by Mark Tufo
“Will you walk with me?” In contrast to the rest of him, his voice was strong and firm.
I motioned with my head to the mutes who were acting anything but casual.
“Hewell, kindly take your squad back to their quarters. I almost envied the power he had right there when Hewell didn’t question him or make some sarcastic comment. I figured it must be nice to earn that kind of respect. When the mutes departed, Alken looked to me and then my weapon. I pretended to not catch the glance or realize what it meant. Just because those mutes had been sent away didn’t mean there weren’t more farther up. When Alken realized I wasn’t going to put my weapon down or at least shoulder it, he turned around and began to walk. I walked with him.
“Hey, Talbot! General! What do you want us to do?” It was BT and his squad.
“Stay there, I’ll be right back.” I was glad we would both be out of earshot for BT’s mumbled reply.
“I do not like humans much,” was his opening line, can’t say I was expecting that. Sure, I got it, but that’s not really a great way to start a conversation. “I respect them, though. You are a tenacious seeker of death, not only for your enemy, but within yourselves. It says a lot about a species when they are willing to die for what they believe is right. Perhaps you are used to that on your world, but I can assure you that is a rare commodity throughout the cosmos. The prevailing sentiment in all species is to hold on to life and to do all to preserve it, even through great sacrifice, servitude, even torture or slavery.”
“Life is truly a gift,” I told him. “But more important is living it the way you want to, without interference from others. Tyranny, slavery, cruelty, we’ve dealt with it all, staying alive at all cost, but now we choose not to. What’s the point of having a life if you can’t do what you want? I mean, within reason. You can’t leave that question open-ended for humans, we umm, there’s some of us that have problems behaving within reason.” I trailed off before I began to talk our whole species down.
“We have a dilemma, you and I.”
“Is it that we’re squatting?”
He understood my comment and did not blow it off, but actually acknowledged it as an invitation to be frank, which meant he understood a lot about us and possibly about me. “You’re being here has caused concern among my ranks. You are like a grindlet.”
“Grindlet?”
“It is a parasite that burrows deep into the skin. It is difficult to remove, but if left to its own devices, it will lay eggs which travel through the blood stream until they hatch. They then latch onto the vessel walls and proceed to eat their way out. Once internal bleeding brings their host down, they copulate upon the rotting flesh and start the entire cycle over again.”
“Parasite, nice. Glad to see you think so highly of us.”
“Even parasites have their role in nature’s great scheme, and many low forms of life can be made to act on our behalf. We discovered that grindlets, for example, can be used to eliminate certain types of cell abnormalities. They also make an extremely effective torture tool.”
“Did you haul your wrinkly ass all the way down here to tell me how much you hate us or to threaten us with a vein eating bug? If you have a point that is not a complete waste of my time, I’d like to hear it. All things being the same, I’d rather spend what time I have left with those I love, or at least like, and who feel the same for me than waste a moment of it with any of your kind.” I sprayed as much loathing as I could at the end of that sentence.
“Time? That is what I have come to talk to you about. It is diminishing for us, all at a quicker rate than we had expected.”
I let him keep talking.
“The Stryvers, in a way that defies our sphere of knowledge, are incrementally picking up speed. The month we previously estimated we had, has been reduced by four days.”
“Which means right now we have about ten days until they’re in range.” I did the math.
“For whatever reason, it seems we share this destiny. For if we die here, so do you.”
“I’ve told you before, Alken, I’m alright with that. And besides, what do you think I can do about it?”
“Well, I hoped you might do something, for both of our sakes. It is likely your demise will be considerably quicker than mine.”
“I’m listening.”
“My computer models show there is a seventy-eight percent likelihood you do not have a nuclear device on board.”
“Yeah, but twenty-two is a pretty high percentage to go messing with when the consequences are instant incineration.”
“I believe even that twenty-two percent is a gross mathematical exaggeration. I have personally reviewed all of the recordings of you with your officers. At no time did you make mention of this device, nor stow any particular machinery away.”
“If you’re trying to ascertain whether we have the bomb, I won’t tell you one way or the other. Either believe me, or don’t. We both know that isn’t why you came down here; let’s get to the meat and potatoes, shall we?”
“Meat and potatoes? You were not born into command, were you?”
“Not really. I don’t have the stomach for ass-kissing, or in terms you might understand, bending over for someone just to keep some unstable peace or create some phony pact that lasts about as long as takes the ink to dry. I feel like whatever you want to tell me is distasteful for you and that’s why you’re stalling. Either that or you’re too old to follow your thought train into the station. Just admit you need our help and we’ll hammer out the details.”
He stopped, he looked long at me; he would not be bullied into speaking before he was ready. I could respect that. “Very astute, General Talbot.”
“You finally came down from your perch to see me; you called your henchmen off. You veiled a threat, and you’ve done some flattering. It all leads me to believe you need something from me. So, what is it? According to your simulators, there are some very large clocks ticking off time in an accelerated manner.”
He sighed and took a heavy breath. “For millennia untold, we Progerians believed we were the masters of the universe, and that we were close to discovering all there was to know. We rose from the muck and marshes of our world, and through millennia wrestled for domination over two races that were better suited to rule. We took the land, then the air, and finally space. Our conquests served to support our ultimate conceit: that we were the rightful lords of all beings. We explored vast swaths of the cosmos, dominating whatever life we found, forcing it to serve us in small or great ways. There was little we imagined ourselves not capable of.”
“And that came to a screeching halt when you encountered the Stryvers.”
“It is a fairly new development in our timeline, and other species, as you know, have been difficult in the past. But recently we have seen many of our long held, proven scientific beliefs turned viciously on their ears. Suddenly there are gaps in our knowledge–in some ways so vast we did not even know how much we did not know.”
Sounds like my calculus class. I was thinking, but I didn’t want to interrupt him.
“To our immediate point, the Stryvers are traveling in the same buckle as we, supposedly, this is impossible. They are catching up; again, impossible. We have operated our space flight under the conception that buckles remain a fixed speed and cannot simply be entered like a stream. We cannot justify our current situation within our frame of knowledge; its ramifications throw our concept of time into chaos. These things should not exist in our world…”
“Yet here they are,” I finished.
“Yet here they are,” he agreed.
“So…?” I led.
“We need your help.”
“I’d really like to tell you to say that again, even though I knew it was coming. But since you’re basically a hostile entity and we’ve already shed blood on both sides, it doesn’t have the sincerity I’d like it to. It sucks that we are so closely tied in our common fates. If we weren’t going to die, I’d say: ‘Great. Good
luck in the afterlife.’”
“As would I.”
“I appreciate the honesty, it’s refreshing. But you might want to ease up on the sarcasm when you’re trying to beg a favor; trust me, people tell me that all the time.” Don’t think he got the concept of asking nicely. To him, one was either honest or one was not. “No biggie. Okay, so what’s in it for us?”
“What’s in it?”
“Yeah, why should we help?”
“Are not your lives enough?”
“I’ve already told you how I feel about that. Surrendering to the Stryvers makes more sense than helping you and yours just to be stuck back here waiting to pop out on the other side to our imprisonment. If you decide you want our help, I’m going to need something tangible and significant, not just a more comfortable trip, and certainly not just words. Asuras was pretty good at blowing smoke…umm…telling me what I wanted to hear and then taking it all back when it suited him.”
“What can I possibly offer?”
“I don’t know. You’re a smart Prog; when you figure it out let me know. Then and only then will I help. But you’d better hurry up because you geniuses have had thousands of years and still haven’t figured out how buckling really works and my folks have only been messing around with it for four years and now we only have ten days. Tick fucking tock, Alken. I’m going to get some lunch. Don’t bother me again unless you have something good.”
“You insolent halfling! I am royalty.”
“Not my king; I didn’t vote for you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have something that resembles pizza waiting for me.” I walked away, making sure to flip an eagle over my shoulder. Didn’t care one way or the other if he understood the meaning; it was more for me than him anyway.
“You just give him the finger?” BT asked when I got back to my escort.
“I did.”
“What’s he want?”
“He wants to know if we marinate well.” At least two of my men paled considerably. “Kidding, sorry. Let’s get back to the engineering gurus. The Progs need some help and they just might come groveling sooner rather than later.”
Chapter 3
MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 3
I met with Master Sergeant Beckert and his crew of MIT and CalTech graduates. The first thing I tasked them with was some sort of interference so that we didn’t need to sound like an untalented drum circle every time we needed to talk. Then we moved on to the drive and the bigger problem. They were throwing words around that barely sounded human, much less English. They did their best to dumb it down for their leader, but let’s be honest, it was like trying to teach jiu-jitsu to a bunny. They’d actually been bandying about solutions to our problem since day one, for fun, I guess, but once I told them they might have a chance to put their theories to work they ramped it way up. They went long into the night working on it, and more than once they’d almost come to blows over who was more right. I’d long since called it a night; the awkward interjections I offered were treated condescendingly and even I could see my presence was superfluous and only slowing things down, like feet on a snake. I was sleeping when I heard footfalls that were purposefully heavy coming my way.
“Beckert, you sound like a train with all that huffing and puffing.” I sat up.
“Sir we need to talk.”
“Got any more of that Greta hooch?”
He winced at the name of the manly barmaid he’d had relations with who had paid him with a bottle of Scotch for his troubles.
“If I did we’d both need a drink.”
“You’ve got ideas? Because otherwise I’m going to bust you down to private and have you clean out mute shitters.”
“Sir, we’ve got ideas, but the best one might be to have us all gather on one side of the room and have your friend there with the rockets drop a couple into the mix.”
“When you say it like that, it really makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside knowing that we have a chance.”
“A cockroach in a sealed box with a bug bomb has a chance.”
“Shit, Beckert. You only die once; how bad can it be?”
“First off, that might not be the case. You’re asking us to screw around with something we have less than a rudimentary understanding of. We could show a caveman how to turn a television on, but he wouldn’t have a clue as to where the signals were coming from, how they were produced or why they showed on the tube. Or what a fucking signal is. That’s basically what we do–just flip a switch and monitor.”
“But you have ideas.” I was going to grasp on to that and not let go.
“Sure, but it’s all theoretical. We have no way of knowing if any of it will work or what the ramifications will be. My bet is we’ll end up blowing us all to hell.”
“We’re already in a world of shit. Either the Stryvers or the Progs get us; I’d much rather go out by our own hand.”
“That’s the most likely scenario if Alken lets us play with his ship.”
“How does your crew feel?”
“Mostly as I do.”
“Is there a consensus?”
“I have six men including me, and we all favor slight variations to our plan, and by ‘favor’ I mean we’re at a standoff.”
“You’re going to have to pretend you’re on Family Feud and come up with one answer.”
“Sir, this isn’t a game show.”
“Beckert, life is a fucking game show. You get to choose one door and it’s either a new living room suite or a lifetime supply of toilet cleaner. What do you want me to do? Order you one way or the other? I can’t imagine that would be for the best, I hardly know what you guys are saying.”
“I want you to hear them out, let your gut dictate. I’ve seen you in combat–you have an uncanny ability to predict the correct course of action.”
“This is different. I don’t think, I just do; everything is happening at blazing speeds around me.”
“I could shoot at you.” This was Tracy, she’d rolled over and was listening in.
“As much as I realize that’s a fantasy of yours, honey, I’d just as soon you keep your ammo to yourself.”
“Pity,” she smiled. “I think you should do it though. The Master Sergeant is right. The little bacteria in your stomach tend to get things more right than not.”
“I thought we said we weren’t going to talk about that anymore? You know that shit skeeves me out! A living thing just hanging out in my body doing its own thing. It’s freaky.”
“Sir?”
“Fine, fine. Anything to get me away from her crazy talk.”
I sat with the geniuses for two hours while they talked flux capacitor this and relativity distorters that. I couldn’t even process it enough to make an ill-informed guess. When it was all said and done there was only one I hadn’t heard from.
“Private…what’s your name?”
“Sir?”
He was a gangly, redheaded kid sitting on the peripheries watching, as I had been. Occasionally he would mumble when one of his peers said something, or he would make what he thought was an imperceptible shake of his head in negation.
“Your head so blown by all this talk you don’t remember your own name?” I’d meant it as a joke, he’d not taken it that way. You never know with these guys; even their sense of humor is hard to peg.
“Pender, sir. Private Pender is my name.”
“Well, Private Pender, what do you think we should do?”
“Sir, he’s my apprentice,” Master Sergeant Beckert said.
“Does that mean he can’t speak?”
I guess I was getting tired and a little curt. “No, sorry sir, it’s just that his…” He hesitated, not even wanting to call it an idea. “…he hasn’t been working on the Guardian system for much more than two months. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.”
“Huh, sounds a lot like what someone else said recently. Spill it, kid, I have a raging headache and I just want to lie down, feels like you guys have been trying to force feed knowl
edge into my head with a spike funnel.”
“Sir, it’s crazy.”
“Master Sergeant, my entire life people have told me that what I do is crazy, do you mind if I listen to someone else speak my language?”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.” He got quiet, but begrudgingly.
“I think it’s simple,” Pender said. “We cut the power.”
Beckert grunted. “You can’t cut the power, Pender.” Beckert didn’t say it like this, but I overlaid him saying those words in Scotty’s accent and adding “laddie” at the end. “The buckle drive, once it’s operating, is somehow fueled by the very wormhole it opened or created.”
“That’s not the same thing?” I asked. They looked at me like I had a learning disability so profound they were surprised I could put my shoes on the right feet.
“Vastly. And we still have no idea how it does it. Judging by the complexity of the Prog operations systems, I’d say they don’t have a clue either; their last couple of generations were probably taught a brief theoretical minimal then shown where the ‘go’ buttons are.”
“Huh,” I said, starting to think about the way Tracy’s hips had lifted the sheet when she turned over. She’s got this incredible…nevermind. Beckert was still talking and I needed to catch up.
“These are like super highways created by space itself or by some other race, and the buckle drive attaches a single on and off ramp, or possibly the drive itself makes the pathway. There are compelling theories for either concept. But yeah, making an exit for ourselves is like making a stable hole in an ocean wave.”
“And the Progs don’t know anything more?”
Beckert shook his head from side to side slowly. “So you see, shutting the buckle drive down is an impossibility. Sure, there have been cataclysmic failures that have made the machine break down, but there wouldn’t even be a debris field. This ship and everything in it would be reduced to its subatomic parts and even those would be reincorporated into the stream.”
