Starfist:Flashfire

by David Sherman; Dan Cragg

  Captain Putten’s table, Charlette discovered, always offered alcohol in plenty. By the time the talk had gotten around to her and Donnie, everyone had had a lot to drink, including Donnie, who whooped loudly and slammed his mug on the table. Charlette smiled, hoping she looked enthusiastic, and thought even quicker than before. This she had not expected.

  “But Donnie, don’t you remember?” she stammered. “We were so much hoping your parents would be at the wedding? If we let the good captain marry us here, now, aren’t we going to disappoint your folks, ain’t they—aren’t they?” She corrected herself automatically but she had been picking up lots of Donnie’s mannerisms lately.

  “We were?” Donnie asked, not remembering discussing that at all and looking at the other passengers as if for confirmation. Then he shook his head to clear it. “Well, Captain, we don’t want to disappoint my folks.”

  “Och, of course not! Cap’n Ermelo, he unnerstan! But I tell you what: Vile you on my ship you gets de ‘bridal suite’,” he roared with laughter. “I gifs you cabin wit single big bed and own head! Ahhahaha, how you likes dat, eh? Ahhahahaha! And,” he added, slamming his fist on the table again, “you dines wit me every evenink dis whole voyage!”

  Both Donnie and Charlette admitted it was a wonderful gesture on the captain’s part. When they finally excused themselves from the table everyone was so drunk nobody noticed the gray sickly cast to Charlette’s face.

  The days passed slowly but too quickly for Charlette. The matter of her impending marriage to someone she liked but would prefer not to spend the rest of her life wedded to boded badly for her future, but something else was worrying her even more. She could now be classified as an army deserter! Sure, she was caught in town when the war began, not her fault. She was on a mission. That’s why she was in Donnie’s apartment to begin with, and the intelligence she had developed through her relationship with him had proved useful to the troops at the fort. And she couldn’t have gotten back to the fort after the shooting started because crossing the lines would’ve been suicidal. And everyone was forced by government decree to evacuate the city. She dreamed vividly one night of the dialogue she’d have with the prosecutor, a major in the Judge Advocate Corps, at her trial for desertion:

  “And so, Sergeant Odinloc, the thought never occurred to you to turn yourself in at the consulate, where you’d have been protected and repatriated to friendly hands? How far was it from this Donnie Caloon’s apartment to the consulate?” The way he pronounced Donnie’s last name made it sound like an insult. “Tell the panel, Sergeant! How far was it? A block? Two blocks? You broke your leg, maybe?”

  “Um, ah, well, sir . . .”

  “You were on an intelligence-gathering mission, Sergeant! How could you have gone into the city without knowing the landmarks? I’ll tell you how far it was, Sergeant! It was five blocks! Five blocks to safety and instead, what did you do? You chose to flee on a ship into the boundless oceans of Ravenette and disappear like a criminal into Hicksville somewhere, and to secure your cover, you married this, Donnie Caloon fellow—here he actually smirked, gesturing at Donnie, smiling like an idiot, who sat in the vast, hostile audience that had been invited to the trial, which was also being covered by all the news services—“until you were found and arrested! Gentlemen,” he said, turning to the court-martial panel, “I think it is plain this, this traitor deliberately deserted her post and her comrades in the face of the enemy to save her own skin, and that you should find her guilty of all specifications and charges!”

  “We don’t need to go any farther!” the judge, a full colonel, shouted, “Guilty, by Amphion’s unstrung lyre! Sergeant Odinloc, I hereby sentence you to life imprisonment and a fine of one million credits payable to Mr. Donnie Caloon in compensation for the way you used that poor boy to facilitate your traitorous escape!” The crowd roared its approval.

  The roaring proved to be Donnie’s snoring. Charlette lay there breathing heavily, a very sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. God, God, God, what have I gotten myself into? she asked. The chronometer indicated it was 3 a.m., wherever they were, somewhere at sea. The ocean was dead calm and the only noise was the subdued humming of the ship’s reactor-powered turbines. Charlette quietly dressed, took a pack of Donnie’s cigarettes, and found her way on to the fantail of the Figaro. There was no one there at this hour. She lit the cigarette and drew the thule-laced nicotine into her lungs, holding it there for seconds before expelling it into the soft night breeze. Ravenette’s moon was full and it cast a bright luminescence over the wake trailing behind the ship. Under normal circumstances this would have been a very romantic moment for a young lady like Charlette Odinloc.

  The news that night had been full of war now raging around Fort Seymour where apparently survivors of the 3rd Division were successfully holding out in fortified positions that were under continuous attack and anticipated to fall momentarily to the forces of the secessionist coalition. She discounted everything else in the report as enemy propaganda except the simple fact that her old outfit was still fighting! For a moment a hot bolt of pride lanced through her, but that was followed by despair. She really was deserting! She was sitting here on the deck on a moonlit night smoking dope while her friends and comrades were . . . she flipped the butt over the stern, buried her head between her knees, and let the hot tears flow.

  “You all right, Hon?” Donnie sat beside her. “OK?” he put his arm around her. “I figured you’d gone for a walk out here, so I come after you,” he explained.

  Without waiting to think twice, Charlette blurted out the truth about herself.

  “Aw, hell,” Donnie responded when she was done, “I knew you was a spy all along!”

  “You whaaaat?”

  “Yeah,” Donnie shrugged. He took the pack of cigarettes and lighted one. “I mean, lookit yer hands, girl! You ain’t never done no work in a laundry! And besides, I figured you was a snoop, that’s why you was always so curious about the things I saw, ’n the police tol’ me to—”

  “The police? Donnie you told the police on me?”

  “Yeah. You’re a spy, ainja? They tol’ me to lead you along.”

  “You—you—Donnie! How come they didn’t arrest me, then?”

  “Well I guess they was goin’ to, sometime. Guess when the war started they had other things to think about. Glad they did, tell the truth. Aw, Hon, don’t look so, so, damned—”

  “Stricken?”

  “Yeah! I din’ tell’em where we was going! Nobody knows where we are! I just figured it was my duty, ya’ know, to make a report, but hell’s bells, honeybun, I wasn’t gonna let ’em get ya! Gawdam, no, I wasn’t!”

  Charlette had difficulty getting her breath. It was as if someone had kicked her in the chest, this revelation. It was almost funny. Here she, the sophisticated offworld army intelligence agent, was stringing this yokel along and all the time . . .

  “You was only tellin’ yer people stuff they already knew or could figure out for themselves,” Donnie said. “I din’ really see you as a bad spy, Charlette, honest! See, honey, I know I look stupid to most folks, and act stupid too, but I know one thing, you are the best thing that’s ever come into my life! Yer smartern’ everybody in Cuylerville, maybe, but by Gawd, yer my girl! We get along good together and I know you ain’t lyin’ when you scratch the livin’ shit outta my back in bed! And I know with my good looks ’n your brains, why that baby of ours is gonna be one good-lookin’ smart sumbitch! So what I mean, Charlette, is I want you to give things a chance. We got us a opportunity here, you know? ’N I love you enuff, girl, that if you don’t wanna stick with me, I won’t hold you to it. ’N whatever you done against yer laws ’n regulations ’n so on, we’ll worry about that later. But right now nobody knows where we are, nobody can touch us, ’n I bet nobody’d even give a hoot if they knew. So let’s see what’s waitin’ fer us ’n just roll along with the waves.”

  Donnie drew Charlette close to him and she rested her head on his sho
ulder and the turbines of the Figaro sang on into the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  Sergeant Charlette Odinloc received two surprises when she and Donnie Caloon at last arrived in Loudon County on the opposite shore of the Ocean Sea. The first was that Donnie’s father was not the one who ruled the roost in the Caloon household. This fact was the source of instant friction. And the second was Cuylerville, when they eventually got there.

  “Whar’d you pick her up?” were Aceta Caloon’s words upon seeing Charlette for the first time. Donnie’s mother stood at dockside, one arm on a bony hip, glaring at her son. Then she shifted a baleful, appraising glance at Charlette. “How long ya been pregnant, girl?” were the first words she spoke directly to Charlette. She turned to Donnie before Charlette could answer and said, “Boy, yer skinny as a rail! Les’ git on home and git some food into yer guts!”

  Donnie’s father, Timor, a bluff, thick-chested man with powerful arms stood by silently, a shy smile on his face. He tentatively but gently took Charlette’s hands in his big paws and squeezed them lightly, then, breaking into a huge grin, he pounded his son on the back and shook hands with him vigorously but said nothing by way of greeting.

  “We don’t got no conveniences here like you do over in the capital, girl,” Aceta said to Charlette, “so ya better be wearin’ yer walkin’ shoes!” Without further word she spun around and began trudging up the road toward the distant hills.

  Bringing up the rear of the procession, Donnie’s father put a big hand on each of their backs and gently propelled his son and his fiancée after Aceta.

  “Momma, Charlette and me et pretty good,” Donnie protested to his mother’s quickly receding back. She only shook her head and forged onward. “Cuylerville’s two kilometers down this road,” Donnie whispered to Charlette.

  As they trudged down the road Charlette studied the Caloons. Aceta was a thin, bony woman, her steel-gray hair tied into a bun at the back of her head. Her face was long and seamed with wrinkles and dominated by piercing blue eyes. She looked to be in her nineties, but couldn’t have been beyond her sixties—old age for backwoods people. Her clothes appeared to be homemade, from some kind of cottonlike fabric, and they hung loosely on her spare frame. She walked at a steady, even pace. After a short while Charlette found it difficult to keep up with her and gradually she and Donnie began to fall back.

  “Can’t keep up with yer ma? Ya been livin’ too soft in that city, Donnie, boy!” she called back over her shoulder but she never slowed a step to let them catch up.

  Donnie’s father also appeared to be in his nineties but it was hard to judge because hard labor was etched into every feature. He marched along steadily, easily keeping up with his children, and as she watched him Charlette realized he could easily match his wife’s stride, but was only hanging back to keep them company. His face and neck were burned brown from years of exposure to the sun and his big hands were thickly callused from work. Donnie had told her his father was a farmer but he’d been vague about just what it was he cultivated on his spread. Whatever kind of farm Timor Caloon worked, it was painfully obvious to Charlette that he used mostly manual labor and he’d been doing it all his life.

  At every step along the dusty, unpaved road Sergeant Charlette Odinloc had the eerie feeling she was trudging steadily back into the past of human history. She had no idea such primitive people still existed in Human Space. But what really troubled her was that with every step toward Cuylerville she was slipping inexorably further and further into the status of a deserter.

  The ramshackle collection of homes that made up the village of Cuylerville straggled up both sides of a narrow valley through which ran a sluggish river. The Caloons lived high up along the east side of the valley along a steep road from the lowlands. The fields they passed by were freshly harvested, so Charlette couldn’t tell what crops had been grown there. Long warehouses lined each field and there hung about the pastures an odor she couldn’t place immediately. “Donnie, that smell. It smells like—like—” she glanced questioningly at Donnie.

  “Yep. That’s thule you smell,” Donnie whispered back. “They store the harvest in them warehouses temporarily ’fore shipping the crops off. Daddy and the other folks hereabouts used to grow grains but the work was hard and there’s more money in thule, and it’s lots easier to grow. All we got to do is harvest the plants and buyers come out from Bibbsville, the county seat, where they got processing plants and a system to distribute the stuff.”

  “But, Donnie, it’s illegal to grow the stuff without a license. Do you have a license?”

  “Nope. Somebody smuggled some of them plants off Wanderjahr and they grow real good in our climate here. In fact they grow better. I been told the two-delta-ten quadrahydrothuminol isomer in our plants is twicet as strong, more ’n six percent, as in them plants they grow on Wanderjahr,” he said proudly. “Them cigarettes we smoked back in Ashburtonville and on the Figaro? They was manufactured right here in Bibbsville. Why, hell, you import that stuff from Wanderjahr, and the price of a pack is ten times what it cost me in Ashburtonville and here we smoke the stuff for nuttin’. So . . .” he shrugged.

  “Quadra—?” Donnie had pronounced that long chemical name like he’d grown up with it. He grinned at her, as if to say, There’s more to me than you suspected. Charlette glanced back at Donnie’s father, who’d heard every word, but all he did was smile and nod his head. Not only was she an army deserter but she was now in among a den of smugglers and God only knew what else.

  “Geez, Donnie, you ever think maybe one reason people don’t like you folks so much is because you break the laws all the time and cheat people out of their profits?”

  “We all gotta make a living, hon.” Donnie grinned. “Ennyway, you was there when they shot all those people at Fort Seymour. The penalty for a little pirating and smuggling ain’t death, don’t ya know?”

  As they passed houses on the way to the Caloon home, people came out into their yards and porches and hollered greetings at them. “Thas a mighty good-lookin’ girl ya got there, Aceta,” one crone cackled as they passed by. Aceta, still far ahead of them, grimaced but Timor gave the woman a grin and a friendly wave.

  “Hey, Donnie!” a young man about Donnie’s age shouted, “ya look like a city man!” Donnie’s face reddened.

  “Git them two married, Aceta,” a big man sitting on his porch yelled down at them, “we cain’t have young folks livin’ in sin around here!” he roared with laughter. Charlette’s face reddened at the remark but she seriously doubted that the concept of sin was well-known among these people.

  “Don’t people work around here?” Charlette asked Donnie.

  “In the season,” he answered, “but this ain’t the season. The harvest is in, it was a good crop, and folks got money in their pockets. You come at a good time of the year, honeybun.”

  The wedding was a strange affair conducted by a man named Bud Clabber, a sort of mayor, justice of the peace, postmaster, and newspaper publisher all rolled into one. He was the latter by default because he was the only person in Cuylerville who owned a radio, so he was the first to receive news from the outside world. He posted the news, printed in big capital letters on plain sheets of paper that he tacked to the wall inside the rundown wooden structure that served as the Cuylerville community center. It looked to Charlette to have been a church a very long time ago. The “service” was civil, short, and to the point.

  “Sign these here papers,” Clabber ordered. Perspiration stood out on his inflamed forehead. He hadn’t shaved in days and there were enormous perspiration stains under the armpits of his dirty shirt, which was missing two of its buttons. His hands were dirty but not from manual labor. He had Donnie and Charlette sign four sets of elaborately printed marriage certificates. Then he signed. Then two witnesses were called up from the fifty or so people who’d found the time and energy to attend the ceremony, and they signed. “Okay, you two are legally hitched,” Clabbe
r grunted. “Now, Donnie, kiss yer new wife then get home and do what married folks do, which I know you been doin’ all along anyway.” Everyone present broke into raucous laughter. “You each get a copy of this here certificate,” Clabber shouted above the noise of the laughter and congratulations. “I keep one, and the fourth one goes to the county seat, next time I get up there.” It occurred to Charlette that Clabber was probably the go-between with the people who bought their thule crop.

  “We’ll have us a little party tonight, hon, up at the house,” Donnie muttered as he escorted Charlette outside, “but it’s too damn hot to have a shindig right now.”

  Outside in the broiling sun people gathered around the couple and offered their best wishes. Nobody offered them any presents, but everyone promised to gather at the Caloon house that night with special dishes for the reception.

  “Hold on there!” Clabber shouted, elbowing his way through the crowd. He waved a sheet of paper in his hand. “You, there, Charlette, look here! I was gonna post this on the wall but forgot in all the wedding business. I want you to read this.” He handed her the paper on which was written in large capital letters:

  “BIG BATTLES IN ORBIT. CASUALTIES HEAVY. ENEMY FLEET LANDS LARGE REINFORCEMENTS AT FT. SEYMOUR. PRESIDENT CONFIDENT OF OLTIMATE VICTORY.” She noted he’d misspelled “ultimate,” but instead of pointing it out to Mr. Clabber, her heart sank and she let the paper dangle in her hand. The expression on her face made her distress obvious to everyone who crowded around to gape at the news.

  “Donnie tol’ us you was an offworlder. Why in hell did you folks start this goddamned war in the first place, girl?” Clabber shouted.

  “We . . .” Charlette began.