by Ahern, Jerry
“Fuck you!” The sound of Dimitri’s voice was more animal than human now, and so low that it could barely be heard over the lapping of the sea against the hull of the Vladivostok Queen.
“That is a trait of which I would never have suspected you, Captain. But, if you wish to fantasize-” And Doring smiled as he walked away. He shouted over his shoulder, “Gunther! When we are safely aboard the inflatables, withdraw.”
“Yes, Willy!”
9
He’d shaken her hand.
Her right arm hung limp at her side.
From the small porch, she could watch the taillights of his car as they became smaller and smaller and smaller. In another moment, they would disappear.
A wind blew strong and cold down from the mountains, tugging at her clothes, at her hair. The shawl across her nearly bare shoulders not too terribly heavy, Emma Shaw was cold. But she stood there alone on the front porch, watching the vanishing taillights anyway.
She had made the ultimate mistake any woman could make: She was in love with a man who was totally unattainable; but that was not the reason that she loved him. There was no reason to it, and that, more than anything, at once terrified her yet convinced her that what she felt was very real, perhaps her ultimate reality. And that terrified her even more.
It was unthinkable that John Rourke would suddenly take her into his arms and ravage her body as he’d ravaged her soul almost from the very first instant she’d seen him.
Emma Shaw could no longer really see the lights from his car, but she stood there anyway.
The wind raised her dress. She made no move to touch the skirt, to hold it down. Her arms hung so limply at her sides now that the shawl had slipped from her shoulders, clung to her only at her elbows. “John,” she whispered to the night. She’d always enjoyed the writings of Albert Camus, the Twentieth-Century French existentialist. A story she’d always remembered was his classic, The Unfaithful Wife,” but she was not about to bare her body to the stars on the roof of some desert hovel. And, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t bared her body on a few occasions before.
She wanted to strip away her clothes, wear only John Rourke’s arms around her. That would be enough, forever. But he wasn’t here. And, he wouldn’t be. The Faithful Husband.” If she were a writer, she could write a story about him, a man garbed in the righteousness of his fidelity to a wife who was all but dead.
Yet Emma Shaw could not bring herself to hate Sarah Rourke. She envied her. And that was funny, envying a woman who had slept for one hundred and twenty-five years in suspended animation, with a bullet in her brain that in all likelihood could never be removed.
And Emma Shaw shivered. The thought that crossed her mind made her feel colder and more alone than any wind or any night. John, when Sarah could not be brought back, would re-enter what he so offhandedly called The Sleep and wait with her.
While John slept with his almost dead wife, she-Emma Shaw-might sleep with others, but never sleep with him. And the great love of her life would quite literally pass her by. When he reawoke, she would be dead, gone, hardly a memory.
Or, worse.
He would reawaken, about forty or so as he was now, and she-Emma Shaw-would be alive and old and near death and John would come to visit her, laugh with her about this dinner tonight, pat her gently on a wrinkled hand, perhaps brush his lips against her cheek.
And then death would be a blessing.
She was conscious in that instant that tears were flooding her eyes. She could have turned her eyes into the wind, made them go away. But, she let them flow from the rims of her eyes and across her cheeks. She tasted the salt of her own
tears on her lips. It was bitter. .
Annie Rourke Rubenstein lay in the crook of her husband’s arm. Neither of them was asleep. She was wet between her legs from him, and she nuzzled closer to him in the darkness, holding him, him holding her. “Paul?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.” His lips touched her forehead. Annie started to cry, turned her face against Paul’s chest, murmured, “Hold me tighter?”
“What’s the matter, Annie?”
“I was thinking about daddy, how lonely he must be? Well, I just can’t-I just can’t-“
“Hell get Deitrich Zimmer, get Zimmer to help her. He’ll use Martin. John can do it.”
“First momma, then Natalia. Daddy doesn’t have anybody, Paul. He’s alone every night. He’s-” She could no longer speak, just hold and be held.
Paul whispered, “I know, baby.” He held her and his lips touched her hair and Annie closed her eyes but didn’t sleep …
She sat, hugging her knees close to her, her eyes riveted to the pirate ship Vladivostok Queen. Willy had told her to watch.
Marie Dreissling shivered, despite the blanket one of the men had thrown over her shoulders. The wind was blowing up, making the swells roll higher and the troughs deeper and her stomach churn.
The men aboard the Vladivostok Queen -all of them-would soon die. Marie Dreissling knew they were enemies, but they were human beings. That was why she was glad to be a woman. Such a decision as this, to kill these men, was a decision she could never have made. That was something only a man could do.
“All right, now, watch, Marie. The explosions will have a ripple effect, sawing the damned ship in two,” Reinhardt said. Marie Dreissling watched.
Men knew about such things, determined who should live and who should die.
She blinked because the chill and the velocity of the wind were making tears rise in her eyes. And, when she blinked, she missed the first explosion. But, she could hear it, and as she opened her eyes, she saw the second, then the third.
She had expected flames, pieces of burning debris, perhaps a mushroom-shaped fireball rising into the night sky, turning the darkness to day. But there were only bright flashes and muted banging sounds and then there was a horrible groan, like the noises Captain Dimitri’s bowels had made as he at last fell prone to the deck just as she had gone down the ladder to board her inflatable.
The engines of all three inflatables purred into life.
The sea churned more wildly.
The port and starboard sections, then the fore and aft sections of the Vladivostok Queen began to fold inward. And the vessel seemed to rise up in the water, as though it were human, drowning, grasping for one last chance at life.
The three inflatables were hydroplaning now and the rolling of the seas felt less pronounced in her stomach.
And the Vladivostok Queen sank beneath the waves.
10
John Thomas Rourke felt little like sleeping.
He spent some time keening the edge of the Crain Life Support System X knife, then touching up the A.G. Russell Sting IA Black Chrome’s edges as well. He took his vintage copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged from his suitcase and picked up where he’d last stopped rereading when other matters had drawn him away.
He read that for a time, but could not concentrate.
He thought of Sarah, and the inevitability of his future should he live long enough to meet it. By the time the day came that Sarah would be restored to him, young Martin Zimmer, their son kidnapped at birth and raised by the Nazi Deitrich Zimmer, then genetically altered to mirror the image of Deitrich Zimmer’s idol, Adolf Hitler, would be dead. John Rourke would have to see to that in one manner or another. Precipitating the death of his own son, however evil and vile that life had become, would be the second most difficult thing he would ever have to do.
For all that Deitrich Zimmer had done, the ultimate responsibility for young Martin being in the world was John Rourke’s, his and his alone. He alone had made Sarah pregnant with the child. And, but for the circumstances of the child’s birth, Sarah might well have been beside him. They could have lived out the rest of their lives, he and Sarah, in relative normalcy.
And, together, they would be in their graves by now, knowing nothing of this future which the begetting of Martin Zimmer helped to create.
The most difficult thing, even more than taking the life of young Martin, would be telling Sarah that he had done it, and losing her forever as the consequence. She would assume, as any mother would, that somehow Martin could have been changed back, for the good. But what Deitrich Zimmer had done to the boy, through the combination of genetic surgery and the environment in which the boy was raised, was irreversible, except perhaps by surgically or chemically neutralizing the personality centers of Martin’s brain.
And that would be a far worse fate than death, to live physically only. If Martin were rational, the man that he could have been, fine and strong like Michael, Martin would choose death to that.
John Rourke stuffed one of the ScoreMasters into his trouser belt and pulled on his old battered brown bomberjacket.
Then he went out into the night to walk, to think, hoping that perhaps the fresh air would make it easier for him subsequently to fail asleep.
There was a Marine walking across the quadrangle. The young man saluted. Rourke nodded and said, “Good evening.” Rourke kept on walking.
His thoughts shifted to Emma Shaw. The woman was good company and a good cook. More than that, she was a good woman. She seemed to combine so many of the qualities John Rourke loved in Sarah and had loved in Natalia. If things were different, Rourke thought… But, they were not. Nor did he regret for a moment that he was married to Sarah, even though he knew she would leave him when she awakened to learn the fate of the child she had nearly died giving birth to, a fate John Rourke would have to fulfill.
Rourke sat on a rock overlooking the harbor area, his eyes focused far out to sea.
What he needed more than anything else now was for someone’s arms to be around him; more than at any time in his life, his soul ached with loneliness.
He looked down into his hands. His eyes, always light-sensitive, enabled him to see in the dark. There was movement by his loafer-shod feet. It was a grasshopper, not particularly large, really nothing noteworthy about the creature. Rourke kept his feet still so that he would not inadvertently step on the creature.
The grasshopper, like all lower animals, led a much less complicated life. But, with the privilege of human thought came responsibility for thought’s consequences.
The grasshopper just “hung around” for several minutes, Rourke watching the creature all the while. And then it moved off. Rourke stood up, careful to direct his feet in the direction opposite the grasshopper’s path.
Life was fragile, Rourke thought, for all.
11
He had raised dogs or had helped his family to raise them since his earliest memories, so he wasn’t at all upset that one of them was barking in the predawn hours. A dog might bark because it sensed danger and sought to raise an alarm, or because it experienced some sort of distress, or simply because it felt like barking.
But since his dogs didn’t usually bark at this hour, he pushed aside the covers and started out of bed, just in case.
“Thorn?”
“Some barking; I’m gonna check,” he told his wife, Ellie. There was another practical concern, of course. Their nearest neighbors were better than a quarter of a mile away, but their children were light sleepers-a good trait, he’d always thought-and might be awakened.
He pulled on a pair of shorts, stepped into his slip-on deck shoes and did one more thing. From the nightstand on his side of the bed, he took up his shoulder holster. He was not a firearms afficionado, but as with most people these days, carrying a gun was for him as natural as breathing, and a fine insurance policy for continuing to do so.
Although never “into guns” as a hobby, he took his marksmanship seriously and was quite careful in his selection of the firearms which he did possess. All were cartridge arms reproductions from Lancer; energy weapons had always seemed like overkill to him and required more maintenance than did cartridge arms. The charge had to be frequently checked and the contacts in this high salinity climate of Hawaii, although
sealed of course, had to be kept scrupulously cleaned.
When he had purchased his guns, he’d consulted with “expert” friends, then read the literature, shopped wisely for price against value and, at last, made his decisions. All his purchases were Lancer-made reproductions. The gun which was carried in his shoulder holster was the SIG-Sauer P-226. The gun which he kept primarily for home defense was ideally suited to other needs should those arise; it was the Heckler & Koch SP-89. The design had intrigued him on an intellectual level. It was a semiautomatic shoulder stockless pistol version of the MP5 submachinegun (Lancer reproductions of these were still in use by some SEAL Team and Honolulu Tac Team personnel).
He had read that in the declining years of the twentieth century, when the SP-89 was developed, civilian ownership of selective fire weapons was frowned upon and all but impossible; these days, such was not the case, of course. If a civilian wanted to own the state-of-the-art plasma energy assault rifle that was current issue to United States military forces, or a Lancer reproduction of the Browning .50 caliber machinegun, all that was necessary was the money to buy it.
There was considerable crime, as there had been throughout history, simply because some men and women did not like to work; but, very little crime was violent, and a miniscule portion of that directed against individual citizens. Home burglaries were a novelty, as were robberies of stores, banks and the like; with virtually everyone armed if he or she chose to be, violent criminality had little chance for success.
The opposite was supposedly true in Eden, where possession of any sort of weapon by a civilian was punished with horrible severity; in Eden, cries of violence against the general population were nearly the rule rather than the exception.
Although the SP-89 was only semiautomatic, he felt no need for anything more than that, as was his prerogative. The firearm his wife carried in her purse was at once equally as eclectic and equally practical, a Taurus Model 85CH, a snubby .38 Special revolver with an exposed but totally spurless and profileless hammer.
He was not a hunter, so he owned no rifle, but kept a shotgun for emergencies, this also Lancer-made, a reproduction of the Remington 870 pump.
As he started downstairs, he looked in at the children’s bedrooms. Trixie tossed and turned a bit as the barking persisted; Daniel seemed undisturbed as yet.
He took the stairs as silently as he could, grabbing his leather jacket when he passed the halltree and pulling it on over the shoulder holster and his bare skin beneath.
He walked through the house from front to rear, exiting via the kitchen door to the backyard and the dog runs beyond. Raising the oversized Malamutes was not as profitable as raising the smaller pet varieties or the Dobermans, but he had a special interest in these animals.
They were all up, awakened by the one which barked.
As he approached, the animal calmed, looked at him.
There was always one named “Hrothgar” in the family. Not that these Hrothgars were true physical descendants of the original who was the companion of Bjorn Rolvaag, of course. But, for more than a century now, someone in the Rolvaag family raised dogs and named one of those dogs Hrothgar.
Thornton Rolvaag stroked the muzzle of his Hrothgar, saying to the animal, “Something’s bothering you tonight, isn’t it? Hmm?” This Hrothgar, however, did carry some of the original Hrothgar’s genes, and had the slightest part of wolf in him because of it.
Hrothgar stood feet planted by the door to his shelter within the run.
Thornton Rolvaag drew his hand back and walked along the fence to the entrance, opened it, went inside. Hrothgar sat before his shelter now. Rolvaag whisded softly and Hrothgar ran to him. “I should have checked for seismic activity, shouldn’t
I? When will people learn to understand animals, huh?” He played roughly with the dog’s ears-Hrothgar loved it-and gave the dog a hug.
What was called in the history books “The Great Conflagration” had one beneficial effect to a man who raised dogs; among
the species wiped out was Ctenocephalides canis, the common dog flea.
“Hrothgar-you go back to sleep and I’ll go do what I should have done in the first place, okay?”
It was odd how Hrothgar seemed almost capable of understanding, because the dog turned around, winding itself down in a descending spiral until it lay prone beneath the roof of its shelter.
Thornton Rolvaag left the run, closing the gate, stopped to give a quick look and a quick pet to each of the Malamutes, then returned to the house.
In the kitchen, he took a glass of water from the tap, drank it, then set the glass on the counter over the dishwasher. His coat still on-the night was chilly-he went toward the front of the house, to his home office.
As he had anticipated from Hrothgar’s behavior, his computer link to the seismographic equipment at the University indicated the volcano was acting up again.
As if on cue, the phone rang. He tried to remember where he’d left it, found it beneath a stack of hard copy, picked it up. “Thornton Rolvaag.”
“Thorn, Betty.”
Betty Gilder, his professor during his postgraduate days at the University of Hawaii, was these days technically his boss, but more than that, she was a combination mother-figure and good old friend. “I’ve got the stuff coming in over my computer. Hrothgar woke me up.”
“I think we should hire that dog of yours full-time, Thorn.”
Til ask him and see what he says,” Rolvaag volunteered.
“Think we can get around the fact he doesn’t have a PhD?”
Til loan him mine,” Rolvaag volunteered.
“You weren’t so flippant when I was your faculty advisor, sonny.”
“Yes, mother. Want me to come in?” “No. But, do me a favor?” “Sure. What?”
Betty sounded a little tired. Tm bushed. Ride herd on it for a little while so I can get some sleep. Then get some sleep yourself and come in by noon, okay?”
