Lost Harvest: Book One of the Harvest Trilogy (5 page)

“The military have gone over to their side.”

Then it was no good, Pearce knew. The light garrison at the encampment would have been taken totally by surprise, and despite their technological advantage, they would be hard pressed. That, and Pearce knew he was not the only officer of the
Drake
ashore in town, staying with a generous host.

Captain Baker
, he thought.

Pearce released Arkadas and reached for his sidearm, turning it on. He felt the warm cycling of the laser spool inside the grip, and tried to think back to his training. He had never fired it at a live soul before.

“Will you be all right?” he asked.

“Maybe.” Arkadas shrugged. “When the coalitions shift, anything is possible. Who knows what the day may bring. But I am in no immediate danger.”

“That makes one of us. Goodbye, my friend. I do not think we will meet again.”

Pearce left the alley, darting from shadow to shadow across the plaza, wishing his footsteps could be quieter. He expected each moment to be his last, to hear that awful hiss before the karabin struck, but his luck held. At one point, he turned back to catch one last glimpse of Arkadas, but the Cygni was gone. A moment later, Pearce reached the last small building at the edge of the plaza. Perhaps a hundred yards of open ground lay between him and the shuttle, and the slowly rising sun cast its new rays on a scene that would chill him forever. The shuttle sat, as it always did, in front of a small clutch of outbuildings the
Drake
’s crew had erected as part of the camp. A crowd of blue jackets surrounded the small ship, forming a swarming mass held at bay, as far as he could tell, by ten Machrines and a handful of able starmen.

Thank God the
karabins
take so long to reload their air chambers, Pearce thought, or they’d all be dead already. Arkadas had once told him that Cygni soldiers were trained to fire their
karabin
, taking advantage of the fear-inspiring sound as well as the deadly force, and then to engage in close combat with the short, iron-clad clubs they carried as well.

Pearce saw a smaller cluster, a bit farther away. A tall figure was standing erect, firing with a hand laser like his own, while two Machrines methodically cleared a path ahead of them, trying to gain the encampment. It was Captain Baker, fighting her way back to her ship. Gritting his teeth, Pearce bolted toward them, and in moments was at her side.

“Good to see you, Lieutenant,” she greeted, and Pearce was struck by her casual tone, as if they had met up on a hillside picking berries. Did nothing ever faze this woman? Coolly, she sighted her weapon and fired over his shoulder. A cry told Pearce she had hit her target, and he whirled around to find that more Cygni soldiers were still coming. Without thinking, he fired as well, and at that moment the sunrise began to blaze in full, and he saw clearly as his beam caught one of the blue-jackets squarely in the chest. It was the first time he had killed anyone, but there was no time to dwell on that.

“Come on,” Baker was saying, and she pulled on Pearce’s arm. “I think we’re the last two stragglers. When we get to the shuttle we can get back to the ship, and maybe I can figure out how to negotiate a ceasefire.” She met his gaze, and for the first time, Pearce saw sadness there, and weakness. “I don’t want to kill any more of these people than we have to, Lieutenant.”

Despite her statement she fired again, killing another onrushing Cygni soldier. Together, with the two robot Machrines before them, Baker and Pearce pushed forward. Somehow, they managed to find a seam in the crowd surrounding the shuttle, and Pearce was suddenly among the ables. One of them, Arash el-Barzin, grinned at him and fired into the blue crowd.

“Welcome back, sir.” Pearce never forgot the way that smile melted off el-Barzin’s face like hot wax, becoming, in an instant, a mask of utter horror. Turning, he saw what his shipmate had seen. Captain Baker had been struck in the back by a
karabin
, and stumbled to one knee. One of the Machrines, Pearce thought it was one of the Alexander models, was by her side, trying to shield her from the blows that were raining down upon her, with limited success. He began to race back toward her, but el-Barzin seized his shoulder, holding him back. One of the clubs had struck her in the back of the head, and she was sprawled on the ground, unmoving. A cry ripped from his throat, but Pearce was being dragged backward, into the shuttle’s open cargo door, by el-Barzin and another crewman.

“Fall back!” el-Barzin was shouting, though he was not in command. Somewhere in his mind, Pearce realized that
he
was the ranking officer on the ground, but his mind was frozen, watching as the Cygni left off their clubbing of the broken and lifeless Captain Baker. Their attention had turned to the unfortunate Machrine that had tried so valiantly to rescue the captain. Pearce could see the designation-badge, dented and scraped. Alexander-457. Its arms hung loose from its shoulders, connected by sparking cables, light flickering in those white, inhuman eye slots, as the sound of metal on metal rang with each strike. In the instant before the shuttle doors closed, those eyes and that plasticene face locked onto Pearce, and he swore that he saw in them agony, pleading, and even fear.

“Bill!”

It took long minutes for Pearce to realize that he was on Earth, in his own bed, and his wife was gripping both shoulders, shaking him awake. He looked at her and tried to focus on her face as the nightmarish images of Cygnus slowly receded.

“I’m all right,” he croaked, finally. “Just a bad dream.”

“A bad dream,” Mary repeated. “About that planet.”

Pearce thought about lying to her, if only to make her feel better, but knew he couldn’t fool her. He nodded. She released her hold on him and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Mary, it was a just a dream.”
“A nightmare.”

“Fine.” He closed his eyes, exhausted. “Have it your way. A nightmare.”

“And that’s where the Minister wants you to go. Back to the place that’s given you nightmares for more than ten years. You’re soaked through with sweat, Billy.”

“They’ve been getting better.” It was the truth, sort of. Pearce didn’t have the heart to tell her that he only had the dreams when he was home, when he slept here. Somehow, illogically, the nightmares never seemed to find him on board ship, and he’d been there a lot lately.

“I’m going to take a shower.”

He left her there, next to the swamp his sweat had made, and shuffled into the bathroom. As the hot water cycled in the shower stall, he rubbed his hands over his face. It had been so vivid, so real, especially the part about the Machrine. Usually he woke filled with renewed grief about Baker’s death, guilt over his inability to save her, but this time it was the destruction of the robot he couldn’t shake. It didn’t make any sense. Machrines were programmed to serve, to fight, and if necessary, be destroyed. They had no concept of their own disposability and possessed no sense of self or identity beyond what was needed to function as part of their unit. Their programming allowed them to display what appeared to be courage, but how could there be true bravery if there was not also fear? The shower had reached the ideal temperature, and he stepped in. He knew he would be limited to the allotted five minutes, and that this meant he would get no shower in the morning, but it was worth it as the sweat and salt sluiced from his skin.

Pearce knew better than to succumb to maudlin anthropomorphizing of the robots. They were machines, not men. The roboticists of the Bailey Institute kept improving their designs, giving their creations personality, humor, and other traits that made for collegial deep-space companions, but they had not yet given them humanity. And they never could. Robotics operated under the well-known axiom of Positronic Horizon Theory, which stipulated that artificial intelligence, however sophisticated, could mimic sentience but could never truly achieve it. The Theory was well-known because it was well-publicized, in an effort to minimize any resentment or fear people might feel toward the mechanical men. Robots could never be self-aware, could never exceed their programming, and so could never be a threat to humans.

Even their usefulness was limited. They were, and could only be, Machrines. Pearce had heard once that a clever marketing consultant had suggested that name, since the robots were designed to replace human Marines as the Admiralty’s fighting corps. Machines + Marines = Machrines. They were useless as starmen, unable to reef, nor hand, nor steer. They lacked, by design and by nature, the instinct or creativity to work a ship.

Pearce knew all of that, and had served alongside Machrines with little or no reflection on the matter. They were tools, like a hydraulic jack or a sonic wrench, to be activated at need and then put away when finished. Still, the dying light in Alexander-457’s optics haunted him. His thoughts turned to Venn Arkadas. Had the scholar survived the military junta of twelve years before? How many political upheavals had there been since? Most importantly, who held power there now?

With a quiet hiss, the stream of water died away, and Pearce took a towel from the stack nearby. He had to go back. How could he not? Banks and Exeter hadn’t really given him the option to turn the job down. Tossing the now-damp towel into a basket, he pulled on a pair of shorts and turned off the bathroom light. A faint glow came from the bedroom, and he could see the outline of his wife sitting up in the bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, where she hugged them like a child.

“Mary, go back to sleep,” he said, with no real conviction.

“You’re going to go.” It wasn’t a question, not really. Pearce sighed and sat at her feet, finding her eyes with his own.

“What would you have me do? Yes, I promised you I would stay. I think you can admit things have changed a bit since then.”

“I’m not angry,” she said softly, with the ghost of a smile on her lips. “And how could I ever hold you to a promise at such a cost?” She reached for his hand and took it, staring at their intertwining white fingers, gray in the shadows cast from the small bedside lamp.

“They could find someone else,” Pearce offered. “There are other star-mariners.” She shook her head.

“No. They want you because you’re their best choice, and by no small margin. You speak the language, you’ve been there before, you have all that deep-space experience.” A laugh burst from Pearce’s throat.

“You seem to know a lot about it.”

“Well,” she replied, with a slight blush on her cheeks, “did you think all the Duchess did was show me the house?”

“Hmph,” snorted Pearce in mock indignation. “They’re using you to get to me, too, it seems.”

“Yes. And James.”

“And James.”

“That’s why it has to be you, Bill.” Mary’s eyes shone from the dark of her face in the half-light. “Not only are you the best choice for them, you’re the only chance for James.”

Save the world, and your son with it.

“Talk to him,” she continued. “He’s not a little boy anymore. And…and it might be your last chance.”

Pearce stood, squeezed Mary’s hand, and let it fall. Wordlessly, he walked down the hall to James’ room, where he paused, his hand poised over the access button next to the closed door.
When did this door start being shut
? He couldn’t remember. It had always been open at first, when James was an infant, and then after the diagnosis. Pearce loved his son, but realized all of a sudden that he did not really know him. He tried to convince himself that his love was real and tangible, not an abstract thing, but it was harder than he liked. When he thought of James, and he did often, he thought of him as a newborn, asleep in his crib, all promise and potential and as-yet undiagnosed with a fatal disease. Or he thought of him as a toddler, still healthy-seeming, still round-cheeked, before they grew gaunt and hollow. He never really thought, it occurred to him, of his son as a person in his own right, with thoughts and feelings and brutally truncated dreams.

What would it be like to know the limit of your years
? Now James knew the truth of his condition; medicines and doctors and unremitting discomfort were not inconveniences, but his own death, steadily stalking him since before his own birth. Pearce had faced death before, on Cygnus, during stellar storms, and once during a cargo dispute that got nasty at The Exchange. He had been aware every time that he might die, but it was always only one possible outcome, and he had always known that it could be avoided if he were tough enough, smart enough, lucky enough. He had never regarded death as a certainty.

It was, now, for his only son.

The thought made him ache. For himself, for James, but for Mary, too. She had never been happier, he knew, than when she was pregnant and when James was tiny. Pearce knew why. The child was with her, always, the constant companion that the father so rarely was, with his frequent and long absences. When James was born, his mother’s affections centered on him totally, completely, unabashedly, to the point that Pearce himself found it hard to build a relationship with his son, or maintain one with Mary.

Do all men lose their wives to their children
?

He touched the panel, and the door slid open. It was black inside, and Pearce’s long shadow stretched out into the shaft of light that stabbed into the room. Finding the interior light control, he inched it up just a couple of centimeters, and the resulting dusk was gauzy and unreal. James was asleep in his bed, a tangle of arms and sheets and legs. The room itself could have been that of a teen boy anywhere, anywhen, clothes strewn across the floor, vidreaders, controllers for a variety of computer-interaction consoles, moving digital pictures of cricketers, and the few toys that had survived the transition from boy to pre-man. Pearce’s eyes went to the shelves on the long opposite wall, shelves he had built himself, loaded with more than a hundred of the small collectible model ships. They were indistinct in the gloom, colors flat and muted, mostly indistinguishable from one another, but Pearce knew by heart where and when he had found most of them. He moved to the shelf and picked up one of the largest, a Raleigh-class methane tanker from the previous century.