Because the other soldier was without his armor, his bare feet left a trail of infrared images on the clean floorplates. The marks were old and fading, but still identifiable with Arviq’s genetic signature: droplets of sweat, skin particles, even stride length gave evidence of his passage. The other man was still bleeding from one of the cuts he’d inflicted upon himself in escaping from the room; occasionally a telltale crimson droplet reinforced Barto’s tracking.
The control voice returned, insistent and self-confident. It comforted Barto, who had lived his conscious life hearing the words: “KILL THE ENEMY! KILL THE ENEMY! KILL THE ENEMY!” He no longer felt so alone.
According to the map display, Arviq had made it to within several hundred meters of the long access ladder that led up a shaft to the outside—the battleground where their squad had been killed.
But Barto also knew he had cornered his quarry.
At an intersection of the dimly lit corridors, a framework of girders and support beams held up the ceiling. The place had been long-abandoned by the underground civilians.
Barto’s visor-sensors detected a large smear of blood at floor level in a corner, as if Arviq had rested there … or as if he had encountered an Enemy, and they had struggled, hand-to-hand. The blood was fresh, wet, warm in IR—like a sign emblazoned there to draw his attention.
Too late, he realized the ambush. From the shadowed support girders above, Arviq let out a loud cry and dropped on top of him. Though he had no armor and no weapons, the other soldier crashed down upon him with brute force. Barto might have found the conflict absurd if Arviq hadn’t been so determined, so passionate—if the other man hadn’t been his own comrade for so long.
Arviq wrapped his left arm in a vice-lock around Barto’s neck, trying to wrench the helmet off his head. With his other hand he tried to grab one of the ID-locked weapons sealed in armored holsters on Barto’s hips.
Barto rose up like a tank, as if his armor gave him stimulus and energy, though Juliette had told him his artificial adrenaline pumps were disconnected from the suit.
Inside his ears, the helmet commanders shouted, “KILL THE ENEMY! KILL THE ENEMY! DON’T LET HIM ESCAPE!” With a weird disorientation, Barto thought the voice sounded like Gunnar’s.
Without letting go, Arviq fought like a wild thing, clamping his knees on either side of Barto’s armored chest, trying to tear the helmet off. When Barto staggered backward, slamming his comrade against the metal wall, Arviq let out an explosive exhale of pain and surprise. Barto recovered his balance and slammed him against the wall a second time.
Arviq struggled but would not let go. He continued pounding with naked fists against the impenetrable armor.
“Come with me!” Arviq shouted loudly enough to penetrate the heavy ear coverings, to break through the harsh command voice. “Let’s go back to HQ. Back to our lives, Barto! We don’t belong here.”
Barto bent over and butted him against the wall, hearing ribs crack this time. Arviq’s grip finally loosened. He wheezed in pain, coughed blood. “Let me go then. Just let me run from here. I’ll leave.” Arviq slumped to one side and scrambled to his feet. Blood from his raw wounds smeared Barto’s scuffed armor.
“Can’t let you do that,” Barto answered. “You must stay here. The commanders gave their orders. Defy them, and you’re a traitor.”
Arviq stood up, glaring at him. His face was uncovered, his emotions unmasked. “This isn’t what we were made for. We are soldiers. War is our life. Not this … where we’re pets on display.” Barto had never really studied his comrade’s face before. “What happens when they get bored with us?”
Barto pressed his gloved palm against the hilt of his ID-coded blaster weapon. The device detected its proper owner and released its grip in the holster. Barto yanked the weapon free, held it in his hand.
Not far down the corridor, he could see the tarnished rungs that rose up the dark shaft. It would take so little for Arviq to scramble up the ladder, pop the heavy hatch—and be out, all alone on the blasted battlefield. Without armor or weapons, he didn’t have much chance of survival—but Arviq seemed desperate enough to take that option.
Arviq gathered himself up, glared at his former comrade and stepped away. “I know what I am, and what to do.” With the back of his hand, he wiped a smear of blood from his mouth. “Which one of us is the traitor, truly?” He turned and, moving slowly, not threateningly, took a step toward the ladder, the escape.
Barto raised the weapon. “Halt.”
Arviq turned to look at him with flinty, determined eyes. “I’m dead down here anyway. If I can’t get back onto the battlefield, then you may as well blast me now.”
Barto powered up his weapon.
The other soldier took two more steps down the corridor.
Inside the helmet, Gunnar’s voice shouted, “KILL THE ENEMY! DON’T LET HIM ESCAPE. YOU MUST PROTECT US. KILL HIM!” Barto leveled the blaster at the target.
Then he heard another voice—Juliette’s—muffled and distant, but coming closer. She cried out, running down the long-abandoned corridors toward him. “Don’t shoot, Barto. You must learn not to kill if you’re going to stay here.”
“Kill! Kill!” Gunnar’s voice bellowed.
Arviq turned as Juliette appeared, all alone, her elfin face distraught. Then he used the moment of distraction to dash toward the rungs.
“KILL!” shouted the voice in Barto’s ears again. And he did.
Depressing the firing stud, he blasted his former comrade in the back as he ran. Arviq had no armor, no protection whatsoever. The bolt flared out and incinerated him, turning the other man into a smoking pile of burned bones and cooked flesh that fell in a heap on the floor, as if still trying to run.
“No!” Juliette cried out, but it sounded like a pout. Barto turned to see her standing there. Her expression was stricken, and then even more terrified as he faced her, the charged weapon still in his hand. “I wanted you to stay here with me,” she said. “It’s a better life, but you’ve got to learn not to kill. Stay away from violence. You’ve earned it. You could live here with me in peace and enjoy your life, escape the horrors of war.”
“They’re not horrors,” Barto said in a flat voice. He refused to take off his helmet. He was a soldier now, fully armed, ready to fight. “It’s the only thing I know.” He holstered the warm blaster. “I can’t stay here as a prisoner of war.”
“But you’re a free man among us,” Juliette pleaded, refusing to come closer. She seemed as much confused as saddened. She couldn’t understand why he would make this choice.
“I am still a prisoner,” he said. “War holds me prisoner.” He stood at attention, as if the feline spies were watching him from the shadows. “I must live by fighting, and I must die by fighting. I have no way to escape that.”
He understood now that this place, despite its comforts and its new experiences, could not possibly be for him. Not for a soldier.
He didn’t begrudge Juliette her civilian life, her pampered existence—and if these people were indeed the commanders in the war, if he was a soldier charged with protecting them, then he must go back and do his duty until death inevitably claimed him on the battlefield. And if he should happen to survive, then he would grow old and train other soldiers until the war was won and the Enemy completely vanquished.
There was nothing else for him to do.
Juliette watched him with despair, then a flash of anger in her brown eyes. Finally, her slender shoulders drooped in defeat. She said nothing else, just watched him with a flush in her cheeks.
Barto didn’t know what he had really meant to her … if he had merely been a trophy from the battlefield, something that increased her prestige among her people—or if she had really cared for him, in a way.
At the moment it didn’t matter. It was irrelevant information.
Leaving his dead comrade behind, sad that the bloodhounds could never retrieve Arviq and take him back to where he could be buried with fu
ll military honors, Barto climbed the rungs of the ladder.
It was a long way to the surface, but when he released the hatch and climbed out under the open, bruised sky, he stared for a long moment. He breathed the burnt air, studied the roiling dust from distant explosions.
He lifted his visor to stare out across the stricken field with his own eyes, then he shut the hatch behind him, sealing Juliette and her world underground, keeping her secret safe. And then he strode off, heading in the direction of his HQ.
It would feel good to get back to the business of fighting once again.
For the 2006 World Science Fiction Convention, held in Los Angeles, one of the guests of honor was actor Frankie Thomas, who starred in the original TV show, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Mike Resnick put together a tribute anthology of stories around the theme of “space cadets,” and he asked me to contribute. This is the story I came up with, action packed but also a little poignant, I hope. Sadly, Frankie Thomas died before the WorldCon, which made the anthology a memorial edition.
Log Entry
According to his brief service record, Cadet Connor Pardee was a good, if unremarkable, recruit. One of his spaceflight instructors made a notation that he possessed “a reasonable amount of potential.”
Connor’s actions after his death, however, made him a hero lauded in all the Corps historical archives.
In the dogfight over a sun-grazer asteroid, the Corps scout ship was woefully outnumbered. Four unmarked smuggler vessels closed in to intercept the cadet before he could transmit a signal back to base. The smuggler ships had been stripped of all insignia and equipped with three times their original complement of armaments. They opened fire. The cadet’s ship spun through a wild course, launching potshots as it tried to evade the pursuers.
From their heat tunnels in the cracked surface, the ffrall watched with interest. In the black vacuum sky above the asteroid, the battling spacecraft were merely flashes of light, hot maneuvering rockets, and blazing energy bolts.
The ffrall were a race of liquid energy beings, interconnected nodes of sentient power. For the last half cycle—as the asteroid soared away from the sun, cooling in the chill of space during its long, lonely year—the ffrall had observed the activities of humans. Ships streaked overhead, bright lines against the backdrop of stars. A few had landed on the asteroid and erected structures, a base from which they launched more ships. The ffrall did not understand.
They inhabited catacomb cracks leading to the asteroid’s warm radioactive core, from which they drew energy. Each cycle, as their rocky home passed through the star’s blazing corona, the asteroid flexed and heated, charging like a battery. The ffrall would commune during the long cooling journey up to aphelion, the asteroid’s farthest and coldest point from the sun, then hibernate to hoard their reserves. The creatures would awaken only when the asteroid plunged again to a warmer part of its orbit.
Soon they would hibernate, but before their long dreaming began, the ffrall wanted to understand these odd strangers.
The dogfight overhead continued, the unmarked ships launching a concerted barrage against the now-damaged Corps scout. With a direct hit on its lower hull, the scout careened out of control. An electromagnetic signal burst out, which the ffrall heard through their extended senses.
“Emergency! This is Cadet Connor Pardee. I’m in trouble. I’ve stumbled upon a nest of asteroid pirates. They’ve got me in their sights. Please, anyone in range—I need immediate assistance. I know this signal won’t reach base for days, but if there’s anybody out there, my coordinates are—”
Another shot from the asteroid pirates knocked out his transmitter. Leaking fuel and out of control, the scout ship crashed into the rocks, rebounded in the low gravity, then tumbled before grinding to a halt. Atmosphere gushed out from hull breaches like arterial blood. The ship lay motionless, systems already cooling.
The four unmarked smuggler vessels circled slowly. One swooped low to confirm the kill. After conferring for a few moments on a coded channel, the raiders sped back to their base on the far side of the asteroid.
Oozing out of their cracks and glowing with internal energy, the ffrall went to investigate.…
Cadet Connor Pardee’s log entry:
The Academy is everything I thought it would be, as hard and as joyful, as challenging and as rewarding. The training is relentless, and the instructional classes are harder than anything I ever crammed for in civilian university. No matter how much you read ahead of time, no matter how much you exercise and mentally prepare yourself, you just plain can’t be ready for this.
I was talking with one of my fellow cadets, Daniel Jones, and he nailed it. He said, “I never knew how much I could sweat before the sun came up. I never knew how hard I could run in the pouring rain. I never knew how much sleep I could go without. I never knew how much I weighed until I carried my weight in a pack on my back. I never knew how much I could miss everyone until they were so far away. I never knew what my limits were until I looked behind me and watched them disappear in the distance.”
The food is terrible, but after a hard day nothing could taste more delicious. The beds are uncomfortable, but I’ve never slept so well in my life.
The people here are the same mix you’d encounter on the outside. Sure, some I like better than others, but there’s a difference: here, even if I don’t see eye-to-eye with someone, even if I actively dislike one of my fellow cadets, each of us knows we can depend upon the other with our lives. Really. Comrades in arms, and all that. It’s a tangible thing.
We do speed-timed suit-up exercises, explosive decompression drills, and simulated combat runs modeled after actual splats from the First Pacification Wars. I’ve nailed flight tests on seven different models of spacecraft, and I’m cramming how to repair every one of them. The Corps won’t let you fly a ship solo until you know every circuit, every cog and linkage, every rivet on every hull plate. It’s a lot to remember.
Funny how you start to realize obvious things. I’ve never loved my mom and my sister more. I look forward to their transmissions as much as any kid ever anticipated a Christmas morning. Even when they don’t say much of anything at all, the sound of their voices and the expressions on their faces warms my heart. “How are you? I am fine” never sounded so good.
Last week my mother shipped a package of home-baked cookies—my favorite, butterscotch oatmeal. Even with military subsidies, sending the package probably cost her a month’s rent. I shared them with my buddies, and we licked every last crumb from the wrapping.
I know my father would be proud of me. Maybe he’s watching up there from somewhere between the stars. He talked about the Academy ever since I was eight years old, and he counted on me entering the Space Corps, just like him. He had the good fortune of serving during the Long Peace. Never once saw combat, not even a police action to quell a minor revolt on an unruly colony planet. When telling stories, he called the timing “bad luck,” but I think Mom was relieved. He died at the age of forty-nine in a stupid loading bay accident. The power source on a gravlifter failed, and a cargo pallet of terraforming dozers dumped onto the workers below. Because he’d been killed in the line of service, my father received a posthumous medal, and Mom got an extended pension.
Times are a lot rougher now. Since the defense corps is spread so thin, asteroid pirates, smugglers, and other unsavories have become more than a nuisance. They hit civilian cargo ships, passenger liners, even colony transports full of wide-eyed settlers. Pirates blast holes through the hull, decompress the whole ship and let their victims suck vacuum. Then they go aboard, ransack the hold, even pick the pockets of the floating corpses. Not very nice people.
Once I graduate, I’ll keep those scumbags in line. If I nail my next set of trial runs, I’ll get my scout pilot cert, and I might even grab command of my own ship.
Then those asteroid pirates better watch their butts!
With small discharges of electricity, the ffrall crept across the uneven
ground, envelopes of crackling static moving of their own volition. The ffrall surrounded the crashed ship and studied its exterior by flowing over the conductive metal hull plates. They tasted the shape of the craft, found where the hull had been broken open, where the engines had been burned.
The ffrall oozed through gaping holes to the interior. The crashed ship was interlaced with circuits, power conduits, and a diagnostic sensor array. The energy creatures easily followed these pathways, sniffing information, gleaning residual power traces.
All of the ship’s primary circuitry was gathered into a single computer center in the smashed cockpit. Once the ffrall realized that the memory records were a form of communication, they began investigating further. They consumed and downloaded the information. Seeking clues and cross-references, they began to digest the log entries, conferring amongst themselves and comparing their insights. Gradually they incorporated enough knowledge to understand this ship, its alliances and enemies—and its pilot.
The ffrall discovered that the spacesuited form, with its smashed faceplate and a jagged chunk of shrapnel punched through the body core, was a cadet named Connor Pardee.
Cadet Connor Pardee’s log entry:
The day I was accepted into the Academy was the happiest day of my life. And then it got better. I aced every class in basic training, and I’m totally ready to be deployed as a rep for the Corps. A genuine space cadet.
Most cadets consider the course on ethics and galactic law to be the dullest part of the curriculum. As fully empowered reps of the Unified Civilizations of Earth, we have to know the nuances of the various articles of independence, the code of unification, and interstellar commercial treaties.
They say new cadets are the most vigorous enforcers. Is that something to complain about? I intend to be one of them. As soldiers grow older, they let more slide, give a little more leeway, but I hope I can stick to the truth. It’s a slippery slope—once you make a minor exception and let somebody overstep the bounds, the next time it gets easier.
Selected Stories: Volume 1 Page 33