Raphaela moved closer, gazing up into Skull’s visage. “I thought I’d leave that to you. He’s your son. What do you want to call him?” She watched him carefully.
He gently disengaged one finger from a tiny hand to stroke the fine hair on the baby boy’s head. “There’s only one answer I can think of. His name is Ezekiel. We’ll call him Zeke.”
“And what’s his last name?”
Skull eyed Raphaela in vague irritation. “Can’t let it go, can you? Can’t just let things be? The more you push me, the less inclined I am to go along with what you want.”
Her eyes teared up in turn, but she smiled through them. “At least you figured that out.” She shrugged. “That’s progress.”
-33-
Captain Absen awoke with the distinct impression he was not alone. He opened one eye, expecting to see the apologetic face of one of his staff poking in, but the cabin door was shut. He closed the eye for a moment before both suddenly snapped open, staring in amazement at the small Asian man with the thin moustache sitting in his chair, utterly still.
The American rolled to a sitting position on his bunk, incidentally bringing him closer to his .45 in the bedside drawer. The other man did not move, but nodded to him gravely, a seated bow.
“Good day, Captain,” he greeted Absen softly. His mouth twitched up in the ghost of a smile. “I am pleased to meet you. My name is Nguyen.” He wore a simple black jumpsuit with no markings save an Australian flag and a cloth nametag on his chest.
Absen’s heart thudded in his chest. “Spooky Nguyen, they call you. Hijacked the Nebraska, fired eighteen nuclear missiles.” He swallowed with eyes hot as his lips skinned back to nothing. “Those warheads killed my family.”
Nguyen blinked, stared past Absen at nothing for a long moment. “I bear responsibility. I fired the missiles. A rogue Psycho changed the targeting. The culprit has been dealt with. It was a tragedy, and for my part in it, I deeply and sincerely apologize.” He stood and bowed low from the waist, holding the position for long enough that Absen could have gotten out the .45 and blown his head off.
Instead, the captain blew out a long breath and rubbed his face with his palms. “It was war. The Unionists…my country’s hands aren’t clean either. We nuked civilians, we launched kinetic strikes. If I make this personal I’ll lose my mind.” He put his hands on his knees. “All right. You mind telling me what you’re doing here? And I won’t even ask how you got past my people.”
“Even so, I will tell you.” Nguyen sat back down and smiled. “Dadirri.”
“Uh-huh. Some kung-fu ninja magic?” He pounded one knee lightly. “And…”
“And I am here to offer my help.”
Absen looked around his cabin, as if seeking some kind of answer to this mystery. He shrugged, sitting back against the bulkhead. “Okay. Your reputation precedes you, so I won’t dispute your ability or the value you might place on it. But why do I need your help?”
Nguyen smiled, held up a first finger. “If I can get in here, perhaps others can too.”
“Unlikely, but stipulated.”
Second finger: “Your crew is composed of men and women of a hundred nations. Do you think none of them have separate, possibly disastrous agendas?”
“I have no doubt of it.
Third finger: “For at least the next two months, this ship is the most powerful weapon in the solar system. Once you deal with the alien, how will you secure your command?”
Absen nodded, thinking. “Any more fingers?” he asked after a moment.
Nguyen shook his head. “Not for now.”
“So you’re here to…what? Be my covert agent? And why would you do that?”
“Let’s just say I am…providing insurance. I know you have a dozen or so of America’s best to guard you and enforce your will if need be. But your real concern is five hundred Australian Space Marines.”
“If this whole situation wasn’t so deadly serious I’d have to laugh at that silly name.” Absen walked over to his small refrigerator, taking out a plastic bottle of orange juice. “Want anything?”
“Yes, the same if you please. And what would you call them?”
“Just…Marines, I guess.” He handed Nguyen one bottle. “Cheers.”
“Up the Irish.” Spooky took a swallow. “No matter what they’re called, they carry the real power here. Which means they hold the human race in their hands.”
“Yes, all this has occurred to me. In fact, I had dinner with Colonel MacAdam and his company commanders last night, just to assess them. The Colonel seems like an honest man. I’d feel better if he were an Eden, but then again, I’m not either so I can’t fault him for that.”
Nguyen put down the plastic bottle to clasp his hands around one knee as he leaned forward. “Interesting that you should point that out. Everyone wants everyone else to be an Eden; so they are predictable, trustworthy, loyal. But look how many do not wish to be so themselves. What does that say about the human condition?”
“Are we here to talk philosophy?”
“Nothing truly exists but philosophy, Captain. Without it we are mere animals.” He tapped his temple with one slim finger. “Philosophy guides the mind, the mind guides the body, and the body guides all of history. I am an Eden,” – of a sort – “did you know that?”
“Yes…and I never understood how you could be so effective with that handicap.”
Nguyen smiled humorlessly, as if pained. “It forecloses some options while opening others. I am still myself. I am still a major general in the Australian Army. And I am still the deadliest single individual on this ship. I commanded all of those men during their training, selected their cadre, their officers, and the colonel himself. MacAdam has ambition, I am sure, but I doubt he would oppose me openly.”
“So you’re…what? My ace in the hole?”
“An apt metaphor. I am a card you must play at the right time, if you need me.”
“Why not just take control of the Marines now?”
“And alienate MacAdam by snatching his independent command away? How would you feel if an American admiral suddenly presented himself to you and said he was taking Orion from you?”
“Point taken. So you just…blend into the crew for a while? Stay out of sight? How do I reach you if I feel it’s time?”
“Just make an announcement over the ship-wide PA for Mister Winter to report to the captain.” Nguyen stood up as if to go.
“Why don’t you stay and talk a while? I have a dozen questions to ask you just off the top of my head.” Absen tossed the juice bottle into his trash bin with a practiced flip of his wrist.
“You have much too much to do. In fact, I suspect we are about to be disturbed.”
A knock came at the door. “Captain?”
Nguyen bowed sharply once more, then opened the portal for Steward Repeth standing outside. “Hello, Jill,” Nguyen said as he walked calmly out, to her complete and utter shock.
Absen looked Repeth in the eyes and held a finger to his lips.
She nodded, speechless in any case.
-34-
For several days Skull made sure he never lost his temper, never raised his voice, never gave any hint of inner turmoil. He knew the game; Raphaela was testing him. While she seemed confident that he would not deliberately hurt Zeke, he noticed she was restrained, careful, reserved around him. Observing. And he had no doubt that after nine or ten months she had rigged the base with all sorts of traps and fail-safes to put him back into confinement if she felt it necessary. So he waited, and played the role she wanted.
A funny thing happened. As the days went by, he played the role less and less, and became the role more and more. Their comradeship, their sexless pseudo-marriage became more and more friendly, more relaxed, less a wary dance between mistrustful strangers and more a smooth and comfortable partnership. Like brother and sister, they raised a child they both loved.
For the sake of peace he’d avoided talking about the future, but
finally he couldn’t help asking as they cleared the table on the fifth evening. Zeke lay asleep in his cradle. “So…when can we expect our visitors?”
“Eight days. I was hoping to discuss it tonight.” She handed him a plate to put in the recycling bioprocessor.
Skull smiled wryly, not entirely believing that. Probably she was waiting for me to bring it up, that way I’m the bad guy for introducing a dose of reality into her idyllic domesticity dream. “Well, we’re talking now. Tell me about it, in detail, would you please. What should I expect them to do?”
“They will not leave their ship at first. They will match velocities with the comet, then they will send down a biomechanical probe. They will hope to get their answers that way; Meme are by nature a cautious race, as most who live long are.”
Skull laughed quietly. “Do you know when you start talking about the Meme, Raphael comes out. You sound like a professor giving a lecture.”
“Or an intelligence officer giving a briefing; did you ever think of that? Why are you always so eager to prove that I’m not really human? Can’t I be fully both?”
“How can anyone be fully both of anything? That’s like there being more than one hundred percent of anything – it’s impossible,” he retorted.
“Weren’t you brought up Catholic?”
Skull froze, then forced himself to relax. “Sure.”
“Doesn’t your Church teach that Jesus was fully God and fully man?”
“Maybe that’s the exception that proves the rule. You got a Christ complex? Besides, even if I still believed that stuff, it would be a matter of faith. We’re talking about biology here.”
“Let me put it another way, then,” she said. “What makes a man? His body? Or his memories? What if I could transfer your mind into someone else’s body and your personality was the stronger?”
“It would be,” he said with confident amusement.
Ironically. “Of course. But who would that Alan Denham mind and that Joe Smith body be? You, him, or both of you?”
“Me,” Skull crowed in triumph. “That’s my point. Your four thousand year old Raphael mind makes you more him than Ilona.”
“So it’s a matter of amount? Percentage of memory? But here’s a better analogy – I graft a computer into your brain with a database containing enormous knowledge – every video, every newspaper, every scrap of history the human race ever generated. Are you still you? I just gave you a set of memories a million times larger than your own.”
“But Raphael wasn’t just a database. He was a conscious being.”
Raphaela put her hands on her hips. “Yes, but in our terms, he was a human-level psyche with an inhuman storage capacity. His actual thinking, reasoning mind was no larger than yours or mine. In fact, his willpower was certainly less than yours, and probably less than Ilona’s. So there was no superiority, no dominance. Raphael deliberately gave his will over to Ilona, incorporated himself into her. That’s the best way I can explain it.”
“So you’re a mostly-human body with a mostly-human mind with a mostly-alien database in your head.” His sarcastic tone had absented itself. Instead, he mused.
“Just like you’re a mostly-human body with a human brain and mind, but who knows how long until the nanites find a way to do the job they were programmed to do?” Her mouth quirked up at each end.
“What? What does that mean?” His shoulders and hands twitched as if he thought about seizing her but suppressed it.
“That means that the nanobots are relentless, and they are small enough and their life-cycle is short enough that they are undergoing a rudimentary adaptive process.”
“Life-cycle?” He looked at her aghast. “The nanites are alive?”
“If that’s the label you want to put on them. They certainly have some of the characteristics of life. They reproduce. They absorb energy, they take actions based on their internal imperatives, they make rudimentary decisions – kill this, leave that other thing alone, rebuild those. And I’ve observed that they adapt. In fact, I’ve forced adaptations on them in my lab. It’s only a matter of time until they find a way past your blood-brain barrier and enter your grey matter en masse.”
This time Skull did put his hands on her, but gently. “Then what?”
The intellectual triumph in her died as her eyes grew worried. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe they will help heal your brain, all those little scars formed by those childhood concussions you had…or maybe they will change you somehow.”
Skull noticed she didn’t ask why he’d had so many concussions. It wasn’t peewee football, baby. He dropped his hands and turned his back on her, rubbing his knuckles. “Maybe they’ll drive me mad. You were right to be distrustful. You knew this before, didn’t you?”
“It was only a feeling, until I put you in the cocoon and ran a lot of tests. And I did what I could to help. I tried to keep them away from your brain with magnetic fields. I cycled the nanites off and on for most of the time. I turned them off again just before you woke up.”
“You were trying to help me then, not just control me.” Still with his back to her Skull lifted his hands in front of his face. “So they are turned off now?”
“Yes. It’s safe to leave them off for about eight hours, then they start piling up in unfortunate places, clog your blood vessels. Some get excreted. Unless you want them all filtered out, we have to turn them back on every now and again.”
“And every time you do, I get closer to…something bad.”
“We don’t know that it will be bad. Everything might be fine.”
“McCarthy wasn’t fine.” Skull flashed back to that day in the lab when the SEAL had gone berserk. “Something about the interaction of the Eden Plague and the nanites made him crazy. Some of it had to have gotten into his brain. People don’t suddenly lose their minds unless their brain is somehow affected. And in my experience, when something changes, nine times out of ten it’s bad.”
“Alan…we can manage the nanites. We could filter most of them out, turn the rest off, extend the time before they clog your system…”
“Sure.” He turned back around with a weak, wan smile. “I know you’ll do your best. Just so long as I don’t hurt you or Zeke, and I can be at full strength when your buddies show up.” He reached out to embrace her and she pressed her head into his chest with a sob.
“Oh, Alan, I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”
A week ago he would have jerked away. Now he just took a deep breath. “I know.” He forced the words out, made them sound natural. “I love you too.
It’s always easier to lie when you’ve let go.
Or maybe it’s easier to admit the truth.
Flip a coin.
***
Skull and Raphaela ate their next meal after making love for the first time. Neither of them counted the violent animalistic sex act that had created Zeke, nor did they discuss it. They were both too raw.
For her it was the fulfillment of desire that had been growing ever stronger over the last nine months.
For him it was not love as most defined it, but it was a reasonable facsimile nonetheless. A relief, a pleasure, and a healing of a part of him he’d thought long dead, the drenching of a dry shriveled seed hermetically sealed in an emotional capsule. The space in his psyche where Linde’s love should have been had been almost filled by his friendship with Zeke Johnstone. The poisonous fertilizer of anger, hatred and death for his enemies had filled the rest.
Now the amazing life-giving love for his son Zeke, and Raphaela’s quiet womanly persistence, had replaced the dead ashes and surrounded the kernel of his humanity. Like any seed, it struggled heroically to life.
For the first time in thirty years, Skull felt fully human.
As he stared at her quietly smiling face across their table, he wondered why that was. He rejected trite answers about the love of a good woman or seeing his son’s face for the first time. He wasn’t prone to easy solutions, and when he made that
observation to himself, he realized why the Eden Plague had provoked nothing but contempt in him.
Like the platitudes of the priests and nuns that taught me, that claimed that salvation was a gift of God, I realized the Eden Plague was a crutch and a trap. Nothing you don’t earn is worth anything. That’s why I had to become strong enough to stand up to Dad and his drunken fists, so I could earn his respect and my own. Then when Linde came into my life and gave herself to me, I took her for granted; I didn't earn her, I used her as a prop in the pathetic little screenplay of my existence. I never really got to know her, just a perfect fantasy image of her that I constructed. That’s why God snatched her away from me, because she was a gift I didn’t deserve.
One thing the Church got right, love is worthless without sacrifice. I didn’t sacrifice my need for speed. I didn’t sacrifice myself for her. I risked her life for a thrill and I killed her. I am the anti-Christ. God was right to punish me.
Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins.
Skull knew God wasn’t his friend, certainly not his buddy like some people viewed Him. Not someone to chat with whenever any inane or whiny thought crossed his mind. God was an embodiment of iron justice, a being to be respected and feared, and only to be addressed when there was something important to say. So for the first and perhaps the last time in thirty years he spoke to the God who had so cruelly laid on the whip: Thank you Lord, he prayed, for making what I have to do clear to me. Now get out of my way and let me do it. He turned away and crossed himself surreptitiously. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritūs Sancti. Amen.
Raphaela saw him in deep thought, recognized the expression of peace that came over him, and she relaxed. Since she didn’t really believe in any supernatural power she had nothing and no one to thank. Still, the culturally-appropriate words came unbidden to her mind. Thank God he’s getting better.
Skull did not smile as he turned back to her. “I know what we have to do now.”
“What’s that?”
The Orion Plague Page 18