to fill your slot.
The search began in the bow. All of the Trader’s crew plus most of the ship’s ambulatory robots had been recruited for the task. The plan was simple: Start in the bow, sweep towards the stern, and drive the phantom before us. Once it was concerned, it would be a relatively simple matter to repair the damage that Lester had done and put the android right. Or so we hoped.
I looked around. Kreshenko had armed himself with a section of cargo netting. The captain had a sandwich in one hand and a stun gun in the other. Killer had fashioned a lasso from a length of utility line and twirled it over his head. Wilson untangled his homemade bolo and Sasha looked bored. “All right,” the captain said through her food, “go get him. And remember, if you hurt the little bastard, we’re screwed.”
Not the most inspiring speech I’d ever heard, but direct and to the point. We spread out and headed down-ship. Hand-held radios helped coordinate our movements. Each corridor, passageway, compartment, and cubicle was searched. We found all sorts of things including rats, a parrot’s mummified body, a cargo module with “urgent” marked all over it and a five-year-old delivery date, the still my predecessor had maintained, plus an entire storage room packed with supplies that Kreshenko didn’t have listed on his inventories and the captain ordered him to ignore. But no android.
Various members of the search party did catch glimpses of the phantom, however, always a step ahead of us, fleeing towards the stern. But large as she was, the Red Trader was only so big, and the outcome was inevitable. We found him huddled in a locker full of pneumatic cargo jacks, trying to blend in with the equipment around him. The things that Lester had done to his body were disgusting enough, but the artificial intelligence that stood in for his brain had been scrambled, and required three shifts of electronic therapy. The result was somewhat twitchy but functional enough to meet our needs-barring what the captain called “major catastrophes,” which I was too stupid to imagine.
And so it was that I went back to petting the aniforms, finished my shift, and hit the rack. The dream grabbed my mind and pulled it down.
“Holy mother full of grace, help me make it through this place…” The pilot’s personal mantra was little more than a whisper now, as if the strikers might hear it, and punish us with a missile. And I couldn’t really blame her, since they were damned close and had some first-class detection equipment. And why not? They had stolen it from the same place Mishimuto did. I patted her shoulder. It was slick with sweat. “You’re doing good, Loot. Just a few more klicks and it’ll be over.”
She nodded stiffly and kept her eyes straight ahead as she slid the ship around the side of a slowly tumbling asteroid. The trick was to keep it between us and the research station for as long as possible. After all, you can’t shoot what you can’t see, and even the best detectors can’t see through solid rock.
That was the theory, anyway, although the strikers might have surrounded themselves with a whole network of remote sensor stations that were busy screaming their heads off.
I imagined missiles leaving their racks, zigzagging away from the installations that fired them, and accelerating in our direction. The Loot might have time to detect them, might have time to say the words uttered by so many pilots before her, but would die a millisecond later along with me and the entire team.
The Loot rescued me from my own imagination. “We’re twenty from the drop.”
I hit my harness release. “Gotcha. I’ll be with the team. Thanks for the lift.”
It was macho stuff, the kind we practice in the corps, and she wasn’t playing. “Your team will have sixty seconds to deploy.”
I nodded, snuck one last look at her nipples, and floated free. I pulled myself down the corridor, cycled the hatch, and propelled myself into the cargo bay. The gunny yelled “Ten-hut” and the troops did their best to obey. But it’s hard to look military inside a Class III battle suit, especially with all sorts of extra gear strapped to your body, and no gravity to hold things in place.
I said, “As you were,” and accepted the gunny’s help in donning my battle suit. It was similar to the trooper model, except for the lighter weaponry, heavier armor, and a sophisticated command and control package. It fit like a glove, smelled like the dump I had taken in it the month before, and was servo-assisted. The gunny thumped her helmet against mine. She had wide-set eyes, a pug nose, and a dusting of freckles across the top of her cheeks. “How ya doin’ sir? Everything okay?”
I tried to ignore the smell. “Just fine, gunny. Couldn’t be better.”
She grinned knowingly. “Life sucks, don’t it, sir? Well, that’s why god gave us the corps. To shorten the suffering.”
I laughed, knowing it was expected of me, and knowing she was scared too. And there were thirty-six men and women on our team, their helmets turned in my direction, all of whom shared the same feelings. I thought about some of the stupid gung-ho crap other officers had laid on me and tried to avoid it. “We’re on final approach. You know the objective, the layout, and what you’re supposed to do. Questions?”
Silence.
“Okay, then. Load the tubes.”
I used handholds to pull myself towards the stern, stopped in front of the starboard ejection tube, and checked to make sure that my squad had lined up behind me. They had. I dived inside and used fingertips and toes to push myself forward. My squad did likewise. A hatch closed behind the last member in.
The gunny did much the same thing along the port side, followed by a seal check. She called thirty-eight names, got thirty-eight affirmatives, and blew the tubes.
We were in position now, ready to be fired out of both sides of the ship, falling, or in this case blasting, down towards the target below. Of course the Loot, plus the ships behind her, would cover us with cannon fire, missiles, chaff, electronic countermeasures, and everything else they had up their naval sleeves, but none of it would mean diddly if the tool heads knew we were coming. Yes, surprise was the key, that and the most fickle ally of all, luck.
“Five and counting.” The Loot was tense but rational. Better than some I’ve flown with, but wired tight just the same. And who could blame her? Recon pilots have a life expectancy of five or six months. “One and counting.”
I stared at the steel in front of my helmet and tried to ignore my surroundings. I gave thanks when the ten- second count began. “Nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one.”
The hatch, mounted up against an indentation in the spacecraft’s fuselage, slid aside. I braced myself, watched the inner hatch cycle out of the way, and felt a wall of air hit the bottom of my boots. We were propelled outwards like bullets from a gun. I had little more than seconds to orient myself, to realize that it was an ambush, and feel the individually targeted micro-missile hit my chest plate.
They say you can’t scream if you’re dead, but I proved they were wrong. It took hours to slow my pulse, to think pleasant thoughts, and drift off to sleep.
9
“Dissent is a luxury that Mars colonists can ill afford.”
Margaret Peko-Evans, architect of Mars Prime-the first settlement
The rest of the trip was fairly routine. Each shift was pretty much like the last. Get up, take a shower, drink three cups of coffee, pet the aniforms, and read for Sasha. Progress was slow, but I did my best and was reading at a second-or third-grade level in no time at all.
The whole thing might have been somewhat enjoyable if it hadn’t been for the way in which the aniforms were “harvested” and passed down the ship’s food chain. I had no part in the actual killing, thank god, but felt like a traitor whenever one of my charges disappeared and was replaced by a newly decanted clone, or “bud.” Then, after I had spent countless hours petting it, the cow, sheep, pig, or chicken would vanish only to reappear around the captain’s waistline.
Yes, the others were just as carnivorous as she was, but I held the captain personally responsible and saw her as the sole culprit. By doing so I could ignore the fact that Sasha seemed to have an insatiable appetite for steaks, pork chops, and Killer’s super-crispy fried chicken.
And making a bad situation even worse was the fact that each aniform was identical to all of its predecessors.
