Tristan smiled to hear the laughter that filtered in through the Tacnet. It was heartening to realize that gallows humor was still alive and well among the marines, despite the hell they’d been through. They would die with their honor intact.
The tank nearest them sprouted a line of light, as if a crack had opened to a brightly lit interior. As its armored skin pulled apart, Tristan realized that that was exactly what was happening.
A figure, bipedal and humanoid, came into view. Only when it emerged completely and left the light did Tristan realize that the figure wasn’t just humanoid but actually human. It was a slight blond man dressed in what looked like shorts and a T-shirt. He was fiddling with some sort of rectangular device and frowning.
When he finally looked up at them and spoke, his voice filled the tunnel.
“What are your terms?”
“What?” Cora said.
“Your terms. Unless my translator is malfunctioning again, you asked for our surrender. I am asking what your terms are.”
Cora just gaped at him. The man returned her look with an earnest, level expression before he broke into a smile.
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I am joking, of course. But if you fought your way through what we left on that planet, you are a formidable fighting force indeed. Had there been more of you, we might have considered surrendering and joining forces with you.”
“Who are you? What is this?”
The man shrugged. “I’m just a delegate. If the information that they’re piping through to me about you is accurate, you’ll be talking to more important people pretty soon.”
He gestured around the tunnel. “As to this, it was once a colony world called Crystallia. It’s no longer inhabited except for some custodians. We got beamed here when you tripped the alarm.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a remote installation. Nowadays, no one can believe that people used to live here, back during the war, but it’s true. We currently use it to store access portals to blockaded worlds whose inhabitants are considered too dangerous to service from more central planets. As you probably realized, we’re prepared to deal with anything that might walk through that gate, and there are tunnels similar to this one that lead to other interdicted prison worlds.”
“There are more planets full of those things?”
“Not just those. We’ve encountered a number of hostile intelligences. Whenever possible, we try to coexist in peace. But it’s not always possible. What you stumbled on was the remnant of an ancient war.”
“Makes sense that it should happen to us. After all, we’re the remnant of an even older war. Just glad I missed the punch up with those black wing fellows. I don’t think I would have been able to survive it.”
“There is much worse than the Oneness loose in the galaxy.”
Tristan felt Cora shudder against him. He could understand what she was feeling. These things had, with nothing more than tiny single fighters, obliterated a complete task force. He wouldn’t want to run into something worse.
“We’ve got some bad news about your containment field. We took it down when we hit the planet.”
“We know. Another team is getting set up to address the issue. Since you’ve managed to seal the portal again, it should be much simpler to do. We’re letting the other races know as well, but we’ll have to volunteer to do the cleanup without help. It’s only fair. Humans broke the containment field, after all.”
He looked them up and down. “Well, anyhow, you’re safe now. I’ve got instructions to take you back to Gliese with me.” He hesitated. “But before I turn you over to the committee, can I ask you a question? About the containment field, I mean?”
“Sure,” Cora said.
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“That, my friend, is a long story. Buy us a drink when the big shots are done with us and we’ll tell you all about it.”
***
Except for the fact that it was filled with life forms that she couldn’t identify and wouldn’t have even been able to imagine if she hadn’t seen them, the bar could have been taken from their own time, two hundred and fifteen thousand years ago.
It was dimly lit, overcrowded, smelly, and noisy. There were small tables in the center and even stalls for privacy against one wall. Those creatures that could drink had drinks in front of them. But the most surprising thing about the place was that it had a bar. An actual bar. With human-sized stools.
The marines had congregated there. Most of them were exhausted beyond the limits of endurance, and shell-shocked and culture-shocked to boot. Most of them hadn’t even begun to process the sudden shift in both their fortunes and the universe they were expected to survive in.
But no marine worth his exoskeleton would ever have turned down a free drink, and the delegate was as good as his word. Besides, the bar was one place in their new environment that they could actually understand. She’d noticed that they seemed to relax a little almost the moment they walked inside. A bar was a bar.
Tina sighed. She hadn’t relaxed at all. She felt completely alone, in a way that she’d never been before. Separated from everything she’d ever known and loved not just by space—she could deal with a few light years here and there—but by an unimaginable expanse of time. At least the marines, even the dropship pilots who’d survived, had a peer group. She was the only civilian in the group.
But she knew that her pain was nothing compared to what another member of their group was going through.
Ian was sitting alone, far from everyone else except for two marines who’d taken it upon themselves to keep an eye on him. She approached one of them. “It’s Tom, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Tina, right?”
“Yeah. Pleased to finally be introduced.” They laughed. “You were the one who pulled him through, weren’t you?”
“Yeah. He put up a good fight, too. He did not want to come. Wanted to blow himself up with the commander.”
“I know.”
“And I keep wondering if I did the right thing. Maybe he would have been better off dying. I think he wants it.”
“Is that why you’re keeping an eye on him? In case he tries to kill himself.”
The marine nodded.
“I don’t think you need to worry. He’ll pull through. Go have some fun, I’ll take care of him.” She walked to where Ian was sitting. “How’s the drink?” The thing he was drinking was fluorescent green.
“Watered down. You’d think something that looks like this would knock you ass-over-appetite after a couple of sips, but I should have known that bars wouldn’t change.”
“Mind if I sit down?”
“Go ahead.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Well, I want to hear about it.”
Ian seemed about to retort, but something held him back. Maybe he remembered that she’d lost quite a bit because of the mission as well, or maybe it was something else, but Ian sighed. “Two weeks ago, I was saying goodbye to my wife. She said she’d wait for me, go into stasis for the expected duration of the mission.
“I told her not to do it, and I think she realized then that it was a suicide mission. She begged me to back out. I told her it was impossible. That they’d have me shot. I really believed that. But here I am, still alive, and she’s not.”
“Do you think you betrayed her?”
“No… maybe. I don’t know. I just miss her, and I can’t believe she’s been dead so long that her bones have probably crumbled to dust. I saw her two weeks ago, for God’s sake!”
“The troops are afraid you’ll try to kill yourself.”
“Me? I doubt it. I’m too much of a coward.”
“I don’t think the commander would agree with that. Do you?”
He stared into his drink. “She ordered me to go, you know. And when I didn’t, she made that marine kid drag me with him. I wanted to die with her, and I know… I know that she want
ed me with her. I could see it in her eyes. She didn’t want to die alone either. But she still made them drag me off.”
“She was a great woman.”
“That sounds so stupid. ‘A great woman.’ What does that matter? Do you think she cared? That’s not even why she did what she did. She lost her husband. The man didn’t wake up. And that took her to the edge, where she didn’t really feel human anymore. I know why she sacrificed herself: it was because she couldn’t live with what she’d become.” He took a deep draught. “And for what? A fleet that went nowhere near the real battle. We didn’t manage to slow the blobs down. You heard what the delegate said… the blobs took Tau and overran Earth. Humanity scattered to the winds, tiny pockets of survivors. We had to hide from everyone until the Uploaders found us and the war against the Oneness began. What we did didn’t matter. Everything we lost was for nothing.”
“But others like us managed to succeed. Humanity won the war, in the end. Or at least we came out the other end free and successful, an important part of the galactic community. People like the commander must have been there every step of the way.”
“I guess.” He didn’t sound convinced. “But it just seems like such a waste.”
“Think of it this way. She should have been dead hundreds of thousands of years ago. It shouldn’t make any difference to you today, so far in her future.”
“That’s stupid.”
But he was thawing. She could see it. He was reconciling himself to where he was, and that there might be something here and now worth seeing. “You might be right. But I’m sure of something else. If she knew you were sitting in a bar drinking… whatever that is, and not raising a glass in her memory, she’d come back from the grave and kick your ass.”
“Now that is definitely true.” He raised the glass.
Tina said: “To Melina.”
She must have inherited her father’s command voice. The marines around them somehow heard her through the noise and stopped talking. Each solemnly raised whatever they had in hand and took a slow, ceremonial sip.
Chapter 22
Hémery heard his footsteps echo in the Lapland’s empty corridors. Most of the crew was in stasis as they headed out to the nearest star. Relativistic time contraction meant that it would only be a three-year—subjective time—run to the nearest star but most of the men and women on board had decided to sleep through it.
They’d dealt with the problem of faulty pods by ignoring it: a factory ship could produce brand new parts, especially considering the fact that the crew was much smaller than it was when they set out.
Of course, there was always a skeleton crew that stayed awake, going into stasis in shifts. They spent most of their time staring at sensor screens, trying to spot any sign of the vampire fleet coming after them. Hoping never to see it. They spent the rest of their time trying to find the Minstrel.
His own reasons for staying awake were far more complex. He needed closure.
The ship’s morgue held exactly one occupant. They’d long since decided to recycle the bodies of everyone who’d died on the trip out to the system, so nearly all the metal drawers were empty.
Except one.
He pulled it open and looked onto Irene’s face. It would be his last visit to this particular victim.
In the excitement of an impending attack by the vampire swarm and the flight that followed, the scientist’s crimes had been completely forgotten. Every member of the ship’s crew was needed to batten the hatches and Hémery was no exception. Like everyone on board, he wore many hats, and investigating crimes was the least of them.
He was surprised as anyone else when her body was discovered.
By the time the airlock door opened, the pressure inside was the same as that outside. There was no differential to blow her out into space. That meant that the death-grip she’d kept on the handle of the inner door had kept her in place.
Eventually, the airlock had automatically cycled closed and the cleaning systems had realized there was something in there. The system had alerted the maintenance crew and the body had been recovered.
In light of the evidence he had against her, Hémery was certain that it had been suicide. Unable to face the certainty of having her reputation destroyed, Irene had taken the drastic step of killing herself. He’d even put that in his file.
But time passed and he began to doubt the theory. For one thing, she had seemed the type to fight to the bitter end. She’d been convinced that she was right and that everyone else on the ship was not just wrong, but uncivilized and incapable of seeing how stupid they actually were.
If she had killed herself, he was sure she wouldn’t have done it like that. Why drain the airlock slowly? It was an awful way to go, especially on a ship which had machines that could create any pill you wanted at the touch of a button. Even with her lab locked away, Irene probably had access to dozens of toxic chemicals.
Hémery asked around a bit and when one of the tech crew confirmed that the airlocks couldn’t be activated from the inside without emergency override codes, he hadn’t even been surprised.
Now, all that remained was to discover who had killed her.
Yes, the woman had deserved it, deserved every second of the excruciating agony she must have gone through. But now that it was done, it was his job to find the killer and bring him to justice.
Hémery got to work on the assumption that it had to be someone who was in the loop, who knew what Irene had done. One of the higher ups among the scientist, most likely. He tried to requisition the video from the maintenance team, but by the time he got around to that, the people who operated the archives had been placed in stasis. His request wasn’t deemed important enough to wake anyone about.
He had two choices: to wait until one of the qualified techs woke and gave him a hand or to try to do it himself.
A murder victim couldn’t just be abandoned. It wasn’t right. Even if that person was responsible for the deaths of two innocents, they were still a victim, and they had the right to an investigation. A delay of a few months while some tech snoozed went against every one of Hémery’s instincts.
It took him a number of days to learn how to search the ship’s database for old video, hampered by his nearly inexistent knowledge of how to use the file functions specific to the video player. Then, unable to use the search functions, he watched all the video for the range of dates in which he believed that she could have been murdered. Even using a fast forward function, there was nothing to be seen.
Finally, he went all the way back to the day he’d confronted her and, unexpectedly, less than five minutes into his review, he hit pay dirt.
The drama unfolded in front of him. The cold brutality of the fighter commander and the silent complicity of the Recon officer turned his stomach. He wondered why they had acted the way they did, and wished the cameras could have recorded audio as well.
They didn’t, so whatever had happened between the three had gone to the grave with them.
“I know you can’t hear me. Hell, if anyone ever watches the tape of me talking to a dead body, I’m going to have to do quite a bit of explaining. They’ll think I’m nuts.
“But I thought you should know that I’ve identified the people who did this to you. I’m afraid they’re well beyond the reach of whatever justice we can bring to bear on them. Hell, I have no idea whether justice is even possible. The commander might have had the right to execute you for treason under military law for all I know.
“Whether she did or didn’t isn’t my problem. I’ve recorded the incident and placed the clipping in the file, cross-referencing it to both your records and the ship’s log entry where your death was noted. I know it’s not much, but if anyone ever looks, they’ll have all the information at their disposal, to do whatever they might want to do with it.
“For what it’s worth, I also wanted to tell you that I think the people who killed you are dead. They went back to the planet to try to save the marines stuck do
wn there. We think they misjudged the speed of the swarm, and they were only there a few minutes before the vampires landed on their heads. We’re pretty sure it was a complete massacre. Sure enough that no one even suggested going back to look for survivors.
“I’m not sure why I’m even talking to you. I guess it’s because we’re on our way to some other system no one has ever visited before, and I don’t know who else to talk to. Everyone sees things so differently from me. I guess I must be getting old.
“Before he went into stasis, the captain said that we would use that system to refuel and replenish before deciding what to do next. Somebody proposed going back to Earth, but everyone else said that it was just too far away, that we’d take hundreds of thousands of years to get back and just have the same problems we had when we came here in the first place.
“They also think they’ve located the Minstrel. Of course, it does look like the ship is still observing radio silence. Either that or they’re all dead, but at least they’re moving in the right direction. If they stop at the star system, we’ll know they’re all right.
“The plan right now seems to be to fly off in a random direction to throw off the vampires and to colonize a new world. They all say we’re lucky that the factory ship survived, and if the marines are alive, that should make a good number of colonists. With a factory ship, terraforming a new world shouldn’t be a problem.
“But what next? Just thinking about living a colonist’s life makes me want to turn back and fight the swarm. An empty planet with nothing that really makes it a human world? What’s the sense in that, anyway? Why isn’t anyone else worried about that? They all seem to be convinced that it will be a wonderful thing.
“I was looking out one of the windows. The galaxy is not a wonderful thing. It’s a huge, cold place, where you need to fight to survive and even then it’s not a sure thing. And everyone is going on and on about how wonderful it is to have so much room to hide. So many planets to choose from.”
Incursion: Shock Marines Page 25