Federation

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  Cochrane looked back at Thorsen’s hate-filled stare. “Why not kill him?”

  “Tempting,” Monica said. “But then we’d become him, wouldn’t we?”

  Cochrane saw something in Monica’s eyes that brought the warmth back to his chest again. Perhaps he wasn’t mortally wounded after all.

  “Come along, you two, our ride will be waiting,” Sir John urged.

  Cochrane turned away from Thorsen. “Nice shooting, by the way,” he said.

  “Optics are optics,” Sir John answered with satisfaction. “Though I must say they never went into this at Cambridge.” He tapped his cane against the floor. It was buzzing now with a constantly resetting capacitor hum, ready to fire at any time.

  The three of them headed for the corridor. Cochrane found he had to limp to keep his ribs from grating. In the office doorway, he stopped, then turned back to Thorsen’s fallen form as he suddenly thought of a way to get the final word.

  “Don’t you even think of leaving Earth,” Cochrane told him. “The colonies are the future of humanity and people like you have no place in it.”

  Cochrane noted with appreciation the way Thorsen’s whitened face began to redden.

  “And if you do come after me,” he added, unable to resist doing so, “I’ll use my warp bomb on you.”

  At that, Thorsen groaned, mouth half opening. Whatever was in him was wearing off. The scientist turned his back on his pursuer and stepped out of the office.

  Cochrane, Sir John, and Monica moved through the dimly lit corridor three levels below the playing surface of the Battersea Stadium. Sir John moved slowly with the cane that was just as necessary for his support as it was for their defense. Monica stumbled along awkwardly because of the missing heel of her boot. Cochrane could only shuffle because of his breath-stealing injuries. They were in sorry shape. But they had won. So far.

  “Is there such a thing as a warp bomb?” Monica asked in a low voice as they began to ascend a pedestrian ramp. The sliding pathway beside it had long since ceased to function. Old advertising posters for beer and suborbital airlines studded the drab walls.

  “Utterly impossible,” Cochrane said.

  “So you just said that about the bomb to annoy him?” Monica asked.

  “I had to do something to him.” Cochrane was surprised at the vehemence he heard in his own voice. But he loathed people like Thorsen, the strong preying on the weak with no other reason than that they could.

  “I, uh, I liked what you said back there,” Monica told him, still whispering as they came to the last level of the ramp. “About people like Thorsen being created by people like, well, like you and my grandfather. Not on purpose, of course, but as … a sort of by-product.”

  Cochrane didn’t have the strength to get caught up in a philosophical discussion, but he felt gratified by the fact that she had paid attention. He had taught students like Monica Burke on Alpha Centauri, thoughtful, capable, and he had always enjoyed doing so. But for now, all he said was “I liked what you did back there. Sometimes I worry I don’t do enough.”

  “You’re joking,” Monica said. She spoke aloud.

  Sir John turned around and shushed her. “This isn’t over, you two. Adrik Thorsen does not travel alone.” His old voice shook with exhaustion.

  Cochrane whispered to Monica. “Should I go ahead of Sir John? I mean, your grandfather’s been through a lot.”

  “You should take a look at yourself,” Monica said. She gingerly touched the gash on her cheek. “We’ve all been through the stamper.” She looked ahead. Sir John had reached the top of the ramp where it exited into a main lobby. All the lights were out, creating a cavern of darkness, but a white glare streamed in through the large entrances leading to the lower level seats around the playing field. The astronomer motioned to his granddaughter and Cochrane to stay where they were.

  “Grandfather’s been through things like this before,” Monica said softly. “After the elections, when the Optimum dissolved the Royal Academies, it was all we could do to keep him from flying his car into Parliament.”

  “We?” Cochrane asked. He suddenly wondered if Monica was married, or at least involved with someone. Whoever the lucky person was, Cochrane was surprised to discover he was envious. Confused by his new and unexpected emotion, he kept his eyes on Sir John, who looked carefully around ahead.

  But Monica said, “My father and I.”

  Cochrane heard it in her tone, in her hesitation. Monica’s father, Sir John’s son or son-in-law, was no longer alive.

  Monica confirmed his guess. “The Cambridge Riots,” she said. “When the Optimum sent zombies in to close it down. Father was a botanical engineer. He knew nothing of politics. He was part of the group who sat down on the commons, expecting to be arrested and get carried off.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cochrane said. The news of the shredderbomb assaults on England’s universities had made it to Alpha Centauri.

  “Come along, come along,” Sir John whispered loudly to them.

  As Cochrane and Monica joined him at the top of the ramp, Cochrane could hear the stuttering pops of distant plasma pulses. There was a firefight somewhere near. Probably out on the playing field.

  “It doesn’t sound like we should go out there,” he said.

  “On the contrary,” Sir John said. “That’s what we’ve been waiting for. We have some associates clearing the landing site.”

  The astronomer stumped off toward the entrance to the lower level seats. Monica followed. Cochrane followed also. He didn’t have much choice.

  The playing field was still brightly lit from the banks of light channels that ringed the stadium. Sir John’s Rolls-Royce was parked out past second base, and Cochrane could see the dark form of a Fourth World mercenary stretched out on the artificial turf beside it. For a moment, he thought the zombie was staying low for cover, but then he saw the dull metal of a fistgun lying a meter away from the zombie’s hand. He had been shot. But by whom?

  “Stay low, children,” Sir John said. He handed his cane back to Cochrane. “The trigger’s under the cap,” he explained. “There’re only two more discharges left. You know what energy density is like for these contraptions.”

  “Aren’t we staying together?” Cochrane asked. He wouldn’t allow the old astronomer to sacrifice himself for them.

  “Of course we are,” Sir John answered. “But when we’re crawling between the seats, I’m afraid this old back won’t let me pop up with the abandon of my youth. It will be up to you to cover our withdrawal, as it were.”

  Cochrane hefted the cane in his hands, trying not to jar his chest with sudden movement. “Withdrawal to where?”

  Sir John pointed up toward the ragged hole in the roof of the stadium. The dull orange glow of low clouds over London shone through it. “You’re going home, young fellow. Just as we promised.”

  They were a few meters from the entrance. Sir John motioned them to the side, then down to their knees. “Heads down, follow me.”

  Plasma fire continued to echo in the stadium, but it seemed far enough away not to be directed at them. Sir John crawled behind a row of seats, and Cochrane followed, awkwardly keeping the cane in front of him, with Monica close behind.

  Suddenly, a bright flare flickered around them, followed a second later by a thunderclap. After that, there was no more plasma fire.

  “Keep down,” Sir John called back to them. “It’s just a temporary respite.”

  They came to the end of the row and Sir John started down a wide aisle. Cochrane got to his feet, remaining crouched over. “Where are we headed?”

  “Home plate,” Monica said, squeezing his hand. “Almost there.”

  Now she ran directly after her grandfather, head ducked. Cochrane did the same. He began to hear a strange pulsing in the air. Not gunfire, but something else.

  A distant voice yelled out through the stadium. “Mr. Bond! Casino Royale!”

  Sir John waved Cochrane and Monica to a stop by the ne
xt to last row before the low wall separating the seats from the field. “Our associates,” he wheezed. “Right on schedule.”

  “Who’s Mr. Bond?” Cochrane asked.

  Monica smiled fondly as she patted her grandfather’s shoulders. “Grandfather is a devotee of twentieth-century literature. For some reason known only to him, his code name is ‘Mr. Bond.’ ”

  “And we only have two minutes to wait,” Sir John added, apparently explaining the rest of the enigmatic message.

  “Code name?” Cochrane asked.

  Monica had a serious expression as she stared up at the opening in the roof. “No matter what Thorsen thinks of it, the resistance is quite real, Mr. Cochrane. And quite well organized.”

  “Her Majesty’s Royal Resistance Force,” Sir John said proudly.

  Before Cochrane could ask any additional questions, the pulsing that he had heard intensified to the point where he would have to shout to say anything. The sound was coming from overhead.

  Then a blinding flash of light shone through the roof opening. Reflexively, Cochrane looked away, covering his eyes with his arm. When he squinted back at the playing field, a craft had landed, but what kind, he couldn’t tell. It was circular, a flattened disk shape with a gently elevated center, top and bottom, with no obvious markings or registry numbers. No landing legs had extended from it, yet there was no sign of a fan effect on the turf beneath it, either. It was, however, the source of the pulsing sound he heard.

  “Move along,” Sir John said urgently. “Move along.”

  Monica pushed ahead to the low wall, straddled it, then held out her hand to Cochrane. Gingerly, Cochrane sat on the wall, moved one leg over, then the other, and dropped the five feet to the turf, losing his grip on the cane. Dark spots sparkled in his vision with the pain of the landing. He coughed and tasted blood again. He felt and heard gurgling with each breath he took and knew a lung had been perforated.

  A moment later, Sir John dropped beside him, but landed far more professionally, rolling from his feet to his knees to his side, absorbing the force of impact along the entire length of his body. Sir John blinked up at Cochrane with delight. “Just like in the bloody paratroopers,” he said. Then he awkwardly got to his hands and knees as Monica leapt lightly down beside them. Cochrane retrieved the cane. It was still humming and resetting itself. He doubted the batteries or whatever it used could last much longer even if it wasn’t discharged.

  In the center of the field, not far from Sir John’s Rolls, the circular craft waited; two brilliant searchlights were deployed from its far edge and swept the distant stadium seats in a search pattern.

  “What is that thing?” Cochrane asked, though he had a good idea. He just couldn’t believe it.

  Monica stared at it, as if waiting for a signal.

  “Plan B,” she said. “A lunar transport disk. Inertial gravity drive.”

  Cochrane decided he’d believe it when he saw it take off. Inertial gravity drive couldn’t take anything from the earth to the moon in any reasonable length of time. Maybe someday it could be used to generate artificial gravity fields, but as a propulsion method, it had proved inefficient except for landing and surface maneuvers.

  A blue strobe light on the forward edge of the disk suddenly flashed three times.

  “Clear!” Monica shouted. “Run!”

  Sir John took off with surprising speed and Cochrane, after a moment of startled hesitation, followed, trying not to pump his arms as he ran. He heard Monica right behind him.

  Then a new sound swept through the stadium, so powerfully that Cochrane couldn’t tell where it came from.

  “Down!” Monica shouted behind him.

  He felt her arms hit his legs as she dove onto him from behind, pushing him to the ground with an explosion of pain that cut through him like red lightning.

  He couldn’t talk, felt only the harsh spikes of the artificial turf pressing into his cheek. Monica was lying beside him, one arm across his back. “Sorry, sorry,” she said into his ear.

  “Sir John?” Cochrane suddenly gasped.

  “He’s all right,” Monica answered, but there was worry in her eyes and voice.

  Cochrane looked ahead. Another vehicle had entered the playing field, floating forward from a players’ entrance, fanjets flattening the turf below it.

  He recognized it as an armored troop carrier, with a plasma cannon mounted at its back.

  The carrier’s headlight strip blazed across the turf, turning it from green to white, catching the disk on its side.

  The carrier’s cannon flared, and the stadium rocked with thunder as the plasma explosion hurled a projectile forward at supersonic velocity.

  But the projectile exploded a heartbeat later in the far stands, as if it had ricocheted from the disk.

  “What’s that disk made of?” Cochrane said faintly. He didn’t think he could keep talking much longer.

  “The shell never hit the disk,” Monica said. “It’s generating an EM shield. Nothing physical can touch it.”

  Cochrane felt the stadium melting and twisting around him in time to his thundering pulse. “Then how can we get on board? Is it a selective frequency?” Even facing death, the drive for knowledge in him was still never far from the surface.

  “Shh,” Monica said, sensing and soothing his confusion. “Almost home.”

  Cochrane stared back at her. From that angle, he couldn’t see the wound on her other cheek. He tried to touch her face. She looked at him, surprised, but not troubled.

  “Thank you,” he said, and he knew his words were almost inaudible, drifting off.

  “For what?” she asked.

  “Paying attention,” Cochrane mumbled. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but he did mean it.

  Another flare of blinding light hit them. Wearily, Cochrane struggled to turn his head to see the light’s source.

  There was an enormous gout of flame shooting up from the field from the point Sir John’s Rolls had been parked. The car was gone.

  “Betsy!” Sir John moaned as if he had lost an old family friend.

  The fanjet carrier sped for the disk. When it had disappeared behind its bulk, Monica pulled Cochrane to his feet. He felt as if he were floating, losing touch with his body. He decided there was too much pain for his brain to deal with. He was disassociating. He fought against the temptation of unconsciousness. But it was a difficult battle, so much easier to give up.

  Abruptly, he realized he was heading toward the disk, Monica supporting him, Sir John beside her. There was another explosion somewhere else, perhaps on the other side of the disk. He saw flickerings on the overhead roof. Monica told him the disk had hit the carrier. But to Cochrane, everything seemed to be happening to someone else. He was no longer in his body. He was no longer on Earth. He thought he saw Micah Brack before him, floating in microgravity, out by Neptune.

  “This is the way it always goes,” Brack told him. “Fire and destruction.”

  “No,” Cochrane whispered to his absent friend. “No more. We’ll change that. Can’t we?”

  Monica asked him what he had said.

  Cochrane couldn’t remember.

  And then he heard his name, blaring, echoing, coming at him from every surface in the stadium as if the gods themselves were calling for him.

  They were almost at the disk, a gangplank was extended, but Cochrane stumbled, looked up to the side.

  The giant visage of Adrik Thorsen looked down upon him.

  “You will not leave!” Thorsen screamed. His enraged face was repeated on the display boards ringing the stadium, blotched by imperfect pixels, incomplete, flickering. His cruelly commanding voice echoed from everywhere all at once. “Air defense will destroy you a hundred meters from the ground.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Monica shouted. She pulled on Cochrane’s arm. He cried in turn with pain.

  “You are the dead!” Thorsen thundered.

  The gangplank was almost before them. And then it disappeared i
n an eruption of fire.

  Sir John whirled in a circle like a mad ballerina, a dozen small fires at work on his coat. He fell to the turf even as Monica doubled over atop him.

  Cochrane staggered to a stop. He thought he heard plasma pulses, or were they just the echoes?

  “You will never escape the Optimum!” Thorsen shouted. “You will never escape your destiny!”

  Dimly, terrifyingly, Cochrane became aware that Thorsen’s last words had not come from the displays. They had come from behind him. He turned.

  Thorsen stood on the wall by home plate. He had a fistgun. It was aimed directly at Cochrane.

  “Earth will be your graveyard,” Thorsen said. “Unless you join me, Zefram Cochrane. Only I can unchain your science.”

  Cochrane listened, thought, considered. He half-convinced himself he was asleep on the John Cabal, that this was all a dream, a nightmare, deep within the crew quarters of the old ice freighter.

  He leaned on Sir John’s cane to keep a semblance of his balance. His body shook as a sharp cough brought up bright red blood to spatter on the green turf. He realized he wasn’t dreaming. He realized he was going to die soon.

  Thorsen jumped from the wall and began walking forward, fistgun held ready.

  “Cochrane—think—your only possible future lies with me.” One of Thorsen’s hands held death. The other was outstretched in friendship. “Give me the warp bomb. Let me celebrate your genius. You need not die when that ship is shot down.”

  Cochrane heard the cane cycle up and reset itself.

  He heard Monica moan. Smoke drifted up from Sir John’s still body.

  Cochrane realized he could kill Thorsen.

  In his mind, he heard Monica’s voice, telling him that by killing he would only become Thorsen.

  Cochrane closed his eyes. This was all happening to someone else, anyway. Besides, he had made Thorsen. “I am Thorsen,” he said.

  “Did you say something?” Thorsen called out. He was only fifty meters distant.