by JournalStone
JournalStone’s 2011
Warped Words
90 Minutes
to Live
Compiled By
Joel Kirkpatrick
JournalStone
San Francisco
Copyright ©2011 by Christopher C. Payne
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel either are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
ISBN: 978-1-936564-33-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-936564-34-7 (dsj)
ISBN: 978-1-936564-35-4 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 201194318
Printed in the United States of America
JournalStone rev. date:
Cover Design: Denis Daniel
Cover Art: Philip Renne
Edited By: Elizabeth Reuter
Dedication
To Rocky Wood
Additional titles from JournalStone:
Shaman’s Blood
Anne C. Petty
The Traiteur’s Ring
Jeffrey Wilson
Jokers Club
Gregory Bastianelli
Ghosts of Coronado Bay
J.G. Faherty
Imperial Hostage,
Book 1 of the Destruction Series
Phil Cantrill
That Which Should Not Be
Brett J. Talley
Reign of the Nightmare Prince
Mike Phillips
Available through your local and online bookseller or at www.journalstone.com
Contents
Dead Already
John La Rue
Godforsaken
Brad Carpenter
Acapulco Blue
Bruce Golden
The Writer
Jeffrey Wilson
An Eye for an Eye
Brett J. Talley
House of Roses
Jasmine Cabanaw
City of Fire
Timothy Miller
Roque’s Requiem
Bill Patterson
The Glade
Peter Orr
Baby Girl
Nu Yang
Uninvited
JG Faherty
Mack and Stretch
Save the Earth
David Perlmutter
In the Shadow
of the Banyan Tree
Jennifer Phillips
1st Place
Dead Already
(Science Fiction)
By
John La Rue
Smitty’s a good kid.
He ducks through the hatchways ahead of me; pops a corner, pretty good for anybody born after the war. A little over-eager maybe but I let him do it. There’s no need; this ship is dead already and so is everyone on it.
If anyone is still here.
“Anything doing?” Captain Jaz buzzes us from back aboard the Lancer.
“No ma’am,” I report. “Empty hallways.”
It’s creepy. Dead ships always are and I’ve never gotten used to the big ones, even when they’re filled with people. A spaceship, to me, is a snug thing, wrapped as tightly around a spaceman as a phone around a battery.
But that was before. Back when dead ships stayed dead.
These days, the nanobots just keep chugging away till they run out of slag. Microscopic, mindless drones working from a schematic of the ship’s original layout, swarming invisibly over the hull to fill in dents and scratches, bridge gaps and repair systems. They’ll repair the ship all right—right back to mint condition even. Only question is whether you’re still alive when the fail-safes reset and life support kicks back on.
They market these boats as unsinkable. Indestructible. Set it and forget it—the ship that repairs itself! Sounds great in a pamphlet I guess. Fate repays us with ships like this one, the Hannah Lee, adrift in space with all its machinery ticking over. But somewhere in here I know there are bodies on the deck, rigid as they fell. Silence rings through the ship, end to end, with the click of our boots.
I keep expecting Linda to come around the corner. Keep hoping that she’ll tell me how glad she is to see me. That she’s sorry she ever left.
The Hannah Lee’s a luxury cruiser. A party boat. Two people can run it; two hundred could ride. Full-gravity decks, real showers, an inflatable ballroom puffed out of one side, that sort of thing. Gravity decks, can you believe it? Hell of an engine in here somewhere, to support all that.
Now it’s just empty, one hallway after another, gentle machines humming in the background, doors hissing open in front of us with perfect automation.
“What the-” Smitty’s too sweet of a kid to swear in front of me, thinks I’m some kind of hero from the war. Like we never swore…. He stops just through the ballroom door. Any marine I ever met could’ve killed him from his right side, easy—he never looked and the blind spot on these pressure suits is like…an acre, even with the visor rolled back. I let it slide and duck past him into the ballroom.
The ballroom’s pretty swank, if you ask me. Some kind of chandelier with prisms and the walls, though I know they’re some light polymer, look a hell of a lot like polished marble.
But it’s a ship that’s got Smitty’s attention. Shit, it’s a Betty, parked right there on the dance floor. Jesus H.P. Christ, a whole goddamn Betty, all in one piece.
“Didn’t you fly one of these, sir?” Smitty asks me, eyes shining.
A Betty’s the least ship a man can take into the sky. Two men, strapped back-to-back around a fuel core—gunner and pilot. You have no life support in there, just you and your suit. No gravity, no air and no eject button.
I went to battle in a Betty a half-dozen times, before me and Randy got promoted past the point of flying—promotion by virtue of survival we figured, cause we never met anybody else who brought back a whole Betty more than four times in a row.
But this one is intact, with the low-libido hull still wrapped in its black matte finish, stealth pinholes as unblemished as the day she was made. Believe me, we stopped making those damned machines before the war even ended.
“What gives?” Captain Jaz buzzes again.
“You won’t believe us,” Smitty says, “But there’s a Betty down here in the ballroom.”
“How many pieces?”
That’s the way they always came back. Pieces.
“Just the one,” said Smitty, “Shipshape, by the look of it. God, what a beauty.”
Something is wrong with this ship though. Something more than the echo of a pre-flight knot in my stomach. She’s uncanny, this one, unearthly, like she’s watching me. Ready to put her BB stinger through my pressure suit.
I shake it off.
“Let’s cut the chatter,” I snap—harder than I meant to, “Smitty, the lifeboats?”
He double-times downstairs, guilty, runs round the Betty to the far wall—the one that’s hull plating when the ballroom’s not inflated. “Both here,” he shouts up.
Well shit.
“Cap’n, is that a
ll of ‘em?” I buzz Jaz, but I know the answer already.
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s all.” Jaz keeps the sympathy out of her voice but she has to know it’s a blow. No survivors then. No chance Linda got out before whatever happened here took down the ship and everybody on it.
“Now what?” says Smitty, coming back up the ladder.
“Look for bodies,” I say.
“Where?”
I just look him in the eye. Make him work it out himself. He plays with the open visor on his helmet as he thinks.
“I guess if my ship were busting up…I’d go for the life support first.”
I follow him back out of the ballroom, looking back at that damned Betty.
Now I’m glad Smitty’s going through hatches first. There are some things I don’t want to see.
It doesn’t take long.
“Got one Sir,” he calls back.
I can see the legs through the hatch. Can’t help but hold my breath. Anyone but Linda….
It’s Taylor. Bent awkwardly, lying on his face.
“He died in null-G,” I observe.
“How you reckon?”
“Bend in the elbow,” I point. “Only rigor-mortis in Z-G gives you that twist. He died first and came down after, when our invisible friends got grav going again. A while after or he wouldn’t be stiff when he came down.”
Smitty nods. “Suffocation,” he says. I raise an eyebrow. His turn to explain. He only points. A facemask and a canister lie in the corner, gauge upturned and orange.
Both of us glance at our own gauges. Can’t help it.
Suffocation’s not a way I want to go, watching the minutes tick down while you struggle harder and harder to draw enough breath.
I figure the first hour is fine. You try to solve whatever problem has you in a bind. You count on the bots to pull through with a repair, patch things up enough to save your sorry ass. Maybe you pray, if that’s your thing. After an hour, you start to worry. You tick into yellow on your gauge and start to panic. Then you hit orange. Then you die.
I shudder.
“Think it was a blowout?” Smitty asks.
“Possible,” I say. I pause a minute, thinking over whether I want to ask what’s on my mind. Oh hell. We came this far. “Your guys bring a forty-four?”
“A what?”
“An N-44,” I say but he doesn’t get it until I pantomime the hat.
“Oh!” says Smitty, “Oh sure! But ours is a 260. It’s way better-”
“Run get it, will you?” I cut him off.
“Bring it here, sir?” he asks.
“It’s where the stiff is, no?”
He goes.
The forty-four is a thing our guys cooked up during the war, back when we were still learning how to have a real good knockdown up here among the stars. The trouble was, you mostly had whole ships alive or whole ships dead. Never had wounded to tell you how things went bad, so a lot of our trouble-shooting schemes were entirely theoretical.
I turn Taylor over with my foot. His eyes stare up past me, gray.
I reach down and shut them, pull a clump of hair from his head. Funny how much you can tell from hair. It’s like a little chemical printout of the last month of a man’s life. The air he breathed, the water he drank, the food he ate—it’s all bound up in keratin and melanin and oil, laid down line by line as it creeps out of his scalp. They used to use the print to work out where a man had been, Earth or Mars or one of the stations. Wasn’t till the war that somebody worked out you could cross-reference the readout with a scan of his cortex and the ship’s logs and get a good read on his state of mind in the closing moments.
Good enough to run a simulation. A resurrection, we mostly called it.
You’d see the MP’s sitting there with their headphones on, talking, asking questions, watching teletype scrawl across a little green screen, fifty characters at a time and listening close for that thin, flat voice, crackling through static from somewhere beyond.
I did a fair number of exit interviews myself. “Tell Sally I love her,” they’d say at the end. Or “Tell Mom I’m sorry.” It sticks with you, the idea everybody dies with something left unsaid.
Taylor—I’m not sure I want to do Taylor. I never met the man, when he was alive. Just heard Linda talk about him. About his boat—this boat. About his plans for ion harvesters in the Beltway. About his damned haircut. It’s enough to know I resent him. His expiration doesn’t change that.
I hear something move in the hallway and fight back the unreasonable surge of hope it might be Linda, climbing out of some unknown safe room. She’s dead, somewhere in here.
The noise is Smitty, hauling something that looks like a beige cabinet, balanced across a four-wheeled cart half its size and trailing a power cord down the hall.
“What the holy hell is that?” I ask.
“The 260,” he says. “It’s kind of a wall unit but you said to bring it over….”
If I’d known, I would’ve had him haul Taylor over to the Lancer. It would’ve been easier.
“Why’s it so damned big?”
The N-44 was a thin thing, like a skullcap made of plastic with copper lacework. It had a jack for the processor and another for the headset and that was about the whole deal. You plugged it into the ship’s data feed and the computer did the rest.
“It’s an all-in-one unit,” says Smitty, like a salesman. “You put the hair in there, the head and the hand,” he points to the different-sized holes in the thing.
“The hand?”
“Well, sure,” says Smitty, but he doesn’t look sure. “It gauges conductivity I think. And blood type. All that stuff.”
I shake my head. “Wouldn’t’ve worked in my day.”
“Sure it would’ve,” he says, “Works anywhere, any time.”
“Not if he doesn’t have a hand.”
I’ve seen a fair number of those in my day. Back in the first year of the war, the theory was that, in case of a blowout—when your ship’s got a hole in it and you’re losing air—the best thing to do was to sound an alarm, then roll the bulkheads slowly shut. Give people time to evacuate.
But people didn’t evacuate. Not spacemen anyway, brave cusses that we were. We found all kinds of bodies mangled in the doorways or freeze-dried in the blown out room and it didn’t get any better when they slowed the roll to give a little more evacuation time.
Not till we had the forty-fours up and running did we work out that men were running towards danger, instead of away from it. Ducking through the doors with the idea they could seal up the hole and save the ship, be a hero. Jamming shoulders into hatchways to hold them open so one more man could come through. You never heard a story where that kind of courage didn’t end badly mangled.
All the newer ships came with snap doors. Loaded them with pressurized pistons that slammed the buggers shut in a couple of milliseconds. Slice right through you if you were unlucky enough to step through the door at just the wrong instant.
But it worked. Fatalities dropped ten percent and all of us stepped a little quicker through our hatchways. Fleet hop, they call it.
But I don’t weigh Smitty down with all that. He’ll see enough messes in his day without hearing all mine.
“You ever run that thing?” I ask.
“Just the once,” he grins.
“Then by all means.” I hold out the lock of hair for him. He takes it gravely from me, drops it in a slot and covers it with a cap.
He lifts Taylor by the shoulders and drags him around until his head slides neatly into a cavity in the cabinet, chattering to me while he works.
“Cap’n says not to worry if you feel a shudder or two—there’s a thruster misfiring, so we’ve got a little spin she’s going to dampen out. Hope you don’t mind if we drift a bit.”
I shrug. I tore into Jaz more than once over the last week to keep the slop out of her search pattern but now we’ve tracked down the Hannah Lee, I don’t have any reason to be precise. At
least the thruster would give Jaz something to think about, instead of buzzing us every two minutes.
“Ready?” Smitty asks.
I nod; he hits the button.
Taylor’s eyes fly open. His jaw snaps, tongue lolling.
“Jesus God Almighty-” I can’t help myself. The dead man twitches all over, lightly, rippling under his skin.
“Oh, sorry, sir,” says Smitty, “Don’t mind the jitters. It’s just calibrating.”
“What the-?”
“All the nerves fire off,” says Smitty, “Maps the pathways through the extremities, the gut. Lots of nerves in the gut.”
No shit. I can feel all of mine.
The twitching stops.
“Here we go!” says Smitty, and the screen lights up. There’s Taylor’s face, in full 3D.
I still hate the guy.
“Boy, am I glad to see you!” he says, “I thought I was done.”
“It’s all right now,” I say. It’s dangerous, letting a simulation—a resurrection—dwell on his own well-being. Once he realizes he’s dead, it’s anybody’s guess what he’ll do. There’s no way accurately to simulate that kind of event, so it throws off all the parameters and the program can’t handle it. The personality crumples and you get no information at all.
“Where’s Linda?” he asks.
I can see Smitty shoot me a look but I keep cool. I’ve handled interviews before. Worse ones even.
“She’s safe,” I lie. “We’ll take care of her.” I’ve got to change the subject. Get him to focus. Move back in his memory so he can run up on death from the front end, instead of working backwards.
“Was that a Betty I saw down in the ballroom?” Resurrections go best if you can give them something specific to latch onto. A nice, tactile memory that lights up a couple parts of the brain the forty-four can locate and use as a baseline. Objects. Places. People. Sex.
