We All Died at Breakaway Station (24 page)

“Well, he
has
done it, Bracer.”

“Yes, I guess he has.”

“I’ll keep you posted when further reports come in.”

“Please do, general.” Bracer paused for a moment before asking the next question. “General, your operation is still dependable, isn’t it.”

Crowinsky’s face darkened for a moment. “There’s nothing to worry about, Bracer. We’ve been able to repair most of the damage caused by that stupid girl’s carelessness.” Crowinsky took his turn to pause. “I suppose you heard the story?”

Bracer smiled. “Yes, something about some comm tech and her boy friend getting high on aphrodisiac happysticks while she was supposed to be on monitor duty.”

“That’s essentially it,” Crowinsky said. “But you know, Bracer, I can almost sympathize with the girl. They’ve all been under a lot of pressure. We’re all beginning to do stupid things down here.”

There was silence for a few moments before the general spoke again. “Well, I’ll be back in touch with you shortly, admiral.”

Bracer nodded as Crowinsky broke the connection and his image faded from the tank. Well, I’ll be damned, Bracer said to himself. Albion actually made it back. Lord, I
would
like to be with him now.

Almost angrily, hating the Jillies that much more for having prevented him that triumph, he punched the button on the desk before him and raised the duty comm man.

“Yes, sir?”

“Inform Captain Maxel and the crew that Admiral Mothershed has contacted Adrianopolis. It looks like he accomplished what he set out to do.”

“Really‌—‌er‌—‌yes, sir. I will, sir.”

“Also pass the word on to Captains Medawar and Bugioli.”

“Y-yes, sir.” The comm man could hardly contain his excitement.

Bracer smiled to himself as he punched the communicator off. Damnation and fireballs, we just
might
survive this stupid mess after all.

Ladislas Rusko had a very satisfied expression on his face when he removed the artificial gastrointestinal system from his abdominal cavity. The tubes came out of the apertures in his sunken skin with a “pop” that Michelle Britt found very disgusting, but she continued to smile back at him.

“It was very kind of you to prepare my meal for me this morning, dear Michelle.”

“It was the least I could do,” Michelle said, lying back on the rumpled bed and looking up at the ceiling. “You are leaving me, and I wanted you to have something to remember me by.”

“I shall remember you, dearest one,” Rusko said, looking at her with a sensual hunger on his thin, drawn features. “I shall always remember what we have had together. It is a beginning, you know, of the growth of love between all living things, between me the Jillieman and you the woman. Perhaps, should divine wisdom show us the way, our next lovers may be our brothers in the stars.”

“Perhaps,” Michelle said.

Rusko stood up and crossed the narrow confines of the single-room apartment to the sink where he carefully washed out his artificial stomach.

“I am sorry that I must go,” he said, “but I have done all that I can here, and there are other cities I must visit, others I must give my message to.”

“Yes,” Michelle said absently, spreading her long hair out behind her head on the pillow, and then running her hands down her naked body. A few moments later she turned to look at Rusko. Standing as he was with his back to her it would have been difficult to tell what he had made of himself. His horribly shrunken abdomen did not show, though the thinness of his nude body and the hairlessness of his head were striking.

“What will you do now, Michelle?” he asked, having finished with his cleansing and turning back to face her.

She looked at him for a few moments before answering, thinking how horrible a thing he was, not a man, but more nearly a man than a Jillie. A monster. That’s what he was. Simply a monster. She looked at his sexual organs, grotesquely naked without body hair, and thought about how they had felt within her, how she had enjoyed it and hated it, how this
thing
had attracted and repelled her‌—‌and how, deep within her soul of souls, she hated him beyond her ability to express it.

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“How do you live?” he asked. “We have never spoken of it before.”

“I live,” Michelle said simply. “Like you I have the Dole, and that is enough for moderate comfort. If I want luxuries, there are men to give them to me.”

“You have never lacked for men,” Rusko said. “Of that I am sure, my dear.”

“No,” Michelle said. “I have never lacked.”

“Why me?” Rusko asked suddenly, at this point of departure finding that he could ask this question, this question that he had feared to ask before.

“I had a sister once,” Michelle said, as if she had not heard his question. “Do you have any relatives, Ladislas?”

“All who live are my brothers and sisters,” Rusko said, slipping back into his normal posture.

“No,” Michelle said, sitting up on the bed. “I mean real brothers and sisters.”

“No. I was my parents’ only child. They contracted late in life. I have a half brother on Rombeck, my father’s son, but I have never met him.”

“I had a sister once,” Michelle said again, looking past Rusko and out the window. “She was smaller and darker than I am. You would hardly have known we were sisters.”

“All of us are brothers and sisters,” Rusko said, slowly approaching her. “All of us must love one another. Ours must be a world, a universe of divine incest.”

“You talk a lot about love, Ladislas,” Michelle said.

“I must speak of love, dear Michelle, for that is our salvation.” He smiled. “Have I not taught you of love?” Michelle did not answer, but looked him directly in the eye, her face an expressionless void.

“I would like to make love to you now, dear Michelle,” Rusko said, then paused, “but I am tired. I did not sleep well.”

“You’d better sit down,” Michelle told him. “You look pale.”

“Yes, I feel weak.” He turned and pulled a chair up close to the bed and sat down in it. “You have not answered my question. Have I not taught you of love?”

“No!” Michelle said, coming up all the way and swinging her legs out across the edge of the bed as if she were going to rise. She did not. She sat there on the edge of the bed, less than a meter from him, and said, “You have taught me nothing of love, Ladislas. From you I have learned hatred.”

“Hatred?” he asked, a pained expression on his drawn face. “How can that be?”

“I had a sister once.”

“You said that.”

“She was in the Communications Corps.”

“She fought against our Jillie brothers?”

“She tried.” Michelle was silent for a few moments. “She was on Port Abell when they raided it. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, I heard something about it. A long time ago.”

“They captured her, the Jillies, and took her away in one of their spaceships. Do you know what they did to her?”

“They meant no harm,” Rusko said, his face becoming paler still, his body relaxing as if against his will.

“No harm!” Michelle cried. “They took her while she was still alive and they cut her up. They cut her up while she was alive, Ladislas! Can you imagine that? Can you even conceive what that must have been like?”

“They meant no harm,” Rusko repeated. “They were merely trying to understand.”

“Then understand how her husband felt when he found her. He came aboard the starship when the human ships from Adrianopolis caught up with them, and he found her with her insides spread out around her. The woman he loved, Ladislas. Can you understand that?”

Rusko struggled to rise, came to his feet, then staggered, slumped forward across the bed.

“What have you done to me?” he cried.

“Drugs, my dear Ladislas. Drugs that will make it impossible for you to move, but they will not put you to sleep. You will remain conscious while I do to you what your
brothers
did to my sister.”

Rusko tried to scream, but found that his vocal cords would no longer function. His body was an inert thing.

Rising from the bed, Michelle carefully cleared off the table, spread a bed sheet over it, and then placed another on the floor under the table. Then she turned back to the scarecrow Jillieman, pulled him up across her shoulder, and half dragged, half carried him to the table.

“Yesterday, Ladislas, while you were out spreading the gospel, I went to a surgical supply house and I bought drugs and surgical instruments.”

Opening a small black case, Michelle took out a tiny laser scalpel and held it before his eyes. Had he been able he would probably have shut his eyes, but even his eyelids had refused to obey his mind.

“They tell me that laser surgery is painless, Ladislas,” Michelle said slowly. “I don’t know, but you will.”

She looked down at the naked half-man on the table. “Where shall I start? I could just open up your chest and pull out your heart, but you would die very quickly that way, so I think I’ll begin with, oh, your toes. Yes, that would be a good place to start. Your toes and then your feet and slowly slice off one part at a time. And I have other tools to stop the bleeding. You won’t bleed to death, if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

There were tears in her eyes and she roughly wiped them away with the back of her hand. “I’m not crying for you, Jillieman. I’m crying for Donna, for what they did to her, and for Absolom and what they did to him.” She paused. “Somebody killed you once, you told me, but the doctors fixed you up. Don’t expect that this time. Each time I cut off a part of you I’m going to throw it away. There’ll never be enough of you left to put back together.”

The Jillieman looked up at her and he still had control enough to beg with his eyes, but she ignored him.

“I know what I’ll do first,” she said suddenly. “You’re still enough of a man to fear this more than anything else.”

And she turned on the laser scalpel and slowly lowered it toward his loins.

By the time night fell in New Portsmouth Ladislas Rusko had ceased to exist. Small chunks of raw meat that had once been parts of him floated in the sewage system of the city, toward the disposal tanks that cleaned the city’s water supply of impurities.

And Michelle Britt went to the top of the old apartment building, looked at the setting sun that was hardly more than a glow along the horizon, and then leaped thirty-four floors to the pavement below.

After a breakfast that was agreeable to his mechanical intestines, and not too unpleasant to the living portions of him, Absolom Bracer had his steward help him into a fresh uniform jacket adorned with the emblems of his new rank. Then the admiral went to the bridge to join Captain Maxel.

Maxel and the entire bridge complement were smiling when he arrived, and seemed almost on the verge of cheering. It was as if Bracer himself had been responsible for Mothershed’s success.

The admiral waved them to silence, returned Maxel’s salute, ordered all personnel back to their duty stations, and checked the log. All was well; all was normal.

By God, we might actually make it, he told himself. “Any specific orders, sir?” Maxel asked.

“No, carry on, captain. I’ll just observe for a while.”

Bracer could not help but smile to himself as he scanned the bridge. There was a sort of triumph in him, and a pride in himself and his crew of cripples. They had done well, most of them, had done a damned sight better than anyone could have expected of them. Hell, with men and women like this, the Jillies don’t stand a bloody chance! We’ll kick them back to their accursed pesthole of a planet. Before it’s over they’ll wish that they’d never heard of mankind.

It was a pleasant and unfamiliar feeling, that of triumph, victory, but one that was alloyed with other feelings and memories. That poor bastard Reddick. The engineers on the
Pharsalus
and Chuck Davins. And…

Enough of that, Absolom. Enjoy it while you can. You’re still a hell of a long way from home.

Bracer looked at the large tri-D tanks at the forward end of the bridge. One showed dun-colored Breakaway, a thin crescent of reflected light, and a huge black bulk occluding the stars, filling most of the tank. Another showed a distant glint of metal, the
Pharsalus
in a parallel orbit. And in a third tank was the
Rudoph Cragstone,
a tiny disk, a vaguely spherical shape orbiting between the two warships. The rest was blackness and stars, the band of the Milky Way, shadowed here and there by dark nebulae, more stars than Absolom Bracer could count in the rest of his lifetime, no matter how long that might be, stars with more worlds than mankind or the Jillies or a hundred other races could settle in a million years. God, space is big! Then why is it necessary to fight? It doesn’t make any sense. All that enormous, awful distance, all those billions of stars, and of planets, and mankind has settled only a few dozen of them; the Jillies no more. Then why in the name of all that is reasonable and sane, why do we find it necessary to wage this kind of insane war here in this one tiny corner of an enormous galaxy in a universe with more galaxies than there are stars in the Milky Way? Why don’t the Jillies go one way and men another, and leave each other in peace? It just doesn’t make any sense!

“A penny for your thoughts, sir,” Maxel said.

Bracer forced a smile onto his fragmented face. “I don’t know, Dan. I was just thinking how big it is, I guess.”

“It is big out there, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Bracer paused for a moment. “You know, we’ve been out here for centuries, in the stars, I mean, but we still don’t have the slightest idea how big it really is. The Jillies don’t either. If either of us did, we wouldn’t be fighting.”

A smile flickered across Maxel’s face. Then is darkened again, something in his mind clamping down hard and tight.

“I know,” Bracer said. “The fact is that we are fighting, and we’ve got to win‌—‌and right now I suppose that’s far more important than all the philosophizing about the enormity of space.
That
won’t keep us alive.”

“What about Admiral Mothershed?” Maxel asked. “What do you think he’s found?”