War World X: Takeover

by John F. Carr

  You have been to the wars, haven’t you? she asked herself, astonished.

  She was determined to sit up and was astonished at how weak she felt. What felt like the grandmother of all migraines glittered and stabbed in her eyes.

  “Coming around?” asked a man in a white coat so worn that even the red staff and crossed serpents of his profession were frayed. RYAN said the badge on the coat. His eyes were blue, and his hair was graying. His face bore the reddish patches of skin cancers, cost-effectively (if not aesthetically) removed. To her surprise, Wyn heard a South Boston accent. A contract physician? He was a long way from home. The tones were efficient, kind and blessedly familiar. She felt her eyes fill as he propped her up and handed her a disposable cup.

  “As soon as you can think straight, I have to talk you. There’s not much time.”

  She gulped the bitter analgesic. The spikes into her brain seemed to withdraw, and then diminished to a bearable level. Light from warped overhead panels: no windows.

  Damn all, had they taken her to a state institution? She’d never be found, much less sprung from one of those rat-holes!

  “I don’t have time to break this to you,” the physician told her. “You took a hit from a sonic stunner. You’re at the BuReloc station in Florida. When I finish processing you, you’ll be put on the first ship out.”

  If she started laughing, she knew she would never stop. Emigrants, forced or voluntary—wouldn’t do for them to die in droves aboard a star-ship, now would it? And what was she doing here?

  “May I make one call, please?” she asked. Her lawyer…her family… could she reach their Senator’s staff? It would be a waste of breath, even if she could. They probably all knew and assented.

  “What good do you think it would do?” Ryan asked her gently. “Records have you down as a political.” His hand went up, blocking Wyn’s sight of the scratched data screen.

  Wyn allowed herself to chuckle once, briefly. “So the son-of-a-bitch got to his Important Contacts, did he? Got named guardian of his crazy sister, the dangerous radical. No civil rights. And off she goes.”

  She shook her head to clear it of the ghosts that threatened to storm her sanity: Hecuba wailing before the black ships; Andromache in a cart; Melos burning, the men dead and the weak led away into slavery.

  “Nothing I can do?” She couldn’t take that. She jumped to her feet, looking for the exit. She was taller than Ryan, stronger, probably, from years of all that good Taxpayer nutrition and exercise. She could push her way past…

  “For Christ’s sake, don’t try it, Ms. Baker!” The sincerity in that shout brought her around.

  “This is kidnapping,” she told him. “You know that.” She paused to catch his eye, to underscore his awareness that they shared a hometown.

  “In the name of God,” she whispered, “could you make some calls for me?”

  It was hopeless. Already, he was shaking his head. Wyn met his eyes. I’m not throwing my life away the way you did. Astonishment and fear that she had had chances he could barely dream of, yet had blown them all showed in his face. He was half afraid of her, half angry.

  “Sure, you’ve been shafted.” He spoke too fast, his face now turned away. “Ms. Baker, five more years, and I reach Taxpayer status, and my kids with me. We’ll never have what you threw away, but we’ll get by. You think I’m going to risk that? We’re just little people. Look: I can make sure you’re fit to ship out. But I’m not ruining my kids’ lives for you.”

  He paused, and his face, already pocked with the scars of skin cancers flushed dark. “I’m sorry, Professor. But it wouldn’t do either of us a damn bit of good.

  “And you can hate my guts all you want. Damned if I care. I don’t have to do this, you know. There are people out there who’d be grateful if I spent more time with them.”

  Wyn bowed her head, fighting panic. I’m not equipped for this, she thought. Read, listen, stay at home; why join the rat race? She’d been told all her life. Her family was too old for people like her to go haring around the universe. Space travel—she tried to recall what she knew of it and was embarrassed she knew so little.

  She wasn’t going to live through this, she thought abruptly. But other exiles had survived. If she were weak, if she let her life slip away, she only let her brother and his trained slaves win that much earlier.

  Listen, remember; try to keep alive.

  “Now, you’ve one hour, one hour before you ship out. It’s going to be rough. And if you’re as smart as your records say”—incredulous headshake—”you’ll help me prepare you to survive.”

  I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe it. She shook her head, waving away the offer of a trank. This was one nightmare for which she had to be conscious.

  “Go ahead, Doctor,” she said in the crisp voice she would use with her own specialists. “Maybe you could start by telling me what I face.”

  “First, Luna Base, then out-system. Tanith, maybe, or Haven.” Coerced, perhaps, by her tone, he tapped in an inquiry on the computer, muttering under his breath as it beeped and sputtered. “There’s a ship bound for Haven scheduled to leave Luna Base. Cold weather world. I can make sure you’re not dropsick, that your immunizations are up to strength and that your circulation is in as good a shape as it can be.”

  I’ll live, Wyn vowed to herself. Living well—living at all—is the best revenge. And I’ll get back….

  He shook his head. Compassion replaced his earlier defensiveness. “Something else,” he said. “I need your permission to inhibit your fertility.”

  Wyn burst out laughing.

  “At my age?” she demanded. “Whom—or what do you think I’m going to meet on Luna Base….”

  “Lady, you listen to me. You’re still at risk. And there’s damn few contraceptives on board ship, and those’ll go to the younger women—if they’re lucky. If they’re damned lucky. You don’t want to be pregnant when a ship Jumps, believe me. Not with what they’ve got for medical care on board if you miscarry….”

  Wyn raised her eyebrows at him. “Doctor, I am not sexually active.”

  He shook his head at her. “Dr. Baker, you’ve got to understand. This trip’s long. And it makes steerage look like a yacht. You won’t be Dr. Winthrop Baker on board a BuReloc ship. You won’t be much of anything except a female body. I can’t tell you what to do with your own body. But if you’ve got any sense, you’ll take the implant. It’ll suppress menstruation, too. And believe me: you want that.”

  Ultimately, she did. Feeling vaguely queasy, she slid down off the examination table and dressed in the coverall he handed her, a coarse thing of greenish gray. Ship issue? she wondered and wondered even more to find herself curious.

  “Better move it,” said the medic. “But before you do…” he handed over her book bag. “Your things are packed in it. I wouldn’t let anyone handle that, if I were you. I added a few more medical supplies. You’ll need them.”

  “Why?” she asked bluntly. “And how much?”

  “I haven’t sunk that low. Yet.” He flushed, and the scars of his surgeries for skin cancer flushed darker than the rest of his face. “Guard this stuff; it’s all you have. Your money’s been impounded, you know,” he told her. She hadn’t. She was not surprised. “God bless. It’s time.”

  She drew herself up and walked to the door, then whirled back to shake Dr. Ryan’s hand. She forced him to meet her eyes, to see the respect—reluctant but genuine—in her own. She was glad his face brightened a little at it.

  “Good-bye, Doctor,” she said. “And thank you.”

  There was blood in the air. And the stinks of sweat, of packaged food gone rancid, sickness and babies too long left unchanged assaulted Wyn, backing her against the stained white concrete walls of the processing center. She gagged, drew a careful breath, and then another.

  Two CoDominium Marines walked by, careful of their weapons and of the crowd of families awaiting processing as if they were criminals instead of w
illing immigrants. They walked right by her, their glances dismissing her: a middle-aged woman, tired, scared, and shabby—in other words, no threat and virtually invisible. Given the wailings and babblings all about her, she doubted if they’d even hear her.

  Cold from the concrete spread into her back as she stared at the panels in the ceiling. Past her flowed the crowd: with screaming children; brothers and sisters huddling together; here and there a solitary man swaggering toward the ship that would take him into exile; the occasional woman, blowsy or terrified, shrinking against the walls: people angry, frightened or numbed by what they faced.

  Dr. Ryan’s shabby office seemed like a paradise of reason and care by comparison. Hard to believe she had ever sat in a chair, been treated and thanked someone like him in a cool, civil voice as if she had a right to care, without appreciating the privilege.

  “Move it, sister.” A trusty gestured to her.

  Wyn moved it; her book bag with her pathetic few supplies and her clothes, the jewels still sewn into the seams, bumping on one shoulder.

  It was really happening. It was happening to her. Ahead of her, someone sank to his knees, moaning and was shoved back to his feet and on ahead. No: no use in collapse, then. She walked toward the wire cages that held interviewers enthroned behind battered metal desks for processing. Her footsteps took on a rhythm that, gradually, she recognized. One of the Herald’s speeches, she thought: March to the ships of the Achaeans whenever the commanders of the army sound the shrill note of the echoing trumpet. March into exile. March into slavery. Euripides had written that after Melos; and all the Athenians, blood upon their hands, had wept. She would have wept if she could find her tears and if they would do any good.

  “Baker,” said the trusty seated at the desk. His coverall, the same gray as the guards wore, was too tight and stained by food. He glanced down at the screen built into his desk. “Political.” Wyn drew breath to make some sort of last appeal.

  “Move it.”

  She stared at him. What about the records checks and the checks for medical clearance—?

  “Move it, traitor bitch, or I call the guards.”

  He glared and gestured. A Marine ambled over, the bell-shaped muzzle of his sonic stunner gleaming, Wyn moved it.

  The trusty pushed a button. A door opened in the wall and Wyn went through, into a maze of narrow white corridors and then into the blinding yellow sunlight she would never see again. She drew a deep breath of air blessedly free of the taints of blood, filth and old sweat. Moored at the end of it wasn’t after all one of the black ships out of a Greek tragedy, the blue eye warding off evil at its prow, but a huge-winged landing ship.

  Ahead of her stretched a narrow gangway, crowded with guards and transportees. “Get a move on it,” muttered a guard, gesturing at her with a prod and a whip. “Haul ass!”

  Wyn moved it. Five more steps and she would be at the end of the gangplank where it fed into the ship. The Florida sun was warm, almost a benediction on her aching back. Before she entered the ship, she turned and took a hasty, hungry look at the violent crimsons and golds of the last sunset she would ever see on her world.

  Moments later, the hatches clanged shut. She was shoved onto a padded shelf and secured like merchandise. The screams of the other transportees rose about her. Then the shrieks of the ship’s engines drowned them out and seemed to hurl them all on top of her.

  Wyn staggered in the unfamiliar, blessed weight of Luna Base’s one-seventh gravity. Not much, but it would suffice to anchor the vomit, assuming her fellow prisoners had anything left in their stomachs. From acceleration to zero-G, the trip to Luna Base had been a horror. Not just the stinks and the slime, but the closeness. She had never thought of herself as overly fastidious and had daily worked up a good sweat running, but now she realized how much she needed space. Here, instead of elbowroom, she had cubic room. And precious little of it.

  And this was the dream of space that she’d heard a few old-time physicists lament? Still, there had been that one glimpse of the Earth from space.

  They’ve taken the dream and broken it. And it should have been ours, she thought. She had never cared to think much about it before.

  Plato, she knew, had written of space, as had the Neo-Platonists. Dream visions, all of them. All out of fashion. In the last gasp of this century, intellectuals had made it a fashion to spurn the idea. Her too, though she had never considered herself as subscribing to fashions in thought. If you surrender control of something, someone will seize it, she told herself. Of all her sins of omission and commission, she feared that abandoning the dream of space, the control over the ships that flew through it, was one of the things that had brought her to Luna Base a convict, rather than an eager student.

  Unsteadily, she walked down the corridor of this new prison, painted the gray-green of Luna’s rock. An intercom crackled over the straining air vents, ordering groups to this side and that. She saw a crowd of men young enough to be her students herded in one direction. Then the order subsided. Indecisive, the crowd from the shuttle milled. A few sat on the now-filthy bundles they still carried with them.

  Their faces as expressionless as if they wore bronze helms with only slits for eyes and nose; the CD Marines in blue and scarlet stood guard.

  Enlisted men. Wyn met officers at this dinner or that. If these men had been officers—what makes you think they wouldn’t tell you that you got precisely what you deserved?

  The crowd waited so long that even the CD Marines began to shift from foot to foot. Finally, the intercom crackled to hasty life.

  “ALL HAVEN-BOUND…” Static drowned out the rest of the message, but not the shouts that followed. “Rest of you, down there! Step lively, now.”

  Trusties in gray coveralls emerged from side doors. They had sonic tinglers; not as bad as the stunners, but nothing Wyn wanted to be hit with. Swearing, waving their weapons, with orders blaring so loudly overhead that it too felt like an assault, they herded Wyn and the other prisoners from the shuttle into a huge room, subdivided into pens. Doors—no, a port—began to slide shut as motors whirled and whined, building up to.…

  Was this the ship? No processing, no questions, no explanations: Had they just been herded on board?

  She closed her hands to conceal the trembling in them. She had hoped that Dr. Ryan was wrong. Around her rose the cries and stinks of poorly tended children. It was like something out of the Trojan Women: herded onto the black ships, helpless and afraid.

  “You come in with us, honey,” came a voice. Wyn nearly wept for gratitude. Men, women and children, thugs and citizens they might be, all lumped together. She had hoped, at least, that convicts would be separated from…from what? Law-abiding citizens? Wyn, she told herself, up here we’re all convicts.

  Then, the screaming started.

  A girl, her mismatched skirt and jacket almost shredded, darted through the narrowing port, pursued by red-faced trusties. Unused to the gravity, she stumbled and fell, still screaming in two languages.

  “They put him out! They threw him out the lock! Out there!” Her sobs doubled her over, and she gagged and retched.

  Wyn started forward, but not before a shorter, much plumper woman grabbed the girl, raised her, and smacked her face sharply. “Quiet! You want to follow him? You want it all to be wasted?”

  She gulped, drew breath for another scream, and the woman slapped her again. “Shut up! Or we’ll all be in for it.”

  Wyn threaded through the crowd and knelt beside them. “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s it to you?” The woman’s eyes were ancient, suspicious, though her face bore the too-taut look of many plastic surgeries.

  “We’re not rats in a trap,” she snapped back. “Was she…?”

  “Probably,” said the older woman as she soothed the hysterical girl with the absent skill of too much practice. “Someone tried to protect her. They put him outside.”

  And when Wyn’s face went blank, the other jerked her thumb. �
��Out the airlock.”

  Air bubbling, lungs bursting, blood freezing and boiling. Wyn fought to breathe and not to gag.

  “Don’t tell me you’re gonna be sick on me, too. Keerist, I thought at least I’d stopped baby-sitting.”

  She bent her head, murmuring over the girl. “You’re called Nina? Pretty. Come on, little girl, you gotta show us you got guts, you gotta make sure the bastards don’t get you, you can live through this, I’ve seen a hundred girls like you, and they all ended up rich and sassy…you’ll see.…”

  She glared at Wyn. “Do something!” she hissed.

  Like what? She could see the men who had chased Nina into the hold, pushing this way and that. Only the crowds kept them from finding her thus far.

  Wyn rose and forced herself to draw a deep breath.

  “All right, you over there. Hide them!” Her coverall was stained. She needed a bath more than she had needed anything in her life, probably including air. And here she was, snapping orders.

  Incongruously, people obeyed. “You—” she gestured with her chin at a compact man surrounded by his family… “See if you can’t get the attention of the Marines.”

  His wife raised an immediate protest.

  “Why…”

  “Shut up!” snarled the woman who comforted Nina. “See what happened to her? It can happen to you family broads, too. Raped and your man breathing vacuum… All right, you men, turn your backs on the poor kid. She don’t need to have men staring at her. Listen to the lady. She told you to get moving.”

  “Just do it,” Wyn ordered. And when the man hesitated, “Please…if we don’t hang together, they’ll hang us separately. It could be your wife, your daughter….”

  The man went. Wyn turned back to Nina. One filthy hand fumbled in a pocket and drew out a phial.

  “Good stuff,” approved her ally, recognizing the brand of trank. “Save it for emergencies.”