Remnants: Broken Galaxy Book Five

by Phil Huddleston

  Tat smiled. “I split my Battalion West into three forces early this morning. I sent one force wide around to the south, and the other wide around to the north. I kept a small decoy force with me, just enough to present the appearance of the main attack coming from the west as Turgenev expected. As soon as we got Kim engaged, we started falling back into the jungle again. He fell for it and came after us. That opened up his flanks. That was the beginning of the end.”

  “Remind me never to go up against you in a battle,” growled Rick Moore from the end of the table.

  “Well,” said Mark. “It’s over. We have to move forward now. Somehow, we’ve got to get this colony back on track.” He glanced around the table. “Luke, what’s the status of the mop-up?”

  “All enemy combatants have surrendered,” Luke replied. “We’ve converted Blocks Eleven and Twelve into temporary prisons. We had no trouble finding people willing to serve as prison guards - in fact, the only problem we’ve had so far is preventing our enthusiastic prison guards from taking their prisoners down to the forest and hanging them from the nearest trees. I guess Turgenev’s people were pretty brutal.”

  “And what’s next with the prisoners?” asked Mark.

  “We’re going through a process of identification now. We’ll identify the die-hards and the thugs and criminals - any that committed major crimes during their rampage, things like rape, murder, and so forth. Those will remain locked up until we decide what to do with them.

  “The rest of them - the fellow travelers - will be identified, then released back into the general population for now. We can decide what to do with them later.”

  “OK,” said Mark. “Sounds like a plan. And how about our colony resources, Zoe?”

  “We took a lot of damage to the crops out East,” Zoe responded. “I’ve already got crews out trying to save as much as possible. I think we can recover most of the damaged crops without too much loss.”

  “Water systems?”

  “No damage to the water systems. We’re good there.”

  “That’s a miracle,” said Mark. He turned to Luke. “And you’ve already restarted the shuttles to bring down the rest of the colonists from Transport Five?”

  “Yep,” said Luke. “They’re on their way down right now. We’ll have the rest of the folks down by late tomorrow night.”

  Mark leaned back in his chair. He passed his gaze around the room.

  “So. One last item for today’s agenda, before we go get some much-needed rest. Turgenev and Kim.”

  There was a silence. Everyone looked at Luke. He was still considered the de facto Supreme Court of the colony. Luke realized they were throwing this open question into his lap. He leaned forward.

  “Does anyone think a trial is necessary?”

  Everyone shook their heads, some of them smiling at the very thought.

  “Then I’ll pass sentence now, if that’s OK,” Luke added.

  Mark nodded at him.

  “Turgenev and Kim are sentenced to be scanned. Their bodies will then be destroyed. Their scans will be held in storage until we have the technology to build new starships.”

  Luke looked around the table.

  “And from that point, they‘ll drive a starship for one thousand years.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Stalingrad System

  Dyson Swarm

  The surviving ships of the Stree fleet spent the next days methodically hunting down and killing every Goblin warship in the system. Thirty-one Goblin ships had survived the last stand at the Dyson Ring; twenty-four hours later, all were destroyed. Admiral Sojatta’s replacement, Sub-Admiral Jisellat, was as efficient as Sojatta when it came to fulfilling his mission parameters.

  Standing off from the Dyson Ring, he spent the next ten days blowing it to pieces. Any fragment bigger than a few square miles was pushed into the star by remote-controlled rockets.

  When that was over, Jisellat turned to the hundreds of other, smaller Dyson squares orbiting the star. One by one, his tugs de-orbited each one into the star, until none were left.

  Stalingrad was dead.

  Finished, Jisellat turned his remaining ships and headed for Aslar. He knew there was no point in returning to Stree Prime. His home world was as thoroughly destroyed as the Goblin system. In the end, mutually assured destruction had won out. Two species, hating each other beyond all reason, had finally succeeded in killing the majority of their citizens.

  Two Months Later

  Phoenix Colony

  The shuttle landed gently in the grass of Central Park, just outside Council Headquarters. The pilot waited a minute for excess gases to exhaust from the vents, then lowered the ramp. In the opening at the top of the ramp, figures appeared, stepping one by one out of the shuttle and into the waiting arms of loved ones and friends.

  Luke waited patiently at the back of the crowd. He knew Bonnie would be last out of the shuttle. And he was right. A dozen Humans stepped off the shuttle before he finally saw the love of his life appear at the top of the ramp, shading her eyes in the bright sunshine.

  Stepping forward, he waited as she let her eyes adjust. Then she saw him. Her face lit up and she ran forward, down the ramp and into his arms. And for the next few minutes, the universe disappeared for both of them as they folded into each other, oblivious to the stares and smiles around them.

  Later, in their apartment, they sat on Luke’s makeshift couch intertwined like a couple of teenagers, still unwilling to let go of each other. Bonnie’s head was on Luke’s shoulder, and she had a drink in her hand - the first locally made alcoholic beverage of the colony.

  “How on Earth did you get liquor?” Bonnie asked, swirling the drink in her glass.

  “First of all, we’re not on Earth. We’re on Phoenix,” laughed Luke. “Second, there was a family rescued from Tennessee that knew how to make a still. As soon as we had some corn and potatoes growing in the fields, they made a midnight raid and collected a bunch of the crop and started making moonshine. Mark decided rather than try to fight it, he’d just embrace it. So he told them to take one of the empty storage areas in Block Fifteen and turn it into a moonshine factory. Viola! Instant cottage industry!”

  “You know, Mark’s a pretty smart cookie,” said Bonnie. “If he had tried to suppress it, there would’ve been nothing but trouble.”

  “Exactly. Now, instead of moonshine wars, he collects a small percentage of the product as tax. He exchanges that for food and other things needed by single mothers, the elderly, injured people who can’t work, that kind of thing.”

  “So everyone benefits.”

  “Well, not quite. We’ve been rationing it pretty strictly to prevent alcoholism. But there’s already a black market springing up around it. We’re gonna have problems with that. But you know, any approach has its problems. At least this way some good comes of it - although the people fighting alcoholism will suffer. We’ll try to help them somehow. It’s not the best solution, but it’s all we’ve got right now.”

  Bonnie took a sip and grimaced.

  “Well, all I can say about it is that it’s wet and it burns going down.”

  Luke grinned. “Yep. It has all the essentials.”

  There was a short silence. After a while, though, Bonnie spoke.

  “I guess we should talk about Rita and Jim.”

  “I guess so.”

  “First of all, there’s two Jims now. Rita made two copies of him.”

  “My Lord!” exclaimed Luke. “Two copies of that madman?”

  Bonnie smiled. “You know he’s not a madman. He’s just a man of action. And when we needed him, he was there for us. So don’t say anything about Jim Carter. And besides, I know you’re just jealous.”

  “Not really. I just like to get a rise out of you when I get the chance.”

  “Yeah, right. Well, anyway. Rita made two copies of him. One copy went with her, and the other stayed with us on the Armidale.”

  “So where is he now? That other
copy, I mean?”

  Bonnie shifted in her seat, a bit uncomfortable. She bit her lip before she continued.

  “He stayed at Stalingrad. Refused to come with us. Said he’d be a third wheel here. He took the Armidale’s shuttle and said he was going to stay there at Stalingrad for now.”

  “And you just left him there? You didn’t try to stop him?”

  “I did try, hon. But has anyone ever succeeded in stopping Jim after he’s made up his mind to do something?”

  Luke shrugged. “Yeah, you got that right. So…you think he’ll be OK?”

  “I guess. I told him we’d send Duncan in the Armidale to check up on him every six months until we’re sure he’s OK. He told us not to bother. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

  “So what about Rita and Tika and the other Jim?”

  “They decided to remain in Goblin form and go to Aslar - to continue their charade as Videlli and Tarilli. Along with Hajo and the other Jim.”

  “I guess I don’t fully understand why they would do that. What do they hope to gain?”

  “They know the Stree establishment will keep going at the Goblins until there’s not one Goblin left in the Galaxy. Rita is hoping they can somehow find a way to prevent that. It’s a long shot, but she’s going to try.”

  Luke took a long drink, thinking through what Bonnie had told him.

  “And Rachel and Ollie?” he asked at last.

  “Well, it took them a while. But they finally decided they love each other. But they didn’t want to come here. Since they’re both Goblins now, they thought there was too much chance of bringing trouble down on us here at Phoenix.”

  “Bounty hunters, you mean…”

  “Yeah. Ollie thinks after what happened, the Stree - and other bio governments farther out toward the Core - will put up large bounties for Goblins. Ollie said that a year from now, there’ll be a hundred bounty hunters out chasing Goblins down, trying to collect the bounties. They just didn’t want to bring that kind of trouble to Phoenix when we’re still getting our colony going.”

  “It’s a damn shame,” said Luke. “They didn’t have anything to do with the destruction of Stree Prime.”

  “Preaching to the choir, babe. Preaching to the choir.”

  “Where will they go?”

  “Four of them - Ollie, Rachel, Luda, and Liwa - are heading out of the Arm. They salvaged a corvette at Stree Prime. They’re going to point it toward the Core and keep going until they find someplace where nobody ever heard of Stree or Goblins.”

  “Or Humans,” mused Luke.

  “Or Humans.”

  Epilogue

  Stalingrad System

  1,275 Lights from Earth

  The little packet boat had once been called Donkey - a joke by its pilot. What had started as a joke had stuck, though, and the packet boat had been known by that name since.

  In spite of its name, it had done yeoman service. It had once carried two young EDF officers to Stalingrad, where the first contact between Humans and Goblins had been realized, and a treaty agreed. It had carried a Goblin called Tika to Dekanna, where she played a role in saving Humanity from the onslaught of the Ashkelon. Lastly, it had returned Tika, Jim Carter and Rita Page to Stalingrad, to begin Rita’s life as a Goblin.

  Then it had been relegated to an obscure dock on the Dyson Ring, no longer needed. There it had been, a remnant of a brighter day, when the Stree entered the system. And as the Stree blasted apart the Dyson Ring, ending the Goblin civilization, the little packet boat had somehow survived. It had been blown off the Ring to drift away into an elliptical solar orbit, accidentally missed by the Stree as they methodically destroyed every remnant of Goblin civilization they could find.

  Forgotten, the little packet boat might have stayed in its lonely orbit for centuries or even forever - if not for a quirk of coincidence. A shuttle passed in the vicinity, searching for usable debris in the system. A sensor beeped.

  The android inside the shuttle had the general appearance of Jim Carter. It had his tall, lean body, his flashing blue eyes, his salt-and-pepper hair. It had his quirky, goofy smile as the figure saw Donkey again, for the first time in a long while.

  But the Goblin inside the shuttle was only a copy of Jim Carter. His original biological body was long since turned to ash, on a distant orb that no longer existed as a viable planet. And his other copy was with Rita Page, somewhere in the Black, headed to Lord Knows Where.

  This version of Jim Carter had sardonically changed his name, at least in his own mind. He called himself Nemo now - an old Latin word for ‘nobody’. It was his own little joke – and another part of the reason he carried the goofy smile right now.

  For the last year, he had made the destroyed Stalingrad system his home, a hermit roaming around looking for things that might interest him.

  Donkey interested him. He made a course change and vectored to the drifting boat, pulled alongside, and gave a remote command to Donkey to open its docking port. To his surprise, it did. With great delight, he realized the little boat still had power. He docked and made his way over to it. Entering, he found it nearly pristine, hardly damaged by its ordeal. It was just as he remembered.

  He paused for a moment on the bridge, remembering. Remembering the last trip on this boat from Dekanna to Stalingrad, with Rita. Remembering the wife and lover he would never have again.

  Because I’m not Jim anymore. I’m Nemo.

  Checking systems, he found them all functional. Only a little light maintenance would be required to bring the boat to normal status.

  After some thought, Nemo decided. He had been in the Stalingrad system for quite a while now. There wasn’t much he didn’t know about it. It was time to move on.

  Twenty-seven days later, the little packet boat settled to a landing at the old Deseret Airport in western Nevada. Through some miracle, it didn’t fall over in the soft sand. The ramp came down, and Nemo stepped out on the old Earth.

  “Hello, Nevada,” he said with a smile.

  Visibility was poor; the dirty, low-hanging clouds were only a few thousand feet off the ground, and the wind was blowing sand around. Nemo ignored all that; he had eyes only for the crumbled ruins of a white aircraft hangar a few dozen yards from him. Moving to it, he walked around until he found what he was looking for - the nose of an old WW2 P-51 Mustang fighter, poking up from the fallen tin roof of the hangar. It looked remarkably intact, considering what it had gone through.

  His internal radiation detector had been going off continuously since he landed; Deseret was roughly between Reno and Las Vegas. Both cities had been thoroughly destroyed, and the entire state had taken a pounding, as the Stree ensured they obliterated all the military bases in Nevada. And Nemo knew his android body was not completely impervious to the radiation fleeting through him.

  But he could sustain it for many days, maybe a month. And that would be enough. He turned off some of his bio-feedback mechanisms, so he wouldn’t feel the pain and nausea caused by the radiation.

  He could repair himself later.

  He cleared away the debris from around the Mustang, found his tools under the rubble, and started checking the airplane. He found and repaired a half-dozen items. He scrounged parts and sheet metal from other wrecked airplanes on the field, until at last - six days later - he was satisfied with his work.

  He found some av-gas in one of the tanks on the field, stale but maybe usable, and fueled the Mustang. Then he spent another half-day cleaning debris off the runway, until it looked reasonably safe to use. At last he strapped into the cockpit, fired up the engine, and taxied out for takeoff.

  He pushed the throttle up slowly. The Merlin engine coughed and backfired, unhappy with the old, stale gas. But once it got into its power curve, it smoothed out, and he released the brakes. The Mustang rolled down the runway, gathering speed. As he got rudder authority, he increased the throttle. The tail came up and he lifted off, pulled up the gear, and bored into the sky toward the mountains to
the west.

  He had been lucky; the clouds had actually thinned above the airport today. He could see patches of blue sky for the first time since he arrived. It was a happy feeling.

  Maybe this old Earth will survive after all, he thought as he climbed out. Maybe there’s a bit of hope. Someday people will live here again.

  After a few minutes, he was in the Panamint Mountains of California. He went crazy then, flinging the Mustang around the peaks and through the valleys, looping, doing hammerheads, throwing it around the sky, reveling in the freedom and joy of being in the air again. He made a turn around Telescope Peak and then, for the sheer hell of it, turned around it again.

  Finally he just climbed, up and up, until the old Mustang had nothing left to give with the weak avgas in her tanks.

  At 35,000 feet, he leveled out and headed east. At this altitude, he could see well over 200 miles in any direction. But he saw no signs of life anywhere. No smoke, no movement, nothing.

  He flew to Las Vegas and made a turn over the crater where once there had been a vibrant city. The crater was larger than the others he had seen; the Stree had used one of their bigger bombs here, he realized. Probably a 50-megaton. Making sure.

  Finally he turned and headed back to Deseret. He did the classic WW2 type of approach, coming in at high speed, flinging the Mustang up into a long climbing curve, letting the g-forces help the gear come down as he laid it over. He lined up on final and did a reasonably good wheel landing, the mains touching while he held up the tail, working the rudders hard, then letting the tail settle in when it was ready.

  Taxiing back to the ruins of his old hangar, he turned the Mustang on the apron in front, facing west, toward the mountains of California across the state line. He let the engine idle for a bit, then shut it down. Climbing out, he chained the Mustang down, as securely as he could. Finally he touched it one last time, caressed it, the touch of a pilot for his plane.

  Then he covered it with a half-dozen tarps he had liberated around the field. He knew it was a hopeless gesture; it wouldn’t survive long outside the hangar in the wind and sand and rain. And even if it did, the chances that anyone would come along in the next fifty or a hundred years and find it before it crumpled to dust were virtually zero.