“Maybe if you fucking explained what’s going on?” Vat asked gruffly.
Murphy met Vat’s stare. “You, along with the rest of the survivors of the attack on that helicopter, were abducted by an alien race known as the Ktor and subsequently smuggled off Earth.” Vat shook his head and started to laugh. Murphy continued, “Our group represents what we believe are the last taken before the Ktor ceased such operations, likely because our technology was becoming advanced enough to spot their ships.
“There are about a hundred more like you in this station who were abducted from Earth.”
“You know,” Vat said when Murphy stopped, “I always loved science fiction. You should have made this into a movie!”
“Nothing ever written is as real as this,” Murphy said.
“You mentioned aliens?” Murphy nodded. Vat recalled the word. “Ktor?”
“You got that faster than I did.” Murphy shrugged. “I believe I was puking, at this point.”
“Why?”
Murphy’s face darkened. “Long story.”
“Right. Anyway, aliens. I suppose they’re all photogenic? Look like little teddy bears, or can make bicycles fly?”
“No, in fact, they look just like us.”
“So, you went with the Star Trek model huh? That saves on special effects.”
“Vat, we need to move this along. The evaluation of your file said you would accept this as well or better than many of the others. But you’re being quite a bit more stubborn when it comes to grasping the basic principles.”
“What, that I’ve been abducted by aliens, and a handy Army major is here explaining everything?”
“No, that you are in space now, part of a group of soldiers taken from Earth. We’re fighting an interstellar war with the aliens who abducted us. You are light years from Earth and it’s 133 years since the chopper went down.”
Vat opened his mouth to reply, closed it, opened it again. “Oof,” was all he could muster.
“Getting the picture?”
“Yeah, I don’t know if I believe it, though.”
“That’s sensible,” Murphy said. “Doesn’t any of this bother you?”
“Not really,” Vat said and shrugged. “I didn’t like anyone back then, anyhow.” There was that one general…”Tell me what’s going on.”
Murphy nodded and took a device from his bag. It was not made on Earth. Vat quickly realized it was a computer far more advanced than anything available in 1993, even more than the stuff DARPA had hidden away.
Murphy began laying out the facts.
* * * * *
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Spin One
The habitat, a hollowed out asteroid, was straight out of science fiction. Vat was pretty amazed, at first. But soon it was just boring and cold, just like the SpinDogs who lived in it. They were a group of cliquish assholes, too.
The so-called “Lost Soldiers,” were housed together while most of them got ready for some hare-brained mission on the local planet, R’Bak. The vast majority of their equipment had been snatched by the Ktor at the same time as the humans they’d kidnapped. Some gear was higher tech, either current-day Earth or provided by the Dornaani. There was precious little of that, though. The brains behind the operations, some guys named Nephew and Nuncle, had taken off before they’d woken Vat, leaving Murphy and his odd balls to hold the rear and establish a base for them to return to, despite plenty of local opposition. And once the planet-scorching Searing began, an even bigger bunch of bad guys from the neighboring system would arrive to raid R’Bak for resources.
“Just gets better and better,” Vat had said as he read the reports. The reality was, he didn’t want a fucking thing to do with the clusterfuck Murphy had taken charge of. Not in the least. Of course, he’d promised Murphy he’d help, so he did odd jobs, helped newly thawed soldiers to adjust, and tried to find an angle.
They had access to a machine from the Dornaani which allowed you to learn things in your sleep. Or at least it seemed like you were asleep. Dream learning, some of the Lost Soldiers called it. Vat refused to get hooked up to the thing. It was mainly used for languages anyway. He didn’t need a machine to learn languages.
“Hey, Vat, your bid, comrade!”
Vat snapped out of his reverie and glanced at his cards. He tossed a stick of chewing gum into the growing pile of assorted items without a second thought. The coin of the realm was different items they’d had on them when they were put into the freezers. Several curses ensued, and cards hit the table.
“Ublyudok,” Artyom spat.
“I know who my mother was,” Vat replied, in Russian. “Do you?”
Artyom’s eyes grew hard in a way most Americans had never seen. He’d told Vat his last memory of Earth was Kursk, where’d been visited by a strange man in a suit with sunglasses offering him a chance to live, before he’d spent almost two centuries asleep. He’d survived the siege of Stalingrad too.
“Da, I know her. She was a bitch,” Artyom said and laughed uproariously. He took a deep drink of chaat, which was basically vodka or close enough that Artyom didn’t care. “I want to see your cards.” He tossed in a cigarette: Call. Men’s eyes bugged out at the sight of the smoke. They all looked longingly at it.
Nobody else at the table was interested in raising; they all folded. It was just Artyom and Vat. Vat put down his cards: two, seven, nine, king, and ace. All spades. A flush.
“Blyad!” Artyom spat and threw his cards down. He had a straight. “You have the luck of the devil,” Artyom said and watched Vat collect the booty. There wasn’t much of a currency among the Lost Soldiers: a problem for every plan Vat had conceived.
“I have it on good authority there is no devil,” Vat replied. “He’d be in this star system if there was one.”
The other five who’d been playing drifted off, but Artyom didn’t. He watched Vat secure his winnings and carefully put the cards back into a holder. He’d traded a RockHound for the cards. It cost Vat a cylinder of helium, which wouldn’t turn up missing for some time.
“I have question,” Artyom said.
I assumed as much when you didn’t leave. “What is it?” Vat asked.
“You believe it?”
“Believe what?”
“All of this,” Artyom said, waving his big, hairy arms. “This is a spaceship, and we are long way from Earth. Everyone we know dead. How can this be?”
Vat knew Artyom was one of the Lost Soldiers who was still struggling with the situation. There were a dozen of them, and they were his nominal responsibility.
“Shepherd them,” Murphy had said. “See if you can move them along the pathway to acceptance. We need every man and woman we can get. The older ones, the PreBooms, are the hardest.” PreBoom, or pre-Baby Boomers, was shorthand for anyone who’d been snatched before Vietnam. The societies which were pre-spaceflight seemed the least able to just accept it and move on. In his own way, Artyom was a poster child for them. Kind of an Extra-Lost Soldier.
“Yes, Artyom, I do believe that all this is real.”
Artyom nodded for several seconds, slowly. It was distinctly Russian and didn’t mean he agreed, but that he was thinking about it. “If this true, then I would like to kill these Ka-Whores who took me from my Natasha.” It was a bastardization of Ktor, but Vat thought it was amusing.
“Wife?”
“Bah!” Artyom spat on the polished rock floor of the room. “She left me for party boss when war started. No, Natasha is my little girl.” The hard eyes softened and became moist. Vat knew what he was thinking. Natasha was dead. Any children Natasha had were dead, and probably their children, too. None of them were so much as a footnote in a history book.
Artyom finally stopped nodding. “Well,” he swept his arm at the gray walls, “I think about this more.” He took another deep drink of chaat. He’d already had enough to launch a rocket. “You sleep well, friend.”
“You, too,” Vat said and watched Artyom get up and leave. The man didn’t e
ven stagger. It was a few seconds before he realized Artyom had called him friend.
“What was that all about?”
He turned around and saw a woman in a flight suit standing in the hallway. The impromptu poker game had happened in a little alcove not far from the refectory. It wasn’t hard to find privacy anymore; most of the Lost Soldiers were either in other areas training, preparing to deploy to R’Bak, or already there.
She was short, with dark, close-cut hair and a curvy build. The flight suit fit her well. She had captain’s bars on her epaulet, and a pair of embroidered wings rode over the name patch: Bruce.
“Bruce is a strange name for a woman,” Vat said as he finished putting the cards away.
Her sharp eyes took notice of what he was doing before flicking back to his face. “My callsign,” she said. “Mara ‘Bruce’ Lee.”
“Ah,” Vat said, nodding.
“I’m into karate, too; it all came together.”
Vat looked at her again and finally recognized the voice. “You were the helo pilot out of Mogadishu.”
“Correct,” she said. “And you were John Q. Public.”
Vat laughed and nodded. He rose, walked over and offered his hand. “Victor Allen Thomas. Call me Vat.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said and gave his hand a firm shake. None of the female service members ever offered a soft shake. “I never found out: NSA?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Contractor.”
“That explains why you had a different name on the flight roster.”
Fuck. Good memory, too. “Okay, I might have been doing some secret-squirrel shit.”
“You’re prior service, but not very old.”
“I left the service for medical reasons.” Well, it wasn’t a lie, really. Anatomy was involved. Sort of. “Army. Logistics. Made first lieutenant and then made my exit.” No need to mention that he’d been led to the door.
She nodded, taking it all in. “So, what was the Russki yelling about?”
“Who, Artyom?” he asked, gesturing in the direction his new friend had taken. She nodded. “He’s one of those who haven’t adapted well. He was taken from the Battle of Kursk.”
“Holy shit,” Mara said.
“Yeah. I think I made progress tonight.”
“You only had to get him shitfaced and take all his cigarettes.”
Vat gave her an overly sheepish look. “Don’t turn us in, we’re not supposed to have smokes. Not that there are very many anyway. The SpinDogs would shit themselves if they knew we were smoking up the place.”
“SpinDogs have this herb they smoke, hookah-style.” Vat’s eyebrows went up. He’d heard rumors. “It’s not quite like marijuana, but similar.”
Vat made a mental note to look into this lead.
“You don’t smoke, though,” she said, not a question.
“No, filthy habit.” She looked confused as he finished carefully stashing the smokes, gum, and various pills in a plastic container. “Long story. You don’t, eh, report to Murphy…do you?”
“Don’t we all?”
“True.”
“I’m just a pilot getting ready to head back dirtside.”
“Dirtside?”
“Down to R’Bak.” Her voice hardened; her eyes became distant for a moment. “They have some new Hueys down there, and I’m training SpinDogs to fly them. What about you? Going down soon?”
“No, I’m fine up here.” She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “You be careful on the planet, okay?”
“Sure. Maybe we’ll cross paths again sometime.”
“You know,” he said, “I’d like that.” He watched her go. She was by far the best-looking female he’d seen since they woke him up. No doubt every soldier in the place was following her around like a puppy dog. “I wonder who does her hair?”
* * * * *
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Spin One
Two weeks passed, and Vat’s nightly poker crew became steady. Despite a breakthrough in understanding, or at least acceptance, Artyom kept on feigning psychological instability. Not a very hard act for him, Vat reflected, and it kept him on Spin One. He, too, had decided it was preferable to the insanity down on R’Bak. People were coming back now, some shot up pretty badly. Considering the amazing stories about the R’Bak’s healing herbs, you had to really work to outstrip the native healers’ abilities.
Atryom had been assigned to move cargos around the docking bays; not an exciting job, but better than the alternative. “If I’d wanted to get filled with bullets, I would have told commissars to fuck off at Stalingrad,” Artyom said as he saw and raised the bid. They’d found little bottles and filled them with chaat when the meager supply of cigarettes disappeared. Most of the Lost Soldiers decided they didn’t want to part with the few they’d brought through time. Vat had managed to win quite a few of them before that, though. There was interesting stuff that had made the trip through time with the Lost Soldiers in the stasis devices Murphy called symbiopods. However, like the smokes, there was not a lot of it.
“My office was in Nagasaki, where we researched submarine technology,” Taiki said. He looked at Vat. “If I had made it back to Japan, you Americans would have blown me up with your bomb!” Taiki Komatsu was a former private of the Imperial Japanese Military Kenpeitai, the secret police. He’d been on a submarine returning with German technology in a late war exchange. They never made it. Last he remembered, his boat was being bracketed by depth charges soon after leaving Vichy France. Then he woke up here, like Vat.
Taiki wasn’t much of a patriot; he’d become a technician at a shipyard, like his father. Then, because he knew German, he was recruited for the Kenpeitai because his father insisted. He hated boats and had admitted to Vat he couldn’t even swim. He’d joined Vat’s group shortly after Vat met Mara.
“Japs had it comin’ after Pearl, you ask me,” Sam Potts said. A fellow American, Potts had been a corporal with the 101st Airborne defending Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He’d ended up in a freezer after meeting another mysterious man in sunglasses.
Vat was still trying to make sense of Pott’s accent. It sounded like classic Georgia from the 1940s, but it had a strange pacing and inflection. He figured it was some older family member, probably recently immigrated to the US, which had influenced young Sam Potts as a kid. It wasn’t uncommon.
“I told you,” Vat said, “no hacking on each other’s country. They’re all gone now anyway.”
Potts snorted and examined his cards.
The Lost Soldier beside him snorted in response. “You Americans, always setting the terms.”
“I said be nice, Lech, or you can find someone else to play with.”
Private Lech Kowak was the last to find his way into Vat’s orbit. He’d been aboard the storied Polish submarine Orzel, which had escaped to Britain but was later sunk by a British plane by accident. The Ktor had taken the crew before the ship went down.
“Poland didn’t bluster,” Lech said and waved a hand at Potts.
“No, Poland surrendered,” Artyom said.
Everyone laughed, except Lech, who grunted and took a drink of chaat.
Vat liked the group, and they’d quickly become loyal to him. The four had been the only Lost Soldiers who’d taken off the sleep learning helmets when they were left alone; none of them liked the possibility that their minds might be manipulated, as well. So they’d only become passingly familiar with what the SpinDogs called ‘first’ or ‘old’ Ktor. The problem was that passingly familiar wasn’t enough for most things. There were ten or more languages between the Lost Soldiers, and quite a few regional dialects.
When they got together, Vat quickly and fluidly switched between Yiddish, Russian, Japanese, English, and Ktor without missing a beat. He didn’t think about it, and his ability in each language steadily improved. Lech, who’d been the equivalent of a junior professor before the war, labeled Vat a “Linguistic Metamorph.” Vat figured it was pseu
do-intellectual gobbledygook. Still, they’d all become better at Ktor, thanks to him.
But he had a new problem: no assignment, not since all the “acclimatization” cases he’d been helping had disappeared. Vat suspected they’d been frozen again. The only Lost Soldiers left on the habitat were either working in their specialties, recovering from injuries after battles on R’Bak, or part of his motley crew. He kept his head down, but sooner or later, Murphy would catch up with him.
“What do you think Murphy will do with us?” Taiki asked, seemingly reading Vat’s mind as Vat shuffled the deck between hands. “He seemed anxious last time I see him.” Taiki had spoken in Japanese, like he usually did when he wasn’t thinking about it, so Vat repeated the question in slow, clearly pronounced Ktor for the others’ benefit.
“You have these atomic bombs, no?” Komatsu asked. Vat nodded. “Use them on this planet and be done with it.”
“We need the planet,” Vat explained again. “As well as some of the assets stashed there. It’s a fall back and resupply location while the attack is going on elsewhere in the galaxy.” It was three-quarters bullshit, but it sure sounded cool.
“Better someone else dying than us,” Lech said in Ktor. This time they all nodded.
The game broke up when most of the chaat had been won or drunk. Vat left and wandered the corridors carved from space rock. His mind worked furiously. Every day that went by meant it was increasingly likely that his hand would be forced. Vat had gotten away with his trade for as long as he had without letting his hand get forced. Always have options, were his watchwords.
Not paying attention to where he was going, Vat ended up in one of the busy operational areas where they were staging ships deploying to R’Bak’s surface. A dozen large storage rooms were being used to store the Lost Soldiers’ equipment. He’d spent a fair amount of time there, talking with other Lost Soldiers, and “finding” certain things. He hadn’t intended to end up there, but he decided to take a look around. Just on general principles.
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