Extinction sf-2

by B. V. Larson

  I snorted. “Nanites or not, exercise is never a bad thing.”

  “Says you. I’ve heard you’ve got an arm on that beast of yours.”

  I raised my eyebrows. I wasn’t really surprised he had spies watching me, but I was surprised he’d let the truth slip out. “Do you want a big fleet produced quickly to meet the Macros? Or maybe I should build them to order with designer colors.”

  “What I want is to know why you rated an arm.”

  “Because I designed the ships,” I said, grinning.

  Crow grumbled incoherently for a few sentences in Aussie slang. I suspected I was being compared unfavorably to a kangaroo.

  When his tirade died down, I dove in and explained the communications worries I had. I gave him a script that would allow communications with local ships of our design, but not with other ‘wild’ Nano ships.

  “There’s something else,” I said, “before I panicked and ordered the ship to turn off communications to other Nanos, I was asking it about the increased effects of acceleration I’ve been feeling.”

  “Oooo,” he said, “Poor baby! Three engines, I hear? You must have been plastered to the floor.”

  “How did you-” I said, but stopped myself. I knew he wouldn’t tell me who was ratting on me, or how he’d gotten the rat’s observations to his ship. But he would enjoy my irritation.

  He laughed loudly, harshly. “Thought you could build a super-ship and give old Crow the trainer, did you? You figured I’d never even notice.”

  “We’ll work on better ship designs after the Macros-” I began.

  “Yeah, yeah. Easy on. I’ll tell you why the ships are pasting us to the floor and the ceiling.”

  “The ceiling?”

  “Just try going down fast-it’s quite a ride.”

  “But why?” I asked, becoming annoyed. Crow loved his little games.

  “Because you forgot something, mate.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know!” roared Crow in irritation. “Some kind of stabilizer. Didn’t you ever notice that these ships could move with wild acceleration patterns and we barely noticed? Well, now you will notice, believe me.”

  I nodded, putting my hand on my chin. I hadn’t thought about it, but it made sense. I wondered how many other devices the originals had built into them that I hadn’t known to include. I’d never seen a stabilizer system, had never found it during my explorations on the Alamo. But apparently, some such apparatus had been aboard.

  “So, we are flying beta versions,” I said. “Well, they are better than nothing. The brass back at NATO must be watching us in a panic. We’ve got a fleet again.”

  “Yes, you did manage to make these things look frightening,” agreed Crow. “At the end of the day, I have to congratulate you, my yobbo engineer. What are we going to do with your ship, now that you have it?”

  “I’m going to mass more of them and face down the Macros.”

  “No sense of adventure,” he said.

  “What are you going to do? Hunt for a new girlfriend on a lonely street? Is that why you want the arm so badly?”

  “Pull your head in! We don’t need to do anything so drastic now. We’re famous. I should be able to get a chickie-babe to climb aboard with me now, no worries.”

  I thought for a second about adventures. It had been a long time since I’d done anything other than work hard for the war effort. Maybe I should take Sandra on a little trip. It would be like old times.

  Then, an idea struck me. “I know what I’m going to do, Crow. I’m going to fly out and investigate the mystery spots. When I have this ship fully outfitted, I’m going to find out how these aliens get in and out of our star system.”

  — 24-

  With only two months to go until the Macros were due to come and collect their tribute, I screwed up. Sandra finally figured out I meant to lead the expedition.

  We’d never really discussed it before. I’d been so busy building up the new Fleet, the legion of men and mountains of equipment, she hadn’t even considered the idea I was going with them. In her mind I was in the Star Force Fleet first, not a ground-pounding marine. She knew I’d fought in the South American campaign, but that wasn’t how she thought of me. She met me as the pilot of Alamo. Now that I had a new ship, I’d returned to that role. Naturally, she’d known I had critical roles in both halves of our organization, but somehow my evasiveness on the topic of who was to command the mission had succeeded for months.

  There were very few things I’d managed to keep her from learning in the course of our relationship. I was surprised on the whole that she hadn’t figured this one out sooner. Looking back, I had to wonder if she hadn’t wanted to know. Maybe she didn’t want to think about being left behind while I went off into the total unknown to wage war for the benefit of a race of alien monsters. Maybe the idea was so horrific, she couldn’t even conceive of it.

  Sandra figured out the truth one sunny afternoon while we talked about Crow and the Fleet. She asked me since he was commanding the Fleet and I was commanding the Marines, then who would be commanding the legion we were so busily training?

  I hesitated. That killed me, I think. Before, I’d glibly deflected her. I’d said things like who knows? Or Robinson is a good man. Or sometimes even some Pentagon type, I suppose. But this time, I didn’t blurt out an easy lie. Probably, it was because the day of reckoning was so near. It seemed wrong somehow to keep such a big secret from her. I knew that ignorance was bliss-but at what point did the sin of omission become a lie?

  Sandra stared at me. I knew, watching her eyes search mine, that I had already blown it. If I tried a lie now, she would probe more deeply, suspiciously. I would be forced to either tell her the truth, or attempt an outright lie. I didn’t have the heart for either, so I dropped my eyes and said nothing.

  “What is it?” she asked. “You-you don’t think you’re going with them, do you?”

  Suddenly, her hand fell on my wrist. She squeezed. If it hadn’t been for the nanites in my flesh, her claw-like grip might have been painful.

  “I’m commanding the mission,” I said evenly, raising my head back up and looking her in the eye.

  Sandra released me and fell back against the couch we shared, thumping her shoulders into the cushions. She made an exasperated sound.

  “This is about the kid-thing, isn’t it?” she demanded suddenly.

  I blinked. “Huh?”

  “If you need to take a break from me, if you really are all messed-up in the head about your own lost kids, then just tell me now. We don’t have to do this, Kyle. We really don’t.”

  She was angry. I could tell that. I couldn’t figure out the rest of what she was saying. It didn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t respond, figuring that was the safest move.

  “You weren’t even going to say anything, were you?” she demanded. She got up off the couch by sliding away, throwing her arms high so as to keep as far out of reach as possible. I made no attempt to grab her. She walked around our living room with quick, pissed-off steps. Her arms were crossed; her head was down, her lips pouted. Her long hair hung around her face like a hood.

  “Of course I was going to tell you eventually,” I managed to get out.

  “No. No you weren’t. You were just going to vanish one day. The way you did the last time the Macros came. You almost went off to the stars that day, too. You remember? You have some kind of fantasy about leaving me, don’t you?”

  I wondered if this was it. I wondered if the proverbial professor had been wise beyond all imagining. I told myself it wasn’t fair, it had been less than a year. I deserved at least another six months. Had I miscalculated the beauty-to-age ratio? Damn.

  “I don’t want you to leave me, Sandra,” I said.

  “Then why the hell are you leaving me?” she demanded.

  “Because I have to,” I said. “I set this up. I can’t send thousands of guys off to die on a distant rock after I negotiated the deal. What if they neve
r come back? How could I live with myself?”

  She stared at me. “It’s not about the kid-thing?”

  “No, Sandra. Really, it’s not.”

  “When did you decide to go?”

  “About an hour after I made the deal with the Macros.”

  Again, I’d been overly-truthful. She huffed and almost slapped me. I saw her hand coming up, and I flinched. I’m not sure why. Her slaps never hurt. I supposed it was reflex.

  “You didn’t tell me all this time?”

  “Are you happier now that you know?” I asked.

  Sandra breathed very hard for a while. Her lower jaw jutted out, showing teeth, while she paced around the room. Her hair had somehow become tousled. “I’m not going to let you go without me,” she said.

  “You don’t have any choice,” I said gently.

  She walked out then, and slammed the door behind her. The walls weren’t terribly thick, and the window rattled.

  I sighed and went to the kitchen to get myself a beer. I thought about the proverbial professor and his ratios. If the old bastard was still alive somewhere, I wanted to strangle him in his sleep.

  Several hours later I was back on the couch. Things were fuzzier now. I’d formed a pyramid with the cans I’d drained. The last one-number ten, I think it was-wouldn’t sit right on top of the others. It kept crashing down. Somehow, this seemed funny to me. I picked it up again and tried to stack them all neatly.

  The door flew open-and it kept going. I looked up, blinking in surprise. Sandra stood there in the doorway. I was confused.

  “Where did the door go?” I asked.

  She glanced back over her shoulder. “I think its somewhere out on the driveway.”

  I stared at her and she stared back. Her eyes were smoldering. She was still angry, but also triumphant. I stood up and accidentally knocked over my pyramid of cans.

  “What did you do?”

  “Something I should have done a long time ago.”

  I took a few more steps toward her. I noticed then there was blood running down her neck on both sides. Her hair looked funny, too.

  “What happened to your hair?”

  “It will grow back.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. She threw back her hair and revealed her neck and bloody ears. “I couldn’t take it. I had to rip my earrings out.”

  My mouth sagged open. There were her lovely earlobes, torn and bleeding. There were hunks of hair missing in spots, too. I looked at her nails. There were a lot of red scrapings under there.

  “I tried to work on my thighs,” she said conversationally. “I ripped at them, the way you tell the guys to do. It did help.”

  “You took the nanite injections?” I asked stupidly. I had almost reached her. I took one more step.

  “Duh.”

  “Why?”

  She slapped me then, very hard. My head jerked to the right as if I’d been hit by a baseball bat. For the first time since I’d met her, one of her slaps actually hurt me.

  “Because, you slow-witted, drunk bastard,” she said, “I’m going with you.”

  — 25-

  We’d ordered a large number of pilot seats for our ships from various defense contractors. There had been mutterings amongst the earther brass, but what could they do? They’d put us back in charge of Earth’s space fleet. No one else could to build the new fleet, as we’d held onto our factories despite their coup attempt. We were still Star Force, and we had to have ships to fly, and these new birds needed seats that could hold a pilot in place.

  The more I thought about it, the more I thought this situation might work out best for Earth in the long run. If any one nation had stolen the factories, would the rest of the planet freely give them the resources they needed? Probably not. They would be terrified the possessing nation would want to dominate the world. By maintaining a neutral stance, we’d gotten humanity through some tough spots. They still called us amateurs-for good reason-but we had a monopoly on Nano technology at this point and we hadn’t failed Earth yet.

  The pilot seats were absolutely necessary with the lack of stabilizers. Our nanotized bodies could take more punishment than normal pilots, but it would be hard to fight my ship if I was bouncing around the bridge like a dime in a drier.

  I had six more ships built by the time I was ready to go check on our alien friends. They might not like what I was doing, so I didn’t want to take off and leave no combat ships behind me. We had put fighter pilots in four of the new ships, real pros. Due to the distances involved, you couldn’t fly the craft visually, and combat took time. You often had to fly them strategically, almost as if you were a sub commander. I put a group of navy sea commanders on two of the Nano ships for this reason. It was something of an experiment to see who would outperform the other.

  Crow and I had hand-chosen each of the pilots-and not only for their skills. We made sure every pilot was from a different nation. Some might call it diversity, but I called it security. It would be hard to organize an internal coup if the pilots didn’t trust or even know each other.

  The day I was leaving, Crow tried to talk me out of it. This was at least his seventh attempt.

  “What if you go out there and cock-up the treaty?”

  “I won’t pull anyone’s tail,” I assured him. “If I see a Macro ship, I’ll run home.”

  “If you must go, you should check out the spot out in the Oort cloud, not Venus. We don’t even have that location pinpointed, and you could find out where my last fleet went.”

  “That’s about two thousand times farther away. I want to be back in hours, not weeks.”

  “Yeah, if you are coming back at all,” Crow grumbled. “What the hell am I supposed to do with all these jarheads if you go off and feed yourself to some alien threshing machine?”

  “Your concerns are touching, Admiral,” I told him.

  I soon tired of Crow and politely broke the connection. I reflected on how our relationship had changed since the failed coup against us. We were equals now, with separate turf. He ran the Fleet and I ran the Marines. I didn’t take orders from him anymore, but we pretended I did in public. Our real relationship was more like a partnership-or a bad marriage with a lot of yelling involved.

  I’d already told him why I had to go. We just didn’t have enough information about our enemies. I needed intelligence, and I’d built a set of spyboxes with nanotech. These systems were essentially a brainbox attached to a passive sensor array, a small power source and a transmitter. I planned to lay a few of these out there near the system entry point, whatever it was, to watch for alien activity. I was sure similar earther systems had already been launched. I could have sent one of my new pilots, but they were unproven and I didn’t want to risk a diplomatic incident over the actions of a green scout.

  There was another reason I was going myself, of course. I was burning to know what was out there. There were so many secrets in this game, and this one was just sitting there, daring for me to do something about it.

  “Socorro, lift us off gently.”

  “Command acknowledged.”

  Damn, I thought, she sounds so much like Alamo. I’d thought about trying to get her to use a different voice, but had never gotten around to it.

  “Head straight up until we exit the atmosphere.”

  We glided upward at what felt like one G of acceleration, added onto Earth’s one G of gravity. I felt heavy, but not terribly uncomfortable. Soon we broke through the atmosphere and reached orbit at about a hundred miles above the surface. I’d installed cameras in my ship this time around. Not just cheap webcams, either. These were high-def with high-grade, military lenses. I’d installed an OLED screen in front of my pilot’s chair, and joysticks to direct the cameras on the outer hull of the ship.

  The view was breathtaking. The Earth was a blue-white crescent, textured with clouds and landmasses. I could see the various Caribbean islands. The sun reflected blindingly from the su
rface of the Atlantic far below.

  I smiled. I really felt like a space traveler today. Up until this moment, I’d been further out in space than any human currently in the Solar System, but I’d never seen my own world from orbit.

  I checked the forward screen. The big board had a number of metallic dots crawling around, but nothing seemed out of place. I decided to check out my observatory. When I’d requisitioned the building materials from the government, there were raised eyebrows. I told them there were things I wanted to see with my own eyes out there. It was the one major extravagance I’d installed aboard my ship. I had real windows in the observatory-or rather a single thick sheet of auto-shaded, ballistic glass embedded in the floor. I was sick of imagining what space looked like outside of my ship. The observatory worked like a glass-bottomed boat, and I meant to look directly down on Earth from inside my ship.

  “Socorro, give me enough acceleration toward Venus to walk properly.”

  Within seconds, the ship had reoriented itself. I was thrown against the straps, then once our course was set, I felt my weight increase steadily until it was about half of normal.

  I turned and tilted my head. What was that sound? I’d heard something, a thump or some shifting of material. I unstrapped and got up, annoyed. Everything should have been secure.

  “Socorro, secure any loose cargo.”

  “Done.”

  There was another sound. What was that? I thought it came from the observatory, which I’d built adjacent to the bridge, right next to the living quarters. Had my new window out into the universe cracked already? Grunting in irritation, I walked up to the wall and touched it. The metal turned to liquid and instantly melted away.

  I stepped into the observatory. The view below my feet transfixed me. The floor of the room was blindingly blue-white. The Earth rode down there, moving very slightly. We were over Canada now, as best I could tell through the clouds. I could feel the cold outside, it had already chilled the room. I’d have to make adjustments for temperature. Apparently, the skin of the ship did that automatically, but the glass floor let the exterior temperature seep inside.