Old Man's War Boxed Set 1 (20 page)

You look terrible
—he sends.

I can’t respond. I can only stare.

I hope I can see the constellations where I’m going
—he sends. He sends it again. He sends it again. He doesn’t send it after that.

Chittering. Rough pads gripping my arm. Asshole recognizes the chittering and beams me a translation.

—
This one yet lives.

—
Leave it. It will die soon. And the green ones aren’t good eating. They’re not ripe yet.

Snorting, which Asshole translates as [laughter].

“Holy fuck, would you look at this,” someone says. “This son of a bitch is alive.”

Another voice. Familiar. “Let me see.”

Silence. The familiar voice again. “Get this log off him. We’re taking him back.”

“Jesus Christ, boss,” the first voice says. “Look at him. You ought to just put a fucking bullet in his brain. It’d be the merciful thing to do.”

“We were told to bring back survivors,” the familiar voice says. “Guess what, he survived. He’s the
only
one that survived.”

“If you think this qualifies as surviving.”

“Are you done?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Now move the goddamn branch. The Rraey are going to be on our ass real soon.”

Opening my eyes is like trying to lift metal doors. What allows me to do it is the blasting pain I feel as the branch is moved off my torso. My eyes fly open and I aspirate in the jawless equivalent of a scream.

“Christ!” the first voice says, and I see it’s a man, blond, flinging away the massive branch. “He’s awake!”

A warm hand on the side of what’s left of my face. “Hey,” the familiar voice says. “Hey. You’re all right now. It’s okay. You’re safe now. We’re taking you back. It’s okay. You’re okay.”

Her face comes into view. I know the face. I was married to it. Kathy has come for me.

I weep. I know I’m dead. I don’t mind.

I begin to slide away. “You ever see this guy before?” I hear the blond guy ask. “Don’t be stupid,” I hear Kathy say. “Of course not.” I’m gone.

Into another universe.

“Oh, you’re awake,” someone said to me as I opened my eyes. “Listen, don’t try to speak. You’re immersed in solution. You’ve got a breathing tube in your neck. And you don’t have a jaw.”

I glanced around. I was floating in a bath of liquid, thick, warm and translucent; beyond the tub I could see objects but couldn’t focus on any of them. As promised, a breathing tube snaked from a panel at the side of the bath toward my neck; I tried to follow it all the way to my body, but my field of vision was blocked by an apparatus surrounding the lower half of my head. I tried to touch it, but I couldn’t move my arms. That worried me.

“Don’t worry about that,” the voice said. “We’ve turned off your ability to move. Once you’re out of the tub, we’ll switch you back on again. Another couple of days. You still have access to your BrainPal, by the way. If you want to communicate, use that. That’s how we’re talking to you right now.”

Where the fuck am I
—I sent.
And what happened to me
—

“You’re at the Brenneman Medical Facility, above Phoenix,” the voice said. “Best care anywhere. You’re in intensive care. I’m Dr. Fiorina, and I’ve been taking care of you since you got here. As for what happened to you, well, let’s see. First off, you’re in good shape now. So don’t worry. Having said that, you lost your jaw, your tongue, most of your right cheek and ear. Your right leg was snapped off halfway down your femur; your left one suffered multiple fractures and your left foot was missing three toes and the heel—we think those were gnawed off. The good news there was that your spinal cord was severed below the rib cage, so you probably didn’t feel much of that. Speaking of ribs, six were broken, one of which punctured your gallbladder, and you suffered general internal bleeding. Not to mention sepsis and a host of other general and specific infections brought on by having open wounds for days.”

I thought I was dead
—I sent.
Dying, anyway
—

“Since you’re no longer in real danger of dying, I think I can tell that by all rights, you really
should
be dead,” Dr. Fiorina said. “If you were an unmodified human, you
would
be dead. Thank your SmartBlood for keeping you alive; it clotted up before you could bleed out and kept your infections in check. It was a close thing, though. If you hadn’t been found when you were, you probably would have been dead shortly after that. As it was, when they got you back to the
Sparrowhawk
they shoved you into a stasis tube to get you here. They couldn’t do much for you on the ship. You needed specialized care.”

I saw my wife
—I sent.
She was the one who rescued me
—

“Is your wife a soldier?”

She’s been dead for years
—

“Oh,” said Dr. Fiorina. Then, “Well, you were pretty far gone. Hallucinations aren’t that unusual at that point. The bright tunnel and dead relatives and all of that. Listen, Corporal, your body still needs a lot of work, and it’s easier for it to get done while you’re asleep. There’s nothing for you to do in there but float. I’m going to put you into sleep mode again for a while. The next time you wake up, you’ll be out of the tub, and enough of your jaw will have grown back for you to have a real conversation. All right?”

What happened to my squad
—I sent.
We were in a crash
—

“Sleep now,” Dr. Fiorina said. “We can talk more when you’re out of the tub.”

I started to craft a truly irritated response but was hit by a wave of fatigue. I was out before I could think about how quickly I was going out.

“Hey, look who’s back,” this new voice said. “The man too dumb to die.”

This time I wasn’t floating in a vat of goo. I glanced over and made out where the voice was coming from.

“Harry,” I said, as well as I could through an immobile jaw.

“The same,” he said, bowing slightly

“Sorry I can’t get up,” I mumbled. “I’m a little banged up.”

“‘A little banged up,’ he says,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Christ on a pony. There was more of you missing than was there, John. I know. I saw them haul your carcass back up off of Coral. When they said you were still alive my jaw dropped to the floor.”

“Funny,” I said.

“Sorry,” Harry said. “No pun intended. But you were almost unrecognizable, John. A mess of parts. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I prayed you would die. I couldn’t imagine they could piece you back together like this.”

“Glad to disappoint you,” I said.

“Glad to be disappointed,” he said, and then someone else entered the room.

“Jesse,” I said.

Jesse came around the bed and gave me a peck on the cheek. “Welcome back to the land of the living, John,” she said, and then stepped back. “Look at us, together again. The three musketeers.”

“Two and a half musketeers, anyway,” I said.

“Don’t be morbid,” Jesse said. “Dr. Fiorina says you’re going to make a full recovery. Your jaw should be completely grown by tomorrow, and the leg will be another couple days after that. You’ll be skipping around in no time.”

I reached down and felt my right leg. It was all there, or at least felt all there. I pulled back the bedcovers to get a better look, and there it was: my leg. Sort of. Right below the knee, there was a verdant welt. Above the welt my leg looked like my leg; below it, it looked like a prosthesis.

I knew what was going on. One of my squad had her leg blown off in battle and had it re-created in the same way. They attached a nutrient-rich fake limb at the point of amputation, and then injected a stream of nanobots into the merge area. Using your own DNA as a guide, the nanobots then convert the nutrients and raw materials of the fake limb into flesh and bone, connecting to already-existing muscles, nerves, blood vessels and so on. The ring of nanobots slowly moved down the fake limb until it had been converted into bone and muscle tissue; once they were done, they migrated through the bloodstream to the intestines and you shat them out.

Not very delicate, but a good solution—there was no surgery, no wait to create cloned parts, no clumsy artificial parts attached to your body. And it took only a couple of weeks, depending on the size of your amputation, to get the limb back. It was how they got back my jaw and, presumably, the heels and toes of my left foot, which were now all present and accounted for.

“How long have I been here?” I asked.

“You’ve been in this room for about a day,” Jesse said. “You were in the tub for about a week before that.”

“It took us four days to get here, during which time you were in stasis—did you know about that?” Harry asked. I nodded. “And it was a couple of days before they found you on Coral. So you’ve been out of it more or less for two weeks.”

I looked at both of them. “I’m glad to see both of you,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. But why are you here? Why aren’t you on the
Hampton Roads
?”

“The
Hampton Roads
was destroyed, John,” Jesse said. “They hit us right as we were coming in from our skip. Our shuttle barely got out of the bay and damaged its engines on the way out. We were the only ones. We drifted for almost a day and a half before the
Sparrowhawk
found us. Came real close to asphyxiation.”

I recalled watching as a Rraey ship slugged a cruiser on its way in; I wondered if it had been the
Hampton Roads
. “What happened to the
Modesto
?” I asked. “Do you know?”

Jesse and Harry looked at each other. “The
Modesto
went down, too,” Harry said, finally. “John, they
all
went down. It was a massacre.”

“They can’t
all
have gone down,” I said. “You said you were picked up by the
Sparrowhawk
. And they came to get me, too.”

“The
Sparrowhawk
came later, after the first wave,” Harry said. “It skipped in far away from the planet. Whatever the Rraey used to detect our ships missed it, although they caught on after the
Sparrowhawk
parked itself above where you went down. That was a close thing.”

“How many survivors?” I asked.

“You were the only one off the
Modesto,
” Jesse said.

“Other shuttles got away,” I said.

“They were shot down,” Jesse said. “The Rraey shot down everything bigger than a bread box. The only reason our shuttle survived was that our engines were already dead. They probably didn’t want to waste the missile.”

“How many survivors, total?” I said. “It can’t just be me and your shuttle.”

Jesse and Harry stood mute.

“No fucking
way,
” I said.

“It was an ambush, John,” Harry said. “Every ship that skipped in was hit almost as soon as it arrived in Coral space. We don’t know how they did it, but they did it, and they followed through by mopping up every shuttle they could find. That’s why the
Sparrowhawk
risked us all to find you—because besides us, you’re the
only
survivor. Your shuttle is the only one that made it to the planet. They found you by following the shuttle beacon. Your pilot flipped it on before you crashed.”

I remembered Fiona. And Alan. “How many were lost?” I asked.

“Sixty-two battalion-strength cruisers with full crews,” Jesse said. “Ninety-five thousand people. More or less.”

“I feel sick,” I said.

“This was what you’d call a good, old-fashioned clusterfuck,” Harry said. “There’s no doubt about that at all. So that’s why we’re still here. There’s nowhere else for us to go.”

“Well, that and they keep interrogating us,” Jesse said. “As if we knew anything. We were already in our shuttle when we were hit.”

“They’ve been dying for you to recover enough to talk to,” Harry said to me. “You’ll be getting a visit from the CDF investigators very soon, I suspect.”

“What are they like?” I asked.

“Humorless,” Harry said.

“You’ll forgive us if we’re not in the mood for jokes, Corporal Perry,” Lieutenant Colonel Newman said. “When you lose sixty ships and one hundred thousand men, it pretty much leaves you in a serious state of mind.”

All I had said was “broken up,” when Newman asked how I was doing. I thought a slightly wry recognition of my physical condition was not entirely out of place. I guess I was wrong.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Although I wasn’t really joking. As you may know, I left a rather significant portion of my body on Coral.”

“How did you get to be on Coral, anyway?” asked Major Javna, who was my other interviewer.

“I seem to remember taking the shuttle,” I said, “although the last part I did on my own.”

Javna glanced over to Newman, as if to say,
Again with the jokes
. “Corporal, in your report on the incident, you mention you gave your shuttle pilot permission to blow the
Modesto
shuttle bay doors.”

“That’s right,” I said. I had filed the report the night before, shortly after my visit from Harry and Jesse.

“On whose authority did you give that command?”

“On my own,” I said. “The
Modesto
was getting hammered with missiles. I figured that a little individual initiative at that point in time would not be such a bad thing.”

“Are you aware how many shuttles were launched across the entire fleet at Coral?”

“No,” I said. “Although it seems to have been very few.”

“Less than a hundred, including the seven from the
Modesto,
” Newman said.

“And do you know how many made it to the Coral surface?” Javna said.

“My understanding is that only mine made it that far,” I said.

“That’s right,” Javna said.

“So?” I said.

“So,” Newman said, “that seems to have been pretty lucky for you that you ordered the doors blown just in time to get your shuttle out just in time to make it to the surface alive.”

I stared blankly at Newman. “Do you
suspect
me of something, sir?” I said.

“You have to admit it’s an interesting string of coincidences,” Javna said.

“The hell I do,” I said. “I gave the order
after
the
Modesto
was hit. My pilot had the training and the presence of mind to get us to Coral and close enough to the ground that I was able to survive. And if you recall, I only barely did so—most of my body was scraped over an area the size of Rhode Island. The only
lucky
thing was that I was found before I died. Everything else was skill or intelligence, either mine or my pilot’s. Excuse me if we were trained well,
sir
.”

Javna and Newman glanced at each other. “We’re only following every line of inquiry,” Newman said mildly.

“Christ,” I said. “Think about it. If I really planned to betray the CDF and survive it, chances are I’d try to do it in a manner that didn’t involve removing my own fucking jaw.” I figured that in my condition, I just might be able to snarl at a superior officer and get away with it.

I was right. “Let’s move on,” Newman said.

“By all means, let’s,” I said.

“You mentioned you saw a Rraey battle cruiser firing on a CDF cruiser as it skipped into Coral space.”

“That’s correct,” I said.

“Interesting you managed to see that,” Javna said.

I sighed. “Are you going to do this all through the interview?” I said. “Things will move along a lot quicker if you’re not always trying to get me to admit I’m a spy.”

“Corporal, the missile attack,” Newman said. “Do you remember whether the missiles were launched before or after the CDF ship skipped into Coral space?”

“My guess is that they were launched just before,” I said. “At least it seemed that way to me. They knew when and where that ship was going to pop out.”

“How do you think that’s possible?” Javna asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t even know how skip drives worked until a day before the attack. Knowing what I know, it doesn’t seem like there should be any way to know a ship is coming.”

“What do you mean, ‘knowing what you know’?” Newman said.