Dirge (20 page)

He had to get away. Somehow he had to avoid the blanket of detection they must even now be expanding across the planet. It was possible that the spider’s web was not yet complete. All that was necessary was for one fly to get through. Throughout the night he slaved intently on readying his wings.

Two hours before sunrise he was ready. As to whether the lifeboat was, the answer would come from the trying. The proof would be in the doing. If his preparations proved inadequate, if trouble arose that was beyond his power to amend, well then, he would die no slower than if he fell into the hands of the invaders.

Settling himself into the cockpit he ran a final check. Those instruments that still functioned, many of which he had personally repaired or replaced, insisted that their respective components were functional. He found himself wishing he had spent more time with each and every one, that he had taken a little extra effort with each installation and connection. But it had all been a lark, a time killer, something to amuse himself with in his idle hours. Now his life would depend on the skill with which he had indulged in a hobby.

Was there anything he had forgotten, anything that had been omitted? Once committed to the launch sequence he would not be able to change his mind, to remember something overlooked. He did not trust the old lifeboat, or for that matter his own skill at restoration, to recover from an abort sequence. Deciding to go, he would go, and devil take the consequences.

Then he did remember something. Spending as much time as he did in the shop, and away from home attending to various work assignments, he tended to miss a good deal of live entertainment and news. When not watching the tridee, it was set to record. It would have recorded informational bulletins. It would have recorded presentations and sports from the capital and elsewhere throughout the colony. Unfortunately, the last transmissions it would have recorded were unwatchable garbage.

But the images he had recently viewed on the lifeboat, the singular movements and images that had been transmitted by the orphaned media mobile, would have been recorded by its own built-in unit, and should be available for playback.

He did not have time to check. Opening the console, he dug inside until he found what he was looking for. Removing the tiny mollysphere, he slipped incontrovertible proof of Pitarian perfidy into a pocket, shut himself into the lifeboat, force-sealed the reluctant lock, and settled into the pilot’s seat and harness. He was no qualified pilot, not of a craft the size of the lifeboat or of anything else. But the whole concept behind such a vessel, the notion that underlay its very design, was that it had to be able to be operated in a moment of emergency by utterly unqualified passengers. As an ex–ship’s engineer he was far better prepared than the average citizen to operate a lifeboat’s instrumentation, even a design as antiquated as the one that now enfolded him.

The star Argus would soon be making its presence known above the eastern horizon. While the Pitar were certainly equipped with all manner of sophisticated tracking devices, he saw no reason to make their search any easier by providing the additional possibility of visual identification. He could do nothing about the lifeboat’s initial liftoff signature. It would be noisy and bright, but only until he reached escape velocity. At that point he would have to risk shutting it down.

A preflight check of the weather indicated the presence of a small storm to the northwest. What he wanted was a hurricane, or some severe thunderstorms. Anything to help mask evidence of his liftoff. The modest rain event would have to do. Programming the shed’s roof and the boat’s navigation to the best of his ability, he tightened the harness as much as his body would tolerate, then waited.

Even if he was detected lifting off, nothing but a shuttle that happened to be in the immediate vicinity stood a chance of intercepting the vertically ascending lifeboat. Not that it mattered. Once out in space, drifting free, he could be tracked down and eliminated by an orbiting shuttle. Or, if he was extremely lucky, a warship might actually have to bestir itself for a moment or two to chase him down. If nothing else, he might at least inconvenience a few of the invaders.

Or having analyzed his craft and realizing it had no space-plus capability, they might simply decide to ignore him, letting him float aimlessly in the vastness of space until his supplies and atmosphere ran out. He suspected that was a forlorn hope. Having already witnessed evidence of their thoroughness, he did not expect that the Pitar would leave anyone alive, not even a lone soul adrift between worlds without any hope of returning to one. He might be found, and that they could not permit.

He had to try, though. Anything was better than sitting and waiting for death to come knocking. Better to kick back and keep on kicking for as long as was possible.

A pleasant feminine voice announced that departure was imminent. He had taken special care with reprogramming the boat’s methodical, businesslike tone. Now he was glad that he had. It might be the last voice besides his own he ever heard. A loud whine permeated the air, and the cockpit began to vibrate around him. There was no port, but the forward viewscreen showed the roof of the shed parting like a pair of flat, featureless hands. Beyond, black sky and scattered stars became visible in the lucent night of Treetrunk. The whine became an irritation, the vibration in his seat and harness almost soothing. A final massage, he mused. The solicitous attentions of a mechanical undertaker.

Something shoved him hard in the chest, and he gasped sharply. The receded roof panels disappeared, and the stars rotated wildly. In minutes he had punctured roiling cloud—the storm that was drenching the forest to the northwest. Minutes later he burst free, like a fist punching through stuffing, to find that the stars had multiplied beyond counting. The pressure on his chest lessened; the hand that had shoved him gradually withdrew. Small unstowed objects began floating about the cockpit. His stomach churned, and his inner ear insisted he was falling. And so he was—falling up.

Free of Treetrunk’s gravity, he was still alive, the embracing lifeboat still intact around him. Loosening his restraints, he hastened to check the readouts. Designed to locate and skew a vector for any nearby ship, the lifeboat was already searching for presumptive help. Prior to liftoff he had thoroughly disabled the automatic beacon designed to signal the lifeboat’s presence to other vessels. There was no help to be found here, and he did not want any nearby craft to pick him up. He would blow the lock first and die cleanly in the emptiness of the void.

The relevant readouts made no sense. Testing for malfunctions, he found none. There were no ships within detection range, which meant that it was possible there was nothing to detect him as he raced, silent and small, away from the surface of Argus V. That was impossible. Where were the Pitarian starships, their transports and shuttles? They could only be one place, he realized.

On the other side of the planet. For the moment, Treetrunk was screening him from detection.

It was not how he would have conducted an invasion. But the more he thought about it, and he had time for nothing else, the more he realized that his extraordinary luck was the product not of alien stupidity but of a quite understandable succession of factors. Having destroyed or captured everything in orbit around Treetrunk before commencing the actual physical invasion, the Pitar had no doubt already secured or rendered useless all three of the colony’s shuttleports and any orbit-capable craft located on the ground. That and the two space-minus interstellar communications facilities would have been their first ground-based targets.

With the ports and their complement of vessels accounted for in the first stages of the attack, there was no reason to suppose anything like a rogue lifeboat might be present elsewhere on the planet, much less anything in operable condition. In the first flush of what surely must look to be a complete and unqualified triumph, they might relax their surveillance just a little—just enough for a single minuscule, almost undetectable craft to make its escape ridiculously perpendicular from the planet’s surface on the opposite side of the world from the attacking armada. No shuttle craft would lift off at the angle he had taken.

He wanted badly to record the size and strength of that invading force, but even if he had possessed the maneuvering capability necessary to sufficiently alter the lifeboat’s course he would not have done it. If he tried to move into a position to observe them, then surely the far more sophisticated instrumentation on board a modern warship would detect his presence first.

So he continued to speed outward from the devastated surface, leaving warmth and atmosphere and ongoing horror behind, heading for the only destination the lifeboat had a chance of reaching before its limited supplies began to run out. He had programmed the boat to aim for the inner moon. Not because it was closer, but because it was far smaller than its more distant relative. It was a less likely place to hide, a much more modest potential refuge. As such, if the Pitar thought to consider such possibilities, there was the chance they might conduct a cursory survey of the more accommodating satellite while passing over its relatively insignificant cousin.

The inner moon of Argus V generated barely enough gravity to hold itself together, let alone affix anything to its surface. Maneuvering the lifeboat as delicately as his limited skills and the remaining propulsive capability allowed, he dropped the craft into lower and lower orbit until eventually it was hovering only a short distance above the floor of a suitable impact crater. With the boat’s motive power all but exhausted, he ran multiple checks of the restored vessel’s status.

He had power. He had air. There were no detectable leaks. Hull integrity was intact. Having positioned himself to the best of his ability, he settled down to wait and to deal with dangers as serious as those posed by the Pitar: loneliness and silence.

The first days and weeks were a cycle of rising, eating, and watching the readouts for signs of passing or patrolling ships. With each succeeding day that the instruments remained quiet and the screens blank his confidence grew. By the end of the first month he felt certain he had escaped the notice of the invading Pitar entirely. As the end of the second month approached he began to fear that he had.

It was terrible in the lifeboat. The psychic weight of airless void on one side and lifeless rock on the other began to press inexorably on his spirit. He felt his very self squeezed between resignation and isolation. Yes, he had foiled the Pitar. Yes, he was still alive when every other human being on Treetrunk was probably dead. But to what end? To thumb his nose at invaders who were not now and never had been aware of his existence? So he could die out here, alone, not even surrounded by the corpses of his fellow settlers? As the days continued to pass, the minutes slowing to a visible crawl, he began to wonder if he had made the right decision. Resistance, survival at any cost—what was it worth? Did it have meaning, or had it been nothing more than the instinctive reflex of a clever ape?

Growing desperate, he even risked some of his precious air by going outside in a suit. The barren, lifeless surface of the dwarf moon drove him back inside where at least there was warmth and recorded sound and visuals. After a while he stopped watching them, too, unable to bear the sight of happy, living humans. The boat was stable in its absurdly low orbit, but his mind began to drift. Gravity is only a local constant and does not hold thoughts.

By the third month his hastily assembled supplies began to run out. He found that he did not care. To conserve air he began to live in a suit, choosing to shrink the available atmosphere around him. He did it because it was expected of him, to preserve life, and not because he had any especial desire any longer to do so. A sufficiency of water to sustain existence for a little while longer remained, but he was out of food. That was a good thing, he decided. He would weaken and eventually pass out and not know when the last air available to his suit was exhausted. His body would remain untouched by Pitar or decomposition, preserved in the perfect coldness of space that had already established its imperturbable grasp on the rest of the ship.

He had been drifting, drifting, for a long time, sucking less and less often at the plastic teat of the water tube in his helmet, when something hazarded to ruffle his sleep. Irritated at the interruption, he rose from his seat and moved to locate the source of the disturbance. Before he could find it, it found him, and he started to scream. After that, he remembered little except the screaming.

As it turned out, except for a few inexplicable outbursts, no one could hear the screaming but him. It went on and on, forever…

14

“… F
orever.”

Tse said nothing. Sliding her hand down his arm, she took his right hand in both of hers. Lifting it, she brought it up to her lips and kissed it gently, then pressed it against her cheek, not giving a damn what any vexed bureaucrats or disapproving hospital personnel watching on distant monitors might think. As he continued to stare out the window at the blue water and gently swaying palms, tears were running down Mallory’s cheeks, copious and unstoppable. His respiration was normal, his heart rate steady, but he could not stop crying. Eventually, he simply ran out of water.

“A part of me is here, alive. Another part is back on Treetrunk, with my friends and associates, dead. A third and last part is floating, floating on an inner moon, raving mad.”

“I’m here,” she told him softly. “I’m alive.”

“Yes.” Smiling again, he wiped at his eyes with the sleeve of his hospital gown. “Thank God for small favors. Not you, Irene. There’s nothing ‘small’ about you. May I call you Irene?”

“Mr. Mallory, you may call me anything you want.” Lowering his hand, she squeezed it very tightly before lowering it back to the bed. “You’ve earned that right.”

“I don’t want it as a ‘right.’ I want it from a friend.”

“However you wish,” she told him softly.

The moment was broken, though not shattered, as Dr. Chimbu, several military and civilian personnel Tse did not recognize, and two medical technicians entered the room. Though they filled it, there was no frenzy, no pushing or shoving. Everyone, including the solemn-visaged officers, was quiet and respectful.

“Mr. Mallory,” Chimbu began gently, “we don’t want to crowd you. If there are too many people in here now, just say so and we’ll have some leave.”

The man in the bed grinned. He had not let go of the nurse’s hand, and she did not draw it away. “Too many people? There aren’t enough. There can never be enough for me, not ever again.”

Standing behind the chief medical officer, a handsome woman in a colonel’s uniform was no longer able to restrain herself. It was an attitude plainly shared by everyone around her.

“Mr. Mallory, as I’m sure you can understand there are some of us who very badly would like to ask you some questions. If you don’t feel up to it…”

“Ask away.” He smiled up at Tse. “And how about some real food? Applesauce is fine—preferably on a large eland sirloin, with fried potatoes. And gravy. And shellfish—any kind of shellfish.”

Tse glanced expectantly at Chimbu, who looked reluctant but eventually nodded. “A
small
sirloin,” he could not forbear from adding.

The elegant soldier was hesitating, spurring Mallory to prompt her. “Go ahead and ask what you will. You won’t upset me. I’ve done my time in upset land.”

“Very well. Mr. Mallory, I’m sure you know that everything that has happened in your vicinity since you were brought here has been carefully monitored. I’m sure you must understand that given the reception the Pitar have been accorded here on Earth and elsewhere, coupled with the fact that over a period of some five years they have displayed nothing even remotely like the behavior you have described—the story you just told is difficult for the rest of us to accept.” The hospital room was dead silent as everyone waited to see how the patient would react.

Mallory’s reply was low, but perfectly intelligible. “So you think I’m a liar?”

“Nobody said that,” another officer hastened to add. “Nobody’s calling you a liar.” He looked to the woman, then back down at the ravaged figure in the bed. “You’ve been through a terrible ordeal, sir. It’s a miracle that you survived, much less with your body and your…” Aware he had stumbled into awkward territory, he broke off.

Mallory finished the thought for him. “My mind intact?” His eyes searched the attentive gathering. “You think I may have hallucinated what happened on Treetrunk? How about the six hundred thousand dead or missing?” His voice rose perceptibly. “That’s one hell of a hallucination.”

“No one disputes the destruction of Treetrunk.” The female officer’s tone was tender, but hardly condescending. “That is something no human being would dare try to deny. What Major Rothenburg and the rest of us are wondering is if you actually saw what you say you saw, or if your mind, overwhelmed by the horror, invented something, however implausible, to mask or blot out an even worse reality.”

“Worse reality? Worse than genocide? Worse than female reproductive organ evisceration and theft?” He shook his head slowly. “Ma’am, all I can say is, you must have a greater capacity for inventing horror than I do.”

From his position near the end of the bed, Chimbu spoke up. “Mr. Mallory, Colonel Nadurovina is an eminent military psychiatrist specializing in combat and combat-related disorders. She doesn’t mean to impugn your veracity. Like the rest of us, she only wants what’s best for you—and to get at the truth.”

“The truth!?!”
His voice bordering on hysteria, the patient leaned sharply forward in the bed. Nearby, a medtech activated the osmotic hypo he held behind his back and started forward. Startled by the unexpected violence of his response, Tse let go of Mallory’s hand. But she did not stand up or retreat from her position alongside him. Seeing the sudden fear in her face, he made an effort to regain his composure.

“I’ve told you the truth. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.” Staring hard at the circle of the curious, he added warningly, “You’d better, because there’s no guarantee the Pitar won’t try something like it again. Unless, of course, they got everything they needed from Treetrunk.”

“Human female reproductive organs?” Rothenburg’s tone laid bare his skepticism. “You’ll excuse me, Mr. Mallory, if that doesn’t strike some of us as unsound grounds for rationalizing an assault on a colony. To gain a strategic advantage or base, yes; to acquire a world rich in rare metals and minerals, perhaps; or even to try and intimidate the occupying species into conceding possession, possibly. But what you say makes no sense.”

“Deliver us from the blindered workings of the military mind,” he muttered. “What’s the military doing here anyway?”

“When six hundred thousand people are slaughtered without mercy or warning, it becomes a military matter,” a man behind Rothenburg replied stiffly.

Mallory grunted and leaned back against his pillows. “For what it’s worth, it doesn’t make any sense to me, either. Pitar and human can’t generate offspring, but at the same time I can’t put the kind of organized organ-gathering I witnessed down to morbid scientific curiosity or aimless disemboweling. The Pitar I saw looked like they knew exactly what they wanted and how to go about getting it. They had storage containers ready to store their…handiwork. What they did was for a reason. If they had other motives for annihilating Treetrunk, then they’re the only ones who can tell you about them.” He made an obscene gesture, heedless of who might be watching via relay on distant monitors.

“Me, I think we should put every weapon we can find on every ship that can be mustered and blow them out of existence all the way back to their beloved bastard Dominion, and then seed both their precious Twin Worlds with radioactive dust that has a nice, long half-life. How about it? Why don’t you put the question to a couple of their local representatives? Gauge their reaction. They’ll lie, of course. Fluently. They’re doubtless convinced they obliterated any evidence of their treachery. Which they did—except for me.” The bluster and bravado abruptly leaked out of him like the air from a balloon subject to deep-sea pressures. His voice became small and frightened, as if two distinct personalities were fighting for space in the same body.

“They don’t know about me, do they? They don’t know I’m here…?”

“Easy,” Tse told him, leaning closer and stroking his arm with her fingers. “Be calm, Alwyn. Nobody knows you’re here.” She looked anxiously over at Chimbu. “Do they?”

The chief physician shook his head. His words spelled confidence. “Only the upper echelon of the hospital staff knows about Mr. Mallory’s origins. Beyond the people presently assembled in this room, there are a handful of government officials who had to be informed.”

Colonel Nadurovina added soothingly, “You would be surprised who knows and who does not, who was deliberately informed and who was kept in the dark. You are safe here, Mr. Mallory. If you look in the hallway you will not see much, if you look out your window you will see less, but it would take vaster weaponry than we believe the Pitar or any other species possesses to reach you.” She smiled, and it did not seem forced or artificial. “At this moment you may very well be, Mr. Mallory, the best-protected individual in this portion of the Orion Arm. The members of the world council are not as well looked after.”

“Then you do believe me.” She might not be in charge, but Nadurovina acted as if she was, so he directed half his attention to her. Whether she was aware of it or not, the rest had been settled on Irene Tse.

“We believe you saw something. We believe that a powerful and inimical sentience is responsible for the eradication of human life on Treetrunk. Whether those two things are one and the same we cannot accept on the word of one man found drifting in space starving, near death, and out of his mind.” This time her smile was wry. “Surely you can appreciate the sensitivity of my position and that of my colleagues who are charged with rendering a decision in this matter.”

“Question the Pitar,” Mallory shot back. “Corner them and press them. Ask them what they might want with human organs and judge their reaction.”

A plump man in civilian clothes who had hitherto been silent now pushed his way forward. “I am Jenju Burriyip. I represent the world council.” His lips curved upward. “Those members who have been informed, anyway. Please tell me, Mr. Mallory, how I am supposed to confront the representatives of what to this point has been a likeable, good-natured species and inquire politely if they might perchance have in an off moment slaughtered six hundred thousand of my fellow beings?”

“How should I know?” the patient snapped curtly. “I’m no diplomat.”

Burriyip nodded solemnly. “That is exactly my point, Mr. Mallory. If, and please bear with me when I say ‘if,’ what you have told us has somehow become confused by your condition, or distorted because you have suffered physically, or has otherwise been altered in your mind, and we wrongly accuse the Pitar, however obliquely, then we stand to forfeit some nice, useful, popular new friends. If word got out, the government could fall.”

“Listen to me.” Mallory chose his words slowly and carefully. “The Pitar are not nice. They are not ever going to be ‘useful.’ They murdered six hundred thousand men, women, and children, for what depraved reasons of their own I can’t say. And if they only had to do it once to get what they wanted or needed, and never do anything like it again, then they will have done worse than what they did. They will have gotten away with it.”

Burriyip was immovable. “I said ‘if,’ Mr. Mallory. No one is ready to discount your theory out of hand.”

“Goddammit, it’s not a theory!” He looked as if he was going to start crying again but pulled himself together with an effort. The hypo wielder held his ground. “Then you won’t confront the Pitar?”

The representative sighed heavily. “I am sorry, Mr. Mallory, but to accuse an entire race of interspecies genocide on the word of one man…We cannot. You have to understand that. You do not have to like it, but you do have to understand.”

“I understand that if you don’t do something you’re going to have humankind dancing and laughing down through the years hand in hand with the worst enemies in its history, and that they’re the ones who are going to be laughing the hardest. If they do laugh, that is.”

“We will do something, Mr. Mallory.” Nadurovina tried her best to mollify him. “We will find out who is lying and who is telling the truth.”

“And most of all,” Rothenburg added, “we’re going to find out who or what was responsible for what happened on Argus V.”

“Not if you don’t ask the right people the right questions.” Closing his eyes, Mallory slumped deeper into the pillows.

Tse held his wrist, not trusting the machines. “That’s enough. He’s only recently emerged from his coma, and this is more activity than he should have to endure.”

Chimbu rose. “Nurse Tse is right. We should leave so he can get some rest.”

“When can we talk to him again?” Despite his professional skepticism, Rothenburg felt concern for the man in the bed.

“Not before tomorrow.” Chimbu began to urge everyone out of the room, an insistent father herding his flock. “If you don’t want to communicate with a mind that might be playing tricks on itself, allow it to rest. If his vitals continue to strengthen and he is willing, we’ll try this again tomorrow.”

“Maybe once he’s rested some more he’ll remember something else,” Rothenburg murmured as he stepped out into the corridor.

“Like who actually committed the atrocity?” Nadurovina followed her colleague down the hall.

“Then you don’t believe his story?” Absently, Rothenburg saluted the two guards who were posted at the far end of the walkway.

“I don’t know. The Pitar as exterminators? And for such an obscure reason? One that might well devolve from some unhappy or repressed childhood sexual experience of the patient’s? I could not find anything in his records, but that does not mean there is nothing of the kind buried deep within his memories.” They entered the hospital lift and stood back from the closing doors. “That does not mean he is not telling the truth. The question remains, is it the truth as it actually is or merely the truth as his traumatized self sees it?”

Rothenburg considered. “Burriyip meant it when he said the government couldn’t confront the Pitar.”

“I know. We cannot, either. Not without a specific directive from above, one that I do not think will be forthcoming. Ever since the first encounter, people have been mesmerized by the Pitar.”

Rothenburg nodded knowingly. “My wife has two outfits inspired by Pitarian design. She’d find the very idea of them killing one human grotesquely laughable, let alone hundreds of thousands. If we challenge or accuse them in any way, there’ll be diplomatic bedlam. Careers will be ruined, or at the very least any hopes for advancement aborted. In that respect Burriyip wasn’t understating the gravity of the situation. Such a confrontation really could bring down the government.”