Space Eater (13 page)

Planes everywhere now. Full thrust, low again, they won’t fire down on their own houses.
Ping:
someone was firing up but not with anything heavy.
Ping
again. Then out over the open road, planes on the dive, a massive rattling and I was being thrown about like something in a pinball machine. I dodged faster, faster, the world going around me on the screen, shots hitting my hull a dozen rounds at a time and WHAM an air-to-air missile had crippled me all in a millisecond. Even if I failed altogether, I’d engaged this squadron long enough to let some other cruisers through to the industrial zone. (Why, oh why, was there so much dull pain crammed into the cruiser here with me?) Going down now, a long ragged glide that would trickle me onto the edge of the airfield. If that was the fuel dump there, I reckoned the fireball would swell to take it in, the blast would total the control towers and every plane in the open. They were still taking off, one every few seconds. God help anything in the air within a thousand meters. Last moments. Last things. Time was stretching thin and my nerve ends felt the same way, stretched to the point where they hurt forever. Earth and sky turned over like some infinitely slow and ponderous machinery. The Egg sat there in front of me, waiting to be hatched. Another rattle. Even more distant and dreamy, lurching, falling ... (_Compromise between necessary tissue deformation and maintenance of cerebral integrity_.) One hundred meters up and falling. The screen was gray and far-off, and my thumbs on the two red buttons pressed down, and down, and went on sinking through a million kilometers of slow grinding pain until the final white-out of the fireball that should have been the welcome end of everything but instead went on, on, on, brightening and shifting to poisonous yellow...

I was awake, and I wanted to claw my way back into the dream. I was caught in that last painful moment: when you’ve been concussed, say, and you’ve drifted forever in bad dreams until consciousness gets switched on like a too-bright light that makes the mess so much worse. It was not good. I was falling, for a start, and had to remind myself how Corvus station was falling all the time without ever moving closer to that poxy little moon. The light
was
too bright, even filtered through the yellow slime of the tank (must be a plastic sheet holding the stuff in?); I couldn’t close my eyes, mainly because there weren’t any lids.
That
had happened to me before; it wasn’t any better here than at home. I could feel, a little bit, the close-fitting coziness of the tank: what was even closer-fitting was the sick pain that was clamped onto everything of me that I could feel at all. My hangover after the Tunnel party had been grim, like an invisible helmet squeezing at my brain: spread that over as much of a body as I had here (I couldn’t move to find out, and the feelings in arms and legs could easily have been ghosts), screw it down a few turns tighter and throw in a generous sprinkling of good old-fashioned nausea ... It wasn’t just being knocked about like in all the Ds before. I felt broken in every part until I’d never be the same again.

I wondered if Rossa had had the dreams she’d worried about—and if so, dreams about what? I supposed she was here, alive, somewhere, about two hours less recovered than I was, maybe staring straight up without eyelids to cover herself and feeling these same pains (hey, if that sensitizer was still working I must be picking up her problems as well as my own—not fair). None of this seemed to matter too much, though. Birch’s merry crew had managed to hurt me more and deeper than I’d thought I could ever be hurt again. Scalpels, bonesaws, heavy cutters, whittling me down to something they could stuff through a tunnel 1.9 centimeters wide and, how long was it? Had they left a chunk of memory behind on the lab floor? How long? Pulling out the answer left me dead with exhaustion: 162 light-years, yes, I could go to sleep now. And back down into the endless sick dreaming.

(Growing up and getting beaten up—the two meant much the same then—in the big slum zones out in Richmond, Surbiton, Kingston, the whole collapsed area of southwest London. Envying those bastards in the fortified enclaves with their guarded powerlines while we had homemade methane converters, oil lamps, open fires or just plain darkness come the nighttime. Getting laid a couple of times before the Force, but those were fuzzy memories that never came quite clear—like how I remembered I’d had this big collection of number plates off the abandoned cars all over the roads, but I couldn’t remember why I collected them. Full color, 3D replays of every one of my first forty-six Ds, and again and again it was back to number 47, arc lights, cold steel underneath, Ngabe with his terrible bright scalpel -- ) When I woke up the second time, it wasn’t as bad. The new eyelids helped, and I lay there a long while just blinking them. Fingers: I was pretty sure I could feel my fingers wiggle in the gooey fluid when I told them to. Toes: not so certain at all. But I could swivel my head a little now, from side to side, not really seeing anything except strips of brightness somewhere outside the yellow. I still felt like something that had been smashed, yes, but now there seemed to be a fresh coat of paint covering the broken surfaces: I was shiny-bright and flimsier than I looked, like steel armor shell-pierced and repaired with a fiberglass patch, the way you might do it to cheat an inspection. Without actually trying it, I knew not to wriggle anything too fast or hard just yet.

The third time was the worst, but it was a familiar sort of worst. The jointed arms of the tank machinery whipped a plastic film around my head; the needle went into my arm to “partly de-inhibit the coughing reflex”
(Mk III Regeneration Module: Subjects
’
Manual
, p. 64). Air hissed into the bubble and the tank waited patiently while I coughed my lungs out and the bubble’s outlet tube sucked away the gobs of yellow nastiness I spewed through mouth and nostrils. Starting to breathe again just isn’t a nice business: it took something like an hour for me to settle down and live in the ordinary way, chest hurting like hell.

Through the plastic bubble I could see, in a distorted fishbowl view, that the rest of me was safely there as I remembered it.

By now I reckoned I could probably walk away from the tank any time I had to, even though my bones still felt creaky and fragile, like an old set dug out of the graveyard and palmed off on the black market. It could be that some of the feeling was being transmitted along from Rossa: I
supposed
she was in the other tank out there. Of course they might have cocked up the connection to tank 2 and left a crawling puddle on the floor for me to find when I was good and ready. There must be a floor, after all; my head was clear enough now to report that one direction was surely down, though not very enthusiastically down.

Low-g, a tenth standard or something like that. They’d quoted me a figure for the spin on this thing, but that had slipped away ... I kept getting feelings of having forgotten something without being able to locate obvious gaps anywhere in my memories. You do lose some RNA en route from termination to the tank, especially if pick-up’s slow in coming. And they say that if you avoid thinking of rats, say, over the period of a dozen Ds then the memory of rats slides clear away. Big argument in the bar one night about whether that was ordinary forgetting or a tank side effect, and someone suggested we all try not to think of Sgt.

Pickersgill for a whole year—see if we could all forget him. Some hope.

I dozed, woke, dozed, talked to myself over the hissing air systems, listened to the chug and whirr of activity deep inside the tank, and in clearer moments kept thinking over how very thoroughly Tunnel, and Zurich command, and the whole damned Force had managed to screw me.

I’d climbed hard to reach the Force and the good life. Someone said once how the old Scandinavians reckoned heaven to be like Combat routine, working together and fighting and dying, and starting over again on the next day. After the bad time, the first death in the pit, I woke good as new and ready to take on anything they sent up against me, and there was the pass-in ceremony and the first D star to wear and much backslapping from old-timers I respected. By the next session I was mad keen to get out there on the training ground and notch up more points for my platoon on the merit board. Each time it was less of a shock, as I soaked up the hypno course that helps you shift attention from pain like turning a page in a book. The perfect Forceman, just ripe for promotion, and now they’d broken me. You
never
feel less than one hundred percent fit when the tank’s finished with you: now I was all back together and terribly afraid the deep aches were with me forever. OK, that’s duty, carry out orders as read, even when they look downright silly ... only there was going to be an afterward. Force missions don’t fail. Afterward came the trip back. Downhill all the way into Earth’s potential well, as Ellan would say, and on this trip it wouldn’t be second class, but third or fourth. No Ngabe to carve with surgeon’s precision, you bet.

There’d been gaps in the briefing, too many, but I could fill
this
one quite clearly: returning, we’d be processed by good old slapdash Ellan and Wui, i.e. by their programming of the FACTOTUM robot here...

Click-whirr-click
. The stimulus electrodes pulled away like sticking plasters. The massage arms unfolded and began to work me over; the yellow gunge was draining away. The tank was finished with me and pronounced me fit. I still felt lousy.

Twelve

Corvus Station wasn’t exactly built for people, which was reasonable, as it hadn’t been built by people either. First impression: I was in a big cylinder well over a hundred meters long and something like fifty across. Hugest room I’d ever been in—there was a star of striplights on the flat surface at this end, where the tanks were, and a few more lamps on the ceiling/floor nearby, but the far end was always in twilight.

Over most of the inside it was lumpy with equipment, all looking rough and jerry-rigged, the whole a mess making Tunnel’s lab seem like Force barracks ten seconds before inspection. Gravity wasn’t up to much, and I had to hang on to the tank’s side while I wiped myself down and got into the worst-made dungarees I’d ever met. The air stank of machine oil, epoxy resins, half-cured plastic, frying electrics and a touch of plain rot—there was an evil-looking stain under one of the tank/pipe couplings and I wondered whether some of those memories I’d missed had spilled on the floor right there.

The whole interior mess started to make sense when you saw the metal rail running along the cylinder’s axis: FACTOTUM with all its special purpose arms was hanging off it like a spider or an octopus, ready to reach anywhere on the curving floor by tracking along and swinging around from above, the high central rails being as above as you could get in this dump (jump higher than that and you dropped to the floor on the other side). So it was nicely planned for FACTOTUM, less good for anyone wandering through the junk on foot. Or you could leap about in the tiny gravity like a comic book hero: I tried that with a cautious jump straight up, and the place keeled over sideways until I came down squashily on some plastic sacks of fluid way over from where I’d started. Something in physics they called Coriolis force? Hell with it—safest to stay on deck.

Time to follow instructions. There were more plastic bags heaped by the tank, with gobs of not-quite solid food in them; I forced some down, and supposed it must have come through the minigate like myself. Even I had to taste better than that muck. Toilet facilities were primitive and none of this nonsense about privacy—your efforts went straight through a double lock into space, it seemed, which cheered me up no end by reminding me of the old stories about divers in decompression tanks. You know, one day the toilet valve doesn’t work right and some poor fellow’s guts get neatly sucked out of him. Wouldn’t you think an experimental, quote, faster-than-light ship, unquote, would have recyclers and such? That could be part of the Big Lie, we can come and go so fast we don’t need to worry about supplies. It certainly
looked
experimental, with its crawling mess of gadgetry put together by FACTOTUM from bits as long as you like but never more than 1.9 centimeters wide...

(Wui had had a machined-steel ring that fitted his middle finger comfortably; he said it was a scientific instrument, anything that went through it would go through the minigate.) I had an attack of pseudo-coughing then, which wasn’t like anything I’d felt before. There was the feel of the rasp in the throat, the quick pains in the chest, the after-ache, and all the time I wasn’t coughing.

When I heard the sound in the other tank, it wasn’t hard to guess what was up. I went and found Rossa lying like an insect in yellow amber, intact—I was glad I hadn’t had to see her in the regrowth phase—the plastic bubble around her head, the cough-spasm already over, her breathing steady. The sight of where her hair was starting to return set me scratching the bristly stuff sprouting on my own head.

Don’t suppose she could see me through the murk and distortion, but it was good to know she was there.

A touch of nausea was coming back, the piffling “gravity” playing now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t with my inner ears so they were never quite sure whether I was falling or not. Sometimes I was: try to stand in Corvus Station with your eyes shut and everything can seem absolutely still and calm until
clunk
you’re chewing a mouthful of steel weld from the nearest machine. To keep my mind off the internal wobble I went exploring.

Corvus Station didn’t have any windows.

It was too big. There just wasn’t any need for it to be so big.

It was dotted with manufacturing machinery—I could recognize lathes, drill presses, flow-welding gear, an arc furnace, a whole shop floor of silent equipment. What the hell was it all for? (A guess: Ellan had mentioned remote control exploration, or experimentation, something along those lines. It was always hard to disentangle what she meant from the long words. Could be they’d tried some experiments out here on the Kraz budget, while Central was still muttering about what to do for the best.) One reason for some of the heavy gear showed up when I reached the far end, the dark end. In the flat surface there was a bloody great airlock, bigger than the vault door on the Tunnel lab—must have been one hell of a welding job for FACTOTUM. Now why should this lunatic deathtrap need a way in or out any wider than the narrowest doorway Rossa or I could wriggle through? I made my way back through the derelict shop floor with another question on my mental list, and a shapeless suspicion that somehow, some way we hadn’t even started to think about, CC’s master plan was set to screw us again.