“Take us down,” I told him. “Now.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see anyone else?” I asked the kid, waiting patiently while he devoured a ration bar with trembling hands.
Luke McLaughlin was, from what he’d told us, twelve years old and probably weighed forty kilos soaking wet. Which he had been when we’d found him. Shivering, starving, scared shitless and so glad to see us, I was pretty sure he’d pissed himself. He’d been wearing rags, wrapped up in an old canvas tarp, but we’d found him a set of work coveralls from a locker and managed to roll up the sleeves and pant legs enough to make it work. They fit like a tent, but it was better than the alternative.
“No,” he declared around a mouthful of food. “There was no one else. But I didn’t, like, go looking.” He paused mid-word and mid-bite, eyes going unfocused for a second. “I just stayed in the root cellar and didn’t come out until I knew they were gone.”
“Did you see who did this?” Deke cut in, impatient. Not with the kid, I didn’t think, but with us sitting here on the ground at Hudson Bay instead of running off to the jumpgate to send a message back.
“It wasn’t no who,” Luke said, eyeing Deke coldly, as if he was angry with him for bringing up the stuff of nightmares. “It was monsters. Monsters floating over us… big, giant skulls. They burned everything. My mom and dad were in the house, but I was out in the woods with my friends. I ran home when I saw the ships… I don’t know what happened to Tim and Georgie. I got to the house and it was gone. And then they started landing. They were like big bugs, kind of.” His voice was an emotionless drone, like this was the only way he could let himself remember what had happened. “Like giant scorpions or maybe a praying mantis. They searched through the woods and I heard shooting, I think. Like they were killing anyone they came across. That’s why I went in the root cellar. It was kind of covered by the snow and I figured they wouldn’t find me.”
“How long ago was this, Luke?” Vicky asked, sitting down beside him on the fold-down medical exam table in the utility bay and slipping an arm around his shoulder. The kid shied away but settled down when she squeezed him in a warm hug. “You can tell me. It’s okay.”
“I don’t know,” Luke admitted, shaking his head. “I slept a lot because I was so hungry. The roots… I tried to eat them, but they were too hard and I couldn’t cook them. I didn’t have nothing to start a fire with. I tried soaking them in water, but they just froze up at night so there was nothing to eat. Except snow.”
Vicky nodded, patting him on the arm.
I should have said something, should have asked him pertinent questions or come up with a plan of action… but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I just saw it over and over again, a constant replay inside my head of my mother falling away from me, blood streaming down her chest. Heard the screams of my father and brother as the bandits killed them while I hid.
“Alvarez,” Deke said, and by the tone of his voice it wasn’t the first time he’d called my name. I blinked the memories away.
“Yeah?”
“I said, I checked the transmitter. The InStell ComSat is gone. They must have taken it out. We have to get through to the next connection and call home, and that’s almost an AU out from this world.”
I remembered that an AU was an astronomical unit, the distance between the Earth and the sun, though I only had a vague idea that it was about 150 million kilometers, and I shrugged.
“Yeah, get us into orbit. We can micro-Transition out to the gate, right?”
“No, we can’t,” he snapped as if I should have known. “You can’t Transition that close to a jumpgate. The spacetime distortion prevents a stable wormhole from forming. It’s going to take us over forty-eight hours to get to the gate at one gravity. We need to leave now.” He frowned aside at Luke. “We really should boost at maximum Gs, but…”
Oh. I got it. And I didn’t like it.
“Luke,” I said, not taking my eyes off Deke, “we need to leave here, and we’re taking you with us. But we’re going to have to go really fast, and that’s going to make you feel like you weigh twice as much as you normally do.” Actually, a little more than that, since Hudson Bay’s gravity was a fraction under Earth-normal, but there was no use worrying the kid. “You might want to go to the bathroom first, because you won’t have the chance for a while after we take off. Okay?”
“I’ll show you where it is,” Vicky said, taking Luke’s hand and leading him back up the passage toward the head. He stopped just a few steps out of the utility bay, turning back to us.
“What about my friends, Tim and Georgie?” He shook his head. “They might be out there somewhere. Or other people who got away from the bugs. It’s… it’s cold out there. They might need your help too.”
I shared a look with Vicky over the kid’s shoulder, caught the sad resignation in her expression. I didn’t even need to look at Deke to know what his answer would be.
“We looked,” I told Luke. “I’m sorry, but we couldn’t find anybody except you.”
His shoulders sagged and he stared down at the deck.
“After he’s done,” I told Vicky, “find him a seat and get him strapped in. And make sure he has food and water close if he needs it.”
“I have an emergency shelter in the crash kit,” Deke told me once the kid was out of earshot. “We leave him with a heater, spare clothes, enough food for a couple weeks, and I can push the Dutchman to three Gs. More if you two take anesthetics and go into a medical coma for a few hours.”
“No,” I said, turning my back on him and striding toward the cockpit.
“It’s my ship,” he said with quiet menace, a few steps behind me yet sounding as if he were leaning right beside my ear. “And you two may be colonels in name, but I don’t know you and I don’t trust you, which in my book means I’m in command out here. Colonel McIntire will support whatever decision I make… no matter who I decide to leave behind.”
Calculating, cold fury pulsed in my veins, searching for ways I could kill him if the need arose. Unfortunately, even with the aid of Jim, I came to the conclusion that the only way to beat him would be to shoot him in his sleep, and even that wasn’t a sure thing.
“Sure,” I agreed, trying very hard not to let that conclusion show in my expression. “You can get away with whatever you want… out here. Because you’re the badass supercommando with the enhancement and augmentation and the jacked reflexes. But what about when you get back, Deke? What happens when you tell my Marines that you left me behind? What happens when you tell my crew on the Ellen that you left us here and decided to take us out of the picture? Do you think that the only company of Drop Troopers in the entire Cluster is going to stick with you, that they’re buying into the bullshit you’re selling about how this is the government now and they have to follow orders?” I took a step toward him, very aware of how easily he could rip my guts out with those talons. “Because we’ve been on our own a long time, and there’s only one man’s orders they’re sure to follow.” I shrugged. “Captain Nance loves being the master of his ship and he’s not too picky about where he flies or it or who gives him the orders, but he trusts me. His crew trusts me. I gave them all multiple chances to go the easy way, to leave me behind when I was infected by the Transformation Virus, and they wouldn’t do it. So, yeah, you can do whatever the hell you want… as long as you’re okay with your decision costing your new Commonwealth military its most advanced warship and its only armored Marines. I’m sure Munroe wouldn’t have a problem with that, right?”
Deke’s face darkened, a storm front advancing across the afternoon sky.
“Fine, Alvarez. We’ll do it your way. But I’ll tell you what, your little do-gooder act costs us vital time, and if we wind up letting thousands or tens of thousands of people die because you wanted to make sure one kid doesn’t get lonely, well…” he raised his fist up between us and a pair of matte-gray talons flicked out of his wrist, so close to my face that I couldn’t focus on the tips of them. “All those Marines and that fancy ship of yours won’t save you from me.”
I didn’t flinch, didn’t move, just held his eyes until he retracted the blades and pushed past me. I waited until he was well out of sight before I let out the breath I’d been holding in a long sigh. I was right, I knew it. I was not going to leave that kid alone on a dead world just to save a few hours of travel time. A few hours either way wasn’t going to make a difference in all this.
I hoped.
[ 24 ]
“At least the ComSat is still here,” Deke murmured, and I envied him for having the breath and energy to do it.
A full day, twenty-four hours, at two gravities before we’d hit the jumpgate except for five-minute breaks every two hours to hit the head and stretch our legs to prevent blood clots, had left me wrung out and exhausted. I hadn’t thought it would be this bad, but I felt like someone had worked me over with a baseball bat, and what was worse was that I hadn’t gotten a wink of sleep the whole time. I’d tried, but every time my head had tilted to the side a sharp muscle pain had woken me up, and pride had kept me from asking Deke if he had any muscle relaxants in his medical kit. As a final kick in the ass, the kid had slept through most of the flight like it was nothing.
Maybe it was nothing compared to what he’d just been through, or maybe it had more to do with the fact that he was going from forty kilos to eighty while I was going from eighty to a hundred and sixty, but the minute Deke had cut thrust on the other side of the jumpgate, then rolled us over for a gentle, one-gee braking burn, Luke had popped up and scampered to the head before one of us could beat him to it. Vicky watched him go with the hint of a smile and I wondered if she was thinking—as I sometimes did—about the children we might have had while we’d been bouncing around the galaxy from one crisis to another.
“Not that there’s anything else left in this system,” Deke added, though I wasn’t sure if he was talking to us or himself. He hadn’t been very talkative during the trip, despite being the only one of us who the added weight didn’t really bother. “Fucking Changed wiped out everything.”
Sylvanus had once been a thriving Periphery world, though I’d never had the chance to visit. The architecture in the vids and images reminded me of southern Europe… or at least southern Europe from two or three centuries ago. I was glad I didn’t have to look at it now. I’d seen enough devastation and death and didn’t need reminding of the nightmare we’d walked into when we’d arrived back in the Cluster. There were probably still people down there on that green and blue world, living in hovels, slowly descending into barbarism, waiting for someone to come rescue them. No matter what I’d threatened Deke with, I knew I couldn’t bring myself to abandon those people.
