Spectra Arise Trilogy

by Tammy Salyer

  Bleeding Christ, another operation in just a few hours, a day at the most? David’s tone mirrors my thoughts. “Commander, my unit is wiped out. We need a few days to stitch ourselves together before another ground incursion.”

  “Oh, you misunderstand—of course, Erikson. I don’t mean to send your company back in. I’m letting you know that you’ll be staying ship-side for a few missions. You, all of you”—she turns her head toward me and dips her chin in acknowledgment—“have shown incredible aptitude and achieved fine successes out there. I know how hard it is to be fighting against people you once fought side by side with, and I can’t promise you the worlds will ever recognize your sacrifices and courage. That being said, I want to give you some time to rest. It’s the best I can do. We’ll rotate your company into onboard duties in a couple of days. Until then, consider yourselves to be on R&R, for what it’s worth. You’ll let your people know?”

  “Roger,” David repeats, keeping his own face stoic, and I wonder what’s going on behind his light-green eyes.

  “For freedom,” she finishes and turns back to Lieutenant Steward, who still waits quietly in the booth.

  David skulks down the corridor to our unit’s berth, and I follow along, fighting to undo a dirt-encrusted buckle on my armor’s torso plate. When we reach our bay, he slams his hand into the hatch code box hard enough to make its backlights flicker briefly.

  “Whoa, big brother, it’s zed-zero-zed-five, not wham!, FYI.”

  “Sacrifices and courage? Aptitude and achievements? Who does she think she’s talking to? This war isn’t about freedom any more than she’s still a Corps officer. Maybe before, but not now. If I’m going to be condescended to, she should at least stop pretending she’s some kind of leader of a new-and-improved master society. She’s just repeating the same fucking bullshit jackboot game that got us here.”

  The hatch opens and La Mer and Desto come through it. “Hey, Erikson His and Hers! You’re back,” La Mer quips. “You look like shit.”

  “And damn, Aly, what’s that smell? You visit a brothel while you were playing soldier?” Desto and La Mer both break up at my body armor’s odor, still front-and-center, even after the three-day-long incursion.

  “This was you?” I ask, finally identifying the prankster behind this nauseating practical joke. “I can barely breathe!”

  “Don’t worry, Twig. Despite your stench and filthy mouth, your overwhelming beauty and charisma still have the power to turn every man into your personal twat-bot.”

  La Mer looks aghast. “Jesus, you guys. Gross.”

  “It’s the language of love, baby. Aly and I have an understanding.” Desto winks at me.

  Rolling my eyes, I reply, “You’re going to pay for this. And I told you not to call me Twig.”

  With a last chuckle, he calms down, and his face grows serious. “How’d it go?”

  David pulls his torso piece over his head. Sand and black rock dust filter down around his feet. Pushing his matted hair out of his eyes, he replies, “Brother, all things being equal, I’m starting to wonder if we’re even fighting for anything anymore.”

  FOUR

  Another one died last night. He had an unexpected and unquenchable fever and then…gone. Like a magazine running dry and the world going silent with your last trigger pull. It’s things like this that make me wonder if David had been right. Had we been fighting for anything?

  At least it was natural causes this time, not suicide, like the last one. Thank Christ. I don’t think the doc could take another one of those. Still, how natural is a death that could so easily be avoided if we had the right medical supplies? I just wish I wasn’t the one who will have to tell Vitruzzi.

  I step through the cruiser’s pedestrian exit to get some fresh air before doing the deed. I don’t like to spread news like this on the radio; it feels so—uncaring. Like someone’s death doesn’t rank any higher than reporting on supplies and ammunition. That’s too much like combat, where a casualty count really is nothing more than a number. I’d known commanders who would curse the dead for having the gall to die midfight and leave a battle undermanned. But the fighting is over, and civilized people dignify death with a little more…I don’t know…compassion? Besides, she’s usually here early to make morning rounds. I’ll tell her then.

  This fleet cruiser, once the PCA Andromeda, is nothing but a five-city-block-sized steel derelict that’s been planted in the midst of vines, trees, and scrubby brush outside Keum Libre’s colony like a monolithic statue of a past age. It came down sometime during the war, and the crew who hadn’t abandoned have assimilated smoothly into KL’s colony. The thing it really is, though, is our last connection to civilization. The technology inside its structure is the only thing that sets us apart from the nomadic tribes of old Earth. One half is an armory with enough weapons and armaments to lay waste to a city, and the other half serves as a hospital for the sick, the feeble, the broken, and the dying. And the supreme god—goddess, really—that haunts its alloy and polymer halls is none other than our good doctor and former Sphynx captain, Eleanor Vitruzzi.

  Without access to the vast energy sources required for these types of cruiser-class fleet ships to stay in the air, and with the easiest interior to keep clean and sterile, it wasn’t hard to decide it should serve as the hospital for wounded fighters who somehow managed not to get turned into carbon sludge during the war. Karl and I, Vitruzzi and Brady, Desto and my brother David, Venus and Jeremy La Mer, and most of the other surviving settlers from Agate Beach put our roots down on Keum Libre as soon as the main fighting was over. Even if the outcome wasn’t clear, the one thing that even the dimmest bulb knew by then was that everything was irrevocably changed. After the war, there would be no picking up the pieces and rebuilding the system based on the old model. Even the pieces were in pieces. Knowing the kind of chaos that would be coming, settling on KL was an easy decision. With the desalination plant, the mostly unsettled expanse of the planet, and limited takeoff and landing points, it’s ideal for hunkering down and staying out of the line of fire.

  And we’re doing okay here. We’re already growing produce crops—La Mer and Brady’s facility with cultivation coming as a surprise to more than just me—and have a small fleet of watercraft that tap the sea to keep us fed. But another purpose of our happy little home has been to provide what aid and shelter we can to the wounded we come across. Becoming an impromptu medic for the colony is never something I anticipated. But V needed help, so we all found ways to do it. I’ve had my hands in more wounds than I ever thought I could stomach in the last few months, and it never gets any easier. It just gets to where you can shut off your mind and treat it like a science experiment. A science experiment that sometimes screams. I know more about tying off a spurting artery and stitching up a layer of torn muscle than most third-year residents, but at least we’re doing more than just waiting for starvation and infection to pick us off slowly. And these days, it seems to be the only thing Vitruzzi can stay focused on.

  Haggard isn’t even the right word to describe her; she’s grown almost too gaunt to find clothes that fit, and frequently I’ve had to repeat her name three or four times before getting her attention. It’s like she’s not even present in her own body anymore, and it’s worrying everyone. The bad news I have for her today just seems that much worse because I’m no longer sure she’s stable enough to handle it. At least she has Brady.

  Sunlight reflecting off the windscreen of an approaching hover-runner draws me out of my thoughts. It pulls into the widened-out area beside the cruiser and powers down, settling against the earth with a dull thud. The screen retracts, and I feel an instant sense of relief at the sight of David stepping out of the cab.

  Rushing over, I reach him in time to catch his pack as he tosses it over the side. “No one told me you were back!”

  He smiles, looking a little tired but happier than usual. “Yeah, we got in about twenty minutes ago. The colony’s satellite seems to be on the
fritz again, so we couldn’t call in.”

  “Did it go okay? Find anything we can use?”

  “Only”—he reaches into the cab and grabs a sealed metal cylinder that rattles slightly—“the jackpot. I’ll tell you about it—”

  The sound of the colony’s heavier track vehicle drowns him out as it pulls in beside the runner. Two of the colonists jump off the back as it powers down and slide open the bars holding the cargo-bed door closed. Then Karl swings out of the cab.

  Tripping over my feet with excitement—and more relief than even seeing David had elicited, which I’d never admit to my brother—I rush over and grab Karl, holding tight. “Missed you, lover,” I whisper against his neck.

  “Me too,” he says, and we stay this way, in each other’s arms.

  “Don’t let the rest of us disturb you,” David says eventually.

  Letting go of Karl, I wave my hand toward the cargo bed. “Is that the jackpot?”

  David smiles at me. “Nope, that’s just the first card.”

  Curious, I walk over and see what’s inside. Hard plastic bins about the size of an ammo crate fill half the cargo space, and the remaining space contains boxes stamped with caducei and the names of hospitals or clinics that had once been on Obal 8. The extra medical supplies alone, something we rarely come across even on the longer scavenging missions, make this score better than good.

  “So what’s in those bins?”

  David responds, “Help us unload and I’ll tell you.”

  * * *

  “It’s absolutely beautiful, Karl. But I’m going to have to agree with V on this one. This is less than useless out here,” Desto says, clenching his entire body to keep himself from breaking into hysterical laughter.

  Vitruzzi had arrived for her morning rounds just a few minutes after David. Her subdued excitement at seeing the med supplies quickly gave way to the same curiosity I had about what the rest of the cargo contained. Because of Desto’s ability to identify and defuse anything that might be rigged for bigger surprises, we’d called him up before opening anything. Once he’d inspected everything and given the all clear, we popped the bins.

  No doubt, the disappointment and confusion on my face reflect the rest of theirs. A good portion of the cargo bins are full of contraband liquor, something that smells like it had probably been part engine degreaser and part something you’d find at the bottom of a rubbish bin. The stench is suspiciously close to the crud I’d drunk just before my guts jumped ship through the back door and kept me off David and Karl’s last run. The rest of the containers hold a mix of more medical supplies and a strange array of sealed chemical elements. Carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, hydrogen, oxygen, and various others.

  “I guess now we know why they left it out there. This stuff will make you blind faster than a sledgehammer to the brain stem,” Karl responds, chuckling despite himself. “Want to run it past your more refined taste buds, Aly?”

  I throw him a scowl loaded with a promise to make him pay later, and he returns it with a half-lifted eyebrow that promises to enjoy it.

  Glancing at Vitruzzi, I realize her eyes haven’t left the contents of the final bin since we’d broken the locks. The tendons in her neck stand out like barbed wire strained close to the breaking point. It didn’t help that I’d had to tell her about the newly shipped-to-oblivion colonist. She’d taken the news with as much silent composure as always, but she didn’t try to hide the sag of her shoulders or the tension that had further deepened the lines around her eyes and across her forehead. I understand her disappointment about losing someone, but now, looking at the usual cargo, she looks as if she’s about ready to kill someone.

  Unsettled by her expression, I try to calm her down. “We’re still good, V. We have plenty of bandages in storage, and the antibiotics are lasting longer than we expected.”

  She snorts, and her expression goes from rage to disgust. She’s like an ever-shifting storm front these days. Sometimes I want to tell her she needs to take a vacation, but I value the current arrangement of my facial features too much. Besides, she’s Doc V; she’s the reason so many in our colony are even still alive. If her job has caused her to lose her sense of humor, I’m sure there’s no one here who doesn’t think the trade-off was worth it.

  “I have work to do,” she says, and leaves.

  The rest of us stand around the crates, feeling like a group of incompetents.

  Finally, David remarks, “So the takeaway is to open the salvage before getting back to KL, next time.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “You know you don’t hang around a derelict and take your time looking through everything. That’s just a good way of advertising yourself as a mark.”

  “I think what David means is, he could have spent the last couple weeks en route getting sauced, pickled, and otherwise drunker than Cooter Brown. Missed opportunity if I ever saw one, bro,” Desto says, slapping David good-naturedly on the shoulder. Then, more seriously: “Don’t worry about it, man. We all know it isn’t easy out there.”

  After a pause David tries smiling and replies, “Pickled? That shit would have turned me into something you’d put in a jar next to a two-headed calf.”

  “And you’d finally be with your own kind,” Desto says, making us all laugh.

  “Anyway,” Karl puts in, “what the hell should we do with this?”

  “Let’s see if Venus wants it,” I say. “Could be good for cleaning parts.”

  Everyone nods in agreement, and we spend the next half hour loading the bins back on the tracker to take over to the dock and out to Venus on the platform.

  It’s already late evening before Karl and I finally get some alone time.

  “Yeah,” he says after I ask about the salvage op Venus’s new degreaser came from. “It was easier than we expected. The ship was just an Admin derelict hanging free outside of anyone’s orbit. We got lucky. I mean it was purely random to find it out there.”

  Karl hands me his Kaldor 75 sidearm and starts stripping out of his equipment vest. I watch closely, hoping to get a chance to help him with the shirt and pants soon. “We took that route through the Spectras specifically to avoid coming into contact with any other ships. The number of scavs is getting worse again, just like it was right after the war started. I guess…I don’t know. People are either getting more organized or more desperate.”

  “Could you tell what happened to the derelict?”

  “We didn’t have time to do much searching, but it looked to me like it was out of power. The hull, everything we saw, was still intact. The crew must have jet on landing skiffs and probably intended to come back for the goods.” He shrugs, his features arranged in disturbed contemplation. “Guess they got sidetracked.”

  Out of power—same story for most of the bigger ships that are still in one piece, and the same reason the Andromeda will stay permanently parked on KL, even if we could repair it. We were lucky that the Sphynx had a solid supply of solar seeds when we hit the deck right before Rajcik went off the deep end. That surplus has kept our three scout ships in the sky for the last six months.

  Speaking of sidetracked, Karl’s not doing anything to stop my hands as they embark on an exploration of the lines of his abdomen and over the lower shelf of his pecs, my fingers running through his chest hair on a safari that feels weeks overdue.

  “Next time you go, I’m coming with you,” I inform him as I lightly tease one of his nipples.

  “Like I’m going to argue,” he answers, then pulls me hard against his body in a way that lets me know we’re done talking.

  * * *

  The rising dawn slips through our window box, and I reach over Karl to tug the improvised sunscreen over it. There isn’t much to scavenge on Keum Libre, but everything that can be stripped from the Andromeda has been, and enterprising builders like Karl and me have begun constructing our own private dwellings outside the main colony area. I don’t sleep here when he’s not around, though—too much quiet for me to be
able to relax. For years in the Corps I craved privacy. But now that I have it, I can’t help but get a little spooked. And then, of course, there’s the coffee-cup-sized arthropods clicking around outside. A face-to-face moment with one of those one morning as I left for work was all I needed to assassinate chivalry for good. When Karl and I stay out here, I always hold the door for him to go out first.

  “So was there anything else worth another trip on the derelict?” I ask, picking up the thread we promptly forgot about last night.

  He pauses before answering, brushing his fingertips along the inside of my arm. “Yeah. I mean, maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “It looked like some sort of data-storage unit, but bigger than any I’ve ever seen. There was a mechanical component to it too. It’s hard to explain. Almost like a matter printer—you know the kind I mean?”

  I nod.

  “We didn’t locate the ship’s manifest, and it didn’t look like something that had any immediate benefit to the colony, so we left it there. In any case, I’m curious. David was too.”

  “Even a solid-matter printer could come in handy, if we can get the right drivers and materials for it. Are you planning to talk to Brady about taking the Orika again?”

  “It’s probably a good idea. But I’m in no hurry to leave. I just got back and our love shack needs some work.”

  I roll my eyes at him, and he gives me a sexy half grin. “I know. Venus and Jer are working on the portable com-boxes for all the outlying dwellings that are getting put up. And they’re already running an ion net for everyone to tap into power.”

  “All that has happened in the three weeks since I left? Wow. Those two don’t sleep, do they?”

  “As if you have to ask…”

  “C’mon, lover. Let’s go get some breakfast,” he says and hands me my shirt.

  FIVE