Infinity Squad (27 page)

"If we choose just the right people from Omega Squad," Zazlu was saying in a low voice, "we can bribe enough to turn the others. And then a few missions later-"

"Oakley won't let us choose," Butcher said. "And just one leak is all it takes. We need to play it straight from here on out."

Zazlu held up a finger. "Or start working on removing Oakley himself. My sources say his position is becoming unsecure with the politicians."

"And
my
sources say that he's more desperate than ever," Butcher shot back. "So we need to stay off his radar even more than before."

"Guys guys guys," I said, raising my voice. "No arguing in front of the kids. What's up, Grimstone?"

The young tech private had been edging closer to our group for the last ten seconds, coming up behind Butcher and Zaz. I had been watching, as a good First Lieutenant should.

Grimstone had a troubled look on his face. "Well, I just wanted to tell you guys, I've been trying to jam headband signals to prove how Ridley died, like you asked me to."

"Is that what I asked you to do?" I asked with a smirk. "It seems so long ago, I'd forgotten."

Grimstone fidgeted. "Something like that. Anyway, it worked."

We sat up in our chairs.

"What do you mean, 'worked'?" Ann-Marie demanded.

"I can jam the base receivers for short enough times that no one notices, but long enough to prevent a good transfer. But when I did that, I noticed Ridley's band was still getting signal from somewhere."

My heartbeat spiked. "Another set of res tanks?"

Rex nodded, and pointed straight up. "The orbiting station."

I looked at Butcher. "When does the next shuttle leave?"

"An hour and a half."

I stood up. "Grimstone, you're with me. Let's go."

The orbital shuttle was the triangular wedge that screamed up and away from the flightline every few days as the base needed more clones or as the space station needed more toilet paper. It turned out to be surprisingly easy to hitch a ride on it, although this security was better than the one around Oakley's office and did make us surrender our sidearms.

I tried to ignore the empty feeling on my hip as acceleration crushed Grimstone and I into soft passenger couches. and the sky outside went from blue to white to black. With the semi-fusion engines the pilot could have taken us up as slowly as an airplane, but I guess this was as exciting to him as a milk run and he wanted it over fast. We got less than a minute of seeing the magnificent blue disk of Angie's Star II laid out below us before the shuttle turned and our windows only showed black space.

"Someday soon we're going to take this run for real," I told Grimstone. "You in that body, me in this one. Our tour will be over and we'll be headed for a wormgate transport, going back to Earth."

"One can hope," he replied.

"Trust me," I said. "I'm your First Lieutenant."

We started our docking approach to the station a few minutes later. We helped the pilot unload his cargo of fresh fruit and croissants to pay for our trip. It wasn't so bad, especially since it let us play in zero-G.

"Croissants," I laughed, doing a corkscrew twist as I pushed the marked crate before me. "What is it with people and croissants around here?"

"They are a light any-time snack," Grimmy replied, floating backwards and pulling a crate of strawberries with him.

We finished the unloading quickly, but the loading of clones to take back planetside had to be done without unhooking any of their medical tubes and was just a tad creepy, like moving warm dead bodies. Who all looked like me. We let the professionals handle it and toured the station.

It wasn't really a space station, just a modified transport which had come through the wormgate early during the war and been left in a parking orbit. Every wall was metal which wouldn't have been so weird if just one of them looked like a
floor
. But no, every wall was a wall and the writing pointed in three directions so up was a matter of opinion.

It seemed like about 25 people manned the station, but the volume could have held twenty times that. Most of the station was dedicated to growing clones in these creepy goop-filled vats, but in one huge room with again no damned direction of up, Grimmy and I came across 100 zero-G res tanks on standby with 100 fully grown versions of me waiting in them.

"I'd heard about other colonies doing something like this," Grimstone whispered as we floated and looked at the mass of tanks. Whispering seemed appropriate. These were three times as many tanks as we had planetside, not constantly cared for under cheerful lighting like Doc Murphy did, but stuffed in the dark, waiting and dusty. Like a mass grave waiting to be discovered.

My throat started going dry. "Why?"

"It's an insurance policy. Probably put in place after what happened at Coverstone. They want to make sure
someone
from the colony survives, no matter what."

I looked over the sealed tanks with their sleeping passengers. "A lifeboat."

Grimmy nodded.

"Check the records for Ridley."

"I don't have the auth-"

"Check 'em."

Grimstone started pulling electronics from his backpack, but instead of hooking it to the terminals in the room, he hooked the equipment to parts of Ridley's dissected buffering band and his own. Then he went into a geek trance.

"Well?" I demanded, after five minutes of keeping lookout down the hallway.

He was shaking his head. "It's confusing."

"Unconfuse it."

"Ridley's band did get a ping from another address in the few hours before he died, but it wasn't this one. 25734 is the base. 00911 is this room."

"Cute."

He shrugged. "What else would you call a lifeboat? Our bands switched over when the shuttle got close enough. But this other address from Ridley's band is... 7A21G."

Now my heart started racing again.

"Another ship in orbit?"

He gulped. "Possibly."

"Can you tell if he resurrected there?"

"No record of that. It was just a ping, a few hours before he died."

"A test?"

"I don't know."

"Keep looking."

I cornered one of the station doctors in their kitchen and over the course of fifteen minutes, gently extracted the information that they hadn't had a single resurrection on board the station yet. I didn't sense that he was lying and kept my interest casual the whole time. When the announcement for the shuttle departure was made, I said goodbye and reluctantly started floating back toward the docking bay.

Where an encounter robot was waiting.

When had the Benefactors come back in to the system? Or had they never left? No, we would have heard about that.

I was going to respectfully pass right by but then the robot reached forward to access the wall panel and the entire wall opened into a huge glass window looking down at the planet.

"I... didn't know they did that," I whispered, not able to look away from the view of blue oceans, white clouds and green land below. The window was crystal clear and stretched almost from wall to wall. It was glorious.

"Many do not. This one does," the robot said, staring out at the planet just like me. "We do not have such direct viewing ports on our ships. All our information is...filtered."

It wasn't an inflection, but just the hint of an inflection trying to make itself known in the robot's voice. But it was something. I moved to float next to him and we looked out at the planet together in silence.

I pushed all my courage into a hard firm ball and asked, "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"It is."

I waited thirty seconds for anything else, then asked, "Is this why you came to the station?"

The robot's head and camera eyes turned to face me. "Why did you come, Lieutenant Jonah Forrest?"

My stomach started tumbling, and not just from the zero-G. "You recognize me?"

"You gave me a most informative report to read about your patrol."

"Oh, yeah, the..." Lightning snake mission, I almost said, but caught myself. "...day in front of the gate. Our first Hell-Spider kills."

"Yes. Your later patrols have been going just as well?"

I swallowed. I had to force myself to remember that this wasn't really a robot, but just a remote control toy being operated remotely by a real living being, tens or thousands of miles away. A living being able to catch lies if I told them poorly. A living thing whose species had the power to starve every human on the planet.

"Very well."

"Excellent. I would like to read your other reports sometime."

"Why?"

"Your reports would provide an unfiltered viewpoint. So we can assure that this war is being conducted humanely. Without nuclear-based weapons, replicating nanotechnology or war machines capable of wide-scale destruction."

I looked the robot in its camera sockets. "How wide-scale are we talking?"

It tilted its head at me. "You have something to tell us?"

"If you come down to the pla-"

Grimstone rushed through to the shuttle dock then, blushing like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

"What did you find?" I demanded as he flew by.

"Nothing! Let's just go home!" he said, flying right into the shuttle and strapping himself into a seat. "It was nothing!"

I shook my head then turned back to the bot. "Come down to the planet. I've got something to show you."

The bot wheeled and panned its camera head all around the Apache attack helicopter, spending extra time at the missile pods and the sixteen shiny warheads poking out the front of each. It didn't ask questions and I just let it keep examining.

"Yes. It is good you showed me this. A machine of this destructive scope is of great concern here."

"But all the other killing we're doing is fine? Artillery, grenades, flamethrowers, that's all okay?"

The robot rose to its full height and suddenly I regretted the sarcasm in my tone. But something didn't add up.

"Intelligent species meeting through the wormgates will always come into conflict, eventually," the Encounter bot told me. "As keepers of the gates, our responsibility is to see that the collateral damage from such conflicts is minimized."

I nodded at the attack helos. "So you'll prevent their use?"

"I will take this information back to our committee. They will decide and may discuss the matter with your commanding officer."

Great. They would send Oakley a strongly worded letter. After a committee met. Space UN wasn't any better than human UN.

"Do not worry, First Lieutenant Jonah Forrest. You have taken the correct action."

As the robot started wheeling away, I said, "And what do I call you? In case I need to pick you out of a crowd of Benefactors?"

It turned to me. "You may call me Envoy Number 2," it said, then returned to its sleeker, curvier alien shuttle.

I watched that ship take off making a tenth of the noise our shuttles did and wondered to myself. Envoy Number 2 had said 'collateral damage'.

Now where did a nice alien like him pick up a nasty human buzzword like that?

I ran into Doc Murphy on the way back. Okay, I swung by the res tanks then the cafeteria and finally knocked on her door but it was still
on the way
.

"Got something for you, Doc," I said, giving her the results of our amygdala testing. The only person with more deaths than myself I had been able to test without arousing suspicion was Lesko from the Immortals, who had now gotten up to eight resurrections. "I hope it's enough."

"It would be better if we had more data," she said, tucking her red hair behind her ear in a way that I could write poems about.

"Sorry. That's all I've got."

"Is this because they shut off access to the Spider? This has something to do with him, doesn't it?"

"What? Shut off how? Look, Doc, I gotta go."

"You're always saying that," I think I heard her sigh under her breath as I hurried away.

Three-Spot was indeed shut off. Two BlackShirts waited in front of the Holding Room door, scowling at everyone who passed by.

"What's going on?" I asked one. "You expecting him to escape?"

He got scowlier. "If you're not a scientist, piss off!"

"Whatever. Sorry you're on the rag today."

Did I mention I hated MPs? I strolled around the corner of the hall and leaned against it, calming my mind.

Three-Spot, how are you doing in there?