The Lazarus War: Legion (42 page)

“What do you mean?”

“When I glanced over a few times I saw him shake his head slightly or make that agreeing sound he makes, but nobody was speaking to him, and once I definitely heard him mutter to him self.” He shrugged. “Never saw him do that before.”

Pyke nodded. “Mojag has a different load to carry than you or I. Got that chunk of hardmem in his head which makes dealing with grief complicated.”

“Mojag is a very mellow fellow,” said Ancil. “He’s usually a calming influence.”

“And I am sure that in time he’ll find a way to cope with his loss,” Pyke said. “In the meantime, how are those fields coming along?”

“A few minutes yet, chief, then we can shake the dust and be on our way.”

“Good man.” Then, sensing something he spun his chair round to see Dervla watching him from the port-side bridge hatch.

“You’re really taking us back to the ice-world?” she said. “Could be risky, going by what we’ve just been through.”

“I don’t take kindly to being trussed and chumped by a bunch of overmuscled leatherboys,” he said.

“Ah, so this is about your ego. Mmm, glad we’re clear on that.”

Smiling, Pyke poked one of the comm buttons. “Scar, set a microjump course back to Nadisha II, if you please.”

“Yes, Bran. I shall be ready to commence a shipwide thirty second countdown in two minutes.”

“Thanks.” He met Dervla’s gaze. “And no, my flower, this is not about my ego. I take on jobs for business reasons, not thrills, and I think I’m quite entitled to remedy the situation.”

“And get us into … ” She shrugged. “Okay, so what’s the plan?”

“Well, as we are in possession of neither the comm-scanner nor the payment we were due from that pus-stain Khorr, the idea is to return to the scene of the crime and see what clues we can find, ion trails, any stay-behind pieces, that kind of thing.”

In the background Scar’s voice announced the imminent hyper space microjump and started counting down.

“So we’re going after the scumbucket,” Dervla said. “While not having any idea of what force he might have at his disposal. Y’know, there is such a thing as cutting your losses.”

“And there’s such a thing as self-respect!” he came back. “In any case, we actually need the money to keep the
Scarabus
operational … ”

At that moment the ship’s hyperdrive kicked in, bending the subquantal structures of space-time in very specific ways. Pyke felt the familiar squeeze-vertigo effect as it swirled through him, but he only paused for a moment or two.

“… and… AND – it might be nice to buy some of that stuff they call ‘food’. I’m led to believe that it actually has a taste, unlike that cyclo rubbish we’ve been… ”

He stopped when Dervla, wide-eyed and uneasy, pointed over at the bridge viewports.

“Is that really… ?”

Even as Pyke swivelled his chair to look, the ship AI spoke. “Planetary anomaly detected – stat conflicts across all main parameters – full macroscan in progress.”

Nadisha II was a pale blue world, its continents buried beneath snow and blizzards that weren’t due to start receding for another half a millennium. But what Brannan Pyke was seeing through the viewports was something completely different, a darkened world, swathed in angry cyclonic weather patterns. As he stared he felt a strange urge to laugh.

“Scar, what the devil are we looking at?”

“Scan results are incomplete but preliminary assessment is confirmed – although this planet occupies exactly the same orbital location as Nadisha II, and possesses the same angular velocity, it is another planet altogether.”

Pyke nodded judiciously.

“Well, you don’t see that every day.”

by Greg Bear

One more tour on the red.

Maybe my last.

They made their presence on Earth known thirteen years ago.

Providing technology and scientific insights far beyond what mankind was capable of, they became indispensable advisors and promised even more gifts that we just couldn’t pass up. We called them Gurus.

It took them a while to drop the other shoe. You can see why, looking back.

It was a very big shoe, completely slathered in crap.

They had been hounded by mortal enemies from sun to sun, planet to planet, and were now stretched thin—and they needed our help.

And so our first bill came due. Skyrines like me were volunteered to pay the price. As always.

These enemies were already inside our solar system and were moving to establish a beachhead, but not on Earth.

On Mars.

I’m trying to go home. As the poet said, if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. Home is where you go to get all that sorted out.

Hoofing it outside Skybase Lewis-McChord, I’m pretty sure this is Washington State, I’m pretty sure I’m walking along Pacific Highway, and this is the twenty-first century and not some fidging movie—

But then a whining roar grinds the air and a broad shadow sweeps the road, eclipsing cafés and pawnshops and loan joints—followed seconds later by an eye-stinging haze of rocket fuel. I swivel on aching feet and look up to see a double-egg-and-hawksbill burn down from the sky, leaving a rainbow trail over McChord field…

And I have to wonder.

I just flew in on one of those after eight months in the vac, four going out, three back. Seven blissful months in timeout, stuffed in a dark tube and soaked in Cosmoline.

All for three weeks in the shit. Rough, confusing weeks.

I feel dizzy. I look down, blink out the sting, and keep walking. Cosmoline still fidges with my senses.

Here on Earth, we don’t say
fuck
anymore, the Gurus don’t like it, so we say fidge instead. Part of the price of freedom. Out on the Red, we say fuck as much as we like. The angels edit our words so the Gurus won’t have to hear.

SNKRAZ.

Joe has a funny story about
fuck
. I’ll tell you later, but right now, I’m not too happy with Joe. We came back in separate ships, he did not show up at the mob center, and my Cougar is still parked outside Skyport Virginia. I could grab a shuttle into town, but Joe told me to lie low. Besides, I badly want time alone—time to stretch my legs, put down one foot after another. There’s the joy of blue sky, if I can look up without keeling over, and open air without a helm—and minus the rocket smell—is a newness in the nose and a beauty in the lungs. In a couple of klicks, though, my insteps pinch and my calves knot. Earth tugs harsh after so long away. I want to heave. I straighten and look real serious, clamp my jaws, shake my head—barely manage to keep it down.

Suddenly, I don’t feel the need to walk all the way to Seattle. I have my thumb and a decently goofy smile, but after half an hour and no joy, I’m making up my mind whether to try my luck at a minimall Starbucks when a little blue electric job creeps up behind me, quiet as a bad fart. Quiet is not good.

I spin and try to stop shivering as the window rolls down. The driver is in her fifties, reddish hair rooted gray. For a queasy moment, I think she might be MHAT sent from Madigan. Joe warned me, “For Christ’s sake, after all that’s happened, stay away from the doctors.” MHAT is short for
Military Health Advisory Team
. But the driver is not from Madigan. She asks where I’m going. I say downtown Seattle. Climb in, she says. She’s a colonel’s secretary at Lewis, a pretty ordinary grandma, but she has these strange gray eyes that let me see all the way back to when her scorn shaped men’s lives.

I ask if she can take me to Pike Place Market. She’s good with that. I climb in. After a while, she tells me she had a son just like me. He became a hero on Titan, she says—but she can’t really know that, because we aren’t on Titan yet, are we?

I say to her, “Sorry for your loss.” I don’t say,
Glad it wasn’t me.

“How’s the war out there?” she asks.

“Can’t tell, ma’am. Just back and still groggy.”

They don’t let us know all we want to know, barely tell us all we
need
to know, because we might start speculating and lose focus.

She and I don’t talk much after that. Fidging
Titan
. Sounds old and cold. What kind of suits would we wear? Would everything freeze solid? Mars is bad enough. We’re almost used to the Red. Stay sharp on the dust and rocks. That’s where our shit is at. Leave the rest to the generals and the Gurus.

All part of the deal. A really big deal.

Titan.
Jesus.

Grandma in the too-quiet electric drives me north to Spring Street, then west to Pike and First, where she drops me off with a crinkle-eyed smile and a warm, sad finger-squeeze. The instant I turn and see the market, she pips from my thoughts. Nothing has changed since vac training at SBLM, when we tired of the local bars and drove north, looking for trouble but ending up right here. We liked the market. The big neon sign. The big round clock. Tourists and merchants and more tourists, and that ageless bronze pig out in front.

A little girl in a pink frock sits astride the pig, grinning and slapping its polished flank. What we fight for.

I’m in civvies but Cosmoline gives your skin a tinge that lasts for days, until you piss it out, so most everyone can tell I’ve been in timeout. Civilians are not supposed to ask probing questions, but they still smile like knowing sheep.
Hey, spaceman, welcome back! Tell me true, how’s the vac?

I get it.

A nice Laotian lady and her sons and daughter sell fruit and veggies and flowers. Their booth is a cascade of big and little peppers and hot and sweet peppers and yellow and green and red peppers, Walla Walla sweets and good strong brown and fresh green onions, red and gold and blue and russet potatoes, yams and sweet potatoes, pole beans green and yellow and purple and speckled, beets baby and adult, turnips open boxed in bulk and attached to sprays of crisp green leaf. Around the corner of the booth I see every kind of mushroom but the screwy kind. All that roughage dazzles. I’m accustomed to browns and pinks, dark blue, star-powdered black.

A salient of kale and cabbage stretches before me. I seriously consider kicking off and swimming up the counter, chewing through the thick leaves, inhaling the color, spouting purple and green. Instead, I buy a bunch of celery and move out of the tourist flow. Leaning against a corrugated metal door, I shift from foot to cramping foot, until finally I just hunker against the cool ribbed steel and rabbit down the celery leaves, dirt and all, down to the dense, crisp core. Love it. Good for timeout tummy.

Now that I’ve had my celery, I’m better. Time to move on. A mile to go before I sleep.

I doubt I’ll sleep much.

Skyrines share flophouses, safe houses—refuges—around the major spaceports. My favorite is a really nice apartment in Virginia Beach. I could be heading there now, driving my Cougar across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, top down, sucking in the warm sea breeze, but thanks to all that’s happened—and thanks to Joe—I’m not. Not this time. Maybe never again.

I rise and edge through the crowds, but my knees are still shaky, I might not make it, so I flag a cab. The cabby is white and middle-aged, from Texas. Most of the fellows who used to cab here, Lebanese and Ethiopians and Sikhs, the younger ones at least, are gone to war now. They do well in timeout, better than white Texans. Brown people rule the vac, some say. There’s a lot of brown and black and beige out there: east and west Indians, immigrant Kenyans and Nigerians and Somalis, Mexicans, Filipinos and Malaysians, Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans, all varieties of Asian—flung out in space frames, sticks clumped up in fasces—and then they all fly loose, shoot out puff, and drop to the Red. Maybe less dangerous than driving a hack, and certainly pays better.

I’m not the least bit brown. I don’t even tan. I’m a white boy from Moscow, Idaho, a blue-collar IT wizard who got tired of working in cubicles, tired of working around shitheads like myself. I enlisted in the Skyrines (that’s pronounced SKY-reen), went through all the tests and boot and desert training, survived first orbital, survived first drop on the Red—came home alive and relatively sane—and now I make good money. Flight pay and combat pay—they call it engagement bonus—and Cosmoline comp.

Some say the whole deal of cellular suspension we call timeout shortens your life, along with solar flares and gamma rays. Others say no. The military docs say no but scandal painted a lot of them before my last deployment. Whole bunch at Madigan got augured for neglecting our spacemen. Their docs tend to regard spacemen, especially Skyrines, as slackers and complainers. Another reason to avoid MHAT. We make more than they do and still we complain. They hate us. Give them ground pounders any day.

“How many drops?” the Texan cabby asks.

“Too many,” I say. I’ve been at it for six years.

He looks back at me in the mirror. The cab drives itself; he’s in the seat for show. “Ever wonder why?” he asks. “Ever wonder what you’re giving up to
them
? They ain’t even human.” Some think we shouldn’t be out there at all; maybe he’s one of them.

“Ever wonder?” he asks.

“All the time,” I say.

He looks miffed and faces forward.

The cab takes me into Belltown and lets me out on a semicircular drive, in the shadow of the high-rise called Sky Tower One. I pay in cash. The cabby rewards me with a sour look, even though I give him a decent tip. He, too, pips from my mind as soon as I get out. Bastard.

The tower’s elevator has a glass wall to show off the view before you arrive. The curved hall on my floor is lined with alcoves, quiet and deserted this time of day. I key in the number code, the door clicks open, and the apartment greets me with a cheery pluck of ascending chords. Extreme retro, traditional Seattle, none of it Guru tech; it’s from before I was born.

Lie low. Don’t attract attention.

Christ. No way am I used to being a spook.

The place is just as I remember it—nice and cool, walls gray, carpet and furniture gray and cloudy-day blue, stainless steel fixtures with touches of wood and white enamel. The couch and chairs and tables are mid-century modern. Last year’s Christmas tree is still up, the water down to scum and the branches naked, but Roomba has sucked up all the needles. Love Roomba. Also pre-Guru, it rolls out of its stair slot and checks me out, nuzzling my toes like a happy gray trilobite.

I finish my tour—checking every room twice, ingrained caution, nobody home—then pull an Eames chair up in front of the broad floor-to-ceiling window and flop back to stare out over the Sound. The big sky still makes me dizzy, so I try to focus lower down, on the green and white ferries coming and going, and then on the nearly continuous lines of tankers and big cargo ships. Good to know Hanjin and Maersk are still packing blue and orange and brown steel containers along with Hogmaw or Haugley or what the hell. Each container is about a seventh the size of your standard space frame. No doubt filled with clever goods made using Guru secrets, juicing our economy like a snuck of meth.

And for that, too—for
them
—we fight.