Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  “We are on Tuan, the first planet in the Behlt system. The tragedy that has played out on this quiet, peaceful world must surely have touched us all…”

  I lay there, listening. About the extremists who had tried to seize power on Tuan. About the residents being suckered into the rebellion. About the members of the Assault Force who had risked their lives to restore order.

  “Some are calling the use of assault weapons a crime. But isn’t it twice as criminal to drag teenagers, children, into your political games?” Nevsyan was asking. “There were twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys fighting on the rebels’ side. They were issued weapons and ordered not to give themselves up.”

  Now I was mad: how low was that? Kids of my age – that meant Arnis could have been one of them. He could have been ordered not to surrender…

  “Not one of the rebels... I’ll say that again: not one... was taken prisoner. Once cornered, they kept firing until they ran out of ammunition and then blew themselves up with grenades. Now here’s a thought, and it’s a no-brainer: that kind of fanaticism can only be achieved through hypnotic suggestion.”

  “Off,” I commanded, rolling onto my back. I lay there, looking at the ceiling. Time to order some soothing music with a smooth drop in volume and a seamless transition into the rustle of falling rain. And when morning came, something lively and feisty to wake me up…

  The videophone summoned me with a cheep and announced respectfully: “Call accepted. Contact in twenty seconds.”

  I jumped up. Rushed to the screen. Stood in front of the camera’s round, bluish lens. Contact in twenty seconds.

  Station antennas hundreds and maybe even thousands of kilometers away were preparing to hurl my call upward, into space, as a coded signal compressed into milliseconds. Somewhere high above the planet, parked in a geostationary orbit, the automatic relay stations would take over, transferring the message via modulated laser beam to the interstellar transmitter, a sphere two kilometers across moving in an independent near-solar orbit. And from there, translated into the language of gravitational pulses and packaged together with thousands of other messages, the signal would take off, into the cosmos. In deep space, near Behlt, the local station antennas would pick it up. And then it would all go in reverse order.

  The screen was glowing with a calming emerald light. “Wait,” it said. But I didn’t need any convincing; I’d already waited all day. Now I’d stay in front of that screen through the night if I had to.

  The screen came to life. The picture was out of focus for a second, then adjusted. I saw a wood-veneer wall and in front of it, a woman with a tired face. Arnis’ mother. She was wearing a severe dark suit, and I suddenly realized that the subjective time on our planets was in sync. So, then, it wasn’t likely that I’d dragged her out of bed. But still, I was horribly uncomfortable.

  “Hello,” I said awkwardly. “Good evening.”

  Her name had suddenly slipped my mind altogether. And the harder I tried to remember it, the more firmly I forgot it.

  The woman on the screen stared at my face for several seconds. Either the videophone image was still too fuzzy or she simply didn’t recognize me. We had seen each other two or three times at most, and then only on a video recording.

  “Hello,” she said, without a hint of surprise. “You’re Alik, Arnis’ friend.”

  “Yes,” I gladly confirmed. And for some reason, I added: “We were at sports camp together last summer.”

  She nodded. And carried on looking at me in silence. With a look that was off-kilter somehow. Indifferent.

  “Is Arnis asleep?” I asked uncertainly. “Can he pick up?”

  Her voice lost even more of its color.

  “Arnis isn’t here, Alik.”

  I got it. I got it straightaway, perhaps because, despite what my rational mind had been telling me, this is what I’d been afraid of. But still I asked again, stubbornly refusing to believe.

  “Is he asleep? Or out somewhere?”

  “Arnis isn’t here anymore,” she repeated, adding only one word. A crucial word. Arnis isn’t here anymore.

  I heard my own voice: “It’s not true!” Then I was shouting, not understanding what I was saying, “It’s not true! It’s not true!”

  And that was when she cried.

  It always scared me when grown-ups cried in front of children. It’s not normal, it’s unnatural. I would start feeling like I’d done something bad, would start saying all sorts of dumb things – how I was going to be better, stuff like that, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  But this time I didn’t give a rip about all that. Arnis, my friend, my truest friend in all the universe, the one I’d spent two months with in Florida and would never see again, was dead. Killed. People don’t die of colds in a war.

  “Tell me. Tell me what happened,” I begged her. “I have to know, I need to know.”

  And why exactly did I have to? Because Arnis was my friend? Or because my dad was an antibiotic that had taken too long to cure a disease?

  “He was with the insurgents,” she said quietly. So quietly that the idiotic videophone automatically regulated the sound, making her whisper so loud it was almost deafening.

  She was talking, and crying all the while. And I listened. Hearing how Arnis had left the house and she hadn’t been there in time to stop him. How he had called home, proud as could be, to announce that they’d given him a real military machine gun. And how she found out that the insurgents had been issued not only machine guns but also devices that would automatically self-destruct after the wearer was dead. And that Arnis, thank God, hadn’t been given one of those devices, so she’d be able to bury him. His face was peaceful, though. He had felt no pain. The neutron ray had killed him instantly. And he had almost no visible wounds, just a little red spot on his chest... where the ray had hit... and his hand... with a laser…

  She was talking, probably unaware right now that I was from Earth. From the great planet that had sent the antibiotic assault forces. The ones who had destroyed the insurgents, and the little boys who just couldn’t wait to play with real machine guns.

  We’d enjoyed playing war in Florida too.

  Of course she didn’t remember who my father was. So she could look me in the eye. But I couldn’t look at her the same way. And when she stopped talking but kept on crying, turning away from the videophone camera’s unpitying eye, I reached out to the keypad and cut the connection.

  It was dark and quiet in my room now. There was only a branch swaying in the wind and stroking the window with a soft rustling sound.

  “Lights!” I roared. “All the lights!”

  The lights blazed, every single one in the room. The matte dome lights on the ceiling, and the crystal chandelier, and the night-lights with their dark orange glass, and the table lamp on its thin, flexible stem.

  The light was blinding. It cut the silence that hung in the room to shreds. And the silence came back to life, sidled over to me, crawled into my ears. Even the branch outside the window had stopped swaying.

  “Music! Loud! News program! Educational program! Loud! Cycle through the radio programs! Loud!”

  The silence exploded, vanished, turned into nothingness. Modern rock blasting in surround-sound, one radio program following another every three seconds. On the TV screens, lessons in the subtleties of Italian, instructions on how to grow orchids, the latest news…

  “Stay with the news!” I yelled, in a pointless shouting match with the racket. “Everything else off, stay with the news!”

  The din stopped. The familiar name of the planet had already disappeared from the news screen. Now they were showing us smoking ruins. Little human figures in glossy fireproof suits were meandering among mounds of concrete.

  “… of enormous force. Not only the morgue but also the attached hospital complex have been destroyed. A spokesperson for the security forces has refused to rule out the possibility that a terrorist raid was responsible for that. It was this mo
rgue that only twenty-four hours earlier had taken delivery of a group of insurgent fatalities that, contrary to their usual practice, had not blown themselves up but had died fighting.”

  The title card for the news on the hour flashed onto the screen.

  “Turn off,” I ordered, without thinking. And I looked at the bracelet.

  It was a very good idea, a device that explodes after the combatant’s death. With a brief, two- or three-minute lag, so that whoever had killed him would have time to approach the body. A device like that could be made to look like a bracelet, but one that was impossible to remove. Could be equipped with a pulse monitor and a payload of powerful explosives, or, even better, a plasma charge with a magnetic trigger.

  And it would need a delay too, for when a group was fighting together so an immediate explosion wasn’t wanted. For example, a button that could be depressed to postpone the blast for twenty-four hours. Even an explosion like that could do a lot of damage to an enemy who didn’t know the secret. It would be best, of course, if the stupid enemy got the bracelet off and took it as a souvenir. But if he gave it to his son, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing either.

  I tugged on the bracelet with all my might. But the tube that had given so easily when I’d shoved my hand through wasn’t budging now.

  I tried to pry it open with a screwdriver, to widen it and tear it off that way. But that was useless too. That bracelet had been made by some smart, savvy engineers. They were probably the only ones who knew how to release it.

  In a mindless frenzy, I started tearing at the bracelet with my teeth. And I smelled a light, pleasant odor.

  What had I been thinking? Mishka could never have picked up the odor of ozone hours after a shot had been fired. Ozone, the triatomic molecule of oxygen, is one of the most unstable compounds ever. But it’s given off by working electronic devices and by magnetic booby traps with a plasma charge.

  Death had latched onto my arm. A fearsome, fiery death that was determined never to release its prey. But suddenly, that no longer frightened me.

  This was not my death. It had been intended for Arnis. Dad had brought it to me, even though he hadn’t known what he was doing. An unthinkable coincidence had become valid simply because it was unthinkable.

  Slowly, like a sleepwalker, I walked to the door. The carpet’s soft pile… the chill of the wooden steps…

  I pushed open the door of dad’s bedroom. And entered the room where the weary antibiotic was peacefully sleeping.

  Settling into an armchair at the head of dad’s bed, I still didn’t know what I was going to do. Wake dad up; doze with my head resting on the cold bracelet; or sit for a minute and then go into the forest, as far away from the house as I could. Whatever I did, it would make no difference.

  But dad woke up anyway.

  Jumping nimbly out of bed, he turned on the light with an imperceptible movement. He relaxed a little when he saw me, then was immediately tense again. He asked his question with a shake of the head.

  “Pa, this bracelet’s a bomb on a timer,” I said, almost calmly. “I won’t waste time explaining. But that’s for sure. It will explode twenty-four hours after its first owner died… give or take. Do you remember when you killed him?”

  I’ve never seen my dad go so pale so fast. An instant later he was standing next to me and was trying to yank the bracelet from my arm.

  I howled. I was in a lot of pain and a little annoyed that my clever dad was doing something so clueless.

  “Dad, you won’t get it off. It was sized for a boy. Do you remember if he had a mole on his left cheek, pop?”

  Dad glanced at his watch. And went over to the videophone. I figured he was going to call someone. But instead he punched through the wood-veneer panel to the left of the screen. And reached into the small opening and pulled out a pistol with a long, mirror-bright barrel ridged with heat-dissipating channels.

  That was when I got scared. A member of the assault forces who kept a functioning weapon at home faced being kicked out of the Corps and having to pay a whopping fine. And if the weapon was fired, there’d be prison time.

  “Pop,” I whispered, staring at the pistol. “Dad…”

  Dad grabbed me, slung me over his shoulder. And bolted to the door. He didn’t say anything, probably because there was no more time for talking. Then we sprinted through the garden.

  He jumped into the flyer cabin and started keying in the distress-call program on the console. He had flung me onto the rear seat, and a second later threw the pistol back there too and the first aid kit.

  “Take a double dose of painkiller,” he ordered.

  Frightened as I was, I almost laughed. A painkiller just before a plasma charge exploded? That’s like bringing a penknife to an elephant hunt.

  Still, I found two tiny, bright-scarlet ampules. Crushing them in my fist, I clenched my fingers, feeling the icy cold of the medicine oozing through my skin. My head spun a little.

  Dad was running the flyer at its top speed. The air wailed as the cabin’s transparent canopy split it apart. Did he really think that someone, somewhere could help us? Would have time to help us?

  The flyer braked, hung in the air. The shriek of the high-powered motor transitioned to a soft roar. We were hovering in the night sky, two people in a miniscule husk of metal and plastic.

  “We’re above the lake,” dad said, adding a clarification that meant nothing to me: “Can’t be done above the forest. A bunch of animals would die, and the animals haven’t done anything wrong.”

  He pressed something on the console, keying in commands I didn’t know. The safety routine chirped – it wasn’t pleased – and the cabin canopy rolled slowly back. With a kilometer between us and the ground!

  The cool night breeze slid over us. There was a faint smell of water. And of ozone, that damned ozone – not from the bracelet, of course, but from the running engines.

  Dad clambered into the rear seat. The flyer rocked a little, and I saw down below the dim glistening of a smooth expanse of water.

  “Hand,” dad commanded. And I obediently laid my hand on the cabin’s outer ledge. Dad sat next to me, pressing me against the seat back with his whole body. When he took me by the hand, my fingers sank into his broad palm. It was very cold. And hard, like the fabric of his protective jumpsuit.

  “Don’t be scared,” dad said. “And you’d better not look. Turn away.”

  My breath caught in my throat. My body went limp. I realized that I wouldn’t be able move now. I wouldn’t even be able to turn away.

  Dad picked up his pistol. For a second longer I felt his fingers. And then a blinding white light flashed in the darkness.

  I’d never known real pain before. All the pain I’d had to that point was just a preparation for this – the one, the only, the real, the unbearable. A hurting that no human being should ever know.

  Dad smacked me across the face, driving the cry back into my lungs. And roared, his voice cracking: “Hang tough! Save your strength! Hang tough!”

  I couldn’t even close my eyes; the pain was forcing the lids to stay open and my body to contort in a tortured spasm. I saw my hand in my dad’s. And a ridiculous, pathetic stump where my wrist should have been. And the silvery bracelet slipping off that stump and plunging into the lake.

  Five seconds passed, no more. The cabin was beginning to close and dad was pressing 03 on the console, setting a priority flight to the nearest medical center. Then the flash came from below, a piercing, hot, orange light. An instant later, something jolted the flyer. And I watched a towering fountain woven from steam and spray falling back into the reddish-orange mirror of the lake.

  Dad was right, as always. Something like that couldn’t be done over the forest. It would have been too hard on the squirrels. And the animals hadn’t done anything wrong...

  They say that the more people love animals, the more they love people. Probably so, up to a certain point. But after that, it’s the straight-up opposite.

>   I came to on an operating table. I was stripped and had sensors attached by suction cups all over my body. People kept coming up to the table, one after another. Dad was there as well, dressed in a white surgical robe and muttering something. The doctors were talking back and forth too as they leaned over my hand.

  “It’s amazing for a cutting tool to leave such an even wound. There’s almost no blood, as if it was done with a laser…”

  “Nonsense. Where are you going to find a military laser on Earth?”

  Someone noticed that I had opened my eyes. He leaned down until we were nose to nose and said calmingly: “Don’t be scared, pal. Your hand’s going to be fine. We’ll put it back. Just be more careful with tools in future.”

  And, turning aside, he added: “Nurse! An analgesic cube... and an antibiotic. Best get the Octamycin, 500,000 units.”

  I burst out laughing. The pain was as bad as ever. It was still gnawing at my arm with its blunt, red-hot fangs. But I laughed anyway, twisting away from the mask with its mind-numbing anesthetic smell. And all the while I was whispering, whispering, whispering.

  “An antibiotic… an antibiotic… an antibiotic…”

  First published in Russian: 1992

  Translation by Liv Bliss

  A SPECIAL THANKS

  The significant costs of translating, editing and producing the first print run of this book were met by a successful Kickstarter campaign held in January 2015. The following generous souls (and many others who chose to make anonymous or smaller donations) made the vital financial commitments that helped bring this book to life.

  A V Tony SCHWAN

  Aaron Willis

  Abhilash Sarhadi

  Adam Hagger

  Alexander Burchenko

  Alexandra Israel

  Aliece Cosby

  Amanda Lerner

  Amanda Rose

  André De Smet

  Andrew Blossom

  Andrew G. Grant

  Andrew Hatchell

  Andrew Janco