“I am a diplomat,” the queazel said. It pulled the oxygen mask back over its muzzle and shut its eyes.
Colm folded his arms. What would a diplomat have been doing at Drumlin Farm? He felt offended that the queazel was lying to him, after he had saved its life. “Really?”
The queazel didn’t respond.
Colm floated out of the foot tethers and peeled his leathers off. His knee was badly swollen. He’d have liked to scan it to see if the ligaments were torn, but the queazel was occupying the gurney, so he’d have to wait until they reached the Unsinkable. He got a cold compress from a locker and wrapped it around the knee. Then he floated, legs dangling in the air, looking down at the queazel’s furry body.
“I’ll give you tropodolfin,” he said.
The black eyes opened.
“If you tell me the truth.”
The queazel made a soft snarling noise. Colm tensed, wondering if it might spring. The teeth crowding its muzzle looked quite sharp.
“No offense,” he said uneasily. “I’d just like to know why you travelled all that way to visit a farm.”
“The other one did not ask unseemly questions.”
The other one— “You mean Bekkelund.”
“Is that what his name was? I asked him for help, and he said yes. He did not ask why.”
Sadness flashed through Colm. Yep, that had been Bekkelund. He had died trying to help people, no questions asked. “I’m not as nice as he was.”
After a moment, the queazel said, “And yet you saved me. All right. Give me the medication.”
Colm opened the meds locker and measured out a dose of tropodolfin, based on the queazel’s bodyweight, which the gurney gave as 14 kg.
“Thank you,” the queazel said. Its head and 50 centimeters of its body rose to the vertical. It grabbed Colm’s wrist with its hard little forepaws, snatched the spoon, and swiped a long black tongue around it. The grains of tropodolfin vanished. “Uffff,” the queazel groaned. “To your question, I was visiting Professor Zaragoza. He is known as one of humanity’s greatest living metaphysicists.”
Not to Colm, he wasn’t. Then again, Colm couldn’t have named any metaphysicists, living or dead.
“I hoped to learn from him how human theorists understand the Ghosts. Then the Ghosts themselves arrived on Majriti IV ... and I learned, instead, how easy it is to die.”
“Yeah,” Colm said quietly. “I learned that lesson tonight, too.”
“Then you are answered.” The queazel snuggled back under the restraints and closed its eyes again.
No, actually, that was no kind of answer. Colm was no wiser than he had been before. However, he recognized he was not going to get anything more out of the queazel, especially not now that it had a powerful sedative coursing through its veins.
He took some corticosteroid ointment from the locker and went to give it to Smythe for her legs.
CHAPTER 8
THEY HELD BEKKELUND’S WAKE in a disused magazine on the Unsinkable’s weather deck. Of course, the Unsinkable did not have a weather deck like a carrier of old, in the sense of being open to the elements. But the terminology had stuck, in the same way as the carrier-based infantry called themselves Marines, although most of them had never set foot on a boat.
The weather deck was the furthest forward of the carrier’s 118 pressurized decks, which were stacked like square pennies around the keel. It was a poorly lit maze of poky compartments. The detonator chemicals stored in this particular compartment had been used up months ago, given to the local militia to make anti-Ghost mines, for all the good those did.
Colm procured the booze. Fleet vessels may officially have been dry, but that was taken about as seriously as the No Smoking signs. There was always a guy with connections. Colm was not that guy but he knew that guy. He had also brought Bekkelund’s own game console. It projected a roulette wheel in the middle of the floor. Bekkelund’s friends and colleagues sat on ammo crates and chairs pilfered from distant mess halls, leaning over, shuffling solid-looking chips, the backs of their hands tinted green by the projector, casting metal shadows on the deck. Cigarette smoke billowed towards a portable air purifier. Cigarettes were a vice that had come back into fashion, now that cancer was no more serious than the common cold. Other vices had never gone away. The guys who had to fly later were on coffee and stimulants. A one-time private network played Bekkelund’s favorite bands, blocking out the ever-present whirr of fans and the gurgle of plumbing.
Colm partook heavily. Just for tonight, he wanted to forget about Ghosts and queazels and sparks in the darkness. He wanted everyone to remember how Bekkelund had lived, not how he’d died, and have a great time. He was standing on his hands to entertain the younger lads when Meg nudged him, bending over to shout something into his face.
“Cannae hear you,” Colm shouted back—he had the music turned up to eleven.
“Look who’s here,” Smythe shouted, her lips twisting.
Colm craned his head around and saw Axel Best, sitting by himself on an overturned crate. He hand-walked over to him. He’d always been good at this, and the half-gravity on board the carrier made it easy to stay upside-down for long periods of time. He liked the way the world looked from down here: it restored some sanity to the madness. “Thanks for coming.” He was drunk enough to want to bury the hatchet.
“Why are you walking on your hands?” Best said.
“It’s the obvious solution when you’ve bust your knee.” Colm had had the kneecap realigned, but then fluid had built up in it and that had had to be drained. He was wearing a brace on it. “It’s no hardship. Watch this.”
He had his ‘sippie’—the squeezable thermos he used in zero-gee—hanging from his belt, bumping against his face. He had been making the guys laugh by drinking upside-down. It didn’t go as well this time. He spluttered vodka and Irn Bru onto Best’s perfectly creased BDUs, lost his balance, and toppled into Best’s lap.
Best set him upright with a crooked smile. “You could get into trouble. Drinking, smoking, gambling ...”
“Don’t forget the dress code violations,” Colm said, thumbing his own t-shirt, which sported a cartoon of a naked woman straddling a gunship. Caption: Size DOES matter. He plopped on the crate next to Best and offered him a cigarette, which Best declined. “We’re not gambling, though.”
“It sure looks like it.”
“No, it’s an auction. We all put in equal stakes. The winners will bid on Bekkelund’s personal belongings, and the proceeds will go to his family.”
“Is that ... customary?”
Best was out of his element. The Marines didn’t hold illegal parties on the weather deck. It had been brave of Best to come. “The thinking is they’d probably rather have the cash than thirty terabytes of porn, a game console, a homemade flamethrower...”
“OK, OK, I get the idea. We must protect the innocent people of Earth from finding out what war is really like.”
“That’s it exactly.”
Best was quiet for a moment. “How did he die?”
Colm dragged on his cigarette, stalling. The truth was he’d been having nightmares again. The horrible events at Drumlin Farm had given his subconscious new fodder to terrify him with. At night, unprotected by the rationality of his waking mind, he confronted the Ghost again and again. Sometimes it had wintry blue eyes, sometimes brown, but it always chilled him to the bone, and sometimes it smiled. Early this morning he’d fought awake, glued to his rack with cold sweat, another two hours to go before reveille and no chance of getting back to sleep.
He had not said anything about the TDP plant in his post-op debrief. He wasn’t crazy. And he certainly wasn’t going to mention it now.
“Vike was a fucking hero, man. That said, he had crap taste in music. Want to hear it? Progressive doom rock. That’s what we’re all listening to.”
“Progressive doom just about sums up my life,” Best quipped. “I’ll pass. I wouldn’t say no to a sippie of that vodka, thou
gh.”
With a couple of drinks inside him, Best unbent. He chatted with Smythe, and contributed a thousand bucks to the fund for Bekkelund’s family, which was twice as much as anyone else had put in. The generous gift clearly impressed Smythe. She clutched Best’s arm with a drunken lack of restraint, and blurted, “I should have said this before, but thank you, sir. If you hadn’t come back for us? I would’ve been Ghost chow. So, thanks. I’m saying it for him, too,” she added, with a mischievous glance at Colm.
Best’s mouth thinned. He brusquely shook Smythe off. “You don’t think I came back for you?”
Smythe shrank away, crushed. Best stalked out of the room.
Colm cornered him in the corridor. A single sensor-activated light shone down on them; the rest of the weather deck was dark. Raucous voices leaked out of the party. Colm folded his arms. “You didn’t need to say that to her.”
“It’s the truth,” Best said, shrugging.
“Oh, I know. You’d never have come back for us. We don’t count.”
“I had orders—”
“To come back for that queazel thing. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Emile Zaragoza has friends in high places.”
“And so you risked a gunship and a lot of civilian lives to rescue his pet.”
“His friend.”
“Oh, right, I’m sorry. The alien diplomat.”
The queazel had come aboard the Unsinkable with them. Colm hadn’t seen it since, but he didn’t expect to. They’d have it well hidden away. You couldn’t have aliens running around a Navy carrier.
“Did Zaragoza say it was a diplomat?” Best asked.
“No, the thing itself said it.”
“Then I guess that’s what it is.”
Best knew more than he was telling, Colm thought. “In my opinion it was lying its furry arse off. It’s no diplomat. It’s a spy.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Best’s expression stayed infuriatingly remote. He was handsome, with dark hair and high cheekbones, and a sheen of privilege that the rough-and-tumble life on board a carrier could not erase. Colm figured he could take him, but he didn’t want to ruin Bekkelund’s wake by punching a senior officer, to say nothing of the disciplinary consequences that would follow.
All the same, he couldn’t let it go. “It’s not exactly news that the sentrienza spy on us. Why shouldn’t every other gang of aliens be doing it, too?”
“The sentrienza don’t spy on us.”
“Oh, sure they do.”
“They’re helping us fight the Ghosts.”
A couple of junior officers came out of the party, locked hip to hip, so absorbed in each other they didn’t even notice Colm and Best as they went the other way. Colm sighed. He was on his second enlistment. Best was also in his mid-thirties. They were two old-timers in a war zone full of kids. Honesty ought to be possible. “The sentrienza aren’t helping us very much, are they? They’ve got all sorts of technology they could give us if they wanted to, and they haven’t.”
“How do you know that?”
“They’re the kings of the heap, right? Got a 500-planet interstellar empire. To them, this shit—” Colm’s sweeping gesture took in the whole war— “is no more than stray dogs fighting in the street.”
Best’s face twitched. Maybe he was remembering his own men who’d died down there. Wondering why it had to be this way. Colm had wondered the same thing every day since Bekkelund died.
“We’ll win in the end, of course.” Colm heard himself saying what an officer was supposed to say, stepping back from the brink of honesty, toeing the party line. He marvelled at the power of the accepted platitudes. “But we’ll have to do it on our own, without any help from the sentrienza or the queazels or whatever other bastards are out there.”
Best hesitated. Then he blurted, “We’re down to three colony systems. Three. Trappist-1, Gliese, and Upsilon Andromedae A.”
Colm stared. If true, this was shattering news. As far as he had known, humanity still held nine or ten systems.
“We lost the Kepler system last year. In twenty years, the Ghosts have destroyed fifteen of the colonies we spent two hundred years building up.”
Colm opened his mouth to say that Best was shitting him, and then closed it again. Which of them was likelier to know the truth? A first lieutenant perpetually on the verge of disgrace, or the son of an industrial titan who hobnobbed with the Human Republic’s top politicians? The Kepler system. Jesus. He remembered parasailing beneath the twin moons of Kepler 442b on a memorable weekend of surface leave. Tried to picture that lovely beach overrun by Ghosts. It was actually all too easy to imagine, after what he’d seen on Majriti IV.
“We’ve had to resettle half a billion people,” Best said. “Earth doesn’t want them, Mars can’t take them. There is no more goddamn room. Our FTL lift capacity is not up to the job. The population of Majriti IV is 41 million. We cannot lose this system! So if a few guys have to die in the line of duty, tough titty. That’s what they signed up for.”
“Aye,” Colm said bleakly. “The hard part’s living with it, isn’t it? I let Vike go off on his own. I knew it was a bad idea, and I let him do it, anyway. He was just a kid. I thought he could handle himself ... I got him killed.”
“Spilt milk,” Best said brusquely. “We just have to do the job to the best of our abilities.”
Com decided that he would punch Best, after all, and damn the consequences. Before he could act on this ill-advised decision, a klaxon resounded through the weather deck. It overrode the music playing on Colm’s comms implant. Fire-engine red text scrolled over his vision. The Rat’s voice rasped in his brain.
“All gunship crews to the flight decks.”
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
“Man your craft ASAP.”
THIS IS NOT A DRILL
“Acknowledge.”
“Warpig Ten, copy,” Colm gasped. He limped back into the party, grabbed Smythe. Then he paused. “Carry on with the auction, guys. Someone bid for me. I want his music collection.”
CHAPTER 9
THE CAPITAL CITY OF Majriti IV, Sebraiville, was under attack.
Colm limped into the ready room halfway through the Rat’s briefing. Pilots packed the room, balls to arse, filling the air with heavy breathing and the smell of sweat and farts. Colm couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen this many pilots in one place. He was surprised the Unsinkable had this many left.
The Rat was not physically present. He spoke on the screen, from the bridge. Behind him, staff officers rushed around, giving an impression of panic that didn’t help the morale of the assembled pilots. “The Ghosts have set off bombs in the city center,” the Rat said flatly. He went on to assure the pilots that they would pulverize the motherfuckers, although he did not say precisely how this was to be accomplished. He then referred each pilot to the individual briefing in his or her inbox.
Colm read his briefing while he limped out to the flight deck. It instructed him to land at Sebraiville Spaceport, drop off reinforcements for the city’s garrison, and board 40 civilians for transfer to the Unsinkable. A glance at the passenger list suggested that they were colonial VIPs and their families.
“It’s an evacuation,” he said to Smythe, climbing into the cockpit.
“It can’t be that bad,” she said in disbelief. The comment made her sound naïve, but then again, she hadn’t just had Axel Best telling her that humanity was down to three colonies, out of eighteen as recently as 2330.
Without further comment, Colm strapped into his seat. He was glad no one had breathalyzed him. He’d have lost his license for climbing into the cockpit like this back on Earth.
“This is your pilot speaking,” he said to the Marines in the cabin. They were seated along the walls, clad in their battlesuits. “Ready to rock and roll?”
They returned a yawp of enthusiasm. Colm remembered what Best had said. We CAN’T lose this system. Well, if anyone could save Majriti IV, thes
e guys and girls could.
The lights dipped. The launch platform flung him at the opening doors. He sprang into space.
No matter how grim the situation, he still relished the physical pleasure of flying. His skin was a titanium-steel alloy, his left side warmed by the light of Upsilon Andromedae A. Coolant, water, and air pumped smoothly through his guts. The ache in his knee no longer bothered him. Esthesia masked your actual bodily sensations; it wouldn’t have worked otherwise. Being drunk, he decided, enhanced the effect.
He dived towards the hazy blue globe of Majriti IV. Garlanded by clouds, the moon looked peaceful. Majriti floated behind it like a gemstone in the blackness of space.
“So I’m looking at the news from the surface,” his new copilot, Suleiman Tan, said. “Two bombs, one in the business district, one in a park. Happens every day, right? The problem is, they were nukes.”
“There’s no nuclear on Majriti IV,” Colm said. “It’s all wind, solar, a bit of natural gas.” And biodiesel made in TDP plants. “Where would the Ghosts get the fissile material?”
“Could be a false report,” Tan said. “Some civilians saw a mushroom cloud and thought nuke, because they’ve never seen a real one. Anyway, they’ve locked down the city. Closed the roads to inbound traffic, stopped the trains, grounded all domestic flights. Death toll in the low four figures so far.”
Tan reported this shocking news without emotion. He had flown his own gunship until recently; lost the bird, lost his crew, got tossed into the replacements bin.
Wanting to get a better sense of the closed-off man, Colm used the downtime of their descent to ask him about himself. Born on Mars. Joined up for the health benefits. Ha, ha. Wife and two kids back home. Tan’s stoic reserve softened as he showed them pictures of his daughters, ages 4 and 2.
“Jesus, they’re adorable.” Colm paused. “So how did you lose your ship?”
Tan shrugged. “I put down on Wellamay Island. It was just a routine ferry run.” Ferry runs were when gunships airlifted local troops from one hot spot to another. “I turned my back for ten minutes ...”
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 5
