by Steve Perry
Salvaje opened the door and the two of them moved in out of the rain. “They fear me,” he said. “Because of my message.”
“Ratshit,” Pindar said. “There are a hundred like you breaking into the nets every day. They preach about everything from pure water to group sex being the way to God. The TCC doesn’t work up a sweat trying to run them down, but somehow you rate a full-scale investigation. They want you bad. I have been questioned.”
“And you told them…?
“Nothing, you think I’m stupid? They can bury a man so deep nobody can find him again. But I want to know what I’m into here. Why are you so important?”
“I told you, my message.”
“Listen—”
“No, you listen! You are nothing, you are an insect! The Messiah is coming! I am a tool of the incarnate god and I will not be slowed by such as you. If you need something to fear, then fear me, technician. I have eyes and ears everywhere, and if you fail to serve me, there will be no hole deep enough to hide you from my retribution, do you understand?”
Pindar shook his head and started to turn away.
Salvaje grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him around, and shoved him so hard the man fairly flew backward to slam into the wall.
“Fuck!”
“If you do anything to thwart my broadcasts I will see to it that you die in a way more horrible than anything you can possibly imagine! Do you understand?”
The technician’s eyes went wide with sudden fear. “Yeah, yeah, okay, okay! It’s just getting dangerous, that’s all I wanted to say. It’ll cost—”
“I care not what it costs! The time is almost upon us. The message must continue. My organization is formed, I have hundreds, thousands, who do my bidding without knowing who I am, but I need the message to go forth!”
Pindar stared at Salvaje. Salvaje felt nothing but contempt for the technician. He was weak, cowardly, fearing of things that had no meaning. The Messiah would have no use for such as this. None at all.
* * *
Onboard the Bionational ship K-014 somewhere in the nowhen and nowhere of hypershift, Massey spoke to his crew of androids. They were experimental models with short lifespans and were definitely expendable. The company had made up just this one batch with their particular modifications, and if word got out how they’d been altered, the company would have to do some fast singing and dancing to explain it. The androids could have been programmed with the mission before leaving Earth, but Massey was not one to take chances. By keeping it to himself, risk was minimized. You couldn’t pry an answer from somebody who didn’t have it, and Massey could snuff his own life if he were ever captured, leaving only questions.
Massey stood in front of the holographic wall, images of the government transport ship Benedict floating just behind him. “All right,” he said, “here is our target. There are five main entrances, three emergency hatches, nine service portals, counting the main bay. Our primary entrance will be the number one aft hatch, here.” He pointed at the shimmering image. “Secondary entrance, in the event of blockage, will be the number two forward hatch here. Tertiary entrance will be the number one emergency hatch, here.”
The androids watched, not speaking.
“You will be armed with splatterguns for soft targets only. While these are trained marines, we will have surprise on our side—they are not expecting us. Plus we have other ammunition in our arsenal.
“The crew and marine survivors will be kept alive until we reach our destination, where we will likely have further use for them. Access the tactical computer for your individual assignments, full data base assimilation by 0400 tomorrow. That’s all.”
The android crew sat, still unspeaking. They were, Massey knew, up to the task. There was some risk of failure, a tang of spice, as it were, but Massey did not doubt that he could overcome the slight chance. He had worked out the plan in the finest details, he had covered everything. He was the best there was at this kind of thing, and he would succeed. That was the point, really. Not the money he was paid, not the fortunes the company would make, not the deaths of the androids or the other crew. The thing was, as always, the challenge.
This was perhaps the trickiest job he had ever taken on, and he intended that it come out as smooth as machine lube on polished crystal. Massey had but one goal, the same as it had always been: to win. Anything less would not do. Better to die than to lose.
He grinned. He wasn’t ready to die yet. So he wouldn’t.
* * *
Onboard the transport ship Benedict when the marines came out of hypersleep, the surprise took a while to filter through to Stephens. Wilks wondered if the man would have noticed at all had not the head count come out one too many.
The squads picked it up right away—they all knew each other—so Billie stood out for them. But Stephens was a chair jockey; he had a list of his troops somewhere and couldn’t yet identify them by names or faces.
Wilks watched the colonel frown at the numbers on his flat screen.
“Sergeant Wilks,” Stephens said.
“Sir.”
“I’ve got a plus-one on my roster.”
Wilks thought about letting it slide, just to see, but he’d find out sooner or later. No point in putting it off forever. “Yes, sir. I brought an extra person, sir.”
Stephens blinked as if still groggy from the chamber. “What?”
“Sir. A civilian expert on the aliens.”
“What?! Are you crazy? This is a top-secret military mission, Sergeant! I’ll have your butt court-martialed! They’ll put you in a pit so deep it’ll take the ceiling light a year to get to you!”
Wilks could feel some of the marines smiling, but he didn’t look to see which ones. He said, “Yes, sir.”
Stephens looked at the troopers, and Wilks knew he was trying to figure out which one he didn’t know. Trying and failing. He stalled. “I told them you were unreliable. You could have screwed up this entire mission, mister! G-ship balances are critical at light-year jumps! An extra person could have thrown us a parsec off while in hypershift!”
“I balanced the weight, sir. I dumped fifty kilos of that raspberry-flavored shit from stores just prior to lift off.”
Behind Wilks, Bueller whispered to Easley: “Too bad. I liked that raspberry-flavored shit myself—”
“Shut up,” Easley whispered back.
“I am going to throw you in the brig and scramble the code,” Stephens said, still looking for who didn’t belong. Since they were all still in robes over their sleeptites, there was nothing to give Billie away; a robe also covered her hospital clothes. As stupid as it was, Wilks was amused that Stephens couldn’t make her. Confirmed his opinion of the colonel.
Time to flex a little muscle. “Sir, you could do that. But perhaps GENstaff might be interested in knowing why the CO didn’t discover the stowaway before lift-off, given that a final inspection is part of the CO’s duties. Sir.”
Wilks knew this was Stephens’s first field command and that he did not want anything to mar it, make him look bad. Now was the time for his pitch. “Sir, if I might have a more private word?”
Stephens was pissed, no doubt about it, but he had to be working the angles, trying to see how this was going to look once he got home. Since Wilks wouldn’t bet a bent demicred that he was going to get home, that didn’t much matter to him, but Stephens wouldn’t be thinking like that.
Stephens turned and moved toward the aft wall.
Wilks followed him. Behind them, the squads stood at parade rest, watching and trying to hear.
When they were far enough away, Stephens turned. His fury was unabated. “This better be goddamned good, Wilks.”
“Sir, if you could show that you were responsible for taking on a civilian expert, then there wouldn’t be any problem. You buried a CMA code in your log, didn’t you?”
Stephens glared at Wilks. If eyes were lasers, Wilks would have been a crisp brown spot sizzling on the deck by now. Wilks hadn’t
been able to check Stephens’s CO log, the access commands for that were beyond his abilities as a computer break-in artist, but he was fairly certain that the colonel had installed a CMA—cover my ass—code so that it was dated near the start of the mission. This was SOP among nervous officers, a simple piece of insurance that could sit there unused, unless something wonky came up. It was easy enough. Log entries were all automatically timed and dated; a CMA code was some innocuous piece of input, usually a phrase that was related to whatever data were going in, but stilted in such a way that it didn’t quite fit. If a situation arose that was unforeseen, the officer could use the code to cover himself by entering new data and then referring back to the phrase, as if it had been put there in anticipation of such happenings. Any lengthy phrase could be made to say almost anything a bright computer wanted later, and the officer could swear he or she had known about it in advance and covered it, but in code, so as to keep it secret from prying eyes.
Suppose your cook was stealing supplies and selling them on the black market. You came up a couple hundred kilos short when you did inventory. This would make a CO look bad. But if there was a code that said something like “Suspect that cook is stealing supplies, will allow him to continue to build case,” then you knew you were on top of it, and what you did was justified in the interests of being certain. It was an old trick, one that shouldn’t fool anybody who’d been in the service more than ten minutes, but one bad officers still used. Wilks was certain Stephens would have done it.
“Why should I help you?”
“Because, sir, you’d be helping yourself. I’ll put the rumor out that our… discussion here is part of a clever subterfuge you worked up, for reasons of your own having to do with some kind of secret military business about which they don’t want to know. When we get back to Earth, you’re covered and I’ll go quietly wherever you want me to go.”
Stephens considered it. He didn’t like it, Wilks could see that, but he was thinking about his future and that was the most important thing on his agenda. “All right,” he said. “Trot him out and let me see him.”
“See her,” Wilks said.
“Where did you get her?”
“I broke her out of a mental hospital. Sir.”
14
Wilks sat next to Billie in the mess hall as they picked at the reconstituted eggs and hard biscuits of the microwaved Ship Meal Packet. Billie had eaten worse, but not recently.
“You okay, kid?”
She nodded. “Yeah. A few aches and stiffness, but otherwise all right.”
Wilks ate a bite of his too yellow scrambled eggs. As he did, Billie glanced around the room. First squad sat bunched in twos or threes at tables nearby. There were eight of them, and Billie had made a point of matching the names and faces within a few hours of awakening. Five men and three women. The women were Blake, Jones, and Mbutu. The men were Easley, Ramirez, Smith, Chin, and the tall blond one, Bueller. There were three other squads of Colonial Marines, thirty-two troopers in all, plus a skeleton ship’s crew of nine. Counting herself, Wilks and the officer in charge, Stephens, that meant a total of forty-four people going to challenge an entire planet of the aliens.
There had been five times that many people on Rim, and only a single nest of the things there. And she and Wilks had been the only survivors. Not very encouraging.
She couldn’t say how long she’d sat there blanked out, remembering, but Wilks pulled her back to the present. “I’m going to go shower,” he said. “You going to be okay here?”
“Yes. I’m fine.”
After Wilks left, Billie sat and stared at her cold food. The mess hall was not a large room. The other conversations were audible from time to time.
“Man, Stephens had a bug up his nose, hey?” Easley said.
“He’s a groundpounder, what do you expect?” Chin said.
“Me, I think our sergeant is more than a little bit off the beam,” Ramirez put in. “A few minutes short of an hour, if you know what I mean.”
Blake pulled out a deck of cards. “Anybody for a little poker? Chin? Easley? Bueller?”
“Not me,” Easley said. “I got walk-through duty. Keep a seat warm for me, though. Back in an hour.” He stood and moved toward the door. There was a headset with throat pickup mike set into a recess there, and Easley took the com unit and slipped it on, nestling the earpiece into his left ear. “Watch Bueller, he deals from the bottom.”
“Your ass, needledick,” Bueller said.
“Big enough so your mother loves it,” Easley said. He laughed and left.
Billie stared at her food. These guys did not know what they were up against, no matter what Wilks had told them. It was one thing to hear somebody tell it, another to face the things, to feel them.
Not something Billie wanted to do again, even though she knew she had to do it. Amazing how the memories came back. She felt as if she were a kid again. A scared kid.
* * *
Easley strolled down the corridor, the faux gravity making it feel almost like a walk through a building on Earth, maybe a bit lighter. He passed the first check station, flashed his lume into a couple of recesses the overheads didn’t show, then spoke into the com, directly to the computer’s recorder. “This is Easley, T. J., on walk-through duty, 1230 hours.” He rattled off his serial number, the ship coordinates, and his findings: “Inspection so far reveals patent hull, no stress cracks, no animal or insect manifestations.”
Yeah, and no runs, no hits, no errors.
This sucked, having to walk inspection. What did they make robots for? The things could see better, move faster, and they didn’t care if they were missing a good poker game while they did it, either. This was make-work, Stephens was a by-the-tape commander, and next thing you knew he’d have them shining their boots and practicing close-order drill. Stupid.
Easley moved along, shining his light into dark spots along the corridor, finding what he expected to find: nothing.
As he reached the aft quarter of his intended loop, he heard something. A faint, voicelike sound. He stopped. Sounded like it was coming from the number four cargo hold.
Easley hesitated. All walk-through was supposed to do was check the hull sandwich, not go poking into closed compartments. Whatever it was, it wasn’t his business.
The sound came again. Almost like somebody talking very quietly.
Could be some kind of transfer echo, Easley thought. That happened sometimes. An air-conditioning vent picked up a voice on one part of the ship and transferred it somewhere else. The dense plastics and metals used on a no-frills military vessel did some strange things with vibrations. Easley remembered once being able to hear guys singing in the shower halfway around a T-2 troop ship.
Yeah, that’s probably what it was. Besides, he was only supposed to do the hull, that was the drill, nothing else. He started to walk on.
There it was again.
Well, what the hell, he was curious. Might as well check it out, it wasn’t like he had an appointment anywhere or anything.
He moved to the sliding door to the cargo area, thumbed the open pad.
“—Benedict to K-014, telemetry data uploading—”
Somebody was talking, no doubt about that, Easley heard. He moved through the cargo area, rounded one of the stack-boxes. Well, would you look at this. It wasn’t an echo transfer, there the guy was, right in front of him. He had his back turned, Easley couldn’t ID him.
“Hey,” Easley began, “what are you?”
That was as far as he got. The figure spun and then Easley felt a tremendous pain lance his throat, as if somebody had stabbed him there.
“Uhhh!” Easley sucked air, felt it impeded, reached for his neck. Felt his hands touch something wet and hot extending from his throat. As big around as his thumb, all the way through!
He tried to yell, found his voice wouldn’t work. All he could manage was a wordless groan. The sound turned to a gurgle as warm liquid ran down his damaged windpipe. “Mmmm! A
aughh!”
He recognized the man who had done it, but he couldn’t say the name.
Something slammed into his solar plexus, and what air Easley had was stolen. He… couldn’t… breathe!
He bent forward, pulling at the spike through his neck. It started to move, despite the slippery fluid coating it.
Then something smashed his head and it all went gray.
* * *
On the Benedict’s bridge the tech monitoring ship’s systems cursed. The pilot, busy feeding corrected stellar coordinates into his console, glanced over. “What?”
“I show the aft number two interior lock open.”
The pilot glanced at his own board. “Yeah, I see it.”
The tech said, “Is there a drill scheduled? Nobody told me.”
“That’s a negative. Nothing on the board. Call the lock and find out what the hell is going on.”
“Copy.” The tech spoke into his throat mike. “This is Systems Control. Who opened the inner door there?”
The tech waited. Nobody responded.
“I say again, this is Systems Control. Respond, whoever is in lock A-2.”
Nothing.
“Where is the camera?” the pilot asked.
The tech’s hands danced over the controls. “I’m not getting a signal from the monitor in the lock.”
“Dammit! Call the jarhead commander and find out what’s going on!”
“Colonel Stephens, this is Systems Control, do you read?”
The pilot looked at his own board. “Buddha. Where the hell is he?”
“Maybe he’s taking a shower, got his unit off,” the tech said. “Hello?”
“What?”
“The hatch is cycling closed.”
“Well, that’s something. Stupid marines ought not to be playing with the hardware—”
“Uh-oh.”
The pilot looked at his board, saw the source of the tech’s new worry. The outer hatch cycling open.
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m going to stop it right now,” the pilot said. “We’ve got a corrective burn coming up and I sure as hell don’t need a hole in the barn wall when it happens. I’m going to override and close that sucker.”