Soldier Spider, sitting opposite Spider, had his eye on Spider’s backpack. “Is that it?” he said.
Spider lifted it up onto the narrow table. “Yup. Got a present for you.”
“Oh, I like presents,” the old man said, not smiling.
Spider reached in and, taking great care, took out the Class III causality weapon, and set it on the table between them. “You won’t like this one.”
“Is it armed?”
“No, I checked.”
Soldier Spider peered at it, thinking hard. “Just trying to remember when it was my turn,” he said.
“Dickhead did tell me how to arm it.”
“Very thorough, that Dickhead,” Soldier Spider said. Even at rest like this, it was obvious the weapon was a delicate instrument, built from, it appeared, millions of components, a triumph of anti-personnel chronotechnology. “So,” Soldier Spider said, “multi-modal?”
“Causality effect plus conventional warhead, yeah.”
“Nice. I’d forgotten just how cute the little thing was.” He was smiling, a little sadly.
Spider, for his part, was terrified of the thing, and could not understand his older self’s nostalgic reaction on seeing it again. “It doesn’t concern you, having this thing on your ship?”
“Spider,” he said, meeting his younger self’s worried gaze, “it does, and it doesn’t. It’s complicated. Yes, it’s trouble. It’s bad news. It’s, well, it’s many things, all wrapped in a surprisingly small bundle. It could cripple our power supply, no question. We’d be dead in the water, so to speak. Probably shut down our flux-shield. And, of course, being a causality thing, it would delete me, and maybe you, too.”
“I’ve had a thought about that,” Spider said.
“EMP?”
“Great minds think alike.”
Soldier Spider snorted. “Yeah, right. Interesting idea.”
“Think it’ll work?”
“Depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Depends if it’s hardened against EMP.”
“Was yours?” Spider asked.
Soldier Spider thought back. “I don’t think so, but I think there was something else about it… Damn, what was it?”
“What? Like a booby trap?”
He was trying to remember. “Let me just check some archives a moment.” Soldier Spider pulled out a small screen, flipped it open, pulled out a pair of battered reading glasses, put them on, and started searching. After a moment, he said, “Yes. There. Look.” He showed Spider the screen. It was displaying an archived record of this meeting.
Spider read the notes regarding the weapon. “Hmm, armed, no, that’s good, tried an EMP shot…”
Soldier Spider said, “Shut down the causality effect, but not the explosive.” He nodded, satisfied. “Sounds about right.”
“You’re very casual about it, don’t you think?”
“Off-brain storage, Spider. Gotta love it.”
Spider stared and stared at him, horrified.
“Listen to me, Spider,” his older self said, leaning forward, speaking softly, “I’m well aware of what this thing can do. I’ve seen them before, this and variations of it. Very popular weapon type. Very effective. Lost a lot of good people to them — and very likely a great deal more who none us even remember.”
Spider was chilled, thinking about it, wanting to get on with neutralizing the thing before one or both of them vanished from all existence and memory. He didn’t understand how Soldier Spider could be so, well, flippant about it all.
And there was more where that came from. “The thing is, you get to a certain age, you see things differently from how you see them when you’re a young ‘tacker’ like yourself. You get a broader perspective. You get sick of war, sick of conflict for its own stupid sake. I mean, take this whole bullshit war we’re in here, us and Dickhead’s bunch. How much time are we wasting trying to kill each other when we could be tackling the Vores themselves? Bloody Dickhead’s a stupid delusional fuckwit, pure and simple, Spider, and you can tell him I said so.”
Spider remembered how he felt, not that long ago, telling his employer he was a cheap bully, and how, while it felt good to say that at that moment, he knew he was pushing it, and Dickhead’s good will, right to the edge. Telling him he was a stupid delusional fuckwit, with that same tone of not giving a shit what Dickhead thought about such a comment, was breathtaking. Spider hoped he lived long enough to try it out for himself.
Soldier Spider, sitting there, weary and demonstrably not too well, was looking at the causality weapon, sighing. He went back to his screen, touched a control, and said aloud, “All hands. Prepare for EMP shot. Shut down all non-essential systems now. Any problems, see your designated damage control officer. EMP shot on my mark.” He glanced at Spider. “All set, Spider?”
“You’re sure this won’t just set it off? Surely Dickhead would—”
“Dickhead is many things, but he’s no evil genius.”
“But—”
Soldier Spider said to his screen, “Mark.”
There was a heavy, sub-audible THUNK that Spider felt more than heard, a waft of warm bad air came through the vents, and the lights went out, quickly replaced by red emergency lights. Soldier Spider was peering at his glowing screen, watching developments unfold. “Damage report?” he said.
Spider heard several voices report in. Things appeared to have gone well, but main power was out for the moment, life support was still running at minimum, and ninety percent of hardened systems survived the shot. There were no casualties. All personnel in sickbay were okay, for now.
Then Spider noticed he was not alone on this side of the table, and he jumped. Soldier Spider laughed and clapped his hands. Spider peered at the thing on the seat next to him. At first he thought it was a dead body, but it wasn’t. “Oh God,” he said, “it’s a robot!”
Soldier Spider laughed again. “I just about shat myself when that happened to me,” he said. “Just priceless!”
“This is your idea of a prank?”
“No, mate. This is Dickhead’s idea of a prank. Take a closer look.”
He hefted the thing’s body until he could see the machine’s face. “Oh,” he said, recognizing it. “It’s Dickhead’s personal assistant. Or something very like it.”
“Ghost mode. Gets you every time,” Soldier Spider said.
“Shit! How long have I been trailing that around with me?”
“Since you were on Dickhead’s ship, I’d say.”
“So it’s been transmitting back to Dickhead this whole time?”
“Yeah, but so what? We haven’t said anything yet.”
“Um…”
“We haven’t said anything operational.”
“Ah.”
Soldier Spider looked pleased with himself. “So, got that remote?”
He handed it over. Dickhead’s idea was that once Spider planted the causality weapon, he’d use the remote to return to the Destiny. At the time Spider did not believe the thing would actually work; he figured Dickhead would be just as happy if Spider died here.
Soldier Spider looked at it up close: it, like the one that got Spider here, wasn’t much to look at, a simple disposable one-shot device. Using his screen, he called someone named Wendy to come and pick it up.
Wendy turned up, looking pale and sweaty with illness, nodded hello to Spider, and Soldier Spider handed her the remote. “Can you do it?”
She studied it for a moment, then said, “Yeah, no worries. Should take about twenty minutes.”
“You’ve got ten.”
“Aye, aye, Skipper,” she said, leaning on the sarcastic, and left. Soldier Spider watched her go, amused, at least for now.
“What about the bomb?” S
pider said.
“Yes, what about the bomb?” Soldier Spider said, still strangely amused. He got up from the table, and grabbed the weapon. “Come on.”
Spider joined him. “Where to?”
“Workshop.” They set off through the confining red-lit corridors of the ship. Where before there had been cool and warm areas, depending on the ventilation and the presence of heavy machinery nearby, now it was frigid almost everywhere. Spider was shivering, and he was sure his breath would be misting if he could see it. His older self, striding along, appeared fine. Carrying a live bomb, but fine.
Spider also noticed there was no one around, not even cleaning bots. When they reached the workshop, Soldier Spider asked Spider to seal the door behind them, locking them in. “Just in case,” he said. The workshop, like all the other living spaces on the ship, was cramped but spotlessly clean and tidy, like an operating theater that dealt mostly in heavy machinery and robots, Spider noticed, looking at things tidily stacked here and there. It was strange to see robots in pieces; it gave him a very distinct science fictional frisson, that feeling he was inside a movie from his youth. “Gather round, Spider,” Soldier Spider told him, indicating a bench. “All right, then,” he said to his younger, petrified self, “what do you know about bomb disposal? As I recall, not bloody much, yes?” He was looking at him over the rims of his glasses.
“That would be correct, yes. Still, I can pass tools with the best of ’em. You name it.” When Spider was a kid, he often helped his dad fix up old bits of dead machinery, which Dad would then sell to make a little extra cash. It was weird seeing his future self like this; taking out the bizarre sf buzz from the scene, it was only too easy to see himself as his much younger self, and Soldier Spider as his father. It was sort of comforting, familiar. Almost enough to make him forget that he could die at any moment.
A small window in Soldier Spider’s screen lit up. It was Wendy. “Got it in seven minutes, Skipper. Do I get a biscuit?”
Soldier Spider was hunched over, studying the bomb in detail under a large illuminated magnifier not that different from similar tools Spider had in his own workshop. “I’ll have to owe you the biscuit, Wendy, but good work. How many’d you get?”
“Enough,” she said, sounding pleased with herself, despite being sick.
“Tell the lads to start suiting up. We’ll be along shortly.”
“Okay,” she said, and was gone.
“Her name, Spider, is Wendy Pheromone Clavier-3. That’s a numeral ‘3’, by the way, not the word ‘three’. Very important. You’ll meet her, if you get to be me, at a yachting regatta off Jupiter. Very handy woman. Capable. Sense of humor. Useful. Now, hand me that phase-cutter. No, that one. Thanks.” Soldier Spider had the bomb seated in a three-pronged mechanism which itself was inside a large tank made of what appeared to be very thick, multi-layered anti-ballistic plastic. Spider was reminded strongly of the Bat Cave. Soldier Spider took the phase-cutter in his right hand, made some fine adjustments with the controls on its handle, and gently touched the working tip of the device to the skin of the bomb. “All right, then, time to light the blue touch-paper,” he said.
Spider said, “Permission to shit my trousers, Skipper?”
“Permission granted,” Soldier Spider said, amused, and hit the trigger. There was a faint hum. The tool started making impossibly precise, steady, delicate incisions in the shell of the bomb. Spider was holding his breath; his heart was in his mouth, taking up a lot of space. In his mind, the only sound he could hear was, “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” and so on. He did not want to die. Not now, not here. Not without Molly. And not without taking care of Dickhead Bloody McMahon.
Soldier Spider shut down the phase-cutter and set it aside on the bench. With a tool that reminded Spider of surgical instruments, he removed a small rectangular piece of the bomb’s shell, revealing a small, glowing red light. “There you go, Spider, have a look at that.”
Leaning in with great reluctance, Spider spotted the light. “What am I looking at?”
“That is the system readiness indicator for the causality weapon. The EMP shot worked!”
“Imagine my boundless joy,” Spider said, still terrified. Then, thinking about the situation, he said, “You know, wouldn’t it have been much easier all round to have some robot do all this?”
“None of the working bots have sufficient fine hand control. And, before you say it, we also couldn’t just shove the thing out an airlock.”
Spider had been thinking about suggesting this very thing. “Problems?”
“Big problems. Little bastard’s pressure-sensitive. We learned that the hard way.” He stared off into the distance for a moment, then reached for another tool, and went back to work on the bomb, removing screws Spider could not see with his naked eyes.
Spider could imagine just what the “learned that the hard way” might mean, and tried to imagine Soldier Spider, in his own place, faced with this same situation, and losing the old man due to a stupid mistake. “That must have been tough,” he said.
“You have no idea. Trashed a lot of the ship.”
“Even with the flux—”
“Ordinarily, the flux-proofing would protect the ship’s entire structure, but that costs energy we don’t have. So we just protect the hull, and take our chances with the inside. The game is about getting a weapon past the shield’s firewall. Listen, hand me a staser, would you?”
“What the hell is a staser?”
Soldier Spider glanced across at him, surprised, then not surprised. “Ah, right. Yeah. Sorry. Listen, I need this thing called a staser. It’s a stasis device. Also works well as a weapon, actually. Anyway, need one. Looks like Mike’s made off with the one I keep here, so I need you to scuttle off to Engineering to grab it for me.”
“And Engineering would be, er, where, exactly?”
Soldier Spider handed him his screen. “There you go, punch up the ship interior layout diagram, and follow your nose.”
Spider found the interface surprisingly usable, and soon brought up the diagram. His eyes widened. “Ship’s bigger than I thought.”
“Used to be a bloody brilliant ship, back when. You’ll like her a lot.”
“So,” he said, looking at Soldier Spider, thinking something was more than a bit odd about all this, “find this Mike guy and get your staser back.”
“Mike’s sick. You’ll need to talk to a bot. You’ll be fine.”
He nodded, frowning. “Okay. Right.” He knew he had to go, but he didn’t want to leave.
“Sometime this year, Spider?”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing’s going on. I need a tool. I need you to go and get it and bring it back.”
“Couldn’t someone bring it here?”
“You need to get familiar with the ship, Spider. If you end up—”
“So you’re letting me in on all the secrets?”
“No, I just want you—”
“You said before there were things you couldn’t show me on this ship.”
“Tool, Spider. Go and get the fucking tool.”
Spider had the worst feeling in the world about this little errand, but he could see that Soldier Spider was prepared to practically throw him out by his ear if he had to, and, even though an old man, he still looked a lot stronger, and a lot fitter, than Spider. “Bugger,” he said, feeling sick in his guts, and turned to leave.
Soldier Spider said, “Oh, um, by the way.”
“What?”
“I’m very sorry about Molly. Just… dreadfully sorry about everything.”
“You said, I know. I understand.”
“No, actually, um, you don’t.”
Spider stood there, staring at the old man, and felt everything fall out from under him. Every assumption, every belief, e
verything he ever held dear and true. “I beg your pardon?” He could hardly speak.
Soldier Spider was staring back at him, ashen, lips pressed tight together. Unable to speak, he just shook his head, his eyes shining slightly in the weak light.
“Oh my God. Did you…?”
“I need that tool, Spider.”
“You lied to me?”
“You don’t know how hard—”
He could hardly think. It felt like his heart would burst. “You lied to me about Molly? You said she’d survive.”
“I—”
Spider, aghast, stared at his future self, saw his future, in which he would, without batting an eyelid, without looking away from him, with a perfectly straight, convincing face, quietly betray his own younger self. He managed to say, “Greater good, was it?”
“We needed a way to get inside Dickhead’s flagship.”
Speechless, shaking with horror, Spider stared at his older self one last time, turned, and went for the door.
“You’ll do it, too, Spider.”
He closed the door behind him, blinked several times to clear his eyes, and glanced at the ship’s map laid out on the screen he held in his shaking hands. He thought of Molly. Thought about that time Soldier Spider showed him her dead body in the ship’s morgue. Killed in a dreadful car crash? Or dead after succumbing to torture on Dickhead’s ship and politely sent back, to be a torment to two versions of the deceased’s husband? He shut his eyes, trying to get past the roaring sound in his head, to reach a point where he could think without wanting to kill everyone on this whole fucking ship.
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 26