John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  "You mean..."

  "I mean, I'm going to take them out!" We both jumped at the savagery in his voice. The amiable, easygoing Travis was gone for a moment. He looked away and got himself under control. Then he looked at Jubal.

  "What do you think, Jubal?"

  He was looking at his hands twisting in his lap.

  "That lady got a nasty mouth on her, sure enough." He looked up. "She really kill their families?"

  "I think you can count on it."

  He shook his head. "I didn't want no more killin'. There already been enough killin', and it all my fault."

  "It's not your fault, Jubal," Travis said.

  "He's right," Evangeline said. I nodded when Jubal looked at me.

  He was still shaking his head.

  Travis sighed, then looked at me and Evangeline.

  "Give me and Jubal a minute, you guys."

  He put his arm around Jubal and took him to the far end of the bridge. Evangeline went to the other side, keeping our backs to them, and looked out at one of the black ships. We could see a bubble on top, with windows, and somebody was standing there, looking out at us. They were too far away to make out, but I thought it was a woman in a black uniform.

  "Want to give her the finger?" Evangeline said. I shivered.

  "No, I think Travis should handle poking at snakes with a sharp stick. All I want to do is run."

  "Me, too."

  We thought about that for a while. Well, I actually thought about kicking myself repeatedly in the ass if I could bend my leg enough. Idiot! You're supposed to brag and swagger about what big balls you have to your girlfriend, aren't you? This is the girl who kicked an armed soldier in the nuts while you stood there with nothing but a dumb, stupe­fied grin on your face. What would it have cost you, popping the rod to that murdering bitch across the way? But it was too late to do it now, it would look stupid. And too late to reassure her with brave words after what you'd just said.

  All I want to do is run. Idiot!

  "I'm glad you're here, Ray," she said, and put her arm around me. I did the same.

  "I'll do what I can," I said. Idiot!

  "I know you will, Ray. I know you will."

  Well, maybe all was not lost.

  We heard only a few phrases from across the room, mostly when Travis raised his voice in frustration, but several times we heard Jubal, sounding determined.

  "I don't want no more killin'," he said. "Been too much killin'."

  Then, just a little later, Travis said, "I don't see the difference. Six of one, half a dozen of the other."

  Jubal said something, and I watched the reflection in the glass as Travis shrugged, but he looked a lot happier than he had.

  "How long do you think it'll take? We only got fifty minutes."

  "Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen."

  "Go to it, then." He took Jubal to a section of the control panel that had only a few basic dials and a joystick on it. He turned some catches under the console and lifted it from the front. Jubal bent over and stuck his head inside. Travis came over toward us, and I laughed aloud.

  "What's funny?"

  I spoke quietly, because I knew Jubal could take offense, being laughed at.

  "He just looks like a mechanic working under the hood."

  Travis looked over his shoulder; I heard Evangeline giggle.

  "When he's done, the rascal will probably pad the bill."

  "Travis, don't you think it's about time you told us what's going on?"

  "Yeah. I was trying to convince –"

  "It done, Travis." Jubal had straightened up and collapsed into one of the control chairs. He didn't look happy.

  "Already?" Jubal didn't answer. Travis sighed, put a hand on each of our shoulders. "Might as well just do it and explain it later. This is my decision, okay?"

  I didn't know what else to do but nod. Travis took his seat, looked out the window at what we figured was the command ship, and picked up the mike.

  "Calling the unidentified ship," he said. "Answer at once."

  "Did you make up your mind?" came the awful voice.

  "No more games, no more insults," Travis said. "I'd sort of like to know your name. Is that you at the window?" He waved at the dark, distant figure.

  "My name is no concern of yours. Have you made up your mind already?"

  "Yes, we have. We've decided to take you out. That's why I asked your name. It does­n't seem right to kill someone I'm looking at without knowing her name."

  She could actually laugh. I hope she enjoyed it, because it was her last one.

  "You are incredible. If you'd had weapons that can take me out, you'd have used them already."

  "No, you'd have used them. That's the difference between us, and I know it's a weak­ness, but I like to give somebody a chance to do the right thing. It's still not too late. Turn yourself in, do a little time, start a new life. There's always work for sadists."

  "You have thirty-nine minutes."

  "No, you have five seconds. And the last lesson you're going to learn in your miser­able life is this: Never assume a ship called the Second Amendment is unarmed." Travis clicked something on the control panel, and we saw her react. She didn't like what she saw. Evangeline and I turned around, and the other two ships were gone.

  Just... gone.

  Travis waved to her, and we saw her turn to shout orders to somebody, and Travis clicked the thing again, and her ship was gone.

  20

  Jubal retired to a stateroom, refusing to talk to anyone. Travis was skulking around with such a sour expression that neither Evangeline nor I thought it was the right time to talk. There was a lot of time before decisions had to be made, anyway. I didn't have the foggi­est idea of what those decisions would be, or much of a notion of our alternatives, though I was chewing that over in my mind a lot.

  Meantime, the only thing we could do was slow down. The first thing Travis did, after Jubal left us, was to turn ship and start decelerating. It would take about four days, at one-half gee. We told Travis we'd be okay with a full gee, but he said he thought he'd need us rested and alert, and he couldn't see any reason to hurry. At the end of the four days we'd be motionless relative to the solar system, and then we'd have to decide where we were going.

  Evangeline poked around the fully equipped galley and told me Travis had been tell­ing the truth. There was enough stuff in there for a trip to the stars. Knowing Travis, I wouldn't have been at all surprised if he'd had that in mind when he had the ship built. He planned for any contingency, including warfare in space, as Captain Whoever-she-was had learned in her last moments of life.

  I asked myself how I felt about that. We'd just killed an unknown number of people. Almost certainly in the hundreds. Most of them were probably just folks doing their jobs. I sure wasn't going to be hypocritical enough to say I wept for the captain... and probably a good part of the people under her command. I was glad she was dead, only regretted she hadn't seemed to suffer. But many of those people aboard were probably only doing their jobs. Maybe some of them didn't even know what the others were doing.

  Well, I figure you've got to choose your job carefully. Read the fine print. If it has anything to do with invading people and torturing them, find another job or suffer the consequences when those folks fight back.

  Evangeline was a wonderful cook. I'd had no idea, but her father was the chef at the Red Thunder, so... duh. She whipped up a jambalaya to die for and set four places at the table. Travis started wolfing his down, not looking at either of us. She spooned a big portion onto the fourth plate and went to Jubal's room. She came back without the plate.

  "He wouldn't let me in," she said, "but he took the food."

  I let a little time go by, let Travis get almost finished.

  "So... Travis... what's he mad about?"

  Travis tossed his fork onto the plate and leaned back.

  "My fault," he said, and swallowed the last mouthful. "Jubal's too gentle to hang around with me.
You heard what he said, he didn't want to kill anybody."

  "We didn't have any choice," Evangeline said.

  "He knows that. Jubal's not stupid, he's just not real logical when it comes to emo­tional things. He was always a sweet soul, even before his injuries. Now he just can't handle ugliness like that."

  "So that's what you were arguing about?"

  "Not exactly. He knew we had to do something. He was arguing we should use his new thing. His stopper bubble."

  Evangeline brightened.

  "So that's what you did? You put them in those bubbles? That means they're still alive then, right?" She caught herself, as if ashamed she was relieved to find they were alive. "I mean, that means somebody can let them out when this is all over. Put them on trial for what they did. I mean, that's better than killing them, isn't it?"

  I hugged her with one arm. I was half through the jambalaya, and I wasn't hungry anymore.

  "That's what I did, all right," Travis said. "Jubal put his new machine in the weapons system, and we froze them in those bubbles. So they're all in there, just like they were a few hours ago. That bitch, the captain is still turning around, still about to give the orders to blow up this ship. If somebody ever finds them, they'd better be ready when the bubble turns off, because she's going to be shooting at anything that moves."

  "Well, you look like you're not happy about it," she said. "Maybe I'm too soft, but I think it's better not to kill, when you can."

  "I'm with you, hon. But it's really academic."

  " 'Six of one...' " I said.

  "Half a dozen of the other. Evangeline, how do you figure we're going to find them?"

  "Well, we know where they were when you... when you stopped them."

  "That's right. We were about a billion miles north of the sun, traveling... I don't even remember, but it was millions of miles an hour. Now, I don't know if they kept traveling. Jubal wouldn't tell me. Maybe he doesn't know. From what you guys described, I think they might have just... stopped. Dead in their tracks. Remember, I've never seen one, and you say they're so black the only way we'd see them was if they blocked out some stars. Whether they stopped or kept going at their original velocity, they are a long, long way from anything. If they're still moving, they could be halfway to Polaris by the time any­one gets around to organizing a search."

  "But you said they probably just stopped. No mass, right?"

  "Like I said, it's way too much of a physics problem for me. But take the best case. Best case for them. They're motionless, a billion miles above the solar system. How is anybody going to find them?"

  She started to answer, then closed her mouth. Physics isn't her thing, but she had an instinctive feel for space and spatial orientation. Maybe that would take her to the answer I'd already arrived at.

  "They're going to be hard to find," she said, quietly.

  "Next to impossible, I'd say," Travis said. "They don't reflect light or radar. We know their position – if they aren't still moving – within about five hundred miles. Now, I guess you could come out here with a really big net and start casting around."

  "But why would they?" she said.

  "Exactly. I have a strong feeling they would be an embarrassment to whoever hired them, if this all comes out the way I'm hoping it will. Best just to forget about them. I doubt anyone even knows they were out here except for the people who ordered them to follow me... and the four of us."

  We were quiet for a while.

  "It's really sort of a theoretical question, I guess," Travis said, at last. "That's why I gave in. I told Jubal if he could modify my Squeezer to make a stopper, then we'd use that. If he could do it in less than an hour. He must have known he could. Anyway, in a philosophical sense, he's right. He's been in one, and he came out fine. Time stopped for him. If I'd used the Squeezer, we'd know that everything inside just came apart. This way, they're at least potentially alive in there. Probably for a very, very long time."

  I remembered Jubal's image of what would have happened to him if I hadn't thought of opening the black bubble with the thing he'd sent me. Jubal, inside a black bubble, sitting on the cosmic egg after the biggest squeeze of all, as every atom of matter in the universe collapsed into one unimaginable thing where mass, matter, energy, time, inertia, gravity... none of it existed... and the bubble floating on top.

  "I'm not going to swear anybody to secrecy," Travis said. "Y'all can do what you want to do. But Jubal and I decided there was no reason to ever tell anybody what happened out here. I'd like to just leave it that three ships came chasing out after me, and I never even knew they were there. I found you guys, took you aboard... and they vanished."

  "Well, that's what happened, isn't it?" I said. "The last part, anyway. I don't see any reason we have to tell anyone the story. I'll probably tell Mom and Dad, though."

  "You go ahead and do that. I'd trust Manny and Kelly with anything."

  Evangeline looked at us. She shrugged.

  "I won't miss the bastards. I may tell my dad, but I might wait a while to do it."

  "Like I said, do what you think best. Now. Anybody got any ideas where we should go?"

  That was the question, of course. Soon we'd know if our families had been picked up, but for now we were in the dark about that. Even decelerating, every second took us farther away from the solar system. Then it would take a while to build up some speed on our way back home. It would be a week before we even made it back to the region of space that might or might not contain the three black bubbles with people frozen in time inside them.

  It was then we would have to decide where to go and what to do when we got there.

  Mars was out. We had to assume that somebody was still in charge there, and it wouldn't be anyone friendly to us. Earth and Luna were out, too, for even more obvious reasons. Where else was there?

  There were small settlements on and inside a few asteroids, on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, some free-floating space habitats near the rings of Saturn. Most of them were tourist destinations or scientific research stations. Pretty tough to hide in any of them. The rest were "communities of affinity," as the sociologists called them. There was a large group of Mormons on Ceres, all-Muslim colonies on Enceladus and Tethys, various New Age philosophical retreats here and there. There was New Africa on Ganymede. Even harder to hide in any of those.

  Jubal came out of his room on the second day and acted as if nothing had happened. That was his way. He'd... brood, or sulk, or pout, depending on how you wanted to look at it, then it would be forgotten. He didn't bear grudges, and he didn't dwell on slights or disagreements. A day alone and he was back.

  Still, we all sort of tiptoed around each other for the next day, as people who had shared in something we knew had to be done, but couldn't find it in ourselves to be proud about. Nobody talked about what we had done, and we all seemed content to leave it that way.

  I pretended to sleep in my stateroom, but every night when Jubal was safely tucked away I made my way down the dim corridor to Evangeline's. It was annoying, but worth it to keep Jubal in a good mood. She did most of our cooking, helped by Jubal, who knew a thing or two. Jubal was lavish in his praise of her cuisine, which leaned heavily toward Cajun and soul food. It was a great deal for me and Travis, since both of us were helpless in the kitchen.

  We'd never have known it if Travis hadn't told us, but we eventually reached what we'd been calling the zero point. That meant we were no longer moving away from the sun. Without a pause we began to move in-system again.

  "Lady and gents," he said, "this is as far from the sun as I've ever been. If we were in the ecliptic, we'd be out beyond Neptune."

  I guess that impressed him more than it did me and Evangeline. He'd grown up in an era when it would take a long time to get out here. We had always thought of Neptune as a place we'd probably visit someday. But I'd never expected to be out in this direction.

  For the first time since the black ships, Travis called us all together
after the evening meal that night. And he got right to it.

  "Ray, Evangeline, I know Jubal told you his take on what is probably the worst-kept secret of this century. Just what it was that hit us and caused the Atlantic tsunami."

  "He told us it was a starship," Evangeline said.

  "Had to be," Jubal said. "Nothin' else that big could go that fast."

  I didn't say anything. The "official" explanation was that it was some previously unknown natural phenomenon. That was their story, and they were sticking to it. Cur­rently they were trying to make the math work such that it might have been some sort of ejecta from a supernova. Which just proves you could always find somebody to whore for the government in any field, including astronomy.

  "That's what I've been working on since you guys went back to Mars," Travis said. "Obviously it was something propelled by some sort of stardrive, either the bubble or something invented by some other civilization. My money was always on it being one of ours, and now I know it was."

  I'd always expected it, too, and that was certainly the dominant theory buzzing around the web. But it was sobering to see that Travis believed it.

  "Jubal told you he thought it might have been an epidemic. Maybe they got to another star system, landed, picked up some sort of virus, headed home, all died, and the autopilot just kept them blasting for home.

  I never liked that. If I was making an autopilot, I'd set it up to turn ship automatically when the time came, and decelerate until it parked itself in Earth orbit, even if it was full of dead people. But I know some people can do some damn-fool things, and a lot of damn fools were building and launching starships back when this one must have taken off."

  He was right about that. I'd read about it in history class. A lot of nations, not all of them with much of a history of engineering excellence, had built starships and launched them soon after it became possible to do so without busting the national budget. Some nations who couldn't afford it, piss-poor countries headed by strongmen, military dicta­tors, or just flat-out psychotics like the people who ruled North Korea at the turn of the century, went ahead and did it anyway, as a matter of "national pride." They'd hire an astronomer to pick out a star known to have planets that nobody else was heading for already, hire engineers who hadn't made the grade in other jobs, slap something together fast and cheap, and set out for the glory of the Great State of Fuckupistan.