The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (74 page)

Then they were off to scrub down and, where necessary, get patched up by Doc Gannett. No one turned out to have any injury more serious than abrasions and contusions and an occasional egg-sized lump on the noggin, which was either the most improbable good luck or else direct intervention by the god of fools and spacemen.

Heading for the command suite to do my own more luxurious cleaning up, I asked Marie quietly if she had any news about Morales and his people. She shook her head.

“We can’t find them,” she admitted. “Fires are spreading everywhere, so you can’t see anything. Close to the surface the ionization is impenetrable, so the scanners are useless, unless Morales can rise above the turbulence as you did. That was very brave and very intelligent of you,” she added, and I accepted manfully the praise that rightfully belonged to nothing but a smart autopilot and plain dumb luck.

Near the entry to the bridge, Cos intercepted us and said, “I’m sorry, Kohn. I knew something bad was coming, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“The object was dark.”

“Yes, it was dark.”

About the other platoon he was at least moderately encouraging. “I think your friend is still alive. When somebody I know dies, it’s like being jabbed with a needle. I haven’t felt that yet.”

“So it wasn’t us the colonists were afraid of?”

He seemed perplexed. “Us? No, they were never afraid of us. What gave you that idea? Somehow they knew this thing was coming. Maybe their prophet is clairvoyant after all, and he must be better than I am. They didn’t think they could escape it, and yet – somehow – they seem to have done just that.”

Then it was shower time, followed by some unpleasant patchwork from Gannett, including sewing back a partially detached left ear. I hadn’t even noticed the injury – it had bled all over me, but in the general mess, who could tell? – until hot soapy water hit it in the shower, when I almost went though the nearest bulkhead. After Gannett left me with six stitches and a shot of painkiller, I and my bandaged ear went to bed, to be wrapped up in clean sheets and comforted by Marie.

I suppose you think we made love. Actually, I was asleep in about twenty seconds, and thoughts of romance had to wait for tomorrow.

The next few days would have been wonderful, except for our anxiety over Morales and his people in Platoon Beth.

Views of the planet were grim. The whole thing was now submerged in clouds that whirled this way and that, random streams of energy colliding with each other and forming cyclones or anticyclones, depending on latitude. After the initial inferno of forest and grass fires, there was evidence of a steadily dropping surface temperature because the red sunlight had been almost totally blocked out.

“Conditions,” said a computer voice, summing up the situation for several of us on the bridge, “have become severe and inimical to life.”

“Thank you so much,” I muttered, but Marie said, “My dear, it’s only a machine, of course it’s banal. It’s supposed to be banal.”

Cos kept insisting that our people were probably alive, or at any rate that he hadn’t received any definite notice of their death. The second or third day, I forget which, he was finally able to indicate a general area where he thought they were – about 300 clicks from where I’d lost contact with them. He added that their shuttle was damaged and they were pinned down by the storms, and were hungry. He figured they might have tried to escape the planet, only to be hit by a downdraft and crash again.

I wanted to take the surviving shuttle and go look for them, but Marie vetoed the idea without hesitation. “Thirty-six people in imminent danger are quite enough,” she said. “To say nothing of the colonists, wherever they may be.”

Now that was truly baffling. Our scanners and Cos wore out their various exotic senses, and simply couldn’t find any indication of them. Yet thousands of people – even if they were somehow managing to live in areas remote from the impact crater, without electronic communications and even without fire – at least had to be thinking and feeling, and Cos should pick up on that. And if they’d all been killed, Cos said he should have received the psychic “tsunami of despair” the mind hurls out at the moment of death. But except for the faint signals from our own people, he’d heard nothing.

As the days went by, Marie came as close to being distraught as I ever saw her. Finally she chose dinnertime, when the surviving cadre were together – effectively a staff meeting, though it wasn’t called that – to announce her decision.

“We’re going to take the
Zhukov
in,” she said. “All the way down to the surface.”

Everybody gave a muted gasp, then sat silent, figuring what that might mean. She began to speak quietly, in the kind of sure, still tone that comes from someone who’s made a tough decision and means to stick by it.

Of course, she said, superficially her plan was nonsense, first refusing to risk thirty-six people in the surviving shuttle and then risking the ship and all aboard. But the
Zhukov
wasn’t just a big transorbital. It was made of nuclear steel and it had almost limitless supplies of energy at its disposal.

She admitted that regulations forbade bringing spacecraft into a planet’s atmosphere for a variety of good reasons – corrosive effects on the ship, release of toxic emissions into the planet’s environment, and so forth. But the regs also allowed commanders to violate standard operating procedures under emergency conditions, the only proviso being that they’d damn well better be able to justify their action later on. She thought she could.

“Anyway, this is what we’ll do,” she finished. “If anybody wants to file a protest, they’re welcome to do so.”

Nobody said anything.

“Then let’s get on with it,” she said. “When we go in, all personnel will be at battle stations. All safety doors will be closed and sealed. All personnel will wear survival suits. I don’t think anything down there can breach a compartment, but if something does and a group becomes isolated, they’ll have to survive on their own for an unpredictable length of time until we can reach them. Mr Cos will guide us until more standard scanning methods pick up signals from the ground. Bonne chance.”

Wine had been served, and we solemnly raised our glasses and wished her and each other luck.

I spent the next twelve hours with my platoon, working out exact procedures if we had to exit the
Zhukov
and help collect Morales and his people. Instead of retreating closer to the core of the ship, like the others, we were to occupy the compartment nearest the shuttle hatch. Everybody suited up, and O’Rourke and I began checking them over and over and over again, to make sure that all the seals were tight and the heating and breathing units were functional. I figured we’d need to take our air with us, because the planetary atmosphere had become a sandstorm of dust and ashes and toxic byproducts of burning. We’d need our helmet lights. We’d need nylon lines connecting us like mountain climbers, so we wouldn’t get lost or blown away. We’d need old-fashioned basket litters to haul the injured. We’d need every goddamn thing.

As we were reaching the end of our preparations, I got a squawk from the bridge. My presence was demanded soonest. I left O’Rourke to do his very competent best and hastened past retracted safety doors through a corridor that would soon, I expected, be chopped up into segments like a snake that ran afoul of an autoplow in a wheat field. As I trotted along, the doors began to be tested, sliding closed with a sigh and whisper and a terminal clank, then opening again.

I popped out onto the bridge to find Marie looking stormy, Cos looking obstinate, and the celestial navigator (what was the guy’s name – Sajnovich? I can’t remember) looking at the planet in the big monitor that hung over the bridge and whistling softly and tunelessly to himself. Marie gestured at Cos, one of those very French gestures, as if she was throwing away a piece of food that had begun to smell bad.

“Écoutez!” she snapped. “Listen to this!”

Cos, still looking mulish, said, “Well, what d’you want me to say? I’m telling you what I’m getting, or not getting, and if it interrupts all your wonderful plans, I can’t help that.”

I touched his shoulder. “Just tell me,” I said.

“I’ve lost Morales and that bunch. They don’t seem to be there anymore.”

“You mean they’re dead?”

“I don’t think so. They’re just gone, that’s all.”

Another goddamn mystery disappearance. When I relayed to O’Rourke the news that all our preparations had been wasted, he looked as rebellious as I ever saw him. Then he shrugged and said “*#%&” ten or twenty times, and told the guys to take off their survival suits and go back to their barracks compartment.

Zhukov
stayed in orbit, bombarding Paradiso’s infernal surface with every form of radiant energy it had, looking for somebody – anybody, in fact. Hours went by, and we were still at it when the sensors started screaming. Not because they’d found our people, but because a chunk of metal instantly identifiable as a VNO, or vehicle of nonhuman origin, had emerged from behind the planet and was crossing the terminator into the dim red light of the sun.

Sirens added to the prevailing racket and robot voices intoned, “Battle stations, battle stations.”

Suddenly everybody was grabbing for personal weapons and running like hell for assigned areas around the central core of the ship. Thirty seconds later the safety doors started closing, and if you got isolated in an outer compartment, that was tough, you stayed there until the All Clear went off and the doors opened. Or until an enemy missile whacked the hull, in which case you died of the explosion if it penetrated and the concussion if it didn’t.

Somehow O’Rourke got all our people to the designated inner compartments. Those who’d been showering were buck naked, but when you’re at war, you don’t worry about trivia like that.

I stayed on the bridge, not because I was useful but because nobody had sent me away, and I wanted to see what was happening. I strapped into the chair usually occupied by the celestial navigator, who’d taken off to a secure compartment on the other side of the core that contained a duplicate guidance system. That way there’d be somebody to maneuver the ship if the bridge got destroyed.

Seated in the commander’s chair, Marie donned one of those virtual-reality headpieces. I donned the navigator’s headset and listened to her issuing orders with the aplomb of a chef instructing a sous-chef exactly how to construct a chocolate soufflé. The delicate fingers that had played such tunes on my body were now resting on keypads that gave her the power to override any and all systems. Somebody’s voice said, “Real bastard, ain’t she?” in tones of pure admiration.

So I watched my first combat in space – hell, my first real combat anywhere – unfold in the monitor. Banks of lasers crisscrossed a big shadowbox, and when the bridge lights were doused, we were all projected into that virtual space. I don’t think I felt any fear at all, it was too exciting, and if an enemy FTLM suddenly materialized in the center of the
Zhukov
there was nothing to worry about anyway, because we’d all turn to quarks in a nanosecond. So I could get an almost esthetic delight out of the cloud-drenched planet, the red orb rising behind it, and the background of hard crystalline stars.

The one thing I couldn’t see was the alien ship – the bogey – that was causing all the upheaval. Then a blue circle appeared in the monitor, locating it for me. Columns of numbers that probably meant something to the Space Service types popped up along the margins of the image. A human voice said incredulously, “Velocity zero?” which I took to mean that the bogey had stopped moving.

Janesco’s voice reported that the lids were off the missile silos. He seemed to be waiting for Marie to say the modern equivalent of “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” but all she said was, “Deploy PBG,” meaning the particle beam generator.

“Ready.”

“Auto response on all systems.”

“Auto response.”

That meant the ship would respond to any detected hostile action without further command. At the same time I heard the main drive engines and even the dark energy generator revving up. Trying to apply what I knew of ground combat to space, I figured she was getting ready to dodge behind Paradiso, and if the bogey followed, hit him hard as he came into view. Sort of like defending a reverse slope in mountain warfare, where you let the other guy show up against the sky, then whack him. These were the thoughts going through my head at the exact moment when the image of Jesús Morales, big and holographically precise, appeared between the laser banks, blocking out the planet and the sun and everything else except the spatter of stars above him.

“Colonel,” he said, his voice somewhat gruff but perfectly audible, “we’re aboard an alien ship. Those guys from the Zoo came in and saved us. All of us, including the colonists. Do you copy?”

Contrary to what my wife Anna likes to say, I am never, or almost never, vulgar. But I do believe there were a lot of spotty underpants on the bridge of the
Zhukov
at that instant.

There was also a stunned silence, in the middle of which I heard my own voice – and yeah, I was a lieutenant and therefore the lowest life form present, but what the hell, Morales was my friend not theirs – say loudly into the navigator’s mike, “Jesús, we copy.”

“If I may,” said Marie icily, and I immediately stopped my runaway tongue by clamping it between my teeth.

“What do they propose to do with you?” she demanded.

“Send us to the
Zhukov
by shuttle. I think it’s meant to be a diplomatic gesture, now that the war’s over and we’re withdrawing from this sector of space. They’re thinking of peaceful trade and things like that in the future.”

“Are all of you there?”

“Seventeen of us from Beth platoon. My other people died. We have six injured.”

“We’ll be ready for you. What about the colonists?”

“The colonists have voted to join the Zoo – become another associated species – and not return to Terra. They seem to have a kind of natural belief in symbiosis, see it as an aspect of love. Also, they don’t trust their fellow humans.”