Trident's Forge (42 page)

“Don't mock me, Barbara. The people they've got up there now? How many of them would have had the balls to take the risks I did to get here, or make the tough decisions, not because I enjoyed them, but because they had to be made? No, they have this shit completely backwards. They shouldn't have been sifting through us. They should have let us all fight it out and grabbed the winners.”

“Sure, an entire starship filled with fifty-thousand testosterone-poisoned narcissists and sociopaths. What could go wrong?”

Another barricade approached as we reached the end of the causeway. But unlike the last one, this one was manned with professional soldiers wearing the light blue helmets of the UN, along with a pair of marines in heavy combat exoskeletons. As soon as they saw our headlights, their recoilless anti-material rifles snapped into the ready position.

“I'd love to keep this conversation going, dear, but the checkpoint is coming up. If you want to leave, I won't stop you. But now's the time.”

She didn't respond.

“Okay, I'm going to take that as you're staying. But that means we can't breathe a word of this to anyone. Not ever. In fact, we probably shouldn't talk about it between ourselves in private. Who knows what kind of surveillance they've built into that ship?”

“Feeling a little paranoid, Maximillian?”

“Covering our bases. We're about to cross the Rubicon, Barb. I'm sorry to drop all this in your lap at the eleventh hour, but I have to know if you're in, or out?”

She sighed heavily. “In, God forgive me.”

“I don't think God's hanging around here anymore, my love.”

The UN soldiers manning the barricade signaled me to stop short of the gate. Glancing over at the enormous cannons the exos mounted, there didn't seem to be any reason to argue the point.

One of the uniformed soldiers walked purposefully up to my window. His sidearm remained in its holster, but his brothers had him well-covered. I rolled down my window to greet him. Look friendly. Look like I belonged there.

“Good morning, soldier.”

“Will you please power down and exit the vehicle, hands where I can see them.”

“I have a passenger in the back. Should she get out, too?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

I pushed the intercom. “They want us to step out of the car. It's okay, just follow their orders.” I shut down the Bentley and stepped out, hands at my sides. Act like I'm in charge, but not condescending. Soldiers obey orders. They respect status.

“Nice car,” the soldier said.

“It was,” I said bitterly.

“The lady's credentials, please,” he said curtly.

“Our disks are in my jacket pocket. I'm going to reach for them, if that's okay.”

His face tweaked in confusion. “You're not her driver?”

“No, I'm her husband,” I answered, but the soldier was already looking past me into the driver's compartment. He signaled for more troops to approach.

“There's blood in here.”

“Our driver was killed in an ambush. I took over.”

He knocked on the windshield. “Windows are intact, care to explain that?”

“Yes, the old fool rolled down his window and they shot him.” I shrugged my shoulders and let my voice ratchet up a few decibels. “Look, private?”

“Sergeant Lantz, sir.”

“My apologies, Sergeant. We've been through absolute hell to get here. I just saw a man I've known for thirty years get shot in the face. I don't want to be out in the open any longer than necessary. The disks in my pocket have everything you need.”

Lantz stepped up as two other soldiers with rifles took up positions behind me.

“Left or right?” he asked.

“Sorry?”

“Left or right pocket?”

“Ah, inside left.”

He grabbed the disks and gave them a cursory inspection. Satisfied for the moment, he handed them back to me and nodded to the two guards behind me. “Okay, Mister?”

“Benson,” I said.

“If you and your wife will follow me, we'll escort you to the processing station.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. Oh, and we have some luggage in the trunk that—”

He shook his head. “Your personal items have to be searched for contraband before they can be transferred to processing. We'll handle them from here.”

I handed over my keys and walked away from the car, indeed, away from the last remnants of my old life. Barbara walked beside me, but said nothing. The silence was anything but companionable. I couldn't tell if the waves of cold I felt came from the bay, or her.

The soldiers led us into a staging area. The launch tower and rocket stack was still more than a mile away, but it already loomed large. Our candle was larger than the NASA Space Launch System that had taken the first humans to Mars. Today, it would take just under two hundred people up to the largest construct in history, and mankind's home for the next two centuries.

The next few minutes would determine whether or not we were among them. I'd done everything I could to ensure our survival, made huge, mind-boggling sacrifices, done things I didn't know I was capable of, and learned some things about myself that I wasn't comfortable knowing. Now, I just had to trust that everything had been done right. There was no one else to bribe. No one else to kill. Nothing more I could do to affect the outcome. All that remained were all the ways it could go wrong.

I'd never felt so helpless in my life.

“Just, be calm. Stay collected,” I whispered to Barbara, pitching my voice low enough that our escorts couldn't eavesdrop. “There'll be plenty of time to break down later.”

“Are you telling me, or yourself?” Her voice had taken on a hard edge, a reflection of the wall that had been built between us over the last half hour. I didn't know if I'd ever see the other side of it. I wasn't sure I cared.

“Just act like you belong here.”

“I don't.”

“Yes, you do. Maybe even more than me.”

“No argument here.”

I let it go. We arrived at a large tent shelter serving as a command post. A short queue stood off to one side. Under guard, I couldn't help but notice.

“What's up with them?” I asked Sergeant Lantz conversationally.

“Stand-by passengers,” he said. “If one of you doesn't turn up, they're the replacements.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“More than you'd think.”

A couple of the men in line shouted angrily as we passed, but most of them just sat in resigned silence as two more chances for survival evaporated. A fresh worry shot through me. It was easier to justify taking someone's spot when it was an abstract concept. But, faced with living, breathing people? I looked over at Barbara, trying to gage if her guilt was about to make her do something stupid, but her face was a mask. She wasn't looking at the alternates. Maybe that was a good sign.

“Your disk, please.”

I'd been so distracted, I hadn't noticed the bald man sitting at a table. He appeared all the shorter by the tall chair he sat in. Focus, Max. You belong here. No one will question it as long as you're confident.

“Of course.” I offered the disk to him. He plugged it into a complicated device that looked like one of the eye-checkers at the DMV cross-bred with an espresso machine.

“Please look into the opening and place your right hand on the scanner.”

I did so. Inside the little box there was a 3D picture of a small house.

“Focus on the house and try not to blink. There will be a flash in three…”

A white light like a camera flash burned into my retinas, leaving a glowing orb floating in my vision. At the same instant, something stabbed my middle finger. I pulled back from the scanner squinting and clutching my hand.

“Your fingerprint scanner stabbed me.”

“I didn't say it was a fingerprint scanner,” the humorless little man said dryly. An icon on his screen turned green. “Ah, here we are. Retina and DNA are both a match to the disk. Welcome aboard, Mr. Benson.” He waved me through the turnstile deeper into the compound.

“Thanks, but I'd like to wait for my wife, if that's okay.”

“Your wife?” The bald man took Barbara's disk and pulled up a passenger list. “Well, that's a first. Some people have all the luck, eh?”

“Yeah. Luck,” she mumbled. My jaw tensed, but I forced myself to relax. Nothing to see here. The statistically improbable happened a million times a day. She repeated the process then stood back to wait for the results, shivering like a mouse in a snake cage.

“Nervous, Mrs. Benson?” The little man asked her with a cocked eyebrow.

“I should've brought a coat is all.” Her answer sounded less than convincing. Not a great liar, my wife.

“We were in a firefight on the way over here,” I hurried to add. “We're still pretty shaken up.”

“I can imagine,” he said. Which was funny; I doubted the diminutive twerp had any imagination to speak of. A yellow icon popped up on his screen. He adjusted his glasses. “Well, that's peculiar. Her retina scan is a match, but I'm seeing some discrepancies in the DNA profile.”

“Discrepancies?” I managed to say it without my voice cracking like an adolescent.

“There's some small genome variance.”

“Maybe there's contamination in the scanner. This isn't exactly a clean-room out here.” I could feel my hands getting clammy with nervous sweat. I put them in my pockets, trying to look unconcerned.

“Maybe…”

Dread spread through my body like an electric shock, threatening to paralyze me where I stood. Somewhere along the line, somebody had fucked up. Our lives were in the hands of this paper-pushing pipsqueak, and it was all about to come flying apart. I wanted to scream, to run straight for the rocket, to grab Sergeant Lantz's sidearm and fight our way to freedom, or go down in a blaze of glory.

Instead, I stood there, silent and immobile as a statue. Impotent.

Barbara stepped up to the table and leaned a hand on it. “I had a blood transfusion a couple months ago after a car accident. Is that what you're seeing?” I was surprised by her improvisation. Maybe she wasn't such a bad liar after all.

“I don't know. I guess it could be…”

“Is there a problem here?” Sergeant Lantz came forward with is palm not-so-discreetly resting on the handle of his pistol.

“No,” I said. “No problem. This man is just having some difficulty telling if my wife is really my wife.”

“Is she?” The question barely concealed the threat behind it.

“Of course.” I leaned in and whispered to him. “Honestly, I'd have swapped her out already if I could've gotten away with it.”

The threat hovered in the air until my heart was about to beat its way out of my chest. Finally, the tension in Lantz's shoulders relaxed and his hand dropped away from his gun.

“I saw them come in together, Doc. What's the issue with her disk?”

“Her disk is fine. It's just a small variance in the DNA match that I can't account for.”

“How small?”

“Point zero zero three five percent.”

Sergeant Lantz's eyes rolled like bowling balls. “That's it? C'mon, Doc. We're on a tight schedule here, and we still have to process the alternates. Green out her screen and let's go.”

The little man waved an arm dismissively. “Fine, fine. Who's next?”

Behind us, four people were cut from the front of the stand-by line and brought forward. Four people had won the lottery, but didn't survive long enough to collect their reward. I saw the two people left at the front of the line. The first losers. The two whose places we'd stolen. I'd live with those faces forever.

Barbara and I walked through the turnstiles together and didn't look back. And that was it. No fireworks. No trophy. No cooler full of Gatorade poured over my head in celebration of victory. I reached over to hold Barbara's hand as we walked, like we used to down by Clearwater beach late at night to watch the sunset, but she pulled away.

I'd won, against the longest odds anyone had ever faced. So why did it still feel like I'd lost everything?

P
atrick S. Tomlinson
is the son of an ex-hippie psychologist and an ex-cowboy electrician. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, with a menagerie of houseplants in varying levels of health, a Ford Mustang, and a Triumph motorcycle bought specifically to embarrass and infuriate Harley riders. When not writing sci-fi and fantasy novels and short stories, Patrick is busy developing his other passion for performing stand-up comedy.

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