by Steve Perry
He liked to do this, visit the eggs. The rubbery, fleshy shells with the flower-petal lips still clenched tightly together, protecting their precious cargo, they touched something in Spears. He was not a man given to deep introspection, no navel picker to worry over the unchangeable past or unborn future, he was a doer, not a ponderer; still, there was a cold and merciless beauty to be found here. These were unborn warriors out of the greatest warriors man had ever met. And Spears was a man of war.
With two guards standing nervously alert, Spears walked to the nearest egg, squatted, put one hand out to feel the roughness of the living container.
You could drop this little closed barrel off a tall building in standard gee and it would bounce like a plastic ball without damaging the tiny occupant. Spears knew, because he’d had it done. In the variable gravity room the scientists had built, they’d done more than a few such experiments. The eggs were tough. Even under three gees they still maintained their integrity. They could be cut, were the knife sharp enough, but the wielder had best be very quick—piercing the outer wall of an egg would get the cutter a face full of acid spray even more potent than that in the grown creatures’ blood. Nature had been lavish in her protection of the aliens’ birth packaging. And the first-stage babies were hardy little devils, too.
Spears grinned, stroked the egg as if it were the head of a faithful dog. The alien queens could reproduce in a kind of modified parthenogenesis, and the drones were mostly neuters. There were some males—the labbos had found a few—and indications were that there could be a battlelike sexual intercourse between the two sexes. The available males, when they reached some critical number, fought each other to the death, leaving only a single survivor, who then lay claim to the queen. She made him work for it, slammed him all over the place, and if he survived this battering, worse than the fights with the other males, the queen would submit to his advances.
The male’s triumph would be short-lived. Within seconds after this hard-contested mating was consummated, the queen would kill the hapless male. The scientists babbled on about genetic diversity and such, but it didn’t matter. If there weren’t any males around, the queen could do it herself. And if there weren’t any queens around, one of the drones would undergo what the scientists called a hormone storm; when it was done, the drone would be a queen.
Spears shook his head. Goddamned efficient bastards. Just what a commander in the field needed. You could hatch your own army in a few months and as long as one of ’em stayed alive, you could start over again when those got killed.
The troopers moved around, Spears could feel their fear. He grinned again, partly because he knew they were scared and he wasn’t, partly because growing down his uniform pants leg was a fairly solid erection. As long as he squatted here, stroking the egg, it didn’t show. He chuckled at his own hormone storm. That didn’t happen much anymore, he’d managed to sublimate his sexual drives into more important things, but the little head did rear now and again. Not that he found sex unpleasant, no, that wasn’t the problem, just that it took too much time and energy to indulge in it these days. Course, when he’d been younger, he thought he would live forever and he would fuck anything with a hole and a pulse and even the latter wasn’t strictly necessary. And he’d learned something from the very first time he’d ever done it, something very important.
He laughed at the memory, Ah, Gunnery Sergeant Brandywine. Whatever happened to her?
* * *
Colonial Marine Cadet Spears at fifteen was still two years away from his first hitch, though he’d already gotten three Corps tattoos. Gunny Brandywine was his small-arms instructor, she was probably twice his age, tough as a boot sole, and could drill the eye out of a ship rat at twenty paces with a carbine or a handgun, you pick which eye. She wore her black hair chopped short in a spacer’s buzz, had a rangy, tight frame, flat pectoral muscles and no breasts to speak of, and abs Spears would die to have himself. A lean, mean fighting machine, Gunny was, a strong and deadly female. He’d watched her in the showers a couple of times, carefully keeping his back turned so she wouldn’t see the short-arm salute she was causing. Christ, he was so hard sometimes it stood nearly straight up.
He didn’t think she’d noticed, but one afternoon after a session in the gym with the autoboxer, he’d found himself alone in the shower with her. As usual, his dick was trying to go ballistic, and he kept fiddling with the water’s temp control, as if it were malfunctioning, so he could keep his erection out of her sight.
She shut her shower off and started to leave. Good.
But her footsteps on the wet plastic tiles went the wrong way. He could see her peripherally when she reached out and slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, cadet. You might as well learn how to use that.”
Spears thought of himself as a marine already, tough, unflappable, cool under stress, but he felt himself go red. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve been wanting to stick that in me for weeks, kid. In my quarters, five minutes, you can give it a shot.” She turned and padded away. He watched the muscular roll of her buttocks, unable to breathe he was so scared.
But it had been fine. Gunny was practiced, she had obviously broken in more than a few first-timers, and she was patient.
The first round took maybe three seconds until he discharged his weapon. Five strokes, no more. It was great, but he knew enough to realize it hadn’t done anything for her. He started to apologize. “Oh, man, I’m sorry, I—!”
“Forget it, cadet. I know how you young guys are. Besides, that didn’t even take the edge off you. Here. Give me that.”
The next three hours were a wonder to Cadet Spears. Sure, he had beat-off plenty, but it didn’t feel anywhere close to as good as what Gunny Brandywine taught him that afternoon. Amazing things.
In the end, the most useful thing of all was patience. He was a hot-shot cadet, always rushing, always in a hurry, like life was a race he had to finish first. He couldn’t wait to be on active duty. Gunny taught him how to wait.
They were on her bed, reconnected for the fifth time, she on her back, one leg drawn up, foot hooked over his ass, he on his side, pumping fast.
“Slow down, mister.”
“Huh?”
She reached out, caught his hip with one hand, slowed his movement.
“When you’re on the handgun range and you get an in-your-face pop-up target, what do you do?”
“Pointshoot, triple tap, two in the heart, one in the head,” Spears said, as if he were in class. Which, he realized much later, he was.
“Right. Slow will get you killed in that combatsit. But if you get a pop-up at fifty meters, do you react the same way?”
He continued his motion at the speed she had set.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “You take deliberate aim using your sights and squeeze off two to the torso.”
“Ah, that feels good.” She grinned, looked at him. Raised her leg so her toes pointed at the ceiling. “Now, back in the combat scenario, explain your actions.”
“Pointshooting is inaccurate at long range. Accuracy is more important than speed in that situation. Shoot too fast and miss, the enemy might not. Better to be slow and certain.”
“Push a little harder now and a little faster.” She bent her knee, brought it down close to her face. “Good. Put your finger here. Rub this way. Mmm.”
He was getting close again. But he forced himself to hold his pacing where she wanted it.
“Life is like the range, cadet. There’s a time to hurry and a time to go slow. Learning when to do the right thing at the right time is as important as anything you’ll ever learn, you got that?”
He nodded. Drawing close to his release yet again, he would have agreed with anything she said, but on some level, he did understand the lesson. It was a unique teaching method.
“Now you go fast. Move, cadet. Move!”
He obeyed. It was one hell of a teaching method.
* * *
Spears came back to
himself. Patted the egg and stood, his sexual excitement cooled. A less patient man than himself might have missed this whole opportunity to develop an invincible army. If Gunny Brandywine were still alive, she’d be a crone, pushing eighty, easy, but it would be Interesting to see her. To show her how well her lesson had taken. And what the hell, maybe to fuck her once for old times’ sake.
“Let’s move out, marines.”
He wouldn’t have to tell these men that twice.
13
“The queen has learned to obey the general,” Powell said. He leaned against a bulkhead, staring at the floor.
“Obey him?” Wilks said.
They’d been in the little ship a long time, Wilks was beginning to feel stiff and cramped, but he wanted to hear as much of it as Powell could get out before they had to break this off.
“Oh, yes. Spears started training her like a dog. Used his cigar lighter. He’d have a trooper with a flamethrower roast an egg while the queen watched. After she calmed down, he’d put a human into the testing cage with her. When she went for the bait, he’d pop the cigar lighter on and hold it next to another egg. The queen picked it up fast. You could leave a man in with her and a dozen drones for hours and none of them would touch him. She’s not stupid, the queen.
“It seems odd, though,” Powell continued, “that the queen will sacrifice the drones without a second thought but that she’ll obey Spears to protect the eggs.”
Wilks shrugged. “She’s an alien. What drives her doesn’t drive us. Maybe her responsibility ends when the damned things hatch.”
“That’s what Spears thinks. But she controls the drones. Telepathically, empathically, we don’t have the sophisticated gear here to be sure exactly how, but it isn’t with sound or odors or any visual signals we can detect. We’ve run tests where the drone was a klick away in an airtight chamber, no possible way it could see or hear the queen, and Spears made it do what he wanted.”
“You have more than one queen,” Wilks said.
Powell blinked. “How do you know that?”
“Somebody is laying the eggs in the air processor. Unless you’re ferrying the queen from here back and forth.”
“No, you’re right. We put one egg from this nest over there. Spears did it himself. There are a score of drones there now tending the young queen.”
Wilks shook his head in disgust. “Spears doesn’t know what the hell he is messing with here.”
“He thinks he does. And he’s done more with them than anybody else, Wilks. Last month he took a dozen of the things out and had them marching in close order drill. He’s taught several of them how to hold a modified M-69 machine gun and had them shooting the weapon.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes. It’s Maggie’s Drawers for accuracy, they can’t hit anything smaller than a wall even at close range, but still.”
Wilks nodded. A monster with a machine gun. The only advantage men had in battle with these things was their weaponry. If they were armed as well as human troops, they’d be unstoppable.
“The drones are stupid,” Powell said. “But even a chimp can be trained to shoot fairly straight. And we think the queen’s connection with the drones gives her the ability to see what she sees. And the queen is probably as smart as we are, according to the psychologists.”
“Buddha fucking Christ.”
“Crude, but apt.” Wilks stood, paced across the room. “But—what’s the point? Earth is history. When we left there, it was already nearly overrun. A few more years and everybody there will be dead. A few clean neutron bombs after that would sterilize the place. All this cowboy shit is stupid.”
“This isn’t about saving the Earth or anybody on it,” the major said. “It’s about Spears and his ideas of personal glory. Or something. I don’t know what, for sure.”
Wilks nodded. “All right. Let’s get to the bottom line here, Major.”
Powell sighed. “Enough people have died, Sergeant. This has to end. Spears is at the air processor plant. There’s a magnetic storm heading this way, sunspot activity on the primary is up. Spears will be delayed some hours, maybe even a day or two before he can lift and return to base. We need to begin our preparations now.”
Wilks nodded. “All right.”
* * *
“Mitch?”
The door to his room was open. He was half machine now, but the android part of him was programmed for sleep, to enhance his human characteristics. He lay on a pallet on his back, a sheet covering him to the chest.
“Come in, Billie.”
The room’s lighting was dim, and he was barely visible as she approached the pallet. She stopped two meters away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I said.”
He remained lying down, his hands under his head. He stared straight up at the ceiling. “I can understand that you were upset.”
“It didn’t give me the right to behave that way. It’s just that—” she stopped.
“Just that what?”
She turned slightly, so she was looking at the back wall and not directly at him. “It’s all so confusing,” she said. “I thought I had gotten past it, about your being an artificial person. That it didn’t matter.”
“But it does matter, doesn’t it?”
Her sigh was almost a sob. “When we came out of the sleep chambers on the way here, you seemed so cold. So distant. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t understand it. What happened, Mitch? Did you change? Or was it me?”
Now he sat up, the sheet draping down around his waist, covering the metal skeleton and revealing his bare upper body. He looked human to her in this light. Was human, she reminded herself, but not quite the same as she was.
“They made us to be as much like humans as possible. We’re as far away from first-generation synthetics as they were from robots. Almost human.
“Funny, there were rumors we heard when we were still damp from the vats—the next generation of synthetics could not only pass for human among wombfolk, they would be born thinking they were human. Memory tapes of childhood, family, full implant blocks of internal workings, anatomically perfect right down to a dye in the circulation fluid so it would look like human blood to a naked eye.
“They would not only look like naturals, they would believe they were naturals. There would be inbuilt Laws of Function, of course, but the new APs would simply think they were personal ethics. They’d have the same energy requirements, ability to process food, oxygen, normal elimination, same natural cycles. For all practical purposes, they would be people, save that they couldn’t reproduce, and they would be stronger, faster, and more durable.”
“Mitch—”
“Of course,” he went on, ignoring her interruption, “the question that immediately arose was: What’s the point? If you want real people, why not make them the old-fashioned way, parent or artificial wombs? And the answer was that they would be expendable. Able to do the dirty and dangerous work that real men didn’t want to do. Radiation disposal, exploration on hostile worlds, pressure rescue, suicide missions for whatever reasons.
“The new androids would be perfect. Acceptable in polite society, able to move without upsetting the most delicate sensibilities, but throwaways. Instant third-class citizens—no, not even citizens, but property, slaves, loyal as dogs, ready to leap at the proper command.”
“Jesus, Mitch—”
“I’m not finished yet. But to get to those happy models, they had to experiment. Stir in the proper emotions so the passers-for-human would laugh at the right spots, cry when appropriate, even fall in love when necessary. So, here we are, you and I. It worked. My fake hormones did what they were supposed to do and I fell for you. Only thing is, there’s enough of me outside the emotional part that I can understand it apart from the feelings.”
Billie turned and looked at him. “And you resent me for it,” she said finally.
“No. Not you. See, I do love you. But I resent them for making me this way. They d
idn’t give me any experience, any guidance, any way of dealing with this whole thing rationally.”
Billie smiled, small, sad, but a smile nonetheless.
His eyes were better than hers. He saw the expression. “Something funny about this?”
She heard the anger in him. “In a way. Nobody ever gave me any guidance or way of dealing with this ‘whole thing’ either, Mitch. Love and logic don’t go together. You’re looking for a nice clean path to walk. It doesn’t happen that way very often among us ‘naturals,’ either. Love is usually messy, cluttered, sometimes painful and just plain awful.”
“At least you had a choice,” he said.
“What makes you think so? We don’t get to choose any more than you do in some things.”
“You could have walked away. You didn’t have to love me.”
“I could have walked away from you but I couldn’t walk away from my feelings. That’s why I can’t just bail out now. I could leave but what I feel for you would stay with me.”
“This is beyond my capabilities to understand,” he said.
“Welcome to the club.”
The silence stretched long between them. If only he had told her before they’d begun. If only she had known. She wasn’t a bigot, she could have gotten past it, could have accepted him.
Really? Are you sure about that, Billie? Are you?
There was the damning part of it. She wasn’t sure.
Not at all.
* * *
Spears sat in the ship, waiting for the goddamned storm to pass. Stupid, he’d known the solar magnetic activity was up, there had been swirls forecast, he should have destroyed the traitors and hustled his ass back to base. They could have beaten it, if they had hurried.
Well. Done was done, no point in crying over a broken plan. Best he make use of the time. There were some combat scenarios he wanted to run; the compsim unit had the latest learned-commands the alien troops had assimilated logged into it. They weren’t a crack fighting unit yet, not by any means, but they were getting there. It was just a matter of time. And when they were ready nothing in the universe could stand against them. Spears’s word would carry more weight than God’s when he had these troops whipped into shape. Yes, indeed.
