Swarm (24 page)

“Well,” said the doctor, chastened. “If you ever do need me, Commander. Come back.”

I nodded and left. I had the ship lift me back up into its belly. I walked into the chamber of horrors that had worked upon my children until it dumped them into the cold of space. The same chamber full of thin, dangling, black arms that had brought Sandra back to life.

In an hour, I couldn’t scream anymore. My voice no longer worked. It had turned into an endless series of hoarse sobs. Sometime after that, I lost consciousness. In two hours, I awoke with my arm mostly regrown, but I was blind. I had the
Alamo
carry me to my couch where I fell asleep. Sandra came and quietly touched my brow.

In another hour, I was functional again, but I still felt drained. My arm was pink-white. New skin had grown with unnatural, accelerated speed. Just like the rings of new cells that had glued on Sandra’s fingers. I saw that the rings around her fingers had faded. That was good. I could hope my arm would look normal again someday.

I flexed my repaired hand, and it tingled. But it worked. I nodded blearily, looking around the bridge.

“How bad was it?” Sandra asked.

“Bad. It was bad. But yes, it was worth it.”

“The satellite phone has been beeping for you,” said Sandra. “I answered and told them to give you a break.”

“You did?”

“I told them you were injured and recovering. But they keep calling back. Once every hour or so.”

“Okay,” I said, reaching for the unit. A few minutes later I was back on the phone with General Kerr.

“All right, Riggs. We need to talk,” he said.

“I’m listening.”

“I’ve been checking out your story and reviewing the battle video.”

“Video?”

“Every one of those fancy suits was equipped with a camera or two. Not all of them worked. Not all of them survived, either. But yours did.”

“How did I do, sir?”

“I’m impressed…. I’m not a man who is easily impressed, Riggs.”

I believed him. “What do you think about my offer now, General?”

“I think you’re crazy. Did these drugs or whatever they are do that to you? Make you into some kind of berserk? You shot that thing in the butt and nearly ate a biscuit, boy.”

I chuckled. “No sir, I was born crazy, I guess. I can’t blame the Nanos for that.”

“Overcompensation. That’s what a psych would call it. You saw good men die over your idea and you lost it.”

“I got that machine to retreat sir. I damaged it enough to turn it around. Then I chased it into the jungle. If I’d had a full platoon as capable as I was, with heavier weapons….”

“Yeah. Yeah, you did. We did some calculations. You were running over sand in full gear, doing about thirty miles an hour. That’s about how fast a dog runs. Did you know that?”

“You believe me then.”

“I think you’ve been altered somehow. But I’m not sure I want to put all my boys through that. Whatever alien bullshit you have in mind for them.”

“I don’t want it to be that way, sir. I want them to be volunteers. I want them to be from every elite service in the world.”

“A Foreign Legion of freaks, huh?”

“Not the terms I would use.”

“No, I suppose not. But okay. The higher-ups saw the whole thing. I briefed them, ran the vid files for them raw. They are convinced to give it another go. With you leading the charge, if you will do it.”

Sandra caught my attention, flapping her hands at me. I looked up at her. She mouthed a single word:
No.

“Yes sir,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I eyed Sandra. She had her hands on her hips. Her lips were curled in disgust and worry.

“I know a fellow crazy bastard when I see one, Riggs,” laughed the General, sounding like he’d just won a bet. “Welcome to the special forces club. Start building super-sized reactor packs and brewing up some of those injections, pronto.”

“Will do, sir,” I said.

“Oh, and Riggs? The Congress is planning to give you a medal of some kind. You aren’t officially in any of the armed services, so they had to make it something any citizen can get. You are still a U. S. citizen, right Riggs?”

I had to think about that one. I supposed that I was, as Star Force wasn’t exactly a nation. “Yes I am. Are we talking about a Congressional Medal of Honor?”

“That’s what they call it. I guess they really need a war hero about now.”

After I hung up, Sandra was upset with me. “You don’t have to go.”

“Yeah, I do,” I told her.

She crossed her arms under her breasts. Her eyes were half-closed. I felt a sudden urge to grab her and kiss her. But I knew that if I did, I would be rebuffed. She was clearly annoyed.

I threw up my arms. The newly regrown one gave me a stab of pain as I did so. “How can I build a new set of weapons, then recruit another thousand guys to die fighting with these experimental guns against giant robots, and stay home shivering in this ship?”

She sighed and relented, sitting on the couch next to me. “I don’t know. But I wish you would stay out of it this time. Somehow.”

Sandra stared at me for awhile, and I stared back. Suddenly, she threw one of her long brown legs over mine and sat in my lap, straddling me. We made out fiercely for several minutes. It was good.

As suddenly as she’d climbed aboard, she jumped off again. I had to fight to control myself. I almost lunged for her, but I stopped. I’d just gotten my own arms back, and it wouldn’t do to accidentally yank off one of hers. She gave a little laugh and had no idea how I was feeling. Or maybe she did.

I could tell she wasn’t going to give me any more sugar at the moment. So, I decided not to beg for it. Women never respected that. I headed into the shower. Lord, how I needed a shower. The water was hot and I stayed in it for longer than usual.

Sandra surprised me in our makeshift shower stall about one minute before I was going to get out. She wrapped her arms around me from behind. We kissed and touched. It was even better than it had been out on the couch.

“Incoming private channel request from Admiral Crow,” said the ship, interrupting.

“Not now, Alamo.”

The ship was silent for about thirty seconds. I made the best use I could of each second. Sandra was really beginning to respond, and we’d moved several steps past kissing.

“Incoming urgent channel request from Admiral Crow.”

“Admiral Crow?” asked Sandra. “When the hell did he make himself into an Admiral?”

“Do you accept the incoming channel request?” droned the
Alamo
. Sometimes, the ship really did sound like a computer.

“Just answer,” sighed Sandra, putting her wet head against my chest, “or they’ll never let us alone.”

“Open channel, Alamo,” I growled.

“You there, Riggs?”

“Yes sir.”

“You on the john or something?”

“Something like that, sir.”

“Well, I’m calling because you’ve gone bananas, and—well, I have to tell you Riggs, right now I’m thinking of demoting you.”

I snorted. Sandra tensed against me. I patted her back, trying to relax her again. This man was a master at ruining a good mood.

“What’s the problem, Crow?”

“You’ve gone and overstepped yourself. Grossly. I’m in charge of this fleet. You know that, right?”

“That was the deal.”

“Well, then why are you negotiating a new force of star marines, or whatever you want to call them, without my approval? Why are you offering to give away one of our most amazing technologies without even
telling
me?”

I pursed my lips. “I have to admit, you have a point. I was too focused on solving the problem to worry about approvals.”

“Well, tell me why I’m not going to cancel all your arrangements and rip some stripes off of you.”

This was more than Sandra could take. Throughout the conversation, I could feel her body getting more tense against mine. She had a temper. And she seemed particularly defensive when it came to me. I supposed that was a good thing.

“What do you want his stripes for, Crow? You sew new ones on yourself every other damned day. Did you run out?”

There was a moment of silence. I looked down at Sandra. She was lovely, wet and naked. There was a wild look in her eye. I should never have agreed to talk to Crow, I decided.

“Is that Sandra? Ah—now I get it!” he burst into laughter. “That
is
a shower I hear running, isn’t it? I need to figure out how to get video feed out of this communication setup.”

-27-

After an irritatingly long talk, Crow came to see things my way. I agreed at length to consult with him before proposing things like new armies or technology giveaways. By the time Crow and I had finished talking, Sandra and I were dry, dressed and out of the mood. At least, she seemed to be. I hoped I hadn’t gotten myself kicked out of her shower stall for good.

I played it cool, however. Exhaustion helped with that strategy. I was simply too tired and hungry to care much. I ate a big meal of chicken, cottage cheese, canned peaches and cold broccoli. It was filling, but lackluster. I resolved to have the camp people build a better eatery. Maybe I could put a real kitchen aboard the
Alamo
as well.

After I ate, I slept for a good dozen hours. Sandra startled me by curling herself up against my chest, about half-way through my sleep. I figured this had to be a good sign. I felt so tired however, it was like being drugged. Maybe the Nanos
had
drugged me, for all I knew, as part of their ministrations. Or maybe it was just a natural reaction to exhaustion and gross injury. In any case, I fell back asleep again without so much as molesting her. Hours later, when I woke up, she was gone.

I awakened with a fuzziness in my mind. I’d had strange dreams and even stranger ideas in my head. I’d dreamt of the home planet of the Nanos. They’d been created—in my dreams—by blue men with huge eyes and even huger skulls shaped like inverted pears. It left me with the thought when I awoke that I needed to know who had sent these machines to Earth. Who, and why.

I’d tried to get this information from
Alamo
before. It had come up many times over the last month or so. But the ship had been programmed to avoid answering such questions. It was part of the Nanos’ internal, unchangeable programming to keep their origins a secret. Either that, I thought, or the ship truly didn’t know.

“Alamo? Are you listening to my thoughts?”

“When your mind forms word-thoughts, they are transmitted to my receptors.”

“Yeah, close enough. What did you think about my dream? Did you see the blue men, with the big heads?”

“Visual imagery is not relayed.”

“Hmmm. Let me describe them, then. They were blue guys, about four feet tall. They were humanoid, but blue-skinned. They had big eyes and big heads. Very big heads, as if their brains could hardly be contained within them. Do the creatures that created you look anything like that?”

“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”

“So, your creators are not blue-skinned?”

Hesitation. This, I’d come to recognize, signaled deep thoughts were going on inside whatever served the
Alamo
for a CPU.

“No,” the ship said at last.

I stood up suddenly. I took a deep breath, and almost whooped aloud. The
Alamo
had answered a question on this taboo subject. I was onto something.

“Alamo… your creators are not machines, are they?”

“No.”

A smile split my face. Stupid machine. It had been programmed not to answer any questions about the creators. But it hadn’t been programmed not to answer questions in the negative. In other words, it could talk about what they were
not
.

I began pacing. I should have thought of this before. It was like hacking. There was almost always a work-around. When you programmed a machine, it was hard to think of all the possibilities. You might create what seemed like a perfect set of instructions, but given input you never thought of, the program behaved in a fashion you had never intended. Anyone who has ever had to unplug their computer after a particularly bad crash knows something about that.

I thought over what I had gotten out of the
Alamo
so far. The people who created the Nanos were not machines. That seemed pretty obvious. The ship had admitted they didn’t have blue skin, either. Big deal. But what were they like? Where were they from? Certainly, if they wanted their identity kept secret, it seemed likely they were afraid someone might come looking for them. Maybe the Macros didn’t know where they were. Maybe the Macros would like to exterminate the biotics who had had the gall to build ships like these and send them out to help other races fight against their invasions.

“Your creators are not in this solar system, are they?”

“No.”

Big news, there. They were interstellar. That was the first concrete evidence. It was one thing to suspect something like that, it was another to
know it
. I was excited. You couldn’t compete with beings you knew nothing about. I was desperate for information.