Swarm (9 page)

“Hello Jack. We lived.”

“We sure did, my fat-brained friend. You helped out tremendously. I want to make you a lieutenant commander, Riggs. No, forget that. A
full
commander! How does that sound, Commander Riggs? I want you to know, you would be the only person with such a high rank in my fleet. You would be my second in command.”

I chuckled. “If I wait another day, will you make me a captain?”

“Right. Well, right. Laugh it up. Well done. This is all a big joke, isn’t it? But consider, the fact that I put together some sort of organization kept us alive today. That ship might have killed all of us, you know. Think about that. Your ideas saved the day, but without my organization, we wouldn’t have worked together at all and we would have failed.”

“You have a point there, Jack.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear you admit it. I’m not just some megalomaniac who wants to call myself a commodore.”

“What’s a commodore?” I asked.

“It’s a rank between captain and admiral.”

“You are a commodore now?”

“Well, I realized I needed to have more ranks as more ships join us. More of a hierarchy.”

“I see,” I said, grinning.

“But that doesn’t matter. What I want you to think about, Riggs, is what that ship would have done if we had lost the battle. What if it had made it down to Earth?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what about the next time? What if there are a dozen ships like that, or a hundred?”

“Next time?” I asked wonderingly. I had honestly not had time to think through the implications of the battle we’d just faced. I felt out of my depth. I had no idea what was going on out here. Was Earth involved in some kind of war? We desperately needed more information. Would there be a next time? Why not? Wars were not usually fought in a single battle. And it did indeed seem like we were involved in a war.

“Jack—Commodore Crow, I mean. Do you have any more detailed political information? Is Earth in a war? Or did Earth just declare war on whoever was in that ship, by helping our ships destroy it?”

“Great questions. Join us, and I’ll assign you the task of figuring out the answers. I’ll do recruitment and organization.”

“What the hell have your people been doing? Do I have to figure out everything?”

“Look, Jack, most paranoid people who sleep with a gun in their hand aren’t deep thinkers. This organization isn’t made up of a bunch of philosophers, diplomats and techies. We are a fleet of opportunistic killers—survivalists. Unfortunately, running a fleet of alien ships in space combat requires more than reflexes and a killer instinct. I’m coming to realize I need you more than anyone else in my fleet. For the last time, will you join me?”

I thought hard for about five seconds. I looked over at Sandra, who nodded firmly. I sighed, and realized they were both probably right. I didn’t really like joining some independent, militia-like organization. It wasn’t my style. But in our situation, I couldn’t see how we were going to be taking orders from the ground, and I wasn’t interested in letting some military agents come aboard and toss me out of this ship. Self-sacrifice had its limits. Who knew, anyway, if the Pentagon could run this ship better than I had done? Would they have won that battle? Maybe I was overestimating my problem-solving skills, but then again, this ship had chosen me for good reasons.

“Okay Commodore. You’ve gotten through to me. For now, I’m joining your organization. I’ll be a commander, if that’s what you want. By the way, what do you call your fleet?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. How about Star Force? That has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

I agreed. It did have a nice sound to it. I broke the connection and looked at Sandra again. She was smiling and I thought I hadn’t seen too many smiles on her face up until now. She was very pretty, but I had to get her out of those ridiculous cables that held to her ankles like manacles. Maybe I should go through with the injections, or whatever it was the ship wanted me to go through to allow people to be in my presence without restraints. I’d have to ask the ship about the details. I mentally added it to the growing pile of tasks I
should
be doing.

“I’m impressed,” said Sandra, smiling at me.

She was a babe. I had to admit it. She was also way too young for me, but that was mattering less and less as I spent more time with her. I was wary, naturally, having watched other professors go down that road with research assistants and the like. There was a legendary formula that an old, philandering professor had supposedly worked out. It described a critical ratio for the duration of such relationships. It involved the measured youth and attractiveness of the student against the length of the inevitably short-lived marriage. It was an inverse relationship. The prettier the girl, the story went, the shorter the marriage. To me, Sandra looked like a two year experience, at best. I had to admit though, it would be an excellent two years.

I turned back to the screen I’d figured out, which now encompassed three walls. The golden beads that represented friendly ships had drifted apart and were heading back toward the dark crescent of the Earth. More golden motes had appeared there, sliding over the surface of the planet. They must be ships that had managed to locate suitable ‘command personnel’. I almost shuddered at the thought. How many people were being dragged from their beds down there and slaughtered? One every minute, perhaps? The flocks of ships were relentless in their searches for someone who could pass their tests. They were machines, I knew now, built of something like liquid metal. There was no mercy in their hearts, because they had no hearts.

“My kids must have been revived by now,” I said to Sandra. “I bet they are freaking out in medical if they were awake and enduring this battle while tied down.”

“That does sound rough,” Sandra said. “I hope they aren’t blinded and screaming in there. I was for awhile before you came and got me out of that creepy room.”

I took a deep breath. I was feeling good, slightly relaxed after a long hard night, one that was easily the worst of my life. It was hard not to feel good after having saved myself, a bunch of other people, and possibly the world itself. My elation was to be short-lived, however.

“Alamo, how are my kids doing?”

The answer was prompt and devastating. “The biotics could not be revived,” said the ship.

I froze. My mind froze.

“Oh no,” Sandra said, reaching for me. A black, snake-like arm whipped out, circled her wrist and yanked it back. “Kyle?”

A block of ice formed in my guts. It made it hard to speak, or think, or do anything. Shock, I suppose they would call it. The hope-monkey had gotten me, I realized with some rational corner of my mind. Just how badly I’d been bitten I would never have admitted before that very moment. My kids had been
alive
—in my mind. It had all seemed so reasonable. Alessandra had been revived, and she was no worse for the wear. I had assumed the ship could work the same miracle upon Kristine and Jake. Like a primitive tribesman who sees a foreign doctor cure a fatal disease with an injection, I thought the magic was unlimited. But logically, they had been far more dead than Sandra had ever been. She had been in a cold ocean for a fraction of the time they’d lain broken in my farmyard. Cells deteriorated far more slowly in icy water than they did in the open air on a warm spring night. Sandra hadn’t been gutted, either. Sewing fingers back on was not the same thing as rebuilding an intestinal tract. The ship had patched Sandra together, but hadn’t managed to do the same for my kids.

I shook with anger. This ship had killed my kids, teased me with their revival, and then killed them all over again, even if they’d only been alive again in my mind. Suddenly all the grief I’d felt earlier, which had been on hold, came crashing down on me again. It was a flood of emotion that had all been kept at bay by the hope-monkey.

“I want to see my kids,” I choked out. “Bring them to me, dammit!”

“The biotics are not aboard.”

“Where are they?”

“When the revival efforts failed, they were released.”

“You mean you dumped them out of this ship? Why did you do that?”

“All waste is to be released.”

“Where are they?”

“Unknown.”

 “What do you mean
unknown?
”
I roared at the walls. These infuriating, cold walls. “Where did you drop them?”

“Shortly after the battle started, they were released.”

“In space then. You dumped them into space. Are they orbiting somewhere? The bodies?”

“Predictive assessment warning. The following is only an estimate: the waste was released in a decaying orbit. The probability is high it has reentered the planetary atmosphere.”

“The
waste?
So they burned up on reentry into the atmosphere?”

“The probability exceeds ninety-nine percent.”

“I don’t even have anything left to bury,” I said dully.

Sandra was saying something, but I didn’t care and I didn’t hear a word of it. I didn’t even look at her. I ripped open a beer can that I found rolling around on the ship’s deck and drank it. It was warm and tasted like shit, but I drank it all fast. Then I fell to my knees and sicked it all up again.

“There’s some more human waste for you,” I said.

I flopped back onto my soggy couch. “Alamo. Take me back to my farm.”

-10-

Sandra tried. She coddled me with her voice. I hadn’t thought she had it in her, really, to be so caring. She had seemed like such a tough, independent-minded—even
mean
girl when she’d had a pistol aimed at my crotch just a few hours ago. But now, she was a friend, and she tried to make things better for me. I couldn’t hear her words. But I got the feeling, the intent—that much sank through my black mood, but none of the rest of it.

The hope-monkey had gotten me. The monkey had, in fact, kicked my ass. That part—the knowing I had let it get to me—was as galling as anything else. It was ridiculous. My kids had died last night, not just now. I had watched them die. I’d looked into their dead eyes, just as I had looked into my wife Donna’s dead eyes a decade earlier. I was no stranger to grief. I knew the process. But I’d let hope revive the kids in my mind, if not in reality. That had gotten me through a few tough hours without feeling the pain of their loss. Now, here I was reliving the pain all over again. Like a wound torn open. Like a broken bone that had to be yanked straight and reset.

I screamed suddenly. It was more of a roar of rage than anything else. Sandra, who had been talking gently to me, winced and shut up.

I spoke a long stream of foul words. My eyes burned, and I could barely open them. Breathing hard, I sucked in gulps of air as if I had swum six laps underwater.

“Alamo, you murderous machine, I hate you.”

The ship did not respond.

“Alamo, what if I ordered you to crash us into a mountain right now? At full speed.”

Sandra looked alarmed, but didn’t speak. I think she rightly judged my mood. I was best left alone right now.

“That order would be invalid under current circumstances,” said the ship. It sounded almost cheery to me, and the voice grated on my nerves. I would have liked it better if it sounded upset, or at least worried about what its crazy commander might do next. That’s the problem with computers. When you are insanely furious with them, they had no comprehension of the situation and they didn’t care one whit.

“I need some air,” I said aloud. “Are we over my farm?”

“Yes.”

“Open a window or something. Open three of them. I want to at least smell my own fields if I can’t get down there.”

Some round holes opened in the walls. I wasn’t surprised to see daylight pour into the ship. It made Sandra and I blink and squint. It looked and smelled like a fine day.

“Can I go down and walk around my house, Alamo?” I asked. I had the sudden urge to visit the kids’ rooms and look at their things.

“Command personnel can’t be exposed to hostile biotics.”

So that was it. I was still a prisoner, not really a commander at all. “Why not?”

“You are command personnel. You cannot be exposed to harm unless you have undergone precautionary treatment or are in the process of being replaced.”

“Precautionary treatment? Those injections, right?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly is in those injections?”

“We are.”

I stopped speaking. Sandra and I looked around at the walls.
We are?
What the hell did that mean? The ship had all along been speaking about itself in the imperial ‘we’ form, as if it was some kind of nineteenth century emperor. I had thought perhaps, since it was in communication with the other ships, it considered itself a plurality of consciousness. But mostly, I hadn’t really given the affectation much thought in all the confusion and excitement. Now however, I could see it was clearly thinking of itself as a multiple form of some kind. And it was talking about injecting this
we
into my body.

“I saw Sandra’s eyes,” I said to the ship, thinking aloud. “They were golden, reflective. You filled her with some kind of metal didn’t you?”