“Perhaps,” the colonel said, “but that doesn’t matter now. Your figures confirm that the coming war will destroy all life and all possibility of future life on the planet. It is dead.” The colonel held up his hand as he rose from his seat. “And this debriefing is over. I see the mission has been stressful for both of you; therefore, you deserve a vacation. You are dismissed.”
The three exited the room as Lester stood, silently shaking with rage.
I’ve been waved goodbye to when leaving for vacation; I’ve been sent off with gestures that indicated my returned presence was not desired; but I’ve never been given a sendoff by an armed guard. They put us on a Scout ship preprogrammed for a flight to a pleasure planet with the controls locked. The computer showed us lovely images of the world we’d be visiting, played soothing music (whether we liked it or not), and offered us a range of entertainments, but no communications.
The planet was far away, so we had nearly a month cooped up on the ship to calm down. To some extent, it worked. We ranted for a few days. It’s hard not to when you think about planetary sterilization. It’s not a pretty idea and no way near as clean as the name implies.
What they do is deploy a bunch of big satellites around the planet and bombard it with gamma rays. After a while, everything on the planet dies; turned to a mildly radioactive sludge. Then they toss in some Terran bugs to start eating the sludge and wait for the radioactivity to clear.
We burned ourselves out after a few days and settled into our usual shipboard routine. It must have bugged Lester more than me. I ended up a couple of credits ahead in our card games by the end of the voyage.
“Aidan,” Lester asked during one marathon game, “what are you going to do after your twenty-five?”
“I’ve got this picture in my head of a planet that’s big enough to have a city with good entertainment, restaurants, maybe a college, but not so big that it has weather control. I still like seasons.”
“More skating?”
“Yeah. I’ll find a place with a pond so I can skate in the winter and a little land to grow some veggies during the summer.”
Lester chuckled. “Somehow I just can’t see you as the gentleman farmer.”
“Well, maybe not the gentleman, but I’ll have enough money to buy a farm. Only money I spend now is what I lose to you at cards.”
“Then you must not be putting much away.” Lester smiled.
I considered decking him but there was no one around to repair my hand.
He drew another card. “Gonna get married?”
“Don’t know.”
“Miyuki wouldn’t want you being lonely.”
“I know, but sometimes you just fall hard for a woman.” I shuffled the cards. “What do you have planned after your twenty-five?”
“That’s too far away.”
I shook my head. “Don’t give me that. Every Scout starts thinking about that even before they’re accepted into the Scouts.”
He picked up his hand. “Okay. I’m going to settle on a world with weather control, on a part of the planet where it’s always sunny, and build a house with a transparent ceiling.”
“Let me guess, no basement.”
“Damned straight!”
I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised either of us to find Marina waiting when the ship arrived. Planning is a Scout forte. We had all been booked into a hotel that stood on a pristine beach by a waterfall in the semitropical region of the planet. The planet has zero tilt and a nearly circular orbit, so the weather is boringly predictable and predictably beautiful. The rains came like clockwork every afternoon for around an hour. They were warm and gentle. Guests would go for walks and come back soaked and laughing. The rest of the days were warm and sunny, evenings balmy. Trails led from the resort into a jungle interior filled with the scents of exotic flowers and the music of birds, where native and Terran plants coexisted and where the largest carnivore was about the size of a small dog and couldn’t have done much more than inflict a severe bite if it had a taste for humans, which it didn’t.
When Marina and Lester weren’t in their room, they stationed themselves on the beach, soaking up the sun. Each room came with a Lester-sized bottle of suntan lotion, complete with anticancer agents. The two of them took great care ensuring that every exposed inch of each other’s body was slathered in the stuff.
After a couple of days exploring trails through the lush growth around the resort, I stationed myself in the bar. The second day there, I saw a woman with auburn hair, about my age, trim, dressed fashionably, seated in a booth by one of the outside windows. She gazed at Marina and Lester on the beach. I watched her for about half a beer, trying to decide if I should mind my own business or make this enforced vacation a little more interesting. I eventually sidled over to her table. “They make a nice couple.”
She seemed startled but turned and peered back at the beach. “I suppose they do. It’s just a bit difficult to see your daughter and her lover at that level of intimacy.”
I was surprised but caught myself—of course the Scouts would think of something to divert me. I looked out. Lester was doing an incredibly thorough job of applying suntan lotion on Marina’s upper thighs. Through the open windows we could hear the occasional moan from Marina. “He’s really a good kid.”
She glanced at me. “You must be his partner. He says good things about you.” She motioned to the other side of the booth. “I’m Mona. Please, have a seat.”
“Thanks.” I sat. We looked out the window at the giggling pair. “They seem very happy together.”
“I know.” She looked back at me. “I just don’t know if they have a future together. My husband made it to thirteen. Marina barely remembers him.”
I nodded. “If you’d known what would happen before you married him, would it have stopped you?”
She sat staring into her drink. “Probably not.” She glanced up at me. “It’s amazing how foolish we can be when we’re young and think we’re immortal.”
I raised my glass. “Here’s to youth.”
She clinked her glass on mine and took a long swallow. “If I stay here watching them much longer, I’ll go completely nuts.”
“Up the beach there’s a waterfall even lovelier than this one. Care to try a beach hike?”
She glanced at Marina, now straddling Lester, rubbing lotion on his chest. Mona downed her drink. “I’d love to.”
The walk progressed to day hikes and picnics and, after they got over the shock, double dates with the kids.
Our vacation was scheduled for two months. With no way off the planet, we settled in and enjoyed it. With a month left, Mona and I decided to quit chaperoning the kids and took a trip to the temperate portion of the planet. The original plan for this planet had been as a working agricultural colony. The primitive native vegetation had proven harmless to humans and had quickly succumbed to the introduced Terran flora and fauna. Everything flourished, but the planet was just too far from the centers of civilization and never attracted the expected colonists. So the world became a tourist trap.
In the temperate zone, the plan called for creation of a forest of redwood and kauri trees to supply wood for houses that were never built. The trees had been growing undisturbed for nearly a century. We strolled through the giants. I held Mona close when breezes blew chill off the ocean. We sat in the lodge before a blaze in the great fireplace and drank hot brandy as the world outside melted into the fog.
And that was all we did. I think we might both have wished for more, but we both had memories we couldn’t leave behind. Within that limitation, we enjoyed our time together.
At the end of two months, Lester and I saw the women off and walked back to the Scout ship. Lester was smiling. “Ever heard of the Movement for Just Colonialism?”
“No.”
“Neither had I, but Marina knew about them
and by tonight, the movement will know what’s scheduled to happen to the bears.” He stopped and looked at me. “There may still be time to stop the government from sterilizing that planet. If those stupid bear things want to kill themselves, that’s too damned bad, but it’s their decision to make. I don’t want to be a party to their murder.”
“You give Marina a big kiss from me next time you see her.”
“Sure thing.”
We walked back to our life.
-8-
Scout command never said anything to us about the information leak, but all hell broke loose in the Planetary Council. The big brass who ordered the mission quietly retired. The bears were left alone; and Lester and I became personae non gratae for months. I was about ready to go wrestle Snarky to break the boredom when we finally got a new assignment. We found out we weren’t off of the shit list when we saw the cramped old ship they stuffed us into for the trip.
The planet for mission twenty-three seemed routine, easy. The number of flora and fauna species was low. I couldn’t tell if they were too scared to let something happen to us or were feeding us a ringer, so we didn’t let that lessen our preparation. By the time we landed, the only question we hadn’t answered was: What is the source of the flashing lights on the planet’s surface?
We surveyed the planet from orbit. There were oceans, lakes, rivers, green plains, lush valleys—everything some damn fool pioneer colonist could want. We landed in a savanna bordering a forest to get maximum ecological coverage. The landing was uneventful. The vegetation, while unlike Terran standard, was green and didn’t get up and walk around. The animals on the savanna looked large and dumb. They showed no interest in the ship.
We suited up and went through the standard decontamination in the airlock to protect the native environment. The airlock opened; nothing approached. We crept away from the ship. Outside the area affected by our ship’s engines, we deployed sensors and sampled the environment. The readings came back “Very active.” The biota of this planet was probably deadly to humans. That left two choices for the planners: give up on this planet, or, if there was absolutely no possibility of intelligent life, sterilize it. We needed to get a closer look at the animals.
I walked toward the trees with Lester covering my tail. A half-dozen creatures moved in the closest tree. Their bodies were ovoid, about a meter long. A pair of legs stuck out from the bottom of the ovoid body with claws that held onto the tree branch. One of the ovoids shuddered and a pair of wings deployed. The creature seemed to inflate them. Then it sprang from the branch into the air. A puff of gas emerged from the end of the creature and ignited. It jetted into the sky.
ILLUSTRATION BY JOSHUA MEEHAN
I laughed so hard I nearly fell over. That was why I didn’t see when another flyer hit me at a full power dive. I slammed into the ground. My helmet visor hit a sharp rock. The visor is supposed to be unbreakable, but it cracked.
The creature grabbed the helmet in its claws. It had one hell of a grip. I could see the crack expanding. Then Lester did exactly what I’d told him to do—he shot it. The compressed gas inside the creature exploded. My faceplate shattered.
A recording inside my helmet was repeating: “Level 1 breach.” I couldn’t speak.
Lester hovered over me, singed but intact. “Talk to me, Aidan.” He picked shards of the faceplate out of my cheek. I couldn’t see from my real eye, but the artificial one registered movement rushing toward us. I pulled my gun and fired. The explosion knocked Lester to the ground. He rolled onto his back and scanned the sky. “I’ve got to get you back to the ship. Can you watch for bird things?”
“Yeah.” It hurt to talk. Lester grabbed the back of my suit and dragged me across the grassland. The jarring hurt like hell. “Stop! Help me up.”
He pulled me to my feet. The kid was strong. I put an arm around his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
When I saw the next bird thing, I shifted my gun to stun. It crumpled and fell from the sky. Lester reset his gun.
I could taste the blood flowing down my face. The trip back to the ship seemed to take an hour. Lester finally got me into the airlock. As the hatch was closing, several flyers dived for us. One made it into the hatch. Lester stunned it as the airlock closed.
I reached for the spare suit locker. “I’ll get a helmet on and we’ll decontaminate.”
Lester stopped me. “We can’t decon. The gas inside that creature will blow up.” The outside viewer showed an increasing number of the flyers clawing at the skin of the ship.
Lester reached for the button to open the inner airlock hatch. I grabbed his arm. “Open that hatch and the whole ship’s contaminated.”
Lester freed his arm. “I’ll stay in my suit till we get to Prime. It’ll get nasty, but I’ll be fine. I can hook up to the ship to replenish air and water and purge waste. We’ve got to get into space before those things damage the ship.” He hit the button and dragged me inside the cabin.
The ship’s klaxon was sounding and the computer droned “Level 1 breach.” I told the computer to shut up.
Lester put me in my bunk and hit the emergency recall button. We took off. Before we jumped into hyperspace, Lester opened the outer hatch of the airlock and dumped the creature into vacuum.
Lester got me out of my suit and started working on me as best he could while wearing a full-isolation suit. He stopped the bleeding and cleaned the wound. Once he got the pain blockers in place, I started feeling human again.
I saw a streak of dirt on the side of his suit and a spot that looked damaged. I had him turn so I could get a closeup look with the artificial eye. “When that flyer exploded, you must have hit something hard. Your suit’s connection port is smashed.”
“How bad?”
“I can’t fix it. We need to do a full decon of the ship so you can get that suit off.”
“You’re not thinking straight, Aidan. This ship’s too small for an isolation chamber and a full decon requires a radiation bath. We’d have to shut the ship’s systems down and be outside the skin of the ship. That means coming out of hyperspace, figuring out where we are, finding a safe place to land, getting there, shutting down, running the decon and getting the ship going again. That’ll take longer than going straight to Prime.”
“Then you need to conserve resources. Lie down and try to sleep.”
Lester stood over me. I could see him with the artificial eye. “Who’s going to take care of you?”
“The auto-doc will look after me. I’m fine for a while. You don’t have to hover. Lie down.”
Lester went to his bunk. I moved the diagnostic sensors over my face. The real eye was gone, but the optic nerve was intact. I could get another replacement. The auto-doc said I had alien bacteria in my body. It was adjusting the flow of drugs to try and control the spread, so far, unsuccessfully. No major organs were being attacked, so I might survive, but I’d be spending time in the domes on Prime.
The drugs made me sleepy. When I awoke, Lester was fidgeting. “How you doing, Lester?”
“I’m bored, uncomfortable, wondering how I’m going to handle six more days of this.”
I checked the sensors. “The alien germs are tenacious. I’m not dying, but I haven’t gotten rid of them. Open that suit, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a dome on Prime.”
“I’d rather be dead.”
“It’s not that bad.”
Lester turned so I could see his face through the visor. “Ever lived on a mining planet?”
“No.”
“Most of them don’t have breathable atmospheres. You live in domes. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in domes. I’d only seen pictures of open sky. Once I got out, I promised myself I’d never live that way again. Bury me in this suit if that’s what it takes to keep me out of the domes.”
“It won’t come to that. Try to rela
x. That uses fewer resources.”
Lester turned his face to the ceiling. “I’ll try.”
By the fourth day, Lester’s suit was starting to malfunction. They were never designed to recycle waste continuously for that long. By the fifth day the medical sensors detected bedsores. By the sixth day the air in the suit was going bad. He refused to open the suit.
My infection was under control but not gone. I sat at the controls on the last day of the flight watching the clock and monitoring Lester’s fading life signs. Several times I stood over him with my fingers on the latches of his helmet. The thought of being confined to an isolation dome with a 100-kilo weightlifter who had a vendetta was the only thing that kept me from releasing the helmet.
When we broke out of hyperspace, I signaled Prime for an emergency pickup. They sent a fast med ship with a rescue and biohazard crew. The med techs pulled Lester out, dumped him in an isolation chamber, did a rapid decon and ripped his suit open.
They stuck me in an isolation chamber and moved me to a dome. Nothing could rid me of the alien bugs, but they seemed to be under control. After a couple of months, I was safe enough to be moved to the dome with Miyuki. It was a bittersweet reunion.
It took over a week before I heard about Lester. He needed skin grafts and his kidneys had taken a beating, but anoxia did the worst damage. The doctors weren’t sure his brain would fully recover.
Slowly, he did recover. He was transferred to Base for rehab, but it was obvious he’d never go on another mission.
He called me a few months later. His face looked older. He’d lost weight. When he spoke the words came slowly, with occasional pauses, but it was still Lester.
“Aidan, thought I’d check in with you before I left. I see you’re with Miyuki. I can contact you later, if you want.”
Miyuki smiled. “It’s all right; we’re only playing gin rummy.”
I moved to get a better view of him. “She’s beating me, as usual. How are you?”