Return to Camerein

by Rick Shelley

  For three minutes, the chaos was too great for anyone to do anything but hold on. When the ship finally settled down, its spinning halted by maneuvering rockets, it took more seconds before anyone could try to get back to work.

  Monitors still showed the gray of Q-space around the ship. Inside, objects and people drifted around, no longer secured by the customary artificial gravity field of the ship.

  “What happened?” Captain Barlowe demanded.

  No one had any ready answers.

  “Damage control, I need a report,” Barlowe said.

  “Still working at it, Captain. We have injured people all over the ship. Something happened just as we entered Q-space. I don’t have any idea what.” There was a pause before the damage control officer added, “All three Nilssens are off-line, Captain. Engineering hasn’t been able to estimate how long repairs might take, or if repairs will even be possible.”

  On the bridge, that occasioned a long silence. The people in the compartment looked at each other, then at the monitors that showed the featureless gray around the ship. It was the navigator who eventually gave voice to what everyone on the bridge, including Captain Barlowe, was thinking.

  “Without the Nilssens, we can’t get back to normal space.”

  7

  Vepper, Shadda, Jeige, and Henri carried the dead pilot from the veranda of the hotel to the grave that Jeige had dug. The flyer’s body had been wrapped in a blanket, and a tarp had been wound around that. All of the exiles at the Commonwealth Excelsior attended the graveside funeral, not just the six who had made the trip to find the wreckage of the shuttle. Even Mai McDonough came out. Her husband raised an eyebrow when he saw her staggering along the path from the hotel toward the river, but he said nothing.

  Prince George automatically took a position at the head of the grave. The stretcher was placed across two bars that spanned the open hole. The other exiles stood around the sides and foot of the hole—shadowy forms around an open grave in the dark of night that might have suggested a bizarre cult with macabre rituals. Camerein’s moon was nearly full, lending strange tones to skin, casting definite shadows.

  “We never had an opportunity to get to know this man, or the others who died in the shuttle crash today,” George said after a moment of silent prayer. “That is our loss.” He looked around at the indistinct forms of the others. Did any man ever have a smaller kingdom to rule? he asked himself. That was a recurring distraction. Quite often during the past seven years he had caught himself thinking of the Commonwealth Excelsior as his kingdom, and its residents his subjects … but those thoughts always remained private; he had never even confided them to Vepper, who knew virtually everything else about his master.

  “All that we really know is that this man was an officer in the Royal Navy of the Second Commonwealth, one of the pilots of a naval shuttle, and that there were also twelve dead Marines aboard that craft. We can only speculate on what that might or might not mean for us here.” He paused, glad for the dark. “But this is not the time for such speculations.” It was bad form to let other concerns, no matter how vital, detract from the dignity of the moment.

  “I don’t know all of the proper words for a time like this,” George continued. “All I recall of the traditional formula is ‘Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.’” He paused again and looked down at the stretcher. A dark lump in the deep shadows of the night was all that he could see.

  “‘Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.’ That is enough, perhaps. His family will mourn him when they learn that he has been lost. His friends and comrades will remember him, for a while. The universe will move on, as it always does. In time, each of us will join him in the journey beyond, wherever it leads. We commend him to whichever god or gods he believed in, whoever is to receive his spirit now.”

  Dacen Poriri and Zolsci Emmet held the body while Shadda removed the stretcher and the two bars. No one had thought to bring ropes to lower the flyer into his grave, so Dacen and Shadda climbed down into the hole to lower the body gently. After they climbed back out, with help from several others, Prince George shoveled in the first load of dirt. Shadda took the spade then and pushed in considerably more, as did Jeige. Then Shadda gestured to his assistants and they took over the work, without enthusiasm but also without protest, The others started back to the hotel.

  At first, the procession was silent, hushed by the soundsof dirt being scraped and tossed into the grave. Mai McDonough tried to hurry ahead of the others, but she was so intoxicated that the faster she tried to walk, the slower her progress became, and the farther she drifted from a straight line.

  “I need a goddamn drink,” she said, very loudly, after managing nearly half the distance. “All thish phony crap. Jest a waisht of time.”

  Jeige moved to her side and took her elbow to steady her. “Enjoy yourself tonight, my dear,” he said in more conversational tones as he guided her along the path.

  “Wha’s that s’posed to mean?” She pulled her arm free and spun to face him, almost falling in the process.

  “Just what I said.” He smiled and took her arm again. This time she didn’t try to pull free. “Enjoy yourself this evening. I had a talk with our esteemed hotel manager earlier. Beginning tomorrow morning, none of the liquor dispensers in the hotel will fill your orders, and no one else will do it for you. You’re going on the wagon, my dear—nothing stronger than the excellent tea the hotel serves.”

  “Goddamn you! Don’ you dare!” She pulled free of his grasp again and backed two steps away, swaying wildly. “Don’ you dare! I’ll kill you, you sonovabitch!” she screamed.

  “Sorry, dear. But if we do ever get off this world, I don’t want my wife to be a hopeless lush.”

  Mai clenched her fists and charged at her husband, ready to do battle. But she tripped over her own feet and started to fall. He had to catch her. When she was able to stand on her own again, she turned away and went on ahead to the hotel without another word.

  Shadda double-checked to make certain that he had locked the door to his room behind him. He was more exhausted than usual. He felt feverish and had a dull, throbbing headache. The medical sentinels in his body would prevent anything serious from developing, but they were not designed to prevent all pain. Pain was still a necessary alarm system.

  There were conditions that might need additional medical treatment.

  “Today, it wouldn’t be normal if I didn’t feel this way,” he decided. “Today, I have more than earned my aches and fever.”

  Zolsci had been unable to raise any ship above Camerein despite the hours he had spent scanning with the radio. If there was a ship there, Zolsci had not locked an antenna on it, or it wasn’t listening—or at least it wasn’t answering.

  The late dinner, following the interment, had been a terrible ordeal for everyone. Mai McDonough had screamed and fumed in a constant tirade—mostly against her husband, but not leaving out Shadda. At first, Mai had tried to get at her husband again, promising to scratch out his eyes and rip his face to shreds. But after she had been foiled at that, she had returned to her drinking, pouring as much alcohol down her throat as she could. It had taken an extraordinary amount of time for her to finally pass out.

  Shadda had been tempted to applaud her collapse, as some of the guests had actually done. He had immediately gone to his office to reprogram the drink dispensers from the controlling complink. There would be no more alcohol for Mai McDonough, not even mouthwash. The machines would ignore her demands for liquor, and there was little chance that anyone else in the hotel would get drinks for her. Physical addiction was impossible, or so Shadda had always believed—a body’s health implant system would prevent anything like that—but Mrs. McDonough had clearly become psychologically addicted.

  There would undoubtedly be more scenes.

  Shadda closed the shutters on the window in his room, then turned off the lights before he stripped out of his clothes and sat on the edge of his bed. The darkness was incomplete. The nume
rals on his bedside clock glowed. Some light entered the room through the louvered transom over his door. Shadda could make out objects in the room without difficulty. He looked at the pillows on his bed. Exhaustion: sleep; the ill: the cure. But Shadda did not simply keel over into bed. His exhaustion extended to a mental inertia so complete that even that simple movement was beyond him. He just sat on the side of the bed.

  I saw one man die today. I saw all of those others, already dead, horribly dead. He rested his elbows on his knees and let his head sag into his hands. At least their suffering is over. That brought a thought that he dared not voice, even in the privacy of his room. If he ever said the words aloud, they might take control of him. Instead: No, that’s not for me. There’s no escape. I couldn’t do that if I tried. I don’t have the courage. He knew then what was coming next.

  His body started to tremble. His stomach tied itself in painful knots, burning, boiling. Every hint of a sound, in the hotel or outside, was magnified into an unknown threat. Ghostly images floated before his eyes. Shadda could not shut them out even by squeezing his eyes tightly shut. Memories took almost physical form to taunt him. Scarcely suspected futures—dreadful, painful futures—waited to claim his body and soul. No escape was possible—or even conceivable. There was an eternity of torment waiting, his exile at the Excelsior lasting through the eons left until the universe would burn itself out.

  Finally, all that Shadda could do was hold himself as tightly as possible and keep his head down, waiting for the unfightable terror to pass … or for it to finally crystallize and strike him down. He had no idea how long it was before he finally collapsed into nightmare-ridden sleep.

  Prince George had not needed an alarm clock or wake-up call since he was ten years old. When he was a child, some of the servants in his father’s palace had found him a little spooky. George always seemed to wake just before they could call him. He anticipated. The reactions of the servants provided the only feedback that George had ever needed in order to hone the talent. Causing that slight consternation became one of his secret pleasures. In time, George found that he could program himself to wake at any given time, virtually to the minute, and his mind developed an uncanny sense for time even when he was awake. Even after he left the comforts of his father’s establishment for his schooling and military service, the gift had not deserted him. In fact, it had become more valuable than ever.

  It didn’t matter that he had managed less sleep than usual this night. George could get by with two hours a night at need, for extended periods. When he woke the morning after the expedition to the crashed shuttle, he knew that an hour remained before first light—because that was when he had willed himself to wake. The hotel was as silent as it ever got, and there were few sounds from outside. The night hunters had mostly finished their business. The day hunters had not awakened yet. And the cachouris had not yet started their morning cacophony.

  George sat up and swung his legs out of bed. He stretched, then stood and stretched again, reveling in the sensations of his body—the proof of life. He moved silently about his morning routine, enjoying the anticipation of his morning plans. After his visit to the bathroom he dressed quickly, all the way up to a hunting vest with all its pockets and loops filled with shotgun shells. He had counted forty-seven shells, plus the five that Vepper had loaded into the shotgun the night before.

  As he slipped into the heavy vest, George reminded himself, I must ask Master Lorenqui to make more shells. I’ll be using them rather more quickly than before. He smiled as he buttoned the heavy vest. George picked up his shotgun and let himself out of the room. He took the back stairs down through the kitchen and went out the rear of the hotel. He cut across the lawn until he reached the path to the river. The sky was clear, and the brilliance of the late stars gave him enough light. As long as he stayed on the path after he was beyond the trimmed lawn, he would be in little danger of tripping or getting snagged by a jungle vine.

  He paused at the side of the new grave. “I do wish you had survived,” he whispered, “whatever your name might have been.” It wasn’t entirely a selfish thought. Certainly, it would have been nice to question the man about the progress of the war, and even better to have learned that there was a ship over Camerein that could take them all back to civilization. But George found himself genuinely regretting the loss of a man he could scarcely claim to have met. “‘Any man’s death diminishes me,’” he said, and he couldn’t recall where he had read or heard that quote.

  “Rest in whatever peace you can find,” George whispered. He looked around, as if to see if there were others watching. Then he went on toward the river. He followed the path to the pumpkin tree with so many cachouri nests visible that he had pointed out to Vepper just the morning before. George stood off near the edge of the tree’s branches, where he still had a little light to assist him. There was no sound from the birds yet.

  “We’ll soon put that to rights,” George mumbled.

  He raised the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The explosion of the shot was followed quickly by screeches from hundreds of birds wakened from sleep. Panicked squawking obliterated the sounds of birdshot ripping through leaves and into branches and nests. George continued firing the shotgun until it was empty, pausing briefly after each blast. The shrieking of the cachouris was far different now from what it was when they went through their morning ritual. The hint of terror was welcome to the lone gunman below. And each time he heard the soft thud of a bird’s body hitting the ground, his smile grew a little wider.

  George slid five more cartridges into the shotgun’s magazine, then pumped one into the chamber. The time that took gave the cachouris a chance to settle down a little. There was no blind flying off for them. Cachouris would not fly at night, even in terror. George moved a little, off to the side, on the edge of the path, going partway around the tree to give himself new targets. Once more he emptied the shotgun’s magazine into the canopy, moving his point of aim carefully with each shot, relying more on memory than sight to tell him where the greatest concentrations of nests were.

  By the time he had emptied the shotgun for the sixth time, there was a little more light. The sun hadn’t appeared, but dawn had started to sketch itself against the horizon. George could see two dozen dead birds on the ground under the tree, and he had heard other bodies splash into the river. Soon he would be able to see those dead cachouris floating away—if he cared to look.

  Now that he could see his targets better, George was slower to shoot, more deliberate, more selective with his aim. A single blast of the shotgun could riddle three or four nests if he were careful. More dead birds dropped. Very likely, there were also bodies in nests, or caught in the lower branches. The shrieking of the surviving cachouris was constant now, rising in pitch with each new assault. Blast and shriek were the only sounds that George could hear, all that he wanted to hear. His ears had become numbed to other frequencies, other sounds. Blast and shriek. It was enough.

  “Quite satisfactory,” George announced after he had emptied the magazine of his shotgun for the last time. He had two cartridges left in his vest. He loaded them into the gun, but he was finished with his morning’s sport. The last two shells were for an emergency—in the unlikely event that a keuvi or one of the jungle’s other large predators might be crazy enough to come toward the sounds of so much gunfire.

  As his hearing started to recover from the effects of the gunfire, George heard people shouting, back at the hotel. The prince smiled while he tried to get a better estimate of the number of birds he had killed. There were at least four dozen on the ground, plus however many had fallen into the river or remained in the tree. In any case, he absolutely had to have averaged more than one dead bird for every shell he had fired.

  “Quite satisfactory,” he repeated, and then he turned and started to follow the path toward the hotel. He walked more slowly than he normally did, savoring his triumph.

  “Don Quixote lives,” George said softly. It was
going to be a good day.

  8

  David Spencer begrudged every minute of darkness during which the commandos were not moving. Night was an infantryman’s friend. But the men needed a rest after moving hard and fast for so long. David needed rest as well, but he had responsibilities. He was awake before the end of the four hours he had allowed for the break. Mitchel Naughton was already awake. He had been checking the sentries when Spencer noticed him.

  “You know, sir,” Naughton said when they came together near the middle of the bivouac, “a lot depends on how large a garrison the Feddies have on Camerein. If they’ve got the manpower, they’ll put in whatever it takes to find us.”

  “I know. It’s like an itch you can’t scratch. And the Feddie commander will need to fill in the blanks on his report properly. ‘So many enemy troops came in, so many accounted for.’ Just like an accounting clerk totting up income and expenses. The sums in the two columns have to agree.”

  Naughton gave an almost silent chuckle. “I won’t tell anyone if he wants to fudge the numbers.”

  David smiled. “There shouldn’t be all that large a garrison here, unless they’re using Camerein for something we don’t know about.” He shrugged. “Of course, intelligence didn’t have the faintest idea what they might be using the world for.”

  “That rather worries me, sir,” Naughton said. “They might have a dozen regiments in for jungle training, or something like that.”

  Spencer pulled down his faceplate just long enough to look at the timeline on the head-up display. “What worries me more is that Avon hasn’t checked in. They’re ten minutes late, and that’s not like Captain Barlowe.”

  “There could be a reason,” Naughton said.

  “None that means anything good for us.”

  Absolutely precise adherence to the communications schedule might not be essential, but the radio link with Avon was the commando detachment’s lifeline, its only connection to the outside, to friendly forces.