by Shawn Jones
Cort thanked Ceram for the demonstration, and went to see Clem. Cort sensed resentment from his great-grandfather, but couldn’t read more than that. He asked about it.
“Why won’t you let me fight?”
Cort knew it was coming, but that didn’t make it any easier. “I’m selfish. Sending you down there would be a death warrant. You hesitate, so I’m not putting you in combat unless I know you won’t.”
“What does that mean?”
Cort told him it meant that he knew, beyond any doubt, that Clem would kill to protect, but Cort questioned if he could simply because he was ordered to.
“You’re great in sims, but that’s different than the real thing. You like Captain Rai, don’t you? Could you kill him if he had an exo? Without hesitation?”
Clem reluctantly acknowledged that he would hesitate, and Cort asked him another question—could Clem kill Rai if the Marine tried to kill Dalek? When Clem said he could in that situation, Cort told him that was why he’d decided to put Clem in charge of ship security. The resentment remained in Clem’s mind, but it was tempered with both understanding and a sense of purpose. Cort knew he’d take the job more seriously.
Biyadiq walked behind the two and contemplated the new facet of Cort’s personality. Turning around, Cort told her that not everyone could be a doctor, either. Biyadiq tried to smile at the compliment, but still couldn’t find one for Cort.
—
Outside the ship’s magazine, Cort pulled his FALCON’s mask over his head and attached a respirator. After cycling through the makeshift airlock, he stepped into the large open area, and addressed the Erom who were housed there.
“I need to speak to you. Who can speak for all of you?”
Two people approached him. He was still struck by their height and graceful appearance. They introduced themselves as Sun and Bloom. Cort looked at his HUD and verified the Erom language had been fully translated. “You are named after a star and a flower?”
“We are.”
It made sense, really. They were pale green. Cort knew their blood was similar to chlorophyll, and all of their internal organs were roughly analogous to plants on human-friendly worlds.
“I’m called Ares. That is my title, I guess. I accept, to a degree, that you are not our enemy, and we do share a common enemy in the exoskeletons. It’s going to be a while before I can make good on my promise to return you to your world.”
Sun said, “There’s no need. We are colonists. Our goal is to expand our species. Going home doesn’t forward that goal.”
“You would be happy in this universe?”
Bloom said, “Of course. But you didn’t come to talk to us about our goals. You have other needs. And we are indebted to you.”
“Do you still have people who can repair and operate your ship?”
“Yes. Sun has people who can repair it. There are others who can operate it. Why do you ask?”
I can do this. I can turn my back on the future. Cort had enough people to start a new society on Solitude. Four alien species, plus the Erom, and thousands of human, or human compatible refugees. Plus my Nill and the Jaifans. I can build a United Nations, independent of all the bullshit wars. Yet every time the thought to remain in the present went through his mind, it grew. Could he tell anyone? No. It’s not time. They wouldn’t understand.
Cort held up his flexpad and showed them the planet. “I may need to evacuate the planet. Is your ship armed?”
Sun reached out to Bloom and shook his head. Cort sensed hesitancy from him? Her? Wait. I could read them more easily before. Fuck. Another thing to be determined. Bloom looked at Sun, then back to Cort. “We are armed.”
“Why didn’t you fight us then?”
When they realized what was happening, the Erom had disabled their weapons to keep the exos from gaining control of the armament. They could be repaired, but not without equipment that was hidden on the vessel.
“Okay,” Cort said. “I’m going to need Sun’s team to help my people repair your ship, and teach us to operate it. In exchange, I will give you several planets to colonize.”
Sun said, “May we talk about it among ourselves?”
“Of course. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
—
At the breech of one barrel of the Remington, Clem opened a door for Cort and told him about the Neanderthals. They had a very limited vocabulary, but approximately the same mental capacity as a homo sapien. The comm system was able to reduce most modern speech to a level the Neanderthals understood, though their speech would be less than that of a three to five year old. George thought their vocabulary would grow quickly, however, and as such cautioned Cort not to underestimate them.
“They take offense really easily, sir.”
Clem opened an inner door, and indicated to Doctor Biyadiq that it was best if she waited outside for them, and monitor Cort with her flexpad. Once inside, Cort looked around and focused on a male. He was shorter and much better groomed than Cort expected him to be. He wore a simple Ares tunic, and his facial hair was neatly combed. The hair on his head, while long, was certainly an acceptable length. He tilted his head to Clem and gestured to Cort.
“Who this, Clem?”
Clem handed the Neanderthal a comm, and pointed at his ear. The man raised his chin and nodded, then put the comm in place. He looked at Cort, tapped the comm, and said, “Who you?”
“I’m Cort. I’m the boss.”
“Clem boss.”
“I’m Clem’s boss. Who are you?”
“Clem says I am Rocky.”
Cort looked at Clem with a question in his eyes.
“I had to name him something. What the hell do you name a caveman?”
Shaking his head, Cort turned back to Rocky and asked if he could fight. They talked for a few more minutes before Rocky took the comm out of his ear, and handed it to Clem.
“You gotta make this work, Clem. They are the only hope for Threm. They have to buy us time.”
“I will, sir.”
Cort looked at Rocky and wondered how many Neanderthals he was condemning to death. He sent orders to Ceram to take DNA samples from every living being on the ship. He would at least preserve their genetic profiles. He went to his office in the armory, laid out a map of Threm, and made plans; plans which would effectively deliver death, and cause more loss and suffering.
—
The mood was somber in the conference room when Cort walked in. Rai, Schwartz, Clem, and Tur were looking a map of Threm, and turned to salute him. He dismissed the action and looked at the map with them. Every continent was infected with exos, and they were spreading rapidly, using their own newfound strategy of employing the natural food chain.
Doctor Biyadiq followed Cort inside and put herself in a corner, where she watched his brain activity on a flexpad.
Cort said, “We are losing the planet, and we don’t have the room to evacuate the underground cities, but we need a way to save as many of them as we can.”
Over the intercom, George told them the nearest planet that was suitable for the evacuation was Cuplan-432c, but it would be crystallized before the formation of the Ares Federation.
Schwartz said, “That doesn’t matter. We can put resonators there.” In the Cuplan war, Cort’s science team devised sonic resonators that were fired into the crusts of planets, and prevented crystallization. A side effect of that, was that they decreased seismic activity on the planets, and made them safer for inhabitants.
Cort called up an image of Cuplan-482c, and studied it. “We can use it temporarily, but that screws with the timeline. Keep it in mind, but we need other options.”
“We could move the planet.”
Cort turned to Tur. “What?”
Tur recalled a meeting that occurred when he was on Cort’s security detail. In it, the possibility of building a PSR cannon, large enough to move a planet, was discussed.
He clicked, “We could put the planet close enough to the black hole
that it would be sucked in and destroyed.”
“They’re just farmers,” Clem said. “We can’t kill a planet full of farmers.”
Tur carried his argument forward, but Cort raised his hand, silencing them both. He told them to look for solutions that didn’t involve destroying an entire planet. “I’ve done enough of that. We need to find a way to save Threm, not sterilize it.”
“And until we do?” Rai asked.
“We protect the elevators. Do not let them get access to the underground cities.”
Biyadiq looked up from her flexpad. “General?”
“Yes?”
She stood and faced him. “I appreciate that the Threm are your primary concern, but you have to protect the fauna of the planet as well. If they have no game, they could starve.”
Cort conceded Biyadiq’s point and ordered Schwartz to formulate a plan to protect samples of the animal life on the planet. When they left the conference room, she thanked him.
Ten
The next morning, Biyadiq met Cort outside his quarters, and they walked to the armory to begin the day. “General, I noticed activity on the Erom ship.”
“No. You didn’t.”
Biyadiq stopped walking. She had seen the Marines and Erom walking onto the ship. Cort stopped a few paces ahead of her and turned around. The look on his face was clear, and she understood; whatever she saw, she didn’t see it.
“You seem more relaxed lately, Doctor. Are you in a better place?”
“Yes, General. I’m well, thank you.”
“How are you adapting to your new reality?”
Cort consciously slowed his pace when he realized the smaller woman was practically scurrying to keep up with him. When she realized he had done so, she said, “Thank you. I suppose I’ll do fine in the long term. Right now, I am still thinking in terms of our old world. I guess you would understand that.”
“I do. Right now on Earth, I’m about to lose an unfaithful wife, and an innocent daughter.”
“When you went back to Earth, did you see yourself?”
“Yes, it was when I made the first trip, to collect DNA for the dummy clones. He, or I, was asleep inside Diane’s room. I had something like vertigo when I saw myself. Fortunately, George and Kim changed my imagery from actual images to a wire overlay, so I only saw the shapes of things, not the things themselves.”
Cort pointed her into the armory area. “This is my operating room,” he said as he inspected the HAWC. He pointed at the railgun on the suit’s back. “That is my scalpel. A single shot from it can save a billion lives if I do my job.”
“How many have you taken? Lives I mean.”
“Too many, Salana.” Cort felt her surprise when he used her given name. “Too many by far.”
She looked at him and saw his sadness. Before she could speak, he went on. “I went back to Earth again, recently, and met another man out of his time.”
Cort took Dvok’s sphere from his pocket and said, “He gave me this. It always points at his home planet. It was a planet I saved at the same time I was saving you and the other humans on Gryll. An entire civilization, bound to a single planet in some other part of the galaxy, or maybe even a completely different galaxy, I don’t know. But they would be extinct if it weren’t for my scalpel. That knowledge tempers the nightmares.”
Salana’s thoughts were jumbled. She looked as though she wanted to ask what he was talking about, but she faced his seeming challenge to her beliefs instead. “Why are you telling me this? Are you trying to convince me that your way is better?”
“No, Salana. Nothing like that. I’m just saying that we both have the tools we use to fight our wars. You fight yours one patient at a time, with disease and pestilence as your enemy. I fight mine against entire planets. Whole civilizations.”
Cort pulled his battle sword from a wall scabbard, and showed her how to hone the molecular-edged blade with the press of a button.
Reluctantly, she took it from him as he compared it to a surgeon’s knife. “But what if they are right, and you are wrong?”
“What if some disease you eradicate turns out to be an important part of the ecosystem we live in?”
“They are diseases!”
Cort showed her images of a crystallized planet and told her the story of the Cuplan war. The Cuplans had considered all other species to be diseases, but now, as Jaifans, they were Cort’s strongest allies. He showed her a picture of the Core Temple on Nill, and told her how he had exterminated one entire species to save another, and to get back his son. He took the sword from her and put it away, then they walked to the enemy ship. On board, he showed her the scenes of the battle. He explained the history of the Erom and the exos, what he knew of Gryll history, and pointed out they were all in the right, according to their own perspective.
“Who’s right? Which side is the right side, then?”
“I had this same conversation with Admiral Thoms, the woman who stayed in the other universe to protect ours. Did you know that when I first arrived in this time, her uncle and brother were the first two people I killed?”
“No.”
“They were simply on the wrong side that day. Fighting for their ideals. But if they’d won, your rape would be ongoing in that other universe. They were surgeons, just like me, trying to cut out the cancer they thought I was, before I infected their time. But they were on the other side, and I was a better surgeon than they were.”
Cort read Biyadiq’s confusion. “Just think about it.”
She then told him about a war in Ethiopia, and working in a field hospital. Cort showed her the spot where the CONDOR had been consumed by the exos as she related her story. A little girl and her pregnant mother were walking toward the hospital, and a puppy distracted the child. She pulled away from her mother and ran to the little dog, who immediately licked the girl’s face and brought a smile to her lips. Biyadiq remembered how white the little girl’s teeth looked against her ebony skin.
“I decided I would ask the military police for some dog food so the little girl could feed her new friend.”
Salana closed her eyes, lost in a painful memory. “There was an American who liked me, but he was a brute. He’d pursued me for months. I’d resisted his advances until then, but I knew, looking at the smile on the little girl’s face, that I was going to give myself to him, in exchange for dog food.” She stopped and faced Cort. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
Cort felt shame and grief start to overwhelm the small woman. “I was happy for them. They were about to be welcomed into a refugee camp, and I was willing to do anything in my power to add to that little girl’s happiness. And in that moment, just a few meters from her mother, she disappeared in a cloud of red.”
Cort considered telling her about the Atlantica attack on the Mars colonies, but it was too complex a story for the moment. Instead , he told her that, he too, had seen the horrors of landmines, and asked if the mother lived.
“Yes. She lost her unborn child and she was paralyzed, but she lived. I spent years thinking it was my fault. That my unspoken decision to give away my virtue, for dog food of all things, caused the little girl’s death.”
“And now?”
She looked up at him. “My next deployment was in Australia. The horrors my own countrymen committed there cured me of my guilt.”
“May I ask, where do you stand with your god?”
“No, General. You may not.”
Cort nodded and showed her the bridge of the ship. It was designed for the Erom. Seats were higher. Control panels were larger and more spread out, and humans had to look up to see displays that were eye level for the taller aliens. Cort told her that with minor modifications, it would work for humans to control.
Biyadiq listened to him, and watched in silence for several minutes before saying, “I might be able to help you. With your strokes and telepathy, I mean. If we filtered the synthetics out of your blood, I could perform a surgery to repair the changes made in your brain by t
he Gryll stroke. I cannot promise it will be successful, or even that you will survive. There’s too much I don’t know.”
Cort stopped walking and watched her for a long moment. She was sincere. “I have to decline then. I won’t risk losing my daughter again. Maybe when you know more, or have a better prognosis.”
“I understand. I’ll keep working on it.”
“Thank you for trying, Doctor.”
“I’ll be close by at all times. I would appreciate your cooperation if I need to run new scans or take samples from you.”