by B. V. Larson
I stood near the door, straightening my kit. Jasmine stepped forward to help. Her small hands felt like the fluttering touch of a bird to me. She arranged my epaulets and smoothed my smart cloth uniform where it had bunched up. Then she reached up and combed my hair with her fingers.
“Have you got a mint?” I asked.
She handed me three without saying a thing. I crunched them and enjoyed the biting flavor.
She did something then that took me totally by surprise. She gave me a tiny kiss on the cheek.
I shied away immediately. I glared at her. I knew my eyes were red and bloodshot. I still felt the burn of alcohol in my blood. A gush of words came out of me, and I regretted them all almost as fast as I said them.
“You’d jump in Sandra’s grave so fast? She’s still alive you know, technically. She’s not even cold yet.”
Jasmine looked as if I’d slapped her. She cast her eyes down, and reached out to touch the door. I could tell she was about to run off.
“I—I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not feeling well.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said quietly, looking at the floor. “I shouldn’t have done that. It was wrong.”
Jasmine left then, and I stared after her. There were more than a few crewmen in the hallway. They took in the scene and tried not to gape.
She moved quickly, not quite trotting, but almost.
Good God, I thought. I hope she’s not crying. Then I saw her hand go up to wipe at her face. Yep, she was crying. I let out a long sigh.
I retreated back into my office. The door melted shut. Already, I could hear and feel the ship making adjustments to it attitude with shivering jets. We were decelerating, coming in to dock. General Kerr was probably already boarding a tiny pinnace to fly over to my ship from his.
I moved to the tiny mirror in my tiny lavatory. I splashed some water and tried to sober up faster. I looked at myself, and frowned. Those red eyes were going to give me away.
“You could have handled that one better, Riggs,” I said to my reflection.
So far, it was looking like a stellar day. I’d lost one girl, sentenced another to death, and sent a third running down the hall, crying.
-30-
We met Kerr and his four guards at the docking bay. The door melted away, and there was a hissing sound as the two pressurized chambers evened out.
General Kerr looked extremely unhappy. He wore what I thought might be the glummest expression I’d ever seen on his face. He knew the score. He’d helped deliver an assassin into my inner circle. I wasn’t going to be wining and dining him this time around.
What he didn’t yet know was what had happened to the assassin. We’d told the Imperials nothing about Alexa. It was obvious I’d survived, but how had she fared? I wondered if he would have the balls to ask the question. It must be burning on his mind.
“Just you, General,” I said. “Leave your guards in the boat.”
Kerr hesitated. The hard-eyed Imperial crewmen at his side looked resolute, but fearful. Looking at them, I figured they were probably nanotized. After all, Crow had Nano factories back on Earth. He was probably busy churning out troops faster than I could hope to do out on the frontier.
The Imperials wore fancy uniforms, dark blue, with gold braid at their wrists, shoulders and caps. They were all noncoms. As space veterans, I respected them. They’d probably seen their share of combat against the machines when they’d fought the Macros we’d let slip by Eden on their way to Earth.
I wasn’t contemptuous of the men, I was confident in Star Force superiority. My men were marines, after all. Out here, that meant more than it ever had.
But right now, I didn’t care about any of that. I made a shooing gesture toward the men surrounding Kerr.
He opened his mouth, closed it again, then nodded. “Go on back to the Carrington, Chief,” he said. “I’ll be fine. Riggs and I go way back.”
“Indeed we do,” I said.
The crewmen retreated reluctantly. My own guards relaxed somewhat behind me.
Kerr stepped forward with the air of a man walking into a viper’s den.
“Do you intend to kill me, Riggs?” he asked. “I think I ought to know. I think you owe me that.”
I shook my head. I wore a grim smile. “You don’t want to know what I owe you, General. Right this way, sir.”
I ushered him down toward the aft of the ship. He looked concerned. “This isn’t the way to the bridge. Not unless you changed your designs all around recently. Wait, you’re heading for the brig, aren’t you? One old man has you worried? Gonna put me in chains, are you boys?”
None of us answered him. I stopped at the door that led to medical. The nanite door melted and Marvin loomed close.
“What in the nine hells—is that your crazy robot? What did you do, give him steroids?”
“I wanted to show you something, General,” I said.
I led the way to the coffin that held Sandra. Kerr eyed the coffin in alarm. I saw understanding dawn at last on his face.
“Your assassin wasn’t entirely unsuccessful,” I said. “As you see here, your dinner hostess has been terminated. Her body still functions due to external impulses. We breathe for her, we pump her blood, we feed her glucose through needles. But she’s quite dead. Her mind, as you know, has been erased.”
“What the hell?” he said. “Erased? Is that what the plan was? I can see how that might work against your kind.” He turned to me. “I knew something was going to happen. But I thought it might just be a spying mission.”
I slammed my fist into his skull then. I didn’t think it over, I just moved. It happened so quickly, I don’t think I even knew what I was doing before I’d lifted my hand.
Kerr recoiled and flew several feet into the waiting arms of a startled marine who’d been marching behind him.
I felt an instant surge of regret. I figured I’d probably killed him. A blow like that—an older, normal earthman could never take it. His skull would be fractured at the very least. Internal bleeding, possibly a stroke.
It was the beer, I thought bitterly. I still had half of it in my blood, and even though the nanites were working their microscopically small tails off, I knew it was affecting my judgment.
I took two steps and stood over Kerr, who was still in the arms of the marine who’d caught him.
“General?” I asked aloud.
His right eye snapped open. It was wide, and there was blood in it. His left eye had already swollen shut.
“Heh,” he said, struggling to his feet. He shoved away the man who’d caught him. “So that’s how you treat prisoners of war in Star Force, is it? I’d thought all those vids by the Ministry of Truth were doctored up until this very moment. If I hadn’t experienced it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
I stared at him in amazement, then nodded. “You are full of nanites, aren’t you sir?” I asked. “You should be down and out, permanently.”
“But you didn’t know that I’d been nanotized,” Kerr said. He looked at me with his one good eye. “So, you meant to kill me?”
I shook my head. “No. That was just an emotional reaction. I’ve grown tired of Imperial lies. They’ve cost me quite a bit lately. I lost my temper, that’s all.”
“You shouldn’t have been able to one-shot me like that,” he said. “You’ve got more than nanites in you.”
“That’s classified.”
Kerr nodded. His one operating eye drifted back to Sandra again, lying inert in her case.
“I didn’t want it to go down this way, Riggs,” he said. “I’m tired of all the bullshit, too. Whatever happens, I want you to know that. Sometimes, we do things because we’ve made a choice between two evils. Not because we wanted either of them. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, General, I believe I do.”
“Your girlfriend wasn’t supposed to be injured. I imagine she got in the way.”
“She did. She wouldn’t let Alexa get close to me.”
> “All right,” he said. “I’ve come here, been clobbered, and I’ve apologized. I hereby respectfully request that I be allowed to return to my ship and leave your territory.”
I laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. I closed my hand with crushing force, grabbing up a handful of his smart cloth uniform. It was a testament to the strength of the material that it didn’t rip, not even as I lifted him up and marched with him held at arm’s length.
His fingers clawed at my hand with surprising strength. His musculature was nothing compared to my own, however. The collar of his shirt cut into his neck, making him wheeze. I walked with him suspended above the deck, kicking and coughing.
I saw his one working eye roll around in fear in its socket. Mercury-like metallic liquids were already shining in his wounds.
“What are you doing, Riggs?”
“I’m granting your request, General,” I said.
I marched him across the central passageway to a circular door, which I tapped open. General Kerr had a weapon out, I noticed. It looked like a pen, but I saw the dark glass projector at the end, which he was trying to point in my direction. With my free hand, I slapped it away. His wrist snapped at my touch. He didn’t scream, but he did hiss, sucking in his breath between clenched, bloody teeth.
“That’s the second time you’ve broken that arm,” he complained.
I stepped into the sally port chamber. I waved for my marines to stay out in the passageway. Reluctantly, they obeyed. The door closed behind us and Kerr and I were all alone in the steel chamber. I hit a big button on the wall, and Kerr’s bulging eye followed me. The indicator light on the wall went from green to yellow, and the air began being pumped out of the chamber.
“Out of this very room,” I told him, “platoons of brave Star Force marines have made death-defying leaps into the void. In a way, it’s an insult to those brave men that I’m allowing you to use the same portal. I should be tossing you out of the garbage chute.”
The light shifted from yellow to orange and a warning buzzer sounded. The air was decidedly thin now.
“You can’t do this, Riggs,” Kerr rasped. “You’ll be at war with Earth. There are only a few thousand of you out here. You’re mad.”
The light changed from orange to red, and I snapped my visor shut. Kerr wasn’t wearing one. Then I reached out toward the portal release.
Kerr lurched in my grasp. Despite his injuries, he managed to wrap his legs and his one good hand around my arm. But it didn’t do him any good. He strained and heaved, but I pushed the button anyway.
The gases still left in the room exited with a forceful gust. I shook the General loose from my arm and let him float outside. There, in the cold void of space, his eye stared back at me.
“You see that?” I shouted, pointing into the darkness. “That silver line out there? That’s your ship. All you have to do is swim over to it. I’m doing as you asked, General. I’m sending you back to Carrington.”
Kerr ignored my speech. I wasn’t even sure he could hear it, as the air was gone.
He knew what to do, of course. He was a space veteran. It was pointless, but he exhaled, letting all his breath out. He had to depressurize his lungs as quickly as possible, or they would rupture. He could last a few seconds longer in total vacuum that way.
Unlike common misconceptions, humans do not instantly freeze in space. They do depressurize. The body is too hot, and too tightly compressed for space. Our blood begins to boil and the lack of oxygen quickly does its inevitable work.
But nanotized marines are a thing apart from normal humans. They’re self-repairing and the little microscopic bastards just don’t know when they’re beaten. Kerr hung out there, in agony.
He’s twisting all right, I thought to myself, but there’s no wind.
A lot of things went through my mind as I watched Kerr die outside my ship in the heartless nothingness that is space. I thought of the moments we’d shared, both good and bad. We’d always found a way to live together, he and I. Others had died all around us, but we’d never struck the final blow against one another.
Maybe that was because we were alike in some ways. Determined men with iron resolve. Men unafraid to order others to die, or to die ourselves. It had always been difficult not to admire Kerr. I had to admit, in my heart of hearts, I blamed Crow for his recent turn to dark deeds.
Something about the way he was going out impinged on me. I’d just witnessed Lieutenant Alexa Brighton, standing at attention, accepting her death as calmly as she humanly could. Here was Kerr, fighting it hopelessly to the final second.
Alexa had died for her family. I believed that part of her story now. She was an honest young woman, and as Kerr himself had said, she’d chosen one devil over another, not because she loved either, but because she had no choice.
Crow would no doubt punish more innocents back on Earth, due to my actions today. Someone had to fall. Someone had to be proven disloyal. Wasn’t that the way of every dictator, or at least, most of them? They ruled via terror, the terror of their subjects and of the dictator himself. Both were afraid of the other, and that fear kept everyone in line, forcing them to do horrible things.
And here I was, reacting. Killing Kerr for revenge, despite the fact he hadn’t given the order in the first place.
I cursed under my breath, and said: “tether!”
A nanite line extended from my suit to the wall of the ship. I threw myself out into space, after Kerr. I reached out a hand, and grabbed him.
I tugged on the liquid steel tether and it drew me quickly back into the ship. I hit the button on the wall, and the lights went from red, to orange, to yellow, and in about thirty seconds, turned green.
I opened my visor and stared down at Kerr. There was frost on the walls, forming ice crystals in the cold chamber.
Kerr had stopped moving. In fact, he looked extremely dead. As I watched, frost formed on his eyelashes. His face was so cold, it was causing water vapor to condense and freeze upon it.
But nanites are cruel, heartless things. They don’t quit. Dead bodies, charred and swollen, might look beatific the following day, after the tiny robots inside work their magic pointlessly on a corpse overnight.
I waited a minute, and I thought I saw something. A slight rise and fall. A redness replacing the bruised purple around the nostrils.
“Are you still in there, General?” I asked the corpse.
The right eye popped open. Although the eye rolled around, I knew it was too frozen to see. His breath wheezed and rattled in his throat. It sounded like the last gasp of a man on his deathbed, but he was breathing.
The blind eye kept moving, as if looking for me.
“I’m right here, Robert,” I said. “It didn’t look like you were going to survive your little journey to Carrington, so I had to reel you back in.”
Finally, the one good hand the General had left rose up slowly. It curled, gesturing for me to come closer.
I bent my ear to his blue lips and listened.
“Fuck you,” he wheezed.
-31-
I felt better after killing Kerr. Oh sure, I’d revived him, and I was now allowing him to recover in the very same coffin where Alexa had spent her final days.
But I had killed him. I took some perverse pleasure in that. He’d gone through the pain, the anguish and the fear. He’d experienced the hopelessness, the final black moments of succumbing. He’d died out in space, with the full and certain knowledge that he was well and truly screwed.
I’m not going to say that was good enough for me, because it wasn’t. I’d kill a thousand General Kerrs to save my Sandra. But of course, she couldn’t be saved.
The ordeal I’d put Kerr through didn’t atone for his part in this evil scheme. I never would have reeled him back in, except for one thing: I didn’t want to make Alexa’s family suffer for nothing.
That woman had struck a hard blow against me and mine, but she’d done it to save her own people. I could understand tha
t. If it had been my own family on the line, I probably would have done the same to her.
My family was all dead now, but her people back on Earth were presumably alive and possibly suffering under Crow’s harsh rule. That’s the part that had changed my mind, and had saved Kerr’s life in the end.
“Sir?” Captain Sarin said, approaching me cautiously.
Everyone was treating me like I was a feral dog on the street these days, even Jasmine. No one liked to make a sudden move in my presence. Probably, that was wise on their parts.
“What is it, Captain?”
“It’s the Carrington again, sir. The Captain is demanding that General Kerr be released.”
“If I did hand him over, he’d probably die. They don’t have medical equipment as good as ours.”
Our medical systems included microbial baths, not just robotic arms, brainboxes and intravenous nanites. I knew Earth didn’t possess our capacities to dispense life at will.
Jasmine paused after my last statement. She was probably hoping I was going to go on and say more. She was disappointed.
“Should I relay that to Carrington, sir?”
“No,” I said.
Jasmine gnawed her lower lip. “They might fire on us, Kyle, if we don’t even tell them what happened to the General.”
I shrugged. “Let them attack, then. I’d like to take out one more Earth battleship.”
“Sir, I don’t understand your—”
I heaved a sigh and straightened. “I’m sorry, Jasmine,” I said. “I’m being self-indulgent. I’ll now give you orders that make sense: tell Carrington that we’ve got their General, and he’s alive. But, he’s had an unfortunate accident. We’ll return him shortly.”
After this, I honestly expected her to turn around and go. But she lingered in the passageway outside my quarters instead.
“Yes?” I asked. “What is it?”
“Why didn’t you kill him?” she asked, her voice just above a whisper. “I know you wanted to. I know you almost did it.”
