The Eternity Brigade

by Goldin, Stephen

  He was suspended in midair on an antigravity field, surrounded by dozens of whirring machines large and small that poked and prodded at his naked body. If anything, his twisted figure looked even more grotesque than Hawker remembered. “Is he awake?” Hawker asked their guide.

  “I really don’t know. I’m not in charge of this aspect. His mind is as damaged as his body; he slips in and out of awareness—”

  The other people in the room noticed the intruders for the first time. One of them, a tall woman with incandescent orange hair, stepped forward. “What are you doing here? Philaskut, you know perfectly well—”

  “It’s visiting hours,” Symington told her, his hand resting lightly on his hip a few centimeters from the butt of his beampistol. “We’ve come to see our friend.”

  As Hawker’s group strode forward, the scientists parted reluctantly to let them through. Hawker noticed one of the men edging toward the door. Ibañez noticed the movement too. “No need to leave,” he said as a gentle warning. “We don’t have any secrets from you people. Let’s just all stay together for now, shall we?”

  They lined the scientists up against the wall, along with Philaskut. Ibañez kept an eye on them while the other four soldiers approached the body. Hawker had to force his stomach to remain steady as he glanced down at the surrealist parody that was his friend’s face. “Dave,” he said quietly. “Dave, it’s me. I came to see how you were. Are they treating you okay here?”

  Green’s face showed no sign of having heard or understood. Hawker turned to glare angrily at the scientists. “What did you do to him? What drugs have you given him?”

  “None,” said the woman who was apparently in charge of the scientific team. She was indignant at the very thought. “We wouldn’t introduce foreign substances. We’re not sure how his body would react. We even have to prepare special predigested food, because his stomach has trouble on its own.”

  Symington, more direct, laid his hand on Green’s shoulder and shook him gently. “Hey, Dave, it’s your buddies. We’ve come to see you. Can’t you even say hi?”

  Green’s eyes continued to focus on some spot well beyond the ceiling, but his mouth began moving. Saliva dripped out of the side and the sounds, barely audible, were simply nonsense syllables.

  Hawker’s anger reached new heights. Turning to the scientists once again, he demanded, “What have you been doing to him?”

  “Just studying him,” the woman said. “We run molecular scans of his entire body, recording the pattern and analyzing it to see precisely where the deviations are. We run tests, that’s all. We’re not trying to hurt him.”

  The fact that her words were reasonable did nothing to mollify Hawker’s anger. If anything, it only infuriated him more.

  “I can see you cared for him a great deal,” the woman continued. “But you’ll have to face the fact that the friend you loved is gone forever. We’ve done what we could to keep the shell alive, but his mind—”

  “Welcome… to Hell.”

  Those words, even spoken as softly as they were, jerked everyone’s attention back to Green There was awareness of a sort in his face; his eyes, both on the left side of his nose, were now focused on Hawker.

  “Dave. Dave.” Hawker felt closer to crying now than he had in centuries. “How do you feel?”

  “How… do I look?”

  “Like shit,” Symington replied.

  “Then that’s how mfrtck tablkrt.” A cloud passed over Green’s eyes as he lapsed into gibberish once more.

  “That often happens,” the woman scientist volunteered. ‘“There’ll be a brief period of lucidness, and then he—”

  “Shut up!” Hawker snarled. All his concentration was on Green; he wanted no distractions. Despite the gibberish, Green’s face did not look as spacey as it had at first. There were thoughts going on within his mind, but he couldn’t connect his tongue to the words.

  Seconds passed, with the only sounds being Green’s gibbered attempts at speech. Hawker strained, positive that if only he listened hard enough he could make some sense of what his friend was saying. But it continued to elude him, and eventually Green stopped speaking again.

  It was Singh who broke the spell of silence. “What do you want to do now, Hawk?”

  Hawker closed his eyes and tried to think, but it was no good; all his mind could see was Green’s twisted body and haunted face. “I don’t know, I don’t…”

  “We can’t just stand around here forever,” Ibañez said. “We’ve got to do something.”

  Belilo, seeing the pained indecision in Hawker’s face, said, “We can take him with us, get him away from these ghouls.”

  “You can’t do that!” Philaskut objected. “He’s army property.”

  “So’s this,” Symington said, pulling his beampistol from his trousers. With a single shot he blew a large hole in the officer’s chest.

  The scientists were cowed, but the woman in charge still had enough courage to speak up. “You don’t understand. Taking him away from here is the worst possible thing. He’s a freak now. He can’t survive in the outside world. You’d only be hurting him, not helping him.”

  “I told you to shut up,” Hawker said. He kept his eyes on Green. “We’ll let him decide what he wants.”

  “He’s hardly competent—”

  Symington’s beampistol lashed out again, tearing away the woman’s leg. She fell to the floor, moaning and crying in pain.

  Hawker looked straight into Green’s face. “Dave,” he pleaded. “Dave, please concentrate. This is important. Do you want us to take you out of here?”

  An eternity passed, then two. Finally, “Yes.” The single sighed syllable echoed through the room like a shout.

  “That does it, then,” Singh said. “I guess he doesn’t like the facilities here.”

  “But where can you take him that’s any better?” one of the other scientists asked nervously. “What can he get outside he doesn’t have here?”

  “How about freedom?” Belilo suggested.

  “The army won’t let you get away with this,” the woman scientist hissed as she lay on the floor. “They’ll hunt you down, bring you back—”

  “But we’ll have a head start,” Symington said.

  “What do we do with them?” Ibañez asked, indicating the scientists cowering against the wall.

  “Well, we can’t have much of a head start if they’re here to give the alarm the instant we leave, can we?” Singh said.

  ***

  “The trouble is, they were probably right,” Singh said as he stripped the body of one scientist to get clothes for Green. “We don’t know where we’re taking him, and we have no idea how long he’ll survive away from these machines.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hawker said. “You heard him. He wants us to get him out. If he dies, he’ll at least die free.”

  “And for good,” Belilo murmured. “Philaskut said his pattern cracked when they dubbed him.”

  “Dave talked about that a lot,” Hawker said, his voice a near whisper. “He was always talking about getting off the merry-go-round.”

  “This’ll be his last life, then,” Symington said. There was almost reverence in his voice. “Let’s make it as good for him as we can.”

  “He certainly deserves better than being stuck here,” Singh said. “That’s for damn sure.”

  “But where do we go with him?” Ibañez asked.

  “The only time I’ve been off the base,” Belilo said, “was to go to that bar in town—and it’s such a small town we can’t hide him there. I don’t know anyplace else on this world.”

  “Let’s get him off the base first,” Singh said. “We’ll figure the rest out later.”

  Green had slipped back into a trance as they dressed him in the dead scientist’s uniform. Hawker and Ibañez carried him to the door while Singh stooped over Philaskut’s corpse and carved off the head, hoping the scanners would still accept it to get them off the base.

  They
retraced their steps carefully, with Ibañez and Belilo going ahead to act as scouts. The scanners recognized Philaskut’s head and opened the doors for them along the way. They made it out to their floatcar and loaded Green into the back. Climbing in after him, they started off toward a side gate where they hoped the security would be less rigid. As yet there’d been no alarm about their escape.

  The late afternoon shadows were lengthening as they reached the gate. There was only a robot sentinel stationed here, not a living person; that could be either good or bad. A robot could sometimes be fooled easier than a real person—but if it became too confused, it could activate alarms and bring the entire base down on them.

  They stopped as the robot commanded, and Singh confidently showed it Philaskut’s head. The robot scanned it, and lights flashed. “Unacceptable,” it said tersely.

  Singh was sweating. He looked at his companions. “Any ideas?”

  “Maybe Philaskut wasn’t cleared for this gate,” Belilo said. “Or maybe his head’s been dead too long.”

  “Try it again,” Symington said. “Sometimes I’d try a dollar bill in a vending machine and it wouldn’t work the first time, then it worked perfectly the second time. These machines are stupid, sometimes.”

  “What’s a dollar bill?” Belilo asked.

  “What’s a vending machine?” Singh asked almost simultaneously.

  “Never mind,” Symington said. “Just try it again.”

  Singh held up the head again, but the results were the same. In addition, a light in the machine’s forehead that had been blinking green suddenly started blinking yellow. The robot’s suspicions were definitely aroused.

  “Oh, fuck it!” Symington said. Pulling his beampistol, he blew the robot to pieces. Immediately the air was filled with the sound of sirens, and the gates ahead of them slammed shut with a blinking red light.

  “That was a shitheaded thing to do,” Singh exclaimed. “Now how do we get out?”

  “Like this.” Symington pulled a grenade from his pocket and flung it at the gates. The massive metal portals blew apart from the explosion, leaving enough of a gap for the floatcar to ease through.

  Singh tossed Philaskut’s head out of the car and piloted their vehicle slowly through the twisted wreckage of the gates, then gunned forward.

  They sped along for more than a minute while the sound of the sirens died in the distance. Then Belilo spotted something on the horizon ahead of them. “What’s that?”

  Singh squinted forward. “Damn. The outer perimeter line went up. Must have happened automatically when we breached the gate.”

  As they came closer, they could see the walls rising out of the ground, with gun turrets stationed every few hundred meters around the top. The biggest guns pointed outward, but a few of the smaller guns could swivel in toward the center—and they were doing so now. As the car approached the wall, it would soon be coming under heavy fire.

  “Even if we get through the wall, we won’t be safe,” Singh said. “They’ll point the big guns at us then and blow us off the map. Our only chance is to take out one of the turrets and hope it’ll give us an escape route.”

  He steered the floatcar straight for the nearest gun tower. His passengers needed no instructions to get down as low as they could.

  As the floatcar came within range, Singh began an evasive pattern that he hoped would keep them out of the automated gunsights long enough to reach the objective. His passengers were bumped frantically around against the walls and one another during his maneuvers, and then jolted forward as the car screeched to a halt.

  “You can get up,” Singh said. “We’re at the base of the tower. We’ll need a few grenades to bring it down and open ourselves a hole.”

  Ibañez had been on top of the pile, so he was the first one up. Grabbing a grenade from his pocket, he hurled it at the tower and, without waiting to see the effect, took out a second.

  Several things happened at once. His first grenade exploded against the base of the gun turret, knocking it off balance and bringing it halfway to the ground, pointing at a cockeyed angle. At the same time, a beam from one of its guns neatly sliced off Ibañez’s left arm halfway between shoulder and elbow. The soldier screamed in pain and fell out of the floatcar, still holding the second grenade in his right hand. Hawker tried to get up to help him—but before he could, Ibañez scrambled to his feet once more and charged directly at the wall. Several more deadly beams hit him, but his momentum carried him up to the barrier and the grenade exploded, destroying him as well as blowing a hole in the wall large enough for their craft to fly through.

  Singh didn’t hesitate, but gunned the floatcar through the breach. There was no need to comment on their comrade’s heroism; they’d all learned to view death as a temporary phenomenon.

  Their destruction of the gun turret seemed to have done the trick; they had a narrow alley of escape through which the base’s fire could not reach them. The guns on either side did not overlap their range completely. Singh took advantage of this, racing the vehicle at top speed away from the installation. The other guns along the perimeter continued to fire, sometimes coming dangerously close, but Singh somehow avoided sustaining further damage.

  “We’ve got company,” Symington commented. He’d been looking back over the edge of the seat, and was the first to spot the pursuit craft coming toward them. The runaways had perhaps a two-minute head start, but the army had vehicles that were much faster than a simple floatcar. Unless Singh could think of a few more tricks, their mutiny would be very short-lived.

  The terrain around the base was largely undeveloped, dominated by heavy brush. As they sped outward, the land became more thickly wooded, and there appeared to be a forest up ahead. The floatcar’s maximum altitude was no more than a few meters, not nearly high enough to clear the trees—and the woods were dense enough to make passage through them difficult, if not impossible. They would either have to skirt around the edge—losing more time to their pursuers—or abandon the car and continue on foot, hoping to lose the pursuit in the forest. The latter was a forlorn hope, considering the sophisticated sensors the army now had available.

  “I’m going to slow the car when I reach the edge of the forest,” Singh said calmly. “Then I’ll turn and veer off to the right. I want you all to be prepared to jump out when I give the word. If we’re lucky, they’ll still be too far away to see you leave, and they’ll chase after me. You can hide in the woods with Green. I’ll come back and join you after I shake them.”

  “But…” Hawker began.

  Singh stopped the protest. “Relax. Without your weights in the car, I can make this fucker do miracles. Get ready…now!”

  The car swerved sharply, slowing and banking so abruptly the passengers were nearly tipped out. Hawker grabbed Green and leaped out with him; Symington and Belilo jumped out on their own. The instant the others were free of the car, Singh raced off to the right without a word of farewell.

  Bruised from the rapid exit, Hawker got slowly to his feet, staring at the rapidly departing floatcar until Symington nudged him. “Come on; we can’t stand out here all day. We’ve got to hide.” The two men picked up Green’s limp body and carried it into the woods without another glance after the vanishing car. Belilo was in the lead, picking a path for them through the woods. All three fugitives knew they’d never see Singh again in this lifetime.

  ***

  They went just a short way into the forest, deep enough so they couldn’t be spotted by surveillance craft, and found places to dig in. They had no way of knowing whether the army thought they were all still in the floatcar, but they knew some tricks to minimize detection. Motion was one of the easiest qualities to detect, as was their body heat. By scattering themselves out so they weren’t clumped together, each heat spot would be that much smaller and harder to find—and by staying still for several hours, a searcher might mistake them for part of the natural landscape.

  Hawker stayed with Green, while Symington and B
elilo were each a hundred meters away in different directions. As night approached, Hawker huddled with his friend for warmth, whispering quietly the story of what had happened so far. He wasn’t sure how much of the tale Green could comprehend, but there were occasional flashes of awareness in the other’s eyes that reassured Hawker he was doing the right thing.

  With the coming of night, the temperature dropped severely. Hawker’s uniform was specially constructed for temperature control, but he could do little for his hands and face. He checked to make sure the controls on Green’s borrowed uniform were working correctly; he didn’t want to have gone through all this trouble only to have his friend die of exposure.

  After about three hours, with the full darkness of night covering them, he heard a rustling in the bushes that turned out to be Belilo. “I think we’re probably safe enough for now,” she said. “If they’d had any idea we were in here, we’d have seen some sign of them before this. We can stay here for the night and move out in the morning.” She didn’t say where they’d move out to; at this point, she had no more idea of that than Hawker.

  She was back a few minutes later with Symington. The three soldiers discussed their situation briefly, and agreed that the best direction for them to go was away from the base. None of them had much idea of Cellina’s geography; they could be heading out into a wilderness with no hope of survival. But that didn’t matter at the moment.

  They had no idea, either, of what possible dangers might lurk in these woods, so they agreed to keep a watch. Hawker was still too keyed up to sleep, so he volunteered to take the first shift. Belilo and Symington moved off a short way into the brush—and from the noises they made, Hawker could tell they were relieving their tensions in ways other than sleeping.

  The noises stopped alter a while, and by the time he went to wake Belilo for her watch she and Symington were sleeping a meter or so apart Neither Hawker nor Belilo made any comment; she got up quietly and he took her place on the ground. He thought he might still be too nervous to sleep, but the day’s exertions finally caught up with him and he slept until Symington woke him at daybreak.