When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (30 page)

Violet said, “Just like in the Glow-Ice days. You and me. Dûmnahn...”

You and me. Dûmnahn. The dead and the dying. Remember them too.

She said, “I wonder where he is now? Sometimes I still miss him, after all these years.”

I held her close and said, “Maybe we’ll see him again some time. After all...” After all, he’s still alive. We could easily run into... one of him. Run into a being somewhere that calls itself Dûmnahn and remembers both of us, just the way you remember characters in a book. Not
quite
like old friends, but...

Violet whispered, “Bastards.”

That was like old times too, back when she still had the will to hate what’d been done to us all by... Hell. By the people who pay us, that’s all. When did we lose the will to hate them? Maybe when they gave us these nice, cushy jobs. Maybe when they let us... be together.

All these weeks, so much like Heaven. So much like...

And then, unanticipated, came the warning chime, loud in our ears.

Over the freeze-frame, Palafox’s voice cried out: “Tally-
ho
!”

Bring your revolver, Watson. The game is afoot...

Little blue lights, sparkling against the sky.

Coming our way.

o0o

The little blue lights descended on us, but we’d seen them in time, several wings of Jettie fighter craft, spiraling in toward us, spiraling in for the kill I suppose. As it happened, we had better ships than they did.

Violet oiled out from under my arm, slid back up to the pilot’s nest, hatch snapping shut behind her. I felt my heart start to pound as I ignited the inertial harnesses, as I put my hands in the sidesaddle interface controls, looking at this freeze-frame and that, making sure all was right with my engines and subsystems and...

The ship bounced and tugged at me through the inertial compensator field as Violet made it twist and turn, our wingman, the ship holding Santry and Regis, turning hard alongside us, crossing the path of the three LSTs, whose Sammies, right now, must be holding on tight, hoping they weren’t about to die, swooping low above Smoky Rose who, I noticed abstractedly, was rolling about its long axis.

Right. Right. Things you can do too...

I said, “Weapons systems up. Optical alignments to null. Pulse radar...” Damn it. Ah. There.

Something flashed outside, nowhere nearby.

I shoved my face into the multiplexer and had at them.

There. There.

Bright blue stars whirling all around.

That one. Now.

The star went nova, burst into a pale blue puffball and was gone, like so many dandelion seeds blowing on the wind. Do I really remember that? Yes I do. We had dandelions in Audumla, I think. Can’t remember. Can’t remember.

Not now, I...

There! There! That one!

Another blue fireflower, another Jettie gone off to Uncreated Time.

Twisting. Twisting. Multiplexer looking around. Looking for...

Cold sweat bathing my face.

All gone. Every last one of them.

Three LSTs cruising onward serenely, as though nothing ever happened. Over there, Smoky Rose was falling back into place, gunports sliding shut all over its hull. Wonder how many Jetties it killed, all by itself?

Orb.

I got two.

Good work. Good work, I...

All around us, Squadron 33’s turretfighters were sliding back into place, slowing down, taking up there positions and I...

I said, “Violet?”

Nothing.

“Violet? Where are Santry and Regis?” Not like them to be out of position.

There was a long, empty silence, then, ever so softly, she said, “They bought it, Murph.”

I tried hard not to understand, but... I can’t remember. Did I see it happen? Can’t remember. Some time, while I was making fireflowers out of those two Jettie ships, a Jettie gunner was looking through his own multiplexer, heart pounding, thoughts chaotic, as he made a fireflower out of them.

Nothing left of them but atoms.

Atoms and memories.

And whoever did it, they’re gone too.

How many people did we kill today?

Don’t know.

More to come.

 So we flew on, flew on to Morgan’s Round, dropped on it out of a dead black sky, doing our job of killing, and Palafox, damn him, played “Hall of the Mountain King” over the intercom, while we flew and killed, and killed some more, until the job was done.

o0o

It seemed like no more than one long day, two quick pulses of battle separated by a few score hours of unnervingly empty travel, stars a motionless backdrop as we slid our deadly way toward Morgan’s Round. Then we fought, twisting, turning, skidding from kill to kill, while Smoky Rose turned its guns on a garden-green world below, fires blooming in cityscape as we fought through the heavens.

Somewhere near the end of it all, long after the Sammies were down and doing
their
job, 331 was rammed by a dense ball of electrically charged plasma, the hot, gasified remnants of an enemy ship.

I remember how Violet screamed as fire danced and roared on the inside of our hull. Remember how sparks jumped from my fingertips as I pulled them from my sidesaddle interfaces. Maybe I screamed too, calling out Orb’s name in vain. Not much time for screaming: I felt the ship surge and buck underneath me as Violet struggled to regain control, as I made a frenzied dance from frame to frame, trying to see if...

Palafox: “
331
! Status, 331!”

“Uhhh...” Orb, get it together! “Gun systems down, Leader. We’re out of it.” No shit... “Uh. Engine power at 4 percent and falling.” Falling fast.

“Can you make it?”

“Uh...”

Violet snapped, “We’ll be all right, Leader. Pick us a spot.”

Silence.

She said, “God damn it, Palafox!”

He said, “Uh. OK, 331. Sammies’ve recaptured the Standard stage at Hobart 5 Intersection, just over the limb from your position. I’ll let ‘em know you’re coming.”

Very dry: “Thanks.”

And what if she’d told him the same thing my instruments told me, that we stood a better than even chance of splattering ourselves all over Morgan’s nice round landscape? Well, you know the drill. Try to come down on residential habitat. Not so god-damned expensive to replace.

The ship started to shudder and sway, stars, explosions, pseudoplanet on fire below, all of it tipping back and forth, back and forth. I realized with a pang of horror that the inertial fields had come down. We run into anything now, anything at all, and I’ll be jelly between the switches of my fucking circuit breaker panels in the twinkling of an eye.

“Violet?”

Moment of silence, then a tight, “Not now.”

OK. Understood. Do your job.

I found a control frame that was still working, put both my hands in and started to feel around. Restitutor Orbis, I... Well, shit. Lookee here. I mated two disconnected subsystems that seemed otherwise all right, felt the world suddenly stabilize as the compensators came back up. Watched, blinking, as the engine power histograms climbed toward green.

Violet’s voice, gasping in my ear: “Oh, God, Murphy! Thank you.”

And so, down we went over the humped-up hills of Morgan’s Round, me at least praying all the way, hoping like hell old Orb was out there somewhere, approving of the work I’d done, brave, brave little man-child, that he’d give us a little push, you see, and today wouldn’t be
my
day to settle back for a nice long rest in Uncreated Time.

There!

Familiar looking Standard ARM installation, buildings like broken teeth, fire and smoke still coming out of them, surrounded by neat green lawns, little lakes and... yes. One nice landing stage, painted pale blue, Standard ARM logo with its blazing sun and double-thunderbolt, just off to one side of the Sammy LST...

Violet said, “Jesus. Hang on, Murph!”

I felt the shields sputter and start to fall. Reached inside the control frame again, but... fuck. Useless. The ground seemed to be coming up awfully fast now and... Fire sprayed outside as we poked through the eutropic shield, hull suddenly coming alive, rattling, banging, wind moaning just a few cems away.

Now. Now... I felt like shouting up to Violet, telling her we
really
ought to be slowing up now, getting ready to settle down on the stage and... I took a quick look at the histogram, watched it fall through blue and amber to red. One percent. No more.

So.

I tried to imagine what it would be like when we hit the ground in just a few seconds. Would I see the walls explode apart, just before I died? Would I carry that memory with me into death, a seed on which my next life would have to form?

And how many of those marines are going to die now, just because we were afraid to?

No answer.

The image of Restitutor Orbis and the promise of Uncreated Time suddenly faded, receding beyond my reach, leaving me with nothing.

Then Violet applied lateral thrust. I could hear her grunt, high and raw, through the intercom, as the world outside twisted and spun, going flat underneath us, racing by, racing... the ship screeched as she touched down, running not quite parallel to the surface.

Bang
.

The emergency pyros went off by themselves and the ventral hatch blew, falling away. Down below my ass, a hand’s breadth away, I could see the blue-painted surface of the landing stage rushing on by.

Look at those fucking sparks, will you?

The ship screeched to a halt, rocked once, and was still. I sat back, looking up at the ceiling, with all its dead instruments, smelling a tang of burnt metal, feeling the sweat trickle out of my hair and run down the back of my neck like hot oil.

Then the connecting hatch to the pilot’s nest, twisted and askew in its mount, creaked open, and there was Violet, blood coming from her nose, looking down at me, eyes so very wide.

She whispered, “Murph?”

I reached down comically and felt the seat of my pants. “Hey. Do farts have lumps in them?”

A bizarre, lopsided grin, then Violet started to sniffle as she slid through the hatch on top of me, getting blood on my nice, clean uniform.

o0o

It took less than a minute for the rescue team to get over to what was left of 331 and get us out of there, though they said they were somewhat alarmed when they cranked open the upper hatch and found the pilot’s nest empty. There’s no provision for bailing out of a turretfighter. I mean, where the hell would you go?

They had an ambulance ready, but we didn’t really need it. I had some burns on my hands that they fixed up with a quick spray; Violet’s nosebleed had come, apparently, from the force of her sudden stop as she flew out of her crash net and went face-first into her dead viewscreens.

I was absolutely fucking
blind
up there, she told the medics. Just
hoping
the god damned radar altimeter was right...

Back along our track, you could see a long, white gouge where we took the paint off the landing stage. We missed running into the LST by about six ems, which would’ve made a fuck of a mess.

Scared the shit out of
me
said the medic. We were parked right by the fucking
ramp
...

Good enough is good enough. I turned and looked in the direction we’d been going. Edge of the stage right there. Then a parking lot full of surface effect cars, most of them still neatly in their spaces, the cars of the landing stage employees. Then a nice terminal building whose front glass wall had been blown out by some earlier event, shards sprinkled like diamonds all over the lawn.

Inside the blown-open building was a small crowd, couple of hundred people I guess, under guard by a few armed Sammies. Waiting for something.

The Sammy officer who’d come out to see if he could help looked where I was looking. “Not sure I feel sorry for them.”

I looked at him, then back at the people in the ruined terminal. “Who...”

“Employees... well. Former employees of Standard ARM.”

Violet was standing beside me now, nosebleed over. And looking at something else, standing very still. A cargo shuttle was grounded to one side of the terminal, bay doors yawning open, and another group of people, people tied together by what looked like chains, were being led inside, being made to lie on the deck, also under guard.

Furry people of various sorts. Optimods.

The officer said, “Valuable property I guess. We heard they were being taken away for... reprogramming.” He glanced at Violet and said, “Sorry ma’m. I didn’t mean...”

She just looked at him, then shrugged, a barely perceptible shift of her shoulders.

I gestured at the people, the human beings sitting inside the terminal. “What about them?”

I don’t think he wanted to answer, looking at me owl-eyed for a second. “Well.” He looked down at his feet, seeming to search for something, then up at the sky. Took a long, deep breath, then looked back at me. “We’ve been told to shoot them.”

Twelve. It’s too easy

It’s too easy to say, War is Hell.

War is more like a poem.

My war’s like a red, red rose...

Fucking idiot.

After those opening battles, it went on and on, all the same. That’s all I remember, really. We fly around. I shoot the guns. The explosions are pretty. People die. What the hell are they fighting for?
Freedom
? What the hell is that?

You’re born out of nothing. You live for a while. You die. You go back to nothing.

What kind of fool dies for a word?

A better class of fool than the one who dies for a paycheck?

Don’t know.

I remember the pretty battles; I remember the between times, making love with my pretty purple fox. If I might die for a paycheck, what the hell am I living for? The wet between my purple fox’s legs? Maybe the light in her eyes when she looks at me.

Don’t know.

Other things changed, after those first battles. We never again talked about Regis and Santry, or any of the other lost ones we’d known so well. Made friends with our comrades, sure, went out and got drunk, raised hell, did what we were supposed to do. But you can’t quite get hold of them, these ghostlike friends. Not any more.