Charlotte's Army

by Patty Jansen

  Charlotte’s Army

  A Standalone Novella in the ISF-Allion World

  Patty Jansen

  Contents

  Author’s mailing list

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About the Author

  More By This Author

  Author’s mailing list

  Click on the image above or visit pattyjansen.com to sign up for Patty’s mailing list. You get four series starter books for free!

  1

  The young woman's skin was pale as milk. Curls of red hair danced about her face when she moved her head. The sign on her lab coat said Starship Comfort, the hospital ship in the fleet.

  Aidin stared, one hand on the bar, standing in the glare of the screen that displayed her larger-than-life. All around him, his fellow soldiers laughed and drank and talked, but their voices faded as he concentrated on the newscast.

  "You are aware that your work causes controversy amongst certain groups on Earth?" This was an interviewer, out of view of the camera.

  The young woman tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with a delicate hand. "I am aware of that, but the construct soldiers are fine-tuned to our requirements, and have different abilities. They like what they're doing. They are people and not mindless clones. No one has ever won a war with an army of identical soldiers."

  Something clicked in Aidin's mind.

  Charlotte. That was her name.

  The barkeeper's voice broke his thoughts. "Mate? Are you listening? Can I have your account?"

  Aidin's attention returned to the noisy bar of the Starship Forward, the strobe-lit sea of International Space Force uniforms. He flipped his account card out of his breast pocket.

  He could only think Charlotte, Charlotte.

  How could he ever have forgotten her?

  Donagh waited in the corridor, leaning against the wall. He stood on one foot, while he braced the other at waist-height against the opposite wall.

  Aidin stopped, swaying with the effects of too much beer, or travelling long-term at hyperspeed, it was hard to tell which. "Can I get past, mate. I want to get to my cabin."

  Donagh didn't move.

  Aidin considered pushing past him, but Donagh was taller than him, broader in the shoulder and shorter of temper.

  "Why won't you late me past? What's your problem?"

  Donagh's face twisted in a snarl. "I saw you looking at her."

  Aidin froze, glanced into Donagh's eyes. What did he know about Charlotte? "Yes, so what?"

  "So what. She's my girlfriend. We met way back on Earth."

  "You are mistaken, pal. She's my girlfriend. I met her in that restaurant on the beach."

  "That's bullshit. I did."

  Donagh swung his arm. Aidin ducked and Donagh's fist slammed into the opposite wall. Aidin ran, but Donagh grabbed the back of his shirt. They both fell.

  "Boys!"

  Silence.

  Captain Crozier stood in the corridor, her hands on her hips, several shades of thunder on her face.

  "May I ask what this is about?"

  "Well—uhm..." Donagh sat up, brushing dust off his uniform. He gave Aidin a sharp look. "Nothing, Ma'am."

  "Hmph. Make sure that 'nothing' doesn't interfere with your duty. Go back to your cabins, both of you."

  A gun, that was it.

  His superiors had trained Rane in rockets and guns, bombs and explosive charges.

  Every night he dreamed of those, as if they had been grafted onto his brain, which of course they had. He was not dumb. He vaguely remembered waking up in some sort of cubicle, and attending sessions with a psychiatrist. He remembered the room, its military cleanliness, and remembered passing out on a table with something attached to his head.

  Since then, he'd dreamed of exploding rockets and plasti-bombs. Setting charges, calibrating how much to use and where to attach it, how far to move away and how strong the trigger signal needed to be.

  Guns exploded, too, even though his tutors seemed to know little about this.

  For this job, a rocket would be too coarse. Delicate girls with fox-red curls did not appreciate rockets. But she would appreciate his very personal gun. He could feel himself take it out. He could feel her hand on it, soft and dainty.

  He would slide it into her soft flesh and ride her like a horse. She'd buck and writhe and...

  He arched his back.

  Hit his head on the bottom of Karl's bunk.

  Ouch.

  It was pitch dark in the cabin, and silent except for the hissing of air out of the ceiling vent and the humming of the starship's engines. And the thudding of his heart.

  Oh for fuck's sake. He'd been humping his pillow.

  Yet the girl was real, he knew that. Red-headed. Charlotte.

  He needed a drink.

  He scrambled from his bunk and went into the corridor.

  Someone was already there, a lanky silhouette leaning against the wall.

  Rane took a cup from the dispenser set it in the wall recess and turned on the tap. "Goodnight, Stani. Waiting for anything?"

  "You."

  The low light glistened off Stani's gun. "I'm gonna get you for messing with my girl."

  2

  Doctor Spencer cracked his knuckles; he always did that when he was nervous and I knew the figure who sat opposite the desk made him more nervous than usual.

  With her stiff dress jacket, buttons and stars of her uniform glittering, Commander Carla Avery looked severe without even trying.

  Dr Spencer licked his lips and looked at the screen, as if that would make the bad news go away. He broke the tense silence. "I'm afraid we need some time to investigate, Ma'am."

  "Time? How much time?"

  "That depends on what we find."

  Commander Avery fingered her upper lip. "The construct is still alive?"

  "He is, Ma'am. His organs may be damaged, but his brain functions normally. We can replace the organs, but... whatever is wrong in his mind might take much longer to repair."

  "What sort of malfunction are we looking at?"

  "Could be anything. Men from his unit say that they managed to wrestle him to the ground and to divest him of his laser. Apparently, the other soldier said something that upset him."

  "Enough to turn the gun on a comrade?"

  In the treatment room next to Dr Spencer's office, I glanced at the face of the construct agent. A clone, some said. I preferred to call them men. He had been brought in, pale and near death, from the emergency shuttle that had dropped off Starship Forward, out of hyperspeed to meet us, the support fleet.

  Even though he was out of danger, we kept him sedated. His eyes remained closed in crescent-moon slivers of hair.

  His nose, straight and aristocratic, reminded me of the marble statues of classic times. There was a nasty bruise on his cheekbone and there were laser-inflicted injuries on his legs, now invisible under the blanket. Whoever had shot him had done damage to a major artery and he had nearly bled to death. He'd have to go into surgery again later today.

  "What does the other soldier have to say?" Carla Avery's voice drifted in from the office.

  Dr Spencer replied, "We don't know. None of them will admit who it was."

  That was typical for c
onstruct behaviour. When faced with one of us, whom they called pristine humans, they banded together and said nothing.

  "What's his stock?" Commander Avery asked.

  "Kessler. This man's an explosives specialist. They shouldn't be aggressive. Kessler stock are technicians, thinkers."

  "Dr Spencer, this worries me, as you will understand. The International Space Force has staked its reputation on the human construct program. Possibly in two months' time, we face deployment of our troops. These men need to be one hundred percent reliable. I want a report on this by tomorrow."

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  There was the sound of a chair being pushed backwards and the door being slid open. When I looked again, Carla Avery was gone.

  Heaving a sigh, Dr Spencer pushed himself up from his chair and came into the lab, advancing silently to the examination table where the patient lay. I knew Dr Spencer was about fifty years old, but he looked at least ten years older, his straw-coloured hair dishevelled, dark patches under his eyes. I didn't know how long ago he'd first heard of these troubles. As fleet surgeon, he dealt with lots of things beyond my domain of the research lab.

  "Any reaction?" He pulled the blanket over the man's chest as if tending a sick child; his hands trembled.

  I shook my head.

  "You asked Julia to scan his brain activity?"

  I nodded.

  "Nothing abnormal?"

  "Nothing at all."

  "Charlotte, we need to find out what is happening, and fast. Download this construct's mind base and modules and see if you can find anything unusual."

  I met his eyes then, and read a strange expression there. Despair almost.

  I froze, realising, or thinking I realised, what it meant. "This is not the only one behaving strangely?"

  He shook his head. "Nothing quite as serious as this, though, but there was a skirmish between two soldiers outside the bar aboard the Forward. Then another soldier was shot by one of his comrades. Fortunately, the charge missed the vital organs, and it could be taken care of by the on-board med-station, but..." He shrugged. "This is not good. They'll have to fight a war. They can't start fighting amongst themselves."

  3

  Find the routine that made this man act strangely. That was easy for him to say. All right, he knew a fair bit about neuro-informatics, since we had worked on this project together, but he was the surgeon who had overseen the production of the men's bodies and I dealt with mindbases, containing their basic personality traits, and memory modules, mini circuits of nano-particles sprayed into the constructs' brains, which could be charged to hold data that made the recipient a specialist in a desired field. Once installed, the circuit integrated in the construct's brain, and emitted the micro-electric signals which translated into knowledge, thoughts and feelings. Inserting the module was easy, but reading and translating the signals later was messy, and trying to look for a small snatch of misfiring brain-fart brought the words "needle" and "haystack" to mind.

  But it had to be done, and I was the constructs' neuro-specialist.

  I glanced at the computer next to the bed. A small icon blinked to indicate that the medicine dispenser was reducing the supply of sedative. Meanwhile, data read-out flowed across the screen, from the man's mind, blocks of hexadecimal numbers.

  I activated the translation software that produced a file I could read.

  "Charlotte." The man's voice was no more than a whisper, but warm and full of feeling.

  I gasped and nearly tipped backwards. How did he know my name?

  I knew that the reduced flow of sedative from the machine meant he would wake, but normally the men woke with a groan or a curse, or by saying they were hungry. It depended on the stock. Men from Kessler stock were often quiet; they were thinkers.

  I pushed the chair away from the computer and went to his side, heart thudding. "Do you have any pain?"

  He whispered, "Leg."

  "Yes, you took a bit of a hit, but I'll give you something—"

  As I bent over the bed, his hand had gripped mine, sweaty and strong.

  I called, "Hey." I hadn't expected him to have recovered that quickly.

  I tried to wriggle free, casting a glance at the sedative dispenser, a little box with a blinking light, trying to judge if I could reach it if I needed to. My brain chose this moment to remind me that this man had attempted to kill a comrade.

  "Charlotte, don't you remember me?" His voice was hoarse.

  "Remember?"

  Constructs didn't come with memories. When their bodies came out of the lab, we gave them knowledge. First the mind base, then we woke them up and added knowledge modules.

  "Yes, we walked together, and went out to dinner, to... Pete's."

  How did he know about Pete's? Yes, I had been to dinner to Pete's on the pier many times, usually with large groups of people, sometimes with men who had heard I had been accepted for the space program and thought to get in through the back door, as a partner. Never with constructs who hadn't even been made by that time.

  He moved his other hand from under the blanket and stroked the skin on my arm. His eyes focused on mine. They were brown.

  Keep him talking, keep him talking. "Remind me."

  "You must remember. I remember you. The sun was shining in your hair and it looked like it was on fire. Someone said it was the same colour as a traffic light, but I thought it was like the brightest of autumn leaves."

  My heart thudded against my ribs. In all the years I had worked with them, the men had never shown any violence towards me, and their minds were too immature for sexual feelings. There was always a first for anything, and here I was, alone, and trapped.

  "Please, let me go. You're in hospital, and you need to rest before you go into surgery." I pulled my arm, but he was much too strong. I knew. We made them like that.

  "Charlotte, I love you more than anyone. Don't fight me. I would never hurt you."

  That was it. I reached for the screen next to the bed with my free hand and hit the button of the sedative dispenser. Lights blinked faster. His eyes lost focus.

  His grip slackened. I sat there, heart thudding, with his warm hand still covering mine. I slowly slid my arm out from under his. His other arm flopped off the table and swung a few times before coming to a rest.

  Shit. You didn't handle that very well, Doc.

  I sank bank onto my chair, staring at his limp form.

  What he said was terribly poetic. I didn't know the constructs could see things like that, had they been his own memories he was seeing, which they weren't, because these hazel eyes would never have seen the Sun except as a tiny speck through the onboard telescope. And he certainly would never have been to Pete's. Where had this come from?

  I sat down to look at the data readout I had earlier produced. The routines were all familiar to me, since I had written most of them, using vast databases with information I had collected from the world's best and brightest scientists.

  I scrolled through the material in an aimless way. This man was from the Kessler family stock, an explosives technology specialist, who had Tech1, Tech2 and Elect1 modules inserted.

  I scrolled through the content of the modules, lines of verb-noun combinations, but there was no way I'd find anything remotely poetic in there. I had written those modules; I knew exactly what was in them.

  This strange behaviour could only have come from the mindbase, the core knowledge of what it meant to be human. This was a standard file that was the same for all men, onto which we grafted capabilities we desired. It was a bit like a custom-made pizza. In this case, the problem with the strange taste seemed to be in the dough.

  I rose and folded the arm that hung over the side of the examination table back over his chest and tucked it under the blanket, so he didn't look so much like a dead body. He was relaxed now, and his chest moved up and down in deep, regular breaths. I'll admit it: he was handsome. Most of them were.

  What he had said was really romantic. None of my ro
tten former boyfriends would ever have said anything like that to me. I like your hair was the closest they came. I suspected most people didn't like my hair. It was loud, in-your-face and totally untameable. At school, they used to call me carrots, in college "the red one". No one had ever described my hair as "the colour of autumn leaves".

  I stroked a curl out of his face, wishing I knew where he got that knowledge.

  4

  I was still staring at the modules when the bell rang for dinner. I slipped off my gown at the door and stepped into the corridor in my regular shirt and trousers, army green, with my rank and name on a badge on my chest. A steady stream of similarly green-clad people was making their way through the corridors, all those one the same diner shift as I.

  "Hey Charlie. How 'ya going with that spunk?" That was Julia.

  She came to walk next to me, about my size but with brown spiky hair and a lean body that was all elbows and knees and wiry muscle.

  "He's... all right, I guess. Cleaned up well after surgery."

  "Did he wake up?"

  "Not yet." What a dreadful lie.

  "Y'know what I reckon? They started fighting because there's no construct women on board. The top brass should have allowed them a few girls and they woulda been much happier."

  I forced a grin, remembering the intense look the man had given me.

  "Anyway, Charlie, you know I came second?"

  "Uhm—second?"

  I stared at her, trying to remember what race I'd forgotten this time. Like most other females on board, she was constantly in competition with the men about who was the toughest guy. She wore her uniform and badge with pride, Lt. J. Fenwicke, with the ISF logo next to it, stretched taut over her virtually flat chest.

  "The marathon."

  "Oh. Congratulations."

  "Congratulations! Charlie, you're so funny. I beat almost all the men."

  "That's great. I mean, really."

  "Hey, we need more girls. Why don't you take part next time?"