by Steve Perry
As in all military ships designed to be sailed or flown by men, the Jackson had certain supplies carefully stored away. Ship’s rations weren’t ever going to top anybody’s culinary lists but you could survive eating them. There was enough food stashed to keep Wilks and Billie alive and even healthy for years, all the proper vitamins and minerals carefully included. That was assuming they stayed in normal space, droning along under the gravity drives.
Billie didn’t talk much these days, but Wilks understood that. She was grieving, and the way he saw it, rightly so. He’d tried to warn her, back when he’d first seen it coming, but she hadn’t listened. It didn’t make him feel smug to think that he’d told her so. That was the problem with being older and maybe a little wiser in the ways of the galaxy. You thought you had something to offer, only thing was, almost nobody ever wanted to hear it. Billie was a kid, he was old enough to be her father. Not that he’d ever thought of himself as the fatherly type, but he had seen the grief between her and Bueller coming a long way off. He’d tried to tell her, to spare her, but she was like the new Colonial Marine recruits he’d seen over the years. Fresh, convinced that nobody had ever done anything except them, reinventing the wheel for themselves. They seldom said it but Wilks had learned to hear it in their unspoken thoughts: Old fart like you? What can you know, gramps? You were never young, or if you were, it was so long ago you’ve forgotten what it was like. Save your breath, old man, you’ll need it to totter off to your grave. Fucking kids.
They were right about one thing, it was hard to remember when he’d been that stupid. He could recall it, but it made him want to shake his head. If he got stuck in a lift with the topectomy he’d been at nineteen, he probably would throttle the self-righteous little bastard after five minutes. Three minutes.
“Wilks?”
“Huh?”
“What are we going to do?”
He shrugged. He could have taken her question to mean a whole bunch of things but he knew what she meant: What are we going to do about Spears? The man was long past sanity, he’d left his troops to die, had killed many of them himself, and was now on a fool’s errand that would certainly be the end of them all.
“Wilks?”
“Right now, nothing. We don’t have any armament, nothing to shoot with except the hand weapons, which don’t do us any good against a ship like that, even if we could figure out a way to hit it from here. Oh, yeah, we could go EVA, we got a few suits, but we’re accelerating and there’s no way we can make up the relative speed. The squirt guns in the suits won’t push us hard enough.
“That’s not to mention what would happen if Spears decided it was time to make the leap into Einstein while we were outside dicking around.”
Billie blinked. He couldn’t tell if she was really interested in this or not, but he pretended she was. “See, the drive fields pretty much follow the contours of the ship generating ’em. If we were hugging the hull, maybe we’d go along for the ride. But anything that stuck out, an arm or leg or a head, maybe, would be left behind.”
Billie blinked again, didn’t speak.
“The field is better than any armor we’ve ever devised, you know, nothing gets through it, so we couldn’t get back inside. So, even if we didn’t get razored in half, there we’d be, outside the ship for however long we were in the warp. Months, a year, maybe longer.”
“Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad,” Billie said.
“Maybe, if you don’t mind running out of oxy and choking to death on your own CO2. Then when the ship did drop back into n-space and eventually started to decelerate, our bodies would zip on ahead and probably spend eternity tumbling through space. There are better ways to shuffle off.”
“And worse,” Billie said.
“Yeah. There are worse.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Waiting. We can wreck this ship. Spears doesn’t want that, not with his little army of monsters onboard. Maybe we can threaten him. Tear out the computers, get control somehow, ram the son of a bitch. Or maybe once we come out of the warp and start to slow down, we get a chance at something.”
“Such as…?”
“Hell, I don’t know, Billie. I don’t have all the answers. You got here at the same time I did. Maybe if you weren’t feeling so fucking sorry for yourself you might come up with something!”
She stared at him. “You knew Mitch was an android. Before I ever met him, you knew. You didn’t tell me.”
Wilks glared back at her. “Yeah, and I tried to tell you to stay away from him, didn’t I? You weren’t having any of it. You can’t blame this on me, kid. I did everything but lock you in your quarters to keep you away from Bueller. It never occurred to you I might know what the hell I was talking about, did it? Old chem-head twenty-year grunt, what the fuck could I know about anything, right?”
Billie looked down, said, “You’re right. It wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry.”
He felt his anger evaporate. Jesus. Big tough marine, beating up on the little girl. “It’s okay. I’m sorry, too.”
That was all either of them had to say for the moment.
Before they could pick up the thread of the conversation again, the ship’s warning buzzers sounded.
“Shit. That’s the ten-minute signal. We’re going into warp,” he said. “Better get to the sleep chambers.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“Warp space does ugly things to your mind if you stay awake. I did half an hour once, part of a test group. It makes your worst nightmare seem tame.”
She shuddered and he knew how she felt. They had both dreamed about the aliens too many times and those visions were horrible enough.
They hurried toward the sleep chambers.
* * *
Spears had three chambers from which to choose, all of which were functioning perfectly. He was normally not a triple-redundancy man when it came to his personal safety, but this mission was much bigger than a single human. Nothing must be left to chance at this stage.
He climbed into the center chamber. All three of the hypersleep tubes had been rigged with special alarm systems. If any of the bioelectronics in his life-support system should malfunction, he would be awakened and given the command to transfer to another chamber by a recording of himself. Even if he were half-asleep he would understand the order well enough to make the change.
Not that he thought any such malfunction would happen, but if it did, he was prepared. In due course he would arrive in the vicinity of Earth. In due course he would choose the spot where the retaking of Terra would begin. He intended that it be some historical battlefield: Gettysburg, the Alamo, Waterloo, perhaps the Plain of Jars or the ruins of El Salvador. Somewhere symbolic, to rally men behind him and his new army. He had considered a new place, somewhere untouched before by the mighty engines of war, but no. Standing on the shoulders of some historical giant would only add to his own stature. Besides, there were so few spots on Earth that had never seen any war. Offhand, he couldn’t even think of one. Might as well choose a site with well-known glory.
As the lid of the chamber clamshelled down and the medical machineries hummed to life and connected themselves to him, Spears considered his choices. Iwo Jima. Hiroshima. Normandy. Capetown. Bunker Hill. The Rio de Morte. Pearl Harbor. The Golan Heights. Baghdad. The 38th Parallel. Sparta. Rome…
So many places from which to select. What a wonderful thing war was…
25
Sleep:
The software of three human minds chemically shunted and spun Zen-like through the wet hardware of their brains with liquid neuronic flows, dendritic capacitors zapping, the subconsciousnesses singing hormonally to themselves.
Alone in a million-kilometer emptiness save for each other and things not human, they dreamed.
One mind was filled with joy. Two minds were caught in the clawed grips of horror. Of this latter pair, one faced certain death but fought valiantly, knowing Death would win. The other discovered she wo
uld live forever—but with the monster she faced as an eternal companion.
There was really no question as to which was the more terrifying dream. No question at all.
26
Billie awoke and for a moment didn’t know where she was or how she had come to be there. Her back ached, her arms and legs were sore, her mouth was gummy. Puzzling, but in its own way, it was one of the happiest moments of her life: she had no baggage.
Then she remembered.
The lid of the chamber fanned up, the circulators kicked on, and a breeze of stale ship air wafted over her. She heard the click of Wilks’s sleep chamber as the lid yawned like a hydraulic clamshell, saw him wince and turn his head as he came awake.
Wilks sat up, rubbed at his eyes, stuck his tongue out. He looked over at Billie and nodded. “Time to rise and shine,” he said. His voice was a hoarse croak. “Another glorious day in the Corps.”
Billie stared at him.
“That’s what my old platoon sarge used to say every time we finished a session in one of these suckers,” Wilks said.
“What happened to him?”
“Something he disagreed with ate him.”
The two of them padded to the showers and cranked the sprayers on. Billie stripped unselfconsciously and stepped under the water. The spray was more of a drizzle but the water was hot and she felt some of the soreness from the months of sleep ebb under the warmth.
Wilks looked at her, taking in her nakedness, then turned back to let the water soak his hair and run down his face and body. Billie saw the scars on his body, some worse than the one on his face, marks of combat she supposed, either in wars or pubs or on some street somewhere. She wondered why he hadn’t had the scars resected and wiped. Even with the marks on his body, he was in pretty good shape for somebody old enough to be her father. Nice ass.
Funny, she’d never really thought of Wilks that way, except in her nightmares. But that was more or less a standard feature of her dreams, had been since she was a kid. A monster tearing itself out of somebody she knew. All the more horrible because it had actually happened to some of the people she had known. Her parents. Her brother.
Wilks turned around to let the water play on his neck and back and Billie glanced down. If he thought of her in a sexual manner, it sure didn’t show. It was kind of difficult for a man to hide that kind of reaction. Not that she had all that much experience with men, there had been a few, but one didn’t grow up in a hospital without learning a little anatomy. She knew what went where, and what it had to look like before it could get there. There was no salute from Wilks to show any interest in her as a woman.
“How long were we asleep?”
Wilks, eyes closed against the stream of hot water, shrugged. “I dunno. I didn’t check the meter. But if the ship woke us up, we must be close to where we’re going.”
“What now?”
“We finish our showers, get something to eat. Figure out our next move after that. One thing at a time.”
Billie nodded, leaned forward a little so the water could trickle down her spine. Maybe that was the only way to get through life without going crazy. Take it one thing at a time, little bites you could chew without choking.
* * *
Spears made the discovery almost by accident. He’d been awake for six hours, had cleaned up and eaten a meal, dressed in ship fatigues and run a few system checks. This latter was more for his peace of mind than anything else, the ship’s operational computer being sufficient to handle virtually all the chores without regulation from him. But being a careful man, he occasionally checked to be certain things were running as they should.
In this case, things were not running as they should. A tracking system on the cargo ship floating there a couple of klicks behind the Jackson said that two of the sleep chambers had been activated and utilized during the trip through hyperspace. Water had been drained from the storage tanks and then fed back into the recycler. Power consumption was up slightly from that necessary to maintain the troops in their suspension tanks. Oxygen consumption was also higher than it should be.
On the face of it, there were two scenarios that came to mind: one, a malfunction either in his computer or the internal systems on the Macarthur; or, two—
Somebody unauthorized was on that ship. They’d slept in the chambers, and were now breathing the air, drinking the water, and using the lights. There would be food stores being eaten, too.
Other than the drive, Spears had not thought to slave the ship’s internal controls to his board, it hadn’t seemed necessary. He had no eyes on the cargo ship, no way to shut down the air or power. True, he did have some weaponry on the Jackson capable of disabling or even destroying his companion vessel, but the last thing he wanted was for anything to happen to his precious cargo.
He leaned back in the form-chair and looked at the computer-generated infocrawl. All right. So there were a couple of stowaways on the ship behind him. No big deal. They didn’t know he knew they were there. When he put down on Earth, he would take care of the problem before they knew what hit them. A pair of deserters, of frightened human troopers, wouldn’t give him any trouble. A concussion grenade through the hatch and anybody standing around would be out of it. The tactical advantage was his. They were still a couple of weeks away from landing; he had plenty of time to plan the best way to take care of sniveling ship rats.
Meanwhile, there were other things to do. He had to get himself prepared for the coming battle. War was imminent. And about damned time, too.
* * *
Wilks exercised, using parts of the ship not designed for such activity but things that could be made to work. A thick pipe for chins. A pair of stools for dips and push-ups. Anything he could hook his feet under for crunches. He worked hard at it, harder than he would have had he been alone on the ship. That episode with Billie in the shower had called up a bunch of mixed emotions. On the one hand, he remembered her as a ten-year-old child, crying in fear as he saved her from the death her parents had suffered. On the other hand, standing naked next to her in the shower, he saw that she was a grown woman, attractive, and it had been too long since he had been with somebody that way. Billie had done it with Bueller, Wilks knew that.
But—Jesus. He was old enough to be her father. And for a brief time had more or less functioned in that role. True, he hadn’t seen her for a decade or so after he rescued her, and that child and this woman hardly seemed related. Still, it wouldn’t be good to let these thoughts continue. Not at all.
He finished his third set of fifty crunches. His belly burned, the muscles dancing on the edge of cramps. He lay on the deck, sweat beaded all over him. He’d been working out for about an hour, he was done. He’d run the water cold in the shower this time.
* * *
Billie opened a meal packet. The reconstituted and heated food in the plastic container smelled like meat and gravy, with vegetables on the side, though it was all soypro.
Wilks entered the galley and nodded at her. She opened a second packet for him.
They ate in silence for a minute. It had been three days since they’d dropped out of warp. Wilks had spent much of the time exercising.
“Are you avoiding me?” she said.
He looked up from his food. “No. Why do you ask?”
“You seem distracted.”
He stared at the brown goop in his container.
“No, I was just working on a plan, that’s all. Thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to let me in on it?”
“Well. It’s a little rough.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay. I’m pretty sure we’re in the Solar System. I can’t do shit with the instruments, they’re all locked out, but it makes sense. With the gee drive it won’t take long for us to get to Earth. Couple weeks, tops. We’ll be moving along at a good piece of light-speed, and the last few days we’ll be coasting, then using retro drive to slow
down.”
“All right, I follow that.”
“So once Spears puts it into reverse, we’re decelerating at the same rate. The ships, him, us. If we suit up and go EVA, we can use the suits’ squirters to accelerate. We’re all moving faster than a speeding bullet, but it’s relative.”
“So we suit up, jump off, and catch up to Spears. Then what?”
“Well, since he doesn’t know we’re here, maybe we surprise him long enough to make it there.”
“Maybe?”
“Uh, yeah, he’ll have proximity mass detectors. Plus radar and Doppler and luxflect. If he happens to be sitting in front of a sensor screen, he’ll see us coming. Or probably there’s an alarm rigged to tell him something is coming if he happens to be on the crapper.”
“Then he shoots us to pieces, right?”
“Maybe not. Maybe he just cuts the retros and leaves us hanging in vac with no place to go. Assuming our ship doesn’t splatter us like bugs on a flitter’s windscreen when it ‘speeds up’ and zips on by.”
“Why does this not sound like a good idea to me?”
“Or we could wait until we get where we’re going and clonk him over the head when he opens the door to our ship to let his tame monsters out to pee.”
“That’s Earth, right, where there are a few million more monsters, none of them tame? No, thanks.”
“All right. His detectors are likely set to pick up ship-size masses or stuff approaching at high speed, asteroids, space crap, like that.”
“So?”
“If we catch up real slowly, maybe the system doesn’t kick in until we’re right on top of him.”
“Sounds kind of iffy.”
“I could go down into the engine room and take a hammer to the drive. If it didn’t go spastic and warp us into a supercompacted ball, which it could, maybe we could disable it and make him come to see what’s wrong. He doesn’t want to lose this cargo.”
“I don’t like that plan much at all.”
“Me, neither. So unless you got something better, I say we wait until he hits the brakes and then we go to him.”
