Velocity

by B. V. Larson

  He patted the comforting bulge in his suit’s hip pocket. He had to do this right. Rogers was not going to give him a second chance.

  Delaying no longer, he raised his improvised club and crashed it down into the delicate navigational sensor. Gold foil bent and tore. Steel-plex clanged against real metal. The force of the blow jarred his slight body. He jerked his club loose from the tangled ruin and struck again. Copper-trace circuits and microprocessors were smashed to fragments. There was a shout in his earphones, Rogers had come around the corner of the ship. Beckwith paid no heed and struck again. Fresh beads of sweat welled up on his forehead and clung to his skin. His left hand throbbed, but he continued to destroy the sensor.

  “What the hell—” yelled Rogers as he came closer. Dr. Beckwith could hear his labored breathing as he trotted to him in his heavy suit. “I’ve got my needler on you, Beckwith!”

  Dr. Beckwith took another swing, missing clumsily this time, managing only to gouge the protective plate that covered the sensor when it was not in use. His left arm was giving out, becoming useless. He ignored Rogers’ approach, keeping his back to the man. He gambled that Rogers wouldn’t burn down a lunatic with his back turned to him.

  “You’re crazy!” buzzed his earphones. “You’re absolutely, goddamn crazy!”

  Dr. Beckwith was relieved when he found Rogers’ powerful hands wrapping around him. He was yanked back from the crumpled sensor. There was a brief struggle for possession of the steel-plex club. Dr. Beckwith kicked and twisted. Both men were hampered by their pressure-suits, Rogers having the added handicap of wearing a helmet. Finally, Rogers simply grappled with the smaller man, putting him into a powerful bear hug. He managed to restrain Beckwith’s flailing limbs. It was this proximity that Beckwith had been waiting for.

  Rogers powerful arms hugged his shoulders, but didn’t stop him from slipping the hypodermic he had gotten from Mom out of his pocket. If he had tried to sneak up on Rogers, the man might have seen the hypodermic and stopped him. But now there was no chance. With an underhand thrust, he stabbed the needle through the tough layers of fabric and into Rogers’ solar plexus. The pliant bulb at the other end pumped automatically, injecting its contents in rhythmic surges, like the poison sacs of a wasp.

  Captain Rogers folded like a popped balloon.

  #

  The day of the lift-off was unbearably hot. Jade had transformed into a wet green hell. Perspiration itched as it flowed out of Dr. Beckwith’s pores to run in tiny streams down his body. He stood in a clearing he had burned in the jungle with his needler, several hundred meters from the ship. He had stacked a considerable store of survival equipment and medical supplies in the clearing. Included in the equipment were two cots, an air-conditioned tent and the nursing unit, Mom. Dr. Beckwith wished only to maroon the two men, not murder them.

  “It’s all very simple,” he explained. “I, as a biologist, understood it almost immediately.”

  There was no response. Neither of his two listeners was capable of making one. Both Rogers and Foster were strapped to their cots and gagged. Beckwith had gagged them after tiring of their endless alternating threats, pleas and complaints. Mom moved between them, attending faithfully to the needs of her patients. The left hands of both were in restraining casts of fiberglass. Their fingers, protruding from the casts, were red and swollen as if infected. They were, in fact, infested.

  Enjoying the coolness of the air-conditioned tent and the novelty of an attentive audience, Beckwith lectured on. “Because of Jade’s parasitic ecological system, it is simply a requirement for all native life forms here to maintain a personal colony of one of the more dominant species of insect. You see, you need them here, for your own protection. One colony of a more easily endured species will keep other more harmful types at bay.

  “That is just how I got rid of the particularly malevolent insect that had you in its death grip, Paul. All that was necessary was the introduction of another species to get it to retreat.”

  In order to continue his lecture, he needed a model. He removed his glove and carefully rolled up his sleeve, as though peeling delicate fruit. His left arm had healed almost completely, and looked puffy and sore only around his knuckles.

  He took a pen out of his breast pocket and used it as a pointer while he talked. “You see, the particular species that seems easiest to live with requires certain compounds, such as calcium, that are most easily reached at the joints—” here he indicated his swollen knuckles with the tip of his pen. “—Since the hand has many accessible joints just below the skin, it is an ideal breeding site for them.”

  Scurrying creatures resembling fleas the size of small sow bugs moved about on his arm, making their way through his body hair as men travel through bushes. The holes they had burrowed in his flesh to get to the joints of his hands were in the process of healing into permanent scar tissue.

  “Now, of course, I simply leave appropriate amounts of calcium powder around the area, so that they no longer irritate the flesh and joints.”

  Dr. Beckwith concluded his lecture and saw to it that Mom had things well in control and was programmed to release her wards after lift-off. He left the coolness of the survival tent and headed for the ship. All around him the green flames of Jade’s countless leafy plants burned brightly with life. He almost envied the men he was abandoning and the freedom they would have here. He knew that they would not agree with his feelings, but he had to leave them. He would be incinerated as a mutineer if he returned to Earth with them. He preferred to be the sole heroic explorer bringing the wonderful news concerning Jade.

  He replaced the damaged microwave navigational sensor with an auxiliary unit, then began powering up the ship for lift-off. While he searched a manual for the proper control sequence to operate the ship’s stabilizing computer, an exploring insect on a scouting mission rustled its way out of his hair. It came out beneath his ear and made its way up his cheek. He felt its numerous churning feet grip his face and its feelers making feather-light contact with his skin. He held still while it investigated his eyelashes. After a few moments, the insect crawled down across his mouth and along his neck to disappear under his collar line.

  He wondered if his fellow Earth-born men would put up with that sort of thing. A twist of cold fear touched his stomach; what if men refused to come to such a place? But then he relaxed and smiled. He was confident that once Earth’s colonization companies had an organically compatible planet to send people to, that careful advertising would omit such nasty details. The promise of a jungle paradise with an open sky overhead instead of a filtered environment beneath a dead gray dome would sound appealing.

  They would come. Others would adjust to Jade just as he had. Adaptability was one of mankind’s greatest survival traits.

  And of course, there was nowhere else to go.

  He finished with the manual and set the ship into motion. Bass-voiced jets rumbled as the ship rose through the atmosphere. Dr. Beckwith watched the aft view of Jade as it telescoped rapidly. The freshly scorched clearing shrank to a black dot swimming in a green sea. Finally, it vanished as if swallowed by a wave.

  Something tickled among the hairs of his armpit. He found it difficult to ignore. He made a mental note to develop some sort of skin desensitizer for the comfort of the new immigrants.

  Blind Eyes

  Tamara knew the giant would kill her if he caught up. He chased her on the dark beach, each heavy step leaving a crater in the wet sand. He was wired on a handful of blur, synthetic blue crystals that looked a little like drain-cleaner. The side effect that gave the drug its name made his eyes water profusely, which was the only reason Tamara still lived.

  Overhead the clouds hid the moon and most of the stars. Far away across the ocean lights gleamed along the coast marking the outskirts of New Havana, Cuba’s largest city. The waves coming up over the reefs and splashing the sand had a phosphorescent glow to them, the ghostly nimbus from plankton blooms that touches the waters of the
Caribbean during certain times of the year.

  As her feet slapped against the dark sand and popped the bulbs of marooned clumps of seaweed, small crabs scuttled about hoping for food. Tamara was blind, even more blind than the wired-up nine-foot tall giant that murderously hunted her. Her closed eyelids looked normal, there was even the semblance of long dark lashes, but beneath these lids she had no eyes at all. The genes for her optical organs and the brain sections that processed the input from the optical nerves had been deleted, as that left more room in her skull for other things.

  She sensed the crabs at her feet, moving objects of a particular shape and size, at a certain location and depth. They had no color or shading, and except for their heat signature, they looked the same to her at midnight or high noon. Tamara perceived the crabs, rather than saw them, just as she perceived the giant.

  He was behind her, over a hundred yards away in the dark. She sensed the foaming seawater that rushed over his heavy boots. She watched his huge heart pound with deliberate liquid motions in his vast chest.

  Doctor Sato had been right, of course. He had bought her as an embryo from Tyro Labs, and he was the closest thing to a father that she had. He had told her to leave matters at the schools alone. She had not listened, she had used her job as an instructor to find the kids who needed help, to reach into their minds and tug here, to pluck there. She had removed the need they had for blur and other drugs, or at least neutralized it.

  Things might not have gone so badly if she had stopped there. If sales had just gone down, the pushers would have been baffled, but not enraged. At least, they would not have had a direction for their anger, and would have been likely to turn it on themselves.

  Yes, if she had stopped there, things might have worked out. But she hadn’t.

  She was getting tired. She knew that just running was not going to work. The giant was half-blind and in the dark, but he carefully used what little myopic vision he had left, tracking her footsteps in the sand. He lost her now and again, as he had back in the village and the jungle, but always regained her trail. His stamina was boundless, he had the muscle density of a gorilla and had sunken deeply into the berserk rage that engulfed all the giants so easily, especially when they indulged in blur crystals.

  It was this last genetic flaw, that when discovered, had finally moved the Office of Social Blending to enact strict regulations. They had essentially outlawed private gene-programming. Gene-shops had long profited from anxious couples. They promised prospective parents the tailor-made child of their dreams. Many sports fans had desired a big beefy son for football or boxing. Once the competition for the best growth programming got started, the free-market and the one-upsmanship tendencies of people everywhere took care of the rest. The modern giants were the result, a highly-publicized and frightening racial subgroup all their own. Every sports team had to have them, every celebrity had to have a bodyguard big enough to match his ego. They did airline and beer commercials, had a high rate of suicide and tended to extremes of violence when intoxicated.

  To this day, despite the laws, in the dark corners of the globe more zygotes were poked and prodded, more poverty-stricken women moaned through emergency C-sections, and more giants were born. Tamara reached the place where the hammock and the lantern hung together on a nail sunk into the bark of a tall palm and turned into the forest.

  As she had tried to tell Doctor Sato, she had done it for the children. It was not enough to stop the pushers in just her little town, in just the school where she taught. She wanted to strike directly at the people who had harmed the children. She wanted to do more than interrupt their cash-flow and sour their profits.

  What had been wonderful was that she had succeeded, for a time. Suddenly the pushers hadn’t wanted to push anymore. Some of them had even turned in their colleagues, all that they knew of, to the DEA. But it had been the others, the secret ones, the ones that hid and watched, who had discovered her. Tamara hadn’t known about them, hadn’t been suspicious enough to spy every mind behind every pair of eyes that watched her.

  She shuddered just to think of their minds. To touch their squirming thoughts left her disgusted, as if she had touched a sea-reptile steeped in slippery bottom-muck.

  She had not suspected them, because the secret ones had been children.

  Only fifty yards behind now, the giant turned after her, ripping loose the hammock from its moorings as he strode beneath the palms. He pulled it away from his chest like a cobweb and fumbled through the trees in the dark, his eyes watering and blinking.

  Tamara, panting with panic and fatigue now, rushed through the humid bug-filled darkness. She crashed in the undergrowth that grew in density as she left the beach behind. Ahead, she thought to make out the tingling heat-radiance of artificial light.

  Then her feet found a trail winding into the interior, and she began to run, haltingly, hands stretched out before her in case her perception failed to pick up a hanging vine or branch. Big soft leaves from jungle plants struck at her, soft as pillows. Cord-like roots sought to loop around her ankles. She stepped on some squishy, unwholesome thing in the dark and gave a small breathless shriek.

  After the secret ones had discovered her identity, the assassins had come. They had been easy to spot and divert at first, until the third one, the giant that trailed her now. His mind was unreachable, a blank gray wall of impregnable brick, hidden behind a dense fog of blur dust. She had no idea who he was or where he had come from and as a natural empath, this was a concept that terrified her. For her he had no more humanity than a machine. A killing machine.

  Ahead the shape of the hut was unmistakable. Inside she perceived movement, although it was muffled and vague through the adobe walls. She stumbled over the half-step in front of the door and tried the latch. It was locked, so she hammered on the ancient mahogany door.

  “Doctor Sato, let me in,” she hissed up close to the door, reluctant to give the giant any sounds to follow. She could hear the giant in the jungle behind her, some ways off, crashing through the vegetation like a power shovel.

  The door swung inward and she stumbled inside, the bright radiance of a lantern and the dim glow of a computer terminal flaring up like new radar contacts in her mind. Doctor Sato was there too, his mind surprised, concerned and fearful. “Tamara, what have you got yourself into now, girl?” he asked, reaching out with his hairy knuckled hands and guiding her gently into the shelter of the hut. He was a short brown man with a wide soft belly and a balding scalp. His dimensions reminded Tamara of a life-sized toy bear.

  “We’ve got to run,” Tamara whispered hoarsely, her breath burning in her lungs. “Another assassin has found me, and it’s a giant this time,” here she shook her head, her long dark hair falling into her face and sticking to her sweaty skin. “We’ve got to run.”

  “A giant?” he said in disbelief. Tamara sensed Sato’s heart quickening in his chest, but could not see his eyes widen with fear nor the way his mouth sagged with dismay. She felt the fear in his mind though, and she felt vaguely sick at having brought all this back to him, at having burdened him with her plight, but she had nowhere else to turn.

  “Let’s go then,” he said, his grip closing around her wrist. He led her through the room, slamming the mahogany door shut behind them and throwing the bolt. He paused only to snatch up some data-capsules and turn off the bio-processor, a reflex. He fumbled with the latch on the backdoor for a moment and the stupid little hook that held the screen door shut stopped them for precious seconds. For some reason, he didn’t think immediately of forcing it. He was sixty-two, and running for his life was something new.

  Behind them, something huge and ponderous pushed through the overgrown walk way and up to the mahogany door. The latch rattled, then there was a heavy thud. The hinges groaned and splinters sprayed away from the doorjamb. Together, Tamara and Sato hit the backdoor with their bodies and it popped open easily, swinging wide and smacking into the wall.

  Tamara saw a startl
ed iguana scuttle away into the jungle. Her mind automatically tracked the reptile’s movement even though it was hidden in the underbrush.

  Visible on the driveway was the cool metallic form of Sato’s ATV. Hope blossomed in Tamara’s heart at its image appeared in her mind. They scrambled to the car and released the hatches, climbing inside. For a few tense seconds Sato fumbled through his clothes pockets for the keys while back in the hut the giant wreaked great destruction, smashing everything in reach of his huge hands.

  “Come on!” cried Tamara, feeling hot tears welling from her empty eye sockets. She could feel the raw burning terror in Sato’s mind as well as experiencing her own.

  Finally, he tugged the clattering bundle of codekeys from his breast pocket where they had been all along and slammed one of the coded cylinders into the ignition. The engine flared into life, Sato threw it into gear and slammed down the power rod. With a tortured growl, the ATV leapt forward on the unpaved road, big balloon tires churning up wet dirt. Tamara sensed the giant had made his way out the backdoor of the hut, following them. His arms swung like a catapult heaving a boulder. An object zoomed out of the dark at them and she screamed. She sensed it as it overtook them from behind.

  “What—” began Sato, then the object struck the back window and caromed off, crashing into the jungle. The object had been Sato’s bio-processor.

  The back window shattered. A spray of glass shards hit them both and Sato almost drove into a mangrove tree. Tamara was so relieved she almost laughed aloud.

  “I thought maybe it was a grenade,” she said.

  Sato nodded while he fought the wheel and got them back on the road. They bounced along at a demonic pace, both of them laughing with relieved tension. There was no way the giant would catch them now.