Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (29 page)

The tracking system hummed, almost contentedly, flat and featureless, against the infirmary wall. The only sign of input/ output capability was a small monitor and an access spindle for a Rraey memory module lying haphazardly on a hospital bedside table next to the tracking system. The tracking system had no idea that in just a couple of minutes it was going to be nothing more than a bundle of broken wiring, thanks to an upcoming Rraey shell. All our work in securing the damn thing was going to go to waste.

The command center rattled. I stopped thinking about the tracking system and placed Jane gently on an infirmary bed, then looked around for the stasis chamber. I found it in an adjoining storeroom; it looked like a wheelchair encased in a half cylinder of plastic. I found two portable power sources on the shelf next to the stasis chamber; I plugged one into the chamber and read the diagnostic panel. Good for two hours. I grabbed another one. Better safe than sorry.

I wheeled the stasis chamber over to Jane as another shell hit, this one shaking the entire command center and knocking out the power. I was pushed sideways by the hit, slipped on a Rraey body and cracked my head on the wall on the way down. A flash of light pulsed behind my eyes and then an intense pain. I cursed as I righted myself, and felt a small ooze of SmartBlood from a scrape on my forehead.

The lights flicked on and off for a few seconds, and in between those few flickers Jane sent a rush of emotional information so intense I had to grab the wall to steady myself. Jane was awake; aware and in those few seconds I saw what she thought she saw. Someone else was in the room with her, looking just like her, her hands touching the sides of Jane’s face as she smiled at her. Flicker, flicker, and she looked like she looked the last time I saw her. The light flickered again, came on for good, and the hallucination went away.

Jane twitched. I went over to her; her eyes were open and looking directly at me. I accessed her BrainPal; Jane was still conscious, but barely.

“Hey,” I said softly, and took her hand. “You’ve been hit, Jane. You’re okay now, but I need to put you in this stasis chamber until we can get you some help. You saved me once, remember. So we’re even after this. Just hold on, okay?”

Jane gripped my hand, weakly, as if to get my attention. “I saw her,” she said, whispering. “I saw Kathy. She spoke to me.”

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She said,” Jane said, and then drifted a little before focusing in on me again. “She said I should go farming with you.”

“What did you say to that?” I asked.

“I said okay,” Jane said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” Jane said and slipped away again. Her BrainPal feed showed erratic brain activity; I picked her up and gently as possible placed her in the stasis chamber. I gave her a kiss and turned it on. The chamber sealed and hummed; Jane’s neural and physiological indices slowed to a crawl. She was ready to roll. I looked down at the wheels to navigate them around the dead Rraey I’d stepped on a few minutes before and noticed the memory module poking out of the Rraey’s abdomen pouch.

The command center rattled again with a hit. Against my better judgment I reached down, grabbed the memory module, walked over to the access spindle, and slammed it in. The monitor came to life and showed a listing of files in Rraey script. I opened a file and was treated to a schematic. I closed it and opened another file. More schematics. I went back to the original listing and looked at the graphic interface to see if there was a top-level category access. There was; I accessed it and had Asshole translate what I was seeing.

What I was seeing was an owner’s manual for the Consu tracking system. Schematics, operating instructions, technical settings, troubleshooting procedures. It was all there. It was the next best thing to having the system itself.

The next shell broadsided the command center, knocked me square on my ass, and sent shrapnel tearing through the infirmary. A chunk of metal made a gaping hole through the monitor I was looking at; another punched a hole through the tracking system itself. The tracking system stopped humming and began making choking sounds; I grabbed the memory module, pulled it off the spindle, grabbed the stasis chamber’s handles and ran. We were a barely acceptable distance away when a final shell plowed through the command center, collapsing the building entirely.

In front of us, the Rraey were retreating; the tracking station was the least of their problems now. Overhead, dozens of descending dark points spoke of landing shuttles, filled with CDF soldiers itching to take back the planet. I was happy to let them. I wanted to get off this rock as soon as possible.

In the near distance Major Crick was conferring with some of his staff; he motioned me over. I wheeled Jane to him. He glanced down at her, and then up at me.

“They tell me you sprinted the better part of a klick with Sagan on your back, and then went into the command center when the Rraey began shelling,” Crick said. “Yet I seem to recall
you
were the one who called
us
insane.”

“I’m not insane, sir,” I said. “I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk.”

“How is she?” Crick asked, nodding to Jane.

“She’s stable,” I said. “But she has a pretty serious head wound. We need to get her into a medical bay as soon as possible.”

Crick nodded over to a landing shuttle. “That’s the first transport,” he said. “You’ll both be on it.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“Thank
you,
Perry,” Crick said. “Sagan is one of my best officers. I’m grateful you saved her. Now, if you could have managed to save that tracking system, too, you would really have made my day. All this work defending the goddamn tracking station was for nothing.”

“About that, sir,” I said, and held up the memory module. “I think I have something you might find interesting.”

Crick stared at the memory module, and then scowled over at me. “No one likes an overachiever, Captain,” he said.

“No, sir, I guess they don’t,” I said, “although it’s lieutenant.”

“We’ll just see about that,” Crick said.

Jane made the first shuttle up. I was delayed quite a bit.

I made captain. I never saw Jane again.

The first of these was the more dramatic of the two.

Carrying Jane to safety on my back through several hundred meters of open battlefield, and then placing her into a stasis chamber while under fire, would have been enough to get a decent write-up in the official report of the battle.

Bringing in the technical schematics for the Consu tracking system as well, as Major Crick intimated, seemed a little like piling on. But what are you going to do. I got a couple more medals out of the Second Battle of Coral, and the promotion to boot. If anybody noticed that I had gone from corporal to captain in under a month, they kept it to themselves. Well, so did I. In any event, I got my drinks bought for me for several months afterward. Of course, when you’re in the CDF, all the drinks are free. But it’s the thought that counts.

The Consu technical manual was shipped directly to Military Research. Harry told me later that getting to flip through it was like reading God’s scribble pad. The Rraey knew how to use the tracking system but had no idea how it worked—even with the full schematic it was doubtful that they would have been able to piece together another one. They didn’t have the manufacturing capability to do it. We knew that because
we
didn’t have the manufacturing capability to do it. The theory behind the machine alone was opening up whole new branches of physics, and causing the colonies to reassess their skip drive technology.

Harry was tapped as part of the team tasked to spin out practical applications of the technology. He was delighted with the position; Jesse complained it was making him insufferable. Harry’s old gripe about not having the math for the job was rendered immaterial, since no one else really had the math for it, either. It certainly reinforced the idea that the Consu were a race with whom we should clearly not mess.

A few months after the Second Battle of Coral, it was rumored that the Rraey returned to Consu space, imploring the Consu for more technology. The Consu responded by imploding the Rraey’s ship and hurling it into the nearest black hole. This still strikes me as overkill. But it’s just a rumor.

After Coral, the CDF gave me a series of cushy assignments, beginning with a stint touring the colonies as the CDF’s latest hero, showing the colonists how The Colonial Defense Forces Are Fighting For YOU! I got to sit in a lot of parades and judge a lot of cooking contests. After a few months of that I was ready to do something else, although it was finally nice to be able to visit a planet or two and not have to kill everyone who was there.

After my PR stint, the CDF had me ride herd on new recruit transport ships. I was the guy who got to stand in front of a thousand old people in new bodies and tell them to have fun, and then a week later tell them that in ten years, three-quarters of them would be dead. This tour of duty was almost unbearably bittersweet. I’d go into the dining hall on the transport ship and see groups of new friends coalescing and bonding, the way I did with Harry and Jesse, Alan and Maggie, Tom and Susan. I wondered how many of them would make it. I hoped all of them would. I knew that most of them wouldn’t. After a few months of this I asked for a different assignment. Nobody said anything about it. It wasn’t the sort of assignment that anyone wanted to do for a very long time.

Eventually I asked to go back into combat. It’s not that I like combat, although I’m strangely good at it. It’s just that in this life, I am a soldier. It was what I agreed to be and to do. I intended to give it up one day, but until then, I wanted to be on the line. I was given a company and assigned to the
Taos
. It’s where I am now. It’s a good ship. I command good soldiers. In this life, you can’t ask for much more than that.

Never seeing Jane again is rather less dramatic. After all, there’s not much to not seeing someone. Jane took the first shuttle up to the
Amarillo
; the ship’s doctor there took one look at her Special Forces designation and wheeled her into the corner of the medical bay, to remain in stasis until they returned to Phoenix and she could be worked on by Special Forces medical technicians. I eventually made it back to Phoenix on the
Bakersfield
. By that time Jane was deep in the bowels of the Special Forces medical wing and unreachable by a mere mortal such as myself, even if I was a newly minted hero.

Shortly thereafter I was decorated, promoted and made to begin my barnstorming tour of the colonies. I eventually received word from Major Crick that Jane had recuperated and was reassigned, along with most of the surviving crew of the
Sparrowhawk,
to a new ship called the
Kite
. Beyond that, it did no good to try to send Jane a message. The Special Forces were the Special Forces. They were the Ghost Brigades. You’re not supposed to know where they’re going or what they’re doing or even that they’re there in front of your own face.

I know they’re there, however. Whenever Special Forces soldiers see me, they ping me with their BrainPals—short little bursts of emotional information, signifying respect. I am the only realborn to have served in Special Forces, however briefly; I rescued one of their own and I snatched mission success out of the jaws of partial mission failure. I ping back, acknowledging the salute, but otherwise I outwardly say nothing to give them away. Special Forces prefer it that way. I haven’t seen Jane again on Phoenix or elsewhere.

But I’ve heard from her. Shortly after I was assigned to the
Taos,
Asshole informed me I had a message waiting from an anonymous sender. This was new; I had never received an anonymous message via BrainPal before. I opened it. I saw a picture of a field of grain, a farmhouse in the distance and a sunrise. It could have been a sunset, but that’s not the feeling that I got. It took me a second to realize the picture was supposed to be a postcard. Then I heard her voice, a voice that I knew all my life from two different women.

You once asked me where Special Forces go when we retire, and I told you that I didn’t know
—she sent.
But I do know. We have a place where we can go, if we like, and learn how to be human for the first time. When it’s time, I think I’m going to go. I think I want you to join me. You don’t have to come. But if you want to, you can. You’re one of us, you know
.

I paused the message for a minute, and started it up again, when I was ready.

Part of me was once someone you loved
—she sent.
I think that part of me wants to be loved by you again, and wants me to love you as well. I can’t be her. I can just be me. But I think you could love me if you wanted to. I want you to. Come to me when you can. I’ll be here
.

That was it.

I think back to the day I stood before my wife’s grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I’ll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life.

I haven’t seen her again, but I know I will. Soon. Soon enough.