Recoil

by David Sherman

  “Have you yourself ever seen one of these entities, Madam President?” Jasper asked quietly.

  “Well, no.”

  “I have. I have seen them closer up than any of your soldiers. I know what they are, Madam President; you don’t. None of your people do either. I am offering you and your people salvation. I know I won’t, but all of you may perish despite my best efforts to save you. If that happens it’s the will of God.” He shrugged. “I can only try, using my puny intellect and insubstantial powers to make you see the Truth. But only you, Madam President, can make that glorious covenant with God; only you can accept the Holy Spirit. It was in fact the Holy Spirit that inspired you to ask me here today, I know it. I know it is not too late! There is hope! But”—he set his glass on the table—“I must leave now.” He got to his feet. “Thank you for inviting me here, Madam President, and may God bless you and keep you and show you the Way.” He bowed and walked to the door.

  Chang-Sturdevant stood, her hand halfway extended, an expression of bewilderment on her face as Jimmy left the room. The officer in charge of Jasper’s escort stuck his head in the door and looked questioningly at the president. She nodded weakly; the interview was over. “Whew!” she muttered and walked on shaky legs to the bar. She poured herself a generous shot of Scotch, which she drank neat in one swift gulp. She poured another immediately but sipped at it slowly as she made her way back to her chair. She looked at her hand. It was still shaking.

  Jasper’s visit had brought back to Chang-Sturdevant with sharp poignancy memories of her own childhood. The Changs had converted to Christianity generations before Cynthia had been born, converted to a fundamentalist Protestant sect in fact. At every meal in the Chang household, grace was pronounced by Cynthia’s father, and he led the family in Bible readings before bedtime every night; attendance at Bible school and church every Sunday was required. The Bible was the King James Version. In their religious beliefs, the Changs were throwbacks to an earlier time. Cynthia’s mother swore that the Catholic Church was engaged in a clandestine plot to destroy Protestantism and take over the world. When the local Catholic church, St. Boniface, rang its bells for vespers, Cynthia asked her mother, “Momma, it’s only seven o’clock, so why are the bells striking thirteen times?” “Hush, daughter,” her mother always answered in a whisper, a faint twinkle in her eye, “their clocks are set on Vatican time!”

  But the denomination the Changs belonged to did not practice infant baptism. According to their beliefs, a person had to be old enough to understand what baptism meant before a minister could perform the rite. By the time Cynthia was old enough to understand, she knew that she did not believe in it, and her parents never pressed her about taking the plunge (they believed in full immersion). Her husband, Jakob Sturdevant, was a rationalist, and before their marriage was ended by his early death, Cynthia Chang-Sturdevant had come to realize that she too was an avowed rationalist.

  But hellfire, the wiles of Satan, the Holy Ghost, salvation, and Jimmy Jasper had brought all that back to her, so President Cynthia Chang-Sturdevant sat for a long time, thinking about what Jimmy Jasper had told her.

  The Home of Attorney General Huygens Long, Fargo

  “What we have here is another goddamned Rasputin!” Huygens Long muttered over his cooling coffee.

  “Oh, come on, Hugh! She’s no doddering czarina, consumed by religious fanaticism! You’re talking about our president! I know her too well to put any stock in this Rasputin crap. You both know her too; you’ve seen her in a crisis. She’d never give in to this foolishness, not in a million years.” Marcus Berentus poured more coffee into Long’s cup.

  “I don’t know,” Alistair Cazombi said, leaning forward over the coffee table. “Stranger things have happened. You saw that guy on the trid. He almost had me convinced! And Jasper already has a following in the Congress. Senator Maxim is introducing a bill to reduce the Task Force Aguinaldo funding in the next defense appropriation. It won’t pass, but the germ is there.”

  “He’s right, Marcus. Look,” Long whispered conspiratorially, leaning across the table, “I’ve been doing some snooping. I think his Sally is about to rally.” He grinned. “She’s the weak link! She was taken by the Skinks too. If we can get her to tell us what really happened . . .” He shrugged.

  “I say we let the president do her job,” Berentus protested.

  “Are you going to help her, Marcus? We hear you’re on the outs with her right now,” Long ventured. Marcus Berentus did not respond. He did not have to: Word gets around quickly in any government, especially when its cabinet officers are heard yelling at their president in the hallway just outside her office.

  “I agree with Marcus,” Cazombi said quickly, glancing reassuringly at the minister of war. “But let’s discuss a ‘just suppose’ scenario. Suppose Hugh’s right and our president has gone the way of Senator Maxim and those others. Just suppose!” Cazombi held up a hand to stave off the protest he could see forming on Berentus’s lips. “Just suppose. What would we do then, we three”—he looked hard at the other two men—“knowing what we do? Knowing that the fate of humanity lies in the hands of this one person? Gentlemen, we do not have much time. What would we do?”

  “What they did to Rasputin,” Huygens Long said softly.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  TWELVE

  Fourth Force Recon Barracks, Camp Howard, MCB Camp Basilone, Halfway

  The Confederation Navy had only one frigate and a single supply ship on station in the sector that contained the newly colonized world of Haulover, and no plans to add starships to the mission. Neither of the starships on station was due for relief for several months, nor was the navy willing to redirect another starship from Halfway to Haulover. Consequently, Fourth Force Recon Company was authorized to send its detachment via commercial shipping. There was no direct commercial transport between Halfway and Haulover, so the Marines caught the next scheduled flight of the SS Accotink to Cecil Roads, a major transshipment point for the commercial craft that serviced a huge part of Human Space. There the Marines would change to another carrier to get them closer to their destination.

  Ensign Jak Daly flinched when he learned which starship he was taking his Marines on; he’d shipped out of Halfway on the Accotink on the first leg of his voyage to Officer Training College on Arsenault the year before. On that voyage, he’d thought the starship would have been better named the SS Neanderthal.

  The day before heading to orbit to board the Accotink, Daly inspected the two squads assigned to the mission. As he fully expected, all eight of the Marines had everything the mission order called for, and everything was in proper shape.

  “At ease, gather close,” Daly said when he returned to his place in front of the squads at the end of the inspection. “I want to give you a mild heads-up about the starship we’ll be on during the first leg of our march to Haulover.”

  The Marines exchanged glances as they broke ranks and grouped closely in front of Daly; a “heads-up” about their transport vessel wasn’t a normal part of the premission briefing.

  “I sailed on the Accotink on the first leg of my voyage to Arsenault last year. If she was a navy starship, she would have been sold for scrap years ago. I haven’t been able to find out if her crew is the same as it was then, but her captain is. The navy probably would have retired Captain Smithers when his starship was scrapped—if not earlier. As near as I can tell, all he does to run his starship is the minimum he must do to assure that she reaches her next port of call within a more or less reasonable period of time after her scheduled arrival. There’s almost no discipline; and the crew does just enough to get the Accotink to the next port without its falling apart along the way and killing them. They seem to spend most of their time playing cribbage for money, and they fight among themselves a lot. They’re the most surly bunch of sailors I’ve ever encountered. Internal maintenance is . . . well, I heard about the bunkers the Marines took over from the army in the Bataan Pe
ninsula on Ravenette. The common spaces and passenger accommodations are close to what I heard about the Bataan bunkers. The cook . . . I don’t think she deliberately tries to poison the crew or passengers, but we might have to take over the galley ourselves to make sure she doesn’t accidentally poison us.

  “Fortunately, we should reach Cecil Roads in no more than two weeks.” In response to a quizzical look from Sergeant Kindy, Daly added, “I know, I know, the itinerary calls for ten days. But I wouldn’t want to sail on the Accotink if I had to make a tight connection. That leg could be nine days, it could be double that. I’m splitting the difference.

  “On Cecil Roads we’ll be able to get another starship to our second transit point quickly; it’s a major transshipment point.

  We might even be able to get a ride on a navy starship for our second leg.

  “Any other questions?” When there weren’t, he said, “All right, then, I’ll see you at four-thirty hours. Transportation for us to Glenn Field at that time has already been arranged.”

  The SS Accotink, En Route to Cecil Roads

  Captain Smithers was still the master of the Accotink, and greeted the boarding Marines with such total disinterest they may as well have been sealed cargo that he didn’t care whether or not got delivered to its destination. The crew, at first sight, was just as surly and unwelcoming as the previous time Daly was on the Accotink. He couldn’t tell much about the cook yet. When he’d been a squad leader with Fourth Force Recon, Daly had made friends with people who might prove useful in the future. This was one of those future times, and one of the friends he’d made was a mess sergeant. Daly prevailed on their friendship to get sufficient prepared mess hall meals to feed himself and his Marines during their first full day aboard the Accotink.

  The next morning, en route to the jump point, Daly discovered that, yes, the Accotink’s chow was just as bad as before—if not worse. So he did have his Marines take over the galley. They spent the morning cleaning it, then drew straws to see who would get stuck fixing the midday mess. To the Marines, the result wasn’t very satisfactory, but it was sufficiently better than what they’d forced down for morning mess that the crew stopped grumbling and Captain Smithers stopped threatening to clap them in irons or heave them out of the air lock into Beam Space. He even went so far as to say he’d expunge the mutiny charges from the ship’s records if their cooking improved enough by the time the Accotink reached Cecil Roads.

  The only person aboard who wasn’t pleased with the improved meal quality was the cook. She was so loudly and volubly displeased that Daly briefly considered mounting an overnight security watch on the passenger deck. But the cook hovered in the galley and gradually began helping out, and by the time the Accotink jumped into Beam Space she had retaken her assigned duties as ship’s cook—with much better results than before.

  Still, Daly and his Marines were quite happy to disembark at Cecil Roads, where they shipped out again a few hours later on the CNSS Trumbull County, bound for Aardheim, where they found another commercial freighter, the SS Briny Stars, about to depart for Haulover. During the entire trip, Daly had his men studying everything they had on Haulover and the incidents they were to investigate. There wasn’t much; the colony was still in its first generation, and there was little information on the destroyed homesteads and missing people other than who and what had been there before the incidents. They got to the point where each of them, including Daly, could recite the history of Haulover and the biographies of its founding fathers and current leaders, as well as the bios of each of the missing people. This was more than a squad usually memorized on its way to a mission, but Daly had his reasons for the intensity of the study. Sergeant Kindy, Corporal Nomonon, and Corporal Jaschke had been in his squad before he’d left for Officer Training College. He had to get them, and himself, to the point where they would never look to him as the squad leader. Fourth squad’s Sergeant Williams wasn’t a problem that way, as he joined the company after Daly had left for Arsenault, but Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporals Rudd and Skripska all had known Daly as a squad leader.

  The SS Briny Stars, out of Aardheim, En Route to Haulover

  Captain Jonas Belzaontzi, master of the SS Briny Stars, read the orders Ensign Jak Daly tight-beamed to his comp and grimaced. He didn’t like having to spend the extra time and effort unloading into orbit the cumbersome package the Marines were lugging with them. Then he looked again at the payment voucher attached to the request—order, really—and nodded curtly. The payment voucher was for enough to make launching a cumbersome satellite worth his while.

  “All right, Marine, you’ve got it,” Belzaontzi said. “I’ll put that sucker in so secure an orbit it won’t begin to decay for a couple of standard centuries. Don’t sweat anything. Before I retired from the Confederation Navy and got my master’s ticket, I was the launch officer on the CNSS Grandar Bay, in which capacity I stung a lot of pearls. You may have heard of the Grandar Bay; she was a Mandalay Class Amphibious Landing Ship, Force, carried a lot of Marines during her life.” His eyes drifted to the side, and he added softly, “She was lost in Beam Space a few years ago.”

  The SS Briny Stars, in Orbit Around Haulover

  Captain Belzaontzi personally directed the placing in orbit of the cumbersome satellite the Marines had brought aboard his ship. He allowed Daly to observe the placement and gave him full access to the launch and orbital data. Orbital mechanics weren’t Daly’s specialty, but the Marine knew enough to see that the orbit was good.

  “So what is that sucker?” Belzaontzi asked before the Marines boarded the shuttle to make planetfall.

  “It’s a multiple-drone launcher, so we can communicate with higher headquarters if we have need for quick comm,” Daly said.

  “I thought so,” Belzaontzi said with a curt nod. “A Mark IX Echo?”

  “Yes, sir,” Daly answered, not surprised that a retired navy launch officer would recognize the satellite.

  “We didn’t have them when I was in but I’ve read about them in the satellite supplement to Jane’s War Starships of Human Space.” Belzaontzi smiled at Daly’s expression. “There are some nasty people roaming the spaceways. The wise starship captain keeps current on what’s out there.”

  Beach Spaceport, Haulover

  Beach Spaceport wasn’t situated at the shore of an ocean or large lake, it was on a broad plateau three hundred kilometers from the nearest sizable body of water. It wasn’t named for its proximity to water but rather after Dr. Martin Beach. Dr. Beach had been a xenobiologist with the initial exploratory team sent by the Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration and Investigation—BHHEI, pronounced “Behind”—to the exploratory world that was then called Society 689. He had brought the attention of the expedition to the existence of a carnivorous and dangerous life-form on Society 689 in rather dramatic form.

  In full view of several other members of the expedition, Dr. Beach, on foot, slowly approached an animal that bore a vague resemblance to an Earth moose. The animal stood calmly watching Beach’s approach, working its jaw in what the observers swore exactly resembled the cud chewing of Earth ruminants. When Dr. Beach approached to about three meters from the beast, it suddenly sprang at him with its mouth spread wide and chomped down on his shoulder as it bore him to the ground.

  There was little agreement among the witnesses as to the exact sequence of events after that; they couldn’t even agree on whether Dr. Beach’s cries cut off almost immediately or if his blood-curdling screams continued for a relatively lengthy period of time. They did, however, all agree that the animal didn’t appear to bunch its muscles before it sprang, that they were surprised at how much wider its mouth opened than they’d thought possible, and that said mouth was filled with huge, very long fangs.

  Having taken Dr. Beach to the ground, the beast commenced devouring him, a repast at which it continued until it was driven off by the terrified, but brave, witnesses to the attack. By then, of course, it was too late for Dr. Beach. Hi
s entire left shoulder and arm, a substantial part of his upper left thorax, and most of his gut were gone before the other scientists, screaming and throwing things, drove the animal off.

  A few days later, a hunting party found the animal, by then unofficially dubbed a “beachivore,” a couple of kilometers from the scene of the killing. It was dead. A necropsy determined that it had been poisoned by human tissue, or possibly by something in the scraps of clothing it had swallowed along with large chunks of Dr. Beach. It was further speculated that there was some form of communication among the “beachivores,” as ever since that one attack, the beasts had kept their distance from humans.

  Ensign Jak Daly was the first person who departed the orbit-to-ground shuttle, followed in quick order by the eight Marines of the two squads. He immediately recognized Planetary Administrator Spilk Mullilee standing at the head of a line of greeting dignitaries. Even if he hadn’t known what the planetary administrator looked like, his appearance would have given him away—he was a Confederation bureaucrat; no matter what he was wearing, he looked gray despite the brilliance of his chartreuse suit and magenta shirt. And no matter how resplendent the Marines looked in their dress reds, Mullilee seemed very disappointed when Daly saluted and introduced himself.

  “Wh-Where are the rest of the soldiers?” Mullilee said when Daly halted in front of him and saluted.

  “Soldiers?” Daly said. “There are no soldiers here, sir. We are Marines, and we can deal with whatever your situation is.” Behind him, Sergeant Kindy got the squads into a two-rank formation.