Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (7 page)
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Authors: Brad R. Torgersen
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Lisa’s head hung to her chest for an undetermined period of time, and when she looked back up at me I saw wetness on her cheeks. Which put a lump in my throat, for her sake. I suddenly felt stupid for telling her about the prisoner who got shot—like she really needed to hear that from me at this moment.
Idiot.
I sighed and looked at the floor. It wasn’t fair. She was young. And, apparently at last, clean. As a pharmacist, she was educated too. She deserved a fresh start. But wouldn’t get it.
Just like me.
For no particular reason that I can recall, I slowly leaned down and pressed my lips to hers. It was a crazy move, given her history.
But for the second time that night, she surprised me.
My kiss was returned warmly.
“Thank you,” Lisa said.
“No, thank
you,
” I said.
We held hands as we sat on her cot. The most intimate contact I’d had with any person in years.
Then, she asked, “What about you, Lee?”
“Huh?”
“You now know why
I’m
in. But what about you?”
My hesitation must have been palpable.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want to pry. I just figured—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I suppose you oughta know.”
I breathed in and collected my thoughts.
The younger me had had a problem with his temper. I’d kept it under wraps when I was in school, but after I got out, I’d gone through a few different jobs because I couldn’t keep my lip zipped in front of the boss. Then came the day on the work site when one little jerk of an engineer had decided to get up in my face. He’d been smaller and smarter than me, and he’d let me know exactly what kind of loser he thought I was. Insults turned to screams, and before I knew it I’d knocked the man onto his back, and was beating him with my wrench. Hard, vicious strokes. The kind of blows a man doesn’t just get up and walk away from.
They told me later that the other workers had to pry me off the engineer, who was pronounced dead at the scene before the constabulary cuffed me and took me away to Corrections. I can still remember sitting in the back of the wagon, bawling my eyes out.
What had I done?
Dad had tried to keep me from doing time. He’d spent what he could for legal help. But it didn’t matter. I’d killed another human being. Eta Cassiopeiae Five might have been frontier territory, but you didn’t just murder a man—in hot blood or cold—and walk away from it unscathed.
Back on Earth they had people to spare. On EC5? No way. Especially not when the victim had been educated. There weren’t any levels or degrees of punishment with Corrections. Once the government deemed you a threat to society, it was The Island. Goodbye. Civilization officially washed its hands of you. I still remembered the look on Dad’s face when they loaded me onto the transport. He’d been sure he was never going to see me again.
He’d almost been right.
I’d spent every day since, regretting what I’d done. And learning to be a different person as a result.
The whole time I told my story, Lisa listened intently. Then she said softly, “I’m sorry, Lee.”
“I’m sorry too,” I said. “But not for this.”
I bent my head down and kissed her again.
• • •
“Wake up, Prisoner Fraccaro.”
I didn’t move. I felt like last night’s cold fish.
“Prisoner Fraccaro, on your feet!”
A gloved fist slugged my shoulder, and suddenly I was tumbling out of my cot, shaking. Morning light streamed into the tent, and I found myself face-to-face with four armed Corrections SWAT officers in mottled fatigues.
Lisa was nowhere in sight. Had they hit her first?
“Chip worked, huh?” I said, realizing the time had finally come.
“Yes,” said the tall, black-skinned SWAT who had sergeant’s stripes on his arm. “But we were already on our way when officer Ivarsen expired. That idea you had, about the mirrors … pretty ingenious. Nobody remembers Morse Code anymore. Except for the computers. When the satellites started picking up your S.O.S. flashing over and over again, it was obvious something had gone wrong.”
I looked down at my nude self, and the back at the sergeant.
“Do I need to get dressed, or can we finish it here?”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on. Bullet to the head. It’ll be quick. Justice will be done.”
The sergeant’s white teeth grinned like the Cheshire cat’s.
He held up Ivarsen’s PDA.
“Don’t worry. I think your alibi is good. Officer Ivarsen apparently thought well of you, and Prisoner Phaan too. He had a feeling Godfrey was bad news. Ivarsen’s last few logs pretty much state that Godfrey was going to pull something. Too bad we can’t put Godfrey up against a wall. He definitely deserved it.”
“You found him?”
“Idiot rolled the dumper. Doing ninety kay over broken terrain. No safety harness. Thrown from the cab, and crushed. Not much else to do but toe-tag the remains.”
“Huh. Can’t say he didn’t have it coming. So what happens now?”
“Let’s go outside.”
I was humming happily to myself when I left the hooch.
• • •
Ivarsen’s logs made all the difference. It was like having a character witness speaking from the grave. That, combined with circumstantial evidence, put Phaan and I in the clear.
They split us up, of course, and sent us to separate sites to finish our original sentences.
Parole came, and I was released back into civilization.
I stayed at my sister’s house while I looked for work. It was as discouraging as I expected. Even the asteroid miners didn’t want me. But I had to do something—I didn’t like the idea of hanging around sis’s place, endlessly mooching.
Dad finally came to visit one weekend. He hugged me harder and longer than he ever had in my whole life. Then he listened to the whole story, about my time on The Island, about the brick sites, about Ivarsen’s death. Then he looked me in the eye from across the living room coffee table and suggested I apply to Corrections.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said.
“Not at all,” Dad said. “This Ivarsen guy, you said he seemed at ease around your crew? Ran the place like it was just another job? The man was obviously an ex con.”
I hadn’t thought of that before. Ivarsen had seemed too decent to be a criminal.
But then, so were Phaan and I.
The next day, I did what Dad suggested. To my surprise, they picked me up without question. And after twelve weeks at the Corrections Academy they sent me out to run one of the brick sites.
It was interesting, being on the flip side of things. I found I actually liked being back in the desert, with its blinding sun and fresh air and shimmering desolation. I’d missed it.
As always, I had to watch my temper. Some of the prisoners were just as stupid as Godfrey had been, and twice as mean. On several occasions I was sorely temped to use my gun.
But I’d sworn to myself I’d do everything I could to never have to kill again.
Planetary months rolled into a planetary year. Then two. Paycheck after paycheck. With no out-of-pocket cost for room or food, my savings began to pile up. I began to seriously think about my future. There was retirement out there on my horizon. Could I save enough to buy a little plot of land on the polar seaside? Maybe join in the effort to transform the planet from barely-living desert to thriving ecosphere? It would be hard work, just like the brick sites were hard work. And lonely …
Using my PDA, I got on the Corrections network one night. Within a few minutes I found Lisa Phaan’s file.
She’d been telling the truth about the drug stuff.
But every record since her incarceration, showed her clean. To include continued reports of good behavior.
I remembered the pleasant sensation of her lips on mine.
Could we have something? Or was I just fooling myself?
Snapping my PDA off, I determined that I’d find out.
Meanwhile, there was always more clay. And there were always more bricks.
Nominally a jail tale, “Bricks” is both a story of redemption, and a look at the less glamorous side of potential interstellar colonization. Any people who manage to arrive on another world circling another star, are going to be starting from scratch. And there won’t necessarily be any virgin forests to tame, as in the case of the Earth’s ancient humans who crossed oceans to settle new lands. Odds are, if there’s any life at all, it’ll be primitive. Perhaps, too primitive to be useful. So what will our hypothetical colonists use for building materials, if there’s no wood?
Once upon a time, I was handy with a potter’s wheel. I know enough about clay—and the processes for turning clay into variously useful things—that it occurred to me that bricks would be an essential component of any interstellar colony’s industrial economy. Assuming said colonists landed with only the land and some water to work with. No major plant life, nor developed mining and smelting of the sort we’re used to in the 21
st
century. All of that stuff will come later. In the meantime, they’ll have to have something to build with.
So I conjured images of millions of earthen bricks baking in the sun. But wait, earthen bricks aren’t as dependable as actual clay bricks, formed and fired. How do you fire bricks if you don’t have wood, coal, or a natural gas supply available?
There are already experimental solar power fields on Earth designed to collect and focus sunlight. When in use, these solar fields can generate a tremendous amount of heat in a very small, focused area. Aim enough rays at a stone kiln—and imagine that the sun’s light is even brighter, more intense, and longer-lasting than it is on Earth—and you have your firing solution. But who among colonists—or their descendants—is going to agree to do such work? It’s not glamorous, it doesn’t take a lot of education, it’s difficult and dirty, and it’s going to potentially take you far from civilization; if said civilization has decided to build far from the equator.
“Bricks” first saw print in Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s anthology Beyond The Sun, albeit in a shortened and somewhat modified form. It got some nice mentions in several reviews. I hope nobody who read the story in that book, minds me re-rendering the story here, in this book. I always did like my protagonist in this story. In my time in the military I’ve known some solid people who, for whatever reasons, ran into trouble with the law while young. Not everybody who goes to prison is the kind of person who should stay there. And especially on a colony world, where human life is rare and valuable in ways it might not necessarily be otherwise, how would the colonists decide to deal with criminals? And how might a criminal convicted of a major crime find his or her way back into society?
Such questions pretty much drove the plot of this story.
***
Guard Dog
(with Mike Resnick)
A passive sensor pinged hesitantly, and Chang came alert. He felt his way through the familiar diagnostic routine, verifying the status of thousands of different shipboard components. As expected, everything was functioning. The sole minimal change was that his available fuel had decreased.
Chang had never been told exactly how long his fuel would last. In fact, there had never been any mention of refueling, nor rearming. This would have bothered him, prior to being crippled in combat. But now it was simply a fact of life. He knew he was disposable; had known it when he’d blinked twice for
yes
during the Watchfleet accessions interview in the hospital ward. It was still better than the alternative.
Another ping, this time a bit stronger.
Adrenaline began to surge.
The threat. Where was the threat?
Chang’s head and spine were plugged into the core of an armored, spherical spacecraft hovering at a nameless set of coordinates that rode directly on the invisible wall between Human Space and Everywhere Else. He’d been on that spot for who knew how long? His cyborg life was composed of a series of long, dream-filled sleeps in between frenetic, life-or-death battles.
At the time Chang had elected to undergo surgical implant and machine integration, the Watchfleet had been mankind’s best defense against the Sortu: a mysteriously aggressive species of xenophobes actively exterminating all “competitor” races in Earth’s particular region of the known galaxy. Where it took years to build, arm, and crew an ordinary warship, a Watchfleet monitor took mere weeks, and required only its cyborg pilot. Chang—and thousands of other wounded veterans just like him—had all signed up to establish an interstellar line in the sand:
this far, no father.
At the time, humanity had been overwhelmed, and the Sortu had almost won.
Chang and his comrades had put a stop to it, but the toll had been high. The Watchfleet had grown thin, to the point that Chang seldom heard the comforting murmur of his fellows—their mental signals broadcast instantaneously through the
gravtrans
buried deep in Chang’s armored shell. Once they had formed an intelligent skein, acting and reacting in concert to surround and crush all opponents. Now they were few and far between, like lonely whales hooting forlornly through the ocean’s inky depths.
When his sensors did not alert him a third time, Chang set up an automated diagnostic routine and allowed himself to slip back into his dreams.
• • •
Lucy’s skin was so pale and freckled that she burned at the merest mention of sunlight. Chang ran a hand appreciatively along his new wife’s bare hip as they lay together in their bed, the hum of the ship’s engines and air cycler filling their tiny compartment—one of hundreds aboard the emigration liner now docked in Earth orbit.
“We should get up soon,” Lucy murmured.
“What for?” replied Chang. “I’m on leave until Monday, then we both depart for deep space. There’s nothing to see on this tub anyway.”
“Yeah, but I feel like a slug just hanging out in bed. We should get some exercise.”
Chang sighed deeply. “They work the crap out of us in Advanced Crew Training. I get more exercise in a day than you get in a week.”
“Oh yeah?” she said defiantly.
“Yeah,” Chang said, smiling as he grabbed her shoulder and turned her quickly onto her back, her breasts fluttering pleasantly on her chest. His hands began to mischievously wander up her belly as the two of them kept talking.
“You still haven’t told your father, have you?” Chang said, his eyes locked onto hers, but his hands possessing a mind all their own.
“No,” she said, “He’d have tantrum if he learned I was leaving Earth. Dad never did like—
oh!
”
Chang’s fingers gently brushed her nipples. She shuddered.
“Go on,” he said with a smile, as if nothing was happening.
“I’m just glad they offer military spouses a free ride. We’ll both happier off … if …
uhhhh!
”
Chang’s wife never got to finish her sentence. If it was exercise she wanted, it was exercise she would
get
. Three months in Basic and six months in Advanced military schooling had turned Chang hard and wiry. Her hands reached up for him, and—
• • •
Ping! Ping! Ping!
Damn.
It had been a long time since Chang had made love to his wife, even in his memory. He reluctantly returned to wakefulness.
He scanned the diagnostic report on the sensors. As far as his internal maintenance routines could ascertain, everything checked out. So what the hell was going on?
Ping!
Chang slipped his more robust active sensors into the vacuum, their huge domes revolving and twirling beyond the confines of the plated hull—
Hello, anyone there?
The cold emptiness of interstellar space remained unbroken. Straight out in all directions.
Then … wait. There.
Pong-pong-pong-pong-pong.
Not a ghost signature. This was something solid. Several somethings.
Not members of the Watchfleet.
The attack came. From the direction Chang least expected.
Eight small craft appeared like ghosts. Using a breed of engine unknown to Chang’s signature recognition software, they moved more quickly than any ships Chang had ever encountered before. Within moments each ship had detached several smaller vessels that were arcing in on Chang’s position.
Missiles.
Fast ones.
Chang retracted his sensors and slammed his internal drive into action. Treading the fabric of space like an Olympic runner charging across a track, Chang shot out of the path of the incoming projectiles, weaving and dispensing countermeasures in his wake. He used the
gravtrans
to hurl an electronic shout into the universe:
enemy units attacking, such-and-such coordinates, Watchfleet assistance needed!
But there was no answer in response.
Worse still, the missiles fired at Chang were different. Smart.
With every twist and curve that Chang threw into his trajectory, the little missiles corrected and accelerated, blowing right through his countermeasures. Like their mothercraft, they moved much faster than he would have thought possible. No wonder none of the other Watchfleet units were responding to his calls. They’d probably been destroyed already, leaving him alone to defend himself.
Chang felt tickles of panic running through his organic tissues.
Simultaneously, a memory sprang into his consciousness …
• • •
Lucy’s father was a tall, unsmiling man. His cheeks were rosy in the cold Peridian IV air, and his overcoat was speckled with drops of water from the colony’s perpetual mist. Chang stood next to him; uncomfortably close. They hadn’t said a word to each other since accompanying Lucy to the playground with the twins.
“Wave to Dad!” Lucy said, propping one of the boys up on a piece of colorful equipment. The little toddler, whom Chang had known all of two days, appeared joyfully bewildered as his head swiveled back and forth, looking for a face he hadn’t yet learned to recognize.
Chang lifted an arm, half-smiling, and then dropped his hand to his side. His own military-issue overcoat was drawn tightly at the waist, collar turned up.
“I’m sorry you had to get dragged all this way,” Chang said finally.
Lucy’s father grunted.
“What choice did I have? My daughter is all I have left. Her, and the boys.”
“I wanted her to tell you before we left,” Chang said. “She kept evading the issue. When I shipped out, I didn’t know she was pregnant. I found out about the boys only after they’d been born. And by then she’d moved you out here to the colony.”
Lucy’s father sighed, and for the first time turned and looked Chang in the eye.
“It’s not your fault,” he rumbled, “but know this: You’re part of our lot now. Those two sons of yours, they’ve got some of me in them, and that makes us
both
responsible. No matter where you go or how old you are or what you see out there in space, those twins will never, ever stop needing you. It’s sealed in blood now, and there’s no going back.”
Lucy looked at Chang affectionately. Her face became puzzled when he didn’t automatically return her smile. He was too busy staring at his sons, and realizing that at age 23 his life was now committed to a certain unbreakable trajectory …
• • •
The memory
poofed
away as quickly as it had come.
A missile had closed to within lethal range.
Desperately, Chang reversed his drive. His ship groaned under the intense stress of the maneuver, but the gravity distortion backwash caught the missile before it could arm itself—leaving a harmlessly dissipating cloud of metal flakes.
Chang experienced short-lived relief. Then, forcing another structural groan, he reversed direction again. Moments before impact with the debris from the first missile, he dipped and curved, his path taking him just barely around the expanding ball of metal shards. Kiloton explosions flared and died. Had the remaining missiles fail-safed, or been manually detonated? There was no time to get an answer.
A wedge formation of three mothercraft was coming up fast. Built like three-sided pyramids, they were very different from anything Chang had ever seen before. His lasers lashed out, their highly-focused beams waving across the enemy like a gardener spraying water from his hose. The pyramidal vehicles disintegrated, then exploded.
Five bogies remained.
The enemy force divided again: two and two and one—and as it did so, Chang picked up the signals from more incoming missiles. He mentally flashed through every detail of every battle he had ever fought as both man and machine, sifting and collating the data until a tactic coalesced.
Chang’s lasers hit the center of the missile swarm like an eraser, eradicating every projectile they touched. A sizable hole appeared within the swarm and he poured every bit of power he could into his own drive.
The missiles were all around Chang, and then they were behind him, their paths curving sharply back on themselves as they all attempted to follow their target. He flashed past the motherships, which also began to turn. A fireworks display of epic proportions erupted directly in his wake. Matter annihilated matter in a fantastically destructive spectacle.
The flush of victory again flowed through Chang.
Just three left to go.
Suddenly, the enemy touched Chang’s skin with their own lasers. He sensed the deadly energy an instant before it hit. There was no use in turning; every part of his armored skin was equally thick. But would it be thick enough?
In a millisecond, a great wound was opened in the hull. An accompanying flow of damage statistics paraded through Chang’s brain—the digital equivalent of pain. The
gravtrans
was gone, and the main drive partially damaged, though still functional.
Again Chang rapid-sorted through his memory banks, seeking alternative courses of action. Humanity was depending on him. More to the point, Lucy and his sons were depending on him.
• • •
Carter and Eric were ten years old when Chang’s patrol was ambushed. He was in his bunk, off duty, staring at a digital photo of his sons on his PDA. An explosion swept through the deck. If he’d already been in his space armor, the blast wouldn’t have done Chang much damage. As it was, Chang had to be carted to emergency triage with third-degree burns—and arms and legs so badly mangled even the months he spent in a liquid regeneration “womb” during the voyage back to Earth couldn’t fix them. They were therefore amputated at the veterans hospital, planetside.
With Chang’s family light-years away, the only ones who came to visit him were the lab men from the Watchfleet. They explained their program: battle vets, hard-wired into a new breed of super-ship, armed to the teeth, autonomous, yet tied together electronically to form a web the Sortu couldn’t penetrate.
The ambush that got Chang hadn’t been the only one. The Sortu were closing the noose. Earth itself was now in danger. Peridian IV, where Lucy and the boys were living, was expected to get hit next.
The Watchfleet was going to be humanity’s best—and possibly last—answer.
Full pay and benefits, of course, to be delivered directly to Chang’s next of kin—regardless of the duration of the Watchfleet battle tour. Posthumous continuation, guaranteed.
Lucy’s father had been dead for years, but his words echoed in Chang’s head. As long as Chang drew breath, he owed his sons whatever he could give them. Unable to speak, nod, or make any acknowledging movements, Chang gave the lab men his answer with his eyes.
• • •
The three remaining enemy ships closed in. Chang could feel them poke and prod with their active sensors. He was badly hurt, he had no missiles of his own anymore, and his laser cannon system had been hopelessly damaged.
The only thing he had left to throw at them now was his own fuel.
Antimatter.
It could be pumped from the central magnetic holding cell into space by using the emergency flush system.
It could result in victory, but a pyrrhic one.
Using the flush pumps Chang dumped half his available fuel into the black void, the antimatter cloud instantly expanding around his own hull. He could feel it eating away at his ship. But would the enemy notice in time?
To his great relief, they did not.
Two of the three ships flared with white fire as the antimatter ate through their hardened hulls. Bright cataclysms flared and died, knocking Chang clear of the deadly cloud. The third pyramid pulled out in time, if just barely. It began limping along, trailing pieces of itself.
Chang moved in, his damaged drive laboring.
Sortu lasers—dramatically weakened—leapt to intercept him, but a secondary explosion wracked the lone pyramidal vessel, and its bombardment ceased.
Chang’s sub-light drive pushed him in close to the enemy craft as it tumbled directionless through space. As the distance shrank, Chang collected data on the make-up of the ship: hardware that had been exposed, the size and type of both known and unknown components, everything he could learn.