Annihilation (Star Force Series) (40 page)

But I wasn’t. I honestly had been thinking of Captain Sarin’s well-being. Running a ship took more than dedication and iron resolve. You had to have good personal judgment concerning your state of readiness, too. In space there was no night and no day. Technically, every hour was the same as the last, and people had to pace themselves or they would burn out and make mistakes.

We made our way to the wardroom and I sat Jasmine down at the single table inside. There was no one on duty at this hour, so I fired up the grill and microwaved some fresh coffee. Sarin watched me quietly.

“Do you think this is a good idea, Kyle?” she asked.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I know you don’t like to eat anything heavy right before bed. Also, I’m pretty bad at cooking. How about a couple of frozen waffles?”

She laughed. “You know I don’t mean that.”

“Jasmine,” I said, “I’m trying to get you to relax for a few minutes. You need to take a solid eight hour shift in your bunk.”

She looked at me in mock alarm.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said.

“I know, I know,” she said, and sighed. “How do you feel about Sandra, right now?”

“I love her, and I hope she’s going to come back to life. But I doubt she will. I guess, I’m in a state of delayed grieving.”

We stopped talking for several minutes. I cooked the waffles, then brought them over to the table and sat across from her.

“You certainly know how to lighten up a conversation,” I said.

“Sorry. These are good.”

I ate half my waffle and was surprised to realize she was right, they were good.

“I think we’ve got real grain in here somewhere,” I said. “None of that reconstituted crap in this meal.”

When we’d eaten most of our waffles, Jasmine drew herself up and squared her shoulders.

“I’ll do it,” she said.

I stopped chewing and stared at her in surprise. “Do what?”

She gave me a little bewildered shake of her head. I did the same, baffled. She leaned across the table and put her hand on mine.

“I’ll come to your bunk tonight,” she whispered. “If it will make you feel better.”

I was more startled than ever. I swallowed and coughed. Suddenly the waffle was like cardboard in my mouth. I washed it down with coffee.

I realized I was on the spot, and I had a big decision to make. I’d wanted to spend a night with Jasmine for years. It wasn’t a big secret that she and I had a thing for one another. But it seemed wrong to me—very wrong.

“I—I’m not ready for that,” I said. “Sorry if I misled you. I honestly came down here to feed you some waffles.”

Her hand leapt away from mine as if stung. I reached out and patted her hand, but she pulled it away farther and crossed her arms under her small breasts. She was staring down at her half-eaten waffle. I thought maybe she was going to cry again.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m not telling you I don’t like you. I’m telling you I’m not ready. You’re a girl. You understand that, don’t you?”

She heaved a sigh and uncrossed her arms.

“Okay,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Fine. Drop it.”

I knew that from her point of view, she’d made a fool of herself. She’d misinterpreted my actions, and I’m sure she was very upset that she now appeared to be the aggressor. I half-expected her to get up and leave, but she didn’t. Sensing she had something else to say, I finished my waffles quietly. They really were good. The best I’d had since leaving Earth.

“What do you think of Ensign Kestrel?” she asked suddenly.

I didn’t even look up. I knew a trap when one was laid at my feet in plain sight.

“Barely competent,” I said in a professional-sounding, clipped tone. “She’s too young to be on a bridge, in my opinion.”

Jasmine glanced up at me in surprise. “Really?”

“Why? What do you think of her?”

“I think she wears her smart clothes too tight,” she said. “She must stand in front of her mirror for ten minutes telling the nanites to cinch-up.”

I snorted. Then I lost it and openly laughed. It was my first laugh since I’d seen Sandra drooling bubbles on the floor of the pool room. I couldn’t help myself. Sadly, the laughter died as quickly as it had come.

“I think you’re right about her clothes,” I said.

“She’s doing it for your benefit. You know that don’t you?”

“Come on. I’m an old man to her.”

“A very powerful old man. She’s the kind that’s attracted to that. I can tell.”

I thought of a dozen rude things to say, such as “it takes one to know one.” But I managed to say none of them. Usually, my mouth acts like a self-destruct system when around women. But today, I held on.

“She’s part of your bridge staff,” I said. “Transfer her if you want to.”

Jasmine sat quietly. I could tell she was thinking seriously about doing it. I sipped my coffee as if I couldn’t care less.

“No,” she said at last. “That would be unprofessional of me. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me lately. I shouldn’t be jealous of her. Why should I be jealous? You were never interested in me in the first place.”

“I certainly was,” I said, “but now is definitely not the time.”

She stood up. “Good night, sir,” she said. “Thanks for the waffles.”

I nodded and watched her go. I wondered to myself, as I watched her posterior shift under that sheer layer of smart cloth, if the whole nanite-thing had changed our sexual behavior patterns. I’d have to say that Star Force marines, both male and female, were a randy bunch. We had bodies that brimmed with energy and recovered quickly. We looked younger and fitter than normal people, and we were often placed in stressful, isolated situations. All of this promoted an active sex life. Affairs between troops were common, and we generally didn’t frown upon them. We were all disease-free, after all, as the nanites cleaned out our bodies routinely from stem to stern.

There was some concern about the females becoming pregnant. The topic had rarely come up in staff meetings, but when it had, the general consensus was that if pregnancies happened, they were good things. No human colonists had ever planted themselves on a new world before, and we’d just done so on three lovely planets. It was in our best interests to go forth and multiply vigorously.

There were bound to be other social implications dictated by our situation. I guess it was all part of our new way of life. It was totally unplanned. We were feeling our way, figuring out how our culture would behave one step at a time.

A harmless, healthy relief of stress
. That’s what my old college-teaching colleagues would have said. And they were the ones who ought to know…

-34-

I went down to visit Sandra in medical before turning in for the night. There was no significant change in her status reported by either Dr. Swanson or Marvin.

Marvin had, however, made progress after a fashion. He’d built something big, strange, and vile.

I recognized it the minute I saw it. A bulbous tank from which thick vapors arose. The numerous PVC pipe connections leaked, creating a steady patter of droplets hitting the floor. The entire medical chamber was dank now, with condensation dribbling from the roof and trickling down the walls. Something was going on inside that bubbling tank, and I thought I knew what it was.

“Microbes, Marvin?” I asked, inspecting his work.

He’d been watching me since I came into the chamber, but he hadn’t said a word.

“Hello, Colonel Riggs,” he said. “I’m glad you stopped by. As you can see, I’m completing my first developmental step. The colony is alive and well. I’m teaching them to work with neurological synapses now—dead ones.”

“Where the hell did you even get a colony to start with?”

“Microbes are everywhere in our environment. Human bodies typically encompass more than a trillion single-celled organisms.”

“Of course,” I said. “We have them inside us. All you had to do was steal a sample from Sandra and build the environment…”

Marvin didn’t confirm nor deny. He didn’t have to.

I approached the tank, which was made of layered smart cloth and pipe-fittings. It pulsed and gurgled. I wrinkled my nose in disgust. I performed a brief inspection and I noticed two things that were especially upsetting. First, there were what appeared to be
brains
floating in the tank. I wasn’t sure if they were human or bovine—or what. Second, there were electrodes hooked up to the tank. I knew what that meant. When we’d first run into the Microbe race on a Macro cruiser, the machines had been shocking them to force them to cooperate.

“I seemed to recall having forbidden this kind of work,” I said sternly. I ran a hand down a nanite wire that led to an electrode. Nanite wires tended to be like shaped-mercury, almost liquid in nature. They were rarely shielded. I could feel the current in it, like a buzzing sensation on my fingertips.

Marvin lifted a black tentacle. He snaked it under the tank and touched a large valve at the bottom. He studied me with his countless cameras.

“This is the release valve,” he said matter-of-factly. “If I open it, the contents of the tank will spill into the drain you see below the tank.”

“Drain? Where did that come from?”

“I had the nanites form it. The pipe leads down through the main hold and out into space.”

I pursed my lips. “What are you saying, Marvin? You’re willing to abort this abomination right now? No arguments?”

“If you say so, Colonel.”

We stared at each other for several seconds. I looked away first. I walked to Sandra’s coffin and gazed into it. She was as lovely in her deathly state as she’d ever been in life. Tan skin, dark luxurious hair and body sculpted with the muscles of an Olympian. She’d had a mole on her cheek when we’d first met, but somewhere along the line the nanites or the microbes had decided to delete it from her face.

I sighed, and my shoulders fell. I realized I still had hope. While there was hope, I couldn’t let her go.

“You’ve got me, and you know it,” I told my scheming robot. “But I want you to stop shocking them. Find some other more humane way to get them to cooperate.”

Marvin’s tentacle slipped away from the tank’s release valve. He considered.

“All right,” he said. “I’m sure something can be worked out. May I proceed with my work?”

“For now,” I said. “Report when you have something tangible to show me. Carry on.”

I turned around and left. Dr. Swanson’s eyes followed me, but she didn’t say a word. I couldn’t imagine what she thought of the situation.

I felt emotionally drained, but I kept my face impassive in the passageway. I hid my state of mind until I reached my cabin. There, I sat on my bunk. It was the very same bed I’d shared many times with Sandra. I put my face in my hands.

I had no idea if I was doing the right thing or not. How many Microbes should die so that one human
might
live? Were a quadrillion of their lives worth one of ours? How much did it matter that the Microbes were intelligent, or that we humans were bigger and had vastly longer lives?

I felt overwhelmed by the weight of such ethical decisions. I figured that no one was really qualified to make the call. I searched my instincts for right and wrong. You had to go with your gut on stuff like this.

My gut was churning—but I let Marvin keep doing his dark work, anyway.

I spent the next two hours in my bunk, tossing and turning. Sleep didn’t come. The bed felt cold and empty without Sandra. Painful thoughts of her, mixed in with Jasmine, Dr. Swanson and even Ensign Kestrel haunted me. Worst of all was Marvin and his vat of gurgling biomass, an image which seemed to pop into my mind whenever I was finally falling to sleep.

“Colonel?” asked Jasmine’s soft, disembodied voice.

I had been dozing, but upon hearing her voice I startled awake and sat up in bed. Twenty-four hour instant communications systems weren’t always a good thing. As the commander of Star Force, I’d been forced to give up a lot of my private time.

I cleared my throat and tapped the wall twice, unmuting the channel.

“Yes, what is it?” I asked, trying to sound alert.

“I’m sorry, sir, but an emergency call has come in from Commodore Miklos at Welter Station.”

“Patch him through.”

Miklos’ voice came to my ears moments later. He sounded frazzled.

“Sir? Colonel Riggs?”

“Yes, go ahead, Commodore. This had better be good.”

“It isn’t good, sir. It’s bad. We’ve got a new Macro fleet coming through at the far ring of the Thor system.”

“How many ships? How did they fare against our mines?”

“We’ve counted about fifty cruisers so far. But about the mines—no hits sir.”

I paused, blinked and frowned. I rubbed my face. “Did I hear that correctly, Commodore? No hits at all?”

“Nothing, Colonel. They have some kind of new approach. A ship led the way into the system, moving slowly and eating up our mines. They appear to have a mine sweeper.”

“How does it work?”