by B. V. Larson
“You boys rolling your suit cameras?” I boomed, cranking up the external speakers. “I’ve got something important to show everyone.”
“Damn it, McGill, come out of that vehicle and surrender!” Turov demanded.
“I’d be happy to, Imperator,” I said in a reasonable tone, “if you would please state the charges for me in detail.”
“I already have! You stand charged with grave-robbing. You stole the personal effects of a dead officer—me.”
“Right, right, but if you could only describe what it is I’m supposed to have stolen, that’d be very helpful. You see, I don’t recall anything of the kind, and I have to know what it is if I’m going to give it back to you.”
Her eyes traversed the circle of faces quickly. They were confused, but ready to act on her orders. I had no doubt that thirty troops could take one dragon, particularly one that was out of ammo. Sure, I’d probably manage to kill a few of them in the process, but I was certain they’d kill me in the end.
The most dangerous members of the platoon were the weaponeers. They were aiming their plasma cannons at my dragon nervously.
Turov could give the order to fire at any moment—but I knew she wouldn’t. The trouble was that the weaponeers would have had to use their belchers to penetrate my armor. And if they did that, the key might well be destroyed in the process.
Turov was doing the same calculations that I was; I could see it in her eyes. I took a clanking step toward her, servos buzzing. She skipped back in alarm, and her troops lifted and half-pulled their triggers, taking a fresh stance.
“My,” I said, “everyone’s sure jumpy today.”
“McGill, you climb out of that machine and give me my property, or I swear I’ll have you executed for this.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Order your hit squad to stand down and leave us alone. After that, I’ll happily make the exchange in private.”
She glared up at me thoughtfully. “What if you decide to kill me?”
“Then you’ll pop out of a revival machine hopping mad,” I said. “No one wants that. Look, all I’m asking for is a breather. I just retook your ship for you, and I think it’s the least you could do.”
She bit her lower lip then waved her arm at the assembled troops. “Primus Winslade, withdraw. McGill and I will handle this situation personally.”
Winslade seemed surprised and confused. He didn’t know about the Galactic key, but he was weasel-smart. He knew something was up, something he didn’t understand.
“Is that safe, sir?” he asked.
“Probably not,” Turov admitted. “But you have your orders regardless. Withdraw!”
Winslade ordered his goons to lower their weapons. With a look of suspicion and curiosity, he marched them away. The troops filtered past, glancing over their shoulders at me and the Imperator. Lord only knows what they were thinking.
The Imperator and I walked off in the opposite direction, toward Gold Deck. When the troops were out of sight, I laughed aloud.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“The looks on their faces were priceless. The stories they’ll tell tonight—I’d love to hear them.”
Imperator Turov was rarely in a good mood under the best of circumstances, but I’d be willing to wager I’d rarely seen her in a worse temper than she was today.
She stopped, drew her sidearm, and fired a bolt into my face. It didn’t penetrate the armor, but it did make me wince, and it dazzled my eyes a little despite the light-filtering effects of my visor.
“Hey, what’s that for?”
“James, you have enraged me to the point that if you weren’t in that machine, I’d execute you right now.”
“Galina,” I said, “you’re an ungrateful woman. All I did was borrow the key and use it to operate this machine. I had to bypass your excessive security to get it to run. By doing so, I was able to destroy the alien infestation on Blue Deck. Would you rather have lost Minotaur to the enemy?”
She continued to point her gun at me. “Give me my property,” she said.
“All right, all right, I will. But what do I get in exchange?”
Her pretty head cocked to one side. “What? You’re making demands?”
“I’m just asking.”
She took a deep, hitching breath and let it out slowly. She closed her eyes and let her gun sag down.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll give you rank. Adjunct—that’s it, don’t ask for more. Graves has already put in the paperwork. I’ve been sitting on it, but I’ll approve the promotion when we get back to Earth.”
This was a stunner to me. I’d been thinking about a romantic interlude—hell, I might have even settled for a passionate kiss. But rank…?
At first, I almost rejected her offer. I didn’t want rank to come that way: through backroom deals and dishonest leverage, but then her words slowly sank in.
“Graves has already put in the paperwork?” I asked. “That means it’s legit.”
“You are mistaken. What will make it real is my signature.”
I struggled to think. If there was anyone in the legion who wasn’t a pushover, it was Graves. He’d never recommend me to be elevated to an officer’s rank unless he honestly thought it was the right thing to do.
“You’ve been sitting on this?” I asked. “Is that what you said?”
She shrugged. “Your conduct isn’t always the sort of thing we look for in our officers. Not even in Legion Varus. Surely you can see that, can’t you?”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got a point there.”
“Then we have a deal?”
“I guess that’s a pretty good offer,” I said, “but there’s just one more thing—”
“You’re kidding!” she interrupted. “You’re demanding a personal favor as well? I told you our relationship was over with!”
“Uh…” I said, vaguely. “I’m just asking for a kiss. The kind of kiss a vid hero is supposed to get from a lady when he saves her butt.”
She looked at me speculatively. “All right. Let’s go to my office. I’ve had the techs working to clear out every taint of those horrible aliens for the last hour.”
We walked the rest of the way to Gold Deck. Under the watchful gaze of a dozen surprised staffers, I escorted the Imperator into her office and shut the door.
“Could you put that gun down for a second?” I asked.
She smirked but did as I asked. I climbed out of the dragon quickly, just in case she was planning to pick up her weapon again in a classic double-cross.
But instead of greeting me with the barrel of her gun when I turned around, she met me with tight smile. At first I thought she was happy to see me—but then I followed her eyes downward and realized she could see the seashell shape of the Galactic key in my hand.
“It’s right here,” I said. “Told you.”
“Give it to me.”
I stepped forward, but I didn’t put the key into her hand. Instead, I snaked an arm around her waist and drew her up close.
She resisted a little at first, but then she warmed up, and we kissed for about a minute. She was breathing hard by the end, and I’d have to admit I was doing the same.
She looked into my eyes.
“All right,” she said. “You can have me one last time.”
Smiling, I put the Galactic key on the desk, but I didn’t put my hands on her. She looked shocked when I took a step toward the door.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just wanted a hero’s kiss. Like you said, we’re broken up, and that’s for the best.”
She sputtered, grabbed the key off the desk and kicked me out of her office. I didn’t mind. I was getting tired of her ungrateful behavior anyway.
-47-
The aliens had really done a number on our ship. Patching the holes in the thick hull around the warp core took the longest. It took more than a week for us to clean up and repair the ship. As soon as Minotaur was operable again, we made preparatio
ns to travel back to Earth.
During the long hours of working on the ship, I’d had no more contact with Imperator Turov. Our brief rekindling had died out, and I wasn’t sad to see it end. We’d always had an odd relationship, anyway.
When we finally did power out of orbit and engage the Alcubierre warp drive, I think every tech on board was holding his or her breath. They gritted their teeth and quickly engaged the drive with their eyes closed, like someone ripping off a band-aid.
After a bit of hesitant shivering, the warp bubble formed and enclosed the ship. We slipped away at a velocity that was effectively greater than the speed of light. I joined the techs in a ship-wide sigh of relief.
When we left the L-374 system I was on Green Deck. The weirdest thing happened when we went into warp. Normally, a holographic image of moving stars crawled overhead when we were inside the bubble-effect. The imagery was projected on the dome over Green Deck creating the pleasant illusion that we could see the universe outside and watch it drift by.
For this voyage, such unnecessary systems hadn’t been repaired. While breaking into the ships, our troops had damaged the dome and pretty much destroyed the projectors that made the simulation work.
Overhead, instead of the blackness of space dotted with crawling pinpoints of light, I saw a uniform surface of throbbing whiteness.
“Kind of looks like a soap-bubble,” I said to Anne.
“You’re right,” she said, “it does.”
We were finally having our promised date on Green Deck, much delayed though it was. We’d both been too busy up until the launch to engage in anything like romance. She’d been trapped on Blue Deck, cleaning the chambers and reviving troops. Likewise, my squad had been given countless tasks to help the damage-control crews.
“See there?” I asked, pointing aloft. “That shimmer of light—it’s mostly white, but sometimes it shifts into a multi-hued ripple, like a rainbow. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s lovely. I guess we really don’t need to watch fake stars, even if they’re comforting.”
I heard a strange note in her voice, and I looked down to see what she was doing. She had a flake of ash in her hands. Unfortunately, that was most what was left of Green Deck.
The trees around us were white skeletal sticks, shorn of bark and leaves. The rocks were scorched and chemically burned. The grass was gone in most places, but we’d managed to find a spot that had a few fresh, green blades to sit on. Most of the organic matter that had once made this place attractive had been destroyed or consumed by the aliens when they controlled our ship.
“Are you sad about Green Deck?” I asked Anne. “Don’t worry. It’ll all grow back soon. They say by the next time we ship out, this place will look as good as new.”
“No,” she said, “that’s not what’s troubling me.”
“What is it, then?”
She met my eyes at last. “James, do you know what the bio people are talking about?”
“Uh…no.”
“You and Turov. That’s all they whisper about. You didn’t even try to hide your lust for her. You couldn’t even manage that much, could you?”
My face froze. I hadn’t been expecting this. Sure, now and then one of my girlfriends got wind of another. That was only to be expected. But Anne had said yes to this date. She’d come out here for a picnic without cluing me in that she was upset about anything.
“Well…” I said. “I’m not going to deny that I had a few moments with that woman. But let me assure you, she’s not my girlfriend now. She wants to shoot me dead most of the time.”
Anne snorted with laughter. “Yes, I bet she does. Sometimes I feel the same way. Let me explain myself: I came to this spot with you to tell you I’m done going out with you. Okay? Whatever our relationship was—it’s over.”
Nodding slowly, I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?
“Look,” she said. “I know who you are. And I know we haven’t been together for a long time. I don’t feel like I own you, James, but I also know that no matter what happens between us, your eye will always wander. Even more importantly than that, you’ve got a family of your own to worry about.”
“You mean Della and Etta?” I asked. I wasn’t used to thinking of them as my family.
“Of course. Even if you don’t have much of a connection with them now, you should at least give it try. I can’t let myself get in the way of that.”
“Okay…I guess.”
She gulped her wine after that, stood up, and walked away. I didn’t get a goodbye kiss—nothing. She kept her head down and didn’t look back. I noticed she walked kind of fast, too.
A pang of regret struck me as I watched Anne leave, an honest pang. I’d had a thing for her for a long time. Now, it looked like that wasn’t going to work out.
Laying down flat on my back on our small patch of dry grass, I drank the whole bottle of wine I’d spent a lot of credit on and then took a nap.
I woke up an hour or so later—but I didn’t do it naturally. Someone had given me a light kick me in the head.
“You’re going to get radiation poisoning out here,” Carlos said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Catching his foot, I twisted, and we rolled around wrestling. That stopped when we were out of the green patch and into the ash itself. We got up, dusting ourselves off and spitting.
“Why the hell are you kicking me awake, Specialist?” I demanded.
“You do it to me all the time.”
“True enough.”
Carlos picked up my bottle of wine but made a grunting noise of disappointment when he realized it was empty.
“Where’s your date?” he asked.
“It didn’t work out.”
“Too bad,” he said.
I gave him a quizzical look. “Since when do you care?”
“Well, I came looking for you to ask if you would mind if I chased Della.”
My face must have changed because he put up his hands in a surrendering gesture.
“Whoa, hoss!” he said in an exaggerated country accent. “Don’t go cracker on me! I’m just asking. She’s not even out of the revival machine yet.”
Della had been with my team on Blue Deck, but like a lot of my people, she’d died there. She hadn’t been revived yet as the brass had decided those with technical skills were more important than fighters.
Thinking over Carlos’ question, I shook my head. “I guess I do mind. In fact, I’ve got to have a serious talk with Della when she comes back. I’ve been sort of avoiding her since we left Earth. You know, it seems like I have a hard time with serious personal issues when I’m out on a campaign.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s like there’s this life, the one we have in space, and then there’s life back on Earth. I don’t like mixing them together much. They’re too different.”
It was an unusually thoughtful statement for Carlos. I clapped him on the back, and we walked through the ship’s guts toward our unit’s module.
For the next week or so, we all worked double-shifts repairing and cleaning up the ship. It was a Thursday afternoon, technically, when Della finally came back to our module and found me waiting for her.
“Hey,” I said when I saw her, “you okay?”
It was the kind of question legionnaires asked one another after a death and a rebirth. Sometimes you could shrug it off—other times, it hit you wrong somehow.
“I’m fine,” she said.
I wasn’t entirely convinced by her tone, but I took her word for it.
“Good,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about something. I wanted to suggest we fly out to Dust World and see Etta. I’ll even pay for the tickets.”
She stared at me fixedly for a few seconds. “I was revived less than an hour ago, and you have to spring this on me immediately?”
“Sorry,” I said, taken aback. “I thought you might be happy.”
She walked away dow
n a passage toward our sleeping quarters. Sighing and figuring I’d screwed up somehow, I followed her.
“Della…?”
She didn’t walk into her squad barracks as I’d expected. Instead, she walked to my room. I followed her inside, and she shut the door.
“All right,” she said, “what’s this all about?”
Her arms were crossed, and her eyes were narrowed.
“Just like I said, I’d like to meet Etta.”
“All of a sudden? Without your parents to goad you into it?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ve been dead for over a week,” she said, her voice sounding haunted. “I’ve never been gone for so long before.”
“Oh…yeah,” I said. “I know that feeling. I’ve been there before. That’s a weird one. The key is not to think about it.”
“Seriously? That’s your best piece of advice?”
“Yes, absolutely. There’s no better way to handle these situations. Complete denial is the best policy. Lock your mind down like a jail cell. Keep that up until you forget about the whole thing. That routine works like a charm for me, every time.”
She looked doubtful, but she did smile a little. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said dryly.
“Well? What about my idea? You want to go back to Dust World with me?”
“I’m not going to try to stop you—but I’ll pay my own way, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay, sure… so you’ll go with me, right?”
“Didn’t I make that clear enough?”
“Just checking.”
Della sighed and rolled her head around on her shoulders. I could tell she was trying to relax and think clearly.
“Yes,” she said at last. “I’ll accompany you, James. If I have to, I’ll even escort you around the rocks and see you don’t get lost. My father will be anxious to interview you.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
I was trying to sound cool, but I felt a fresh worry growing in my mind at the mere thought of Della’s father. He was the leader of the colonists on Dust World. They called him the Investigator, and he was a strange guy…strange as in kind of scary.