Infinite Day (20 page)

“The devil is in the details,” muttered Vero to universal incomprehension, but before he could explain, Lloyd raised a hand and Merral saw unease on his face.

“Excuse me, sir . . .” There was embarrassment in his voice. “Can I talk to you alone?”

“Without me, you mean,” Azeras said with another grunt. “No, I understand. Look, I'm going to get a drink.” He rose and left.

“What is it, Sergeant?” Merral asked after the door had closed.

“Sorry to raise this, but . . . this deception—I've got a question. Who does the talking?”

“Well spotted, Sergeant,” Vero murmured.

Merral leaned back in his chair. “You mean, who says, ‘We are a medical ship; can we come on board?' Well . . . yes. It would have to be Azeras. Or Betafor. They are the only ones who speak Saratan.”
And you don't trust either of them.

“Excellent,” Vero murmured.

Lloyd looked awkward. “Sir, I don't like it. You—
we
—wouldn't know what was being said. They could say anything. Set up a trap.” He looked miserable. “Sorry; it's my job.”

“I know. But what's the alternative?”

“We learn Saratan ourselves,” Vero said. “At least enough to do this. We have five weeks.”

When Azeras returned, he was more positive about the language learning than they had expected.

“Hah, a good idea. I don't want to constantly be translating. That would slow us down and it would look odd.”

“Can it be done?”

“I think so. The lord-emperor has imposed Saratan on all whom he conquers, so there are language aids on board. And because Saratan is a second language for most of the Dominion, it's often not spoken well; a strong and unfamiliar accent would not be unexpected. And Betafor will help. So, let the commander here do it.”

An objection rose in Merral's mind.

“But I can't do it. Lezaroth knows me.”

Azeras gave a low rumble of dismissal. “Betafor can alter your on-screen voice, change your eye coloring, alter hair color. And anyway, it may be the captain you meet.”

“Benek-Hal? I only met him once.”

“There you are. But there is another matter I ought to mention here. I have just been considering it.”

Merral looked at him. “Namely?”

“Armor. On this model, some of you will be fighting. It will be useful.”

“We already have armor.”

“The armor you have was specifically constructed for dealing with Krallen. It may not be much good against impact or beam weapons.”

“And where will we get this better armor?”

“Remember, this ship was a transport. Mostly weapons and supplies. I just checked. The
Star
is carrying enough armor for all the soldiers. Center hold; pallet C3.”

“And can we use it?” Merral asked.

“Yes. But you need to practice with it. There's a whole new set of techniques that you'd need to learn.”

“Then the sooner we start the better.”

Then discussion returned to the mechanics of seizing the
Comet,
and Merral made notes. Eventually, feeling he had learned enough, he adjourned the meeting and left, accompanied by Lloyd.

“Well, let's go and see how the military are doing. And after that, we need to get some exercise.”

Lloyd groaned.

“The fourth level is a jogging track. Two laps is a kilometer. Ten laps, Sergeant.”

Later in the afternoon, Merral and a small team went to the lowest levels, where three holds extended along much of the ship. They entered the forward hold, a long, shadowed compartment framed by girders and ribs and almost entirely filled by two ferry craft. Leaving Laura, Ilyas, and the engineer to assess the suitability of any ships for a rescue operation, Merral walked on with Lloyd and Azeras to the center hold.

“Mind the slug,” Azeras said as they walked through the doorway. Merral sidestepped a formless blob hanging off a pipe. The long, gloomy bay was almost entirely filled with stacked and strapped-down containers.

“Freight. Military equipment. Various stores,” Azeras commented, a distant, almost distracted tone in his voice.

They found C3, and after Azeras confirmed from the writing that the pallet bore armor, Merral arranged for it to be opened and the contents brought up.

Lloyd turned to Merral. “Sir, request we open some of the others?”

“Sergeant, this is not the time or the place to experiment with strange explosive devices.”

“Sorry, sir. Just thought I'd ask.”

They moved on to the rear hold and there, amid more crates, came across two slender cylinders, perhaps two meters long, with stubby tail fins coated in a hard, translucent material.

“What are they, Sarudar? Weapons?”

Azeras stepped forward from the rear of the party. “No. Survey drones. Drop them from orbit, the coating burns off during entry, and you can fly them round in the lower atmosphere for up to a dozen hours.” He pointed to the front. “Cameras here.” He tapped the central top section. “A small payload bay for sampling equipment or anything else.”

Merral nodded. “Assembly seeding and survey ships have similar devices.”
But not this small.

Azeras shrugged. “These are military. They tend to be used to check out landing zones.”

It came to Merral that much of this Dominion military technology could be used for peaceful purposes.
Perhaps when this is all over, we can use it to make habitable worlds more quickly
.
Can good come out of all this evil?

Deep in thought, Merral led them back to the ferry craft.

Laura was examining a panel joint. “Crude workmanship,” she said with a shake of her head.

“Does it make a difference?”

She gave a dismissive shrug and smiled. “
Nah
. It works. We've never had to make military equipment on a large scale. But if I wanted some furniture for my house, I wouldn't get these guys to make it.”

Merral gazed at the ferry craft passenger compartment. “How many seats?”

“Thirty,” Ilyas grunted.

“We need to fit twenty-four soldiers in these going out. That's no problem. But we need to bring another thirty back.”

“Rip out the seats,” Ilyas suggested. “Put webbing down. Have everyone cling on. It'll be a rough journey.” He hesitated. “Of course, to expect to have fifty-four passengers on the way back is . . .
optimistic
.”

Struck hard by what he had said, Merral took a moment to reply. “
No!
Let's not think like that. And if there are . . . losses, we will bring the bodies back. No man or woman deserves to be left there. That's an order.”

As they left the hold, Merral realized that Ilyas's comment seemed to have sown a dark certainty in his mind.

We aren't all going to make it back.

That evening as they ate together in the canteen, the quality of the air seemed to abruptly change. Unbidden, people looked around. “
There!
” cried someone as something that resembled a large octopus began to form just below the roof of the canteen. The chatter ended and chairs were overturned as people stepped back.

Merral, sitting next to Luke, saw how all eyes turned to the chaplain. Someone came over and whispered in Merral's ear. He turned to Luke. “This is something more serious than those slugs. They want you to exorcise it.”

“An issue I have been expecting to arise,” Luke said, his voice low. “But one that raises the subtle peril I mentioned earlier. Well, this may be the time to make a point.”

He rose to his feet. “Crew, soldiers: I want us to pray against this. As you sit or stand around your tables, let us please pray together that the eternal Lord—Father, Son, and Spirit—would move in power here. Such things—and worse—were defeated at the cross. Let us pray.”

For some minutes the hall buzzed with sincere prayer; then without any fuss, Luke closed by offering thanks for the meal.

The tentacled form had gone.

“I didn't see the subtle peril,” Merral said to the chaplain later.

“That's because it was subtle and because it was for me, not you,” Luke said with a private smile. “But for your information, I will not be your resident exorcist. The Lord's people together can do such things. Now, can you pass the coffee?”

Later, as they assembled in the congregation chamber, there was an hour of loud and cheerful music making in a variety of styles. And as the music finished, Vero announced, to cheers, that as they had a copy of the Library files on board, they had a vast number of films. He suggested that “in view of the prevailing lighting conditions” they might find watching some of the black-and-white comedies from the beginning of the moving image era most suitable.

And so for the next hour, they laughed at the antics of an accident-prone man with a perpetually solemn expression. And twelve thousand years and fifteen trillion kilometers away from that sunlit day in California where the films had been made, Buster Keaton once more made men and women forget their sorrows and fears.

That night Merral dreamed again in color. He was in winter woods, the branches reaching up into the sky like carefully penned black lines. Thick snow lay on the ground and a ruddy sun was low in a sky of drained blue. The dream was so pleasant that when he awoke he lay on the bed, feeling the faint vibration of the engines, trying to avoid opening his eyes for as long as possible in the hope that the images would return. But they didn't return, and all on the ship was still gray.

In fact, by the fifth day, their voyage seemed, if it was possible, to turn even grayer. Not only had any novelty of the first days vanished but with increasing depth came more—and stranger—apparitions. Something like a vertical cluster of branches higher than a man appeared on level 3 and moved slowly along the corridor for an hour. Another apparition, like a leathery bird, appeared just below the ceiling of one of the stores and flapped its way around for several hours. In the medical center a skull appeared on a shelf.