The Eternity Brigade (19 page)

Philaskut licked his lips. “We make exactly one backup copy—”

“Only one? For the entire army?” Singh was skeptical.

“For security purposes we can’t have lots of copies floating around. We don’t want them falling into the wrong hands.”

“They’re already in the wrong hands,” Belilo said.

“So why can’t you make a new Green from his backup copy?” Singh asked.

“We… that is, our procedure—and it’s worked perfectly for centuries—is to dub the people, make a complete backup at once, and then destroy the old records for security’s sake. Nothing has ever gone wrong with that.”

“Until now,” Symington said.

“We think the cosmic ray, or whatever, affected the primary record sometime between when it was last recorded and when the dubbing was done a couple of months ago. Immediately after this dubbing, a backup was made and the old records were destroyed, as always. It took us several hours to realize that the flaw was in the record itself and not a malfunction in the dubbing process.

“And to make matters worse, the distortion to the… to Green’s crystal caused it to shatter when the dub was made, so it didn’t even get backed up by the automatic process. That was the only copy of him there was. We couldn’t even duplicate the re-creation. That’s why w
e must study this altered copy so thoroughly, to learn exactly
how
the accident occurred. When we know how the cosmic ray got through and did its damage, we can improve our shields.”

Hawker felt ill that such a thing should happen to his closest friend in the universe. “I want to see him.”

“Who? Green? I’m afraid that’s not possible. He’s in a classified ward; I can’t order a video linkage—”

“I don’t want to see a fucking picture!” Hawker exploded. “I want to
visit
him, be beside him, give him comfort if I can. He’s my friend, goddamn it!”

Philaskut shrank back from this outburst. “That’s even more out of the question. That ward is strictly off limits to anyone without a triple-alpha clearance—”

“I don’t think you understand, friend,” Symington said, coming around behind the computer display so he towered over the seated officer. “That wasn’t a request.”

Philaskut looked around the room at the five determined faces, and at the look of fright on the clerk’s face as Ibañez held her tightly. From some unexpected depths of his soul, the officer drew a tiny shred of courage. “Who are you to order me around?”

“Just a group of people who think five to one is pretty good odds.” To emphasize his remark, Singh opened his tunic to show the butt of the beampistol tucked into his trousers.

“What will you do, kill me?” Philaskut’s bravado was gaining momentum. “Do you think you’re the only people who can be dubbed? Do you see this little button in my neck? Everyone on Cellina has one. My pattern is being continuously broadcast to Rez Central, continuously updated. If you kill me, I’ll be dubbed exactly as I was the instant before you did it. You’d gain nothing. I’m not scared of you.”

“Actually, we weren’t thinking of killing you.” Belilo leaned down, gently at first, on the glowing display of symbols; when it held her weight, despite its apparent lack of substance, she sat on it, and leaned over toward the officer. “Killing is so crude, don’t you think? The army’s taught us lots of things over the years. Do you happen to know how many bones there are in the human foot?”

Philaskut blinked “No.”

“Neither do I, exactly, but I’m told there’s a lot. Twenty or more, I think. All nice, tiny little bones. I wonder if we can set a record for the most broken at one sitting.” She looked back at Hawker. “Do you think we should do that before or after we peel the toenails all the way back?”

Philaskut’s courage evaporated as quickly as it came. “P-please don’t. I’ll take you there somehow. But it’s all the way across the base. I’ll have to get us a floater.”

“We’ve got one downstairs,” Singh said, “all ready and waiting.”

“What about her?” Ibañez asked, bringing the clerk forward. “Do I have to drag her around with us?”

Belilo walked over to the frightened woman. “What about it, sister? You got one of those buttons in your neck?”

“Y-yes.”

“Good. I’ll try to make it painless.” With a sudden blow, Belilo lashed out and snapped the woman’s neck. The clerk gave just a soft sigh, and fell to the floor as Ibañez released her.

Belilo looked at the corpse for a moment. “Somehow it doesn’t seem so bad when you know it’s not permanent,” she remarked.

Philaskut stared nervously at this display, and Symington had to lift him by his collar and deposit him on his feet. “Get moving,” he said brusquely. “We’ve got things to do.”

***

They took Philaskut down to their waiting floater and drove to a large building he indicated on the far side of the base. Several times they were stopped for ID checks, but a beam of light scanned Philaskut’s face and they were passed on to the next checkpoint. Eventually they pulled up beside a door, got out of their floater and Philaskut’s facial scan opened the way for them again.

Hawker and Symington walked on either side of the officer, each taking one of Philaskut’s arms and locking tightly to it so the frightened man couldn’t escape. The other three walked close behind. They wandered up stairs and through a maze of corridors they could barely keep straight, passing three checkpoints along the way. Each time, Philaskut’s facial scan gained them admittance. If he hadn’t been in such an angry mood, Hawker might have been impressed by the importance of the man he’d kidnapped.

At length they came to a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” Philaskut’s facial scan worked perfectly on it, too, and the door disappeared. The group marched silently into the room beyond, and the door reappeared behind them.

They were in a laboratory. Five people in crisp green uniforms moved about the room, checking the wealth of instrument displays, noting the readings and resetting the calibrations. The entire room was bathed in the antiseptic glow of a cool blue light. And there, in the center of the room, lay David Green.

He was suspended in midair on an antigravity field, surrounded by dozens of whirring machines large and small that poked and prodded at his naked body. If anything, his twisted figure looked even more grotesque than Hawker remembered. “Is he awake?” Hawker asked their guide.

“I really don’t know. I’m not in charge of this aspect. His mind is as damaged as his body; he slips in and out of awareness—”

The other people in the room noticed the intruders for the first time. One of them, a tall woman with incandescent orange hair, stepped forward. “What are you doing here? Philaskut, you know perfectly well—”

“It’s visiting hours,” Symington told her, his hand resting lightly on his hip a few centimeters from the butt of his beampistol. “We’ve come to see our friend.”

As Hawker’s group strode forward, the scientists parted reluctantly to let them through. Hawker noticed one of the men edging toward the door. Ibañez noticed the movement too. “No need to leave,” he said as a gentle warning. “We don’t have any secrets from you people. Let’s just all stay together for now, shall we?”

They lined the scientists up against the wall, along with Philaskut. Ibañez kept an eye on them while the other four soldiers approached the body. Hawker had to force his stomach to remain steady as he glanced down at the surrealist parody that was his friend’s face. “Dave,” he said quietly. “Dave, it’s me. I came to see how you were. Are they treating you okay here?”

Green’s face showed no sign of having heard or understood. Hawker turned to glare angrily at the scientists. “What did you do to him? What drugs have you given him?”

“None,” said the woman who was apparently in charge of the scientific team. She was indignant at the very thought. “We wouldn’t introduce foreign substances. We’re not sure how his body would react. We even have to prepare special predigested food, because his stomach has trouble on its own.”

Symington, more direct, laid his hand on Green’s shoulder and shook him gently. “Hey, Dave, it’s your buddies. We’ve come to see you. Can’t you even say hi?”

Green’s eyes continued to focus on some spot well beyond the ceiling, but his mouth began moving. Saliva dripped out of the side and the sounds, barely audible, were simply nonsense syllables.

Hawker’s anger reached new heights. Turning to the scientists once again, he demanded, “What have you been doing to him?”

“Just studying him,” the woman said. “We run molecular scans of his entire body, recording the pattern and analyzing it to see precisely where the deviations are. We run tests, that’s all. We’re not trying to hurt him.”

The fact that her words were reasonable did nothing to mollify Hawker’s anger. If anything, it only infuriated him more.

“I can see you cared for him a great deal,” the woman continued. “But you’ll have to face the fact that the friend you loved is gone forever. We’ve done what we could to keep the shell alive, but his mind—”

“Welcome... to Hell.”

Those words, even spoken as softly as they were, jerked everyone’s attention back to Green There was awareness of a sort in his face; his eyes, both on the left side of his nose, were now focused on Hawker.

“Dave. Dave.” Hawker felt closer to crying now than he had in centuries. “How do you feel?”

“How… do I look?”

“Like shit,” Symington replied.

“Then that’s how mfrtck tablkrt.” A cloud passed over Green’s eyes as he lapsed into gibberish once more.

“That often happens,” the woman scientist volunteered. ‘“There’ll be a brief period of lucidness, and then he—”

“Shut up!” Hawker snarled. All his concentration was on Green; he wanted no distractions. Despite the gibberish, Green’s face did not look as spacey as it had at first. There were thoughts going on within his mind, but he couldn’t connect his tongue to the words.

Seconds passed, with the only sounds being Green’s gibbered attempts at speech. Hawker strained, positive that if only he listened hard enough he could make some sense of what his friend was saying. But it continued to elude him, and eventually Green stopped speaking again.

It was Singh who broke the spell of silence. “What do you want to do now, Hawk?”

Hawker closed his eyes and tried to think, but it was no good; all his mind could see was Green’s twisted body and haunted face. “I don’t know, I don’t...”

“We can’t just stand around here forever,” Ibañez said. “We’ve got to do something.”

Belilo, seeing the pained indecision in Hawker’s face, said, “We can take him with us, get him away from these ghouls.”

“You can’t do that!” Philaskut objected. “He’s army property.”

“So’s this,” Symington said, pulling his beampistol from his trousers. With a single shot he blew a large hole in the officer’s chest.

The scientists were cowed, but the woman in charge still had enough courage to speak up. “You don’t understand. Taking him away from here is the worst possible thing. He’s a freak now. He can’t survive in the outside world. You’d only be hurting him, not helping him.”

“I told you to shut up,” Hawker said. He kept his eyes on Green. “We’ll let him decide what he wants.”

“He’s hardly competent—”

Symington’s beampistol lashed out again, tearing away the woman’s leg. She fell to the floor, moaning and crying in pain.

Hawker looked straight into Green’s face. “Dave,” he pleaded. “Dave, please concentrate. This is important. Do you want us to take you out of here?”

An eternity passed, then two. Finally, “Yes.” The single sighed syllable echoed through the room like a shout.

“That does it, then,” Singh said. “I guess he doesn’t like the facilities here.”

“But where can you take him that’s any better?” one of the other scientists asked nervously. “What can he get outside he doesn’t have here?”

“How about freedom?” Belilo suggested.

“The army won’t let you get away with this,” the woman scientist hissed as she lay on the floor. “They’ll hunt you down, bring you back—”

“But we’ll have a head start,” Symington said.

“What do we do with them?” Ibañez asked, indicating the scientists cowering against the wall.

“Well, we can’t have much of a head start if they’re here to give the alarm the instant we leave, can we?” Singh said.

***

“The trouble is, they were probably right,” Singh said as he stripped the body of one scientist to get clothes for Green. “We don’t know where we’re taking him, and we have no idea how long he’ll survive away from these machines.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Hawker said. “You heard him. He wants us to get him out. If he dies, he’ll at least die free.”

“
And for good,” Belilo murmured. “Philaskut said his pattern cracked when they dubbed him.”

“
Dave talked about that a lot,” Hawker said, his voice a near whisper. “He was always talking about getting off the merry-go-round.”

“
This’ll be his last life, then,” Symington said. There was almost reverence in his voice. “Let’s make it as good for him as we can.”