The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1)

by Felix R. Savage

  Colm felt dizzy. With an effort, he held his back straight, hands stiff along the seams of his dress uniform, eyes fixed on the dripping pipe.

  “You have the right to appeal this verdict. Your appeal must be lodged within three days. Is this clear, Lieutenant Mackenzie?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. That concludes this hearing. Dismissed.”

  Colm gave a jerky salute. He paused. “That pipe’s leaking, sir.”

  “So it is.”

  “Leaks like that can cause a lot of damage, can’t they?”

  The judge sighed. Still focused on the screen of his computer, he intoned, “Do I need to remind you, Lieutenant Mackenzie, that you remain bound by the naval code of honor as regards operational intelligence? Any infringement of the said code could result in a criminal prosecution.”

  “Aye, right,” Colm said. “The code of honor.” He had his answer. This was still all about the queazel. “I’m only saying it’s likely to be a clogged condensate pipe. You can fix that with a vacuum cleaner.”

  The judge reached under his desk. Colm heard a faint click. He guessed that the judge had turned off the recording equipment. For the first time, their eyes met. “A word to the wise, Lieutenant Mackenzie,” the judge said. “You have the right to appeal this verdict. But don’t bother. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Colm saluted again, spun, and walked out of the courtroom a civilian.

  *

  THE WORST WAS YET TO come.

  He collected his personal belongings from the barracks, trying not to cringe when the lads commiserated over his bad luck. Colm used to be the life of the party in the 207th, the voice of experience, if not the voice of wisdom. Now he was a cautionary tale. He’d probably never see any of them again.

  He turned in the gear he had always thought of as his, but which actually belonged to the Navy: leathers, sidearm, rucksack.

  Then it was time to go under the knife, to relinquish the rest of it.

  The neurosurgeon looked as if he hadn’t yet graduated from high school. Hands buried in the control gloves of a medical robot, he removed Colm’s infocals, his comms implant, and his esthesia implant. Colm did not tell him that he had skimped on the anesthetic. It felt right that this should hurt.

  Woozy, vision blurring, he staggered out of the hospital and took the train to Regnar, the largest of Gna’s roofed cities. He went into the first hotel he came to and requested a room for the night.

  They wanted a deposit.

  Right. When you’re a civilian, you have to pay for things.

  He tried to call up his credit balance on his infocals, remembered he no longer had infocals, dug his five-year-old computer out of the laundry bag he was carrying his possessions in. Standing at a corner of the reception desk, he powered it up.

  Bloody thing was broken.

  Couldn’t be connecting properly to the net.

  It said he only had a couple of thousand dollars in credit.

  He paid the deposit and went up to his room. His vision was doubling, his head pounding. Sprawling on the crackly disposable sheets, he wrestled the truth out of the computer.

  Financial penalties. That had been no mere symbolic charge, as he’d assumed.

  The Navy had garnished his credit balance for the cost of that sodding train on Majriti IV.

  Colm had had six figures owed to him. He’d left it in the Navy Bank, where it had been accruing interest for ten years. When he got out, he’d been going to buy the house on the Isle of Skye that once belonged to his great-grandfather. It had been up for sale for years. Needed a lot of work.

  An ore train on Majriti IV, evidently, cost slightly less than a house on Skye.

  So, since that hadn’t completely wiped out his savings, they’d added another penalty: compensation for the suffering of the colonists he’d dumped fallout on, who could only have suffered for a few days, if that, before they were massacred by the Ghosts. What must they have felt as they watched the Navy, which they’d trusted to rescue them, fly off and leave them behind?

  Colm had an inkling, now.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE ONLY THING TO do in these circumstances was to get outrageously drunk, and that was what Colm set out to do, as soon as his vision cleared up and his headache dulled to a manageable throb.

  He rode the train two stops to the red light district, saw that it was wall to wall with Marines, and hopped back on again. He transferred to the Vilnius Bay line and got off, arbitrarily, at Loftar 15.

  Gna had first been settled 150 years ago as a waypost for the colonization effort then just getting into full swing. The rogue planet’s location—far from any star, one of many planets and failed stars drifting in the interstellar void between Sol and Alpha Centauri—guaranteed it virtually unfindable. Humanity had stumbled on it in the first place out of sheer luck. When the Ghosts came along, this made Gna the obvious place for the Human Republic to base the Fleet. In twenty years of war, the population had exploded from thousands to millions. Even since Colm first arrived here for basic training, the place had changed out of all recognition.

  More recently, the Human Republic had begun to resettle evacuees on Gna, in rough-and-ready loftars—modular, box-shaped domes constructed from fiberglass and sheetrock.

  This was a real sign of desperation. For Gna had no sun. Torn away, presumably, from the Alpha Centauri system billions of years ago, it retained a hydrogen sulfide atmosphere that seeped through anything and embrittled steel. You couldn’t go outside without an EVA suit. Everyone who lived here, military and civilians alike, spent their free time plotting their escape to somewhere nicer.

  Hence the Waikiki, the bar and lounge where Colm ended up after wandering through the overcrowded streets of Loftar 15.

  If you can’t actually move to Hawaii, you can at least pretend you did.

  3D wall treatments created the illusion of an endless, moonlit beach. It was mildly entertaining to watch drunks walk into the walls while looking for the toilets. Colm ordered a blue cocktail with an umbrella in it, as an overture to the hard liquor binge he was planning, and enjoyed the soundtrack of crashing surf. He had never been to Hawaii, but it sounded the same as the waves curling on the pebble beaches back home.

  Gna had its own seas, vast pools of liquid water in the calderas of extinct volcanoes like this one. The rogue planet’s moon dragged them back and forth on a predictable schedule. It was high tide outside Loftar 15 right now. Colm amused himself by exploring the town’s live external feeds on his computer. An undersea camera showed the water sluicing over the forest of vortex generators on the sea floor, producing kilowatts of energy.

  Gna was not short on energy. Or volatiles. Or sheetrock.

  It was just awfully short on everything else that made life worth living.

  He found one nice view—looking north from Loftar 15 across Vilnius Bay. Shuttles launched from the military spaceport every couple of minutes, blue-white spikes vanishing into the fog, lighting up the mountainous piles of loftars around the bay and the fish farms floating offshore.

  What held his interest, of course, was the shuttles.

  Every one of them carrying other lucky sods back into orbit.

  Colm could not afford to get back into orbit, let alone back to Earth.

  He checked his credit balance again.

  $1,746.

  He waved down the waitress, who clocked his buzz-cut and offered him the active service member’s discount. “I’m a bloody civilian,” Colm said, and then felt bad for biting her head off. He ordered a double whiskey on the rocks, added an extravagant tip.

  $1,722.

  His computer was still on the table, propped against a pineapple-shaped salt cellar. A message blinked.

  Hey Collie Mack, where are you?

  Smythe.

  Colm drank his whiskey. Then he responded, In Hawaii. Wish you were here! He held up the computer and panned it across the 3D walls.

  Twenty minutes later,
Smythe crashed through the door and plopped down at his table. Her eyes glittered. She was wearing jeans and a hoodie, which made her look like a different person—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her out of uniform. In fact, they hadn’t spoken since the day he was arrested. He hadn’t wanted her to see him like this.

  “Well,” she said, “that’s the last time I ever try to help people.”

  Colm frowned. Then he put the pieces together. The civvies. Her dishevelled appearance. The heavy duffel bag she had dumped beside her chair.

  “They canned you, too? I don’t believe it.”

  She nodded. “For leaving the ship at Drumlin Farm. Remember that?” As if he could have forgotten it. “I just don’t understand why that’s a DD offense.” Dishonorable discharge. Oh, poor Smythe. “I’m not the first person who ever went for a walk on the surface, so why is it suddenly this huge deal?”

  It was on the tip of Colm’s tongue to tell her she hadn’t been discharged for that. The real problem was she had seen the queazel, too. Then he remembered the code of honor, and instead said, “What’re you having? I recommend the blue cocktails.”

  Three cocktails later, Smythe started crying. Elbows propped on the table, she hid her face in her hands. Tears dripped onto the formica. “I just don’t know what to do,” she gasped. “The Navy was my life.”

  Colm picked a napkin out of the dispenser. On Gna, there were no trees to make paper from, so they used bioengineered silk grown from bacteria. It held a crease nicely. He folded it into a bunny with cute floppy ears and pushed it under the tent of Smythe’s hair. She grabbed it and wiped her eyes. Then she said, “Oh, I crumpled your bunny rabbit,” and started crying again.

  “I can do more,” Colm said, fingers flying. He folded a whole family of bunnies and made them appear from behind the salt cellar, his computer, and Smythe’s ear. He’d learned tricks like this from his father. He could also do card tricks, juggling, and balloon animals. The disappearing / reappearing bunnies finally coaxed a wet-eyed giggle from Smythe. “That’s better, lass.”

  The waitress had been watching, a tart smile on her face. Colm beckoned to her and found a bunny in her apron pocket. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” she said. If kids on Gna even had birthday parties, Colm reckoned, they did not have conjurors.

  “What are you going to do now?” Smythe said, nibbling a pretzel.

  “I’m thinking I’ll seduce that waitress,” Colm whispered.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I.”

  “Well, I guess you could do worse. Go for it, Collie Mack. Your gunny approves.” A wry smile twisted Smythe’s lips. “Where are you staying?”

  “A budget shithole in Regnar. Disposable sheets, 2D screen, perceptible smell of toilets.”

  “How romantic.”

  “It’s not what the sheets are made of, it’s what you do between them,” Colm said with a leer, which he turned into a wistful half-smile for the waitress as she returned to her station at the bar. “Oh yeah, wiggle that ass, baby,” he murmured under his breath.

  Smythe threw a pretzel at him. “Stay classy, Mackenzie.”

  “I try.” Colm ate the pretzel. It had the fishy undertaste of ‘bread’ products made from algae.

  “But seriously. What are you going to do tomorrow? And for—for the rest of your life?”

  “I’ve not got that far yet. But the immediate plan is to burn through all my credit.”

  “Good plan.”

  “No, there’s a method to my madness. If I’m dead broke, they’ll have to repatriate me.”

  Smythe’s eyes widened. “They’re not doing that anymore.”

  “Sure they are. They don’t want penniless ex-service members cluttering up the planet.”

  “No, the policy’s changed. I just heard from Best ...”

  “Best? That Best?”

  “Yeah. He said they’re not doing repatriations anymore. He was bitching about it because he’ll have to get Daddy to pay for his ticket home. Cry me a fucking river, am I right?”

  “Why does he need to buy a ticket home?”

  “Oh, didn’t you hear? He got a DD for the Drumlin Farm thing, too. It made the news. Philip K. Best’s son.”

  Colm chortled into his whiskey. “Now that’s poetic justice.” He couldn’t bring himself to feel too sorry for Best. He’d have a soft landing.

  But Smythe wasn’t laughing. “I thought the Fleet was better than this. Didn’t you?”

  Colm hemmed and hawed. Still reeling from the way they’d been treated, he didn’t want to confess that he’d ever fallen for the Fleet’s image of honor, justice, and so forth.

  Smythe was less shy about admitting it. “That’s why I joined up. I’m not stupid, I know no organization is perfect. But I wanted to dedicate my life to defending humanity.” She banged a fist on the table, hard enough to make their glasses jump. “What am I going to do now?”

  Colm caught the fist and covered it with his hand. He hated to see her tearing herself up about it like this. But he had no solutions to offer, except one. “My shout. Another blue cocktail?”

  Smythe’s almond-shaped eyes brimmed with emotion. He suddenly remembered her taking off her battlesuit on Majriti IV, shivering in her undies. And you didn’t even have to buy me a drink ... He pushed away the titillating memory of her gunnng down Ghosts in a sports bra and shorts. Bad boy!

  “Drinking doesn’t help, Collie Mack,” she said.

  He released her hand. “No, you’re right, alcohol is for pikers. We need hard drugs.”

  “Ha, ha.” She wiped her eyes. “All right, I’ll have one more of those disgusting blue concoctions. Then I’m going to go back to my hotel and watch romantic comedies.”

  Colm fanned himself. “Careful with those mind-altering substances.”

  “I might really go wild and eat a box of chocolates, too.” Smythe’s gaze drifted to Colm’s computer. He had a news feed scrolling. Unconfirmed Ghost sighting on Gliese 581 g. “Oh God, not another system!”

  “Was anyone not expecting this?” Colm said.

  Governor urges calm, promises investigation.

  “Woo-hoo. An investigation,” Smythe said. “How about actually finding out where they come from, and how they appear out of thin freaking air?”

  Colm remembered a huddled mass of shadow in the corner of the sitting-room. His father, three-quarters plastered, mechanically stroking the cat. He said, “Maybe we’re better off not knowing.”

  Smythe frowned. “OK, but if we can’t find out how they do it, we’ll never be able to beat them.”

  Colm shrugged. Harshly, he said, “It’s not our problem anymore, is it?”

  CHAPTER 13

  COLM WOKE UP ENTANGLED in the shreds of the disposable sheets, with a weapons-grade headache. The juicy throb of a hangover mingled with post-surgery stabs. Competing signals of nausea arose from his stomach, feeble at first and then urgent.

  Eyes squeezed shut against the light, he leaned over and vomited.

  Onto the smooth stomach of the waitress from the Waikiki Bar & Lounge.

  He was still apologizing and waving a towel in her direction as she dragged her clothes on. “Just shut up.” She had a charming colonial accent. “I should not have come here, anyway.”

  “I’m very glad you did, if that helps?” For a little while last night, he’d been at peace. Her arms had felt like a refuge from the war outside, and the war in his head. And now he’d fucked this up, too. “Let me make it up to you.”

  Her eyes softened, but her tone stayed severe. “You drank far too much last night.”

  “I know.” At this rate he’d be turning into his father, than which no worse fate could be imagined. “Have a shower, stay for breakfast. Please.”

  “No. I am late for my shift.”

  “Ah, I’m sure they’ll overlook it. You’re the best waitress in that place.”

  She picked up her bag and squeezed around the foot of the bed. God,
she was gorgeous, even at this hour of the morning. Hand on the door, she glared at him. “I am not a waitress. I’m a geologist. I have a doctorate. I taught at the university on Ross 458 c. Now our planet is gone, and I have to wear a stupid uniform and serve booze to idiots like you ... and be grateful that I have a job at all!”

  The door was automatic. It didn’t slam. But Colm could practically hear the slam in the way it hissed shut after her.

  He fell back on the wet spot on the mattress, pressed the towel over his eyes, and tried to remember her name. The headache defeated him. He remembered that he’d got her address as the first step of his seduction campaign, and reached down to the floor for his computer. Zhanna. That was it. He’d call her later, apologize again ...

  He had two new messages, but his head hurt too much to read them. He went back to sleep. When he woke up again, the headache had receded. He negotiated the room service menu on the wall screen, ordered orange juice, coffee, and toast. He took the last of the pain pills he’d got from the military hospital with the orange juice. The fishy taste of the toast turned his stomach. The coffee was OK.

  He checked the towel he had stuffed in the smoke detector last night. It was still securely lodged in place. He lit a cigarette, retrieved his computer from the floor, and squinted at his credit balance. $860. At this rate he’d be on the street in another 24 hours.

  Time to deal with his messages.

  Smythe: Remember Tan? You guessed it: he’s out, too.

  Colm let his computer drop onto his chest. It seemed as if everyone he had come into contact with on Majriti IV was suffering for it.

  Anyway, ping me when you’re up, you Scottish sex machine.

  Sex machine? If only she knew about the vomiting episode.

  We’re staying at Best’s pad in Regnar.

  Huh, huh, huh? When did that happen?

  It’s seriously lush. Here’s the address. Come on over.

  Not likely. Colm tapped through to the other new message. So damn clunky having to do this on the computer. He missed his infocals.

  Dear Mr. Mackenzie,

  It has come to my attention that you were recently discharged from the Fleet. I cannot help feeling personally responsible for this, although I had no involvement with the decision. Therefore, at your convenience, I would like to discuss a potential opportunity which may provide you some compensation for your misfortune. I hope this offer does not offend your dignity. I am not confident in my understanding of human etiquette. But please be assured of my sincere desire to repay you for the service you did me on Majriti IV.