A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  The corners of his lips went up, and his eyes sparked with mischief. “Yep,” he said. “Lunatic. Certifiable. I tell you we’re going to invade and take over a well-defended place, in a desperate bid to change the tenor of this war, and that the chances are we’ll fail and if we fail we’re dead men, and you react like I just invited you to a Sunday school picnic.” He shook his head. “You have a screw loose, Luce, and you need a minder to make sure you don’t end up living with three pigs, one of whom wears an apron.”

  A Few Good Men and

  Not a Few Women

  So we went to Circum. Okay, it wasn’t that easy. On the other hand perhaps it was. Going there was easy in itself. We went to this place in Central Europe, in the middle of the zone that got the same treatment as the North American continent. Okay, minus the nukes, but the difference was more academic than not. Bacteria had eaten everything and here there was, as yet, no regreening.

  Nat said that was where the Mules were raised, after being created, but I think he got something wrong, because I’ve looked up the history of the place and it was a resort of some sort, until it was bought by the famous Jarl Ingemar and kept as a private sort of resort, where he could—I presume—hide out from the world, and perhaps from the fact that he would never feel like a normal human.

  It was locked with genlock, and it had a bioshield on both entrances, and though I’d never trade it for the Longs’ farm, it was a wondrous area that various earthly paradises of legend could be based on: trees massive as houses, wildlife of a non-man-eating sort, fishes that leap into your hand, and a climate that was kept warm year-round. The only thing marring it was knowing it was artificial, a sort of playground for the very wealthy and eventually for the wealthiest man of his time.

  Nat did manage to secure access to the genlock code. Don’t ask me how. I got the impression that Athena Hera Sinistra was very fond of him. We plan to go there, now and then, for privacy and rest. If we live long enough.

  We’d met Athena Sinistra and her people there—well, her husband who . . . I’ll confess I try not to be prejudiced, and there’s a lot to be said for someone who is bioengineered himself not casting stones, but look . . . The man’s eyes looked like cat’s eyes, and I found I couldn’t look at him straight on. It read to my back-brain as some sort of horrible deformity, and it was no use telling myself it was perfectly normal.

  Mind you, he seemed to be a good man, and he went with us to help us take Circum, and there was no evil or malice in him, but it would have taken me months to get used to his eyes before I could look at him straight on. It gave me another insight into how we, humans, are wired not to accept those who are too different from the norm. It seems to be baked in, and while it can be overcome, it is part of how humans aren’t perfect.

  There was also Zen, leggy and reddish-blond, that color that used to be called Titian blond. I never looked at her straight on, because if I did Simon would probably have growled at me. There was a growl always hovering at the back of his gaze, and in the pinched setting of his mouth, and I don’t think it would have done any good at all to tell him that while she was aesthetically pleasing I had no more personal interest in her than in any work of art. When a man gets it that bad it’s no use being logical with him. I have reason to know.

  Athena Sinistra, herself, was tiny and dark-haired. I remembered her father, a crusty son of a bitch to whom the term sawed-off-bastard could be applied with very little remorse. I saw the resemblance between them, of course, as I should if they were male and female clone. Twins of a sort, I suppose, but in Athena, what had been sullen distrust in her father became . . . boundless energy, a sort of determination always on the verge of erupting into action. I thought that she had a lot in common with Nat and it didn’t surprise me at all that they got along, nor that now and then I found them with their heads together and whispering. It only disturbed me when Athena then proceeded to look at me and smile a secretive sort of smile, like she knew something I didn’t.

  The fourth member of their party was called Doc, and if one is to believe them he was Doctor Bartolomeu Dias. Yes, the Mule of that name. While I couldn’t understand why he’d have stayed behind in Eden instead of going on to the stars, and while the rejuv job that would allow someone to live close on to four hundred years was hard to buy, he looked at least that old, and looked startled when he saw me, and mumbled in the way people do when retrieving a long-forgotten name, “Keeva, now. Another one, I suppose.”

  The trip to Circum was uneventful, and we landed in an area of Circum that hadn’t been used in a long time. Part of me wanted to go through everything in that area to examine ships stored there since the Je Reviens had been built. They’d been meant to take everyone to the Je Reviens, but the contingent had been vastly diminished, between the Mules who were deliberately excluded and those bioed people who’d been caught and killed in the turmoils.

  I tried to imagine what that had been like for my “father”—being left behind as the most important train of your lifetime departed without you. How it must have felt to know that your closest friends, your associates, the only people on Earth like you had left you behind; considered you unfit to live and departed to build a new life without you. Worse, they’d left you behind to face the turmoils and the almost certainty of getting killed in a horrible and public way.

  I shuddered. No wonder they’d left all these air-to-space vehicles here, mothballed. No wonder they’d never tried to do anything about them or repair them in any way, or even use them for anything. Frankly, if I were them, I wouldn’t even want to think about these, or anything related to them.

  I’d have done exactly what they had done, in fact. I’d have left them here, and built other chambers onto Circum Terra, and done my best to pretend this area doesn’t exist.

  “There are legends,” Simon said, in a hushed tone. “That a lot of these areas are infested with AI robots hostile to mankind or . . . or worse.” He took a deep breath, almost shuddering, then said, “But I wonder, truly, if it’s just . . . you know . . . ghosts. And I wonder if it’s the ghosts of those who left or those who stayed. I think it would kill you a little to be betrayed this way.”

  I nodded. I was sure it would kill you. Even I might have become just like the creature who’d called himself my father.

  Nat’s hand touched my arm, and he said, “Not a chance,” as though answering my thoughts, but I had no time to enquire what he meant, because Doctor Bartolomeu Dias said, “We thought we were doing it for the best. That they couldn’t be trusted, you know, around . . . normal humans. But since I’ve wondered. Mind you, these men were by no means angels, but neither were the rest of us.” A brief pause. “We did what we thought we had to do.”

  We had to let that serve as epitaph as we moved fast through the area.

  We in this case was myself, Nat, Simon, Doctor Dias and Athena’s husband, Kit. I would like to say I liked him better for volunteering to help us, and I did, but it was all a liking in the mind. At the same time I felt bad for cringing when he looked in my direction with his odd, feline eyes, and got impatient at myself for feeling bad. I told myself it would take months to get used to it. But we didn’t have months. And he appeared to be a good person, and for that I’d honor him.

  The women stayed behind working at outfitting one of the old, boomerang-shaped work platforms used to assemble the Je Reviens. They thought they could fit it for the trip to their world, Eden.

  As for us, we walked through several compartments.

  The part of Circum in use came up with startling suddenness. We went from an area covered in dust and cobwebs, through two doorways and a sealing door, and we were in shiny, air-conditioned corridors. And two men were running towards us.

  My first reaction—Nat’s too—was to reach for the burners on my belt. But as the men came near and slowed down, it turned out they were holding their thumb and forefinger together in a circle. Jan had sent messages ahead, he said through the grapevine, to Usaians aboa
rd the station. And they were coming to meet us.

  After some negotiation we armed them. The negotiation was such even I didn’t understand, but it seemed to hinge on whether they were members in good standing and could be trusted. Simon deferred to Nat in the decisions, so I assumed none of these scientists were Sans Culottes.

  About a third of the scientists were Usaians and almost all the harvesters were.

  Yes, I know what you’ve been told. That we took Circum, the three of us, and heroically rewired the communications devices.

  It wasn’t that easy. And we were nowhere near alone. There were maybe sixty-five harvesters, and they were armed. Mostly homemade burners, but effective. They waited for us in the next area. After we armed the Usaian scientists, we advanced on the larger part of Circum where we were told almost everyone was at that time.

  There were a hundred or so scientists and technicians, in a vast room partitioned in a hundred different cubes and sporting enough apparatus and machinery to stock your average continent.

  Simon ordered everyone from the cubes, an order reinforced by harvesters running up and down the hallways with unsheathed burners. But two of the men who were, Simon whispered to me, guarding the equipment we needed, the communications equipment that had in them the kill switches that controlled communication on Earth, refused to come out. It looked like they’d have to be shot where they were.

  This is when I got to see Nat in action mode, though he told me later on that this was not how he behaved in actual war, unless it was in very specialized circumstances. He’d brought with him a gun large enough that anyone who didn’t know him would think he was compensating for other issues. The burner was massive, normally called a ship-killer and he had worn it in a holster slung across his back. It had become a joke, I think started by Athena, to say “Don’t let Nat use the shipkiller.”

  The reason it was called a shipkiller, of course, was that if fired inside an air-to-space—or for that matter at an-air-to-space—it would tear it in two like a nut shell, which was why I was fairly sure that Nat had no intention of using it. But he unslung the shipkiller from his shoulder and at the first sign of resistance went into a good impression of a maniacal killer, yelling, “I just want an excuse to use this, okay? We’re at war on Earth and they’re killing my people. Mere children. People under my command. I’ve seen them die.” Something like the horror I’d seen in his eyes when he’d come out of the night into my room, made it all more believable. “And I would love to get a little back, in revenge and in their memory.” He pointed the ship killer at the two scientists and added, “If I shoot you, we’ll have a hole in the hull, but there’s probably another room behind and I don’t care.”

  “Nat,” Simon shouted. “Don’t, you might hurt the machinery.”

  Nat told him, in loud and clear terms what he could do with the machinery. Comprehensively. Simon stepped back, and I thought his fear wasn’t feigned. But even I was feeling a little concerned, except before I could intervene, the scientists put their hands in the air and allowed themselves to be shepherded into a group of others. Which was when Simon disappeared, after muttering he was going to find Zen.

  But he was back by the time the scientists had been herded into two groups—those, who while not being Usaians were vouched for by the Usaian scientists, and those who . . . weren’t.

  Nat, striding about casually brandishing the shipkiller, looked as forceful as Abigail had been and managed to convey the impression he was about to burst in fire at any given moment. Only I knew that his short fuse was more of a put-on veneer than a real lack of patience. “What are we going to do with you?” he asked, even as Zen disappeared into the compartments the two scientists had tried to guard.

  “Make them breathe space,” Simon said, casually. I wasn’t sure if this was an act, but it didn’t sound like it to me.

  It mustn’t have sounded like it to Nat either, because he looked over his shoulder and, for just a moment, let us see a very shocked face. If the scientists had seen that, it would have destroyed all our chances of scaring them with Nat.

  But at the same time, Doctor Dias clicked his tongue and said, “No. No, we don’t act like them.” And, looking intently at Simon, he said, “And you should be particularly careful not to act like him.” I understood that by “him” the doctor meant the man from whom Simon had been cloned, one of the men who had been judged neither stable nor human enough to be trusted aboard the long-distance ship to the stars.

  I shivered, thinking that my father, too, hadn’t been trusted and wondering how much I was like him.

  But the exchange had served its purpose; the scientists were cowed. When Doctor Dias said to the harvesters, “Herd them into one of the air-to-spaces in the unused portion. When we’re secure, we shall send them down. They can land wherever they feel safe and good luck to them,” they didn’t even try to resist. Probably because it was all reinforced by Simon saying, “This is misguided. They will come back with a strike force.”

  But then Athena’s husband, who’d been very quiet until then, looked suddenly haunted and shook his head. “No,” he said. “No. Can I have three or four of you more . . . ah, technically inclined gentlemen?”

  And as about a dozen of the loyal scientists approached him, I heard him say, “I will show you how to rig a defense system, so any ship trying to attach, without your specifically allowing it, will be burned on sight. Any ship trying to leave unauthorized, too.”

  “We don’t have weapons here,” one of the men said. “The harvesters have some, but . . .”

  “You have a lot of discarded pieces, from the building of the Je Reviens,” Athena’s husband said. “And you have unlimited energy, in harvested pods.”

  His manner was different, his voice slightly higher than normal, his speech oddly accented in a way that reminded me of Doctor Dias.

  For the next two days, Nat and I and Simon—though he was likely to disappear to go help Zen—kept the friendly scientists and the harvesters under eye, because we had to ensure no treason occurred.

  Food was from rations and largely tasteless, but not unpleasant. Certainly more pleasant than pink mush and green mush.

  After the two days, Zen announced that the machinery was rigged in such a way that it would not only no longer suppress communication on Earth, but that any attempts to suppress it again could be circumvented by bouncing the broadcasts off Circum and it would disseminate it to the whole Earth.

  And Nat, Simon and I took our leave of Athena, Kit and Doc and left with instructions to release the ship with scientists a set time after us. At the last minute, before our air-to-space closed, Zen joined us. She said she’d decided she was more useful to us and Earth than to her native Eden.

  At any rate, I didn’t have much time to think about it, because shortly after we entered Earth’s atmosphere, we found out we were in trouble bad.

  Our Beloved Home

  I’d be tempted to say I’d forgotten how insane Earth’s system of defense was, except I’d never known it. In my entire time as heir to Olympus, I’d gone to space three times, all of them before the age of twelve, with Mother and Father and, the last time, with Ben as a guest to keep me company.

  We’d visited Circum twice, on state occasions, and once the Luna station on the moon, on some sort of inspection. The last trip was the only one I remembered, and most of what I remembered was the gratification of being able to impress Ben with going to space and show him space. By then, we’d watched quite a few holos of space adventures, and we’d spent most of the time by the viewport inventing and telling each other stories of space pirates and spaceships from other worlds, filled with strange creatures.

  On the way back, all that I remembered was that we’d landed. But, of course, father’s air-to-space had had the right broadcasting signals, identifying it as the traveling vehicle of the Good Man of Olympus. And the other Good Men would never dream of interfering with that.

  Which brought us to our return to Ear
th now, on an air-to-space—probably the same one we’d taken up—which had no information as to its origin and no traceable identifiers.

  And this was when I found out that the Earth had a defense problem. For one, there was no such thing as an Earth defense mechanism. There wouldn’t be, right? How could there be when all of the Earth had no one to fear from the outside? Even if all of Circum, all of the moon, and possibly all of mysterious Eden had come to attack Earth they’d not even be noticed by most of the Earth’s population.

  No, the only thing that could threaten Earth was Earth itself, and it turned out, once you entered the fields of alarm and defense of the various territories ruled over by Good Men, you found yourself in the crisscrossing path of several alarms, all of them threatening you with missiles or with robot-ships coming to arrest you.

  For me, the cacophony of shrieking alarms came as a total surprise. For the others, I took it that it was also unexpected but not because they hadn’t thought of it.

  Zen said, “I thought I’d rigged it with your signal,” to Simon.

  And Simon had said, “You probably did, but it’s probably broadcasting another signal, from when it was built three hundred years ago.”

  And Nat just went very stern and determined and I knew that he hadn’t expected this, and didn’t want this, but understood it, and was determined to out-pace it.

  He nudged Simon, who was sitting at the controls. “Simon,” he said. “Let me have those.”

  Simon looked up at him, in surprise. “What?”

  “Let me have those. I know all the safe zones, where they can alarm but they won’t be able to hit us.” He continued, to Simon’s disturbed look, “I had to. We fly transports, you know?”

  Simon, clearly, like me, did not know. But he got up and let Nat take over the controls. Nat sat down, as new alarms echoed “You are invading the air space of the principality of Duachen, stop now or we shall—” “You are flying over the territory of—” and “Desist now or we shall have to—”