Survivalist - 15.5 - Mid-Wake (32 page)

He had seen it work. Seen men turn on their female comrades, even each other, killing until they themselves were killed or died of exhaustion from their murderous rampages.

It was this gas that Karamatsov was planning to use on his helpless prisoners. Perhaps as some test, or perhaps only because he wanted to watch it.

Sam Aldridge took a gulp from his coffee cup, medicinal whiskey Jason Darkwood had expropriated from Sick Bay. “Go slow on that stuff, Sam.”

“Yeah,” Aldridge breathed.

Darkwood stood up and walked from the small sofa across the cabin to his desk, turned around to face Aldridge again, and leaned against the desktop as he spoke. “So—what happened?”

“Everything?”

“Tell me about this Rourke guy.”

Aldridge laughed. “He made some joke about being five hundred years old—God bless him. He risked his life for us like crazy—then this. Shit.”

“You said he was going back after a woman.”

Aldridge nodded. “Must be some woman. Maybe one like him. Wherever he’s from.”

The few old planes that were left had gone out in search of terrestrially based life and, aside from some data concerning the Chinese—never anything conclusive—there had been nothing. No evidence. But perhaps that was why some of the planes had never come back, Darkwood mused. “You think he’s telling the truth, Sam? I mean, about being a five-hundred-year-old American?”

Sam Aldridge had been sipping at his whiskey and now he swirled it in his coffee cup, setting the cup down, Darkwood watching him intently. “Well, Sam?”

“Remember Lincoln’s remark when they told him Grant was a whiskey-drinker? Well, if John Rourke’s five

centuries old, I’d like to know his brand of whiskey too. That man’s good. He is so good it would scare me to death if he was a bad guy, ya know? He’s like a machine—deadly efficient. But compassionate too. I gotta say, if Rourke’s an American, however old he is, he’s the finest American I’ve ever met.”

Darkwood was struck by his friend’s words—almost the same words used five centuries ago by Commander Gundersen to describe the original John Rourke. Were they really one and the same?

The com box on his desk buzzed and he hit the switch. “Darkwood here.”

“Jason—this is Maggie. I’ve gotta talk to you.”

“My place or yours?”

“Mine—I’ve got too many people down here to leave them for long.”

“Rourke—he’s, ah …”

“That’s what I’ve gotta talk to you about. How much longer until we dock at Mid-Wake?”

Darkwood consulted his watch. “A little over an hour. Will he make it that long?”

“Come down and talk to me about it. They’re waving me over to another patient now. So take about ten minutes, Jase.”

“Right.”

The transmission was gone and Darkwood stared at the com-box for a long time afterward… .

He had given her more than ten minutes and still had to wait for her once he had arrived in Sick Bay.

He sat in her private office now, watching as she poured herself a glass of her own medicinal whiskey. “Want some?”

“Looks bad for the Captain to drink on duty—but you go ahead.”

“Doesn’t look too hot for the ship’s medical officer either—but what the hell.” She took a long swallow from a coffee cun and set the CUD down, then scrunched UD onto

the top of her desk and tucked her legs up, pulling her uniform skirt down over her knees. “Is he gonna live?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s built like a rock. And he’s been shot before. That’s evident from some scars. That’s in his favor, because shock and trauma can be just as big killers. Those new Soviet uniforms with the built-in soft armor took the spin out of those 4.86mm rifle bullets, so the bullets just penetrated and never exited, and they didn’t do as much internal organ damage as they could have. He lost a lot of blood. Some of the bullets I just flat out can’t get out—with these,” and she raised her hands toward him, backs outward, fingers splayed. “Someone who specializes in delicate surgery and has the right team assisting—maybe she could. I don’t know. I mean, anybody could take ‘em out and kill him. The head wound was just a deep graze. The acid burns on his hand will heal quickly enough. Apparently that spray Sam mentioned that was found in his shoulder bag is some kind of combination antiseptic and accelerated healing agent, like our Dermi-Flex 2. Even smells similar. The arm wound isn’t much. But the abdominal injuries—shit. I lasered the bleeders but I couldn’t get half the bullets out— couldn’t get near them.”

“Maggie,” Darkwood said softly. “That’s not what’s bothering you.”

“No.” She took another sip from the coffee cup. Darkwood was beginning to feel out of place. Aldridge. Now Margaret Barrow. Everybody had a coffee cup except him. “Do you have your appendix?”

“Of course I don’t. Nobody has an appendix anymore. Just a useless organ that can work like a time bomb inside you.

“The appendix has been removed from every infant born at Mid-Wake in the last four centuries.”

“So—so he still has an appendix. Did you remove it?”

“No—I didn’t think I had the right to and as far as I could tell there was nothing wrong with his anyway. My nurse found a vaccination mark—”

“I was there.”

“There hasn’t been any such thing as a vaccination mark for centuries, Jase.”

“A vaccination mark and a healthy appendix don’t make him five hundred years old either.”

“No—but he’s not one of us, he’s not a Russian. I can tell their surgical procedures a deck away. And he’s not Chinese.”

Darkwood leaned back against the bulkhead. “Then he is a surface dweller from some other American community. Do you realize what that means?” He pushed away from the bulkhead and walked across to stand beside her. She rested her head against his chest. “It means we’re not alone,” he told her.

Five hundred years old or middle thirties like the man looked to be. An American. Not from Mid-Wake. But from the surface of the earth.

Jason Darkwood touched his fingers to Maggie Barrow’s hair and she looked up at him, her green eyes tired looking but pretty. “Hold me—tight.” And she stood up and came into his arms.

He held her tight… .

“I was speaking with one of the Chinese, through Machinist First Class Wilbur Hong, Jason. According to the Chinese—who was not terribly eager to speak with a non-Oriental but did appear comforted at having Mr. Hong translating—the Chinese have quite a flourishing culture on the surface. The Chinese knew nothing of our mysterious friend Rourke, but did know that others may well exist on the surface as well. There are at least two Chinese cities and possibly a third, though that is likely only rumor. The First City, as this Chinese calls his homeland, is most curious in its design, rather like the petals of a flower, the various segments of the city in fact being called petals—”

“Sebastian—I’m interested in all of this, really. But right now I’m more interested in our friend in Sick Bay.”

Darkwood sat in his command chair, Sebastian hulking over him as he spoke, the familiar noises of the Reagan’s bridge something Darkwood found himself oddly aware of, keenly aware of, as if a background for his thoughts. “This man Rourke, Sebastian—he is evidently from another culture like our own, but a surface culture.”

“I would be more inclined to think of it as a culture more similar to that of the Chinese, in many respects more in touch with the reality of existence far beyond our own scope.”

“Reality of existence?”

“For five centuries, Mid-Wake has battled the Russians here beneath the sea, and for five centuries both we and they have had precious little time for concerns other than survival. But, most curiously, the Chinese endured several centuries of peace, it appears from my brief discussion with the escapee who accompanied Captain Aldridge and the others here. We have advanced in the ways of war, but perhaps the Chinese and what other terrestrial cultures there may be have advanced in other ways. For the dead, on the surface, the war ended. For those who survived, as did the Chinese it would appear, the war ended as well. But for ourselves …”

Jason Darkwood looked up at his friend. “Generation after generation, your ancestors and mine.”

“I have always found it rather ironic that our ancestors were scientists dedicated to advancing the possibilities of living and working beyond our planet and we have been forced in order to survive to live, in effect, beneath it. Men and women of peace forced to become a warrior culture …

“We have art, learning—we do only what we have to do to survive, Sebastian.”

“At what cost, Jason? For generations, we have not seen the sun except for rare visits to the surface within the past century by heroic persons willing to attempt to fly outmoded aircraft in a so-far-vain search for others of our kind—a vain search until just a few short hours ago. And oerhaDs we have indeed found other Americans, nntp.ntifll

allies and friends, but we may also lose them forever if this man Rourke dies, as it appears he might.”

“Your point,” Darkwood said, hearing in his own voice a testy quality he hadn’t consciously intended.

“My point is pointlessness. If we someday defeat our Soviet adversaries, what will we do then?”

“Return to the surface, I guess. It’s habitable now. We’ve been sure of that for the last century almost. But we can’t return to the surface while the Russians remain a threat. They wouldn’t dare use their nuclear missiles here in the ocean. It would be sheer madness.”

Sebastian smiled strangely. “Then why have they developed them, Jason? In anticipation of destroying us after we have destroyed them? That is a logical absurdity. They intend surface conquest. The testimony of the Chinese with whom I spoke made it abundantly clear that his people have been plagued by our Soviet adversaries for some time, the ultimate goal perhaps conquest of the Chinese city on the surface, the technology they possess. Why go to the surface in order to struggle when you can go as a conqueror, with a city and all that one might require already waiting for you?”

“That’s an intriguing theory. And if the Russians were to do that, we couldn’t stop them unless we fabricated nuclear weapons of our own, if we had the opportunity.”

“Yes.” Sebastian nodded somberly. “Built nuclear weapons. We threaten and they threaten and eventually they strike first or we strike first and the world is once again in ashes. What will we have achieved then?”

Jason Darkwood had no answer to that.

The darkness was like velvet now, and the stars were very bright as they always were in the thinner atmosphere since the Great Conflagration. And the temperature had dropped drastically. As she shifted her weight in the saddle, the blanket she had cocooned around her upper body and draped over her legs began to slip and she rearranged it.

There was a shape, gray against the blackness, and she recognized it as one of the German field tents. Ma-Lin rode sidesaddle beside her and, for the first time in at least a mile, spoke. “I believe we approach the encampment.”

Annie Rourke Rubenstein looked at the girl and nodded. “I believe you’re correct. I know women did it for hundreds of years, but how can you ride like that? I’d be scared to death I’d slip off.”

“I will show you, if you like.”

Annie smiled at the thought, picturing herself in a long dress and fancy hat and veil, riding off to the hunt like something out of a videotape movie or a book. “All right. I’d like to try it, but I don’t think I could ever get used to it.

“Is it not uncomfortable riding astride, as you do?”

“No—you get used to it. I haven’t ridden in a long time—a very long time. But—it just seems natural.”

Ma-Lin smiled. Ma-Lin smiled quite a bit.

Annie turned her little horse—the Chinese horses seemed smaller in stature than Western horses—up along

a defile, the gray shape taking more definite substance now.

There was a flash of light where the tent flap should be, and for a brief instant she saw a figure profiled in it. She kept riding, slowing her horse as the ground rose, then reining in a few yards away from the tent, Ma-Lin and the Chinese soldiers a respectable distance behind her. At her left was Bjorn Rolvaag, his dog Hrothgar over his saddle. Rolvaag looked so ill at ease on horseback that perhaps, Annie thought, Ma-Lin should teach the huge Icelandic policeman how to ride sidesaddle. The thought was amusing. Rolvaag half fell from the saddle, his dog bounding away from him. Annie stayed where she was.

The figure from the tent approached, a lantern in one hand, a pistol in the other. She could see his face clearly now as he belted the pistol and raised the lantern toward her.

Annie had been told by the Chairman that his personal representative with the Rourke-Rubenstein party sent to penetrate the Soviet base camp was an intelligence agent named Han Lu Chen.

He was a smallish man, wiry-looking and with an air of toughness, but with a warmth in his eyes that she liked. “So—you are Mrs. Rubenstein. It is an honor to meet a woman whose father, husband, and brother are all men of such great courage.”

She had flown by J-7V, traveled by one of the German jeep-like vehicles—its technical designation something which continually eluded her powers of recall—then ridden the last five miles on horseback. And she was tired of politeness.

“Yes—and you are Han Lu Chen.”

“Yes.” Rolvaag’s dog was sniffing at Han’s high boots and the Chinese bent over to stroke the animal behind the ears, saying something in his own language which she could not comprehend. Then he reached up and took hold of the reins of her horse. “Your brother and your husband and Dr. Leuden have not been heard from in several hours. There is no reason to suppose that something is

amiss, yet there is no reason for rejoicing. Please join me in the tent for refreshment.”

“I didn’t come here to be refreshed. I came to look for my husband, my brother, and then for my father and Major Tiemerovna. But there’s no sign of them either, is there?”

“There is no sign. It is cold out here. Please—may I help you to dismount, Mrs. Rubenstein?”

She only nodded, not that she needed help, sluffing off the blanket and draping it across the front of the saddle, then rising in the stirrups and swinging her right leg up and over, stepping down, Han’s hand at her elbow. She was shivering without the blanket, the heavy shawl and the coat beneath it usually more than adequate, but not now after sitting for the past five miles with the cutting edge of the wind so terribly cold.