. Air hissed as it circled through her space suit. The frozen-over field of scorched debris—she could recognise no part of the Broadsword it had once been—was littered with body parts frozen by howling winds. The frigid conditions had prevented decomposition, but the impact had torn them to pieces. There must have been twenty people’s worth, all things told, now only icy bones and scorched meat. Some light source near the edge painted the whole scene in Technicolour—lurid greens and purples and reds. “This is scary.”
“Believe me,” said Mike, the calm in his voice unsettling as the wind whipped around them both, “what was inside is even worse.”
Was inside. The ship had no inside now. It was on the outside and everywhere.
“This part’s going to take a long time,” Mike said. “We’re looking for a bright-yellow storage device—something about the size of a forty-four-gallon drum—and an ID fob. The storage device might be ruptured, but that’s okay. If we bring it back intact, that should be enough.”
“Okay,” she said. She wanted to say more, but the whine of approaching engines from above stole her attention.
A strange, blocky ship sank toward them, something that looked like part of a larger spacecraft. It touched down on the ice, a hatchway opened, and a short, wiry Kel-Voran slipped out. He immediately sat on the ice and contributed exactly nothing, not looking at either of them.
Mike looked as though he was going to strangle the stranger. “Going to help us, Belvarn?”
[“Silence.”]
“Well fuck you too, cunt.”
Penny grimaced and then reached out and touched Mike’s shoulder. She flicked her suit over to a private frequency so neither the Rubens nor their new companion could hear. “Hey, now we’re alone down here, I want to ask… I know you’re in a bad place now, but are you going to be okay?”
“Nope.” Mike looked at her, and despite the smile on his face, she could see the real pain behind his eyes. “I need one of those hugs that turns into sex.”
“When we get back to the ship,” Penny said, unable to hide a smile. “For now, though, I’m pretty sure that guy isn’t going to help, so… how do we find this fob?”
“It’ll be hard to spot—small, about the palm of my hand, and bright purple.”
She looked over the wreckage, her heart sinking. How could they find something the size of a fist in a field of debris almost the size of a football field?
“Is this Toralii technology?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said Mike. “Matter of fact, it is.”
“Is it flat and shaped like one of those clip-on ID cards?”
He paused. “Yes?”
Penny gingerly tiptoed several metres into the debris field to where a light was emanating, reached down and yanked a glowing device out of the ice, a flat rectangle about the size of a business card. It shimmered as she turned it. “Is it this thing that’s practically an ultraviolet glow stick?”
Mike laughed with a mixture of relief and disbelief. “Wow. Yeah. Of course, it has an emergency locator beacon. That makes sense.”
“Well, turns out you did need my eyes anyway.”
She handed it to him, shielding her face. Mike put it in his pouch.
“So,” said Penny when the light was gone. “What are we going to do with Belvarn?”
Mike dialed his suit to the standard frequency. “Go home,” he said to the Kel-Voran.
[“Finally.”] Belvarn stood and, after a tense silence, marched back into his ship.
The moment he was gone and the hatchway sealed, Penny could sense the tension flow out of Mike. He wasn’t normal although Penny wasn’t sure what normal was anymore, but he was better.
“Better” was a start. Belvarn’s ship rose into the air, and when it was just a tiny dot in the sky, she gestured to the bodies. “Who were these guys?”
Mike’s voice tightened a little. “They were Marines. French special forces. Commandement des Opérations Spéciales, Marine Nationale. Or so Anderson tells me.”
“What were they doing here?”
“Killing all of the Toralii everywhere.” He stated it boldly but completely without emotion.
Penny shuffled her booted foot, careful not to step on any remains. “What?”
“Scarecrow’s a name of a ship, but it’s also the name of a plan, a plan Fleet Command made before the destruction of Earth to infect Alliance ships with a virus. A sample was in the large yellow drum we’re looking for.” Mike spoke with a mix of apprehension and apathy that unnerved her. “Anderson was light on the details, but from what I can gather, it’s basically the perfect weapon. I’m no expert, but I’m guessing it’s airborne, fast reproducing, hardy, and highly contagious but with a nice asymptomatic period so the thing can spread and spread far.”
Genocide. Fleet Command, back when it had existed, was planning genocide. Penny felt compelled to ask, “What was the delivery method?”
“The Forerunner network. The ID-card thing is actually a piece of very important hardware: Toralii access codes. A computer virus would spread throughout the entire Forerunner system network, find the probes, and reprogram them to jump to a central meeting point to be retrofitted with the virus plus a dispersal agent. They’d then spread out to populated Toralii worlds and deploy their payload. The idea was to affect as many worlds as possible, all at once, so their emergency services couldn’t possibly hope to recover, and they’d all die.” His voice was bitter. “The truth is, the Toralii only did to us what we were planning to do to them.”
As she had watched Earth burn, Penny had prayed to God to make the bastards pay. Now she had been handed exactly what she wanted.
How could she tell if this was the work of God or the other guy?
“We’re here to recover the data and the virus, aren’t we?” There wasn’t much of a question in there.
“Yes.”
“And… you’re going to give them both to Liao and Anderson and the others, so they can use it against the Toralii, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
She stared out at the ice-white horizon, with nothing but the constant wind and the sea of frozen corpses around them. “I’m guessing the virus is engineered to kill only Toralii.”
“Yes,” he said.
A virus wouldn’t know the difference between Telvan and the Toralii Alliance. A virus could not tell allies from the enemy. “And the Toralii Alliance trades with the Telvan,” she said. “Ships come and go every day. They’ll get infected too. Hundreds of them.”
Mike’s facade started to break down. “Tens of thousands every day, to systems all over the galaxy.”
Thou shalt not kill. “And the virus is active and infectious for a week. A freighter might visit, what… four, five, six systems in that time?”
“More.” He too stared out over the ice. “I’m not going to lie to you, Penny. I’m not entirely comfortable with this.”
Neither was she, but she was the instrument in the plan, not the agent. If she refused to search, then Liao, Anderson, and the others would simply find someone else to do it.
Was that e
nough? To simply resign oneself to being an instrument of another’s will? Could that excuse evil?
“Let’s leave.” Penny’s visor fogged with her breath. “Let’s just leave and say we couldn’t find it.”
Mike broke through the ice with a pick, shoving shards of frozen water away as he searched. “We need that weapon, love.”
“So the Toralii dug a big grave for us and threw most of us in. So our plan is to dig a bigger one and do the same to them?” Her chest hurt. “It’s wrong.”
Mike said nothing, brushing his hand over the ice. Then he stood up, eyes fixed downward on a sliver of yellow.
“Magnet to Rubens,” he said, palpable hesitation in his voice. “I’ve found it.”
CHAPTER III
Decanted
*****
Medical Bay
TFR Rubens
Orbit of Velsharn
SEVERAL HOURS AFTER JAMES LEFT, Saeed returned. “Well,” he said, his face full of cautious optimism, “I think we’ve gotten the most we can out of your stay in the healing chamber.”
Liao had seen enough of that dark-green world to last a lifetime. “Honestly, the sooner you can get me out of here, the better. What do I need to do?”
“According to the computers, plus the Toralii I consulted about this thing, nothing. Just try to keep calm.”
She took a slow, easy breath to calm her nerves and then nodded. “Do it.”
Saeed pressed a single button. For a moment, nothing happened—all was quiet in the Toralii medical bay. A low whine echoed throughout the chamber, and the green lights inside the tank flickered.
“Odd,” said Saeed. “I expected warning lights.” He thought for a moment, and then realisation dawned. “Of course. They’re in ultraviolet.”
“Of course,” echoed Liao. She felt a ripple through the fluid, a tremor that gave her gooseflesh.
“Close your eyes a moment,” said Saeed, closing his. “The UV light might damage your eyes. Your pupil won’t contract to protect you.”
She did so. She felt a disturbance in the fluid around her, a slight churning, as though she were in a washing machine about to begin its cycle.
