by Wil McCarthy
“Very well, sir,” Marshe said crisply. “The Waister armada will attack Medius in thirty-seven point six hours.”
The colonel's face darkened. “This is not a joking matter, Captain. I expect a complete revision of your report by lights-out tonight. If the revision is not acceptable, then you will work through the night to re-revise it. Further, I shall be expecting update reports every twenty-four hours, and more frequently than that if I present you with specific questions. Your group exists, madam, as an extension of myself. Its purpose is to satisfy me. Nothing else. I trust my meaning is clear.”
“Ever cut wood with a blunt saw?” Marshe asked the man, her tone decidedly un-cowed. “You could sit there all day, cutting and cutting, or you could take five minutes out to sharpen the blade, and quadruple your productivity. And get cleaner pieces that don't splinter when you carry them.”
Jhee's mouth twitched with the initial stirrings of real anger. “Emperor Nero played a fiddle,” he said, “while the city of Rome burned around him. No more games, Captain, get to work. We may still have time to save... something.”
Marshe rolled her eyes again, clenched her teeth. Like so many of the upper-echelon commanders, Jhee was trapped in a backward, almost Clementine mode of thought. If victory were possible, it would be achieved through plodding, relentless labor, through mass production and massive confrontation. There was no room in his mind for innovation or imagination. As a scientist, Marshe was accustomed to quick changes in viewpoint, quick dissolution of tightly-held beliefs and prejudices. Her more brilliant colleagues would attack problems from inside, from outside, from any side at all. The fresher the perspective, the better. But Jhee could no more turn a question on its head than he could swap the poles of the sun.
“Colonel,” she said carefully. “We'll prepare the report, if it's that important to you. But the primary purpose of this group is still to acquire a basic understanding of Waister psychology.”
“No, madam, it is not.”
She sighed. “We seem to have a difference of opinion. You'll get your reports, Colonel, but you'll get more than that. I'm trying to offer you insight. If you think the opinions of this group are irrelevant, then you're turning your back on what may be your most important resource.”
“Good day,” the colonel said, his voice and face registering only a dense and puzzled frustration, as if he'd tried to stand up, only to find one of his legs numb and unresponsive.
The screen flickered, and the Lalande schematic replaced the colonel's visage once more.
“Clodgy bastard,” Josev muttered behind her. “If his head were any thicker he'd have to—”
“Thank you,” she interrupted, turning back toward the group. “It appears we'll have to postpone our team-building exercise. Josev, I hope your blood sugar is high this morning. You too, Ken. We'll need a strong, soldierly tone if we're going to shut that man up.”
“It's too bad,” said Josev. “I was so enjoying Worker Two's story.”
Roland glowered but said nothing.
“Oh,” Marshe said. “One more thing. I was going to start some voice lessons today, but it doesn't look like we'll have time. I'd like each of you, in your spare moments, to practice speaking the Waister language.”
Josev stared at her. “You're not serious are you? We haven't got the mouth for it.”
“That's already been taken care of. I've ordered a set of vocal prostheses. We should have them in a couple of days. In the mean time we all need to get ready.”
“This was another one of your brilliant insights, wasn't it?” Josev said, turning an accusing look on Ken Jonson.
Ken sighed. “Yeah, it was. Josev, why are you so hostile to me? I thought we were friends.”
“Yeah, well. We are.” Josev leaned his head forward, scratched uncomfortably at the back of it where the Broca scars were. “Oh sludge, chum, I'm just worried. You seem so... so sharp. You're paying close attention to everything, you're sitting right straight up in your chair. It's not natural. It's... Well, I don't know you too terribly well, but it's not like you, is it?”
Marshe watched Jonson's mouth twitch in that peculiar way she'd seen last night. “No,” he said. “It isn't. You might say I'm playing a role, here. Acting the way I imagine a Waister drone would act. But that's not really accurate; as I go along, I'm reinventing my self-image. Obviously, you think I'm going too far.”
“Becoming the enemy?” Josev's face was dark and serious.
“Yes,” Ken said.
“Gentlemen,” Marshe cut in, putting both diplomacy and force into her voice. “Let's not get sidetracked. We have an awful lot to cover.”
She triggered the outliner, and guided the two men through a series of highly specific questions, looking occasionally to Yeng and Hanlin, her Workers, for additional information. The task went slowly. The clock seemed hardly to move.
Becoming the enemy? The phrase kept floating up in her mind. Not studying the enemy. Not imitating or emulating the enemy. Was Jonson right? She'd lived for years in the shadow of Colonel Jhee and others like him. Had their influence led her somehow to propose a timid, half-hearted plan? She tried to think.
Becoming the enemy? The question repeated itself.
Yes, she heard Jonson's voice echo dimly. The aliens were faceless, incomprehensible. To know them, to understand them... Jhee's mind was closed, but Marshe's was not. She nodded slightly, privately. Becoming the enemy. Yes.
Chapter Seven
The corridors went on forever, glistening, hexagonal tunnels that bent and twisted back on themselves again and again. A three-dimensional maze of endless lavender through which Ken staggered. He longed to lean against the wall, or to trail a hand along it, at least, as he walked. But in this nightmare place, walls became floors if he brushed too close. He had fallen hundreds of times, to crawl sluglike through the gravity that tried to press him hard against every surface. It was so difficult to get up, then, so easy to lie still and rest. He thought maybe he had slept once or twice. He wasn't sure.
Nobody was with him. He remembered that there had been another, but... but...
The Waisters had attacked yet again, not with their magic wands but with some other kind of thing. And then, somehow, they were gone again, but Ken's companion, a young private, had taken a hit in the middle of his chest. He'd come running at Ken—face a hypoxic blue, rebreather groaning and rattling through a ragged opening three centimeters across—and jammed his rape hose into Ken's plexial socket.
The two men had fallen, and Ken had heard a terrible gnawing sound as the circulation pump in the private's rebreather broke loose and bit through flesh and bone. Hot, sticky syrup had splurted from Ken's air vents, down onto his face and neck, and fine red droplets had misted the inside of his helmet visor.
Ken's wiregun spools were long expended, his shotgun lost somewhere, but Excalibur was firmly gripped in his hand, as if welded in place, and with a shriek of disgust he had swept the blade sideways, severing the hose.
Moments later, his eyes had begun to sting and burn, and he'd felt a horrid tingling in his nose and throat and lungs as mucous membranes started to dissolve. His rebreather was drawing Waister air in through the stump of the rape hose! He'd reached up to paw at the release buttons, while the other man let go a deep, guttural scream. Somehow, the private—blood fountaining from the end of his hose as it whipped and thrashed back into its hole— got to his feet and started running, and then... and then...
Something had happened to him. Ken couldn't remember what.
There were sounds on the radio, now, distant chattering that struggled against the static. But this had happened many times before. The voices were never intelligible, and Ken had long ago given up trying to reply.
He hadn't the strength for speech, anyway. His body was a distant thing, a faded memory that cried out with little more than than the echoes of pain. Even his eyeblinks were slow and somehow vague.
He trudged onward. It seemed, at times, that h
e should have a goal or destination, or something. At other times, it seemed he had always been here, wandering through the haze and darkness that was the far side of exhaustion. Sometimes the purple-gray walls pulsed womblike around him, a thing which both comforted and disturbed him. He didn't know what it meant. Then, sometimes the walls shimmered and faded, and Ken walked beneath the hot Albuquerque sun or beneath the canopy of a great misty jungle.
He longed to banish sensation altogether, to put an end to the far-away pain of breathing and movement, to spill the last dregs of awareness from his mind. It seemed he had once known how to do this. A simple thing, a... a... He didn't know. He couldn't imagine.
Movement ahead.
He raised his eyes, peered through the crusty white film that clung to the outside of his visor, the crusty red-brown film that coated the inside. Movement.
Waisters, many of them. Three, his mind whispered. One stood on what was, for Ken, the corridor's ceiling. The others clung to the walls. He watched the sinuous roll of their bodies, saw the underwater dancing of willowy arms and fingers. These were the Thin Waisters, he saw. The ones that wouldn't attack. There were Fat Waisters, also, and Small Waisters that looked for all the worlds like hairless dogs. But it was the Thick ones who attacked, who swept through the corridors in waves of ten or twenty or a hundred. Ken hadn't seen any of those for a very long time.
Dreamily, he fought against the gravity and raised his sword. En garde, he mouthed, dry lips cracking with the effort.
The Waisters, dimly visible through the smeared visor, turned and fled. Ken stopped, waited. Surely the Thick ones must come now, to defend their slender kin. He waited further, for minutes, eternities. But the corridor remained empty. Finally he lowered the sword and continued forward.
He noticed small pools of blue-white slime on the walls and ceiling. As if the aliens were covered with slowly hemorrhaging wounds. He wondered. Many of the Waisters he'd seen seemed to be drooling blood from their lobster-like mouths. Had they been attacked but not killed, all of them? It didn't seem likely.
He followed the trails of blood.
It occurred to him, briefly, to wonder about his air supply. The rebreather would recycle his exhalations indefinitely, but not perfectly. Bad air would accumulate slowly, driving out the good. There were bottles of oxygen and nitrogen integrated with the body of his suit, and they dribbled out their precious gas slowly, compensating for the recycling losses, but the reservoirs were few, and small. And of course, since a suit could never be completely sealed, he would lose a cubic meter of air every ten hours or so. Or was that only in vacuum? There was air pressure, albeit caustic and probably lethal, all around him here. What did that mean?
He shook his head, and the discomforting thoughts fell away like leaves from a dying tree. He had been here forever. He would always be here, forever. Numbness settled back into his mind, and the hardsuit embraced him like a sweating lover.
He walked on, switching walls every now and then, navigating the shoals of treacherous gravity as he swept through the occasional bend or turn. The pools of blood became gradually bigger, more blue in their centers, the crusty white clinging mainly to the edges. Fresher?
He stopped, wiped at the filmy deposits on the outside of his visor. Yes. The blood did look fresher. He was closing in on his prey, chasing them down as relentlessly as the Waisters themselves had hunted every last human in the Sirius and Wolf systems. And like the Waisters, he would show no mercy. Ignoring the distant screaming of his body, he quickened his pace.
He turned a corner, the gravity shift swinging him briskly around like a ball on the end of a chain. And suddenly the Waisters were there.
The three of them stood on alternate walls, their impossibly-curled bodies facing inward, the tops of their “shoulders” almost meeting in the center of the corridor. Their “backs” (bellies?) were toward Ken, their faces pointed away.
Too tired to be startled, he simply raised the sword and continued toward them. But suddenly, something was wrong; thin blue beams played back and forth through the air, and the Waisters were shrinking, shriveling, changing color. One of them let loose a scream, like the sound of plate-steel being torn, and then it fell silent again. In moments, the aliens had become unmoving heaps of brown-black leather.
There was something behind them in the corridor.
A blue beam flashed across Ken's visor, scintillating through the layers of white and red crust. He felt brief heat on his face, like the rays of the Albuquerque sun, but the light and the heat were quickly gone.
“Hold your fire!” He heard a voice scream.
Everything went still.
Twenty meters down the corridor, a group of bipedal figures stood on the walls, their heads pointing inward like the spokes of a wheel. Their suits were a bright, gloss white, with the shining, blue and orange starbursts of rape-hose sockets standing out like spring flowers.
Navy, Ken's mind told him quietly. But the word seemed to have no meaning.
“Names of God,” a low voice cursed, with a kind of wonder. “It's one of the marines!”
The figures crowded forward.
“Can you hear me, son?” A different voice called out. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Silently, Ken staggered forward, Excalibur held out before him. No mercy. He stepped awkwardly over the shriveled bodies of the Waisters. Excalibur's blade glittered in the pale, sourceless light.
“Son? Hello? Goddammit, will somebody get on the other channels and talk to this guy? Put down the knife, son. We're all on the same side.”
“I'll take him, sir.”
“What?”
“I'll take that knife away from him. God's names, just look at him. He's not in any shape to fight.”
“Mmm. Okay. Kassim, Rasheed, get ready; if he jumps wrong, you burn his hand off.”
Ken continued toward the white figures. Their chattering voices meant nothing to him. No mercy, he mouthed. Empty star systems. Smooth craters in the desert floor. No, no mercy.
One of the figures stepped forward and grabbed Ken's sword arm firmly. Then, with the other hand, the figure reached forward, beneath Ken's personal horizon, and played with the switches on his helmet chin. Ken flailed his left arm weakly, felt it slide against the surface of the Navy hardsuit.
“Relax!” The Navy man shouted. “Corporal! Get a foothold, man!”
Ken struck at the figure again, but his left arm was captured by strong fingers. He tried to pull away, couldn't.
A moan escaped from his lips, rising quickly to become a shriek of pure terror. The skin of his face stretched painfully as it tried to accommodate the scream.
“He's out of it, Commander!”
“Hold him!”
“Get a rape hose into that man! Give him air, give him air!”
“I've got him. Will somebody get... Yeah. Now hold that.”
The white suits crowded around Ken, grabbing and pulling at him, forcing him down onto his back. Excalibur was lifted from his hand. Arms and legs were pinned, a hose jammed forcefully into his plexial socket.
Thrashing his head inside the helmet, Ken screamed and screamed, and he scarcely noticed when the Navy men pulled the hoods of his chin switches and turned off his radio. Eventually, his strength failed, and he quieted, and then strong hands lifted him and carried him away.
~~~
“...probably a gamma ray burst when we melted the drive motor,” a voice said, distantly.
Ken opened his eyes. He lay on a hospital bed in a green-white hospital room. A private room, only one bed, walls adorned with terrestrial lithographic prints, sailing ships and stone buildings in neat wooden frames. Two men stood in the doorway, wearing the gray smocks of Navy nurses.
One turned to glance at Ken, and did a double-take that Ken felt should have been funny. It wasn't.
“He's awake!” The man said to his colleague.
The two hurried over to Ken's bedside. “Corporal!” One said. “Welcome back, man
, it's great to see you!”
“How do you feel?” Asked the other.
Ken stared at the two for a few moments, then took another look around the room. Pictures on the walls. Carpeting on the floor. Gentle lighting.
“You're aboard the hospital ship Lindrenmedze,” the first orderly explained. “We've put all the heroes in captain-level accommodations.”
“Heroes,” Ken said, slowly. His voice was weak but steady.
The man nodded, smiling down at him. “Most of the marine survivors were found on the outside of the hull. Spider malfunctions and such. Seven hundred men, almost.”
Ken's blood temperature seemed to drop. Seven hundred survivors? The marines had begun the Flyswatter operation with over a million. He remembered the screams of his men as Waister weapons destroyed their bodies. He remembered the sparkle of disintegration beams against the blackness of space. Each death a tragedy, a family broken and ruined.
“How...” his voice choked. “How many survivors from inside the ship?”
The nurse seemed suddenly to realize Ken's distress. His face darkened with shame. “They recovered about a hundred and twenty. One group hadn't seen any Waisters at all. Others had. We have thirty-eight people in the hero bunks right now, people who saw really heavy action. Like you.”
“You're going to get a Wounded-In-Action and a Bravery-Beyond-the-Call,” the other nurse said gently.
The first nurse nodded. “You've saved us, Corporal. Saved the whole human race. Captured a God-damn Waister scoutship. I... God, there's no way to thank you for that.”
Take me home, Ken thought. Rebuild my city and give me back my family and friends. But he said nothing.
“Would you like to be alone?” The first nurse asked.
Remembering the ghastly emptiness of the scoutship corridors, Ken shook his head.
“Can we answer any questions for you?”
“Uh. What's wrong with me? Why am I here?”
The second nurse held up a flatscreen covered with winking, dancing displays. “Mostly exhaustion,” he said, “But there was also minor respiratory damage, aspiration of toxics, dehydration, uh... radiation damage and circulatory dysfunction in the extremities. Don't worry, Corporal, you're going to be fine.”
