Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “Christ.” Travers took a step toward him. “How – when?”

  “While you were in Fleet. A lab accident.” Vaurien studied the hand, which was identical to the one he had been born with. “My hand was burned off. Cloned replacement, grafted on below the elbow – wipe the horrified look off your face, Neil, it was nine years ago. I rarely even think about it now, and even if I did, it’s only to remember a fun year waiting for the new limb to grow … and some dark times, when I was so far out of my skull, I often didn’t know what day it was.” He glared balefully at Teniko. “So don’t you try feeding me any line of merde about Ibrepal being tolerable, and not making you almost incapable of handling a car, much less state of the art lab equipment, with the future of the Deep Sky riding on your shoulders!”

  Again, there was little Teniko could say. He went for another tequila and nursed this second one. “I still want to help. I’ve still forgotten more about hyper-Weimann geometry than anybody else ever knew.”

  Jazinsky’s voice took them all by surprise. Travers had been so intent on the pair before him, she gave him a start as she appeared at the top of the stairs and said tersely,

  “The little shithead’s dead wrong – Mark can dance rings around him in the same field. But Mark’s spreading himself too thin … he’s run ragged, and he knows it. There’s too much work and too few of us. The kid wants back in, does he?”

  “He does.” Vaurien stood, and very deliberately joined Jazinsky, slid one arm around her waist, while he frowned over Teniko. “You can’t handle Ibrepal any more than anybody else can, but I also know there’s a two-hour window between shots – long enough after the last one for it to have cleared far enough out of your brain for you to think straight, and long enough before you need the next one for the pain to be tolerable. True?”

  “Well, I suppose – maybe,” Teniko muttered.

  “True or not?” Vaurien barked.

  “All right, true.” Teniko gave him glare for glare.

  “Then, here’s your deal. And it’s not negotiable,” Vaurien warned. “Your baggage is scanned before you load it. You bring the Ibrepal. Nothing else. I find angelino or mai boogey or some other crap in there, I throw it out, and you after it. You turn over your Ibrepal supply to Bill Grant, and he administers the shots, right on time. You answer to him about your physical condition, you answer to Barb about your work … and you stay the hell out of my way. Understand?”

  “But I thought –” Teniko began, and then seemed to think better of it.

  “You thought you’d be sliding right back into my life, my bed, and you could pick up where you left off, making wreckage of me?” Richard’s eyes narrowed on him. “Is this why you want to get back aboard the Wastrel? Because if it is, don’t even think about it.”

  For a moment Teniko hesitated, and then shuffled to the couch and sat down heavily. “No. Well, yes, but … not only that. I do want to help. I’ve been in the clinic at the high end of the valley, getting the gene therapy, so I know what’s going on in the Resalq community. I’m not blind. I see things, and even if I didn’t – Jesus! It doesn’t take much in the way of brains to work it out. I watch the newsvids like everybody else, and I also know what I’m looking at, which the other stupid sods don’t. I …” He paused and licked his lips. “I want out.”

  “Out of Riga?” Jazinsky asked.

  “Borushek,” Teniko corrected. “If the Zunshu are coming –”

  “They aren’t,” Vaurien said tersely. “They’re here.”

  “Then I want off the ship before it sinks, like the rest of the rodents, like Sherratt and all of them.” Teniko thrust out a belligerent chin. “But I don’t expect a free ride. I can work my passage, do what I do best. Hyper-Weimann geometry is where I live, Richard, and no amount of Ibrepal is going to change that.”

  “The little snot has a point,” Jazinsky admitted. “He’s doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons, but we can use him.”

  “Then use him,” Vaurien invited. “Are you and Mark done? I had a message from Tully just before Tonio got in. The Wastrel is unloaded. Grant’s done briefing the medical staff, Harrison’s taken delivery of the full consignment of mines for Borushek and Velcastra, and we need to get out of here. I want the Esprit out of Albeniz, muy damn’ pronto. And I assume,” he added disdainfully, “we’re the only ride off Borushek Tonio is going to get.”

  They were moving as he spoke, and Jazinsky frowned deeply over Teniko, as if he were her responsibility. She had found him, recruited him – taken him out of a sanatorium on Velcastra. “Go pack your gear,” she told him. “Meet us back here, half an hour, max. You bring anything except your Ibrepal, and you ride out with somebody else, got it?”

  “Oh, I got it.” The look he had for her, even for Vaurien, was murderous. He tossed back the second tequila too fast for wisdom, scrambled back into his jacket, and was gone at once.

  In his wake, Marin indulged himself in a soft curse. “Keep your eye on that one, Richard. He’s nothing but trouble.”

  “He’s also brilliant,” Jazinsky said philosophically. “Not quite as uniquely brilliant as he thinks he is, but … almost, I regret to say.” She gave Vaurien a thoughtful look. “If he’s coming with us to Alshie’nya, he’ll see way too much for us to ever let him leave the Wastrel as an enemy. Know what you’re doing, Richard.”

  Vaurien was restless, already eager to leave. “He already knows too much. He knows so much of our business, and Harrison’s business, it’s a risk having him out there, drugged out of his gourd and babbling anything, when anyone might be listening. He’s been a risk for a long time, and the only reason I let him go the first time was, I knew he was coming here. Riga.”

  “And the alternative? Cryogen?” Marin wondered.

  “If there’s a tank available at the time,” Vaurien sighed. “And if not, he can spend however long it takes under arrest, confined to quarters on the Wings of Freedom, chipped so Etienne can track him. Like Conway Streller and Marianna Wing.”

  A harsh chuckle ambushed Travers. “When you said you’d throw his bags out and him after them, he probably thought you’d send him back to Borushek. You didn’t mean that at all, did you?”

  “No.” Vaurien was still intent on his left hand. “I didn’t.”

  “Let me see it.” Travers reached out, and Vaurien gave him the hand, the forearm. The sweater sleeve was pushed up to the elbow, the limb was fully exposed. Not even a white line remained to betray the surgery that connected the clone. It was perfect, strong, warm, the exact same skin tone as the rest of the man. Travers was impressed, and might have said so, if Joss had not interrupted a second time that morning.

  “Message for Major Marin and Major Travers, from General Shapiro. General call to all personnel for the cruiser Mercury. Engineer Fujioka reports Weimann drive on standby. Departure time: sixty minutes.”

  “That’s us,” Marin said wryly. He dropped a hand on Travers’s arm. “Give me a minute, will you? I want to say goodbye to Mark. You know what I mean.”

  Travers knew. The Mercury was headed for Velcastra, and before she returned, the Carellan Djerun could easily be gone, taking the Sherratts, their partners and half of the Resalq science hierarchs with her. She would be headed for Saraine, where the old Freyana was being powered up and victualled for a long-duration flight; and then? Depending on who chose to sign with Shapiro’s mission aboard Lai’a, and who did not, Marin might never see Mark Sherratt again.

  Odd, hot and acid tears prickled Travers’s eyes as he followed Curtis down the stairs, but he held back at the lab’s open door, reluctant to intrude on the moment. Mark had heard the message. He knew the situation as well as Marin did. They embraced for some time – old friends, adopted family, sometime lovers.

  Then Mark held Curtis Marin at arm’s length to look at him. “I’ll catch up with you,” he promised. “If we’re gone when you get back to Borushek, we’ll rendezvous at Alshie’nya, before Lai’a heads into Elarne. I wo
uldn’t let it leave on such a mission, with the last blood of my blood aboard, without at least being there.”

  “Yes.” Marin’s voice was husky with emotion. “Dario and Tor –?”

  “Out, busy. Somewhere.” Mark gestured in the direction of downtown Riga, and smiled faintly. “Eles therin, emelhun.”

  “I will.” Curtis took his hand again, kissed the open palm, and then returned to Travers, past him and up the stairs, without looking back.

  “I … we have to go,” Travers said thickly. “Later, Mark.”

  “Later, Neil.” Mark lifted his hand in farewell. “Alshie’nya, if nothing else! And then, who knows? You and Curtis could be shipping out on the Carellan, with us.”

  “It’s – possible,” Travers agreed. “I don’t know, Mark. I just don’t know.”

  “None of us does,” Sherratt agreed. “But you’ll know when the time comes, and it won’t be a hard decision.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Travers withdrew to the stairs and turned back for a moment. “You be careful. All of you.”

  He caught up with Marin in the greenhouses, halfway back to the Capricorn, hung one arm over his shoulders and stopped him for a moment in the humid warmth. Marin was silent, but a surreal calm seemed to have settled on him. Travers was envious. His head was full of the scent of orange blossom as he laid his cheek on Marin’s hair and looked out, beyond the glass, at the house, the line of the mountains, the blue morning sky where a few cars jetted in and out of Riga.

  It could all be gone. The reality settled in his belly like a weight of ice. “Are you all right?” he asked against Marin’s ear.

  “I’m fine,” Marin said honestly. “Mark Sherratt doesn’t need either one of us to take care of him. It was always me needing him.”

  “I can’t believe that.” Travers leaned back to look at him.

  The hazel eyes were bright with tears, but they did not spill. “Believe it,” Curtis told him. “There was a time he was all the family I had.”

  “Not now.” Neil set one palm flat on his chest, over his heart. “What did he say? What was it? Eles… something”

  “Eles therin, emelhun.” Marin smiled faintly. ‘It’s just an old Resalq sentimentalism. ‘Take care as you go forward, my dear little one.’ They would say it to children and lovers, when…”

  “When they might never see you again,” Travers finished.

  Marin looked up at him, unblinking, for a long moment, and then stepped away in the direction of the double-sealed doors, where the Capricorn’s simple AI was already running up the lift engines and negotiating with Riga’s civilian air traffic network.

  Chapter Ten

  Cruiser Mercury,

  Velcastra

  Sweat coursed down Marin’s back, soaking the mesh shirt and Tai Chi pants. The Mercury was a comparatively small ship by Fleet standards, two hundred meters from engine deck to operations room, four decks from the spines of the comm arrays on her dorsal hull to the great caverns of the gunship hangars in her belly. Marin was on the top deck, which was quiet, little more than service bays, dormant labs and darkened machine shops, an Infirmary which was currently deserted. He had run the distance twenty times, concentrating on the steady pace, the rhythm of his heart and breathing, the pulses of a body which was only now returning to full strength and fitness after the ordeal of Omaru.

  He needed the exercise, after four days of idleness and growing boredom. Velcastra was a matter of hours away, and he felt stiff, slow, which was dire, when he and Travers would be wrangling Shapiro’s security. Neil was in the gym, pumping iron with the gunship crews; Shapiro played racquetball with the senior officers, but Marin preferred to run, in the company of his own thoughts.

  In Fleet trim, as a light warship, the Mercury would have operated with a crew of ninety. Shapiro had pared this down to thirty. Three shifts in the ops room and on the engine deck; an Infirmary on standby; three gunships on a rotation roster; minimal hangar crews. Drones under the control of his AI had replaced most humans, and only the presence of Bravo Company made the ship feel anything less than echoingly empty.

  Most of Bravo was intact, and to have them back on a warship gave Marin a creeping sensation. Memories of Hellgate, the Intrepid, refused to be exorcised, though he had come to like Travers’s ‘kids,’ and respect them. They were in the belly decks, playing folgen with the hangar crews, eating, getting laid – getting soft, Marin thought, and quickened his pace as he jogged to the end of the corridor, where it met the wide armor doors of the engine deck. There, he spun and turned back toward the bow.

  Three strides into this last lap, he felt the telltale shimmy through the airframe, and knew the cruiser had dropped out of e-space. She would be on the edge of the Velcastra system, negotiating with the Fleet ATC for an approach lane, while Shapiro placed several personal calls.

  Officially, he was here for the memorial. Fleet accepted this as a necessity of protocol. Michael Vidal had been reported lost in action in Hellgate on a mission which Shapiro had logged as ‘investigation of sensor traces consistent with wrecker activity.’ Fleet knew nothing of the Orpheus, nor the data stream on which the Sherratts and Lai’a were still working. It was enough that they knew Vidal as a close cousin to Velcastran royalty, and Shapiro’s presence here was not merely expected, it was mandatory.

  Every soul aboard the Mercury now was hand-picked, and had served on Shapiro’s private staff since long before the loss of the Intrepid, the ambush on Saraine, where the general signed Vaurien’s crew, plus Mark Sherratt, Travers and Marin himself. Not a single conscript remained aboard. Shapiro had spent the last year weeding the crew until only those like Marin, Travers and Bravo Company remained.

  If there were one place in the universe he ought to feel safe, it was here, on this deck, yet Marin’s skin crawled with an unpleasant foreboding, and he had been restless since they left Borushek. Food, booze, sex, logic and philosophizing did nothing to assuage it, and he was resigned to it. Mark would have called it the ‘wolf within,’ the primal creature inside every man which could feel a storm coming, though the civilized man was oblivious.

  The four days en route to Velcastra had been far from wasted, he allowed. Shapiro spent several hours each day with the prisoner – the secretary who was the sole survivor of Boden Zwerner’s operation on Halfway. George Kiveris was a pretty young man in his early twenties, with a business degree from a college on Earth itself, and a desperate desire to stay alive a little longer. He had stumbled backwards into Boden Zwerner’s employment just four months before, so he could hardly be held culpable for any part of the CL-389 incident.

  He was confined in quarters at the forward end of this almost deserted deck. Two guards were on his door, around the clock, and the AI had him under observation every second. Not, Marin thought, that Kiveris was in any mental of physical condition to make trouble. In four days, he had been sober twice. The flight had been the equivalent of a binge on everything from beer to cognac, and in the first few hours, Marin could have assured Shapiro he was hearing the truth when Kiveris spoke.

  No one, no matter the training, was capable of lying coherently over that length of time, when he or she was so drunk, they did not know what day it was. Thoughts, memories, reason and imagination became too muddled. In the early days of his Dendra Shemiji training, Marin had been taught how to ‘ride’ most drugs and to control his brain, his tongue, at doses little below the lethal level. But even Mark Sherratt admitted, alcohol made such a swamp of the human brain, it was difficult to find a technique for dealing with it. Curiously, alcohol had almost no effect on the Resalq body. The massive, multi-lobed Resalq liver simply metabolized it.

  The door to Kiveris’s quarters was open even now. Judith Fargo and Tim Inosanto lounged at the door, looking in, watching, with a pair of Chiyoda machine pistols propped against the wall outside. Their presence was a mere formality. Inside, George Kiveris was singing in a light, sweet tenor voice.

  “Please, George,”
Shapiro was saying reasonably as Marin jogged to the door and came to rest. “George? George!” He was sitting at the side of a narrow bed on which Kiveris sprawled, half asleep, still singing.

  “Hey? Whazza madder?” Kiveris paused in his song and looked up out of bloodshot eyes. He waved as he saw Marin at the door. “Hey, look, iz Curtie. You wanna li’ll drikie-poo, Curtie? Cutie. You’re real cute. Do they tell you, you’re cute? They should. You wanna drink? I’z got plenty leff, and ever time I run out they bring more and more, so…” He ran down into silence and subsided, back onto the bed where he was sitting against a mound of pillows. “Anyway, whadya wan, Generbal, honey? Y’know, you’re kinda sweet. I like that. You asked … something. I can’t remember.”

  “I asked,” Shapiro repeated patiently with a glance over his shoulder in Marin’s direction and an amused smile, “if you’d be so kind as to tell me about the office on Earth that organized the funding.”

  Kiveris burped resonantly and blinked at him. “Wha’ fundin’ izzat?”

  “The funding for CL-389,” Shapiro reminded him. “You know – the time your boss, Mister Zwerner, organized an ore hauler to destroy the city of Hydralis, Omaru, and most of the colony with it.”

  “Oh, that.” Kiveris made dismissive gestures. “Din I tell you bout that before? No, probly not, just maginin’ things. I do that. A lot.”

  “So?” Shapiro prompted again.

  “So the money came from Earth.” Kiveris yawned. “From the shitty of Kitago … thaz wrong. The City of Chicago. Shee-car-go. You ever been there? Pretty shitty city, juz ’tween you an’ me.”

  “And the funding for CL-389 came from Chicago?” Shapiro repeated.

  The young man’s head wagged animatedly. “Yup. From Shee-car-go on good ole Earth isself.”

  “You saw the records of the arrangements?” Marin had stepped into the room. “You had access to the documents.”