Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “Don’t,” Marin said sharply. “Enough, Mick. I know better than Neil what you’re remembering. I’ve been through this, or a version of it. Not as bad, and I’ll admit, I wasn’t … I was never tortured into the Infirmary.” He clenched his teeth against a shiver as his own long-suppressed memories wallowed perilously close to the surface, then he took a breath and steadied his voice. “We knew it had to be something like this, but I thought it was transspace that had freaked you, the way looking into the e-space conduit can send the human brain loopy.”

  “Transspace?” Vidal forced himself back to the present. “Transspace is the ride of your life, Curtis. It’s e-space blown out through ten dimensions into heaven and hell, every pilot’s fantasy and nightmare rolled into one. You’re scared shitless of going back … you can’t wait to get back there. You can’t imagine it, you don’t even know what I mean. Yet. You’ll know soon enough. You’re a pilot.”

  “But not a transspace pilot. Not yet.” Marin felt the unsteadiness of his own insides and looked up into Travers’s eyes, which were dark, dilated in the low light and studying him closely, as if Neil were waiting for either Curtis or Vidal to break, and he was not sure which it would be.

  Brows arched in speculation, Travers said quietly, “You want Grant to come up here, Mick, maybe give you something? A shot, to help you sleep?”

  “No.” Vidal was already going down now. His voice had begun to slur.

  “You haven’t told Bill any of this, have you?” Marin guessed.

  “That was a joke?” Vidal groaned. “He’d have to report it, and then it would be shrinks and therapy and a hundred different fucking drugs, till you don’t even remember your own name. Forget it.”

  “Then you need to talk to Mark,” Marin repeated. “We’re heading back to Alshie’nya as soon as the situation at Velcastra is resolved. Harrison’s group will probably be deciding the timing right now, and then – Hellgate.”

  “Elarne,” Vidal slurred.

  He was already more than half asleep with sheer exhaustion, and Travers reached for the quilt, drew it over him. “Etienne, lights off.”

  The stateroom lapsed into companionable darkness, lit by a faint red-orange glow from the idling threedee. Marin got up carefully, so as not to disturb him, and was a pace behind Travers as they stepped out. At the door he turned back to frown at Vidal, who had not moved. He was right in the middle of their bed, arms cast out, crucified against bronze linen sheets and passed out in a dead sleep. Only the faint movement of breathing told Marin he was alive.

  The door slid shut, and Travers thumbed on the “do not disturb” light. He gave Marin a haunted look, and pulled both hands across his face. “Mick might not be able to handle a drink, but I need one. Crew mess?”

  “Yeah.” Marin fell into step with him, acknowledging the tremors of old, old nerves which had come alive at Vidal’s memories and were quivering in every extremity. “Christ, it’s no wonder the poor sod’s a basket case.”

  “He needs the therapy, whether he thinks he does or not,” Travers said darkly.

  “Shrinks, and drugs?” Marin echoed. “If he were doped to the gills, he wouldn’t be able to fly. Richard would never clear a pilot to fly, much less fly transspace, if he’s too full of drugs to know what day it is.”

  “And Mick’s desperate to get back to Elarne,” Travers added. “Like Lai’a itself. Hunting Zunshu is only part of it.”

  “You noticed that.” Marin paused, a few steps short of the crew mess adjacent to the small labs, sixty meters aft of their quarters. “Mark can make him forget. He took memories from me that had been killing me by inches. I told you about it, a long time ago.”

  Travers grabbed him bodily, dragged him into an embrace which crushed Marin’s ribs. “I haven’t forgotten. You were a kid – you took a furlough on Lushiar, watched your best friend chained to the floor and flogged to death. That’s enough to dump you in the same basket right alongside Mick. You should have had therapy yourself.”

  “I couldn’t talk to anybody about it,” Marin said pragmatically. “Not after I’d made my first Dendra Shemiji kill. You wouldn’t want to talk to a Fleet shrink, and open up that can of worms!” He gave Travers a push, caught his head and kissed his mouth. “Let it be, Neil … but I’ll take a cognac, if there’s any of the LanShan Red Label left.”

  The bottle was in the back of the wet bar, hidden behind the mixers and soda, apparently where Travers had left it. The mess was almost deserted, with just a few of Ingersol’s engine techs on downtime and, to Marin’s surprise, Tonio Teniko was sitting in the dimmest corner, with a plate of high-carb junk food and a handy over which he had been hunched until they appeared.

  His eyes were wide, hollow, unblinking, but he was sober for the moment, and working. Marin lifted his glass to the younger man, wondering if he wanted company, but Teniko responded only with a curt little nod of acknowledgment, and shuffled to the ’chef. He looked bad, Marin thought. His spine was curved with pain, hunched in the shoulders as he tensed against the knifing aches he could never escape; his hands were too large, dangling limply from his forearms, with thickened knuckles, and he was stumbling, ungainly, as his brain fought to cope with the changing body geometry. Even his face was different, altering itself visibly as the skull grew and the jaw and cheekbones became heavier.

  The incredible beauty that had seduced Vaurien was gone. In a year, two, when the growth was complete and the body had found its new form, he would stand up straight, towering over Travers, taller even than Vaurien. He would command the Pakrani stature he had wanted, but the Tonio Teniko Richard had found irresistible would have been erased.

  With a fresh mug of something hot, Teniko returned to his work. Marin pulled a stool up to the bar, where Travers was rummaging among the stock, looking for the makings of a pitcher of margaritas. He had a half bottle of Los Toros in one hand and was comparing a Velcastran triple sec to a Jagrethean white Curacao.

  Apparently on a whim, he decided to pour the whole assortment into a jug, and began to hunt for limes and ice. “You want to get a little snockered, and make out?”

  “Give me any good reason why not.” Marin swallowed the cognac too fast.

  It burned his gullet, and he waited for the buzz, the slow, steady deadening of the nerve endings. He would have said Vidal needed the same therapy, in lieu of the drugs he would not take, but with only the nano holding his liver and pancreas together, the prescription would be lethal.

  He studied Travers with a strange sobriety, clear-headed when he longed not to be. Travers waited for him to speak, but Marin’s thoughts were too tangled, the feelings behind them too muddled. He just held out the brandy glass and let Neil fill it with a margarita that seemed equal parts ice and jet fuel. He coughed, hauled in a breath, and at last the booze began to find its way to his brain. He rested both elbows on the bar and closed his eyes.

  “Albeniz,” he said at last, probably the last word Travers had expected to hear.

  “We’ve been predicting it.” Travers rattled several ice cubes in the bottom of a tall glass. “The man said, total destruction.”

  “And they think it was us.”

  “It easily might have been,” Travers said with a deep pragmatism. “Albeniz is … was the biggest Fleet drydock in the Deep Sky. In a time of war, Earth’s own strategists would call it a legitimate military target. It’s a loss that’s going to hurt Fleet badly, for minimal casualties.”

  “Minimal?” Marin echoed, cracking open his eyes and studying Travers, who had pulled a second stool up on the inside of the bar.

  “Against forty million predicted dead in the action at Velcastra, any losses they took at Albeniz add up to a fleabite,” he retorted. “Not that the news services in the homeworlds will parse it that way! They’ll play up the casualties at Albeniz as if it’s the biggest crime in history, and anything we suffer when Fleet hits Velcastra will have been earned, deserved, fair.”

  “Homeworlds bullshit,” Cu
rtis said acidly.

  Travers touched the rims of their glasses with a ringing sound. “Vive la revolution, as Richard would say. How do they say it in Resalq?”

  “They say heshel ol’gemeshe.” Marin could hear the wind-down in his own voice, “which translates back into Slingo as ‘flourish, fresh-reorganization.’ They don’t have a word for revolution. To us it means rebellion, revolt, uprising, coup … war. Their revolutions – and they had plenty of them! – were all about throwing out an old social model and revamping it, reorganizing it, into something fresh. Bloodless coup was never the human way of doing things. So – vive la revolution.”

  “Heshel ol’gemeshe,” Travers repeated in a thick Slingo accent, lifting his glass in salute.

  The vibration in the deck told him the Wastrel was underway. The throb of massive generators found its way into Travers’s neck, his skull, and he groaned as he came awake. Reality filtered back a little at a time through a mist of tequila, orange and lime. He cracked open his eyes as he felt the telltale shudder through the ship’s airframe. She had slipped back into e-space for the four-hour transit to Velcastra.

  He sat up in the darkness and peered at the chrono in the bottom of the threedee sphere. Shiptime, it was still early, but the Wastrel never slept, and he knew Shapiro and Liang would have worked the night through. Vaurien would have slept lightly, the catlike doze that would let him wake and be back in the ops room in minutes, if the AI’s deepscan sensors registered anything untoward.

  With a soft curse he swung his feet onto the floor and padded into the bathroom. From the bed there was no sign of life, and he closed the door before the bathroom lights came up. The face in the mirror was shadowed, and he gave it an obscene gesture before he set the water – hot, cold, hot, cold, a ritual that woke the body fast, brought the brain back online. He drank a glass of water as he dried in the turbo-storm of hot air, and knew he needed a shot of blockers, if Bill Grant would indulge him. Then breakfast.

  He killed the lights before he reopened the door. Quiet breathing suggested Marin was still asleep. He might have expected Vidal to have stirred, but Mick had not budged a muscle since he passed out there, six hours before. It could have been the first sound sleep he had enjoyed in months.

  So Travers turned on the red safelight in the back of the closet, hunted for a clean shirt, and from the door he stood frowning at the bed for some time. Curtis’s own ghosts had returned to haunt him without mercy, and Travers could only guess at the goblins tormenting Vidal. No man should have to carry them. Only the desire for transspace had sealed Vidal’s lips, and in fact, he was right. Going by the book, Grant would have drugged him into oblivion and referred him to psyche specialists.

  The door closed silently, and again he hit the ‘do not disturb.’ Let Curtis wake in his own time, he thought, and as for Mick – the longer he could sleep, the better. He wondered if it might be the comfort or security of being with warm, living bodies that gave Mick the peace to let his mind rest.

  He thumbed for the lift, rode up with a crew of Arago technicians. When he stepped into the Infirmary, Grant seemed to be waiting for him. Despite the hour, the Lushi was in baggy denims and a shirt so loud, Travers could have read by it. The garb was anti-Fleet, counter-military. The more Fleet personnel arrived aboard – like Vidal and Queneau, even Bronhill and Sung – the more outrageous Grant’s clothes seemed to become.

  “You look,” he said tartly, “like crap.”

  “We had a few.” Travers gestured vaguely in the direction of the crew mess. “I’ll take the blockers, if you have ’em.”

  “I’ve got ’em.” Grant headed into the drug store and returned with a blue box. He tossed the familiar red capsule with the ‘AB-Blox’ logo into Travers’s waiting hand. “One for your better half?”

  “Thanks.” Travers slapped the business side of the capsule against the base of his neck and gave it a solid shove. A smarting bite in the skin, and the blockers fired in. He counted to ten, and as they hit his brain the room seemed to brighten, sounds sharpened, fine details began to resolve.

  Grant traded him the empty for a fresh capsule, which Travers slipped into his breast pocket. “You had more than a few,” Bill observed. The Australian thickened in his voice, which told Travers he was annoyed. “And if I’m not seeing Curtis, that means he’s still comatose. I also haven’t seen Mick this morning – he’s late for his shots. Jesus bloody Christ, you idiots didn’t get him boozed up?”

  “Give it a rest, Bill,” Travers remonstrated. “He’s got better sense, even if we were stupid enough to offer him a drink.”

  “Thank gods for small mercies,” Grant said acidly. “You know the only liver function he has is coming from the nano playing tag in there?”

  “He mentioned clones.” Travers glanced around the infirmary, where the beds previously occupied by Queneau and Rabelais were empty now. “Between you and me, he’s a mess.”

  “You got that right.” Grant subsided. His face was a study in scorn. “Something went on in there, in transspace. He won’t breathe a syllable of it to me, but I know some bloody thing happened to him. I went over him, a millimeter at a time, when I had him in the coma. I never found the scars and signs, but I could swear he’s been shoved balls-first through a meat grinder.”

  As a Fleet medic, Grant had seen every kind of injury, from the armory accident to the battle wounds, via the kind of trauma incurred in the citybottom sexshops where crewdeck grunts spent their downtime. He had seen it all, and knew what he was looking for. He was waiting for Travers to comment now, and Neil chose his words with great care.

  “Transspace was a nightmare. Plays havoc with the mind.”

  “Uh huh.” Grant’s lips compressed. “So now tell me why Ernst and Jo are sane as a couple of judges, while Mickey-boy is wild-eyed and jumping at every sound.”

  The question was dangerously astute. Grant was good, Travers thought, and he shrugged evasively. “When he wants it said, he’ll come out and say it himself. What do I know? Queneau and Rabelais were tanked, they came out of there in cryogen. Mick flew the hybrid out of the transspace event they were trapped in for months, and I’m guessing that would be enough to send a man and his sanity in separate directions.”

  “All right.” Grant spread his hands. “I’ll accept what you’re telling me. I’ll have to, because Mick sure as hell ain’t about to tell me what’s going on in his head. And he’s still overdue in here for his next series of shots. You know where he is?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” Travers was on his way back to the lift. “He’s right in the middle of our bed, with Curtis dead asleep on one side, and a dent in the mattress on the other, where I used to be. And before you say one word –”

  “Mick,” Grant said flatly, “couldn’t raise an argument. Not till his gonads are finished cloning. Which means he actually slept … which is more than I’ve been able to do for him.”

  “You’re welcome,” Travers said with dry humor.

  “Get out of here, Colonel,” Grant told him. “And when he wakes, just send him in here, will you?”

  “I’ll do that,” Travers promised, and stepped into the lift.

  But he punched for the ops room, playing a hunch, and as the car opened into the passage opposite the wide, open doors, he saw he was right. Vaurien and Jazinsky were loading the navtank, while Shapiro, Liang and Rusch had pulled chairs up to a flatscreen where an edit of the conference was playing. Jon Kim stood behind Shapiro, both hands on his shoulders, thumbs massaging the back of his neck, a tiny concession to stress and fatigue which Shapiro would allow.

  On the screen, Allan Bronhill and Valerie Sung were working with the AI, and at a glance Travers knew what they were doing. He joined Vaurien and Jazinsky at the navtank, and saw a massive-scale interpretation of the same data. It was the inner Velcastra system, with every world, planetoid, and artificial body charted, and the shipping roads overlaid in luminous swathes of color.

  And marked with sco
res of bright green blips were the positions of the minefields and the Mako itself, which was wrangling them like a puppeteer. Travers stood in the weird glow of the tank, surveying the whole chart with the eye of the master sergeant who had led more field assignments than he could remember, under the gun and often against ridiculous odds.

  From the discreet audio track, he heard Allan Bronhill’s voice going over the data in meticulous detail, while Etienne fed the surveillance recording through every mode of analysis at its command. Vaurien came around the tank and joined him. From there, he could watch Bronhill’s face, and Travers knew he was looking for something, anything, that might identify the man as a fraud.

  “They gave us the approach lanes and negotiated the time,” Vaurien said quietly. “Chandra Liang asked for 03:00 hours, Elstrom City time, which is a little over four hours from now.”

  The announcement made Travers’s belly churn, and a pulse beat in his temple. “So soon?”

  “Why delay?” Vaurien gestured at the tank. “The board is set, the pieces have been in place for days now. There’s no point in delaying, Neil – the weapon will work, or it won’t. And it will.”

  “It had better,” Travers whispered. “You heard the estimate. Forty million dead and the biosphere stripped.”

  Vaurien regarded him with a deep frown. “You have doubts?”

  “I’ve watched flawless plans that couldn’t go wrong fly apart like swarms of bugs.” Travers shook himself hard. “Where do they want the Wastrel?”