Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen

by Brad R Torgersen

  “Oh yeah?” she said defiantly.

  “Yeah,” Chang said, smiling as he grabbed her shoulder and turned her quickly onto her back, her breasts fluttering pleasantly on her chest. His hands began to mischievously wander up her belly as the two of them kept talking.

  “You still haven’t told your father, have you?” Chang said, his eyes locked onto hers, but his hands possessing a mind all their own.

  “No,” she said, “He’d have tantrum if he learned I was leaving Earth. Dad never did like—oh!”

  Chang’s fingers gently brushed her nipples. She shuddered.

  “Go on,” he said with a smile, as if nothing was happening.

  “I’m just glad they offer military spouses a free ride. We’ll both happier off … if … uhhhh!”

  Chang’s wife never got to finish her sentence. If it was exercise she wanted, it was exercise she would get. Three months in Basic and six months in Advanced military schooling had turned Chang hard and wiry. Her hands reached up for him, and—

  • • •

  Ping! Ping! Ping!

  Damn.

  It had been a long time since Chang had made love to his wife, even in his memory. He reluctantly returned to wakefulness.

  He scanned the diagnostic report on the sensors. As far as his internal maintenance routines could ascertain, everything checked out. So what the hell was going on?

  Ping!

  Chang slipped his more robust active sensors into the vacuum, their huge domes revolving and twirling beyond the confines of the plated hull—Hello, anyone there?

  The cold emptiness of interstellar space remained unbroken. Straight out in all directions.

  Then … wait. There.

  Pong-pong-pong-pong-pong. Not a ghost signature. This was something solid. Several somethings.

  Not members of the Watchfleet.

  The attack came. From the direction Chang least expected.

  Eight small craft appeared like ghosts. Using a breed of engine unknown to Chang’s signature recognition software, they moved more quickly than any ships Chang had ever encountered before. Within moments each ship had detached several smaller vessels that were arcing in on Chang’s position.

  Missiles. Fast ones.

  Chang retracted his sensors and slammed his internal drive into action. Treading the fabric of space like an Olympic runner charging across a track, Chang shot out of the path of the incoming projectiles, weaving and dispensing countermeasures in his wake. He used the gravtrans to hurl an electronic shout into the universe: enemy units attacking, such-and-such coordinates, Watchfleet assistance needed!

  But there was no answer in response.

  Worse still, the missiles fired at Chang were different. Smart.

  With every twist and curve that Chang threw into his trajectory, the little missiles corrected and accelerated, blowing right through his countermeasures. Like their mothercraft, they moved much faster than he would have thought possible. No wonder none of the other Watchfleet units were responding to his calls. They’d probably been destroyed already, leaving him alone to defend himself.

  Chang felt tickles of panic running through his organic tissues.

  Simultaneously, a memory sprang into his consciousness …

  • • •

  Lucy’s father was a tall, unsmiling man. His cheeks were rosy in the cold Peridian IV air, and his overcoat was speckled with drops of water from the colony’s perpetual mist. Chang stood next to him; uncomfortably close. They hadn’t said a word to each other since accompanying Lucy to the playground with the twins.

  “Wave to Dad!” Lucy said, propping one of the boys up on a piece of colorful equipment. The little toddler, whom Chang had known all of two days, appeared joyfully bewildered as his head swiveled back and forth, looking for a face he hadn’t yet learned to recognize.

  Chang lifted an arm, half-smiling, and then dropped his hand to his side. His own military-issue overcoat was drawn tightly at the waist, collar turned up.

  “I’m sorry you had to get dragged all this way,” Chang said finally.

  Lucy’s father grunted.

  “What choice did I have? My daughter is all I have left. Her, and the boys.”

  “I wanted her to tell you before we left,” Chang said. “She kept evading the issue. When I shipped out, I didn’t know she was pregnant. I found out about the boys only after they’d been born. And by then she’d moved you out here to the colony.”

  Lucy’s father sighed, and for the first time turned and looked Chang in the eye.

  “It’s not your fault,” he rumbled, “but know this: You’re part of our lot now. Those two sons of yours, they’ve got some of me in them, and that makes us both responsible. No matter where you go or how old you are or what you see out there in space, those twins will never, ever stop needing you. It’s sealed in blood now, and there’s no going back.”

  Lucy looked at Chang affectionately. Her face became puzzled when he didn’t automatically return her smile. He was too busy staring at his sons, and realizing that at age 23 his life was now committed to a certain unbreakable trajectory …

  • • •

  The memory poofed away as quickly as it had come.

  A missile had closed to within lethal range.

  Desperately, Chang reversed his drive. His ship groaned under the intense stress of the maneuver, but the gravity distortion backwash caught the missile before it could arm itself—leaving a harmlessly dissipating cloud of metal flakes.

  Chang experienced short-lived relief. Then, forcing another structural groan, he reversed direction again. Moments before impact with the debris from the first missile, he dipped and curved, his path taking him just barely around the expanding ball of metal shards. Kiloton explosions flared and died. Had the remaining missiles fail-safed, or been manually detonated? There was no time to get an answer.

  A wedge formation of three mothercraft was coming up fast. Built like three-sided pyramids, they were very different from anything Chang had ever seen before. His lasers lashed out, their highly-focused beams waving across the enemy like a gardener spraying water from his hose. The pyramidal vehicles disintegrated, then exploded.

  Five bogies remained.

  The enemy force divided again: two and two and one—and as it did so, Chang picked up the signals from more incoming missiles. He mentally flashed through every detail of every battle he had ever fought as both man and machine, sifting and collating the data until a tactic coalesced.

  Chang’s lasers hit the center of the missile swarm like an eraser, eradicating every projectile they touched. A sizable hole appeared within the swarm and he poured every bit of power he could into his own drive.

  The missiles were all around Chang, and then they were behind him, their paths curving sharply back on themselves as they all attempted to follow their target. He flashed past the motherships, which also began to turn. A fireworks display of epic proportions erupted directly in his wake. Matter annihilated matter in a fantastically destructive spectacle.

  The flush of victory again flowed through Chang.

  Just three left to go.

  Suddenly, the enemy touched Chang’s skin with their own lasers. He sensed the deadly energy an instant before it hit. There was no use in turning; every part of his armored skin was equally thick. But would it be thick enough?

  In a millisecond, a great wound was opened in the hull. An accompanying flow of damage statistics paraded through Chang’s brain—the digital equivalent of pain. The gravtrans was gone, and the main drive partially damaged, though still functional.

  Again Chang rapid-sorted through his memory banks, seeking alternative courses of action. Humanity was depending on him. More to the point, Lucy and his sons were depending on him.

  • • •

  Carter and Eric were ten years old when Chang’s patrol was ambushed. He was in his bunk, off duty, staring at a digital photo of his sons on his PDA. An explosion swept through the deck. If he’d alread
y been in his space armor, the blast wouldn’t have done Chang much damage. As it was, Chang had to be carted to emergency triage with third-degree burns—and arms and legs so badly mangled even the months he spent in a liquid regeneration “womb” during the voyage back to Earth couldn’t fix them. They were therefore amputated at the veterans hospital, planetside.

  With Chang’s family light-years away, the only ones who came to visit him were the lab men from the Watchfleet. They explained their program: battle vets, hard-wired into a new breed of super-ship, armed to the teeth, autonomous, yet tied together electronically to form a web the Sortu couldn’t penetrate.

  The ambush that got Chang hadn’t been the only one. The Sortu were closing the noose. Earth itself was now in danger. Peridian IV, where Lucy and the boys were living, was expected to get hit next.

  The Watchfleet was going to be humanity’s best—and possibly last—answer.

  Full pay and benefits, of course, to be delivered directly to Chang’s next of kin—regardless of the duration of the Watchfleet battle tour. Posthumous continuation, guaranteed.

  Lucy’s father had been dead for years, but his words echoed in Chang’s head. As long as Chang drew breath, he owed his sons whatever he could give them. Unable to speak, nod, or make any acknowledging movements, Chang gave the lab men his answer with his eyes.

  • • •

  The three remaining enemy ships closed in. Chang could feel them poke and prod with their active sensors. He was badly hurt, he had no missiles of his own anymore, and his laser cannon system had been hopelessly damaged.

  The only thing he had left to throw at them now was his own fuel.

  Antimatter. It could be pumped from the central magnetic holding cell into space by using the emergency flush system.

  It could result in victory, but a pyrrhic one.

  Using the flush pumps Chang dumped half his available fuel into the black void, the antimatter cloud instantly expanding around his own hull. He could feel it eating away at his ship. But would the enemy notice in time?

  To his great relief, they did not.

  Two of the three ships flared with white fire as the antimatter ate through their hardened hulls. Bright cataclysms flared and died, knocking Chang clear of the deadly cloud. The third pyramid pulled out in time, if just barely. It began limping along, trailing pieces of itself.

  Chang moved in, his damaged drive laboring.

  Sortu lasers—dramatically weakened—leapt to intercept him, but a secondary explosion wracked the lone pyramidal vessel, and its bombardment ceased.

  Chang’s sub-light drive pushed him in close to the enemy craft as it tumbled directionless through space. As the distance shrank, Chang collected data on the make-up of the ship: hardware that had been exposed, the size and type of both known and unknown components, everything he could learn.

  At five kilometers the finer details emerged. Among the floating bits of debris, Chang could identify tiny carbon-based components. Interesting. He’d never seen the Sortu in the flesh. In fact, he wasn’t sure anyone ever had—this would be a first.

  Chang zeroed his remaining sensor equipment in on the lifeless bodies.

  After only a few seconds of examination, the truth became clear—the corpses of the aliens were not alien at all.

  There, Chang could see a little man who had been shredded, his arms and legs curled lifelessly to his chest. Next, a headless human female. Next, a male, his space suit half on, helmet still clutched uselessly in one hand.

  Hundreds of human bodies drifted like a school of dead jellyfish brought in on the evening tide.

  Chang hung motionless with shock. This simply did not compute. Humans did not fight humans. It was aliens who were the enemy, to be slaughtered with impunity. The Sortu! They were …

  He set about slowly collecting the corpses. The uniforms were different from the ones Chang had worn when he’d been a whole man, working in the Service. But the faces were all too familiar—young men and women, as he’d once been, sent to fight and die in the depths of interstellar space. And for what? By who?

  Chang stopped cold.

  One face in particular caught his electronic eyes.

  Carter.

  It couldn’t be. But the name tape sewn into the breast of the uniform was Chang’s last name. The young, dead man bore the same uncannily mixed features. Only now he was grown up: semi-almond eyes, dark hair, freckled skin, and Lucy’s fine nose …

  Chang set that particular body aside and kept collecting, until a face that was almost identical to the first appeared.

  Eric.

  Same name tape, same features. Chang put the boys side by side, comparing their faces. They’d been frozen forever, startled at the very end.

  Chang silently began to boil with a sensation of complete and utter betrayal.

  He quietly rummaged through the wreck of the pyramid ship. Accessed the computers. Read the records.

  A picture became clear.

  One entirely different from what Chang had been given when he’d signed up, first as a mere soldier, then as a Watchfleet pilot.

  He’d not been defending Earth against aliens.

  He’d been defending Earth against her own children.

  An alliance of human colonies had apparently been fighting for independence, since Chang himself had been a child. The Sortu were a lie—bogeymen. The enemy squadron he’d just dispatched had in fact been constructed at Peridian IV, a recent addition to the alliance’s ranks.

  It was beyond obscene.

  Surely the Watchfleet Command knew the truth?

  So many falsehoods collapsed like dominoes.

  After many days of waiting, while Chang’s internal damage control systems slowly patched up what could be fixed, he gathered his sons and all the other dead, and gently placed them back into the belly of their ship. The alliance would find them, after he was gone. He left a small message asking that the dead be given heroes’ honors.

  Chang them set a course for Sol System. For Earth. Maybe the alliance had managed to pick off all his comrades. But there was one watch dog still left. And he was going to take a chunk out of his masters.

  Not a usual story for me, “Guard Dog” is grim in tone. It is also the second of three different collaborations that Mike Resnick and I worked on, after I first met Mike in Los Angeles in 2010. The shell of this story dates to 1996, when I was toying with the idea of a mortally wounded space soldier being “recycled” for additional fighting duty. As often happens when I am only working with one idea—these days I almost always wait for two or three ideas to organically coalesce, before I have the nugget of a good story—I wasn’t able to make “Guard Dog” work. Not until I took it out and showed it to Mike, and Mike (in his fatherly, knowing fashion) said, “You got it all wrong, kid, let me suggest some ways you can change it.”

  The story that resulted was pretty different from the story as I’d originally written it. And Mike’s suggested ending is different as well. But it works nicely. Especially since Mike and I were working within such a tight word count limit. I often feel as if I am barely clearing my throat at 4,000 words. For “Guard Dog” we told a lot of story in just under 3,000 words; and the manuscript went to print in editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s Space Battles anthology.

  I learned a lot from Mike, while working on this piece. The man is a master of the human condition. Not us as we wish we might be, but us as we actually are. To include the bad, as well as the good. “Guard Dog” therefore morphed into a picture window view of ordinary people trying to do the right thing, and being manipulated—at levels far about their awareness—against each other. Chang’s life story is compacted tremendously to fit the space Mike and I had to work with, but I think the raw punch of Chang’s predicament was made stronger as a result.

  ***

  Counselor: L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

  I had only known L.E. Modesitt, Jr. by name and reputation—prior to actually meeting him in 2009. At the time, I was just an
other hopeful aspiring writer in a small sea of aspiring writers at the Life, The Universe, and Everything (LTUE) symposium that is run annually in Utah County, Utah. I had not realized until then just how chock full of venerable professionals the Utah speculative and fantastic writing scene is. Oh, I knew Orson Scott Card had once called Utah home, but having spent the prior 14 years living and working in Washington State, my understanding of the Utah scene was non-existent. So imagine my surprise when I went to my first panel and saw not just Lee Modesitt, but also Dave Wolverton, and several other luminaries, holding forth about which kinds of science fiction were “hot” and which kinds of science fiction were not.

  I had my hand up several times during that panel, asking what I hoped would be pertinent questions. Lee was urbane and scholarly in both presentation and manner, wearing a crisp oxford with contrasting tie, and a beautifully complimentary vest—an ensemble look I would soon associate with Lee as his chosen, signature look. After the panel ended, I managed to approach him (as a brand new Warrant Officer Candidate) and make a sidelong military connection; since Lee had just spoken about his own military credentials while discussing the health of Military SF in the marketplace.

  I was impressed that Lee took time out to talk to me, if even for a couple of minutes. And was even more impressed (a few months later) when Lee took even more time to talk to me at the CONduit SF/F convention in Salt Lake City. I’d made Finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest by then, and was chomping at the bit (perhaps too much?) to pick the brains of the elder statesmen of the field who were present and available for conversation. I felt almost desperate to “level up” to the point I could qualify as a junior colleague of these accomplished men, and Lee especially impressed me with his experience and breadth of knowledge.

  I’ve made a habit of seeking Lee’s counsel as a result. I occasionally travel up and down the state for business, and when I am headed south (and I know I will have the time) I like to take Lee to lunch, just to hear what he has to say about writing, science fiction, politics, the state of national affairs, or perhaps laugh while he shares an anecdote from his days flying helicopters in the Navy. There’s very little Lee can’t talk about without it becoming immediately interesting. I’ve always had the sense that when I am conversing with Lee, I am conversing with a remarkable, dynamic, incisive mind. The kind of person who won’t mistake being clever, for being wise.