James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 09

by Gethsemane

  “Where are the parents?” Alkema asked.

  Oberth was red with shame now. “When the Enforcers found a family hiding children, they forced the parents through the Gateway and left the children behind. It was supposed to punish them, and make them an example to others. Compared to everything else we were trying to do, trying to keep our society from total collapse, it was just one horror among a thousand. It loses its power to shock, after a while.” They had reached the door to the bus, which slid open. Oberth gestured Alkema to come toward him. He whispered below the rumble of the bus’s engine. “The thing is, y’see… I could get left behind just for telling you this…”

  “Telling me what?”

  “Some of the kids who were separated when their families were arrested and put through the Gateway by force were gathered up and taken to what they called a

  ‘Non-Relocation Camp.’ Y’see, it was set up for the kids who wouldn’t be relocating through the gateway, so they could be taken care of until…” Alkema waited from him to finish, but the old man just shook his head, unable to say it out loud. “Where is the Non-Relocation Camp?” Alkema asked him.

  The driver of the bus revved his engine. Oberth grabbed Alkema’s shoulder and pulled him close enough to make sure he heard. “Go to a place called the Abbadon, in the valley between the Seth River and the Saltwash River. You should be able to find it on a map.

  There’s children there,” he said. He paused.

  “Does Kahn know about it?” Alkema asked.

  “Yes,” Oberth told him. “It wasn’t her idea, but it was the one time the Authority stood up to her and did something she didn’t want to do.”

  The driver blew his horn. “You better go… now!” Oberth insisted.

  Alkema still needed to know one thing before he got on the bus. “Why won’t Kahn let us help?”

  Oberth suddenly looked tired and old. “When I told you how we found out children didn’t come out of the Gateway on the other side, I didn’t tell you Hildegard’s only daughter was one that didn’t.”

  Phoenix – David Alkema and Anaconda Taurus Rook shared the ride back. The two aves leaped into the auburn sky and shot toward Pegasus. En route, they reported in to TyroCommander Change.

  “President Kahn doesn’t want us to evacuate the children,” Alkema explained. “I don’t know why.”

  Change really didn’t care. “President Kahn’s orders are irrelevant. Tell me how you intend to proceed,”

  Taurus Rook answered. “Our only option is a full-scale search and rescue operation. I’m going to need every Aves, every pilot, every MedTech… Hell, I’m gonna need everybody on the freakin’ ship.”

  Eliza Change grunted. “All right, Lt. Commander Rook, you’re in charge of the search and rescue operation. 100% of ship’s resources are at your disposal. Flight Captain Driver will be in charge of the airlift, under your direction. Similarly, Lt. Commander Kitaen will provide any needed tactical support. Get Chief Delilah from Operations to open up the Tertiary Inhabitation Area. We don’t know yet how many children we’ll be receiving.” Kitaen joined the conference and wanted to know what the tactical assessment was.

  Taurus Rook answered, “All they have are a few security guards at the Gateway. From what I’ve seen, a pack of Young Boy Rangers could hold off their entire military establishment, what’s left of it.”

  Alkema displayed a topographical map of the planet’s surface. “We think Abaddon must refer to a place listed in their records as ‘Fort Abaddon.’ It’s located between two of the planet’s rivers, like Oberth said it would be.”

  Kitaen interrupted. “Based on your initial encounter, this is not going to be a standard search and rescue. It’s not going to be easy to get them on our Aves voluntarily.”

  “I’m working on a plan to deal with that,” Taurus Rook assured him.

  One of the children on board Phoenix regained consciousness, and began screaming and writhing against his restraints. A medical technician adjusted his calmative and the child soon relaxed again.

  “How are we going to fix that?” Alkema asked. “We only have a handful of crew trained to deal with childhood trauma.”

  Eliza Change answered him. “I’ll find someone in the crew to worry about that. Your job is to come up with a way to help us find the kids that are left on the planet; better sensors, better search patterns.”

  “What’s your ETA, here?” Kitaen asked.

  “About fourteen minutes,” Alkema answered.

  Change demanded from Kitaen. “How long will you need to prepare teams of warfighters for search and rescue operations.”

  Kitaen frowned. “I can be fully mobilized in half a day, but we can have the first teams ready to go by the time you’re ready to launch your first Aves.” Change cracked a small smile at that. “Sounds like a challenge. I’m sure Flight Captain Driver can have ships ready to go by the time Taurus Rook hits the flight deck.”

  “My warfighters will be waiting in the Hangar Bay when they arrive,” Kitaen promised.

  Pegasus – Main Bridge – After she closed out the COM Link, Change stood up from her command chair, crossed the bridge, and knelt next to Specialist Atlantic. “I suppose this means the message was meant to be taken literally after all,” she said.

  Pegasus – Hangar Bay Alpha – As Phoenix docked in the Hangar Bay, Crews for the first six Aves assigned to search and rescue were already prepping their ships for departure.

  Alkema thought this a bit premature, as he and the others exited their ship, since they didn’t even have search and rescue areas mapped yet.

  Anaconda Taurus Rook did not think this would be a problem. “We’ll use the ground base we already have at Port Gethsemane as our ground command center. We’ll begin searching in the immediate area, and we’ll dispatch another squad to Abaddon.” She handed Skua to Johnny Rook, “Hold this.”

  Then, she took a case from out of one of the ship’s storage lockers and handed it to David Alkema. “You, hold this.”

  Taurus Rook climbed to the top of the Aves Phoenix, standing just behind the command canopy. She touched a control on her gauntlet that put her on ship-wide COM Link, and raised her hands in a demand for silence and then she spoke. “May I have your attention!”

  The crews stopped their preparations and looked up to the shapely woman in the tactical gear standing atop one of the ships. “I know some of you were looking forward to shore leave, to science expeditions, to cultural surveys of this planet. But we have to put those things aside if we’re going to save the children that are still down there.

  “As you have been informed, the Gethsemanians devised a means to escape their doomed planet. Whether you believe it really is a Gateway to the Afterlife, or you think it’s some kind of trans-dimensional portal, that doesn’t matter. The flaw in its design is that children can’t go through it. Which means the Gethsemanians left their children behind, and they will die unless we get them up to Pegasus.

  “We don’t know how many there are to evacuate, we don’t know where they are, and we have only seven days to do it. Probably less. This is an impossible job. Let me tell you how we’re going to do it.”

  She peered over the edge of the ship. “Lt. Cmdr. Alkema, toss me up that box, would you?”

  Alkema tossed up the case. Taurus Rook unlatched it and set it down on the top of the ship.

  “The children are semi-feral, so…” She kicked a pulse-rifle out of the box, flicking it up into the air and catching it in her hands. In a single smooth motion, she armed and locked it. “Heavy stun should take them down.”

  “Whoa,” a young warrior with unkempt reddish-blond locks, Warfighter Copperhead, objected from the front row. “We’re gonna shoot children?”

  “That’s right.” Taurus Rook told him.

  Copperhead grinned. “Neat.”

  “Getting hit with a stun pulse is not a pleasant experience,” a female voice in the back protested.

  “Standing on a planet when it explode
s is a much less pleasant experience,” Anaconda Taurus Rook countered. “Perspective, people, you got to have it. We’re going to need a lot of it in the next few days.”

  Taurus Rook continued. “Shooting the kids is only going to be a last resort. It’s possible not all the children on the planet will be as gone wild as the ones we encountered in Port Gethsemane. We’ll also be transmitting audio calls and using other enticements as part of the operation.

  “Once we have secured the children, we also have to keep them calm while we transport them, and while we evacuate them to Pegasus. Medical Technician Rand, I believe you have a solution to this problem.”

  Medical Technician Ran held up a bracelet. “We’ll fit the children with these. They’ll keep them calm and sedate while we transport them and acclimate them to the ship.”

  “So, we’re going to shoot the kids, and then drug them,” someone heckled.

  “That’s the general idea,” Taurus Rook nodded. “The ground search is only half the effort. We need to prepare this ship for an unknown number of refugees… hundreds, maybe thousands. While the search and rescue teams are on the planet, we need shipboard crews to prepare the tertiary inhabitation areas. We’re going to need clothing, blankets, medicine, food, water… We’ve got work to do, no doubt about it.

  “We have to be realistic. This will not be easy. It’s going to require the effort of every man, woman, and family on this ship to find these children, catch these children, bring them back to Pegasus, and give them a home.

  “We’re going to rescue the children the Gethsemanians left behind!” She said in a determined voice, not shouting, not hectoring, simply stating the fact. “So, teams, form up, and get ready to depart. Flight crews. Let’s get these ships out of here.” Chapter 07

  Keeler – William Randolph Keeler met Delia Katherine Anne (Somerset) Chanski in the summer of 7270, when he was a fairly disreputable Assistant Professor of Histories, and she was a novelist on the verge of a breakout. The occasion had been the launch party for her first long work, The Bold and the Beautiful, a meditation on history and philosophy disguised as a novel about a man and a cyborg in love with the same woman and on the same quest for lost Commonwealth treasures. (Keeler would later read the book and wince at the anachronisms and historical errors, but her prose was surefooted and her grasp of the role of evil in the evolution of mankind’s civilization was spot-on.) The launch party had taken place at the Somerset estate in Shoreline, one of the communities that stretched along the beachier shoreline of Lake of the Loons to the west of New Cleveland, where the third wave of rich settlers had come to live centuries earlier. It was a more gentile place than New Cleveland proper. The Somerset manor was a four hundred year old stone structure on a hill overlooking Lake of the Loons. The Somersets had made a fortune, ages ago, developing Magnetohydrodynamic power stations for coastal cities. Just when they had squandered their original fortunes, they made a pair of fortuitous marriages to the Chanski family, who had built an even larger fortune investing in shipping and industrial companies in Jutland Province. They only wintered in Oz. The Chanski family home was in Amity, on the northeast coast of Delta continent, a small town with too much money for its own good.

  And when those fortunes had run their course, their survival instincts kicked in again, and they targeted the Keelers. The marriage of Bill Keeler to Delia Chanski would give the Somerset Chanski clan access to nigh-on inexhaustible wealth and status, and would provide the Keelers a chance to marry off he-who-was-thought-unmarriable. Arranged marriages were not unusual on Sapphire.

  Which was fine with Bill Keeler, as there were certain implied understandings about arranged marriages, and the rather limited husbandly duties required of them.

  The first thing he noticed about her on that crisp September had been her eyebrows. Sure, she had fabulous tits, but so did most all of the women of his acquaintance in those days. Those eyebrows, though, the way they arched above her violet-colored eyes, he couldn’t stop staring at them.

  “Why are you staring at my eyebrows?” she had asked him.

  “What eyebrows?” he had slurred in response.

  When Delia turned from the luncheon table and smiled at him wanly, Keeler had to look at her eyebrows again. There they were; beautiful arches underneath the bangs of her straight black hair, still protecting her eyes from moisture and dust, but more importantly, always letting him know exactly what she was feeling. At the moment, they indicated warm surprise.

  “So good of you to join me,” she called over to him in that smoky, yet precise accent from the upper society of Amity. She wore a conservative white suit with a pale yellow summer skirt that was too warm and too conservative for subtropical New Cleveland…

  and he loved her for it.

  He almost immediately fell to his knees beside her, unable to speak, nearly weeping.

  “What’s wrong, dear heart?” she asked him. “Are we out of the Arcadian nut liquor again, or have you just been into the Arcadian nut liquor again?” He took her hand and kissed, held it against his cheek to convince himself it was real. It was real. It was soft and warm and smelled of that expensive milled soap she ordered from that boutique back in Amity.

  “I love you, Delia,” Keeler whispered.

  The eyebrows indicated bemused annoyance. “Good Lord, you have been into the nut liquor.”

  “I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again,” he whispered.

  “Why, did you drink yourself blind last night?”

  He stared up at her. So many thoughts converged at once in his mind: he was so happy to see her, to touch, her to smell her; if she was here, maybe this was his Afterlife; although he doubted she would be ragging on him about his drinking in an actual Afterlife; actually a drink would be pretty good right now.

  “What is it?” she persisted in asking him.

  His reply came in a near-sobbing jumble as all his thoughts spilled out in his words: “So happy, me, heaven, reality, deserve, drink.”

  “Maybe you should go back to bed,” she took his face between her two hands and cradled it. She looked straight into his eyes, saw the tears in them. “Whatever is the matter, darling?”

  Keeler tried to say something, but only managed to exhale. It was as though he had forgotten how to speak.

  “What?” she insisted.

  He had to concentrate and will himself to make the words come out. “I don’t know where to start. I cannot believe you’re alive… or possibly not, but you seem real, and we’re together again, and that’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and even more wonderful.”

  “Maybe I should call Dr. Christmas,” she said.

  “Neg, neg… you see…” He paused and recovered himself a bit, tried to look her steady in the eye. “How to say this without sounding like an incoherent drunk…” She smiled patiently. “Good luck with that.”

  “I am… for the last nine years, I’ve been the captain of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus. This morning, I walked through a Gateway on a colony called Gethsemane, on the other side of the galaxy. This Gateway supposedly takes you to an Afterlife. But I woke up here, in this house, and came down to see you.”

  She nodded slowly and released his face from his hands. “I’m afraid you’ve failed, dear.

  “

  He grabbed her hand. “Seriously… Forgive my incoherence, but after twenty-one years, I am back with the woman I love again.”

  “You’re crushing my hand,” she said.

  A little voice in Keeler’s head demanded: If this is the Afterlife, wouldn’t she know that this was the Afterlife?

  He released her hand and slowly stood up from the ground. She looked him over, head to toe. “There is something different about you. I am wondering, if you had some sort of dream. And now, you wake up confused by reality.”

  Keeler winced. “In my reality, you died twenty-one years ago. That was no dream.” She was startled by this, at first. Then, she asked. “Tell me, if I am dead, do you remember how
I met my gruesome end?”

  It was painful for Keeler to recall it. “It was shortly after the second work in your trilogy was launched, As the World Turns. You went to Corvallis as part of some sort of promotional tour. We were having problems with our marriage, and I stayed behind. You went to a game of rounders. You were in the front row of the stadium. A fastball went wild, caught you right in the temple. You died instantly.”

  “How ghastly,” she patted her mouth with a napkin. “I so remember that game. It was the Corvallis Haberdashers against the New Sapporo Coopersmiths. The Haberdashers won 42-38 in extra outings. They went to the Global Sequence that year, but they lost in seven games to the New Halifax Steamrunners.”

  “I didn’t even know you liked rounders,” Keeler said. A servant he didn’t recognize helped him into a chair.

  “I didn’t much at the time, but I’ve become something of a loyalist since then. Our local squadron is not very impressive. They need a couple good utility fieldsmen, if you ask me, and a thrower who doesn’t lose his nerve in the lightning rounds.” Keeler was losing the sensation of a world spinning away from him. Everything seemed to be coming to rest. Normal conversation seemed possible. In that spirit he asked, “What happened to you. You didn’t die at that rounders match 21 years ago?” She shrugged, “Well, if you must know, I returned to New Cleveland. I finished the trilogy. The third work was called The Guiding Light. It considered the possibilities of redemption. Sales were respectable, although the critics were unimpressed. We purchased a lovely cottage in Jutland with the proceeds, and for nearly two years, we lived there and…” She blushed. “We didn’t work or bother with the family, I’ll put it that way. We were too young, too restless, too bold, too beautiful. We did marvelous things. We traveled the planet. We bought some amazing things. You developed an especial interest in antique novelty light fixtures shaped like naked women.”