by B. V. Larson
“You’ve damaged this suit, Adjunct,” he said. “How’d you manage that?”
“I’m not sure,” I lied.
“Well,” he said, smiling, “I bet they dock your pay for a year when we get home.”
I was so happy to be alive, I smiled back at him. “Maybe they will at that, Vet. Where’s your package?”
He pointed up the beach. An oblong object shaped like a football rested in the sands.
I chewed him out until he hustled back to it and scooped it up again.
“These things are your babies,” I told them. “Nobody puts one down. Sargon, where’s yours?”
“Right here, Adjunct,” he said, patting a burden he’d slung around his belly.
“Damned right it is. Harris, are you slacking?”
He glared at me. “No, sir.”
“Good. Let’s move out.”
He kicked people in the butt after that, all the way up the beach. I didn’t interfere. It was like my officers had always told me: in Legion Varus, shit always flowed downhill.
Inside Claver’s strange-looking workshop, I had the team drag out the ripening Wur body and leave it near the waves. Kivi was my only tech, and I put her straight to work.
“Where’s Lisa?” she asked me.
I shrugged. “There was a malfunction back at Central. You’re on your own today, Kivi.”
She narrowed her eyes. The problem with Kivi was that she knew me too damned well. She saw the hole in my jump-suit and put her finger there too, as Harris had done.
“She’s not coming after us, is she?”
“Nope.”
She shook her head. “McGill, I don’t know if I can do this without her. I’m not the best programmer. Lisa was a pro.”
“She is a pro,” I corrected, “but she’s not here right now. You’re going to do just fine.”
Looking glum, she headed over to the programming equipment. There, she spent about an hour tinkering.
“I don’t think so,” she said at last. “I can’t do it. I can’t change the settings.”
For the first time, I began to feel worried. Lisa had learned everything from my vids that she could, and after experimentation she’d managed to jump people from spot to spot around Central flawlessly.
But the trouble was, the programming effort wasn’t an easy one. It took a lot of calculus with limits, derivatives and what-not. The best she could explain it to me was that it wasn’t about typing in a simple list of x, y, z coordinates. You had to take a lot of other factors into account, such as the gravitational effects of the local stars—both at the start and end points—time in-flight, etc. Setting up a destination, particularly one that was light years distant, required a whole bunch of math I didn’t have a clue about.
“Hmm,” I said, “who could do better?”
“Better than me? Better than Lisa?”
“Yeah.”
She thought about it. She shrugged. “I don’t know. I wish Natasha were here. She could—”
My hand touched her shoulder. She looked at me.
“You really want Natasha back?” I asked.
Her eyes widened. “Of course! You sound like you have a plan, McGill. You know where she is?”
I hesitated before I answered her. I did know where Natasha was—at least one version of Natasha.
Years ago, there was an accident out around Dust World. Natasha was revived as part of the legion, but the real Natasha—the original—hadn’t actually died like we thought. She was revived without confirming her death first. It’s a Galactic-level crime to duplicate anyone before they actually die. So her friends, me among them, had kept quiet about it since finding out that the original was still around.
The upshot of the situation was that there was another Natasha. The same fine mind, the best tech in the legion. That other version was the legit original. She’d been living back on Dust World all this time, stuck out there in hiding since the duplication.
It also happened that I’d had Claver preset one of the destinations on my suit’s dial to Dust World. I’d done that for personal reasons—I’d always wanted to meet my daughter, Etta. I’d figured that before Earth fell, I’d try to make the trip.
Today, it looked like I might get to do so ahead of schedule.
-58-
The trip out to Dust World was a strange one.
I’d been worried before while flying between the stars, but I’d never been thoughtful and maybe a little nervous. To see Etta, in person, for the first time—I had no idea how that was going to feel. How was she going to react to me? Was my child going to accept me as her daddy? I’d missed so much of her early life. How could I ever make it up in one visit?
And on top of that, there was the whole Natasha thing—that was going to be downright weird. What was freaking me out was that this would be the real Natasha, the one I’d left behind on a desert planet for nearly a decade. Just thinking about it was stirring up thoughts that had long been dormant.
I’m not an overly emotional guy, don’t get me wrong. But when faced with questions about my reality, even my armored mind can be affected.
We’d gotten so used to our alien revival technology. Had we lost track of who and what we are? Were we all just three dimensional printouts of human beings? Or were we really human in the traditional sense, something that went above and beyond mere collections of cells and chemicals?
Usually, when I died and came back, I’d managed to ignore such questions. But when faced with the reality that there were two Natashas, both alive and well for years, it was difficult to pretend any of us were special. If there were twin versions of her, there could be copies of any of us. Since there were two, why not a thousand? I couldn’t answer these questions, so I put them away neatly somewhere in the back of my brain for a later time.
My arrival was as neat and clean as it could be. I suddenly found myself standing in the middle of a wavering region of space on a large, flat rock.
That was nothing unusual on Dust World. Most of the planet consisted of large, flat rocks blasted smooth by sandstorms.
No one was there to greet me, so I put away the suit and marched downhill toward the central pool of black water that the valley encircled. I was in an oasis of sorts. It was really a deep canyon in the planet’s crust. Such rare places were the only inhabited regions on the planet. These canyons allowed water to collect and life to flourish at the bottom.
A thousand meters above me was the rim of the canyon. Above that, there was nothing but a circle of empty blue sky. Since we were fairly close to what passed for a polar zone on this world, the sunlight never touched the ground directly, even when its star had risen to its zenith. If it had, it would’ve scorched everything. Dust World was too close to the star. All animal life would perish and every plant would shrivel up and die if exposed directly to those hot rays.
Heading toward the shoreline, I reached habitation sooner than I expected. It did my heart good to see humans out in the open, no longer fearing the slavers who came down from the skies to harvest them. Instead of huddling behind the walls of the canyon in caves, they’d set up a village. There was wood smoke, the sounds of playing children and even the barking of a few dogs.
“A spaceman!” shouted the first kid who saw me.
He was dirty-faced and half-dressed. He pointed a finger at me like he’d accused me of some kind of unholy sin. He had a small hunting crossbow in his hand.
“A spaceman!” he repeated, more loudly than before.
An adult soon showed up as I walked closer, forcing a smile to stay frozen on my face. The man held a weapon, a black blade that dripped with deadly nanites.
Seeing that, I halted. I understood that Dust Worlders were a socially divergent group. They’d been cut off from the rest of humanity for about a century. As a result, they had their own ways of doing things out here in this star system.
Black blades weren’t to be trifled with. Trained nanites could eat their way through flesh, polymers
and anything else softer than steel. One touch from that black blade, and I’d be a goner.
I could, of course, shoot the man. But that wasn’t why I’d come all the way out here. Halting, I held up a welcoming, empty hand.
“I’m from Legion Varus,” I told the farmer and his son. “I’ve come to talk to Natasha. Do you know who she is?”
The two stared at me suspiciously.
“There’s no Natasha here,” the father said. “You must leave now.”
This was a problem I hadn’t anticipated, but maybe I should have. Natasha had told Della and everyone else that her existence among the people of Dust World had to be kept secret. If the Galactics ever found out, they’d have her promptly killed for illegal duplication.
Earth maintained the same law locally, despite the fact the Galactics weren’t often in our neighborhood these days to enforce their will. No one on Earth had so much as seen a Galactic in over three years, but that didn’t mean their influence wasn’t felt by all of us. Besides, the restriction on self-duplication seemed like a good rule to have. The law had never been repealed or altered in any way.
“Listen,” I said, “I know Della, and I know her father the Investigator. I’m James McGill from Legion Varus.”
The man stepped sideways a few paces. He kept his blade pointed at me. I noticed he hadn’t ordered his kid to stand down either. Dust Worlders didn’t coddle their children. They let them run free over the landscape. If they got hurt, well, they figured that would just make them stronger and better prepared for a harsh life as an adult.
“Della is not here,” the farmer said, “but the Investigator might speak to you. Come this way.”
The man turned and nodded to his child. Both of them lowered their weapons and stepped apart. I walked between them, keeping a wary eye on the farmer and his weapon.
Now, at this point, I have to explain that it had been a long time since I’d been to Dust World. I’d kind of forgotten how suspicious they were of strangers.
For the last decade, colonists from Earth had been coming out here to settle. Almost all of them had gone to the other habitable planet in the system, a cooler world covered with oceans. Still, I kind of assumed these people had become more or less civilized over the years.
But apparently the people who’d been left behind on the hotter of the two planets weren’t the most trusting sort. They were so used to living in such a deadly environment—a desert full of weird plants and animals—that they’d never let their guard down.
In short, I should have expected what happened next, but I didn’t. I was completely taken in.
The kid shot me in the ass.
I swear, I never saw that coming. One minute, the little bastard was walking along behind me with his small hand-crossbow aiming at the ground. The next, I felt a jolt of pain.
I turned, and both of them crouched at the ready, teeth bared and eyes gleaming.
“I told you I was Varus,” I said in exasperation, “why would you shoot me?”
“You aren’t the first to come here speaking lies,” the farmer said. “We see your suit. We see your face. Now, we see your blood on the stones at your feet and foresee your death.”
The pain was spreading steadily. That meant it was a nanite-tipped bolt, just as I’d suspected. I was a dead man.
“Tell Natasha,” I said, “tell her that James McGill wants to meet his daughter, Etta.”
I could have done a lot of things at that point. I could have shot them in my dying moments. I could have raged or used my tapper to transmit a desperate report.
But I didn’t. Instead, I fell to the ground gasping. I rolled over onto my side and stared up at the distant, perfectly blue circle of sky.
“I’ve died here before,” I said to them as they paced around warily. “I died on this world fighting the cephalopods. You should all be taken by a slaver ship for being such poor hosts.”
“That’s an evil thing to say!” spat the man, showing me his teeth.
“Be sure, be safe,” I said to him.
He nodded sagely in agreement. “Be sure, be safe. Good advice!”
Then, probably with the intention of being both sure and safe, he shoved his black blade into my heart and finished me off.
* * *
When I awoke, there was only one thought on my mind. How many days had passed? Had Earth perished in the meantime?
It was a grim thought. Blinded, I clawed at hands that clasped my newly grown wrists.
“Let go,” I said. “Where am I?”
“James? Is it really you?”
I knew that voice, and I stopped struggling. “Natasha?”
She sobbed then. “I’m so sorry. The people here are harsh and very protective. I’m so sorry.”
“Natasha, listen to me. How long was I dead?”
“I don’t know… maybe twenty hours. The farmer didn’t report the killing until nightfall.”
I could see her now. I stared at her fine face.
She’d aged. She was a beautiful, older version of the Natasha I remembered. She was Natasha still—but not exactly my Natasha. Not the one I’d spent the last several years serving with in the legion.
“Listen to me,” I said, and I quickly told her what was happening back on Earth.
She was surprised by the news. The colonists out here on Dust World had heard about our growing conflict with the squids, but apparently, the news we’d been invaded and were about to lose Central hadn’t yet reached them.
Looking around, I was surprised to see the revival machine nearby. Of course, there had to be one, but how had it come to be here?
“Why do you have a revival machine?” I asked her. “Did you Dust Worlders buy it?”
She laughed. “No, we could never afford something like this. We found it, left behind for dead by your legion. I nursed it back to health and put it into service for the good of the colony.”
That made some sense. The colonists were masters at repairing old equipment and developing their own. I’d been impressed the first time I came here by just how much they’d done with so little.
They were also secretive as a people. Due to their history of betrayal and abuse by other powers, they’d always held their secrets tightly.
But there was something else in her words that didn’t add up to me. She’d said “we” could never afford such a machine, and that it had been left behind by “your” legion. That told me she now considered herself to be one of the colonists. She wasn’t part of Legion Varus anymore—at least, not in her mind.
“You’ve gone native,” I told her, “but I can’t blame you for that.”
She glanced at me sharply. “These people may not be a forgiving lot, but they took me in. They allowed me to work and live among them. That’s more than Varus was willing to do at the time.”
I nodded and put my clothes on with clumsy fingers. There was a hole in the back of my suit I could put two fingers through.
“Did the farmer give you my dying message?” I asked her.
She was messing with her equipment, but she stiffened.
“About Etta? Yes, the boy told me.”
“Well?” I asked her. “I don’t have much time.”
She turned around and looked at me squarely.
“I’m sorry about what you’ve been through, and I know you’ve every right to take her—but you can’t have her. She’s mine now.”
-59-
There was clearly a misunderstanding going on. I frowned at Natasha, trying to puzzle it out.
“I’m not going to take her from you,” I said, “I just want to meet her.”
She looked at me with eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“You want me to believe you came all the way out here to see your daughter, and you don’t have any intention of kidnapping her?”
“No, that wouldn't be right. It wouldn’t be the best thing for her, either. Just let me meet her.”
“I can’t take the chance. You can teleport. In an
instant, you’d be thirty lights away. I raised her, James. It’s not fair!”
“That’s crazy talk. You know me. You know I’d never do anything like that.”
“It would be so easy for you. All you’d have to do is put your arms around her and vanish. No one on this planet cares for her—they don’t care for any of their children. I’m not like that. I can’t—”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m still trying to get my mind straight after the revive, but it’s not Etta I want to take home from Dust World. I came here for you.”
That stopped her. She stared at me like I might bite her.
“I can’t go home. I’d be executed.”
“No, you won’t. Your other self died recently. I didn’t report it because I realized it was a chance for you to come home. There was no revive—you are the one and only Natasha.”
She put her hands on a stone table and leaned on it, thinking hard.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “You’ve managed to make me sick to my stomach with worry again. Do you know that you’ve always had that effect on me? It’s been so long, I almost didn’t remember.”
I took a deep breath and moved to comfort her, but she dodged away.
“You never tried to come out to see me. You didn’t call. You didn’t even tap out a text. You knew I was out here trapped in this desert for years, living a harsh life among hostile people.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “I’ve been kind of busy fighting wars among the stars. I also knew you couldn’t come home while the second version of you was running around. If the Galactics had found out about the illegal duplication, we might all have been permed.”
She sighed. “I’ve followed your exploits and those of Varus. You’ve covered a lot of lightyears and done permanent damage to many worlds.”
Shrugging, I didn’t argue. I couldn’t, because she was right about that part.
“Look,” I told her, “Earth needs you now, Natasha. I need you—even Etta needs you. Without your help, I think we’re all going to be permed or enslaved.”