“It’s all right,” I said carefully. “I understand why you shot. I won’t mention it again.” The overcaptain smiled. The interview was proceeding nicely, but only because I let it.
The overcaptain stared at me for a long time, so long that I started to fidget. I didn’t know what he wanted. At last, he cleared his throat and spoke again: “Were in imminent fear of death?”
“Huh?”
“You were afraid you were going to die when we were shooting?”
Couldn’t he leave ill enough alone? “Um, yes, sir. We figured we were going to buy it.”
He started to break down. He mumbled and looked at his notes, then cleared his throat again and flushed red. “Why did you stand-fight? How could you?”
“How could I? What else would you expect a Marine to do, sir? If I were going down, I wanted to take a few of the bastards with me . . . um, no offense, sir.”
The overcaptain grunted and scribbled in his gouge book. But after years in the field under fire, I can always tell when someone is scared—and Overcaptain Tokughavita was hiding terror behind that mask of objectivity. Terror about what?
I glanced to my right and saw that Arlene was awake, lying on her own side and following the exchange. It emboldened me, her being there. “Sir, can you tell me why Josepaze just fell apart when we captured him? He sounded like he thought dying was the worst possible thing he could think of—as a soldier, don’t you accept death as a possibility?”
Bad mistake. I had to listen to a twenty-minute lecture on what I already knew, that Homo sap was the only race in the galaxy anyone had discovered who could actually die. But the more we talked about death and dying, the more agitated he became until his skin was pale, he was sweating, and his eyes darted left and right instead of fixing on me, as they had at the beginning of the interview.
I suddenly realized the blindingly obvious: Overcaptain Tokughavita suffered from necrophobia, the irrational fear of death. He was asking how Arlene and I had managed not to panic under fire!
I began to get very uneasy, squirming around on my table. How could a soldier with a morbid fear of dying rise to such a high rank? He asked a couple of “wind-down” questions designed to relax me: what battles I had fought in and something about types of food. That last reminded me of the pills we needed to survive on somebody else’s; but I figured that since they were human like us, we could probably eat their food directly. Then he left me alone to wonder how humans just like me (the overcaptain and my erstwhile prisoner) so obviously could have no courage at all when it came to risking their lives.
Arlene sat up on her table, grimacing and involuntarily clutching her stomach. “Christ!” she said. “Are we the only humans left who still believe in honor and duty even unto death, semper fi, and all that?”
I shook my head, lying back against the hard cold cushion. “We’ve only had two examples! I’ll bet seven to two that we’ll eventually find that Tokughavita is pretty unrepresentative of the soldiers even in his era.”
Well, Arlene should have taken those odds. Over the next four days, while my arm was still immobilized and Arlene slowly healed up, seven more soldiers wandered in to talk to me about death and ended up shaking like a leaf in a lawn blower. By the time I was ready for transport, and my broken clavicle and arm joint were nearly mended, I had figured out that this entire band of humans were so paranoid with necrophobia that they fell all to pieces at even the thought of death.
On the fifth day, I was up and about. They didn’t rub my face into it during that convalescence that I was a prisoner. I had the run of their ship parked in the sand, except for certain restricted areas around the engines and computer stacks.
I didn’t realize my life was about to take a hellish turn: Arlene and I were both summoned to separate but adjoining cabins in the stern of the human ship. Somebody had suddenly decided that he simply couldn’t live without knowing all about our ability to transcend the fear of death and dying. He decided to give us a little test.
10
The human ship looked roughly like the Fred ship, except scaled down by a factor of four or five. They walked me up a bunch of spiral stairwells and into a small cabin, and suddenly the best-buds routine ended. Before I could struggle or fight back, three guys grabbed me and forced me into a chair, then cuffed both ankles and my left wrist with plastic straps embedded in the seat. A wall suddenly paled and turned transparent, and I saw into the adjacent room where they’d taken Arlene: she was trussed up just as I was, two Christmas turkeys staring at each other through a bulkhead that had suddenly turned into a window.
A large clock—the old-fashioned analog kind—faced me below the window. It was marked up to sixty by fives, and a needle was set at the far end of the scale. Next to the clock was a tube that looked disturbingly like the business end of a large-bore rifle, something ghastly like .75-caliber. I did not like the looks.
The overcaptain stood where I could see him. “Have sixty seconds before gun fires. Whoever moves lever first will live, other will die. If no one moves lever before time limit, both die.”
Through the window, I saw another man talking to Arlene. From the way she paled, I figured she had received the same instructions.
“Starts now,” declared that malevolent thug Tokughavita, pressing a button on top of the clock. The hand began to sweep downward, and I felt every oriface contract and clench. My mouth was dry; even my tongue was sandpaper when I tried to lick my lips.
Christ . . . oh, Christ! My right hand was free, the lever that would kill Arlene in easy reach. I made no move toward it. Through the glass, or whatever it was, I could see Arlene equally miserable, equally immobile.
I turned to the overcaptain, who watched with curious dispassion. “I will kill you for this, you—as God and Jesus are my witnesses, you will never live another day without looking over your shoulder for me.
“Have thirty-five seconds,” he declared, starting to look pale. “Must push lever to live. Can’t kill me if you’re dead.”
My eyes bored into his skull so hard he flinched and looked away. “My soul will return as a ghost and hound you into your grave,” I promised, my voice so low he could barely hear it. He began to shake and sat down abruptly on a chair, staring at my right hand. I deliberately clenched it into a fist and left it just barely touching the lever . . . but not moving it. “Watch how a man dies,” I promised, “for the Corps; in God we trust.”
“What is this God?”
I curled my lip. “If you don’t know, I don’t think I can tell you in twenty seconds.”
“What is God?” he demanded, practically screaming.
“God is faith. Without faith, man is a beast.” I looked at the clock—ten seconds of life remained. “So long, beast.”
“Other will kill you!”
“No, she won’t.”
“How do you know? Must push lever, save yourself!”
“I don’t know, I have faith. Oh, sir?”
“What? What?”
“Screw you, sir. You’re a walking dead man.”
The second hand swept through the last few seconds into the red. I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, preparing for the blow that would open a hole in my chest the size of the great Martian rift. But instead of the explosion, I heard a loud snap. When I blinked my eyes open, I saw Overcaptain Tokughavita, face wild and eyes staring, his hand still clutching the button at the top of the clock. He has no will, I realized. I’ve beaten the bastard!
I deliberately slowed my breathing, trying to calm my pounding heart. Arlene’s face was florid, the normally pale skin flushing deep pink, but her expression made me shudder: I had never seen my bud with such cold buried rage. The overcaptain unlocked me as the other man on the other side unlocked Arlene. I made no mention of my decision—I never go back on my word, and I had sworn to kill him, but that didn’t mean I had to remind my target in case he had forgotten or not believed me.
I noticed one strange thing. Back in the Corps,
an officer might be in charge of an op and do most of the planning, but he would have a batch of enlisted men do the actual physical grunt-work (which is why they call us grunts). But here, aside from the initial strap-down, which required several helpers for a man my size, Overcaptain Tokughavita had done everything himself, despite the fact that there were numerous people around obviously of lower rank. Jesus, didn’t they even have the concept of a chain of command anymore?
I rose, matching Arlene. Both of us marched from our staterooms, angry and hot, and rejoined each other in the passageway. We said not a word all the way back to our quarters, then Arlene did something she only rarely does: she wrapped both arms around me and held tight for several minutes, reassuring herself that I was still there. I stroked the shaved back of her head—after all these years, Lance Corporal Arlene Sanders had maintained that same high-and-tight she had worn the first day I saw her, when she and Gunnery Sergeant Goforth played William Tell.
When she was certain I wasn’t going anywhere, she unburied her face and grabbed my uniform by the lapels. “Fly,” she said, “these people are nearly starved to death for faith.”
“You’re an atheist,” I pointed out.
“It doesn’t have to be faith in God! Just anything outside and higher than themselves, like the Corps, or honor, anything. They’ve got the words; they talk about ‘the commons’ as if that meant something to them. But it’s just words; they don’t really act like it . . . they act like totally individualist pigs.”
“Social atoms,” I agreed. “The Church has always warned about the danger of social atomism—where you think only about yourself as an individual, not about your community, country, society. These so-called communists are the most socially atomist people I’ve ever seen! I see what you mean. They don’t believe in anything, really.”
“Fly, there’s something weird going on here with these people. I have a terrible feeling we’re missing something big . . . or something really, really small. But if we can get ahold of the faith lever . . .”
“Women’s intuition?”
Arlene rolled her eyes. “All right, sure, call it that. It doesn’t change the fact that there’s something hidden here, and, by God, we’re going to find it, Bud! I mean, Sergeant. If we get ahold of the faith lever somehow, I think we can move this mountain to Mohammed.”
I blinked at the metaphor food-processor action, but I got the general drift. This was what we call a “high-level strategic victory condition”—a blue-sky goal. But at least it was something to shoot at.
The holding cell was pretty civilized, as far as those things go. We had a nice bunk, and Arlene and I didn’t mind shacking up—to sleep, that is. There was a fold-down toilet and sink, a table, even a terminal, except we couldn’t figure out how to crack the security system around the local net. In fact, we couldn’t get away from the initial set of menus, which seemed to display informative “non-authorized pers” as 3-D letters floating above the keypad whenever we got far enough along any route.
Our uniforms were starting to stink, but when you live in a ditch in Kefiristan for eight months, you’re thankful for any pair of trousers or camouflage jacket that doesn’t actually get up and crawl away under its own motive force. Arlene had more pressing needs, as a woman, but she managed to explain enough to the guard that he brought some cotton, which she wrapped in a cloth torn from the tail of her shirt. God only knew what she was going to do tomorrow.
I sat down on my bunk, flexing the arm that by all rights should have been broken and immobilized for months. “Hey, A.S., you notice anything remarkable here?”
She barely glanced up from the terminal, trying yet again. “You mean besides our miraculous medical cure?”
“I meant the medical. I was pretty damned shot up; you even . . .” I paused. I had been about to tell her that she even shot me once herself, but I decided there was no point. Why make her feel like crap? “Even you should have had some really bad bruises, even if your armor took all the shots. But I know I had at least four bullets in my arm and one in my leg, and one of the ones in my arm took out my rotator cuff.”
I stood, moving my arm in a slow, but steady, circular arc. “So how come I can do this?” I winced, but the point was I could do it at all!
She shrugged. “Fly, they’re two hundred years more advanced than we. Wouldn’t you expect them to be able to perform medical miracles? I’m more surprised by something you haven’t even noticed yet, Sarge.”
I waited. When she didn’t continue, I growled.
“Ah, look at the ship,” she said hastily.
I looked around our jail cell. “For what? Everything’s pretty shipshape, as what’s his face, that CPO out of Point Mugu would say.”
“Squared away? Sharp corners, nice right angles? Everything our size? Sink and toilet perfectly fitting us humans, and obviously integral to the ship, not an add-on?”
“Oh.” Light began to dawn on marblehead. “You mean this ship was built for humans?”
“Sarge, this ship was built by humans!” She stood, making a wide gesture that included the entire ship, not just our little white cell. “All of it—the whole ship was built by human beings—and I’ll bet if we looked at the engines, they would say Pratt and Whitney or Northrop!”
“Jesus . . . so we’re out in space on our own, now? Not just piggybacking on a Klave ship or hijacking some Freds?” I stared. Everywhere I looked, now that I was looking for it, the decor screamed Western European American human. Even the language was basically English with a lot of slang words we didn’t know.
All right, so the Earth had become some sort of social-welfare semi-capitalist world-wide government—but it was still ours. We had won the freaking battle, oo-rah!
“Notice something else about the ship, Sarge?”
“Look, knock it off with the Sarge stuff. I’d rather be Fly when we’re alone. Save it for the troops. What else about the ship?”
“Sorry, Fly. Um . . . oh, that’s right; you were unconscious when they loaded us aboard. Fact is, I thought sure you were dead. I was barely awake myself, and after they got me here, they shot me full of tranks and I was out until I woke up with you.” She leaned toward me, tapping her eyes. “But I wasn’t completely unconscious when they scooped us up after the Battle of Quicksand Hill. I pretended to be, and I got an eyeful.”
“All right, spit it out, Lance. What did you see?”
“Hmph! Now you’re the one with the rank thing, Sergeant Fly. I got a good look at the outside of the ship. Two things: first, there are English-language markings on it, or at least they’re using our alphabet; this thing is designated TA-303. . . . Does that mean there are several hundred ships in the human fleet?”
I scratched my head and shrugged. “I don’t know how the Navy numbers ships, Red, if it still even is the Navy. But you’re probably right that they wouldn’t be numbering in the hundreds if there were only three or four of them.”
“And second, Fly-dude, the thing was tiny—barely three hundred and fifty meters long and no wider than an aircraft carrier from our era.”
I thought about the Fred ship—3.7 kilometers long and almost half a klick in diameter. Most of that was engine, which meant—
“Arlene, are you saying this ship is much more advanced than the Fred ship?”
“Not just in engineering tech, Fly. Did you notice when they took us to Torture Theater, we went up a long series of spiral ladderways?”
“Yeah. So?”
“We went up about eight flights.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Fly, that’s more than half the diameter of the ship.”
“Yeah. So—” I froze in mid-dismissal. The significance suddenly struck me. If you ascended past the centerline of the Fred ship while the ship was parked on the tarmac, suddenly all the decks would be upside down. The Freds induced acceleration that functioned like gravity by spinning the circular ship, so the outer deck had the heaviest gravity and the inner core was zero-g.
But the ship was built like a building—they never intended gravity to pull any direction but one! “Christ, girl. We’ve got artificial gravity—real artificial gravity, like in ‘Star Trek’!” I sat down and thought for a moment. “Arlene, didn’t Sears and Roebuck say that the gravity zones left behind by the First Ones, the guys who built the stuff on Phobos and Deimos, the Gates and stuff, couldn’t possibly work on a ship—not even theoretically?”
She nodded gravely. “Yup. Obviously, this ship is more advanced than what the First Ones built.
“Fly, I’ve been trying to reconcile all of this with the pace of human technological development. Now maybe I’m just getting cynical in my old age; I don’t think so—I still think we can take control here and win this thing. But criminey, Fly! Interstellar travel and artificial gravity and extraordinary medical advances, all in a couple of hundred years—starting from a completely destroyed civilization?”
I stared, saying nothing. The creepiest feeling was dawning across me.
“Fly, does that sound reasonable to you? Even considering that we evolve so much faster than the Klave or the Freds?”
I slowly shook my head. When we left Earth, we were fighting for our lives. Humanity had been set back at least fifty or seventy-five years—our cities destroyed, nuked; bacteriophages sweeping the globe; the Freds had just perfected their ultimate terror weapon: genetically engineered monsters that looked just like human beings, until they opened fire on you. The aliens had the power to move entire planets around like bowling balls! And they had what we called the Fred ray, an immensely powerful blob of energy that cut down everything in its path.
Arlene was right; it was pretty freaking hard to believe that in only two centuries we’d move from that to this. In fact . . . “Arlene, I know of only one race that evolves that fast.”
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