The Orion Plague (25 page)

This time Skull did put his hands on her, but
gently. “Then what?”

The intellectual triumph in her died as her
eyes grew worried. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Maybe they will
help heal your brain, all those little scars formed by those
childhood concussions you had…or maybe they will change you
somehow.”

Skull noticed she didn’t ask why he’d had so
many concussions.
It wasn’t peewee football, baby
. He
dropped his hands and turned his back on her, rubbing his knuckles.
“Maybe they’ll drive me mad. You were right to be distrustful. You
knew this before, didn’t you?”

“It was only a feeling, until I put you in
the cocoon and ran a lot of tests. And I did what I could to help.
I tried to keep them away from your brain with magnetic fields. I
cycled the nanites off and on for most of the time. I turned them
off again just before you woke up.”

“You were trying to help me then, not just
control me.” Still with his back to her Skull lifted his hands in
front of his face. “So they are turned off now?”

“Yes. It’s safe to leave them off for about
eight hours, then they start piling up in unfortunate places, clog
your blood vessels. Some get excreted. Unless you want them all
filtered out, we have to turn them back on every now and
again.”

“And every time you do, I get closer
to…something bad.”

“We don’t know that it will be bad.
Everything might be fine.”

“McCarthy wasn’t fine.” Skull flashed back to
that day in the lab when the SEAL had gone berserk. “Something
about the interaction of the Eden Plague and the nanites made him
crazy. Some of it had to have gotten into his brain. People don’t
suddenly lose their minds unless their brain is somehow affected.
And in my experience, when something changes, nine times out of ten
it’s bad.”

“Alan…we can manage the nanites. We could
filter most of them out, turn the rest off, extend the time before
they clog your system…”

“Sure.” He turned back around with a weak,
wan smile. “I know you’ll do your best. Just so long as I don’t
hurt you or Zeke, and I can be at full strength when your buddies
show up.” He reached out to embrace her and she pressed her head
into his chest with a sob.

“Oh, Alan, I don’t want to lose you. I love
you.”

A week ago he would have jerked away. Now he
just took a deep breath. “I know.” He forced the words out, made
them sound natural. “I love you too.

It’s always easier to lie when you’ve let
go.

Or maybe it’s easier to admit the truth.

Flip a coin.

***

Skull and Raphaela ate their next meal after
making love for the first time. Neither of them counted the violent
animalistic sex act that had created Zeke, nor did they discuss it.
They were both too raw.

For her it was the fulfillment of desire that
had been growing ever stronger over the last nine months.

For him it was not love as most defined it,
but it was a reasonable facsimile nonetheless. A relief, a
pleasure, and a healing of a part of him he’d thought long dead,
the drenching of a dry shriveled seed hermetically sealed in an
emotional capsule. The space in his psyche where Linde’s love
should have been had been almost filled by his friendship with Zeke
Johnstone. The poisonous fertilizer of anger, hatred and death for
his enemies had filled the rest.

Now the amazing life-giving love for his son
Zeke, and Raphaela’s quiet womanly persistence, had replaced the
dead ashes and surrounded the kernel of his humanity. Like any
seed, it struggled heroically to life.

For the first time in thirty years, Skull
felt fully human.

As he stared at her quietly smiling face
across their table, he wondered why that was. He rejected trite
answers about the love of a good woman or seeing his son’s face for
the first time. He wasn’t prone to easy solutions, and when he made
that observation to himself, he realized why the Eden Plague had
provoked nothing but contempt in him.

Like the platitudes of the priests and nuns
that taught me, that claimed that salvation was a gift of God, I
realized the Eden Plague was a crutch and a trap. Nothing you don’t
earn is worth anything. That’s why I had to become strong enough to
stand up to Dad and his drunken fists, so I could earn his respect
and my own. Then when Linde came into my life and gave herself to
me, I took her for granted; I didn't earn her, I used her as a prop
in the pathetic little screenplay of my existence. I never really
got to know her, just a perfect fantasy image of her that I
constructed. That’s why God snatched her away from me, because she
was a gift I didn’t deserve.

One thing the Church got right, love is
worthless without sacrifice. I didn’t sacrifice my need for speed.
I didn’t sacrifice myself for her. I risked her life for a thrill
and I killed her. I am the anti-Christ. God was right to punish
me.

Without the shedding of blood, there is no
remission of sins.

Skull knew God wasn’t his friend, certainly
not his buddy like some people viewed Him. Not someone to chat with
whenever any inane or whiny thought crossed his mind. God was an
embodiment of iron justice, a being to be respected and feared, and
only to be addressed when there was something important to say. So
for the first and perhaps the last time in thirty years he spoke to
the God who had so cruelly laid on the whip:
Thank you Lord
,
he prayed,
for making what I have to do clear to me. Now get out
of my way and let me do it.
He turned away and crossed himself
surreptitiously.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritūs Sancti.
Amen
.

Raphaela saw him in deep thought, recognized
the expression of peace that came over him, and she relaxed. Since
she didn’t really believe in any supernatural power she had nothing
and no one to thank. Still, the culturally-appropriate words came
unbidden to her mind.
Thank God he’s getting better.

Skull did not smile as he turned back to her.
“I know what we have to do now.”

“What’s that?”

He told her what, and she hated him for it.
But in the end, tearful and grudging, she agreed to do as he asked,
because she loved him, and because she loved her son.

Orion
proceeded slowly outbound for a
week after launch.
We are the lumbering rhino
, Absen thought
to himself for the hundredth time.
Earth is their target, but
the Asteroid Belt is their arsenal.

All the analyses agreed that the most
devastating and simple tactic the aliens could use was to throw
rocks. Push them with their ship’s drive, or perhaps slap fusion
engines and a guidance system on them and it was goodbye
humanity.

The rock that hit Tunguska, Siberia in 1908
was only about one hundred meters across, yet it struck with the
force of a thousand Hiroshimas. A one-thousand meter asteroid would
devastate a small country. A big one, perhaps ten kilometers
across, might wipe out all life more complex than cockroaches.

Absen’s nightmare scenario was that the Meme
were as clever at war as they were at biology. If he was in their
shoes he would come in slowly, watch for enemy, move laterally
along the plane of the solar ecliptic, and send in the rocks all at
once and from unexpected angles in a coordinated bombardment. There
was no rational reason he could think of that the aliens would
engage his ship in combat. Perhaps a bullfighter and a rhino was an
inapt metaphor; it was more like a Zeppelin and a fighter plane.
How could the dirigible catch the airplane?

He had to hope for a break. Perhaps they
would be stupid, or single-minded, or overconfident. Perhaps they
had no kinetic weapons and relied exclusively on plagues to do
their dirty work, though he knew the Raphael alien had contradicted
that notion. Perhaps they could be enraged.

Perhaps the aliens would be the rhino and
charge the bullfighter if they waved the right red flag.

His only chance then was to proceed with eyes
wide open in hopes
Orion
could spot the enemy before being
seen, to sneak up on them and launch a surprise attack. It sounded
preposterous, but space was enormous. There were thousands of
asteroids in the solar system larger than
Orion
; perhaps she
would be mistaken for one of them.

Absen wished again he could broadcast a hail
to try contacting the Raphaela alien, but that was too risky. As a
submariner his instinct was to run passive.
Orion
possessed
powerful phased-array radars but they were all shut down, and other
electromagnetics were minimized. Instead, they listened, and
looked. Meter-wide telescopes probed outward, computers comparing
known backgrounds with observations, looking for anomalies.
Communications dishes collected the signals of the universe,
sorting out the noise of stars, looking for…something else.

“Sir! We’ve got something.” Rick Johnstone,
Comms officer on watch, typed in a command and a low sound filled
the bridge, a machinelike whirr and series of pops, rising and
falling rapidly. “It’s machine code.”

“Where away?” Absen leaned forward, then
stood up to loom over the young man. “What’s your rank,
anyway…Johnstone?” he asked, reading Rick’s nametag.

“I’m a civilian expert, sir. They gave me a
Reserve commission as a lieutenant but I don’t know anything about
rank insignia really –”

“Never mind. Where’s the signal coming
from?”

“Uh…”

“I got it, sir.” The Sensors officer,
Scoggins, tapped rapidly at her controls and a moment later the
main screen showed a representation of the ship and its
surroundings. She made adjustments and the view pulled out rapidly,
until
Orion
was just a blue dot near the orbit trace of
Mars. A red icon flashed, out beyond Uranus’ orbit.

“It’s telemetry, sir,” Johnstone said, one
ear pressed to a headphone. “I’ve heard it before.” He touched a
control and the sound slowed, then looped. “You see, it’s
hexadecimal. The third and fourth grouping –”

“Good work, Mr. Johnstone. You too,
Lieutenant Scoggins,” he interrupted, nodding in the direction of
the Sensors station. “Stay passive, work together and collect
everything you can. Pass it to SIGINT and Crypto, see if it can be
cracked. Put that Korean supercomputer to use.”

Chief of the Boat Ray Timmons, his senior
enlisted man from the USS
Tucson
, stepped up beside him,
catching his eye. Absen glanced over, then withdrew to his
captain’s chair, the COB following after. “Crew’s talking already.
Might be a good idea to calm them down, sir.”

“Right you are, COB.” Absen knew with this
green and mixed crew the scuttlebutt would race around like shit
through a goose, triggering misunderstandings and mistakes. He put
on his headset.

“Now hear this. This is Captain Absen. We
have detected an alien signal. Maintain silent running, obey your
officers, do nothing to let them detect us. The closer we get to
them, the more likely we will beat them. I say again, no signals,
no emanations, no ranging lasers, no radio-telescopy, no radar,
nothing. That is all.” He released the button and nodded at the
COB.

Timmons raised his ever-present coffee mug of
lifer-juice in salute and faded back to his niche.

Absen felt a thousand times better now that
he had a target. He hoped it was really the alien, and not some
forgotten relic of one of Earth’s space programs.

They were headed in roughly the correct
direction, but one problem loomed and grew. Use of the nuclear bomb
drive was painfully obvious, impossible to hide. They had launched
when Earth was turned away from their line of travel, then whipped
around in orbit and adjusted course with a few bombs, hoping that
the explosions would not be connected with a ship heading the
aliens’ direction. But setting even one off this far out would
surely alert them to the presence of something manmade.

No, Absen had to keep thinking like a
submariner sneaking silently up on his target, only revealing his
presence at the last moment.

If he’d had to say, Skull would have sworn
he’d never get back into his cocoon, the one in which he’d slept
away the nine months of Raphaela’s pregnancy.

Technically, he hadn’t – the thing that
encased him now had been so heavily modified it was more of a
biomechanical space suit. He could move in it, eat in it, excrete
in it, and fight from it – more or less. It was Raphaela’s final
gift, a project that had occupied the several long days until the
base’s sensors had at last detected the Meme scout ship
decelerating toward the comet.

Fortunately the forward-facing fusion flare
from the decelerating enemy masked its sensors, and Raphaela and
little Zeke flew away in the other direction, themselves hidden by
the bulk of the comet. The fusion wake blasted the comet even from
thousands of miles away, kicking dust-sized particulates into a
cloud. The accelerated helium atoms also knocked water molecules
and contaminants off the naked ice surface. The combination
obscured the base, the comet, and their escape.

Skull saw most of this as the base fed him
visuals and passive sensor data. He watched as the Meme scout ship,
a dirty grey teardrop, matched velocities with the comet and
detached some kind of shuttle from a hundred miles out.
As she
said, they are being cautious
.

It maneuvered carefully closer, agonizingly
slow taking hours. After a journey of hundreds of years, the Meme
were apparently in no hurry to find out what had happened to their
forward base.
Yet another difference between us and them
,
Skull thought.
In their place humans would be screaming with
impatience. Like I am now.