by Steve Perry
Wilks turned, ready to pull his carbine up and start shooting. But Powell moved into the line of fire between Wilks and the trooper behind them.
“At ease, trooper,” Powell said.
“Major Powell?”
“That’s right.”
For a moment the young marine looked confused. It had been drilled into him from his first day in the Corps: If an officer says jump, you’re in the air before you ask how high he wants it. But this was one of Spears’s troops, and the major was no longer in command. The trooper’s intellectual waters might be muddy but one thing was clear: A general outranked a major and the general was giving the orders.
“Keep moving, Billie,” Wilks said softly. Since Powell blocked the marine guard’s view, he slowly shifted his weapon, swung the barrel around carefully.
“You’d better come with me, sir,” the trooper said.
“I don’t have time for this, marine,” Powell said. “General Spears and I have settled our differences and I’ve got business that cannot wait. Call him, if you like, but hurry it up.”
From his angle, Wilks could see the trooper reaching for the bonefone control over his right ear. In another second he would be online with whoever was running the operations channel and the game would be over. Wilks now had his carbine aimed right at the trooper—only Powell stood right under the sights. Now or never.
“Powell, get down!” Wilks yelled.
The major was pretty quick. He dived to his right, hit flat on the deck, giving Wilks a clear line of fire.
The young marine was confused again. He didn’t know whether to finish his opchan call or shoot. He tried to do both.
Wilks fired a single round, hit the man square in the middle of the chest. A clean heart shot. With the 10mm high-velocity slug, such a hit would usually put a man down pretty fast. The head and spine were better targets, but while a single shot might go unnoticed in all the mechanical noise and fuel venting in the hangar, a full burst would not.
The trooper went down, still looking confused. His carbine sagged. Went off. Half a dozen rounds blasted from the uncontrolled weapon, bullets spanged off the deck. Damn!
Powell, who was rolling, caught at least one of the slugs when he came up in the wrong place. Wilks saw the man’s head explode.
When he’d been a boy, Wilks had once put a big firecracker into a watermelon. The effect of the bullet at this range was much the same as what had happened to the watermelon when the firecracker went off.
“Ah, shit!”
“Wilks?”
“Get in the ship, Billie. Fast!”
* * *
Seated in the control cabin of the Jackson, Spears got a call on the opchan.
“Sir, there has been some small-arms fire near the Macarthur.”
Spears reached out and put the control computer online. “Cause?”
“Sir, we found Major Powell’s body next to that of one of the sentries.”
“I see. Any other activity?”
“No, sir. The Macarthur is loaded and sealed.”
“Good. Let Powell’s traitors bury him,” Spears said. “I will be lifting off in three minutes. Clear the hangar and cut the gravity.”
“Yes, sir.”
Spears slaved the Macarthur to the Jackson, checked the codes to be sure the computer didn’t have them wrong. Everything was green, all systems functioning properly. Overhead, the hatch covering the hangar began to slide back. He could feel the drone of the big pumps as they sucked the air inside the hangar into storage tanks. The gravity began to fade. A small tap on the repellors and the ship would rise. Once he was clear of the hangar, he would light the engines and boost into a slingshot orbit.
“Launch minus one minute,” came the dry voice of the control comp.
The infocrawl on the screen sped by. The Jackson was clear to lift, the hatch over the Macarthur would be fully retracted in thirty-six seconds…
Spears nodded to himself. Perfect.
* * *
Inside the ship, Billie and Wilks looked at rows of aliens in their containers, stacked on their sides in bins, three high.
“Christ,” Billie said.
“Yeah. Come on, let’s find the control room.”
They’d taken half a dozen steps when the gravity faded considerably.
“Wilks? What is it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a malfunction in the station. Or maybe…” he trailed off.
“Maybe what?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, Wilks. Don’t start holding out on me now.”
“Could be we’re about to lift. Inside a hangar they’ll shut down the faux grav and use the repellors to boost, that’s SOP so they don’t fry the hangar with the engines’ exhaust.”
“We can’t leave. Mitch—”
“I know, I know. Let’s see if we can find the control room and do something.”
With the gravity reduced to that of the planetoid, normal walking was impossible, they’d bound to the ceiling with every step. Wilks moved using a kind of swimming hop. He’d take a short, tiny step, grab something anchored, and pull himself along as if they were underwater. Billie figured it out pretty quick and it seemed to work.
They hurried toward the control room.
* * *
“Lift-off commencing,” the computer said.
Spears felt a slight tug as the repellors kicked on, shoving the ship straight up. After a moment the repellors cut off and the massive ship drifted upward like a hot-air balloon on a cool and crisp morning. Spears touched a control. The external hardskin armor retracted and the inner polarized plate in the control cabin cleared. The blackness of space lay over the ship and planet like a shroud pierced with laser points.
He liked space travel, the sense of going vast distances to do great things. Made a man feel powerful, knowing he could conquer the galaxy that way, secure in his machine from the killer vacuum that would steal your air.
Can’t touch me, he thought. He grinned at the vac for its impotency.
He switched another control on and got external cameras going. Put the rear viewer onscreen. Saw the Macarthur begin to rise from the base.
When the second ship was clear, Spears found another control, one that had not been installed when this ship had been built, a jury-rigged button atop a powerful transmitter. He had put that one in himself. He shoved the button down with his thumb.
Below, the engines of the remaining starships would begin converting themselves to molten waste. In less than a minute, what had been the acme of man’s technology would be no more than a white-hot soup of swirling metal and plastic and electroviral matrices, all cooked beyond repair by anyone less than a god. And if God could fix them, he was one hell of an engineer.
Carefully, Spears opened the plastic box containing his cigars. He picked one from the middle of the box, pulled the tube out, twisted the airtight cap free. A tiny whoosh as the inert gas escaped, bringing with it the smell of a fresh cigar. He tilted the tube, removed the dark Jamaican Lonsdale, and looked at it with reverence. Worth a fortune, the dark-leafed beauty was about to go up in smoke. He smiled. Wasn’t that the way of things? Even a great cigar would be nothing but ash after it was smoked. Things didn’t endure. Only deeds lasted. And nobody had ever done a greater deed than to reclaim an entire planet from an enemy, and the motherworld of humans to boot.
He clipped the end of the Lonsdale with his cutter, wet the fragrant leaf with his lips, sucking on it lightly, then reached for his lighter.
The first puff filled his nostrils and sinuses and he blew it gently into the control cabin’s cool air, watched the blue smoke pulled into the cleaners.
It didn’t get much better than this, thought the savior of mankind. No, sir.
23
“Wilks!” Billie yelled. “Stop the ship!”
The gravity was gone, the ship was lifting, and Wilks knew there was no help for either from where he sat. The control board for the vessel was locked; noth
ing he tried got any response. Still, he tried.
“Wilks, goddammit, you promised—!”
“So fucking sue me! I can’t do shit here! We’re on automatic!”
Billie stared at him as if he had suddenly sprouted horns and a forked tail.
“This ship is probably slaved to Spears’s,” he said. “We go where he’s going. I’m sorry.”
She stared, not speaking.
Wilks sighed, leaned back, and pulled his safety straps tight. Okay, it was too bad about Bueller, but it wasn’t his fault. He would have held the ship down for the android if he could have, but there was no help for it. It galled him to leave a marine from his unit behind, but he’d done it before. A lot of his comrades had died along the way. When your number was up, it was up. What the hell. Billie would probably come around to that view, and if she didn’t, too fucking bad. Life was hard. She should know that by now.
* * *
Spears had his com on and it was only a matter of a couple of minutes before the frantic calls began to come through.
“General Spears! This is Pockler, on the Grant! There’s been an engine malfunction! The ship is nonoperational, sir! We can’t lift!”
Spears looked at the com. The transmission was no-pix, so he couldn’t see the man’s face, but he could tell well enough from the tone of voice how rattled the trooper must appear.
“General Spears? We’re getting reports from the other ships, somebody has sabotaged their engines, too! Sir! Please answer!”
Spears took another puff of the cigar. God, this was a great smoke! He’d have to toke it all, of course, you couldn’t smoke half and save it for later, it wouldn’t store even in dead gas, not and be fresh like before.
“General Spears! Sir, we are trapped here! You’ll have to bring the MacArthur back down!”
The ventilators sucked the used smoke away. He thought about shutting the things off and blowing a few smoke rings—they’d hang there for a long time in the greatly reduced gravity—but no.
“Sir, the alien drones have all gone crazy! They’re hammering at the ship, they’re everywhere, it’s like they’ve lost their minds!”
Spears observed the glowing end of the cigar, held the thing up so the nearest intake vent could draw the ash away. Wouldn’t do to foul the cabin with the residue, no matter how valuable it had been before. So, the aliens could tell that the queen was off-planet. Interesting. He wondered if the empathic connection was shut off by distance. Must be something like that. Mama had left and the children were upset. Most interesting.
“General!”
But a good cigar, ah, now that was really interesting.
* * *
The ship’s controls were locked but the com was operational. Wilks wasn’t gonna be making any outgoing calls; he didn’t want to take the chance somebody might overhear them—so far, he didn’t think anybody knew they were here. And not that he had anybody to call, anyhow.
But somebody knew they were here. The board cheeped with an incoming, complete with visual.
Bueller.
Damn.
* * *
“Mitch!”
He didn’t look any the worse for wear on the holoproj. Billie couldn’t tell where he was, there was some bland officelike background behind where he sat behind a desk. His new legs weren’t visible and if she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he was as whole as when they’d met. So long ago. So far away.
“Hello, Billie. I’ve got this channel in a security pipe, computer-guided, nobody can overhear us. if you want to talk. If you don’t, I understand.”
Billie looked at Wilks.
The marine shrugged. “Go ahead. Anybody figures out we’re here, fuck it. I just realized this boat is like a pay ship, we’re carrying the cargo Spears wants.” He touched a control.
“Mitch, I’m here.”
“I’m so glad to see you’re okay,” he said. “I was worried you’d been hit when the shooting started.”
“You saw it?”
“I was across the way from you, yeah.”
“Mitch, I’m sorry—”
“Not your fault,” he cut in. “Spears has your ship slaved to his; you couldn’t have stopped it without wrecking it.”
“Can you get on another ship?”
He grinned, a small and tight expression. “Probably, though it wouldn’t do much good. The troops all piled into one and the motor wouldn’t start. My guess is that Spears slagged the engines. He doesn’t want anybody following him.”
There was a muted explosion in the background.
“What was that?”
“Grenade, probably. The alien drones left here are running amuck. Spears took the queen. I think they can sense that, somehow.”
“Oh, God—”
“There’s nothing to be done about it, Billie. I’m here and you’re there. If there is a God, he or she or it has a warped sense of humor, from what I have seen.”
“Mitch, I—I—”
“Don’t, Billie. I have had some time to think about things and you’re right. We’re too different for it to have worked long-term. We’d have tried and probably beaten whatever we felt for each other to death sooner or later. It isn’t just that I was made one way and you another. Our frames of reference are different. Even if we could have worked out all the stuff that went before, the ride wouldn’t have lasted much longer.”
“We could have made it last, if I hadn’t been so afraid,” she said.
He shook his head. Another explosion drifted up along the radio and television channels to where she sat watching him.
“No. The newer model androids, the really slick APs, maybe they’ve made the crossover into full-fledged humanity. Until I was torn apart by the alien, I could fool somebody’s eye, that’s all. I could even fool myself for a little while. In the end, I’m not really human, not in the same way you are.”
Billie couldn’t speak.
Wilks butted in. “You’re better than we are, Bueller. That’s your problem. Tougher, smarter, faster, and when it gets right down to it, more humane and more forgiving. If I were in your boots—if you still had any—I’d be royally pissed at what had been done to me. You’re letting us off the hook too easy, man. Mitch.”
Billie blinked and stared at Wilks. It was the first time she’d ever heard Wilks use his first name.
Mitch got it, too. “Thanks, Wilks,” he said. His voice quavered, he was barely able to choke the words out. Oh, God!
“You take good care of Billie.”
“I will.”
“Mitch.”
“I’ve got to go, Billie,” he said. “There are people out there dying and even though I’ve learned that not all people are worth saving, I still can’t break that little built-in ethical rule. Take care of yourself, Billie. I love you. I realize now I always did. And for whatever time I have left, I always will. Good-bye.”
The picture vanished before she could say it.
“Mitch!”
“Carrier’s down,” Wilks said. He stared at the blank spot where the projection had been. He wouldn’t look at her.
If she’d been him, she wouldn’t have looked at her, either. She felt like shit. Mitch was an android, but Wilks was right. He was a better person than she was. Much better.
She cried for what seemed like a long time.
* * *
“We’ve broken orbit and are moving at a pretty good clip,” Wilks said.
Billie nodded dully but didn’t speak.
“Probably we’ll shift into Einstein space pretty soon. There are half a dozen sleep chambers in the forward crew section. The others have been torn out to make room for the aliens but those still seem to be in working condition.”
Billie didn’t speak to that, either.
“We should go down and check them out. No telling how long we’ll be in transit once we shift. Could be months, years, maybe.”
She looked at him. Her silence was getting on his nerves.
&nbs
p; “Look, I already checked for a lifeboat. They took it out for cargo space. If they’d left it, we could have gone back. There are a few deep-space and C-suits, but they wouldn’t do us any good. Even if we survived the trip down—and that’s real iffy—we couldn’t lift again. The aliens will eventually take over the base, you know that. Going back without a way to lift would be suicide. We couldn’t help anybody.”
“I understand,” she said. Her voice was dead calm, flat, unemotional.
Jesus.
“Maybe when we get wherever we’re going, we can make Spears pay for this,” he tried.
She looked at him. “Whatever it costs him won’t be enough,” she said. Same tone.
“Maybe not. But it’ll make me feel better.”
After that, neither of them had anything to say for a long time.
* * *
In his bunk, tucked in with nothing more than accel-gee and a few bungles, General Thomas A.W. Spears slept, the peaceful sleep of a man without worry, a man without shame, a man without guilt. His rest was only a little disturbed by a pleasant, slightly sexual dream of war. He was riding with Stonewall Jackson, it was early in the Battle of Chancellorsville, before Jackson received the wounds that would take his arm, then later his life. “The Lord has given us this day in victory,” Jackson said. Spears, who had nothing but contempt for any kind of religion, smiled and nodded. The Lord helped those who had the troops and the best strategy and tactics. But then again, victory was the key word, wasn’t it?
Always. Always.
24
Wilks sat in what passed for a rec room on this tub, staring at the view of the MacArthur provided by the nose cam he’d managed to program to track Spears’s vessel. The other ship was maybe half a klick ahead and slightly offset, relative to their ship. They could have been directly astern of the Mac, given that gee drives didn’t spew dangerous flux, but the maneuver was an old one, adopted when such things had still been a problem.
Against the backdrop of blackness and pinpoints of unblinking stars, the other ship appeared frozen. There was no sense of movement, Spears’s ship just seemed to hang there. Even the drone of their own engines was merely background sound, like being inside some big factory that throbbed but certainly wasn’t going anywhere.
