Read Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen Online
Authors: Brad R. Torgersen
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Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (8 page)
At five kilometers the finer details emerged. Among the floating bits of debris, Chang could identify tiny carbon-based components. Interesting. He’d never seen the Sortu in the flesh. In fact, he wasn’t sure anyone ever had—this would be a first.
Chang zeroed his remaining sensor equipment in on the lifeless bodies.
After only a few seconds of examination, the truth became clear—the corpses of the aliens were not alien at all.
There, Chang could see a little man who had been shredded, his arms and legs curled lifelessly to his chest. Next, a headless human female. Next, a male, his space suit half on, helmet still clutched uselessly in one hand.
Hundreds of human bodies drifted like a school of dead jellyfish brought in on the evening tide.
Chang hung motionless with shock. This simply did not compute. Humans did not fight humans. It was aliens who were the enemy, to be slaughtered with impunity. The Sortu! They were …
He set about slowly collecting the corpses. The uniforms were different from the ones Chang had worn when he’d been a whole man, working in the Service. But the faces were all too familiar—young men and women, as he’d once been, sent to fight and die in the depths of interstellar space. And for what? By who?
Chang stopped cold.
One face in particular caught his electronic eyes.
Carter.
It couldn’t be. But the name tape sewn into the breast of the uniform was Chang’s last name. The young, dead man bore the same uncannily mixed features. Only now he was grown up: semi-almond eyes, dark hair, freckled skin, and Lucy’s fine nose …
Chang set that particular body aside and kept collecting, until a face that was almost identical to the first appeared.
Eric.
Same name tape, same features. Chang put the boys side by side, comparing their faces. They’d been frozen forever, startled at the very end.
Chang silently began to boil with a sensation of complete and utter betrayal.
He quietly rummaged through the wreck of the pyramid ship. Accessed the computers. Read the records.
A picture became clear.
One entirely different from what Chang had been given when he’d signed up, first as a mere soldier, then as a Watchfleet pilot.
He’d not been defending Earth against aliens.
He’d been defending Earth against her own children.
An alliance of human colonies had apparently been fighting for independence, since Chang himself had been a child. The Sortu were a lie—bogeymen. The enemy squadron he’d just dispatched had in fact been constructed at Peridian IV, a recent addition to the alliance’s ranks.
It was beyond obscene.
Surely the Watchfleet Command knew the truth?
So many falsehoods collapsed like dominoes.
After many days of waiting, while Chang’s internal damage control systems slowly patched up what could be fixed, he gathered his sons and all the other dead, and gently placed them back into the belly of their ship. The alliance would find them, after he was gone. He left a small message asking that the dead be given heroes’ honors.
Chang them set a course for Sol System. For Earth. Maybe the alliance had managed to pick off all his comrades. But there was one watch dog still left. And he was going to take a chunk out of his masters.
Not a usual story for me, “Guard Dog” is grim in tone. It is also the second of three different collaborations that Mike Resnick and I worked on, after I first met Mike in Los Angeles in 2010. The shell of this story dates to 1996, when I was toying with the idea of a mortally wounded space soldier being “recycled” for additional fighting duty. As often happens when I am only working with one idea—these days I almost always wait for two or three ideas to organically coalesce, before I have the nugget of a good story—I wasn’t able to make “Guard Dog” work. Not until I took it out and showed it to Mike, and Mike (in his fatherly, knowing fashion) said, “You got it all wrong, kid, let me suggest some ways you can change it.”
The story that resulted was pretty different from the story as I’d originally written it. And Mike’s suggested ending is different as well. But it works nicely. Especially since Mike and I were working within such a tight word count limit. I often feel as if I am barely clearing my throat at 4,000 words. For “Guard Dog” we told a lot of story in just under 3,000 words; and the manuscript went to print in editor Bryan Thomas Schmidt’s Space Battles anthology.
I learned a lot from Mike, while working on this piece. The man is a master of the human condition. Not us as we wish we might be, but us as we actually are. To include the bad, as well as the good. “Guard Dog” therefore morphed into a picture window view of ordinary people trying to do the right thing, and being manipulated—at levels far about their awareness—against each other. Chang’s life story is compacted tremendously to fit the space Mike and I had to work with, but I think the raw punch of Chang’s predicament was made stronger as a result.
***
Counselor: L.E. Modesitt, Jr.
I had only known L.E. Modesitt, Jr. by name and reputation—prior to actually meeting him in 2009. At the time, I was just another hopeful aspiring writer in a small sea of aspiring writers at the Life, The Universe, and Everything (LTUE) symposium that is run annually in Utah County, Utah. I had not realized until then just how chock full of venerable professionals the Utah speculative and fantastic writing scene is. Oh, I knew Orson Scott Card had once called Utah home, but having spent the prior 14 years living and working in Washington State, my understanding of the Utah scene was non-existent. So imagine my surprise when I went to my first panel and saw not just Lee Modesitt, but also Dave Wolverton, and several other luminaries, holding forth about which kinds of science fiction were “hot” and which kinds of science fiction were not.
I had my hand up several times during that panel, asking what I hoped would be pertinent questions. Lee was urbane and scholarly in both presentation and manner, wearing a crisp oxford with contrasting tie, and a beautifully complimentary vest—an ensemble look I would soon associate with Lee as his chosen, signature look. After the panel ended, I managed to approach him (as a brand new Warrant Officer Candidate) and make a sidelong military connection; since Lee had just spoken about his own military credentials while discussing the health of Military SF in the marketplace.
I was impressed that Lee took time out to talk to me, if even for a couple of minutes. And was even more impressed (a few months later) when Lee took even more time to talk to me at the CONduit SF/F convention in Salt Lake City. I’d made Finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest by then, and was chomping at the bit (perhaps too much?) to pick the brains of the elder statesmen of the field who were present and available for conversation. I felt almost desperate to “level up” to the point I could qualify as a junior colleague of these accomplished men, and Lee especially impressed me with his experience and breadth of knowledge.
I’ve made a habit of seeking Lee’s counsel as a result. I occasionally travel up and down the state for business, and when I am headed south (and I know I will have the time) I like to take Lee to lunch, just to hear what he has to say about writing, science fiction, politics, the state of national affairs, or perhaps laugh while he shares an anecdote from his days flying helicopters in the Navy. There’s very little Lee can’t talk about without it becoming immediately interesting. I’ve always had the sense that when I am conversing with Lee, I am conversing with a remarkable, dynamic, incisive mind. The kind of person who won’t mistake being clever, for being wise.
Not surprisingly, Lee is—so far as I can tell—a rigorous centrist who does not suffer political fools of Right or Left. He’s got a lot of experience dealing with and seeing insider baseball in Washington D.C., and both he and his wife are educated, erudite, whip-smart individuals who have worked very hard to create for themselves a life (and a family) which reflects their impressive values. I can think of few people who have done so well in the SF field while also doing well in other arenas too. Which is probably another reason Lee and I seem to connect—Lee kept his foot in with “real world” occupations long after many writers might have pulled up stakes and gone full-time.
In other words, Lee—more than any other writer—has shown me that you
can
have a successful science fiction writing career, without having to sacrifice everything else in one’s life on the altar of one’s authorial ambition.
I internalized (long before I was published) the idea that, if you want to be a successful professional, you need to select who it is you deem to be both “successful” and “professional” and then make a point of spending time around those people. Absorbing their ideas, what they have to say, their thoughts and feelings, observing their successes and their challenges, and otherwise immersing yourself in conversation that is not amateurish in nature. Lee was always someone who welcomed me to that grown-up dialogue. Sitting and discussing the field, or the world, over lunch, with Lee, I am forever impressed at just how keen Lee’s observations can be. How knowing his sensibilities usually are—especially when it comes to teasing the truth out of a mess of wishful thinking—and how Lee has managed to quietly create for himself one of the more robust SF/F writing careers I’ve been privileged to witness up close and in person.
Lee is neither flashy nor flamboyant. In a field which sometimes seems to be peopled with nothing but eccentrics, Lee is possessed of both poise and dignity. A professional’s professional. I’ve grown to admire this. And to also admire Lee as both an author, and as a gentleman.
Thank you for your kindness and generosity, Mr. Modesitt.
***
Recapturing the Dream
The proximity alarm
ponged
like a bronze bell.
Henrietta Lechtenberg stirred reluctantly, then flipped herself out of her hammock and floated over to the west wall of her sleeping chamber. Gripping a support rail with her left hand, Henrietta tapped at the wall’s touch-sensitive display surface with her right. The proximity alarm went silent, and a full-color visual representation of the asteroid 33 Riga appeared—along with a small, flashing vector symbol indicating whatever it was that had blundered into Henrietta’s domain in the middle of her sleep cycle.
Henrietta frowned.
The visitor wasn’t natural—it was altering course and velocity, and would intercept 33 Riga within the hour.
“So they’ve finally come,” Henrietta said, her frown deepening.
She slammed her hand on the wall. The image went blank.
Then she used support rails to pull herself out of her sleeping chamber, down a narrow corridor lined with hardened vacuum-proof foam, and into the house’s central hall. As had been the case for many years, the hall was silent, save for Henrietta’s breathing. That, and the sound of her blood pounding in her ears as she felt her temper flare.
“Not fair,” she said to herself.
There were many Near Earth Objects suitable for exploration and harvesting. Why had someone resumed interest in 33 Riga? It had been over twenty years. Enough time for people to forget, if not forgive.
What would Henrietta do now?
All Henrietta had was her silence. It had sufficed during 33 Riga’s long, ellipsoidal trek out of the solar ecliptic. No contact with outsiders. No messages, nor broadcasts, nor even a single e-mail. She’d simply shut off all the receivers, dishes, and antennae, and gone dark—her stadium-sized, lumpy little world drifting back into the eternal void of deep space.
At least until 33 Riga’s orbit inexorably carried it back down towards the ecliptical plane—and another relatively close pass by the Earth and Moon.
People.
Henrietta shuddered at the thought.
The tickling dread of a panic attack began to build in her chest. She wrapped her arms around herself, and tried to think.
Food.
Food would calm her down.
She forced herself to the kitchen, where yesterday’s pickings of berries from the hydroponics farm sat cleaned and chilled in the fresher. She ate voraciously, pounding down fruit between large gulps of pristine meltwater from the subsurface cistern.
As asteroids went, 33 Riga was fairly well suited for habitation, being honeycombed with pockets of frozen water and gas. The house’s central hall had been such a pocket, and once the water ice within had been melted and electrolyzed for air and fuel, the empty void made an ideal shelter. The ore in the walls protected against solar radiation as well as micrometeoroids, and there had been more than enough room to house the mission’s expanded construction equipment while Henrietta, her husband Shavro, and the other two astronauts tunneled deeper into 33 Riga’s interior.
Henrietta had been hopeful then.
Now … all she wanted was solitude.
With her stomach satisfied and her mind alert, Henrietta pulled herself back to the hall, then up a third, much longer tunnel to the asteroid’s surface. She popped up into the dark observation dome, found her way by feel to the dome’s controls, and flipped the toggled for the dome shield to retract.
It clam-shelled out and away from the transparent dome proper, revealing an unbroken, brilliantly-starred sky from horizon to horizon.
In the great distance, a small multi-colored marble hung against the blackness of the universe. The sphere glowed white, emerald and sapphire along one side, while the other side was darkened in shadow.
How long had it been?
Henrietta felt the sensation of panic return, and busied herself scanning the thousands of pinpoints of light—looking for anything that moved.
Within ten minutes she picked out the dot that was the visitor’s spacecraft. It grew ever-larger as it closed in. Occasionally, little bursts of spent gas
chuffed
from its sides as it adjusted course for a soft landing.
Henrietta watched the visitor with fearful interest.
• • •
He was just one man.
When he removed the helmet to his suit—slimmer, more streamlined and intricate-looking than the suits Henrietta used—she was surprised to see the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and the pepper color of his hair.
Not a youngster …
He’d put down twenty meters from the observation dome and, after a prolonged period of inactivity, popped his hatch, descended his ladder, then made his way to the long-unused dome airlock.
Henrietta wouldn’t let him in, of course.
Not that it mattered. She watched him through the dome’s transparent bubble: deploying a hand-held computer tool with cables attached at one end, and to which he interfaced the dome lock’s exterior electronics panel. A few moments later he’d stepped into the lock, used the same tool on the inner door’s electronics, then entered the dome itself.
He met Henrietta’s glare with a small smile.
“Miss Lechtenberg, I presume?” he asked in American English.
Henrietta said nothing.
The man scanned his eyes around the dome, turning his head this way and that.
“Where are the others?”
Silence.
The stranger’s eyes softened.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry if my presence comes as a shock. I do wish circumstances were different. Can you tell me where the other astronauts from your team are?”
“Gone,” Henrietta said coldly. English wasn’t her first language, but as the nominal commerce language of the solar system, she’d learned to speak it fluently; like everyone else.
“They … left?” he asked hesitantly.
“They are
dead,”
Henrietta said matter-of-fact, her arms crossed over her chest.
The man’s eyes fell, and the corners of his mouth turned down.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and seemed sincere about it.
More silence.
“You can’t stay here,” Henrietta finally said, keeping her arms crossed.
“May I ask what happened to the others?”
“No,” Henrietta said.
The stranger kept his helmet grasped in one hand while he looked at her. His eyes were sharp blue, and intelligent. Though somewhat hidden behind drooping and folded skin. Those eyes penetrated. He was feeling her out; trying to discern her motives.
Henrietta looked past his shoulder and out the dome to where his spacecraft sat in the sunlight. Insect-like.
Just big enough for … two?
“Please,” the stranger finally said, “if you won’t tell me what happened, at least tell me why you wouldn’t respond to any of my communications. I’ve been pinging you for months. It took a lot of time and fuel to meet you this far in advance. I’d hoped we could have had this conversation a long time ago. But that didn’t happen. So now we’re starting from square one.”
“Don’t you understand me?” Henrietta said, bristling. “I said you can’t stay here. You have your vessel. Go back.”
Again he looked intently at her with those blue eyes.
Not judgment? Discernment—he wonders if I am crazy.
“You were an employee of the Asteroid Development Consortium when you left Earth in 2036,” he said, “and you’re still an employee now. Benefits, pay, retirement, it’s all waiting for you when we reach home.”
“This has been my home for two decades,” Henrietta said. “I have no other home. And you are trespassing. Now please
leave me alone.”
“33 Riga is Consortium property,” he said.
“Correction,” Henrietta said. “33 Riga is
chartered
to the Consortium, for mining and industrial use. The expiration date on that charter was 2050.”
“And that charter’s been extended to 2100,” he said. “Ma’am, I don’t doubt that it’s been enormously difficult for you. All this time with nothing but the original mission gear—and whatever you’ve managed to scrape together off this rock—to sustain you. I noticed you got the solar panels deployed, but I don’t see any sign of the mining robots, nor the automated self-contained refinery that came with them. Are they destroyed?”
“No,” Henrietta said.
“Malfunctioning?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“The thruster-pusher motors—designed to slowly shove 33 Riga out of solar orbit and into Earth orbit. I see them half-assembled on the surface. Is something wrong with them?”
“None of the company’s precious equipment has been damaged,” Henrietta said, growing tired of the stranger’s inquisition.
“Then what
happened?”
“It is a story I am too old and tired to tell,” Henrietta said, dropping her hands to her hips. Her slippers had grip pads on the bottoms, which kept her upright in 33 Riga’s near-microgravity environment. The stranger had something similar on the bottom of his boots, though his helmet drifted free on a small tether at his waist when he began using his hands as he talked.
“Look,” he said, “even if you’re not interested in telling me what happened, there’s still a job to be done. ADC put a lot of money into the original mission and I’m not willing to see it flushed away without an attempt to recoup the investment. 33 Riga was to have been just the first of several asteroids moved into Earth orbit for industrialization and colonization. When your team went silent and 33 Riga never diverted off its natural path, the worst was assumed. Which caused a whole ripple effect that you may or may not be aware of.”
“Is that so, Mister . . ?” Henrietta said.
“Brett Jimmerson. Most people actually call me Jimmy.”
“Mister
Jimmerson,” Henrietta said, “there was a time when I might have cared about the company and their investment. That time passed long ago. I’ll note that their concern extends only to the hardware, not the software.”
“What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“Myself and the others. Were we part of the bottom line when ADC considered whether or not to write off the 33 Riga retrieval?”
“Of course,” he said reflexively. Then considered the question more carefully. “Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘bottom line.’ If you think ADC considered you
expendable,
you’re wrong.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The two simply looked at each other for several long seconds.
“You said the original mission package is more or less intact?” Jimmy asked, changing the subject.
“Yes, and when I am dead ADC can have 33 Riga on the next go-around. Another 20 years. Meanwhile they can keep my back pay, and my retirement. They can keep
everything.
But this is my home. It has been for a long time, and ADC’s got no right to take it away from me. You go tell them I said that when you get back to your cockpit.”
Jimmy wrinkled his brow and ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek. He seemed to be considering her words carefully.
Henrietta’s heart jumped when he slowly faced away from her and stared at his spacecraft in the distance.
He’s going to leave!
Jimmy pulled out a small rectangle that looked a bit like a multi-function phone, and began tapping the phone’s screen with his thumb. Suddenly the upper half of his ship blasted into the sky, exhaust gas flinging bits of brassy foil away in a sparkling shower.
“Wha … what have you done?”
Henrietta exclaimed.
Jimmy turned back to her.
“That was the return-flight stage. It’s programmed to automatically go back to Earth in the event that I tell it to. I just told it to.”
“Are you mad?” Henrietta yelled at him. “Now you’re stuck here!”
“That’s the idea,” Jimmy said.
His expression was not one of malice.
Rather, his blue eyes held determination.
When Henrietta finally realized the full magnitude of what had happened, she fled the observation dome as fast as her hands and arms could pull her.
• • •
Henrietta slammed the air-tight emergency door shut behind her in the middle of the passage, trapping Jimmy in the observation dome above. Then curled herself into a ball and shivered for many long minutes while her carefully-constructed chrysalis of reality crumbled around her. It had taken a long time to adjust to her hermit’s lifestyle, but now that she’d lived it for so long, the thought of accommodating another person in her space—especially someone she didn’t know at all—was intolerable.
Briefly, she considered cutting off the air circulation to the dome. His suit wouldn’t supply him forever, and he’d be forced to go outside. Could she find a way to defeat his equipment and keep him out of the other airlocks? Moreover, could she live with herself if she watched him slowly suffocate, inches from relief?
In the end, she released the dogs on the hatch.
Jimmy passed through—hesitantly.
Henrietta must have looked a mess.
“Thanks,” he said awkwardly. “For a moment there I wasn’t sure you weren’t going to keep me trapped outside.”
“Believe me,” Henrietta said, “I considered it.”
“Why? Do I scare you?”
“It’s not
you
I am afraid of,” she said, wiping her eyes and nose on a small handkerchief retrieved from a pocket in her use-worn jumpsuit.
“That’s good,” Jimmy said. “Because even if everything goes as planned, we’re going to be stuck together for the twenty-four months it’s going to take to push us into Earth’s gravitational grip.”
“We are not going back to Earth,” Henrietta said.
“It’s the only way you’re going to get rid of me,” he replied.
Henrietta felt the urge to snap back, but held her tongue.
With the execution of a single computer command, Jimmy had married their fates more surely than any pastor or justice of the peace.
“Look,” he said, “it might help if I explain a few things.”
“I am listening,” she said.
The two of them floated about four meters apart, their voices echoing off the walls of the hall. Vacuum-proof foam was excellent at stopping leaks, but it was lousy for sound deadening.
“When the 33 Riga job was declared a bust, investors made a run on the stocks of the various companies incorporated under the Consortium banner. News of the failure swept through the trade cycles until the Consortium was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Future missions were placed on indefinite hold. The core partners tried to recapitalize, with limited success. Then the global market caved in. China’s middle-class bubble burst, and burst hard. When the Chinese economy went into recession, the rest of the world went with it. Kind of like the crash at the turn of the century. Anyway, the Consortium shed as much of itself as it could, and devoted resources to short-term satellite launch missions as a way to stay afloat until the economy was ready for another push.”