The Price of Freedom

by William R. Forstchen

  The shift in topic threw Blair for a loop. "Oh?" he said, the expression a time filler while he tried to think of something more intelligent to say.

  She gazed at him directly. "I first heard of you after the raid on Kilrah when you and your pilots took out the shipyards there. I followed the press and propaganda stories—I never missed an episode of Heros of the Confederation. I knew it was all fluff, of course, but I had a terrible crush on you."

  He thought over his own interest in her, the age differences, and his past with Rachel, who hadn't been much older than she was, even if he had been younger then.

  She smiled. 'Then, there you were, on the Intrepid. I couldn't believe it. I'd always wanted to meet you, then I did. And it was wonderful." She looked up at him, her blue eyes framed by her slightly disheveled hair. He thought she looked compellingly lovely. "I still have that crush on you, you know."

  He felt his own desire for her as a physical ache. He wanted to take her in his arms, to pull her close. Her shining eyes were an open invitation to him. Her lips were slightly parted, as though waiting to be kissed.

  He saw, in that moment, two courses open to him—to them. It would be so easy for him to take the first step towards her. They were alone together, the door was even closed. The crew was too busy and the ship too big for anyone to remark on their absence together. There would be no scandal. No one would know.

  The second road was harsher. He saw himself, an aging pilot, using her youth and beauty to try and reclaim some of his own spent years. It would be a classic midlife crisis. He'd tried a May-December romance with Rachel, and while he knew he'd driven her away with his drinking and bitterness, the hurt was still there when it failed. He didn't want to go through that again.

  He realized that he couldn't trust his own motives where Velina Sosa was concerned, and because of that, he didn't move, didn't take the first step. "Velina," he said. "I…" He broke off, uncertain how to continue.

  Her eyes searched his face. He watched her drawing her conclusion from his stance and his tone of voice. Her expression shifted as she tried not to look hurt. "I'm sorry," she said, looking down, "I've embarrassed myself terribly. I should go." She seemed to draw in on herself as she turned to collect the things she'd left in the bathroom.

  "It's not what you think," he said, trying to salvage the situation.

  "Oh?" she said, her face closed and still.

  "Look," he said, aware he was foundering, "I'm forty, you're twenty-five. I'm almost old enough to be your father."

  She shook her head. "Well," she replied, "you'd have had to start young." She set her jaw and looked up. Her eyes searched his as he fought to keep his face expressionless. "I see," she said after nearly a full minute, "so that's how it is."

  "I'm looking out for you as much as I am me," he said. He realized too late how badly that came out, making him sound both self-righteous and condescending.

  Her expression hardened. "In case you haven't noticed, Colonel, I'm all grown up. I'm a big girl. I can take my own risks. I don't need you to do me any favors." She grabbed her small bag and stormed out, leaving him staring after her.

  Then she was gone, the door closing automatically behind her. He sat on the edge of the bunk and held his head in his hands.

  Chapter Eleven

  Blair rubbed his gritty eyes as he stepped into the Princetons Auxiliary Control room. He had revisited his last conversation with Velina over and over as he'd tried to sleep. He'd eventually given up tossing and turning, to walk the darkened halls of the Princeton. The carrier, so like the Concordia, had roused the ghosts of his memory. Sleep wasn't an option after that.

  He sipped from the coffee mug he'd liberated from the Marines. Dekker brewed his coffee black and heavy. The caffeine jolt brought him to some semblance of alertness.

  Toliver looked up from the Princetons command chair. "Good morning, Colonel. I got a priority message from Admiral Wilford. He wants you back on the Evil I."

  Blair nodded, as aware of anyone in the fleet, over the bad luck ships named Intrepid seemed to share. "How soon?"

  "Yesterday," Toliver replied. He held the flimsy out to Blair. "There's trouble."

  Blair took the scrap and began reading it. "What's up?"

  "I don't know," Toliver said, "but it must be bad—real bad."

  Blair considered stopping to shave, then decided that if Wilford wanted him that badly he could put up with a little five o'clock shadow. "Tell the admiral that I'm on my way."

  He made his way down to the launch deck without seeing Velina, which both troubled and relieved him. He was still chewing on the implications of that when the lift arrived at the flight deck. Pliers met him as he stepped out.

  "Toliver gave me the word, kid," he said. "We've got

  you all spotted on 'Cat One. Your pre-flights are finished and she's ready to go."

  Blair followed him, already anticipating the flight back to the Intrepid, and hopefully a long nap soon after that. They stepped into the launch bay. Blair looked around for his Thunderbolt. "Where's my bird?"

  Pliers pointed him towards the black fighter mounted on the launch cradle. "Black Lance Five-Four, at your service. Son." He grinned smugly at Blair's stunned look.

  "Black Lance?"

  "We cracked open a box of technical tapes," Pliers said, "that's what they call 'em. Black Lances. Callsign's usually Dragon." He spat a long dark stream into a can. He was apparently still unwilling to defile the Princetons deck with tobacco juice. "They're easy to maintain, almost do it themselves, in fact." He grinned. "You should see the wiring harnesses on this baby. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant."

  Pliers grinned happily "These're show pieces, works of art. Every detail's perfect. Hell, they don't even have to fly. Just put 'em in galleries, where people can admire 'em."

  Blair smiled. "I don't think we want these to be museum pieces just yet."

  "Ha," Pliers laughed. "Just like a pilot. Ain't happy unless he's jockin' around at 800 per. Still, there ain't nothin' in space like these babies. And they all have a real, live, functioning cloaking devices. Definitely Kilrathi derivative, and definitely functional." He pointed up at the large intakes mounted behind the pilot and along the leading edges of the wings. "See those Bussard intakes? They scoop in everything, hydrogen, dust, anything their magnetic fields catch. The matter feeds a whole new power plant—matter/antimatter. Do you know what that means?"

  Blair nodded his head. He'd first encountered the antimatter engines on the experimental Excalibur fighters he'd used for the attack on Kilrah that ended the war. Those engines, the first successful attempt at miniaturizing the cap ships' drives, allowed virtually unlimited range.

  He peered at the fighter, scrutinizing its lines. Shave here, add there, change the camber of the wing and reposition the intakes. He could see the family resemblance once he knew what to look for. The Excaliburs had been prototypes for the Black Lances.

  "Yeah," he said at last, "a jump capability and no need to stop and refuel. You can run on afterburner forever, as long as you can find hydrogen."

  Pliers nodded enthusiastically. "Your guns and shields'U be some drain on the system, but there isn't anything in space that'll touch you."

  Blair thought of Seether. "Except another Black Lance."

  Pliers bobbed his head, unwilling to take his eyes off the ship. "Yeah, but imagine the speed!" He spat a lump of something black and disgusting into the can, then fished his pouch from his pocket and reloaded his cheek.

  "Son, you got one hot rocket prepped and ready on Number One. Are you gonna sit here all day, or are you gonna cruise?"

  Blair turned towards him. "Don't you think this'll make our people a touch nervous?"

  Pliers laughed. "Who cares? You can outrun 'em, outturn 'em, and if that doesn't work, you can just cloak." He jerked his thumb at the fighter. "Besides, I loaded the IFF codes for the Intrepid. You'll be fine."

  Blair looked up. His palms itched to try the ship out. "Where's
my helmet?"

  Pliers slapped his back. "That's the spirit. It's sitting on your control yoke."

  Blair climbed into the cockpit. Pliers helped him strap in, then went over the various flight controls with him. He could really see the Excalibur family resemblance in the cockpit layout. He ran his hands over the controls, refamiliarizing himself, while Pliers checked his equipment. The only odd item was a line of covered switches. Several were crudely marked by Pliers, and were for arming and firing mines. The rest were unlabeled. He knew better than to toy with them.

  The launch proved an anticlimax. The Lance had power enough to get it off the deck without assistance, and Pliers' knowledge of the launch board made the shot uneventful.

  The Black Lance flew more smoothly than Blair believed possible. Every ship, including Excaliburs, had some roughness, some point on the power scale where the engines vibrated or the controls were sluggish. The Lance had none of that. He brought it up to maximum standard cruise, then put it through its paces. The maneuverability and precision were better than the Hellcats and nearly on a par with the Arrow's. The Black Lance was a pilot's dream. It had the ordnance and staying power of a heavy fighter, and the nimble speed and quickness of a light ship.

  The Intrepid's CAP, made up of pilots from Maniac's badly depleted squadron, reacted poorly. It took him a fair amount of fast talk and IFF interrogations before they left him alone while he swooped and dove, jinked and weaved, and put the frame through as much stress as he could. He heard none of the creaks and squeaks that indicated lurking trouble, and the Lance performed like a champ. He decided, as he entered the Intrepid's landing cycle, that he was in love.

  He was still suffused in the warm afterglow when he stepped onto the Intrepid's cramped Httle CIC. The odor of burned circuitry permeated the air, making him sneeze. He noted that a quarter of the CIC's displays were out and heavy portable conduits connected the data cores to a pair of rollaways that had been set up to take the place of the navigation station. The main viewscreen and nolo-tank were down as well. The Intrepid, he realized, had taken yet another pounding.

  Wilford turned in the command chair to face Blair. "It took you long enough," he said without preamble.

  "I got delayed," Blair replied.

  "I saw your little joyride," Wilford said. He waved his hand around his face. "Had time to go for a flight, but not enough to shave, huh?"

  Blair shrugged. He looked at Wilford, noting the bags under the admirals eyes and his glum face. Wilford should have been ecstatic. "What's up?" he asked, trying to change the subject.

  Wilford gestured to a small holo-tank set above a damaged console. "We received an SOS message last night," he said. "It's pretty grim." He stood and gestured for Blair to precede him to the terminal. "This came in from the Telamon system." He tipped his head towards the communications tech, who placed a chip into the reader and cued the screen.

  The image in the reader was female. Snow almost blotted the picture out, and the audio faded into static. "It gets better later, sir," the tech said. "A lot of it's getting washed out by the nebula. Telamon's also got a lot of sunspot activity."

  "… under attack from some kind of virus," the woman said, "… canisters were found… bio-weapon of some sort. We are issuing… general plea for help. We need medicines, trained medical personnel, anyone you can send. We have thousands lying in the streets, dying. We need your help." The image cleared and the static faded. The picture jumped and fuzzed, then froze as the tape came to an end.

  The Telamon woman, wearing a doctor's lab coat, stood in front of what was obviously a hospital ward. Hundreds of people were crowded into an area meant for a few dozen. Beds were occupied two and three deep. Other victims lined every inch of floor and lay in pools of their own vomit, blood, and excrement. The victims all had terrible, bleeding lesions on their exposed skin, and their bodies appeared to sag as the flesh drooped. The image embodied the worst human nightmares of the plague, like a scene from a Bosch painting.

  Blair turned away, sickened. "Oh, my god. This was an attack?"

  Wilford looked at the frozen image. "It looks that way." He leaned towards the viewer and snapped the horrific image off. "I dispatched a bio-hazard team to Telamon as soon as we got the message." He glanced at his watch. "They should be reporting anytime. I'm putting out a call for volunteers, medical personnel. We don't know what the possibility of infection is, so this will be a one-way trip for those who go." He rubbed his face, aging several decade before Blairs eyes. "I've had a dozen takers, so far. Bless their hearts."

  He turned away. The comm tech, his voice carefully controlled, spoke into the silence. "Sirs, I've got a message coming in from Telamon. It's on the bio-team's trans-light freq."

  Wilford set his jaw. "Run it." The screen snowed, then settled as the transmitters matched. A man in his early thirties appeared. His wild eyes gave Blair some indication of the nightmares he'd seen firsthand.

  "Admiral, this is Dr. Clivers. We made landfall about five hours ago. This is a preliminary report, based mostly on data the Telamon inhabitants gave us." He took a deep breath.

  "Its bad down here, worse than I've ever seen, and worse than the distress beacon indicated. This stuff is virulent, it's everywhere, and, until we can get a handle on its toxicity, we're considering it unstoppable by conventional medical means.

  "Admiral, you have no choice except to impose an ironclad quarantine of the planet." He looked away from 'he viewer a moment and murmured to a person off-:amera. "You better make the quarantine shoot to kill. This can't get out."

  "What is it?" Wilford asked. "How bad is it?"

  Clivers chose to take the second question first. "Do you remember those old death camp two-dees, from Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen? The Nazi stuff? This is worse. A thousand times worse. We've got bodies lying in the streets, for a lack of anyone to collect diem. Most of the population's dying, so there's fewer people every day to keep things running. Thank God, temperatures have been cool. That's slowed the decomposition somewhat, but the whole planet reeks like a charnel house. The rotting bodies will add another round of epidemics to the crisis, cholera and secondary transmissions could carry off those who make it through this."

  He ran one hand through his hair. "And as for what it is… there is no hell hot enough or deep enough for the bastard that cooked this up."

  "So it is a weapon?" Wilford asked.

  "Oh, it's a weapon all right," the doctor responded. "There are small canisters all over the place. The locals say they were dropped by some kind of black fighter plane. The details were sketchy, but the birds didn't sound like anything in our inventory." He took a deep breath.

  "The cans were covered with a residue of these sonsabitches." The image faded to be replaced by a photo of what looked at first like a tiny, hard-edged spider. The image changed again, showing other views and scenes of the same organism. ftstaoked to Blair like a virus, with tiny prongs and probes. Something that looked like a set of pincers extended from one end. The usual contours had a precise, machined look.

  The doctor's voice continued as a voiceover as the images shifted. "You're looking at a bio-engineered microcomputer."

  "A what?" Blair asked.

  The last of the graphics faded to be replaced by Clivers' face. "Think of them as microscopic computers. It looks like an airborne vector. They seem to get into the body best as an airborne viral infection, but there's no reason they can't also be transmitted by water, food or even sex." He laughed harshly. "Especially sex. They really seem to like the gametes.

  "They get into the body, get picked up by the blood, then begin to reproduce by heisting the cell's DNA and using it to replicate themselves."

  "Just like a virus?" Wilford asked.

  "Worse," Clivers replied. "They do a genome comparison of your DNA helix. If they don't like what they find, they start attacking your RNA, converting it into malignant cancers, pathological hemocytes, and a dozen forms of what looks superficially like organ reject
ion. Your cells stop replicating and begin killing each other. Your connective tissue fails, giving the distinctive slack-faced look reminiscent of stroke.

  "That's the last stage. By then, your organs are all but destroyed. Then you die. It takes from sixty to ninety hours to run its course. The locals are calling it DRT."

  "DRT?" Blair andi Wilford asked together.

  Clivers smiled without humor. "Dead Right There— it's first cousin to being DOA—Dead On Arrival." He gestured at the room behind him. "You contract this, you're DRT." Blair saw body bags stacked from floor to ceiling. "We've cut open a dozen, so far," Clivers continued, "and we're seeing the same thing over and over again."

  "Why aren't you dead then?" Blair blurted.

  "I will be, in a couple of days. About half my team seems to be okay. The little bastards seem to like their DNA."

  "How's that?" Blair asked, trying to come to grips with the fact he was talking to a dead man.

  "This isn't random," Clivers said. "The microcomputers seem to leave about one in ten alone."

  "Why them?" Wilford asked. "Is it immunity?"

  Clivers shrugged. "We don't know what it is. The stuff" seems to invade their genetic material as well, and it does take over enough cells to replicate, but it doesn't attack the host. Our very preliminary guess is that it's making tiny alterations in the victim's genetic code, but we don't know. We've been more interested in the dying than we are in doing much research on those who seem to be immune. That'll change, of course, but right now we're just trying to assess and contain the damage."

  Clivers mopped his brow. Blair could see runnels of sweat running down his face, even as his breath smoked in the slightly chilly air. "As I said," the doctor continued, "we don't know what the causal factors are. It could be any single genetic characteristic or a combination. Hair color, body fat percentages, skin color, we just don't know.

  The sample of the dead is so broad and their DN A is so disrupted that we often can't even place what the genome looked like originally."