When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (23 page)

These are the things you see in all the old cartoon dramas. Some talking bear gets one stuck over his head and runs howling to the horizon, furious hornets stinging him on the ass while his betters laugh.

It was Styrbjörn I think who made a joke that day about getting up a game of touch football with the thing. The rest of us laughed at his wit, remembering our cartoons.

Big, dark portals on the Mobilitzyn ships gaped open suddenly and swarms of blue fireflies came pouring out, some swinging toward Squadrons Three and Seven, some making for
Bakunin
, some... well, streaming toward the rest of us.

“Commodore... ?”

Getting tired of that.

I called in the other squadrons, directing them this way and that, watching as portals opened on each and every one of the Mobilitzyn ships, portals belching out streams of blue bees, bees coming straight for us. Which ship does Jade command? I forgot which squadron she joined.

“Commodore... ?”

I said, “Well. If I’d been the Mobilitzyn commander, I’d’ve sent at least half frigates to guard the carriers. This guy...” Every last one of the ships a carrier, filled to the scuppers as they say with fast little fighters, closing in on us now, outnumbering my fleet three to one.

The pilot said, “So what do we do now?”

I smiled at him and shrugged. “Nothing left now but to fight. That’s what it’s all about anyway.”

Blue light suddenly flared up from the astrogation frame, flickering around our little chamber, and, when I looked, I saw
Bakunin
had exploded, a great, mottled ball of nuclear fire, taking out Three and Seven, taking out an entire squadron of Mobilitzyn fighters as well, doing nothing at all to square the odds.

The pilot stared down at me from his nest for the better part of a minute, and I saw by his eyes that he was deathly afraid. Should’ve thought about this while you had the chance, hm? I said, “Let’s go.” He turned away then, put white-knuckled hands to his controls, while our three gunners turned to their weaponry and the ship began shuddering around us.

Time.

I shoved the astrogation frame out of the way, grabbed the controls of my own gun and put my head down in the nerve induction box. There. Blue lights rolling up all around. I normalized the sighting system, told the gun what I wanted it to do and...

There.

Particle beam sizzling, a line of hard yellow pixydust, swinging, swinging... one of the blue lights flared and burst, shards tumbling away, disappearing in night.

That’s one.

The ship shuddered hard, twisting under me, and someone shouted
yahoo
, maybe the pilot, courage emerging in all this action, maybe only one of the gunners, taking out his quarry.

There.

Aim. Tracking, tracking... sizzle of yellow, another blue light exploding in flame, a brief helter-skelter of debris, and that’s two...

Something hit me in the back of the head and bounced away as I tried to track a third. Definitely the pilot’s voice now, a panicky babble of swear words.

Tracking, tracking...
bam
. That’s three.

“Commodore... ?”

Tracking, tracking...

Something slammed hard into my back, making me break contact with the gun controls, and I found myself in a cockpit full of blue smoke and coughing men, snakes of fire crawling here and there on the inside of the hull armor.

“Shit.”

I started to lean back into the gun, but the pilot said, “Commodore, I’m getting us out of here while we’ve still got plasma pressure. Maybe I can make Suzdal. Maybe not.”

I pulled the astrogation frame back into my lap and looked inside. We were already behind the principal scrimmage plane of the Mobilitzyn fleet, and there weren’t many red hornets flaring any more, just swarms of blue bees making for their home ships. I let the frame count for me and shook my head slowly. Not one single carrier destroyed.

I sat back in my crash couch and relaxed, feeling
655
shiver underneath me as the pilot tried to save our lives. Be a hard death, suffocating out here rather than dying in flame with our brethren, hm? Tried to think about all this
ours is not to reason why
business, but...

You knew. You knew this would happen, didn’t you? And yet...

And yet you went right ahead and did it anyway.

Fool?

Or hero?

No answer, as usual.

o0o

I remember standing on a landing stage near the north pole of Suzdal, the one we’d left only a day or two ago, standing beside the smoking ruin of
MS-655
, smoking ruin long ago abandoned by its crew, standing under an eerie sky of green and gold, red Wernickë turned rusty mud brown seen through a eutropic shield hardened by burst after burst of intense gamma radiation and a swarming neutron surf.

Far away beyond the sky, in the direction of the Pup, you could see blue lights flaring, mingled with lovely fleurettes of scarlet as Broadbent’s fleet did its best against Mobilitzyn, playing tag, catch as catch can among the gravitational and magnetic anomalies around Sirius B.

Days away.

No one will come back from that one.

Just as well.

 Wish it was me?

Maybe. Maybe not.

I watched another little fighter, one of ours of course, dip down through the eutropic shield and begin straggling in over the field, trailing pale blue smoke. Maybe this one will be Jade’s little ship.

It hit the edge of the apron with way too much lateral momentum, belly scraping along, flaring sparks. Good job, that pilot, working with mangled hardware... her nose dug in and the little ship tumbled end over end, gouting smoky orange flame, shedding bits of this and that.

Good job.

The field’s fire suppression automata went into action, vomiting foam while the ambulance sirens wailed. Medical equipment here’s not as good as what Standard had, back in the Glow-Ice Rebellion. Most of
these
people will die.

Unless Mobilitzyn Associates wants them saved for some reason or another.

So much for Act One.

o0o

I remember standing once again on the balcony of my apartment, looking out at the burning city, struggling to remember its name, failing, my mind seeming as hazy as the smoke that hung beneath Suzdal’s eutropic shield.

Tiredly:
Clydesbûrh
.

Capital of what would have been the People’s Republic of Sirius.

Would have been.

There were fires everywhere, but localized, mainly, perhaps entirely set, by fallen bits of military debris. Our own munitions, failing, falling back on the people who fired them. Even pieces of crashed Mobilitzyn fighters, exploded beyond the sky, continuing along their inertial track and...

I heard the glass door slide open behind me and marveled briefly that it was still unbroken, despite the concussive events it must have suffered already. Jade came up behind me, leaned against my back, looking over my shoulder at incipient devastation.

“It still looks beautiful,” she whispered, breath blowing on the short hair over my ear.

The city was burning, yes, here and there, everywhere soon, but, beyond the skyline, you could see the trees and mountains, the forests and plains of Suzdal, crescent Wernickë hanging in the sky, reflecting bright Siriuslight, Sirius flaring just on the horizon, subdued by the shield’s optics.

I could feel her breasts flattening against my back, the gentle nudge of one pelvic blade. Maybe that other brief bump, the mere promise of a contact, was her pubis bone, below that, one knee touching the back of mine.

She said, “The others are waiting. We’ve got to go now.”

I felt an urge to make some bitter response, along the lines of,
Why bother
? Nothering ever changes, you see, anod now? Well.

It’s all over now, isn’t it?

There was a flicker-flash, just above the sky, no more than a few kems away.

Disturbance in the eutropic shield.

Sharp, high squeal, making splinters in my ears.

Then the incoming missile burst through and slammed down on one of our missile sites, bloomed into an impossible ball of violet light that made my eyes squeeze shut, tears leaking under the lids.

The pressure wave slammed me in my face, carrying with it a hard thump of technological thunder.
Bam
. Then a long echo.

When I opened my eyes, the fire was dark red, rising from the crater it’d melted in Suzdal’s ersatz ground, rising like a little mushroom cloud, deathshead rising back through the skyhole it’d made, up into outer space and gone.

The eutropic shield tried to heal behind it, rings forming, squeezing the hole shut, leaving a brown bullseye scar on the sky.

I staggered back, banging into Jade, almost making her fall, turned and looked at her.

She reached forward, eyes wide, taking me by both arms: “We’ve got to get
out
of here, Murph! Come on. The others are
waiting
. Broadbent’s
dead
, for God’s sake!
You’re
in charge now!”

I nodded slowly, looked over my shoulder at the yellow-white hole where the missile site and its crew had been. Right. In charge. Responsible. I said, “Of... course. We’d... better get busy.”

Something kindled in her eyes then. She smiled, leaned forward, kissed me lightly on the lips and, as she turned away, said, “That’s the spirit.”

Never say die, hm?

Which story is that?

o0o

Crouching in the dry brush lining Plumbago Ridge, near the crest of the Yellow Mountains, rounded peaks by the western shores of the Saddleback Sea, I froze under a hard teal sky, sky banded with streaks of deep vermilion, listening to the soft grumble of fighter moduli running at minimum power.

I raised my head cautiously, flipping my flash goggles down, and looked out over the flat black waters of the sea. There. Two narrow gray lines, slowly lengthening, beyond them, beyond the gently curving horizon, a column of brown smoke rising in a fat wedge, staining the heavens above. I remember how the ground shook, how the whole world shook, when the missile hit.

Try as I might, I can’t remember what the target was.

Doesn’t matter.

Not any more.

Jade’s hand was on my calf then, warm through the leg of my pants.

Funny. It seems like it should be cold up here, like we should be crawling through snow. But Suzdal’s become a steambath from all the fire, explosions, destruction. As if the seas are boiling now.

I flipped up the goggles and looked back along the length of my own body. Jade, with her goggles still down, half lying on the flitgun resting beside me, beyond her, beyond the gently curving horizon of her backside, six more men and women, waiting.

Soon, now.

 In the distance, I could hear another soft rumbling. All right, our information’s correct. Here they come. I crept forward through the bushes again, dragging my gun along, slid around the bole of a thick old maple tree, crawling across hard, lumpy roots, slid to the edge of the bluff.

Down below, a road. On the road, some trucks.

Suzdal is like a world from the past, filling my life now with so many datatrack dramas I can’t separate reality from fiction from history from...

Orb knows they could have brought flitters and flier-gunships. Nothing. All they brought were carriers full of space-fighters, troop transports full of ground pounders. So they’ve had to use whatever local transport they could impound, which was most of it, and Suzdal is an antique world, almost, not quite, left behind by history.

Jade crept up beside me, flipping up her goggles so she could look down at the Mobilitzyn truck convoy sliding between the hills, and I could smell a faint touch of jasmine, some last concession to the memory of her old life.

“Well,” she said, “Glad to see them out here at last.” Bitter, angry grin on her face, a smile of real pleasure.

In the months since they’d so quickly wiped out our space fleets, since they’d taken over the principle habitats around Wernickë, since they’d occupied the cities of big artificial worlds like Suzdal, they’d tried to sit us out.

But that never works. Sängershaven. Mars. Afghanistan. Vietnam. America. The Song Empire. Achaemenid Persia. To name just a few, the lessons of history.

Now they have to come out here and find us. Find and kill us all.

And, sometimes, with her perfume in my head, I think about the fun Jade and I would have, if we weren’t so busy with the business of killing and dying.

I flipped my goggles back down, made sure they were tuned to just the right frequency, checked the settings on my flitgun, and said, “
Now
.”

A long collective moment, eight men and women steeling themselves, scraping together the scraps of courage, then we rose from concealment, standing like little gods on the brow of the hill, outlined against the sky, and opened fire.

Down on the road, little red flowers began twinkling all over the trucks as we hit them with our explosive rounds. Down on the road, as the trucks turned and spilled, you could hear men and women starting to scream. Shouts of anger and agony, dismay, confusion, noncoms bellowing commands. Down on the road, you could see the soldiers scrambling from the trap made of wrecked trucks, running this way and that, scrambling for the safety of the trees.

When they started to return fire, little missiles snapping around us, exploding into the trunks of trees, ripping up the bushes atop Plumbago Ridge, we ducked down, ducked down and dispersed.

Alone now, well separated from Jade, wherever she’d gone, I got myself one good view of the road after another, crawled around ‘til I could see the ravine beyond. Forget the fucking trucks, they’re on fire anyway. Go for the soldiers. Flitgun rattling, shaking in my hands. Six men near the end of the ravine, six men who thought they were safely hidden, sprawling suddenly as my fire twinkled over them, six men dying not quite suddenly enough.

Though it was too far, I imagined I could hear them screaming, hear the liquid sounds they made as blood flooded their lungs, hear the soft
splat
of bursting flesh.