by Joe Pace
“Not exactly.” This time she added, belatedly, “sir.”
Not exactly?
“Fletcher…” another crackle of interference hummed across their connection, and Pearce spat out a string of vulgarities, damning this alien world and its odd magnetic fields, damning his own luck at ever having been stupid enough to go into space in the first place. Finally the noise subsided. “Fletcher, you will report to me at once. Five minutes ago, do you hear?” He cut his signal before she could respond. He stood stock still, vibrating with impatience. Nearby, Crutchfield was almost as edgy. The robots, true to their emotionless programming, betrayed no trace of unease.
Breaking the heavy silence, Pearce’s wristlink chirped with an incoming message. If it’s her with some excuse, he thought, activating it savagely.
“What!” he bellowed.
“Sir.” It was the calm, twanging voice of Pott, with the clarity of broadcast that only the Harvest’s transmitter boosters could achieve. “Sorry to bother you, but are Lamb and Briggs there? Their shore leave expired fifteen minutes ago and we’ve been waiting for their signal for the shuttle. I didn’t know if perhaps they were having some trouble reaching us. When I try their frequencies, I get nothing.”
“No,” Pearce replied evenly, regaining his temper. He glanced at Crutchfield, who shook his head. “No sign of them here, Pott. Hold on.” He knew it was useless before he did it, but like a man joining a crowd at a locked door, he had to try it himself. As he expected, transmitting to their numbers returned nothing but the low hum of a deactivated unit. What now? He switched back over to the Harvest frequency. “Nothing.”
“Sir, I’ll send a shuttle to search for them.”
“Belay that,” Pearce ordered. “An aerial search probably wouldn’t do much good. But have Mister Hall prep a shuttle and stand by.” From the corner of his eye, he saw a lone figure approaching along the broad causeway linking the point to the mainland. He could tell from her gait, slow enough to irritate him further, that it was Fletcher. “Pott, stand by. I’ll handle matters here.”
“Yes, Captain.” There was a hint of reluctance in his first officer’s tone, but Pearce ignored it and terminated the connection. He fixed his gaze on Christine Fletcher, watching intently and simmering as she sauntered closer. I gave her five minutes, and she takes near twenty.
“Fletcher,” he greeted her as she arrived, endeavoring to keep his voice flat as he gathered the shreds of his composure together.
“Captain.” Fletcher seemed relaxed, either unaware or disinterested that her commander was seething.
“I will ignore your tardiness, but I insist that you explain your earlier comment. Where is Luther-45? He was assigned to you.”
“He was. I gave him to Jairo.”
“You gave…!” Crutchfield stepped forward, the words escaping his throat in a canine yelp. Pearce held up a hand, and the sergeant stopped, his eyes wide with confusion.
“Lieutenant Fletcher, I must have misheard you,” Pearce growled.
“Not at all, sir.” She smiled, and it took every last ounce of Pearce’s will not to surrender to fury. “Jairo was curious about Luther, so I made a gift of him. It seemed a fair exchange, given how much help they’ve been, and how much we’ve collected. You did order me to engage in cultural exchange, and to nurture our relationship with the Cygni, after all. I didn’t think it would be a problem.”
“You didn’t think it would be a problem,” Pearce repeated through clenched teeth, ignoring Crutchfield’s slow-burning horror off to his periphery. “You’ve been in our briefings. You know our regulations about making inappropriate technology available to other societies. You didn’t think it would be a problem? You didn’t think I would mind? You didn’t think it would upset me? No, Fletcher, you simply didn’t think.” In an incandescent moment, his tenuous grip on his temper failed, and he roared unintelligibly. “I was a damned fool to bring you. To insist on having you on this voyage! You’ve been deliberately defiant! Insubordinate! All but bloody mutinous!” Fletcher had taken a step backward, but he closed the distance between them, his purpled face scant inches from hers. That face, he thought through his wrath, that beautiful face, and then it suddenly all made sense to him.
“Jairo,” he spat, his voice suddenly and dangerously low, “is manipulating you, Lieutenant, and doing a splendid job of it, I should say.”
“What are you on about, Bill?” she asked, unsettled, forgetting herself.
“Captain!” he snarled, “or sir, damn you! It’s these Cygni; they breathe some bewitching fog, some miasma that makes others like them, even love them.” He said this last with a sarcastic timbre. “I’ve seen the two of you together. Unofficerly, schoolgirl conduct. He is using you, Fletcher, and you’re too damn infatuated to even notice.”
She slapped him, and the alien world seemed to stop rotating on its fat axis.
“Damn you, Bill Pearce,” she hissed, and everything between them was irreparably broken. He touched his cheek, gingerly, disbelieving.
“Sergeant Crutchfield.” The words did not catch in his throat, as he was afraid they might. Sadness and anger comingled and filled him like a cold liquid. “You will take Lieutenant Fletcher into custody, please.” Pearce stared at her, his eyes boring holes into her, his rage and misery a living, writhing dance within his gut. The massive officer spoke a quiet command, and one of the machrines, Victor-11, stepped forward in mute obedience. He enclosed Fletcher’s hands in his, and a blue-tinged immobilizer field emitted from his wrists. She did not resist, did not even look at the robot, never taking her eyes off the captain. Pearce finally tore his own gaze free, and signaled Pott, in orbit high above.
“Lieutenant Pott, please have Mister Hall report to the surface with Ambrose-226.” That would leave no machrines on board the Harvest, which made Pearce uncomfortable, but he saw no other way. “I have arrested Lieutenant Fletcher for gross insubordination, striking a superior officer, and…” he was about to say treason, but at long last words failed him. “…and theft of the ship’s property,” he finished. “She is to be confined to quarters with no access to any ship’s network, and no contact with any other crew members.” There was silence on the other end. “John?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the lieutenant replied at last. “Right away.”
“And Pott…find Green and Reyes. I want the final shipments of samples brought on board now. All other shore leaves are hereby terminated. All personnel are to report to the ship within the hour. Pearce out.”
He ended the transmission and turned to Crutchfield.
“When Hall arrives with the shuttle, remit custody of the prisoner to him with one of the machrines. Probably Victor, but I leave that to you. They can escort her back to the ship.” He glanced sidelong at the woman he had thought was his friend, the woman he had thought so vital to their success. Feeling the anger rising within himself again, Pearce shoved it back down. He didn’t have time to lose his temper again, not right now. He stabbed a thick finger in her direction. “I’ll deal with you when I get back to the ship.” Christine Fletcher said nothing, her silence full of seething and hurt.
“Where are you going, sir?” Crutchfield asked.
“After you transfer her to Mister Hall, you take the two other machrines, and you find Lamb and Briggs.” During the exchange with Fletcher, Pearce had begun to suspect a connection between his missing crewmen’s absences and the abduction of Luther with Fletcher’s complicity, unwitting or otherwise. It could, of course, simply be a matter of desertion, and the timing a mere coincidence, but Pearce wasn’t about to bet his ship, the future of humanity, and his son’s life on it.
“Where are you going, sir?” repeated Crutchfield.
“I’m going to find Luther and bring him back.”
“Alone? Is that wise, captain?”
“Wise or not, that’s what I’m doing.” He looked one last time at Fletcher, allowed himself the shortest instant to feel
grief at the final dissolution of their long friendship, and then dismissed it from his mind. “It’s time Venn Arkadas and I had a talk.”
Twelve
Paradise Lost
Figuring out where to go had been a simple matter. The machrines were more than just guards and training partners; they were ever-watchful sentinels and dutifully reported to their sergeant, whichever Cygni Briggs and Lamb had been seen with most frequently. Sergeant Orpheus Crutchfield, like soldiers before him for millennia, had nurtured a kind of professional rapport with the mid-ranks of the indigenous military. With their cooperation – and a little too much of the intoxicating Horfan beverage, edan – the identities of the native collaborators were readily established.
“The Burned Hills,” they told him. “They’ll head for the Burned Hills.”
So Crutchfield headed there, too, following their directions, eager for the moment when they drew near enough to make use of the machrines’ tracking capabilities. The “painting” of crew members as friendly was more than a tactical advantage, it was also a useful method for keeping track of wayward crew. It would only be a matter of time, really. He would have enjoyed the assignment if it hadn’t been so damned hot.
Crutchfield had been on exploration or garrison duty on a score of worlds, but he had never experienced this kind of sticky, roasting heat. He had been slick with sweat ever since venturing forth from Horfa, through the surrounding countryside, and into the vast wilds beyond the farthest settlements. The farmhouses and cultivated fields, with their odor of herd manure and growing things, gave way to untended chaparral, russet grasses, and the insistent chirp of some kind of red-winged birds that circled overhead by the dozens. Crutchfield had been mildly interested at first, having only the vaguest understanding of birds, but now the damn things were an annoyance.
Worse than the birds, almost than the heat, was the openness.
Despite his wide and varied experiences in the service, Crutchfield had remained, at heart, a child of the close spaces, narrow hallways, and windowless rooms he grew up in, in the subterranean apartment complexes honeycombing what was once the northern deserts of Africa. His parents had worked in the copper and bauxite mines, kilometers below the surface, in the dirty and dangerous labor of extracting vital minerals for the ever-hungry apparatus of empire. He could vividly remember the first time he saw the sky, venturing to Cairo for a school field trip. He had been seven years old and terrified. Older kids at school had told him that people sometimes fell off, up into the sky, if they didn’t hold on to things while on the surface. Eventually he learned better and paid back his tormentors, but he never forgot the terror of that first glimpse of the heavens.
Where he really wanted to be was with Captain Pearce, retrieving (the word rescuing came to mind, but he dismissed it) Luther-45 from wherever it was he had been spirited off to. He had no paternal romanticism that the machrines were his children, but they were certainly his responsibility, and he took that seriously. Trained extensively in combat but also in the maintenance, programming, and management of his robotic squad, Crutchfield was the very model of a modern soldier-technician. Captain Pearce had ordered him to hunt down and apprehend these deserters, and so he would. He was a martial creature, the habit of deeply ingrained obedience, and yet he felt an even more pronounced sense of filial devotion to the old man. A right proper commander, not one of your mollycoddlers or gladhanders. He had served under those sorts of permissive officers before, the ones who were always courting the love of their jacks, only ever earning a soft kind of pitying derision. The crew might not love this captain, Crutchfield thought, but they respect him, and even fear him just enough.
Discipline, the god of gods in the service, demanded the return of the starmen. If desertion were not properly punished, the Harvest – any ship, really – would lose crewmen at every port of call. But it wasn’t that he didn’t sympathize with Peggy Briggs and Saul Lamb. Crutchfield was a big man – enormous really, ogrish, gargantuan – in a world engineered for maximum efficiency where the taking up of space was concerned. This was especially true in his chosen starfaring profession. He had to admit there was something almost intoxicating about the freedom to move about without the fear of knocking his head or elbow on some bulkhead. And like the furtive crewmen, he was a born commoner, from the lower echelons of common, and this open world promised a kind of liberty and comfort not to be found on board His Majesty’s ships or back on Earth. But Crutchfield had been around long enough to know that such promises were illusions, cruel in their beauty and short-lived.
The intoxication of Cygnus was mitigated, and forcefully, by the heat. There was more sky above than Crutchfield had ever seen. It formed an unbroken dome of cerulean with only the wispiest hint of clouds, which did nothing to block the baleful gaze of the huge and reddish native sun. He was beginning to wonder if the heat would affect the machrines, and glanced back at them in concern. Despite the white glare gleaming from their plexisteel skins, they showed no outward signs of distress.
“Sergeant,” intoned Ambrose-226, with that disembodied, eerily human voice that these artificial things used, each unique and each taking no small amount of getting used to, “are you all right? You appear to be leaking.”
“It’s perspiration, Ambrose,” Crutchfield growled, though he knew that in another time, in another context, it would be funny. The machrine’s fussy, high-pitched voice was masculine, but only just. “Access your file on human heat regulation and secretion of wastes. I’m fine. Your status?”
“Internal gauges show temperatures in excess of thirty-eight degrees Celsius, but well within operational parameters, sir.”
With a grunt, Crutchfield continued to climb. The baking fields had given way to baking hills and stony scrambles leading inexorably upward. It all formed an oven with no cover, no trees, no shade. The sergeant drove himself forward with the pleasing thought of catching the deserters and dragging them back in irons. Each outcropping of rock yielded to another, the stone hot to the touch, and the sergeant unflaggingly crested each with increasing appreciation for the name Burning Hills.
“Two hundred meters, ahead and to your right, sir.”
Ogden-92 had a lower voice than Ambrose, more grating and less cultured. The Ambrose model was newer, resulting in more human tones and mannerisms. Still, there was something about the Ogden models, a certain gritty toughness, which Crutchfield had always liked. And for some reason, though the programming and software was identical across the models, the Ogdens always seemed to be superior trackers. If he didn’t know better, the sergeant would say the thing relished the task. Crutchfield stopped, crouching behind a ledge of gray boulders and gesturing to the two robots to get low, as well. It was blessedly cooler in the shadow cast by the rocks, and he paused, wiping the sweat from his eyes before creeping to the edge, coiled and taut, silent despite his bulk, his lips curling back from his teeth in a grimace of anticipation.
From his protected vantage point, Crutchfield could see across a broad, pebbled plain to a grove of dark green trees. There was movement there, and voices. With the patience born of years in the service, he waited, watched and counted. As he had on many a mission before this, he gave thanks for the stolid machrines behind him, neither moving nor speaking, asking no stupid questions, waiting with their own kind of inanimate patience for their orders. Six, he thought after ten minutes. There were the two ables, Briggs and Lamb, and four natives – three women and a man, as best as he could tell. He had known there were Cygni with the deserters, but it scarcely changed the calculus of the operation. He beckoned to the robots and they approached soundlessly, within arm’s reach.
“Unpaint Briggs and Lamb,” he whispered. “Ulster Protocols.” Apprehend targets. All force short of lethal approved.
Crutchfield turned again to observe the fugitives. He didn’t see the sharp blue of Cygni military uniforms, and he would have been shocked if he had. Civilians. That didn’t guarantee that they would b
e unarmed, but the likelihood of facing a trained, hardened resistance was much less. Good. He wanted to get this done, to get out of these scorched hills and back to the ship, so that he could find his missing machrine. In rapid succession, he made three hand signals. Ogden and Ambrose disappeared, swiftly and soundlessly. Crutchfield toggled the safety on his hand laser, and the indicator light shifted from red to green. Green means go, he thought. Once upon a time, it was something his instructor had shouted during drills, but short of the alliteration, he still had no idea what the hell it meant. Slowly, he emerged from behind the ledge, running silently, at almost full speed, despite being bent nearly double, making less noise than a breeze. Nonetheless, he expected to be seen at any moment. The bright red of his uniform was one of the longest traditions in the marine service, intended to convey utter confidence and irresistible strength, but he knew that was one thing in a large-force maneuver and yet another in a small team dependent on concealment.
Somehow, his luck and skill held, and Crutchfield reached the edge of the copse undetected. The rocky scrabble had given way to yellow grasses midway through his sprint. This, in turn, had given way to green. He heard running water now, less than thirty meters ahead, in the heart of the grove. Some kind of spring must bubble up through the ground here, he thought, giving life to the trees, the bushes, the huge orange flowers with petals like dinner plates. He waited, crouching in the midst of a dense thicket of greenery. The vegetation brought relief from the heat and unrelenting openness of the hillsides. From his vantage point he could see Briggs, seated against the base of a wide tree, a silver-haired native male reclining against her in casual intimacy. Lamb was moving about the small clearing, rigging up what looked like rough tents, while the three Cygni women busied themselves preparing a cold meal. Just a temporary stop, Crutchfield thought, wondering where they planned to go next. It hardly mattered.