Infinite Day

by Chris Walley

  Lloyd shook his head. “Sir, I’ve been reading about being a bodyguard, not carrying out in-space attacks. But I’d say if direct assault is out, then it would have to be a trick. A deception. We’d have to get invited in.”

  Azeras nodded.

  Vero looked up. “On our reckoning, Lezaroth can have no more than five or six armed men. And he will not be expecting us. Once we get on board, we have a chance.”

  A deception? The thought troubled Merral. We abhorred the lie. Now we are forced to use it. Is this right? He saw that they were looking at him. “I don’t like deception.”

  “But what else can we do?” Vero asked.

  Merral heard himself sigh. “Okay, let’s come up with a trick that will work.”

  Azeras spoke. “We wait nearby. As soon as they appear, we make for them. And . . .” He shrugged. “We offer them assistance?”

  Vero shook his head. “Lezaroth may not accept it. Unless . . .” He slowly raised a finger. “Unless it’s an order from the lord-emperor. But why . . . ?”

  Lloyd snapped his fingers. “The medical orderly trick!”

  They looked at him. “I pretended to be a medical orderly to get Vero off the plane from Isterrane. That worked. So we get on board as a medical team.”

  Merral considered the idea. “Nice, but that depends on him being in need of doctors.”

  “No!” Vero was half out of his seat. “Quarantine! The lord-emperor has imposed a quarantine. Innoculations—inspections—are required!”

  Merral gestured for Azeras to speak.

  “It might work,” he responded without enthusiasm. “The panels on the side of this ship are active; we can change the name. And while I have never heard of an imposed quarantine, the lord-emperor is given to making decisions on a whim.”

  Merral pushed on. “So we persuade them. Send a ferry craft over—with soldiers hidden on it—get access to the air lock hatch, enter, and seize control. Anyone see any problems?”

  “The devil is in the details,” muttered Vero to universal incomprehension, but before he could explain, Lloyd raised a hand and Merral saw unease on his face.

  “Excuse me, sir . . .” There was embarrassment in his voice. “Can I talk to you alone?”

  “Without me, you mean,” Azeras said with another grunt. “No, I understand. Look, I’m going to get a drink.” He rose and left.

  “What is it, Sergeant?” Merral asked after the door had closed.

  “Sorry to raise this, but . . . this deception—I’ve got a question. Who does the talking?”

  “Well spotted, Sergeant,” Vero murmured.

  Merral leaned back in his chair. “You mean, who says, ‘We are a medical ship; can we come on board?’ Well . . . yes. It would have to be Azeras. Or Betafor. They are the only ones who speak Saratan.” And you don’t trust either of them.

  “Excellent,” Vero murmured.

  Lloyd looked awkward. “Sir, I don’t like it. You—we—wouldn’t know what was being said. They could say anything. Set up a trap.” He looked miserable. “Sorry; it’s my job.”

  “I know. But what’s the alternative?”

  “We learn Saratan ourselves,” Vero said. “At least enough to do this. We have five weeks.”

  When Azeras returned, he was more positive about the language learning than they had expected.

  “Hah, a good idea. I don’t want to constantly be translating. That would slow us down and it would look odd.”

  “Can it be done?”

  “I think so. The lord-emperor has imposed Saratan on all whom he conquers, so there are language aids on board. And because Saratan is a second language for most of the Dominion, it’s often not spoken well; a strong and unfamiliar accent would not be unexpected. And Betafor will help. So, let the commander here do it.”

  An objection rose in Merral’s mind.

  “But I can’t do it. Lezaroth knows me.”

  Azeras gave a low rumble of dismissal. “Betafor can alter your on-screen voice, change your eye coloring, alter hair color. And anyway, it may be the captain you meet.”

  “Benek-Hal? I only met him once.”

  “There you are. But there is another matter I ought to mention here. I have just been considering it.”

  Merral looked at him. “Namely?”

  “Armor. On this model, some of you will be fighting. It will be useful.”

  “We already have armor.”

  “The armor you have was specifically constructed for dealing with Krallen. It may not be much good against impact or beam weapons.”

  “And where will we get this better armor?”

  “Remember, this ship was a transport. Mostly weapons and supplies. I just checked. The Star is carrying enough armor for all the soldiers. Center hold; pallet C3.”

  “And can we use it?” Merral asked.

  “Yes. But you need to practice with it. There’s a whole new set of techniques that you’d need to learn.”

  “Then the sooner we start the better.”

  Then discussion returned to the mechanics of seizing the Comet, and Merral made notes. Eventually, feeling he had learned enough, he adjourned the meeting and left, accompanied by Lloyd.

  “Well, let’s go and see how the military are doing. And after that, we need to get some exercise.”

  Lloyd groaned.

  “The fourth level is a jogging track. Two laps is a kilometer. Ten laps, Sergeant.”

  Later in the afternoon, Merral and a small team went to the lowest levels, where three holds extended along much of the ship. They entered the forward hold, a long, shadowed compartment framed by girders and ribs and almost entirely filled by two ferry craft. Leaving Laura, Ilyas, and the engineer to assess the suitability of any ships for a rescue operation, Merral walked on with Lloyd and Azeras to the center hold.

  “Mind the slug,” Azeras said as they walked through the doorway. Merral sidestepped a formless blob hanging off a pipe. The long, gloomy bay was almost entirely filled with stacked and strapped-down containers.

  “Freight. Military equipment. Various stores,” Azeras commented, a distant, almost distracted tone in his voice.

  They found C3, and after Azeras confirmed from the writing that the pallet bore armor, Merral arranged for it to be opened and the contents brought up.

  Lloyd turned to Merral. “Sir, request we open some of the others?”

  “Sergeant, this is not the time or the place to experiment with strange explosive devices.”

  “Sorry, sir. Just thought I’d ask.”

  They moved on to the rear hold and there, amid more crates, came across two slender cylinders, perhaps two meters long, with stubby tail fins coated in a hard, translucent material.

  “What are they, Sarudar? Weapons?”

  Azeras stepped forward from the rear of the party. “No. Survey drones. Drop them from orbit, the coating burns off during entry, and you can fly them round in the lower atmosphere for up to a dozen hours.” He pointed to the front. “Cameras here.” He tapped the central top section. “A small payload bay for sampling equipment or anything else.”

  Merral nodded. “Assembly seeding and survey ships have similar devices.” But not this small.

  Azeras shrugged. “These are military. They tend to be used to check out landing zones.”

  It came to Merral that much of this Dominion military technology could be used for peaceful purposes. Perhaps when this is all over, we can use it to make habitable worlds more quickly. Can good come out of all this evil?

  Deep in thought, Merral led them back to the ferry craft.

  Laura was examining a panel joint. “Crude workmanship,” she said with a shake of her head.

  “Does it make a difference?”

  She gave a dismissive shrug and smiled. “Nah. It works. We’ve never had to make military equipment on a large scale. But if I wanted some furniture for my house, I wouldn’t get these guys to make it.”

  Merral gazed at the ferry craft passenger compartment.
“How many seats?”

  “Thirty,” Ilyas grunted.

  “We need to fit twenty-four soldiers in these going out. That’s no problem. But we need to bring another thirty back.”

  “Rip out the seats,” Ilyas suggested. “Put webbing down. Have everyone cling on. It’ll be a rough journey.” He hesitated. “Of course, to expect to have fifty-four passengers on the way back is . . . optimistic.”

  Struck hard by what he had said, Merral took a moment to reply. “No! Let’s not think like that. And if there are . . . losses, we will bring the bodies back. No man or woman deserves to be left there. That’s an order.”

  As they left the hold, Merral realized that Ilyas’s comment seemed to have sown a dark certainty in his mind.

  We aren’t all going to make it back.

  That evening as they ate together in the canteen, the quality of the air seemed to abruptly change. Unbidden, people looked around. “There!” cried someone as something that resembled a large octopus began to form just below the roof of the canteen. The chatter ended and chairs were overturned as people stepped back.

  Merral, sitting next to Luke, saw how all eyes turned to the chaplain. Someone came over and whispered in Merral’s ear. He turned to Luke. “This is something more serious than those slugs. They want you to exorcise it.”

  “An issue I have been expecting to arise,” Luke said, his voice low. “But one that raises the subtle peril I mentioned earlier. Well, this may be the time to make a point.”

  He rose to his feet. “Crew, soldiers: I want us to pray against this. As you sit or stand around your tables, let us please pray together that the eternal Lord—Father, Son, and Spirit—would move in power here. Such things—and worse—were defeated at the cross. Let us pray.”

  For some minutes the hall buzzed with sincere prayer; then without any fuss, Luke closed by offering thanks for the meal.

  The tentacled form had gone.

  “I didn’t see the subtle peril,” Merral said to the chaplain later.

  “That’s because it was subtle and because it was for me, not you,” Luke said with a private smile. “But for your information, I will not be your resident exorcist. The Lord’s people together can do such things. Now, can you pass the coffee?”

  Later, as they assembled in the congregation chamber, there was an hour of loud and cheerful music making in a variety of styles. And as the music finished, Vero announced, to cheers, that as they had a copy of the Library files on board, they had a vast number of films. He suggested that “in view of the prevailing lighting conditions” they might find watching some of the black-and-white comedies from the beginning of the moving image era most suitable.

  And so for the next hour, they laughed at the antics of an accident-prone man with a perpetually solemn expression. And twelve thousand years and fifteen trillion kilometers away from that sunlit day in California where the films had been made, Buster Keaton once more made men and women forget their sorrows and fears.

  That night Merral dreamed again in color. He was in winter woods, the branches reaching up into the sky like carefully penned black lines. Thick snow lay on the ground and a ruddy sun was low in a sky of drained blue. The dream was so pleasant that when he awoke he lay on the bed, feeling the faint vibration of the engines, trying to avoid opening his eyes for as long as possible in the hope that the images would return. But they didn’t return, and all on the ship was still gray.

  In fact, by the fifth day, their voyage seemed, if it was possible, to turn even grayer. Not only had any novelty of the first days vanished but with increasing depth came more—and stranger—apparitions. Something like a vertical cluster of branches higher than a man appeared on level 3 and moved slowly along the corridor for an hour. Another apparition, like a leathery bird, appeared just below the ceiling of one of the stores and flapped its way around for several hours. In the medical center a skull appeared on a shelf.

  And there were other issues. As he walked round on a tour of inspection with the engineer, Merral felt that the mood of the ship had changed. The shadows seemed more prevalent, some where, by every rule of optics, they ought not to be. There were pockets of cold, too, where men and women shivered and walked on swiftly. A single recurrent thought tugged at Merral’s mind: We are in enemy territory.

  Yet as time passed the pattern established on the second day stayed in place and deepened. Framed by morning and evening fellowship and broken up with exercise and regular meals, the training and planning continued. The snipers practiced on long- and short-barreled weapons in a specially modified room on level 2, and in another series of compartments the general soldiers rehearsed an assortment of maneuvers from the ancient manuals, including storming rooms, rescuing hostages, and taking prisoners. Some procedures remained theoretical—no one dared to fire the armor-penetrating bullets or explode the neuro-stun grenades they had recreated from ancient designs from the Library. But they studied as many weapons as possible. Merral, who joined in as much of the training as he could manage, expressed the rule of practice thus: “Because we cannot be sure of the specific setting we will have to fight in, we will practice as many techniques as we can.”

  During spare time, everyone kept active. Merral turned his attention to learning enough Saratan to pass as the captain of a medical ship. Others also studied Saratan, while some played chess or took part in a basketball league.

  At lunch on the third day, Merral noticed a number of crew clustering around one of the soldiers. He walked over to find that Slee Banias, a muscular, sharp-eyed man with wild curly hair that seemed oddly at variance with his neat, pointed beard, was passing round a sketchbook filled with crisp black-and-white caricatures of the crew. Merral glanced at them and found himself impressed at the wit and skill of the drawings.

  “These are good, Slee.”

  “Thanks. I was training as an artist.” The voice was quiet and sadly reflective. “Then everything changed, and here I am.”

  I can sympathize with that. “Here we are.”

  Slee nodded. “Sir—Merral. I was wondering . . . the ship is awful bare. The gathering room has that large white wall. I was thinking about a mural.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of us all. The team. Like these sketches.”

  “Good idea. Do it.” Then an idea struck Merral. “But don’t let’s have us in uniform. Show us as we once were. And as, by God’s grace, we may yet be again.”

  Slee gave a smile and a salute and left.

  There were many responses to the changes on the Star. Luke took over the internal communication system and filled the ship with recordings of bright and cheerful hymns, songs, and Bach cantatas. And no one could say whether it was a coincidence, but while the music played, the forms seemed to be rarer and less substantial.

  But the manifestations still continued. Merral talked with Azeras about the phenomena. “Are they likely to get worse?” he asked.

  “Commander, I do not know.” The drawn gray face appeared tired, but Merral felt it hard to judge such things in the strange monochrome world they now existed in. We all look like corpses now. It was a thought he wished he hadn’t had.

  “We are about as deep as I have ever been. So far things seem fairly mild.” Azeras scowled. “Rumor has it that only a little bit lower the manifestations start to notice you are there.” He made the gesture of warding off evil. “But there is no consistency about the Nether-Realms. Things may change in seconds. So far, you have been spared; the effects have been minor. But we are heading deeper by the hour. Let’s see what happens.”

  That afternoon, Merral and a few others looked at the armor suits that had been brought up out of the hold. As Merral examined the helmets, jacket, leggings, and boots, he remembered having seen men clad in this at Fallambet. Then he had assumed it was heavy; now he realized that it was surprisingly light. As he held it, he was unable to decide whether the fine-spun material it was made of was metal or synthetic or some hybrid of the two. Tilting it, he
saw how the gray tone changed.

  Azeras caught his gaze. “An active surface; it changes color in the light. There’s a lot of circuitry. Active patches, so you can put your name on the back and sides. Note the biometric sensors. They work better if you have bio-augmented circuits built in.” He flexed his left wrist and the back of his hand came alight. “But they emit signals indicating whether you are dead or alive or in trouble.”

  Merral found a jacket and leggings that fitted him and tried them on. Although stiff, they adjusted to some degree, and Merral was pleased how little they impeded movements of his arms and legs.

  “So what else does the suit do?” he asked Azeras.

  “It absorbs impacts and diffuses heat very quickly. There is also an active wound-sealant system.” Azeras picked up a helmet and handed it over. “Try this.”

  As Merral put it on, he was disconcerted to feel the neck section unroll downward and fuse with the jacket and something slide out to press against his ears. Azeras touched the side of the helmet and the visor slid down. As it dropped Merral saw a stream of numbers and letters appear along the top of his vision.

  He was aware that sounds were sharper and clearer.

  “The visor is active. There are various data readouts and the usual mouthpiece communications. It also darkens against brilliant light and protects your vision. The earpieces can boost quiet sounds and enhance your hearing as well as blanking off loud noises.”

  Merral moved his head, feeling uncomfortable. He hadn’t cared for the space suit, but this was even more claustrophobic. Azeras was tapping the back of his suit. “You’ve even got help in the event of vacuum exposure or a gas attack. The suit seals up and you have enough oxygen in the small tanks to give you twenty minutes’ air.”

  With Azeras’s aid Merral took the helmet off. “Whoever invented all that is clever.”

  Vero, sitting on a crate and watching, gave a sour shake of his head. “Whoever invented that is long dead. What you’re looking at is something that has evolved over twelve thousand years of battles. There, survival of the fittest really does count.”