War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

Chevrier gave him a nod. “This one here is tough. It’ll take you a few minutes. It’s right next to the reactor, and it’s going to be hotter than hell.” He gave Rucker the tools he needed and sent him off down the tube to the reactor room.

  “I’ll need a shower set up for decontamination,” said Noyes.

  Max found the air shower over by the other clean room, and showed him where it was. Noyes started setting up the lead-lined bags for clothing and equipment disposal.

  By the time they went back to the monitor room, Chevrier had diagramed his repair. His volunteers double-checked the equipment lined up in the hall. He sent others, who hadn’t volunteered, to run a connector line from the fresh water tank. They were just getting ready to go in, when Rucker staggered back out. He looked . . . cooked. Like the worst sunburn Max had ever seen. His clothes were soaked, and glowing drops of water followed through the air in his wake. Noyes was there, swiping the droplets out of the air with a lead blanket. He wrapped Rucker in it, and started leading him toward the shower.

  The lieutenant’s badge was bright red.

  One crewman bolted, and another one threw up. Fears about radiation ran deep on the planet, fed by a generations worth of vids. No one said anything about the smell, but one of the men took off his shirt and tried to catch the vomit as it scattered through the air.

  Chevrier ripped his badge off. “Won’t need this. Just one more distraction. If we’re going to go swimming, we might as well go skinny-dipping.” He stripped off his clothes and the other volunteers followed his example. “Can’t handle tools in those damn vacuum suits anyway.”

  Anger, fear, those things were contagious, Max reflected. But so were courage and foolhardy bravery. He hoped the price was worth it.

  He supposed he ought to be at decontamination, with Noyes, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the monitors. There were no cameras aimed directly at the spot where the men were working with the pipes, but they passed in and out of the vids. The radioactive water pooled in the air, drop meeting drop, coalescing into larger blobs like mercury spilled on a lab table and just as poisonous. The drops floated through the air like anti-bodies in a bloodstream. The men splashed into them as they moved and the water clung to their skin, searing wherever it touched.

  Simco appeared at the door demanding a report for the Captain. Max ignored him. The reactor was so hot that the paint peeled off it, curling like bits of ash as it burned away. Water that hit its surface boiled away into steam, but the steam hit the other water, and became drops again instantly, a swirling rain that never fell. And, except for the dead tone of the radiation alarms, it all happened in silence, with no one in the monitor room speaking for long minutes, and no sound at all from the reactor room.

  Noyes appeared beside Max. “That man needs to come out right now,” he said, tapping at one of the monitors. There were glowing circles, spinning in slow lambent spirals on one man’s buttocks.

  Max laughed, a sound that came out of his mouth only as a breathless sigh. “Those are tattoos, Doc. Jets. Lightning bug juice impregnated in the subdermal cells.”

  “I’ve . . . never heard of that,” said Noyes.

  “It’s supposed to bring a spacer safely home again.”

  “It’s an abomination,” blurted Noyes. The people of Jesusalem were against any mixing of the species. “Let’s hope it does,” he said.

  “Indeed,” replied Max.

  DePuy stood beside them, shaking his head. “They’re not getting it fixed.”

  Max was beginning to think he’d miscalculated badly. He hadn’t wanted anyone to look too closely at Lukinov’s corpse. He wanted the ship to turn around and head back home. But with the main engine down and the back-up scuttled, they were in big trouble.

  The hatch flew open and two men came out.

  “They’ve been in there almost an hour,” said Noyes.

  “Is it done?” the men in the monitor room demanded. Max heard his own voice blurt out, “Is it fixed?”

  But their faces were mute. The blistered flesh bubbled off as Doc wrapped them in blankets. Noyes helped one towards the shower, and Max took the other. “This is hopeless,” Noyes said, trying to clean the men. “You have to go back there now and get the other men out before they die.”

  “I think we all die with the ship if they fail,” said Max.

  Rambaud, one of the troopers, appeared in the door. “Message from the Captain, Doc. He wants you on the bridge.”

  “Tell him no.”

  The trooper’s eyes kept flicking nervously to their badges. Max noticed his own was a sickly orange color. “Beg your pardon, Doc, but he’s getting ready to abandon ship. If it’s necessary.”

  “If he wants to give me an order, he can come down here and do it himself,” said Noyes, pumping the burned man full of painkillers, and starting an IV.

  Rambaud fled.

  Noyes stared after him. “They were going to suicide all of us anyway, for nothing. If I’m going to die, it might as well be doing my job.”

  “Hell, yes.” Max’s job was getting the specifications on the deflectors to Drozhin. If the Captain took the escape shuttles and flew in system, then it was Max’s duty to retrieve the chips from his quarters and get on a shuttle.

  He followed Noyes back into the mouth of fire instead.

  “They’re coming out!” someone shouted.

  Four more men this time, in worse shape than the others. Noyes had to hypospray them full of painkillers just to get them down to the shower, and it was the whole routine all over again. Max carried the man with the tattoos. They were coal black in his skin. Whatever lived in the cells and gave them their luminescence had been killed off by the radiation.

  Before they finished the others, Chevrier was brought to them, covered with burn blisters, his hands raw meat, his eyes blind. He couldn’t speak.

  “Did he get it done?” shouted Max.

  No one knew, so Max flew back towards the monitor room, where the handful of men that remained were arguing over the monitors. “The temperatures are still rising,” shouted DePuy. His voice had risen an octave in pitch. “I tell you he didn’t get it running.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Max.

  “The pipes aren’t open,” said one of the Electrician’s mates.

  “Somebody needs to go in there and turn this valve here,” said DePuy. He pointed to one right in the middle of the steam put off by the overheating reactor. It was almost impossible to see in the fog.

  No one volunteered.

  They were boys mostly, eighteen or nineteen, junior crewmen. They’d all seen the others carried out, had smelled the burned flesh, had listened to their weeping. They were heirs to a hard-earned fear about radiation, and they couldn’t get past that, couldn’t overcome it.

  The cut on Max’s leg throbbed. His face and arms felt hot, burned. “I’ll go in,” he said.

  Reactors were the only ship system he wasn’t officially trained on, and all the reading he’d done before the voyage seemed inadequate to the task now. But it was his responsibility. He could go in there and turn a valve. He could do that much.

  He went out to the corridor and found it blocked by a man in a vacuum suit, dragging a plasma cutter on a tether and reading the manual in his palm-pad. The man turned, his face gray behind the clear mask covering his face. It was Kulakov, the Chief Petty Officer.

  For a second Max thought the man would freeze up.

  Kulakov looked back down at his diagram. “Be sure to seal the locks tight behind me,” he said. “Send someone right now to levels three and four, portside, directly above us, to clear the corridors and seal the locks there. You have to do that!”

  “Will do,” said Max. Then, “Carry on.”

  Kulakov passed through the hatch, but when Max went to seal it, the fresh water supply tubing blocked it. “Damn,” he said, with a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  Then DePuy was there beside him with a clamp and some
cutters. He severed the pipe, and tossed the loose end through the hatch after Kulakov. Max sealed the door. “Did someone go to three and four?”

  DePuy nodded. “But I’ll go double-check,” he added, glancing at the bare spot where Max’s comet should have been. No, he was looking at Max’s radiation badge. It was orange-red, bleeding into a bright crimson.

  “You better head over to see Doc,” said the Electrician’s mate at the monitors.

  “Not yet,” said Max.

  On the video feed they watched Kulakov move methodically from point to point, comparing the hook-up and settings with the diagram on his palm-pad. It took him much longer than it had Chevrier when he was naked. A couple times it was clear that between the fog, and the loss of sensation caused by the suit, Kulakov became disoriented crossing an open space. He spun in circles until he found the right side up again. He reached the final valve but couldn’t turn it. He peeled his gloves off, surrounded by the steam, and slowly cranked it over.

  The Electrician’s mate pounded the monitors. “It’s running! Look at the temps drop!”

  Max did, but he watched Kulakov too, as he struggled to put his gloves back on, picked up the plasma cutter, and then burned a hole through the hull.

  The weeping sound of the radiation alarms was joined by the sudden keening of the hull breech alarms. There was a shudder through the whole ship, the bulkhead creaked beside him, and Max’s ears popped.

  But he kept his eyes fixed on the screen in the reactor room. The steam and all the radioactive water whooshed out of the ship. So did Lukinov’s body. And so did Kulakov.

  There was a dark, flat line straight across one of the screens, like a dead reading on a monitor.

  Kulakov’s tether.

  “Hey look!” whispered one of the crewmen as Max entered the sick bay. “The Corpse is up and walking!”

  They all laughed at that, the survivors, even Max. Chevrier was dead, and so was Rucker, and so were two other men. Of the six surviving men who’d received red badge levels of radiation exposure, only Max was strong enough to walk.

  Kulakov sat in the middle of them. His hands were wrapped in bandages, two crooked, crippled hooks. Max nodded to him. “They still giving you a hard time?” he asked.

  “You know it,” grinned Kulakov.

  “Well, it’s not fair that he should be the only one who gets leave while we’re on this voyage,” said one of the men.

  “How can it be shore leave without a shore, that’s what I want to know,” said Kulakov.

  They all laughed again, even Max. That was going to be a ship joke for a long time, how Kulakov got liberty—hanging on a tether outside the ship.

  “Papa sent me down here with a message,” said Max. Captain Petoskey, Papa, had only been to the sick bay once since the accident, and quickly. Most of the other crewman stayed away as if radiation sickness were something contagious.

  “What is it?” said Kulakov, the words thick in his throat.

  “He wanted me to tell you that he’s going to request that they rename the ship.” The crewmen looked up at him seriously, all the humor gone from their eyes. “They’re going to call it the New Nazareth.”

  New Nazareth had been nuked the worst by the Adareans. The land there still glowed in the dark.

  Kulakov chuckled first, then the other men broke out laughing. Max saluted them, holding himself stiff for a full three seconds, then turned to go see Noyes. The medtech slumped in his chair, head sprawled across his arms on the desk, eyes closed. “I’m not sleeping,” he muttered. “I’m just thinking.”

  “About your fiancée,” asked Max, “waiting for you at home?”

  “No, about the bone marrow cultures I’ve got growing in the vats, and the skin sheets, and the transplant surgery I have to do later this afternoon, that I’ve never done unassisted before, and the one I have to do tonight that I’m not trained to do at all.” He twisted his head, peeking one eye out at Max. “And Suzan. Waiting for me. And the ship flying home. How are you feeling?”

  “I’d be fine if you had any spare teeth,” Max said, poking his tongue into the empty spots in his gums. That didn’t feel as strange as having gravity under his feet again.

  “They’re in a drawer over by the sink,” said Noyes. “Take two and call me in the morning.”

  Max walked through corridors considerably less crowded than they had been a few days before. Almost everything inside the ship had received some radiation. The crewmen went crate to crate with geiger counters deciding what could be saved and what should be jettisoned. With the grav back on, the men’s appetites returned. They also had a year’s worth of supplies and only a few weeks voyage ahead of them. So every meal became a feast. Some celebrated the fact that they were going home, and others the simple fact that they’d survived

  Only Captain Petoskey failed to join the celebration. When Max entered the galley, Petoskey wore the expression of a man on the way to the lethal injection chamber. Max couldn’t say for sure if was the condemned man’s expression or the executioner’s.

  Ensign Reedy sat on one side of a long table, with two troopers standing guard behind her. Petoskey and Commander Gordet sat on the opposite side with Simco standing at attention. Petoskey looked naked without his beard, shorn before they recorded these official proceedings. Burdick, the other Intelligence officer, sat off to one end.

  Petoskey invited Max to the empty seat beside him. “Are you sure you feel up to this, Nikomedes?”

  “Doc says I’ll be fine as long as it’s brief.”

  “This’ll be quick.”

  Petoskey turned on the recorder, and read the regulations calling a board of inquiry. “Ensign Reedy, do you wish to make a confession of your crimes at this time?”

  Max looked at the youngster. He hadn’t seen or spoken to her since he’d taken the chips in the radio room. If Reedy broke and told them what Max had done, then the entire gamble was for naught.

  “I have nothing to confess,” Reedy said.

  “Corporal Burdick,” continued Petoskey, “will you describe what you found in the radio room.”

  “The equipment had been disassembled, and the memory chips replaced with spares.” He made eye contact with no one. “This happened sometime during the last shift when Lieutenant Lukinov and Ensign Reedy were on duty together.”

  “Sergeant Simco, please describe your actions.”

  “Sir, we made a complete search of Ensign Reedy’s person and belongings looking for the items described by Corporal Burdick. We found nothing there, nor in any place he is known to have visited. We also searched Lieutenant Lukinov’s belongings and found nothing.”

  “Lieutenant Nikomedes,” continued Petoskey. “Would you describe what you saw in the radio room?” He added the exact date and shift.

  Max repeated his story about the battery short circuit. “If Lukinov removed the chips that Ensign Burdick described, and he had them on him, then they were spaced.”

  Petoskey nodded. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. Ensign Reedy, can you explain what happened to the chips containing the communications from the neutral ship?”

  “No sir, I can not.”

  “Were you and Lieutenant Lukinov working together as spies for the Adareans?”

  “I was not,” answered Reedy. “I can’t speak for the Lieutenant, as I was not in his confidence.”

  Petoskey slammed his fist on the table. “I think you’re a coward, Reedy. You’re too weak to take responsibility for your actions. I’d tell you to act like a man, but you’re not.”

  If Petoskey hoped to provoke Reedy, then his gambit failed. She sat there, placid as a lake on a still summer day.

  “Can we conduct a medical interrogation?” interjected Max.

  Petoskey went to tug at his beard, but his fingers clutched at emptiness. “I’ve discussed that already with the surgeon and Commander Gordet. Noyes is only a medtech, and not qualified to conduct an interrogation that will hold up in military court. Conceivably, we cou
ld even taint the later results of a test.”

  Max leaned forward. “Can we use more . . . traditional methods?”

  “I won’t command it,” said Petoskey, looking directly into the recorder. He waited for Max to speak again.

  Max ran his tongue over the loose replacement teeth, saying nothing, and leaned back. He might get out of this, after all.

  “However, if you think . . . ” said Petoskey.

  Max looked at the camera. “Without an immediate danger, we should follow standard procedures.”

  Petoskey accepted this disappointment and concluded the proceedings with a provisional declaration of guilt. He ordered Reedy confined to the brig until they returned to Jesusalem.

  As Max limped back towards his quarters afterwards he noticed that Gordet followed him.

  “What can I do for you, Commander?” asked Max.

  The bull-shaped second-in-command looked around nervously, then leaned in close. “There’s something you should know, sir.”

  “What?” asked Max wearily. “That Petoskey ordered Simco to kill me, that he intended to blame it on Reedy, and then have her arrested and executed?”

  Gordet jerked back, flabbergasted. “Did you check the secret orders too?”

  “What does it matter now? Simco failed, Reedy’s arrested anyway, and we’re on our way home. A bit of advice for you, Mr. Gordet.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “Next time you should pick your horse before the race is over.”

  He walked away. When he returned to his room, he recovered the sheet with the combination from its hiding spot, and destroyed it. He didn’t know what the secret orders said. He didn’t care.

  There was only one thing he had left to do.

  Third shift, night rotation, normal schedule. Max headed down to the brig carrying a black bag. One of Simco’s troopers stood guard. “I’m here to interrogate the prisoner,” Max said.

  “Let me check with Sergeant Simco, sir.”

  Max had been thinking hard about this. Only two people knew that he had the plans for the deflector, and the only way two people could keep a secret was if one of them was dead.

  “Sarge wants to know if you need help,” said the trooper.