Under Strange Suns (24 page)

“That, Aidan, was a very coarse expression, a fine example of joon profanity,” Yuschenkov said. “I’m not sure exactly what a few of the sexual activities he mentioned consist of, but he devoutly wishes that all Lhakovi engage in them with their mothers.”

“Some sort of tribal conflict? North of the Wall and south of the Wall squabbling?”

“Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. The Lhakovi are much more than a tribe. They are a militant religious culture. As I understand it, they have expanded aggressively for the last two hundred years. Two hundred Ghark years, that is. They now occupy the bulk of the continent, and exercise political domination over the rest–except for this rump between the Wall and the sea.”

“I can see those mountains presenting a significant barrier. So the Lhakovi are just waiting for Hannibal and a few circus elephants before swarming over?”

“Well, I would guess it’s partially the Wall and partially the relative paucity of the population on this side. Few converts, not a great deal of loot. It hasn’t been worth it to the Lhakovi to mount a full-scale invasion. Yet. Assuming the veracity of the stories that have filtered in from the south over the years, attack and assimilation are inevitable. Next year or a generation from now, but inevitable.”

“There’s nothing new under the sun. Or under strange suns,” Aidan said, his voice little more than a whisper.

“Eh? Oh, yes. It appears so. We flee to the stars only to find our iniquities waiting for us.” Doctor Yuschenkov slumped, somehow managing to make his spare frame look even gaunter. “I don’t suppose you’ve a drink on you?”

“I wish. I could use a beer.”

“Or whiskey. Whiskey to drink to our dead.”

Aidan hoisted the cup of water. “To Quentin Burge and Michael Thorson. Water doesn’t do them justice. Well, maybe it’s good enough for Thorson.”

He started to pour Yuschenkov another cup, but the physicist raised a restraining finger.

Taking the cup from him, Yuschenkov unsealed the shelter door enough to extend his arm and the cup into the storm outside. After a moment of noise and swirling air currents invading the shelter, Yuschenkov resealed the door and raised the brimming cup in a toast.

“To Sasha, Bill, and Wyatt. I’ve served twenty years for negligent homicide. It’s not penance enough.”

“Negligent homicide? C’mon Doc, how could you know the Y-Drive would crap out?”

“The Y-Drive? The Y-Drive was working fine. No, the fault was mine. Once we hit the system and I saw Ghark orbiting Upsilon Andromeda d, I just had to bring the ship in close. I couldn’t wait. Sasha was begging me to wait, proceed cautiously. Watch, categorize. At least observe a complete orbit.”

Yuschenkov stopped. Aidan couldn’t be sure in the light, but he thought he saw a wet shimmer in the man’s eyes.

“Look, Doctor Yuschenkov, you don’t need to tell me any of this.”

“No, Aidan, this has been eating at me for twenty years. Telling the story won’t absolve me, but it might be cathartic.”

“Okay, Doc. Go on. What did you do?”

“I set a course right to the edge of the moon’s gravity well. I wanted to get the cameras rolling right away, record what I knew would be the first sighting of a habitable world. I was right about that, at least.

“Sasha pointed out Ghark’s satellites, and I corrected course. But what I didn’t do was allow enough time for a complete scan for any smaller objects. See, those two satellites each have a tail of about a half-dozen smaller objects, none bigger than a passenger car, stretching about fifty miles. Well, three of those objects I didn’t bother looking for smashed into the propulsion system, took maneuvering completely off line, and threw us deeper into the gravity well.

“The crew had plenty of time to tell me what they thought of me before impact. The safety devices functioned better than anyone could have hoped. Sasha lived long enough after the crash to call me a murderer before she died of internal bleeding in what must have been excruciating pain. The others didn’t even get a chance to spit in my face; killed instantly.”

Yuschenkov stopped. He drained the rest of the water from the cup. “No, I don’t feel any better at all.”

“Holy shit,” Aidan said. “So you’ve not only been shipwrecked here for twenty years, you’ve been living with that on your conscience?”

“Thanks for the words of comfort, that’s very helpful.”

Conversation ceased. The relentless torrent of rain on the shelter provided the only sound for several moments. Aidan felt like an asshole. He cleared his throat preparatory to an apology. But Yuschenkov beat him to it.

“Sorry, Aidan. Yes, you are right. Twenty years of guilt. Sometimes I can make it through almost an entire day without thinking about it, without seeing the accusing faces of my crew.”

Again they sat without speaking, listening to the storm beat against the shelter.

“I don’t think it is going to let up anytime soon,” Aidan said at last. “Maybe we should call it a day, get back on the road in the morning.”

“Look, Aidan, about –”

“Doc, enough. I’m not a judge. I’m not a priest. I can’t offer condemnation or absolution. My own hands aren’t exactly clean of blood. It seems to me you’re doing a fine job of punishing yourself. If you’re looking for someone to throw stones, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Between us, the slate is clean.

“So let’s leave that topic behind. Okay Doc?”

“Deal, Aidan.”

They shared out another ration brick and Aidan sampled a bite of Checkok’s meal. He found the orange tuber pleasantly spicy and the baked loaf of grains almost offensively bland, while Checkok wrinkled his high forehead at the morsel of chocolate bar that Aidan offered in return.

The alien resealed the shelter door after spitting the bite of chocolate out into drenching gale and the three bedded down for the night.

Aidan brimmed with questions, but after Yuschenkov’s revelation he couldn’t bring himself to move on immediately to other topics. What must it have been like, waking up every day and confronting the fact that your impatience had killed three of your friends?

Aidan gnawed on that thought until sleep took him.

* * *

Brooklynn slept fitfully. Physician’s assistant was an unfamiliar job for her. She had found it exhausting. After Doctor Roberts’ pronouncement that Foster would live, Vance had gone directly to her cabin and dropped onto her bunk, not even bothering to disrobe.

She dreamed. Disembodied heads in the darkness rushed toward her, becoming distinct. Accusing faces screamed abuse at her: Michael Thorson. Quentin Burge. Aidan Carson. Even Gordon Foster. Howling, telling her that it was her fault they had died.

Tiny moans escaped her lips, like the whimpers of a kitten in the throes of a nightmare.

Someone was holding her hand. She lifted her gaze to see her mother pointing upwards. She followed the finger. A rocket that was somehow also Uncle Brennan arced into a star field over which was superimposed the laughing face of Mehmet Azziz.

Aidan Carson loomed again, but whole, not simply his head. Wasn’t he dead? What was he doing walking about in her head?

“It okay, Brooklynn. You’ve got this,” he said to her, his image wiping away Azziz and the starscape. He smiled, drifted away.

She woke. Carson. The man sounded smugly self-confident even as a figment of her imagination. Where did he get the brass to offer encouragement? This was his fault. If she had flown the shuttle — as she had meant to do — they would all be safely on the surface by now. But Carson had insisted on Thorson.

No. That wasn’t right. She was the captain; Carson couldn’t
insist
on anything. Instead he had convinced her. Because he had been right; her place was aboard the ship, commanding. It was hardly Carson’s fault that Thorson disobeyed her orders. So maybe her imagination knew a thing or two and she shouldn’t berate its figments.

Brooklynn dropped into restful slumber. If she dreamed more she did not remember.

* * *

Beneath the growing light of the dawning primary star, Aidan packed away the shelter. All about him he heard the sound of rushing water. The plain was sheeted with the results of the previous night’s deluge. Every fold and draw had become a watercourse, draining seaward the accumulated rainwater and melted mountain runoff. Loose soil, minerals, and shreds of vegetation stained the slough a sludgy blue-grey.

There was a musical quality to it, but Aidan could have done without the constant risk of plunging up to his knees in frigid water. The three of them moved at a deliberate pace, probing ahead with the shaft of one of Checkok’s javelins.

The rain had stopped, but the sky remained overcast, the clouds diffusing the light of the secondary star in a roseate glow.

“How far?” asked Aidan.

“Took about half a day to reach you,” Yuschenkov said. “But then we weren’t slogging through an endless wading pool. Figure most of the day, unless we reach drier ground.”

“Long hump,” Aidan said. “I don’t think I brought enough dry socks.”

“If that’s an example of the quality of your jokes, yeah it’s going to be a long hump.”

Aidan laughed. “I was an MP. Also a weapons specialist on a Special Forces A-Team. I never had the time to work on my stand-up routine.”

“Better. You don’t take yourself too seriously. Good.”

They splashed through another hundred yards. Then, just when Aidan thought they’d settled into quiet slogging, Yuschenkov said, “Tell me about my niece.”

“Brooklynn? She’s something. Driven, smart. Absolutely no quit in that woman.”

Yuschenkov looked at Aidan for a moment, trusting to his probe to keep him from dropping into a deep spot. “She’s made an impression. I can’t wait to see her.”

It was Aidan’s turn to stare at Yuschenkov. The older man was facing forward again. “Yeah,” Aidan said after a moment.

“So tell me how she came to search for me. We’ve got time. Tell me the story.”

“Well, Doc, it was of all people, Mehmet Azziz who provided the clue where you might have gone.”

“‘Of all people?’ What do you mean? Did he come along too?”

Oh shit,
thought Aidan.

“Maybe I ought to back up, start the story a bit earlier.”

Aidan took a few more sloshing steps, arranging the narrative in his mind. Then he explained the destruction of Washington, DC.

“Stop there,” said Yuschenkov. “Azziz? Mehmet Azziz did this? Activated a Y-Drive in the Capitol Building?”

Aidan nodded.

“I don’t believe it. It’s not possible. He wouldn’t. Not Azziz. He was gentle, quiet. Not a...beast. Not a murderer.”

Aidan said nothing, letting Yuschenkov digest the impossible while they sloshed along for another mile.

“Go on. Tell the rest of it,” Yuschenkov said at last. “It must be true, whether I can believe it or not.”

Aidan picked up the story, telling about the box that Azziz had delivered to Brooklynn Vance. The spasm of retaliatory strikes that followed DC, and the later, slow grinding war. He answered a dozen of Yuschenkov’s questions concerning the conflict, the slow-motion disintegration of the United States, the turmoil engulfing the rest of the Earth. He related what Vance had told him about her career, her elaborate preparations for the search and rescue expedition. He told about his own return to civilian life and taking Vance’s job offer. About the crew of the
Yuschenkov
, the flight, the failure of the Y-Drive, and Thorson’s showboating atmospheric entry.

They had eaten a midday meal on the go before he had finished the tale and bright teal was peeking through gaps in the diminishing cloud cover above.

“Wait a minute,” Yuschenkov said when Aidan at length brought the narrative to a limping halt, “Are you telling me that your aerospace scientists don’t know how to re-season a Y-Drive?”

“Re-season? You mean repair it when it conks out? No. That’s why the ships travel in pairs.”

“Shit. It isn’t that hard. I figured out how to do it. Azziz knew...Right. So the
Yuschenkov
is not heading back to Earth to pick up a new shuttlecraft?”

“No.”

“So we’re not getting off Ghark.”

“No.”

“Fucking Azziz.”

“Yeah.”

They continued on in silence. Then Yuschenkov began a monologue in Checkok’s language.

When Yuschenkov finished, the joon stopped walking and the other two halted as well. Checkok strode up to Doctor Yuschenkov, extended his long arm, and placed his fingers against Yuschenkov’s forehead. Then he walked to Aidan and repeated the gesture, adding a few words.

“He says he is sorry you are stranded, and you are welcome to stay in the village,” Yuschenkov said.

“Please thank him for me,” Aidan said. He was mulling over what Yuschenkov must be feeling at the moment, the hopes he must have harbored now dashed. Aidan wasn’t quite ready to deal with his own anxiety at this exile. He didn’t want to allow it to sink in.

“But I still can’t believe it,” Yuschenkov said. “Azziz. My own assistant, and all that time a–what?–a sleeper agent? A terrorist. He was such a nice man. Kind. Polite. Well, fuck him. Nothing kind or polite about mass murder.”