Selected Stories: Volume 1

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Two volunteers played ping-pong, but neither was very good at it. One man, who had already put on fifteen pounds, placed orders from the galley and ate all day long. Paulson knew the food was not at all tasty, but at least the quantity was comforting. Just this afternoon, though, a dietician had come in, to take control over the man’s eating habits, and advise (as well as enforce) nutritious meals. “You are required to take care of your body,” the dietician said in a decidedly threatening voice, “in case it should be needed.”

  The volunteers seemed to have a free ride, but they were obligated to take care of themselves. Although they, as individuals, weren’t important, their bodies were considered vital to planetary defense, and the navy had made a considerable investment in them. Some volunteers took the task seriously and worked out in the fitness center, lifting weights, jogging on the treadmill. Paulson did the required calisthenics, but he had never seen the purpose in picking up heavy things and putting them back down again, or running on a piece of equipment that went nowhere.

  He remembered how his parents had told him he was going nowhere, that he spent too much time reading, paying little attention to practical things. They had been right, according to their own definitions. Now, they were probably proud of him for being a part of the brave Earth Planetary Navy. If he were called upon to provide the mortal escape hatch for Admiral Haldane, they would be pleased as punch to tell their neighbors about how their good-for-nothing son had become a war hero.

  Paulson didn’t feel particularly brave. Any heroic end on his part would be completely out of his hands. Most of his fellow volunteers had resigned themselves to an imminent and unpleasant demise, grabbing as much life as they could in the meantime, playing games, horsing around, sleeping in. Several had written up a petition demanding access to a military-approved escort service, and that request was currently working its way up the chain of command.

  Paulson was the only one who cared about the war against the Sluggos, and about increasing his chances for survival, as well as the rest of humanity’s, in a worst-case scenario. Because he was cerebrally paired with Admiral Haldane, he requested access to the briefings on the invasion and records of prior Sluggo attacks, in hopes of teasing out any vulnerabilities. He studied news reports, although the most detailed, and most gruesome, footage was missing.

  He requested additional intel, including the full classified reports, but since he was just a seaman-recruit, with the lowest possible security clearance, his request was summarily denied. So he submitted an appeal, documenting that he was the functional physical equivalent of Admiral Haldane, that his body—and therefore the structure of his brain—would be used by the leader of the Earth Planetary Navy. Therefore, any information might be beneficial, should the admiral be forced to swap bodies with him. Paulson also pointed out that if the admiral ever did activate the transfer protocol, Paulson himself would be rapidly devoured by aliens, and therefore all secrets would be safe.

  The yeoman, who was harried and overworked, didn’t entirely understand the nuances of the argument, but rather than risk annoying the real Admiral Haldane, he bumped the request up the chain. Somehow, it got approved. Accidentally, Paulson supposed.

  In the rec hall/prison, he spent hours poring over the records, watching the movements of the Sluggos through the water during the rare times they were tracked. But whenever sonar rigs tried to track the large conglomeration, the entire mass vanished like a puff of smoke. Maybe they just dissociated into a million little worms again, invisible to sonar traces.

  The EPN knew about where the alien invaders lived beneath the Pacific, a broad, general area where their starships must have landed. Supposedly, that was where their base might be.

  He studied biological reports of the creatures. Many Sluggo specimens had been dissected, individual nematode-like things that had very little physical structure. Each Sluggo was just a sac with a few rudimentary organs, a digestive system, and a mouth with sharp teeth, but no eyes or other obvious sensory apparatus, not even a brain, just a small nerve cluster.

  It made no sense that these things could combine into some gigantic entity that obviously had a structure and a purpose and was presumably intelligent. The Sluggos used tools, they built machinery, constructed spacecraft, and flew interstellar distances. Not bad for a bunch of hungry worms.

  In the specimen tanks or dissection trays, they didn’t look any more sophisticated than extraterrestrial leeches. When Sluggos moved en masse in the water, they looked like a gigantic school of fish, somehow moving with one mind. He shook his head.

  Then the pendant at the base of his skull began to tingle.

  The rec hall around him fuzzed. The ringing in his ears grew as loud as church bells, and he wavered. Other volunteers in the rec hall looked up, sensing something amiss.

  “It’s happening!”

  This was too soon! He wasn’t ready. No one had even told him Admiral Haldane was going out to fight with the Sluggos. It would have been nice to have a little more warning.

  He felt as if his soul were rushing down a wind tunnel. He left his body, yelling—but without making any sound.

  And when he woke up he was somewhere else, inside a different body. And he screamed in agony. He felt shattered bones, torn muscles, a bashed head, nerves that clamored about all the bodily damage. He tried to open his eyes, but he was surrounded by white blurs, moving faces. Doctors? If he was going to die, he wished he could at least stomp on one or two Sluggos first.

  Then the pain was too much, and he faded into unconsciousness.

  HE AWOKE to find his own face staring down at him.

  Paulson recognized himself, saw the body at the bedside—am I really that scrawny?—but realized that the eyes were different. Then the pain hit him again, so he wished he hadn’t woken up. The agony was somewhat diminished from before, and he was a little foggier. He could feel painkillers like slimy, wet velvet working through his mind and body, but he could also feel the physical damage. He knew this body was mangled.

  This wasn’t his body in the first place … so many things didn’t feel right. Meanwhile, Paulson watched his own body pacing back and forth in the infirmary room, studying the medical equipment and monitors that provided a discordant symphony of bleeps. His own face turned toward him, and in all his life of looking at himself in a mirror, he had never seen his expression show such disapproval before.

  And his reflected image had never talked back to him, either. “Good to see that you’re awake. I need to explain the situation, and then be off to a briefing.” His voice sounded funny.

  Paulson croaked in a rough voice, “You’re not dead.” This had to be Admiral Haldane. The vocal cords weren’t his own, and the tone sounded wrong in his head. His throat was sore—he must have been yelling or screaming before the swap.

  “I was badly injured during the battle of Pearl Harbor. I thought I was a goner there for a while, and I almost used the transfer during the worst part, but I got walloped before I had the chance.”

  Paulson’s body shrugged. Admiral Haldane touched his new shoulders, felt the bones there, encircled his wrist with thumb and forefinger. He clucked. “You really need to take better care of yourself, Kenz. Put on a few pounds, preferably muscle.”

  “I’ll leave that up to you now, sir,” Paulson said.

  “This transfer is just temporary while that body heals,” Haldane retorted. “The doctors said I was going to live, but the recovery would be hard and painful. I don’t have time for that bullshit—there’s a war on. And then I thought, what do I have you for? Now, you just lie there and heal. It’s the least you can do in service to your country and your planet.”

  Haldane leaned over the infirmary bed and prodded the bandages in Paulson’s side. Paulson gasped, nearly fainted from the rush of pain that exploded through him. Haldane continued. “A few broken ribs, lots of bruises, stitches in a half-dozen places. Oh, and they removed your spleen, but you can do without that. When was the last time y
ou used your spleen?”

  “Never noticed it before, sir,” Paulson said, trying to be stoic.

  “The medics are pumping you full of accelerated cell growth. Your body’s got so many bruises all over that your skin has natural camouflage. But that’ll heal. The bones will heal. The physical therapy is going to be rough, but you can handle it. I don’t have time—I have meetings.”

  Paulson lay back and just felt the aches piled upon aches. He had dreaded being called upon to transfer with the admiral, but this, he supposed, was the best realistic scenario. He was still alive. He could lie here and recover in the admiral’s place, as he asked.

  And whenever the fuzzy painkillers wore off, maybe the EPN would even provide him with a reading library so he could catch up on some of the books he’d meant to read.

  “Be quick about it healing,” Admiral Haldane said, before turning around. “I’ll want that body back again as soon as you’ve fixed it.”

  VII

  Something about the scrawny body of Paulson Kenz inspired disrespect despite the medals and rank insignia on the uniform. Kenz was bookish, shy, the sort of person who simply begged to have beach sand kicked in his face by a bully of even modest proportions.

  The more days Admiral Haldane lived inside the other body, the more he noticed the subtle attitude shifts toward him.

  When the admiral entered the La Diego base headquarters, he carried his revised ID and temporary access cards, with Paulson’s fingerprints and retina map transferred over to his diagnostics records. It was just a temporary situation, though, since he expected to swap back to his preferred body as soon as the damaged one was healed in sick bay.

  Previously, Admiral Haldane’s very presence had inspired instant deference, but in Paulson’s body he had to work at it. As he marched down the passageway, a pair of junior officers strolled by, engrossed in conversation and paying little attention to him. Annoyed, Haldane placed himself directly in their path so that they were forced to look up and notice his insignia and name badge. They scrambled to give the proper salute accompanied by hasty apologies.

  Haldane walked on, not entirely satisfied. War was all about sacrifices, he supposed. He could endure this one.

  It wasn’t just the fact that he felt physically weak, that he grew winded after climbing only five flights of stairs, that simple acts such as opening a pickle jar or carrying a box of classified printouts to the shredder were more difficult. He didn’t like the way he looked when he took a shower, couldn’t imagine suavely trying to pick up a woman in a bar or, even more embarrassing, taking her home where he would have to make bedroom excuses: “This isn’t really my natural body. My normal endowment is much more impressive.” He could already imagine the seen-it-all-before looks of skepticism.…

  He was still trying to get his office in order, breaking in a new chief of staff, since his adjutant Ms. Tenn had been inconveniently killed during the Sluggo attack on Pearl Harbor. Her death had caused innumerable problems.

  In his office, the interim replacement had brought him the morning coffee, a cinnamon cappuccino which, after thorough testing, was what Haldane and Ms. Tenn had determined best suited his Aaron Shelty taste buds. He gave a grunt of thanks and sipped the coffee as he sat down—but it tasted awful. He had forgotten. Paulson Kenz’s body preferred something else entirely. Haldane growled in his throat and drank the cinnamon cappuccino anyway, forcing it down because he simply didn’t want to bother to get it done right.

  He had work to do and a world to save.

  The morning’s reports made the day seem much brighter. He studied the new images and grinned, then he immediately called together his highest-level advisors.

  THE BRIEFING ROOM was full of high-ranking EPN officers, prominent politicians, and even businessmen in charge of massive amounts of funding—all the important people who could make the proper decisions without the delay of red tape. The secure conference room felt like a cave; the original design had been to evoke the comfortable camaraderie of an exclusive gentlemen’s club.

  “Gentlemen,” Haldane said, before nodding toward the lone female in the room, “and ma’am. We have wonderful and fascinating intelligence—our reconnaissance has finally borne fruit!” In his ears, Kenz’s voice sounded squeaky.

  The lights in the briefing room dimmed further as he displayed images on the wall screens.

  “With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Sluggos showed their real intent. They are going to infest our oceans, then swallow up our islands, then devour our coastlines. Who knows, they may even chew canals wide enough to bring them all the way to Kansas. And as you well know”—he narrowed his eyes and swept his gaze across them—“we have no naval bases in Kansas.”

  He saw the determined faces around the room nodding gravely. An unnamed man in a business suit folded his hands and leaned forward. “You’ve already convinced us, Admiral. No one disputes the magnitude of the alien threat. Our shipyards and weapons factories, our naval construction operations have been blossoming like weeds. Just tell us what you can do, and we’ll give you everything you need.”

  Haldane smiled. Throughout his EPN career, his ideas had been met with reluctance and resistance, thanks to narrow-minded individuals and the web of red tape they spun. Now, Admiral Haldane had everything he could possibly ask for. All he had to do was ask. Even in his scrawny body, these advisors looked to him, respected him, understood the weight of experience and wisdom he brought to these discussions.

  Among the inner circle gathered here, he knew that at least six of them had transfer circuits implanted, because they were deemed to be powerful and influential enough to be classed as irreplaceable. They had their own escape hatch volunteers.

  “I have faced the Sluggos several times in person, at the cost of two previous bodies and damage to a third. I’ve looked them in the eyes … well, at least in the slimy membranes. I have watched men and women die all around me, and I’ve felt myself die. I know what it’s like. I was aboard the Far Horizon until its last moments. I was there at Pearl Harbor. And I’ll be there again at our final engagement.”

  He changed the images on the screens to show blurry sonar readings. “After the attack on Hawaii, the Sluggos withdrew with many vital spaceport components, dragging them beneath the sea. We’ve been trying to find their secret base. A fleet of fast mapping survey ships cruised over the surface, covering thousands of square miles of open sea. They were ready to map every inch of the damned Pacific if they needed to. And this is what they found.”

  He zoomed in. The sonar trace showed the gigantic mass of Sluggos that had formed the conglomerate monster. The echo was bigger than a hundred giant squids as it moved along the ocean floor. The first image of the huge alien mass was sharp, the second was fuzzed and blurry.

  “With the third sonar ping,” Haldane continued, “the Sluggo mass had vanished—as usual. But this time it’s different, because we found where those creatures go to bed.”

  The sonar trace showed the ocean floor, a low-resolution image that nevertheless revealed a city of permanent undersea structures, a hodgepodge assembled from wreckage the creatures had stolen.

  “Knowing where to look, we dropped off submersible microcameras, self-guiding imagers that dove down to the coordinates. They were small enough to remain unnoticed—for a time.”

  Haldane displayed crisp video feeds as the submersible cameras dove to where the invaders had built their submerged fortress. At such a depth, the water was dark and murky; activating bright lights to penetrate the gloom, the microcameras revealed bizarre free-form sculptures, towers and domes that were welded together with mud and coral. The structures incorporated the wreckage of ship hulls, including the bridge tower of the Far Horizon, along with sunken wrecks dragged hundreds of miles from Oahu.

  The buildings themselves, however, seemed to squirm. As the microcameras flitted closer, they revealed that the walls were also built out of Sluggos. The wormlike creatures piled up like soft flexible bricks, m
any of them dead, others dissolving and oozing into organic cement. Gantry structures stolen from the Honolulu spaceport served as frameworks, and individual Sluggos crawled up the girders, wrapping around them like putty.

  “Unfortunately, the lights the cameras used to obtain these images attracted attention,” Haldane said.

  The images on the conference room screens switched to static one at a time. The last microcamera zoomed in on one of the eel-like creatures swimming toward it, its mouth gaping wide until it swallowed the camera, which valiantly transmitted a last few images of the alien digestive sac until the acid destroyed it.

  Haldane crossed his arms over the many medals on his now-scrawny chest. “So there you have it, gentlemen.” He nodded to the woman again, “And ma’am. We pinpointed their base. We know where they’re lurking.” It felt good to grin. “We have a large expeditionary sub being converted into a battle vessel. It was originally designed to complete a full sonar map of the ocean floor, but now we have more important work for it.”

  The man in the business suit nodded. “Ah, the Prospector. We funded that. One of our subsidiaries is developing domed underwater housing as condo time-shares, and we were going to lay claim to all that undeveloped real estate. We’re having trouble selling shares, thanks to the Sluggo infestation.”

  Haldane nodded. “We know sonar does little good to track them, but we can arm the Prospector to the teeth. It’s got a reinforced hull and expanded magazines to accommodate more than fifty torpedoes. I’ll find a determined crew. We’ll be ready to make our final assault within a week. I intend to lead the expedition myself and blow the living slime out of those Sluggos!” He smiled. “If I have your permission.”

  They gave him their exuberant approval, but the lone woman asked, “Why wait a week if we know where the Sluggos are now?”

  “It’ll take that long to get ready, ma’am. We have to give this our best shot.”