There is something very odd up here, Keeva announced. Her voice was a welcome intrusion.
“What are you seeing?” Tommy looked away from the pathetic scene.
When someone opens a tunnel through space-time, they leave a trace, an artifact that remains for thousands of years. There are twenty-six artifacts that all appeared at roughly the same time as the asteroid impact. They sit directly above the crater. There are twenty-six artifacts indicating a departure a few days later.
“A rescue attempt?” Tommy looked over at his companions. Gelna looked up at the soaring space above them.
“Or an attack,” Kale growled. He nodded at Gelna. “The Dactari brought mass drivers last time they attacked us.”
“The Republic didn’t exist three thousand years ago.” Gelna met Kale’s gaze. “The Republic didn’t take shape for another few centuries.”
“No, but your ancestors were the Empire’s military race,” Kale replied. “They would have been the ones bringing a mass driver here, if your emperor decided this planet would be more trouble than it was worth.”
“Whatever happened here,” Tommy cut in, “we certainly can’t hold Gelna personally responsible for it. Still, if we hadn’t brought the Midgaard back with us when we returned home from Khola…”
If they hadn’t brought their new ally to the battle, the Dactari would have had the time to destroy all life on Earth. As it was, the defensive fleet had intercepted and boarded five mass drivers on their way in from the Kuiper Belt. Those captured ships were now with the Alliance fleet, somewhere in the Dactari Republic.
“Let’s have a look at that station in orbit,” Tommy suggested. He had a hunch that it might explain why this planet was attacked, or at least, if it was attacked.
When they opened their eyes, they were in a large compartment. I think you will find this space to be illuminating, Keeva suggested cryptically.
The station had long ago lost its ability to convert sunlight into power and the room was dark. Keeva had adjusted their view to mimic a fully-lit facility. As the three were still physically on the bridge of the Dark Defiance, pretty much any kind of adjustment was possible.
“Hey.” Kale nudged Tommy and pointed to the middle of the room where a small drone lay in a docking cradle. “Back end of that thing look familiar?”
Tommy approached the small craft. “That ring array kind of reminds me of the engine room on the Völund,” he said in surprise. “Rather odd,” he mused. “They had almost no presence up here, but they were working on an advanced, interstellar engine?”
“Keeva, how did this civilization compare to Humans,” Kale asked. “More specifically, how advanced were they technically?”
They were far more sophisticated than your species. Their technology was several decades ahead of yours. Considering the exponential increase common in technological advancement, the difference is considerable.
“So they just didn’t bother with space?” Kale sounded dubious.
“Or they didn’t bother until theories came along that sparked their imaginations,” Tommy suggested. He frowned, feeling a tingling at the back of his neck. He reached out to the small vehicle, even though he couldn’t physically touch it. “What if they created the first one?” His voice was almost a whisper.
“The first distortion drive?” Kale approached from the other side, gazing down at the drone.
“Yeah. Think about it.” Tommy’s voice grew in volume. “Three thousand years ago, the Empire was starting to realize their tunneling drives were the cause of the increasing number of drop-out disasters. Ships were appearing on top of the artifacts left by previous voyages. It was a rare thing for thousands of years but the occurrences suddenly started to increase at an alarming rate. Pretty soon, passenger and commercial traffic came to a standstill because folks have a natural fear of being scattered all over space.”
“Some folks are funny that way.” Kale nodded.
“Yeah, well, only the military was willing to travel by tunnel drive anymore,” Tommy went on. “What if they realized what these guys were working on and just took it?” He looked over at Gelna. “The records indicate the distortion drive was discovered shortly after the dangers of tunneling space became apparent.”
“But it was still too late to save the Empire,” Gelna replied with a shrug.
“Yeah, but one planet – say Dactar, for example – could have pushed the development of this new technology and used it to retake some of the old imperial worlds.” Tommy looked back at the little vehicle. “It’s not as fast as tunneling, but when the only other alternative takes centuries, what’s a few months?”
“But why kill this planet?” Gelna demanded. “It was no threat.”
“Sure it was,” Kale retorted. “They stood between the Dactari and their stranglehold on interstellar travel.”
“It does make sense,” Tommy added. “Distortion drives appeared too late to resurrect an imperial economy based on instant transport, but they would have supported the birth of something new.”
“Like the Dactari Republic,” Kale offered.
Changing Humanity
The Dawang Cheng
Dwight stared at his coffee. It was the same thing every morning: Wiley, an orderly from the Midway, would bring him a cup of coffee along with whatever he could scrounge from the current ship’s mess by way of breakfast. Dwight would make a half-hearted attempt at eating so as not to insult the young man, who seemed to hold him in awe as the one who brought immortality to the fleet.
And then the killing would begin.
This was his fourth Chinese ship, or maybe the fifth – he wasn’t sure anymore and, though he could have asked Wiley and gotten a definite answer, he was too numb to care. A television outside their cordoned area of the hangar bay was playing the Mandarin version of the video that Dwight had suggested.
He listened idly to the voice, his mind overlaying the basic information from the English version. The speaker introduced himself, going on to state his expected lifespan now that he had been given his shot and cleared the one-hour testing period. Dwight had no idea how long it might take to say the same phrases in Mandarin, but the intonation seemed to indicate that the speaker was now explaining the process.
After the shots, the crewmen would remain in restraints for an hour. Those who showed no signs of the mutated virus would be released to their duties, secure in the knowledge that they would now live for at least ten times the normal Human span.
Those who fell into that small – very small – percentage (Dwight was certain he had noticed that reinforcement in the speech) would be given privacy and an hour to record a final message for comrades and family. After the hour, they would receive a shot that would prevent them having to go through the horrific process of turning.
Those who chose to forgo the final hour could opt to have their second shot immediately.
This assignment was actually supposed to be an easier rotation. Strauss and two of his doctors were each leading similar clinics on three of the carriers today. They had overridden Dwight’s insistence that he be responsible for every termination in the fleet and were, even now, preparing their doses on the massive hangar decks of the biggest vessels ever made by Humans. They had guessed at Dwight’s reasons, rightly assuming he had taken on the task as a penance of sorts. They had wrongly assumed that the self assigned punishment was for bringing the plague to the fleet.
It was for his role in creating the plague in the first place.
With a crew of only twenty-five hundred, the huge supply ship would probably average three doomed crewmen per hour, while Strauss and his doctors would face closer to forty. After they had finished those three carriers, they would spend the next ten days in a marathon of death, vaccinating the remaining thirty carriers. They would then join Dwight as he worked his way through the smaller cruisers, frigates and support ships. One welcome distraction, oddly enough, was the culture shock encountered on the various ships.
The first thing that he had noticed when boarding a Chinese ship hadn’t been the language; it was the uniformity. Their uniforms were falling apart, just as uniforms were fast deteriorating aboard the western vessels, but on the Chinese ships officers of the various divisions still enforced a uniform look.
If several crew members had worn the lower cuffs off their fatigues, common in engineering sections where low mounted pipe fittings often snagged at the fabric, then the entire division was made to shorten their trousers. Weapons techs, who often ripped their sleeves while servicing the vessels various guns, were now uniformly short-sleeved.
The other major difference was the smaller Marine escort. Drawn from the Hexi Zoulang, Admiral Hu’s flagship, they were typically half the escort Dwight arrived with when inoculating a western vessel. Despite their fear of the process, the Chinese crews seemed loath to display their reluctance in front of him.
Disturbances still occurred but far less frequently. He had no idea if it was a cultural thing or simply a product of the iron discipline found aboard the PLA vessels.
He realized Wiley was there, trying to catch his attention. The inoculation team, drawn from the Dawang Cheng’s sick bay, was ready to begin testing. Sighing, Dwight gave a nod and the white-coated men and women headed for their assigned cubicles.
In just a few minutes, he would know how many crew from this shift would require his services. He would be killing them in just over an hour, assuming nobody wanted to have their shot immediately.
For a crew of just over five thousand, the team would vaccinate roughly seventeen hundred per shift. That meant he would have to inject roughly thirty people every eight hours. If previous experience was any guide, the unfortunate crew members aboard this vessel were less likely to take their despair out on him as he administered their terminal injection.
He actually felt better when the patient raged at him. It somehow made him feel less like a fraud.
It would be hours before he grew tired enough to catch any sleep between the injections. With a hundred patients per hour, odds would always be in favor of there being three or more crew from each batch in which the retrovirus had mutated. On previous vessels, he had actually managed to get almost a full hour of sleep between the terminations.
Every time, he had been horrified that he was able to sleep while some poor young man or woman was recording their last thoughts for transmission. The medical staff doing the injections were relieved every eight hours, but he didn’t begrudge them their reprieve. After all, they were only doing what was necessary.
Necessary because of his own research.
At loose ends for the moment, he took his coffee and exited the forest of temporary cubicles, walking to the starboard side of the hangar. He sat on the open rear ramp of a shuttle and took a tentative sip of the black liquid.
It hadn’t been so long ago that he had been part of the research team that created the plague. They had no idea of the horrors they would unleash upon Earth. At the time, they had been focused on replicating the incredible longevity of the Midgaard. The limit of his cynicism had been his assumption that the discovery would be tightly controlled by the political and economic elite.
In his wildest dreams, he had never imagined Earth with more than three quarters of the population dead. Not just dead, he corrected himself. Dead but still walking.
He looked up as the first of the patients were being released. All the usual emotions were visible. Some showed relief at knowing they wouldn’t be dead in the next hour. A few seemed to realize they might not even be dead several centuries from now. They were the ones with the quietly meditative attitude. A few, invariably, chatted and joked as they headed for the hangar exit.
Almost all of them looked around at their fellow survivors, trying to identify who might be missing. One had stopped and moved to the side, close to where Dwight sat. He watched his emerging comrades, looking calm but for the constant clenching and unclenching of his fists. He wore the unified fleet insignia of a petty officer.
Dwight often took up station at the exit. He found it was one of the few things keeping him sane. Seeing the thousands of survivors, knowing they would live for centuries, was the only compensation for having to kill those who would turn as a result of the failed injections. Sometimes, scenes like this managed to sour his compensation.
An orderly came out from behind the temporary wall as the crowd was thinning. He saw the waiting man and headed for him. During the short conversation, the young petty officer’s shoulders began to sag and his fists opened to hang listlessly by his side. The orderly indicated the wall with a wave of his hand before stepping away to approach Dwight.
“We have only one patient for you this time, Dr. Young.” He looked down at the tablet in his hand. “A young hai jun zhong wei – a junior lieutenant.” By standing orders, the names were never provided to Dwight. “She is waiting for her husband to join her, but she does not wish a long goodbye.”
The standard prohibition against fraternization between commissioned and non-commissioned personnel had been struck down not long after the fleet had realized they were cut off from Earth. With a looming personnel shortage and the knowledge that they might never see home again, the balance between discipline and survival had shifted quickly. As long as a couple registered their intentions, it was now legal for an NCO and an officer to enter into a relationship.
That didn’t mean the fleet had turned into a love-in. There had already been a trial of a lieutenant and one of his subordinates for concealing their affair. Though fraternization was now permitted, it was still forbidden for the two participants to work together. It was incredibly injurious to discipline and good order for an officer to be sleeping with one of his or her NCO’s. Every decision would be scrutinized and dissected by the other crew members who would suspect favoritism in a service that often demanded dangerous activity.
Their crime had not been the affair but, rather, their failure to report it. A simple transfer would have allowed them to continue in their relationship, but they had sought to hide it, unwilling to work apart. In consequence, the officer had lost his commission and the NCO had been broken back to ordinary seaman. They were still together, but now they had to share much smaller accommodations.
The coffee felt sour in Dwight’s half empty-stomach. “I’ll be right there,” he replied. He watched the orderly walk away. He may hate this work, but at least his patients still have hope when he injects them with the serum. All I have to offer is a quiet death. He got up and walked back into the team cubicle where the doses were stored.
Setting his coffee mug down on top of the small portable refrigerator, he leaned down and took out two dose packages. There would be two intravenous lines, one in each of the young officer’s arms. The second was there as a backup. If anything went wrong with the first line, he needed to be able to move on quickly to the second. Nobody should have to wait for technical difficulties when they were facing the end of their life.
He sat on the stool, noticing, now, the muffled sounds of abject despair that came from the other side of the low walls. His throat burned as he fought down the wave of emotion. He remembered one young woman on the Trafalgar who hadn’t learned of her man’s death until it was too late. The seaman couldn’t bear the idea of her watching him die and so he used his recording to say goodbye.
She had screamed and raged. Including everyone in her wrath, reserving the greatest anger for her departed mate for not giving her the chance to say goodbye. Dwight had stood by helplessly until one of the orderlies had gently reminded her that there were others waiting for her to stop so they could record their own last words to send home.
Absorbing the rebuke, she had nodded silently and then left, finally accepting the data chip with her lover’s last message.
There was Wiley again. God, how he was coming to hate the man’s face! Dwight stood and followed him into the cubicle where the young couple waited. The petty officer was by the gurney, holding the office
r’s hand where it was strapped to the rails.
By any standard, she was a lovely woman and Dwight fought back an image of the same face covered with lesions, the skin loose and translucent. Without these shots, it would be inevitable. Without Dwight and his old research team, none of this would have happened. He stood by the left hand IV and waited quietly.
The young woman looked up at him, her eyes rimmed red and her cheeks wet. She nodded and turned back to her husband who leaned over to press his face against hers. They sobbed quietly as Dwight injected the large dose of barbiturate. In less than half a minute, she fell quiet and the petty officer buried his face against her neck, unable to control his anguish any longer.
Dwight slipped out as quietly as he could and headed back for the small refrigerator. He knelt and opened the door, stopping to stare at the needle in his hand. No easy escape for you, he thought. You haven’t even begun to pay your debt…
He put the needle back and closed the door. He would be needing it again within the next two hours. Dwight headed for his cot. He didn’t think he would sleep, but he was too drained to deal with anyone. Wiley might even leave him alone if he thought he was sleeping.
Picking up a Few Things
Caurtez, Tauhento
Harry was feeling the thrill of the hunt, even though it was starting to look like an easy takedown. Ro’j Yoyeco didn’t seem to have a care in the worlds. The smuggler stopped at a food vendor, the shop’s permanent concrete foundation proudly proclaiming the long lease enjoyed by its owners. This was the kind of place where you could eat without poisoning yourself for half a week.
Harry had quickly learned to steer clear of any food vendor that had mag lifters on it. His ancient memories of Oaxes were much the same. The markets were constantly shifting masses of various sized structures. Alleyways appeared and disappeared on a regular basis as shops came and went.
As word got out about a vendor selling tainted meat or passing off carrion-eaters as prime fowl, the proprietor would send out a family member to scout a new location. Shortly after nightfall, the entire shop would lift off while his employees scrambled about the exterior scaffolds, changing the appearance with apparent disregard for their own safety.
The Orphan Alliance Page 10
