The Nuclear Druid

by Felix R. Savage

She smiled and shrugged, although the truth was she hadn’t been OK since Colm Mackenzie inexplicably disappeared from the Unsinkable’s weather deck, 71 days ago.

  That disused compartment still had sensor barriers around it and Marines standing guard 24/7. The Rat’s people had scanned every inch of the uninteresting little room, trying to work out where the hell Colm had gone. They had found no clues. He’d pulled a Houdini so perfect, Houdini himself couldn’t have managed it.

  “It’s the meds,” Meg said, holding up her right arm. You really couldn’t tell, but from the elbow down it was a vat-grown prosthetic. She’d lost her arm on a sentrienza ship, the day she killed the king and queen of Betelgeuse. “I know I have to take the stuff so my body doesn’t reject the prosthetic, but man, it makes me sick as a dog.”

  Axel relaxed like he believed her. “Maybe you should go to the clinic. Request different meds.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  He put his arm around her. She said, “Don’t kiss me unless you like the taste of puke.”

  He kissed her anyway. Someone applauded at the end of the corridor. Axel casually gave them the finger.

  Peeling herself away, Meg saw Axel’s crew. Axel flew a Vulture now. That was the new name of the fighters the Fleet had built by reconditioning luxury yachts, which had been built in the first place on the airframes of fighters that got cancelled because the sentrienza didn’t like them. Humanity was done with dancing to the sentrienza’s tune. But defiance had come late … maybe too late. The Unsinkable, her sister ship the Indomitable, and their few auxiliary craft were stuck in the Betelgeuse system, in a standoff with the surviving half of the sentrienza’s Betelgeuse fleet.

  It would be a hopelessly unequal fight, except for one thing … and that wasn’t the Vultures, despite their crews’ bravery.

  “I had to get up for work, anyway,” Meg said.

  It was not easy for her to smile and casually say hello to the crew as she passed them on her way back to her cabin. The Marine Corps used to rely on the Navy for air support, but the Vultures were their babies. They wouldn’t let mere sailors fly them. Meg had been reinstated into the Navy, in fact she was a second lieutenant now … but she wasn’t allowed to fly anymore. While Axel and his crew were about to go into action against a militarily superior foe, she had to stay on the Unsinkable, waiting it out, like some kind of damsel in distress.

  She dressed in one of her damsel outfits—an ankle-length blue velvet dress with sparkly trim around the neck and cuffs—yanking the sash so hard that she couldn’t breathe, and had to loosen it again. She detested these dresses, and the shoes which went with them—absurd pointy-toed things that made her slip around in the half-gravity on board.

  Axel wolf-whistled.

  “Are you trying to piss me off?” Meg said, her frustration escaping.

  She turned away to fix her hair. In the mirror, she could see Axel shaving at the other hygiene unit. They shared this cabin, although that would normally not have been allowed. Axel got privileges because his father was Philip K. Best, one of the architects of the CHEMICAL MAGE project, now the governor of Juradis.

  He buzzed the razor over his jaw with unusual care. His handsome, high-cheekboned face looked drawn, his eyes fixed on some distant place. She remembered that he was going into combat today, and regretted yelling at him.

  “Walk me to work?” she said. “There’s still a few hours before we get there, anyway.”

  After their successful assault on the sentrienza’s Juradis fleet, the Rat had split his forces. The Indomitable had stayed at Juradis to guard the planet—and the half a million human refugees on its surface, as well as mara, shablags, and queazels. Meanwhile, the Unsinkable had burned directly away from Betelgeuse. Their destination was Noom, the second-largest of the Big Three terraformed planets which orbited between 60 and 70 AUs from the red supergiant.

  But they hoped that to the sentrienza, it would look like the Unsinkable was running for home. If the sentrienza figured the Unsinkable wasn’t coming back, they’d hopefully commit all their forces to retaking Juradis ... leaving Noom and Barjoltan, the smallest of the Big Three, undefended.

  So the Unsinkable had burned STL for almost two weeks, which was how long it took to get far enough out of Betelgeuse’s gravity well to enter the zero-gravity field. They were now in the FTL portion of the journey, which was scheduled to take five hours. Noom lay 170 AUs away, on the other side of Betelgeuse.

  Climbing through the grubby, weathered crew decks, Meg and Axel passed air support crew and Marines on their way to the flight deck, or to the sim suites for one last rehearsal of their date with death. The atmosphere was tense and gloomy. Although everyone talked a big game about kicking faerie ass, they could not really conceive of winning. This was the freaking sentrienza. The species that ruled most of the Orion Arm of the galaxy. Any victory in the Betelgeuse system would last only as long as it took the sentrienza to find out what had happened and send more ships from elsewhere.

  That’s why they had to capture Noom.

  Meg suddenly noticed that they were going the wrong way. “Where are you going? I’ve got to be on the bridge in twenty minutes.”

  “This’ll only take a second.” They were on Deck 55. Sickbay. The nice sickbay, for company-grade officers, walls painted a soothing green, quiet music tinkling.

  Meg had spent a week here after the battle on the Ruddiganmaseve. The place held painful memories in both the literal and the emotional sense.

  “Those meds are making you sick,” Axel said. “We’re going to get you a new prescription.”

  He had so much anger inside. Anger at his father, at the Rat, at everyone who’d supported the desperate gamble of CHEMICAL MAGE. Now he’d finally found something it was OK to get mad at: Meg’s meds.

  But she had a lot of anger stored up, too, and she jerked away from him. “I’m fine, Axel.”

  “You’re so fine, you’ve been puking twice a day.” He strode into the self-serve pharmacy. “Megumi Smythe …” He gave her ID number. “It needs your eyeprint and voiceprint.”

  Meg stomped into the narrow reception area. Now that he had told the system she was here, she had to go through with the transaction, or it would be a red flag in her record. In the old days there would’ve been a pharmacist behind the desk, but now such non-essential positions went unstaffed, leaving the computerized prescription system wide open to abuse. Requiring biometric ID did not stop people from faking symptoms to get drugs.

  “I do not need any new meds,” she told the computer.

  Behind the reception desk, a sensor-activated LED fixture illuminated walls lined with tiny lockers, stretching away into the darkness. A robot arm hung motionless between the lockers. The music had gone off, since there was no longer anyone in the corridor; the quiet filled up the space between Meg and Axel, like something solid with edges that could cut.

  The computer said, “At present you have no active prescriptions, Lieutenant Smythe. Do you wish to report symptoms?”

  Axel stared at her.

  Meg flushed furiously. Caught out, caught out. She said, “It’s a mistake.” The truth was she’d finished taking the anti-rejection meds several days ago.

  “But you said …”

  Axel trailed off. The music had started up again in the corridor. They were about to be interrupted. Thank God.

  But no one came in. Meg heard no footsteps. All the same, she started for the door of the pharmacy, eager to escape.

  There was no one in the corridor.

  Just the music, tinkle-tinkling, like a tune from a music box. Für Elise. It was really a horrible little tune. It used to drive Meg mad when she was stuck in here, hearing snatches of that tune every time someone opened the door of her room. It would get stuck in her head for hours.

  The yellow-tinted lighting no longer looked soothing, but weak and unpleasant.

  Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.

  A breath of cold stung Meg’s face. She flinched against
the jamb of the door.

  Axel stumbled back. He’d felt it, too. Meg reached for her weapon—a reflex not hindered by the fact she wasn’t allowed to carry a weapon anymore. Her prosthetic hand closed on empty air.

  The lights in the far back of the pharmacy flickered on for an instant.

  Meg gasped.

  There was someone back there, pawing through the lockers like they weren’t even locked.

  Axel vaulted over the reception desk. “Hey! What are you doing?”

  Half a pace behind him, Meg ducked under the motionless robot arm. Axel halted suddenly. She crashed into his back.

  “Colm?” Axel said, sounding like a scared child.

  “Collie Mack,” Meg breathed. She squeezed past Axel on his non-gun side, hardly noticing that the protruding sensor pads of the lockers snagged and tore her dress.

  Colm stood in the shadows at the end of the long aisle, pulling meds out of a locker. Blister packs and vials cascaded to the floor. “I can’t find it,” he said despairingly. His voice sounded faint and insubstantial, like the music-box tinkle of Für Elise. But the music had stopped now and Colm was here.

  Or was he? As Meg instinctively moved towards him, she realized that she could see the wall through his body. The freckles on his cheeks were puncture wounds of shadow.

  “Oh, Meg,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Packets of pills dropped through hands made of darkness.

  “You should be fucking sorry,” she spat, forgetting to be afraid. She had forgiven him for so many things over the years, but she could not forgive him for disappearing. “You vanished. How is that OK? I’ll tell you one thing, It’s not OK with Admiral Hyland. If he ever sees you again he’s going to space your ass.”

  “It’s no good. They’re not going to help us. I want to go home.” Colm reached through the door of another locker and pulled out more meds, as if the door wasn’t there.

  “What are you looking for?” Axel said, with barely a quiver in his voice.

  “Tropodolfin, of course.”

  Axel read the labels on the lockers and tapped his Void Eagle on one high up above Meg’s head. “Here.”

  “Thank fuck.”

  Meg and Axel cringed back, crowding each other, as the shadow that was Colm surged closer to them. Listless sparks cracked from the robot arm overhead. Colm raked the contents of the tropo locker out. As before, everything fell straight through his hands. He cursed hopelessly.

  “What’s wrong with you, Collie Mack?” Meg burst out. “You came back from wherever just to get drugs?”

  “It’s a shithole,” Colm said. “If you were there, Gunny, you’d want drugs, too. ”

  Axel reached for her hand. It was probably meant to be reassuring but static sizzled between their hands when they touched. She flinched away. His hair was standing on end. Hers would have been, too, if it wasn’t done up medieval fashion.

  “Where have you been all this time, anyway?” Axel blurted.

  “All this time? It’s not even been one day,” Colm said.

  “One day? It’s been more than two months.”

  “Two bloody months. You’re joking.” Colm began to fade. “I’m losing it,” he said, panic-stricken. She could read the labels on the lockers through him.

  “What can we do?” she pleaded.

  “Hold onto me. Oh God, Meg, hold onto me!”

  If only she could hold onto him. That had been her heart’s desire. She grabbed at his shadowy arms. But there was nothing there to hold onto. Her hands went through his flesh, with a prickling sensation as if she’d plunged them into a freezer, and closed on thin air.

  The lights came back up.

  Colm was gone.

  She was standing in the pharmacy amidst a junkie’s treasure trove of meds, with queasiness roiling her stomach and the normal hum of spaceship fans and plumbing in her ears.

  The computer repeated, as if the power outage had never happened, “Do you have any symptoms to report?”

  “Yeah,” Meg whispered. “I’m pregnant.”

  CHAPTER 5

  COLM CAME BACK TO himself in the dark outside the blockhouse. It was snowing again. He was holding a pair of spoons. He threw them down in an agony of frustration.

  He’d borrowed the spoons from the children after Dhjerga left. They were quite beautiful, with enameled handles, and the children’s mother would want them back. He picked them up. But he did not move. He just stood staring at the ice slabs in the river.

  It hadn’t worked.

  He couldn’t fetch things without tropodolfin. And he couldn’t get tropodolfin because he couldn’t fetch things.

  He was stuck on Kisperet.

  Forever, the river seemed to say. Forever.

  Day was coming at long bloody last. Gray brightened the clouds, in what wasn’t necessarily the east because day on Kisperet meant that it had orbited to the dayside of its gas giant parent, not that Kisperet itself had rotated. Was it tidally locked, with the same side always facing the gas giant? Probably, as the gas giant had not budged from its position near the horizon. The little moon had moved across the sky, and was now a black pimple on the gas giant’s bland face. Moons-of-moons were incredibly rare. Would be interesting to know the precise balance of gravitational forces that allowed Kisperet to hold onto its moon …

  No. It would not be interesting. Fuck physics, Colm thought, clenching his fists. The mathematics of the cosmos were irrelevant to the Ghosts and they would be irrelevant to him from now on.

  His feet had gone numb in his Fleet boots, and the wind cut through his inadequate dress uniform like it was made of paper. But still he did not move. The river was looking tempting.

  The fear on Meg and Axel’s faces haunted him. They had thought they were seeing a ghost. A Ghost. Ha, some Ghost I’d make; can’t even flit …

  I’d like to wring Gil’s furry neck for getting me into this mess …

  Two months had passed, Axel had said. Two whole months.

  Insult added to injury, Ghost travel wasn’t exactly instantaneous, after all.

  *

  Gilliam Tripsilion Nulth met Axel and his crew on the flight deck, wearing his EVA suit. It was a tubular, flexible garment with eight grippers on its underside, which he could manipulate with his eight dexterous paws. Queazels’ clawed appendages served them as both hands and feet. Gil knew that the EVA suit made him look, to the humans, like a cross between a centipede and a silver sausage. Two of the Marines rubbed his helmet for luck as they boarded the Vulture. Gil half-wished he were not wearing the helmet, so that he could have bitten their fingers. On the other hand; vacuum.

  In the unpressurized hangar, all six of the Unsinkable’s Vultures perched on their launch platforms, attended by scurrying rampies who looked tiny from the height of the airlock. The Vulture’s frivolous, needlenosed silhouette, with swept-back wings for in-atmosphere operations, ended in a drive powered by a 3 GW reactor. This was a serious spaceship. The humans had risen in Gil’s estimation when he first saw one. It was almost as good as a queazel spaceship.

  Of course, the humans, like the queazels, had got the key technologies from the sentrienza. Everything good came from the sentrienza … and they made you pay for it.

  Gil’s people had paid with the loss of their homeworld. They still had records of Uzzizriat. Gil drew pictures of Uzzizellan scenery sometimes, imagining that he was really there, not in this war-torn system.

  He still believed that he, Admiral Hyland, and Philip K. Best had done the right thing.

  As he settled into one of the couches lining the Vulture’s stripped-down crew cabin, a pang of sadness shivered him from nose to rump. If only the CHEMICAL MAGE project had gone right, the war with the Ghosts would be over by now, and this war with the sentrienza need never have begun. But now that it was begun, they must finish it, even if that meant dying.

  “Internal comms check,” Axel said from the cockpit.

  “Copy,” said the Marines, and Gil.

  “OK,
guys and girls. Are you ready to kick faerie ass?! Lemme hear you!”

  The Marines roared in the affirmative. Gil declined to join in the primitive morale-boosting ritual. He rested his chin on his hindquarters and mused that Axel seemed to be in a strangely good mood, considering the dangers they were about to face. Of course, Axel’s moods were unpredictable at the best of times. But still.

  The Unsinkable burst out of the zero-gravity field, barely 150 kilometers above the surface of Noom. Swirling gray clouds exploded onto Gil’s personal screen. Sentrienza satellites pelted the carrier with queries, which the Unsinkable answered with computer-generated garbage that concealed pellets of malware. The humans had captured enough sentrienza gear on Juradis to be able to devise cyberweapons that would slow down the sentrienza’s famed semi-sentient automated systems. The data war lasted 29.07 seconds. That was long enough for the Vultures to escape from the carrier.

  Their drive plumes seared the closing doors of the launch bays. Streams of charged particles lashed the carrier’s sides as the automated defense platforms recovered from their disorientation. Too late. The Vultures had already duck-dived towards the sullen clouds. Noom’s radiation belt broke up the energy beams that chased them.

  “Yee-haw,” Axel yodelled, as the clouds blanked their screens out.

  Gil opened a private channel to the cockpit. “Axel,” he said. “Do you have a reason to sound as if you are having a good time?”

  “We’re on a search and destroy mission to take out the Duke of Noom’s headquarters, which are said to be defended by the most advanced automated systems this side of Rigel. It’s about time we had some fun on the job,” Axel said.

  “It’s a suicide mission in all but name,” Gil said. “I wish I had not come.”

  “Well, It looks like the Rat’s head-fake worked,” Axel offered. He was not really that gung-ho. He just acted it for the sake of the crew. “No sentrienza ships in orbit..”

  “It will not take them long to return, once they realize they were tricked. Sentrienza drives are measurably superior to yours.”

  “Why did you come?”