Come Back

by George Erlynne

  "In a way, it has turned out for the best." Selena explained serenely. "We wanted some of the infrastructure to remain, it was to be used to rebuild the right way, but now we have a clean sheet, a blank. We can draw our own picture of the world for the future." She seemed pleased, no not pleased, satisfied, content, satiated almost, her eyes taking on a dreamy look. "The people, our people down here, they were to set up the system for the survivors. They knew when it would happen and they made sure they were safe, they installed the terminals. They were all ready-made of course, it was a complete plan, perfect and foolproof. We had the neuron capsules programmed for manufacture." She smiled at me like a lazy cat. "All over the world, the new order came in and now we have the planet clean and free for the future." Her eyes hardened and the smile disappeared. "All our people sacrificed themselves, they died to bring a fresh start, to make the planet ready for us and our children to come. It is a balance, you see, and we have created an ecology that God will recognise."

  "Not quite." Melanee had recovered from her frozen shock and was tapping her fingers on the control panel.

  "Ah, yes, Miss Mutant. You may have interfered but we have done what we wanted." Max was looking at her like a cat seeing dinner. "We have cleansed the Earth and you cannot bring it back. You can only help us release the new generation, the special people, or you destroy the whole system. Millions more to die? I don't think you can do that and even if you did, the world would still be safe." He gazed dreamily at Selena.

  You are not a biologist." Melanee spoke softly, running her fingers lightly over the blank switchboard, raising delicate eyebrows at Selena. "But you are? The best that the Earth could breed?" She gazed at her with cold finality. "You should know about code amendment programs, ways to alter your behaviour patterns."

  Selena sniffed. "Of course you can, but not for millions, only one at a time and that will take you more than your lifetime." Her sniff turned into a grin. "Book learning is not the same as true knowledge, but you won't be around to appreciate the difference. Each individual, even our mass-produced beings, has huge code differences, it would require a review of each genome, the total information for an individual." She let her grin grow. "It would take years to do twenty people."

  "A sentient, quantum computer can do it if programmed." Melanee released a small smile of her own. "The downlink from the ship will provide the data stream. I have set the programs in motion."

  "Impossible." Selena muttered, showing teeth in a feral grin. But slowly, ever so slowly, a certainty arrived as she gazed at Melanee's calm eyes. "You mutant bitch." Time to give the signal, I thought, watching the slowly growing layer of icy rage spread over Selena's face. Max, aware of the disaster facing their brave new world, started to stand up, murder in his eyes, but Selena grabbed his arm. "Wait! We still have control." She turned that cold beauty, the blond perfection hiding her clinical soul, to face me. "We have two guests outside the door. Perhaps you would like to talk to them before you do anything irrevocable? Your mutant there can reverse her own programs I am sure, if you ask her, and you will, or Mary and her lover will never see another day."

  I had been expecting this. The delay before they chased us was suspicious and they had been grinning too much. What to do? "Maybe you two would like to join your ancestors? That might give your friends a little encouragement to co-operate." I suggested blandly but I knew Melanee would prefer that I didn't fill the mass of control screens with bullet holes so let's get the show outside the door. "Suppose you and your playmate go outside and we'll see if your pals have the right idea."

  Max stood with a courteous air. "By all means, old chap." He tapped the door codes in, waved at Selena to stand clear and watched my rifle barrel. Melanee slid gracefully to stand behind me, her eyes betraying no emotion, just an irritating serenity. The hatch was wide and they knew any sudden move would be their last, so they trod slowly out.

  Clustered on the ramp outside was Mark, clutching a machine rifle of unfamiliar design, plus the remaining band of planetary cleaners, all festooned with weaponry. Sitting at their feet were Mary and Mike, looking tattered, worn and white. Mary was breathing heavily, obviously in distress, while Mike had bloodstains all over his shirt.

  "You think we will worry about two more?" Mark stared at me with his detached, amused expression. "I have been listening. You have loyalties and we will let you live."

  "If?" I grunted, intrigued by the lies they were going to tell us.

  "If she resets our program. Then you can take your mutant playgirl and these two obsolete people and live on a lovely island in the Pacific. We might even visit you in a few years and count all your children, Of course, we will have to educate them for you, we can't have a new generation growing up in ignorance, can we? That was the problem before and we don't want that to start again." Mark was gazing down at Mary's forlorn figure as he spouted this smooth and spurious nonsense. "Now why don't you exercise what you call your intelligence and give Max your rifle."

  No way were they going to let Melanee live. She was too dangerous, she only had to lay her hands on any terminal and they were truly spifflicated, so this promise was a downright lie. No doubt sensing what I was brooding about, she nudged me gently from behind. Raising an eyebrow at her while watching their twitching armaments, she nodded slightly, a tiny movement. Was this the signal? Hardly had the thought started to crawl around my cortex when the lights went out. Absolute darkness hit us like a blow in the face.

  One of the skills, if you can call it that, of so-called special forces, is to know where everyone is in a given moment, especially moments like this. Melanee, with formidable intellect, had promptly sat down behind me, her back against the wall, her hand on my leg to tell me where she was.

  Naturally, I shot Max first. It was time someone did it and he had been asking for it for a hundred centuries. The flash of the gunshot lit up the scene like a photo gun. Now I was on the floor with Melanee while Mark let nearly a whole magazine go, the roar of the machine rifle drowning the scream from Selena. Rolling vigorously to one side, hoping that none of the storm of ricochets would land on us, I tried to make sense of figures flitting around in the flickering light of gun flashes while hoping that Mike retained some sense. He should have moved and quick, taking Mary with him. Several others joined in the fusillade, but they were a cretinous bunch. Selena was screeching something but I didn't pay any attention and neither did they. It was time to be decisive so I sprayed them all at waist height, certain that Mike and Mary were as clever as me and were trying to imitate moles. Loud screams and a considerable explosion greeted this new tactic. The firing became wild, so I gave them another burst.

  It was going well, I could tell, but regrettably, someone now buggered up my master plan by putting a bullet through my left shoulder. The impact of it threw me back, a terrible numbness hit my arm, the rifle dropped with a clatter. Heavy breathing plus a strong arm arrived next to me as I let out a painful gasp, the shock blasting my nervous system like a lightning bolt. Loud screams plus a background of groans and receding footsteps brought the entertainment to an end.

  Melanee had her hands all over my chest, her distressed exclamations almost drowned out by Mike, who was the owner of the heavy hand and strong breathing.

  "Sit him up!" He hissed. "Where's the gun?"

  "Wait, wait..." Melanee gasped.

  "What the hell for? We need to get this sorted. He's bleeding like a pig."

  She let out a small squeak of alarm, nearly drowned by my groan as she found the exit wound. "Seconds now." She whispered, receiving a grunt from Mike but he had no time for any more comment because the lights came back with a sudden glare to reveal a messy scene. The pain was getting to me now but I could not help feeling a wash of despair. Ten thousand years, the death of a planet, near annihilation and we were still the same, including me.

  Max was propped against the opposite wall, still alive. He'd obviously crawled there, leaving a trail of blood like a giant snail. Of his
allies, four bodies were decorating the floor, one still twitching. Of Selena, Mark and her last two henchmen, there was no sign. Cordite smoke hung in the sir, blood lay in pools, the walls were pock marked, weaponry was scattered over the corpses, ammunition and empty cartridge cases littering the place. It was a squalid and depressing scene.

  Melanee set to work to improve my condition by hissing reproof at me, while tearing my shirt to pieces. Mike was torn between helping her and seeing to Mary who was white as paper, bleeding from a cut over her left eye and clutching her stomach. "It has gone straight through." Melanee informed me, gazing with horror at the mess I was making.

  "Damned good thing." I muttered. "We got any pain killer in that bag?"

  Mary came back to life slowly, waving Mike away with a dirty hand and a quick smile. Melanee rummaged in our pack while Mike peered at inscriptions written by some military pharmacist ten ages ago. The pain was bad, very bad, worse than I remembered. It was all I could do to stop screaming but survival is a strong program built into every one of us and it made me stretch out the hand that worked and painfully draw my sidearm from its holster. The reports made them all jump out of their skins but I watched the bullet strikes go into Max's chest, saw the light of life fade from his eyes. Then I let the gun barrel droop and fainted.

  It had not been in the plan. I was supposed to be the hero while the rest of my band looked on admiringly. Regrettably this didn't work out but Melanee's brain power was still making strides so they decided to put me in one of the medi-units next to Marie. It was a damned silly thing to do with Selena and Mark roaming around, particularly as neither Mary nor Mike could fire a machine rifle and hope to hit anything more than three feet away. What they should have done was hunt them down but no, they spent time taking turns to watch over the wounded, Melanee crying at regular intervals over my inert form, or so Mike told me afterwards.

  Three days later, I woke up. The pain was gone but the arm wouldn't work. Melanee had been reading vast medical textbook programs and now felt she was a brain surgeon, swathing me in a huge roll of bandage, making me swallow vile tasting slush, while Mike paced around nervously clutching a large firearm. Mary wasn't allowed to exert herself, but she exercised management skills over Mike in a loud voice while resting. All in all, they had a great time.

  They had brought me out of the unit earlier than recommended because they knew that Selena was surely lurking somewhere, or at least that was what Mike and Mary said but Melanee just smiled her brilliant smile. I don't think she was worried about the Mark/Selena axis, she just wanted to see me again, or so I kidded myself.

  "We've been watching this place like bloody hawks." Mike said jumpily. "Melanee's locked down the master terminal, or so she says." He glared at her as if she was a young basilisk. "Those bastards are well and truly f..."

  "Yeah." I agreed, not wishing Melanee's vocabulary to increase at this moment. "Why haven't they come back, eh?" I croaked, discovering that any movement of the shoulder produced a flaring pain.

  "They don't know you're hit." Mary supplied, leaning against the nearest unit. "You were busy exterminating the lot of them, so Selena and Mark departed, you remember? And your genius there says they've only got one rifle between them."

  Raising a careful eyebrow at Melanee generated a small smile in reply. "When we were standing there, I counted all the guns. When the lights came back I counted what we had and only one is missing."

  We all stared at her. Not only had she introduced some computer worm which turned the power off at a convenient moment, but she retained the presence of mind to take note of all the artillery being brandished in our faces. Of course, the opposition, or perhaps we should say the ex-opposition were a bunch of incompetents, letting us stand there and argue the point. They should have shot me as soon as I came in sight. Maybe they would have suffered casualties but their problem would have been solved, instead of which they allow themselves to be filleted. Brightest brains of science they may be but combat effective they were not.

  However, such ego boosting thoughts did not solve our problem which was that Selena and Mark would kill us at the first opportunity if we let them. "They'll go back upstairs." I opined.

  Melanee nodded. "Perhaps they may find more weapons."

  "We'll have to go get them." I said gloomily.

  "We?" Mike grunted. "You're not climbing any ladders like that."

  "Come." Melanee waved at us, shooing us to a large desk like unit which displayed a schematic. "This is the installation plan. It is used for monitoring the units but you see the layout? There is only one way up to the surface apart from that shaft we came down."

  "Comes up close to the clearing." Mike peered at the lines while Mary hugged herself.

  "What did they do back at Verdun when we left?" I asked her quietly while Melanee was telling Mike that the display was showing things he didn't like too much.

  "We heard the firing." She looked at me with that reserve which peeped out every time I had to fire guns. "We wondered who was being killed. We were careless and before we knew it Max was there with the rest." She bit her lip. "Mike was going to fight, to fire and warn you but...but..."

  Mike turned away from Melanee and faced us. A much older man looked out of a lined face as he put an arm round Mary's shoulders. "They beat her, kicked her when she was on the ground, tied her hands and strung her up to a tree." He choked as Mary held onto him, her face buried in his shirt. "So I... I kept quiet, did what they wanted... and soon we heard you take off and we knew you meant to leave us."

  Melanee looked stricken, her face white. Twice she opened her mouth to speak but the words wouldn't come. "Mary..." She whispered. "I had to..."

  Mary looked up, a tear stained face staring at Melanee. "I know." She said quietly. "But you only had to ask us and we would have done it anyway. We knew, we worked it out, you had to come here, you'd told us."

  "Trouble was." I thought I ought to try and mitigate the awful guilt that Melanee was suffering. "Jules and Marie lit the fuse before anyone was ready. If they hadn't done their bit you might have got clean away."

  "But you were still going to leave us." Mike said evenly. "We were the decoys."

  "You think she has the capacity to betray and not regret it?" I put my free arm round Melanee's waist, feeling the tension which was making her shiver. "It was me. If you want an object of ridicule and disgust, blame me. I knew what she wanted and I knew she couldn't ask you because of shame. She didn't learn shame from me, but you know that. She grew a conscience about people, something I don't have, except for her and..." I paused, watching their blank faces. "And for you. I don't have friends, not in my profession, but you are and if it makes you feel any better, I felt shame as well, worse than her because I knew what we were doing and she didn't. She'd never met Max."

  They looked at each other, Mary and Mike, a pair who should provide an example for the new generation, if it ever happened. Mary smiled, a slightly nervous smile, gave Mike a careful hug and reached out a hand to touch Melanee's arm. "We know that, and I suppose that's what hurt. David, you've changed, you know that? If it wasn't for you we wouldn't be here. We've been through a lot and it won't stop now, will it?"

  "Just don't bloody do it again." Mike grumbled, a slow grin spreading across his features. "Won't be any need now that you've met Max again, will there? Now we only have to chat to Selena and Mark and everything's laughing kitbags, right?"

  An uncertain laugh followed this summary of the situation, but at least they seemed reconciled if not happy. I meant what I said. They were the people that made our lives brighter, friends who could not be replaced. Mike proved it by promptly forbidding me to start climbing steel ladders one handed. Melanee, of course, spiked his guns by explaining how we could get out of this clinical nursery without raising a sweat. We go through the entrance shown on the plan which was another one of those pressure doors. Max and co obviously knew about it and it was another small French miracle that the whole thing
hadn't reduced itself to dust aeons ago.

  We had a vast nursery on two levels, an ocean of children frozen before they were born, all of it attached to the control room where Melanee had done her magic. But the whole issue had to have power and that was where the fusion generator came in, on a level below us but not under us. Maintenance passageways plus radiation deflector machinery connected the two plus of course the power lines and in the middle was our exit coming up under a massive concrete slab near that clearing we were all so fond of. Personally, I marvelled that anything still worked at all and could hear Marie's voice telling me it was all due to French genius.

  But we had to invest in common sense, rare commodity. They had a rifle, or they had when they decamped. Where had they gone? Back to their lander? I couldn't see myself crawling around in the forest with a bullet wound so, despite a certain amount of doubt expressed by the brains we decided to hole up until I was convalescent and Melanee had worked her miracle. It meant gathering food plus sealing off the inconvenient tunnel which Selena and co had disinterred from God knows how many feet of forest litter. Fortunately, this last precaution proved to be surprisingly easy, we simply shut the pressure doors which were dotted at intervals of fifty yards up the tunnel and the master computer altered the entry codes. That left the maintenance shaft down which I had painfully carried Marie but short of them dropping a large bomb down it, there was no way they could do any damage as long as we kept a sentry close by.

  Food was different. We had some but not enough to keep us going especially as I loudly demanded meat. Melanee sorrowfully informed us that all preserved food had not lasted and the French had shortsightedly not tried to keep anything more exotic than obscure sausages which now looked like badly wrinkled machine gun bullets.

  So, before we shut the pressure doors it was necessary to forage. Fruit and meat, firewood and stones to build a fire in. A strange mix of technology was to provide supplies. We light a fire on the floor of a subterranean complex kept clinically clean for ten thousand years and toast raw meat on it. Even the French could not have foreseen that but there were no microwaves available.