Getting off the shuttle brought back a flood of unwanted and unwelcome images. The hangar, except that it was filled with people all armed with rifles pointing at us, still looked pretty much the same as it had those years ago when we had made good our escape. I mean, except for the giant hole that had been ripped in the side by a nuclear explosion. Yeah, other than that.
“Do not move!” A guard shouted to us from about fifty feet away. “Raise your hands up to where I can see them.”
I was about midway down the ramp. “Okay, you said don’t move and then you said raise your hands. Which is it going to be?”
“Hey, Colonel Talbot!” he called out. “Good to see you again!”
“Sergeant Greggs?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good to see you too. I’m raising my hands.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“Where’s the general?”
“He’s on the bridge monitoring the situation. I’m to take all of the Progerians to the brig, including the pilots, until such time as these talks conclude.”
“Understood. I thought that might be the case. No harm is to befall them, Sergeant. Every one of them is considered to be made of glass. Is that clear?”
“Glass, sir?”
“Well, maybe that really strong tempered stuff, but yeah, glass.”
The sergeant was having his men round up the pilots.
“Greggs, when are your men going to frisk us?” I asked. BT went rigid with alarm.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed loud enough to be considered a pissed off cat.
“Frisk you, sir?” Greggs looked confused.
I was trying to put on as good a show as I could for the sake of the Progerians. I needed to have plausible deniability when I was back standing in front of Asuras, provided I made it back, that is.
“Check them for weapons, you fool.” It was Beth. “These men have been held captive by the enemy and are now about to have an audience with the most powerful man on the planet and you haven’t thought to check them? I should have you busted down to private; we’ll make you in charge of latrine maintenance.”
Good old Beth, if anyone could be counted on to look for deception it would be her.
“Up against the shuttle,” Greggs ordered all of us.
“Good to see you again, Michael,” Beth said.
I didn’t utter a word. I knew Paul was watching and I’m not sure there was anything I could have said that he wouldn’t have misconstrued.
“Man, she is fine,” BT whispered.
“She’s crazier than she is pretty,” I told him.
BT may have sighed.
“And not the good crazy,” I made sure to clarify. “I’m not talking the spinning her hair during some wild lovemaking session crazy. I’m talking about holding a knife to your neck, or elsewhere, while you sleep crazy.”
“Might be worth it,” BT said.
After Greggs had his men pat us down and found nothing, I was getting desperate. I needed for us to get caught and now before the Progs were led away.
“Beth.” She looked at me, surely hoping for much more than me thrusting out my chin towards BT’s crotch. The Progs hopefully would not understand the gesture.
Another attribute Beth had going for her besides her beauty was her smarts. She was maybe too intelligent; they often say brilliance and insanity go hand in hand. Looks like she nailed it.
“Sergeant,” Beth said as she began to move closer to us. “If one were going to smuggle something of an untoward nature, where might one put it?” She kicked my right leg so it splayed out further than it already was. She reached up and squeezed my balls like she was trying to make orange juice from a particularly dry fruit. My stomach lurched.
“I was pointing to him.” I panted out in pain, barely above a whisper.
“I know.” She breathed in my ear. “Just didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.”
My head was hanging low, while I debated the merits of bathing the floor in some tummy tonic.
“You do that to me and I’ll smack you bitch,” BT said as he looked over his shoulder. That garnered two rifles being pressed up against his sides.
“My, my, have the gods favored you?” Beth asked as she first felt him up and then stepped away. “Sergeant, have him remove his pants.”
“I’m a guest here, we are on a parley!” BT yelled.
I stayed quiet, first because I wanted the damn thing found and second to open my mouth meant I had to unclench my teeth from the vomit that threatened to spew forth.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t bring more than one weapon,” she smiled, looking at his crotch as Greggs’ men spun him around.
“Mike, what the fuck is this about?” he roared.
“Better do as they say.” I managed to get out. My stomach was roiling, a hundred cockroaches running around in my gut would have been a more welcome feeling.
“This is fucked up, making a grown ass man pull his pants down in front of a room full of people.”
He was stalling, he was genuinely afraid. Couldn’t blame him. I wish I could have let him in on what I’d planned, although I’d really only thought of it in the last couple of minutes so I was pretty much doing everything on the fly. Was still a good chance we could both end up dead for this.
“That’s impressive,” Beth said as we all peered at BT. Looked like he had a football shoved down there and not one of those under-inflated ones either.
Lucky for him, BT wasn’t a fan of the commando style, like myself, and we could all see the harness that was holding up his extra package and not any other surprises.
“Do not move!” BT was ordered as another guard came over and undid the buckle.
“This a bomb, Colonel?” Greggs asked.
“You should lock us up Sergeant,” I told him. “We’ll never tell you.” I winked. If anything that just confused the matter for him.
“Get them out of here!” Beth urged him in regards to the Progerians.
Once they were out, I was feeling better both physically and psychologically. “Sergeant, you still like tinkering with electronics?”
He nodded as he kept looking at the device.
“I need you to put this thing in a Faraday cage and do not fuck it up, do you understand?” I told him.
He nodded again. He was looking a little pale. “How dangerous is it, sir?”
“Well, I don’t think it’s a bomb and probably doesn’t leak radiation. Other than that, I don’t really know. Good luck.” I patted him on the back as I sent him on his way.
“Fuck man, you are just a dick,” BT said.
“Alright, it’s time to talk to Paul.” I took a deep breath.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Greggs said, but he was heading to engineering.
“Yeah, I don’t know what the hell is going on here either,” BT said as he pulled his pants up.
“I’ve missed you, Mike,” Beth said as we walked down the corridor. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for us.”
“Beth, there is no us.” I didn’t make eye contact as I strode purposefully to the bridge.
“I love you. What does Tracy have that I do not?” She grabbed my shoulder and stopped me, turning me slightly so that I had to look at her.
“Umm…let’s start with a conscience and then a heart; I also really like the part about her not being insane. That’s really high up on my list of priorities that I look for in a mate.”
“I agree with that one, man. I’ve dated some off their rockers women,” BT added.
“What makes you think that you are all strapped into your sanity? I’ve poured forth my feelings to cold and indifferent statues. How do you think I’m supposed to react?”
“Listen, Beth, thank you for your help back there. I don’t think Greggs was going to get it. But I’m happily married and, even if I wasn’t, you’re married as well. Now before you start twisting all of that up in your head and spinning some fantasy, I’m goin
g to speak very clearly. Even if we were both single, I would not want to be with you.”
“I was afraid you might say that.” She stepped back and pulled out a gun from some hidden holster.
I put my hands up.
“You loved me once.” She had tears coming down her face.
“I did,” I said honestly. I was looking at her knuckle on the trigger; it was looking fairly white from the pressure it was exerting. “That’s over now.”
BT took in a big intake of air through his teeth at my words. “You couldn’t play along?”
“She’s not stupid. You’d see through that, wouldn’t you Beth?”
“It’s that bitch Tracy’s fault. If she wasn’t around you’d love me again.”
“I wouldn’t.”
She raised the pistol up and stretched it out farther. Any closer and I was going to have burn marks on my forehead from the gun powder when she pulled the trigger. I was sixty / forty thinking she was going to do just that. Kill me, I mean. Then I brought the thought out a step more and wondered if she was going to do the murder-suicide thing. If she did kill me there was more than a seventy-five percent chance she’d kill herself immediately after. Then I revised those odds when I remembered the narcissist she was. Might only be ten percent, and that only after she accidentally pulled the trigger as she put on a show about just how anguished she was and how she desperately wanted to kill herself. My guess is she would plead insanity to Paul and he would pardon her.
“Put the gun down,” BT said in an authoritative voice.
“Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” she spat at him.
She turned the gun on him like she was going to start blowing holes.
I moved forward and ripped it from her hand but not before she was able to squeeze the trigger. There was a dime-sized hole to my left and about head high in the hallway wall. I turned that gun on her. I was thrumming with adrenaline. I pushed the barrel into her forehead creating a circle.
“You crazy bitch!” I was so hot I couldn’t even think straight.
“Do it,” she urged, spreading her arms out. “Life has been one big fucking nightmare since the night of that concert. I can’t take it anymore. And the only person in the whole world who could possibly make it right wants nothing to do with me. Please do me the favor and just end my suffering.”
“What are you doing, Mike?” BT asked as he watched me pull back on the trigger, the hammer moving slowly as well.
I was breathing like I was running a four-minute mile. Ending her seemed like the most natural thing I could do right then, logical, even. This is one of those teaching moments; sometimes you should just follow your gut.
“Colonel! Put that weapon down!” It was Paul and it looked like he had a platoon of Marines with him.
Beth instantly changed her tune. “Help me, Paul, please! He wants to hurt me!”
“Wow, that was fast,” BT said.
“Mike, put the damned gun down!”
“Are you that fucking stupid?” BT yelled out. “Do you think Mike put that hole in the wall behind him?”
Beth wailed in an attempt to drown out BT.
“I don’t want to die, please! He went crazy! Said if he couldn’t have me nobody could!” She wrung fat heavy tears from her eyes. She had her back to Paul and his men. She spoke the words and she even trembled for effect but her gaze screamed to me of longing and hate. There was a hard set to her eyes that revealed volumes of the hurt she was going to rain down on me when she could.
“I want to feel sorry for you,” I told her. “But I don’t.”
It was BT that kept me from murdering her, though a day would come when he regretted that decision. Two men came up and grabbed Beth.
“Whoever was on guard duty I want thrown in the brig for letting her out,” Paul ordered his men.
I dropped my arm holding the gun; Paul took it easily enough from my hand.
“I gave this to her,” he said, looking at the gun. Any doubt he may have had about whose version of events was true was erased when he saw that firearm. I wanted to ask him what he thought he was fucking doing by giving a psychotic person a gun. Might as well give a teenager a lighter in a fireworks store, someone is eventually going to get hurt.
“Let’s go,” he motioned to BT and me.
“Auspicious start,” BT said quietly as we trailed Paul.
I guess I looked at him funny.
“I was being sarcastic,” he clarified.
“No, I caught the tone.”
“Promising, it means promising. I was basically saying how we got off to such a shitty start.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
“Sorry, forgot I was talking to someone with the equivalent of a sixth-grade education,” BT said.
Paul opened the door to his quarters and led us in.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Mike?” Paul asked the moment the door was shut. “I mean, I knew you had a proclivity for the other team—I just didn’t realized you want to play for them.”
“What is it with the big words today?” I asked BT.
“Appetite, penchant, inclination, take your pick,” he answered.
“Stay close; I think I’m going to need an advanced English to basic English interpreter today,” I told him.
“This is fucking serious, Mike. You’re aboard a hostile Progerian vessel asking for me to join you against the only…things that have given us a hand as we struggle just to exist.”
“Come on man, you know the Stryvers aren’t doing anything out of empathy.”
“Don’t you think I know that!?” he shouted with a fair degree of vehemence. “I’m constantly weighing the benefits of this alliance—the concern of when they are going to decide we are no longer worth saving or that we are ripe for the picking. That they attacked on Earth is indicative of how close to that conclusion they are approaching.”
“Yeah, about that. Thanks for leaving us to get our asses kicked.”
“That’s on you!” He had a finger in my face. “I sent ships to help and to evacuate you. You…you decided to stay behind. It was fucking mutes, Genos, and Stryvers getting killed and good riddance to each and every one of them. You should have got your ass on the shuttle with your wife and there never would have been a problem.”
“He’s got you on that one,” BT said.
“I just got shot at! In fact, I’ve been getting shot at a lot lately. I don’t need shit from the both of you!” I said.
“Most of my men, Mike, think you damn near walk on water and right now I’m debating if I should arrest and try you for treason.”
“Why, because I’m trying to make an alliance that could save our asses?”
“I think you’re forgetting to mention that the alliance you are trying to forge is with those that destroyed us. Do you not get what I’m saying? I’ll try and dumb it down for you. It’s December 8th, 1941, the United States is still trying to put out the fires that rage in Pearl Harbor, thousands are dead or dying. The hospitals are full of the screams of those suffering and here comes Japan with hat in hand asking if we can be friends and fight against the evil Russians that thus far have been an ally.”
He almost had me, I had to admit it, it was pretty much exactly what was going on. “Well since you already laid the groundwork, I’ll just bring this one to its conclusion,” I said. “So who was the US friends with before this all started and who have we been on the brink of mutually assured destruction for almost seventy years? We had a chance way back when to take out Russia; you’re the one drawing lessons from history...don’t you think we would have been better off?”
“When did he start making sense?” Paul asked of BT as he sat on the corner of his bed. “It’s good to see you,” he said, never bringing his gaze up to mine.
Maybe he was the bigger man; I just couldn’t find it in myself to return the greeting. The words would have rung hollow.
“For what it’s worth, I have reservations about
the Progerians, too. I believe Asuras wants to do the right thing, but I can’t imagine those on his home world will feel the same. But this at least buys us time. This ship, as admirably as she’s fought, cannot stand against a sustained Prog attack. They’ve calibrated their equipment; they can track your returns.”
There was a look of surprise on Paul’s face.
“It’s true,” BT said.
“That means no more hit-and-runs and we both know that’s really your only tactic. How much do you think any of us has left? Any one of those ground forces we faced yesterday would be more than a match for whatever we have left to muster. We are outmanned and outgunned both on the ground, in the air, and in space. We are almost so much of a non-factor now that the Stryvers decided to play a card and show that they are in the game. I wish we could just sit this one out and let them kill each other, but we both know that isn’t going to happen.”
“I’ve chosen a side,” Paul said.
“Not the right one.”
“So that’s what’s going on now?” Paul stood. “We’re going to fight on opposite sides now? I get the Stryvers and you the Progs? Who gets the people? Are we going to split them up? Maybe incite a civil war to go along with everything else happening?”
“Wow, you figured me all out, Paul. Yeah, I’m looking to win a popularity contest. You have got to be reasonable. You know—you absolutely know Progs and Genos don’t lie.”
“I don’t know that. You told me they wouldn’t be a problem when we migrated the Genos to earth; look how that turned out.”
“They were being harassed and killed; they were defending themselves.”
Paul brushed that aside. “I can’t imagine why people would harbor ill-will against those that were directly responsible for completely ripping up our way of life. Strange how people are like that.”
“The Genos were victims, just like us.”
“Not just like us! They seemed pretty okay with killing us, Mike, and in case you forgot, they really liked to eat us as well. You tell me how that makes them the victims. We’re done here. I’m keeping three of the Progerians as prisoners of war, you can have one so he can pilot the shuttle back to their ship.”