Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (40 page)

“I wouldn’t have known. I’ll try to remember once we get the thing aboard.”

I said, “Do that—also, in case you forget, I will disarm it here.”

Stepping cautiously over the low doorsill, we found the ladder, a broad-treaded affair with short risers. We followed it through the smoke, down into the bowels of the vessel. As we went, visibility got steadily worse, even with the contrast enhancement provided by our suits. Occasionally, we passed a video unit, its screen still ablaze with the bright green Fodduan letters that apparently meant “abandon ship”.

These lamviin really knew their electronics, I thought, yet they still mixed animal-powered vehicles with motor carriages in their city streets. The sugar-based equivalent of black-powder still found favor in their small arms, although this vessel’s artillery seemed to run on natural gas. Mav said his people had not even conceived of surgical anesthesia, yet. Progress in different fields proceeds at different rates, I supposed, depending on the interests of the culture making it.

Rounding the corner, we discovered the remains of a crew-being, recently dead, its carapace perforated, leaking emerald-colored ichor onto the deck plating. We stepped carefully around it, to negotiate the next set of uncomfortably-proportioned stairs.

WHAAANG!

What must have been a thirty-gram projectile flattened itself on the bulkhead next to my shoulder. I ducked back, stomping Lucille’s feet, peered out from behind the doorway’s protective steel in time to see a pair of lamviin in battledress peering out at us from the next doorway.

One of them had a weapon with a bore the size of my fist.

So did the other one.

“Surrender, monster, or die! Your Podfettian masters will pay for this!”

Before I could answer, there was a roar beside my ear. A ball of white hot plasma streaked toward the Fodduans. One stood up, firing at Lucille. I heard her scream, looked back in time to see her slammed against the opposite bulkhead. I snapped a shot at the rifle-barrel, getting a slug down the center of the enormous bore—it was not very difficult. The weapon exploded in its user’s hands, killing him instantly.

His partner retreated out of sight. Keeping a cautious eye behind me, I knelt down beside Lucille where she lay crumpled against the bulkhead, not two meters away from the first dead Fodduan we had found.

“I’ll be okay, Whitey,” she gasped. “It just knocked the wind out of me, that’s all.” Her suit-arms both shrieked with blinking scarlet lights.

“Call the ship, Lucille! Bomb or not, we are getting you back upstairs!”

There was a long pause. “I can’t raise them. Something’s happened to my—Whitey, look out!”

Blam! Blam! Blam!

I had learned by now to aim for the few vulnerable places that a lamviin possessed. He dropped his bigbore weapon, pitched over onto the edge of his carapace. His legs crumpled underneath him. He was still. I felt terrible. I liked these people. I had no desire to kill them.

Stabbing the buttons on my own suit-arms, I was dismayed to discover that I could not reach
Tom Paine Maru,
either. There was probably too much metal wrapped around us this deep in the Fodduan ship.

“We must disarm the bomb,” I told Lucille. I could not even strip her helmet away. This atmosphere had plenty of oxygen, but it would suck the moisture out of her tissues in minutes, even this far out to sea. Instead, I used the manual controls of her suit to produce a true image of what lay beneath the silvery rubber. Her face was deathly pale.

“I must go now to disarm the bomb, Lucille, it is being watched by
Tom Paine Maru
on instruments. Then they will know to haul us in, okay?”

She put a weak hand on my arm. “Whitey, please don’t leave me ... I—”

I nodded, understanding. “Do not worry, love, I will not leave you.”

If I could believe it, her suit was telling me she had no serious internal injuries, no broken bones. Whatever the damage, it would be nothing, compared to being abandoned again on Sodde Lydfe. I collected both her pistols. She would not want them left here. Tucking an arm between her legs, I grabbed the back of her neck, stooped down even further, levered her onto my shoulders. I then gathered ankle to wrist together in my left hand. This would leave me one hand free for fighting.

I stood up, only halfway, naturally, as the ceiling was too low, thinking about the Scavian dungeon where I had met Lucille. Pointing my gun ahead of me, I trudged to the ladder, began taking the steps one by one. At the foot, I rested for a moment, trying to catch my breath.

“Lucille?”

No answer.

Only one more flight, if I could just find where it began. I cast around in the smoky darkness, wishing now I had undergone the implant. As light as Lucille was, not more than forty-five kilos, strain was beginning to hurt me in this cramped, bent-over position. I kept imagining nine-legged things with guns coming out of the blackness at me.

Instead, I saw an angel.

With a blue halo. A broach-circle opened in front of me, its edges glaring brightly like neon in the dim light. Out of the broach stepped little Elsie Nahuatl, fully suited up, a pistol in one hand, a dagger in the other. The broach snapped closed behind her with an explosive
pop!

She sheathed her knife—it was of the pattern called “rezin”—but kept her pistol handy. “I thought I’d find you here, Whitey. How come you haven’t disarmed the bomb ye—oh, boy, are we ever in a mess!”

That was how long it took her to see Lucille’s condition.

“Are you in communication with the ship, Elsie?”

“Not exactly, see, I—”

“Get that way! Tell them to get us out of here. Lucille’s been shot!”

“Whitey, they’re all busy now, and nobody’s listening. Besides, I can’t communicate through this metal! I came to tell you that they’re going to Broach the whole
Amybo Kiidetz.
It’s the only thing we can do—”

WHIRRINGGG!

A heavy-caliber bullet ricocheted off the bulkhead from behind us. I fired half a dozen random shots in that direction, grabbed Elsie, found the ladder. We climbed down. At the bottom, a door opened onto a large, high-ceilinged hangar-like hold where I could finally stand up. I was glad we had our suits. The smoke in here was even thicker than above.

THUMP!

A dull explosion. The blow took me full in the face. There was a sickening, disorienting sensation as the ship lurched. I fell atop Lucille—who only managed a little moan at the impact—I felt Elsie’s hand wrenched from mine. Her gun clattered to the floor. She screamed.

The hold filled with the sound of tearing metal, as a shaft of daylight burst in upon us. Through a brand new hole in the hull, I could make out the outline of a helmeted head. The smoke was emptying rapidly.

“Whitey! Whitey! It’s me, Owen Rogers! Have you seen Elsie? We think she came to find you. Have you wrecked that bomb yet? Where’s Lucille?”

I opened my mouth to speak—

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

I knew by the sound that it was a Dardick pistol. Rogers ducked as the bullets ricocheted noisily off of the metal plating around his head.

Far away, at the other end of the hold, Sermander stood straddling a bulge in the floor where the atomic bomb had been welded. In front of him, he held Elsie. She screamed and struggled. He slapped her on the side of the head with his pistol. She stopped struggling and was silent.

“Hold still, damn you! It will not be very much longer. Corporal, leave that baggage and get on your feet. Come over here to me. We are going to blow the starship—with everyone aboard it—to kingdom come!”

the teddy bears’ picnic

Slowly gathering my feet beneath me, I stood. Lucille still lay unconscious on the deck. Whatever might happen, I would never abandon her.

“That is right, Corporal,” Sermander soothed. Holding the little girl’s neck in a vise-like grip, he reached up with his gun-hand to peel his suit mask down to his chest. It was foolish, but made good politics.

“Come join me, Whitey. There is no responsible alternative. I have discovered—employing the startling powers that these Confederates have been naive enough to bestow upon me—that they have not felt it necessary, as yet, to notify the remainder of their vast fleet about Vespucci.”

Elsie squirmed, “Let me go, you big mammoth-turd!”

He looked down at her almost benevolently, “Is that any way for a child to talk? At home, we would teach you better manners, would we not, Whitey?” He shook his head, “Indiscipline is chronic among these people. It is a sickness, a contagion, a plague. It deserves only death.”

He looked up again at me: “It is a great pity that we cannot send a warning home. But we can buy our beloved nation time. What do you say, Corporal?”

“I say that they need more than time, sir. They need that warning—every last bit of the information that you alone can give them, now.”

Glancing sidewise at the hole that had been cut in the ship’s hull, I could just make out the motion of fingertips clinging to the ragged lower edge. Someone had adjusted his smartsuit to give visual impressions from the ends of those digits, a sort of periscopic effect.

With overly dramatic sadness: “It is we who have no time left. It is required of both of us that we give our lives, unremembered, unsung—the ultimate sacrifice for which our beings were shaped at their incep—”

“Let me go!”

Renewing her struggles, Elsie flailed her arms as Sermander held her by the rubbery nape of her smartsuit. Almost negligently, he slapped the side of her head a second time with his heavy military pistol.

A third.

The little girl went limp.

“At long last,” he sighed, “blessed silence.”

I drew my own gun, pointed it at his face. “If you have hurt her ... Let her go now, Sermander, there is something wrong about your implant. This insanity has gone far enough if it means hurting little girls.”

Big ones, too. I did not know if Lucille was still alive.

He laughed. “So they finally got to you after all. I thought that might be the case. How many little girls, do you suppose, perished in the Final War? Yet can you deny that it was a war that had to be fought? Sentimentalism will not alter what has to be done, even now, Corporal.”

Carefully, Sermander transferred his weapon to the hand that also held the now-unconscious little girl. Stooping down, he stretched to reach to the glowing control panel of the atomic bomb between his knees.

“Enough debate. So long, Corporal, it has been—”

Firming my two-handed grip on the Dardick, I shouted “I am not fooling around with you, Sermander, let her go now! Get away from there!”

Chuckling at me, Sermander lifted poor Elsie like a coat on a hanger, until her quiet, unmoving form shielded his body from head to knees.

“Are you aware how foolish you appear, Corporal, using a mere pistol to threaten an individual who is prepared to blow himself up with—

“
AAAGHHH!”

Elsie twisted the dagger she had slid beneath Sermander’s kneecap. In an agony of pure reflex, he tossed the little girl savagely away. With a horrible noise, her tiny body crashed among a mountain of stowage. A barrel burst around her with the impact. Sermander plucked feebly at the knife-hilt where it projected from his ruined joint, looked at me, a sickly smile on his face, then reached again for the bomb.

I pulled the trigger. The ship’s hold lit briefly with the muzzle-flash.

Sermander’s headless body pitched forward, spewing gore.

Belatedly, Rogers’ shot roared through the space where Sermander’s head had been only a fraction of a second earlier. His bolt of plasma blew yet another hole, in the opposite side-wall of the
Amybo Kiidetz.

Unconcerned about anything else, I whirled, knelt, gathered Lucille in my arms. I was cradling her motionless body when they found me.

-2-

The people of
Tom Paine Maru
filled Lucille’s stateroom with flowers.

MacDougall Olson-Bear turned out to be a decent enough fellow, after all. A great deal taller than I was—he was perhaps a full two meters tall—he possessed a thick mop of reddish-blonde hair, his mother’s sea-green eyes, along with muscles on his muscles on his muscles.

Under the circumstances, I did not think to ask him very much about himself. A fighter-pilot, someone had said. Whatever it might have been, it had given his clean-shaven face a weathered reddish-pink finish typical of people who spend a lot of time outdoors but do not tan well. It looked as if his chin had never seen a razor—or needed to.

I met him in Lucille’s quarters where he was busy filling cartons with belongings. The place smelled cloyingly-sweet with murdered foliage.

“I guess it wasn’t really much like having a mother,” he admitted, continuing our awkward conversation while attempting to control his expression as each item that he packed away evoked a long-buried memory.

Earlier, he had told me that he had grown up aboard the
Tom Jefferson Maru.
He had never gotten along particularly well with his father, from whom he had sought something like a divorce at an early age. He had pursued an adventurous life ever since then, still using his father’s name, unaware of his mother’s, or even that she was still alive.