Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “You mean, I look like I just saw the ghost that walked over my grave?” Rusch wondered.

  “Something like that.” Shapiro was looking back across the Infirmary, watching Grant’s team and the drones maneuver Rabelais out of the tank and onto an Arago gurney. “Damn, the man’s a legend.”

  “The man,” she added, “is about to inherit the family castle, and I’m just dying to see the looks on the nasty, puckered-up little faces of Trick and Ying Shackleton when they find out, they don’t get a buck.” Her eyes first widened and then closed. “Harry, we have to get a message through to Velcastra. It almost killed Charles when I told him Michael was dead. He needs to know, he’s alive.”

  She was right, Marin thought. Old Charles Vidal needed to know at once, his son had been recovered. Mick was officially reported killed in action in the Drift, but Shapiro would amend the record to ‘missing, presumed dead,’ and then the Wastrel would report one of the conjuring tricks for which the Drift was infamous. It spat Mick back out, sick, injured, but alive.

  “I’ll send a drone courier,” Shapiro was saying. It was the fastest way to get a message through. “Three days, Alexis, and Charles Vidal will know. If you want to draft the message, do it now.” He looked across at the bed where Vidal lay, connected by hoses and tubes to the machinery. “He’ll be waking very soon. If he’s thinking clearly, he could record a simple message for his father, then I’ll launch the drone at once.”

  As he spoke, the gurney carrying Rabelais made its way to the bed beside Vidal’s, and Grant’s assistants scurried to set up the IV and scanners. Grant passed a handy over Rabelais’s entire body a third time before he was satisfied, and very carefully set a half glass of water into the man’s trembling hands. He helped Rabelais hold it, brought it to his lips, held it there while he drank it to the bottom.

  Still glassy-eyed and mute, Jo Queneau was looking on, and she was aware enough, alert enough, to come unsteadily to her feet and take the empty glass from Grant. She moved into Rabelais’s line of sight, took his hand, and, though she could not speak properly yet, she pointed away to his right, where Vidal lay. Rabelais’s head turned on the pillow, and Marin heard him groan, saw his hands clasp weakly about Queneau’s.

  “What the hell happened to them?” Jazinsky whispered.

  “I’d give a year’s pay to know.” Travers shoved both hands into the pockets of his slacks. “Rabelais is in halfway decent shape. I could wish Mick would wake up.”

  Marin was frowning at the brainscan analysis, reading the notes appended to the data rather than looking at the raw numbers. “According to the specialist on the Carellan, the damage is this side of a line he calls the ‘catastrophe point.’ Whatever that means.”

  “It means the brain is still at the point where it can rewire itself to get around areas that were destroyed,” Rusch said quietly, “and with the assistance of the right brand of nano, it can repair itself to the point where, as a commander, I’d put the poor bastard right back onto armor, or into the cockpit of a spaceplane, and tell him or her to get back out there and fight.” She shuddered animatedly. “I never intended to be a soldier. I signed with Fleet to get myself into the Drift, to study it. What the hell was I doing on the Omaru blockade, telling kids to go kill each other?”

  “You were suckered in, like he rest of us,” Travers said with a certain note of sourness.

  “You’re the one who reenlisted,” Vaurien said pointedly.

  “Temporary insanity,” Travers growled.

  “Kismet.” Mark gestured at Marin. “If you and Curtis hadn’t been on the Intrepid, she would almost certainly have been destroyed. There was no one else aboard with the authority and the power of personality to drag the remnants of the crew together and get them out. From what I understand, the ship was ruptured, twisted and depressurizing faster than your tech gangs could keep it welded together. Curtis would have died there,” he added quietly.

  Vaurien’s arm went over Neil’s shoulders and dealt him a hug. “Call it fate, if you like. Destiny. I never blamed you for going back to Fleet. It all worked out the way it had to … and here we are.” He gave Shapiro a frown. “You’re going to repatriate Vidal, send him home?”

  “It’s up to the young man himself,” Shapiro mused. “The truth is, he’s already been to hell. He’s pushed his luck so far, I would never ask him to sign aboard the Lai’a mission and go back into transspace –”

  “But there’s only three human pilots who ever flew transspace and survived to share the experience,” Jazinsky added, “and if Michael were crazy enough to volunteer, you wouldn’t turn him down. Major Vidal would be pivotal to the expedition.”

  “Colonel Vidal,” Shapiro corrected, “would be aboard with my gratitude. But I won’t be asking him to do it, and if he wants to return to Velcastra, he’ll go with my blessing.”

  “Not aboard the Mercury,” Vaurien warned.

  “She’s on Fleet’s most wanted list.” Marin was watching Rabelais get his hands around a mug of something warm. The IV was set up, and Grant was injecting numerous compounds into the tubes. “Until the Battle of Velcastra is history, General, you’ll go there as a Freespacer or not at all.”

  “General?” Shapiro echoed. “The rank means nothing, not now, not here. I am a Freespacer, Curtis. We all are.”

  “Then … I’m going to offer you my hand as a civilian and a friend,” Marin said levelly. He thrust out the offered hand, and did not withdraw it until Shapiro clasped it. “Someone with good taste stocked the office ’chef this morning, so will you take a coffee and a Danish with me, Harrison?”

  “I will.” Shapiro lifted a brow at Travers. “Colleagues, Neil?”

  “For some time now,” Travers agreed, and shoved Grant’s work aside to make space on the desk. “Welcome to Freespace. Who else wants the coffee and Danish –?”

  Marin was configuring the autochef when a machine across the Infirmary issued a quiet tone, an alert rather than a warning. He might have asked what was wrong, or right, but before he could speak Grant called,

  “Neil, Curt, Colonel Rush, get over here.”

  For a moment Marin feared the worst, and the tray he had been loading clattered onto the desk, but Grant was merely standing at Vidal’s feet with a handy playing back and forth across him, while Mick began to stir. He shifted in the bed, flexing his limbs, and tried to lift both hands to his face, only to find them fettered by tubes and wires.

  “Easy, Major,” Grant said quickly, dropping the scanner and catching him by both wrists, before he could dislodge the taped-in cannulas. “Take a breath, hold it. Can you focus on me? Can you see me?”

  His voice was a bare croak, desert dry. “I can see you, Bill. What the … what the sweet fuck did you do to me?”

  “Everything,” Grant told him honestly. “You came in too hot for me to even stand beside you, unless I was wearing a goddamn hazmat suit. You’re clean now, but I’ll just bet you feel like hell.”

  “You think?” Vidal was blinking owlishly. “God almighty, I’m tubes everywhere. What’s this crap?”

  “IV, chemistry, nutrients. Keep bloody still, damnit,” Grant warned. “If you rip ’em out, I’ll only have to sick ’em right back in.”

  “Drink,” Vidal croaked. “Gimme a drink.”

  “Water.” Grant beckoned one of the handling drones, and the machine jetted closer with a half glass. “Steady now, old son … slowly.” He held the glass to Vidal’s chapped lips, and when Vidal settled back against the pillows, lifted each eyelid in turn to check his pupil dilation.

  “Not now,” Vidal groaned. “Get lost, Bill.”

  “It’s my job,” Grant said firmly. “You know where you are?”

  “Wastrel,” Vidal said in dutiful tones.

  “You know the boss?” Grant sat on the bedside.

  “Rick Vaurien, and where the hell is he? He ought to bloody be here.” Vidal was peering in the too-bright Infirmary lights, but his eyes found Neil Travers first, and
right behind him, Alexis Rusch, and some part of him seemed to relax. “The nearest and dearest are gathered at the beside.”

  Rusch was highly adept at masking anything she felt. “You’re not going to die, Michael,” she sad acerbically. “I’ve seen the brainscans. If you were still with the Delta Dragons, you’d be back on the flightline in three days.”

  It was a lie, and Vidal knew it. “Then thank Christ this isn’t the Kiev,” he said hoarsely. “Come to that, where are we?”

  “The Wastrel,” she began.

  “And where is the Wastrel?” Vidal demanded. “Neil, for godsakes!”

  Only Marin would have noticed the quick tear Travers cuffed away before he took Vidal’s wrist in the old ritual, warrior clasp, leaned down and kissed his forehead. “We’re parked on station-keeping at Alshie’nya, still decontaminating Lai’a. It pulled you out of there yesterday … not two hours after it launched on its hyper-Weimann trials.”

  For a moment Vidal blinked at him. “That can’t be right.”

  “It is.” Travers drew a very careful caress around the gaunt face, with the old Delta Dragons tattoo, which looked almost like a scar on the sunken left cheek. “Timestreams running faster, slower, gravity tides headed every which-way … search me.” Travers could only shrug. “I just go with the flow. If you want to know how any of it works, ask Mark.”

  Vidal seemed to settle into the pillows with a vast weariness. “Mark’s here? I need to tell him about the ship. The Orpheus.”

  Mark had been a few meters away, with Vaurien and Jazinsky, deliberately staying out of Vidal’s field of vision so as not to confuse him. But Vidal’s mind was clearer than Marin had expected – he had no cryosleep to recover from, and as Grant had said, he was lucky. His brain had not passed into the catastrophe zone, and the purpose-designed nano had reconstructed much of the damage while he slept.

  “I’m here.” Mark came closer. “We spent weeks processing your launch data, Michael, and everything we got from you before the event closed was used to prime Lai’a for the next insertion. Lai’a brought back so much, we’ll be analyzing it for weeks more. I’d like to say months, but in fact we don’t have months.”

  “The Orpheus,” Vidal said, husky, parched. “We burned out the drive engines, trying to stay out of a temporal field. They took a lot of hammer, but they quit in the end, and we were sucked in, sucked right through.” His eyes cleared, widened. “You get Jo and Ernst out of the tanks?”

  “They’re safe,” Grant assured him, still busy with the monitors.

  “Damn.” Vidal subsided weakly as a sheen of sweat began on his brow. “Those tanks scared the crap out of me. Ernst said they were state of the art. I said, state of the art in the Paleozoic?” He flexed his shoulders, hips, legs. “God, I hurt.”

  And Grant sorted through his tools for a hypogun. “I can give you something for that. A big dose is going to make you drowsy, though.”

  “No. Just take the edge off,” Vidal groaned. “Where are they?”

  The drug fired into the IV tube, and Grant stepped aside. “Jo’s right here – but don’t expect her to be too brilliant. She’s got a bad case of retrieval shock. Ernst is right behind me, still being scanned. He’s almost as bad as you are … what the hell happened?”

  Vidal took a long, deep breath. “He fell twenty, twenty-five meters. Fell off a scaffold, should’ve had a safety line clipped on, but we didn’t have enough line. Didn’t have enough of anything. Took risks, dumb risks, stupid. Anything we had to do, we just found a way to do it.”

  He was tiring fast, and Marin knew exactly what he was feeling. The lights would start to dance in another minute, then the walls would spin just before the floor slid over the ceiling. He set a hand on Travers’s shoulder and said, “Bill, he needs to rest.”

  The medic gestured at Shapiro, Rusch, Vaurien. “Tell them. They’re foaming at the mouth, dying for the details, but I can tell you right now, you won’t get much more for a while. A few hours’ll make a world of difference.” He lifted a brow at Vaurien. “Boss?”

  In fact, Vaurien was smiling ruefully at Vidal. “Get some shuteye, Pilot. That was one hell of a job, and if you don’t mind me saying so, you look like merde.”

  Vidal’s eyes were closed, his arms were immobilized with tubes and cables, but he still had the use of his middle finger. “Do like the doc says, and get out of here. Gimme a chance. Give us all a chance.”

  The group broke up, drifting away by twos and threes, until only Travers, Marin and Rusch remained beside Vidal. He knew they were there, and held out a hand to each of them. Grant seemed to set aside a harangue, and retreated to his office.

  “Hey,” Travers said, soft, gruff, not as adept as Rusch at disguising his feelings.

  “Hey,” Vidal echoed. “You still here, Neil?”

  “Still.” Travers looked at Marin, beckoned him closer with a nod. “They gave you a fantastic memorial service in Elstrom City. Would have brought a tear to your eye. They’re going to put up a statue of you … or, they were. I expect they’ll have to take it down, now you’re not dead.”

  A painful chuckle racked Vidal’s chest. “Christ, don’t make me laugh. Hurts. Everything hurts.” His eyes opened a fraction, and he looked up, from Travers to Rusch. “Alexis.”

  “Michael.” She laid a hand on his forehead. “Welcome back.”

  “My father,” Vidal whispered.

  “He took the news badly,” she said honestly, “but the last time I saw him, well, he was dealing with it in his own way. You know how he is. I’ll put something together for him – send him a message yourself. Harrison is going to send a drone courier, it’s the fastest way to reach Velcastra from here. And then,” she added quietly, “if you want to go home, we’ll get you there.”

  The blue eyes opened a little wider, and for some time Vidal seemed to grapple with what she had said. The painkillers were hitting him hard now, and his thinking was not as clear. “Velcastra,” he murmured. “The battle …?”

  “Not yet.” She stroked his face. “The Chicago battle group is en route. It’ll be arriving in a few days, and before you trouble your head about it – don’t. The Zunshu weapon is in place. Captain van Donne’s crew is monitoring the deployment, and very soon Robbie and Sonja Liang will be returning, to announce our sovereign territory.”

  “When?” Vidal rasped.

  “A day. Two.” Rusch breathed a sigh. “Time has caught us up. It’s happening, Michael, with or without us. The Colonial Wars.”

  “Zunshu?” Vidal added.

  “They’re hitting the outlying colonies routinely now,” Travers told him with the brutal honesty Marin knew Vidal would want. “But we fought them on Ulrand’s big moon – and we beat the bastards. The Silence of Knives, you know? That’s twice we’ve taken them on and beaten them, and now we know how to do it.”

  “Zunshu.” Vidal repeated, and gestured with one thin hand, a frail movement which fetched Marin a deep shiver. “We know how they get through, Neil. Through the Drift. Elarne … transspace. You know, you can see to Orion 359? So weird. Can get readings off things slipping through temporal streams. Zunshu things.” He roused himself for long enough to pry open both eyes and look up into Rusch’s and Travers’s hovering faces. “I can pilot that shit. I can. I did it … could do it with more power. Power like Lai’a. I can fly it.”

  Then he was asleep, and Travers stepped back from the bed with a soft curse. He was shaking, and Marin slid an arm around him, if only for emotional support. Neil recovered fast, dragged both hands over his face and pulled his shoulders back. “If he says he can pilot the Drift, I believe him.”

  The voice which answered surprised them all. “You better,” Jo Queneau said, slurred and rasping, as if she had just chugged a half bottle of raw spirits and had not yet collapsed. “Never knew Mick to lie … and I saw him do it. Helped him do it. Takes two. Navdeck goes to crap … human brain runs the nav, or you’ll hang it up. One to navigate, one to fly, while a
ship bucks like a bronco, gives you the fight of your life.”

  Marin, Travers and Rusch had turned toward the chair which sat between Vidal’s bed and Rabelais’s, and Grant drifted back as he heard her speak for the first time. He was busy with a handy at once. “How are you, L.T.? Doing better, by the sounds of you.”

  “Hungry,” she told him. “Tired. Cold. Can I eat?”

  “A little,” he said cautiously. “Too much, and you’ll throw it up. You’ve been starving for too long. I’ll get you something.”

  “Food ran out,” she said vaguely. “Long time ago.”

  The words were slurred, and as she spent what little energy she possessed, she was going down fast. Marin had no experience with retrieval syndrome, but he thought he knew what she was suffering, and he could only admire the woman’s determination as she forced her tongue around the words.

  “How long?” Rusch wondered quietly. “How long were you in there, Lieutenant?”

  “Long time … not sure. Ask Mick,” Queneau muttered. “Ernst might know. Me? Too tired. I got sick, was out of it, a lot of the time.”

  As she wound down into silence, Grant returned from the ’chef with a bowl of jelly and a beaker of juice. He set the bowl into her hands, watched her hold it as if she had no idea what to do with a spoon, and called the servitor drone.

  “We’ll leave you, Doctor,” Rusch decided.

  “I’d be grateful,” Grant said honestly.

  But Vidal had half woken, and when he murmured Travers’s name, Neil returned to the bed. One thin hand reached out, and Travers took it with exaggerated caution. For a long moment Vidal seemed about to speak, but he slithered back into sleep before the words would form, and Travers very carefully set the hand back on his chest.

  Marin watched him closely, trying to read the storm of his feelings. They were in the lift, riding back to the crew levels, when Travers permitted himself the brief luxury of tears. Marin offered an embrace, and Neil took it gratefully. “They’re so lucky to be alive.” Curtis heard the thickness of emotion in his own voice.