Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (21 page)

The instructor is panting. The recruit shuts his mouth. Angel looks at his paper, taps his pencil. He draws a line down the middle. On the left, he writes
SENTIENT
. Under it:
HUMANS
. On the right side of the paper he writes
WASPS, SPITTERS,
MANTISES
. He crumples the paper and shoves it into his jacket.

~~~

Angel sits at the kitchen table in his EnviroDome 4002. He pulls threads from a dishtowel, mutilating it. He and Lisa have not met eyes all morning.

The home is sound-proof, self-contained and thermally controlled, with adjustable humidity and airflow levels. The advertised “more Earthlike than Earth” quality brings Lisa comfort against the loneliness of Martian living. Angel considers puncturing a hole through the barrier of the EnviroDome 4002.

Bandages, slings and titanium pins hold his body together. Though Lisa calls the crash an accident, Angel knows better. He soared over that ridgeline and smashed into the red rocks to drive toward something, to find something indefinable. The crash has placed a wedge of understanding between the two. Though Angel and Lisa once exchanged thoughts freely and easily, now Lisa wonders about Angel’s mind while Angel yearns for the innocent ignorance Lisa once possessed.

Angel knows nucleite is responsible, to some degree, for this loss. The quickly accessible energy source allowed the colony on Mars to prosper and exploratory vessels to venture to the Outer Planets. Probes now refuel in depots right in the Belt, allowing them further reaches into the frontiers of space. Angel knows nucleite has saved mankind, not only solving but erasing the energy problem. Only a couple of decades ago civilization was sinking into a culture of bandits and savagery, when his own father was killed over a few hundred gallons of Alaskan oil.

Yet he cannot help but compare this age of Endless Power to two centuries earlier, when eager young men had torn across the United States in search of gold, heedless of native landscapes, wildlife and tribes. When the continent was conquered, and the lust for gold faded, those rugged, ruthless men struggled to find new purpose. By the mid-twenty-first century, the eyes of Manifest Destiny, which had grown restless since running against the Pacific Ocean, gazed into the night sky.

Lisa jumps at the electronic chirp of the telephone. She answers and, after snatching the mangled towel away from him, hands the receiver to Angel. He listens, acknowledges, looks down, acknowledges again and hangs up.

Lisa stares at him. “Well?”

“Zappy’s wife.”

“Zappy?”

Lisa only knew the men before they had call signs. Angel cannot remember Zappy’s original name. He tries to explain, becomes muddled, and Lisa places her hands on her hips and frowns.

“Zappy’s dead,” Angel says. “Amphetamine OD.”

“How’d he get it?”

“We have connections in the Belt. It wouldn’t have been hard.”

“We?”
Lisa says. She reaches out for the sugar bowl, not with an ebony arm but with a neon yellow proboscis, swollen with corrosive acid. Angel twitches, his fingers playing around the handle of a butter knife.

“He.
Whatever.
I do too.”

“You make no sense,” Lisa says. Angel looks at her arm, which is normal again.

“Don’t worry about me, Leese,” he says, trying to sound light. He blows her a kiss. She turns away.

“You’re not back yet, are you?” she asks. Angel says nothing. “Let me know when you are.” She walks out of the kitchen, slamming the door.

Angel crosses to the closet. On the door is a sticker, reminding him that in case of an emergency, one can enter the closet and seal it from the inside. The closet/emergency pod has enough water and oxygen to support human life for 96 hours. Angel digs at the sticker with his nail,
then
peels it off.
Safety wrapped in safety
, he thinks, and a shiver of shame runs through him. His friends had died in the Belt; he had not. Other men are still dying in the Belt; he is alive and safe. He flicks the sticker away and opens the closet.

Each movement stirs pain in his broken body as he dons his pressurized suit and goes out to the new transport. He sits in it, not thinking, just hating the safety he cannot escape. Then he turns on the ignition and, obeying all Martian colonial traffic laws, drives along the flagged routes to Zappy’s home. His head feels stuffed with insulation.

Angel parks in front of Zappy’s EnviroDome 3090. It is surrounded with a white plastic picket fence, a standard EnviroDome feature. Angel wants to kick the fence down. At the front door he buzzes the intercom. There is no reply, but he is not expecting one. Zappy is dead because his heart exploded, and Zappy’s wife is at the hospital with him. The front door is unlocked; Angel opens it and walks to the bathroom, where he knows he will find his old comrade’s remaining supply of amphetamine.

~~~

Angel is a boy of eleven, reading a beaten paperback on his front step. Though his friends tease him for reading when he isn’t playing ball, he cannot read enough fantasy stories. This book is a tale of adventurers who seek dragons and slay them out of duty to their king. All day long, Angel daydreams of the thrill of traveling to a distant, unforgiving land; hunting dragons; and slaying them. But at night he dreams he is a dragon being pursued by cruel, armed men. When he wakes he feels cold and confused, one question nagging him above all: After the knights slay the dragon, after so long training and practicing the ways of killing, what would they do in life? Could they ever return to their old lives, or to any sort of life at all?

~~~

Stomper squats between two jagged rocks on asteroid S093, his pupils wide in the darkness, his fingers twitching,
his
mind flashing like heat lightning. Custer floats around the cavern.

Zappy glues legs from dead Wasps on his pressurized suit with super-strength adhesive. He extends one of these dead legs to Splash, who is writing a report for Endless Power in corporate jargonese. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” Zappy says with an affected rasp. “Don’t know if you’ve met the mate and larvae yet—” Splash floats away to finish the report.

Clown’s replacement, Lizard, fires meaningless energy pulses into the rock. The other men rarely speak to him. S093 has been a grueling, confusing mission.
A dense asteroid with narrow crevices and sharp angles.
No nucleite. No Wasps or Spitters. Every shadow might be a Mantis, and turns out not to be. Stomper wonders if the Mantis is real. Reports insist that it is. Just like reports insist this rock is loaded with resources — and the crew is not allowed to evac until the resources have been secured. Stomper buffs his J-4 blade with a micro-abrasive cloth, like a knight of old polishing a longsword.

He thinks about knights and whether plowing a sword through a man would be sickening or thrilling.
Intoxicating
, he decides. Making
oneself
toxic.
Filling oneself with the poison of killing.
He wonders if killing humans becomes easier with each kill. Cross that line enough, he tells himself, and it disappears. The line between life and death, right and wrong, not killing and killing — like those chalk lines on the Little League field. Step on the line enough and it gets smudged out.
The line between killing space creatures and killing humans.
Stomper thinks that is a line better left uncrossed.

Three Wasps pounce on Custer, jabbing spikes through his armored suit. The man thrashes before going still. Lizard fires his EP-19, and one energy pulse knocks a Wasp against the rock. Stomper propels himself into the fray. Holding out the blade, he pierces the carapace of one Wasp. Zappy snatches Custer’s J-4 blade and hacks at another. Wasps swarm out of the tunnels into the cavern. Splash screams into his com for support, though reinforcements are hours or days away. The men scream and pounce, crushing and stabbing everything that moves. A needle prick in Stomper’s arm makes him pant and sweat. Weightless, he is pure energy, invincible. He smashes and splinters the Wasps, the fragments of their bodies going slippery with slime. Any emotional reaction to Custer’s death is incinerated in the amphetamine fire running through his veins. Stomper feels as alive as is possible. Not good, not excited, but raw and alive.

When it is dark and quiet again, the men lie on the cold rock like limp fish. Stomper does not know if he is awake and trying to fall asleep, or asleep and dreaming of being awake. In that sleep fog, he sees another Wasp, jolts awake and chops it into slime and shell.

Then Splash shakes him awake. “Mantis,” the leader whispers, and Stomper is awake and sharp again. The four men make their way further into S093, burrowing into the darkest depths of the space rock. They see nothing, but the needle jabs into Stomper’s arm, and he feels sparks running through his veins. Something moves in the dark ahead. It is a Mantis; Stomper is sure of it.

Then Splash shakes him awake again, and he stares in disbelief at everything.

~~~

Splash and Lizard step on a nest of Spitters, and the acid bores through their suits faster than Zappy and Stomper can react. The men spasm like hooked fish, then go still, and their bodies float in the vacuum. Stomper screams through his com to Queen Bee, safe in the distant, orbiting command station, “Evac! Evac!
Evac!”

Then he cries.

~~~

Angel packs his few belongings because Lisa told him to leave the EnviroDome 4002. He feels no emotion; he thinks only of escaping the artificial bubble. He listens to an audionews broadcast from Mars’ single station.

Reports from Endless Power, Inc. indicate that larval Wasps, and worse, may have been transported to the nucleite farms on Mars. An infestation could ruin the corporation’s investments. For more on this we—

Angel contacts Endless Power headquarters. He speaks with an operator and volunteers to scour the nucleite farms. She asks his name, which he provides.

“Mr. Perez,” the operator replies, “you have an exemplary record of service with our company, and your eighteen months of scouring in the Belt already exceeds our maximum recommended—”

“Please,” Angel begs. “Give me a J-4. I can jump, I can attack, I can slay—”

“Let me transfer you,” the operator says, and Angel disconnects. He wonders if this is how a knight of old found his way into knight errancy — when the knight’s need to serve outlived the king’s need of his service.

~~~

Angel looks out at the nucleite, replicating itself in rows. The crystals jut up from the rock, promising profit and power.
Endless power
, Angel thinks,
but for whom? What does mankind do with endless power and no boundaries?
It comes to Angel that Endless Power has been harvesting nucleite, but the harvest has been fueled with another unlimited resource: young men, and the reckless, undirected enthusiasm that defines them. Like the Spitters that consume nucleite, which is filled with potential energy, and spit out acid, Endless Power consumes promising men — and Angel realizes now that he is the waste product.

Something moves.
A Mantis.
Angel knows it. Polygons on polygons, grinding against one another, swiveling with machine speed. Angel’s heart thumps in his chest. He places Zappy’s vial of amph solution in the medical access slot of his suit. A syringe stabs into his scarred arm. In seconds the rush returns.
A Mantis for certain.

Angel scrambles into his transport and slams the accelerator, spinning the tires and clawing through the nucleite fields. Crystals shatter and smash to powder as Angel screams, feeling alive. The Mantis looks up, sees the vehicle and turns. Its mechanical-looking legs propel it toward the colony. Angel speeds up and screams. Spittle flies from his lips and his bleary eyes dilate.

Though it is twice as large as the transport, Angel thinks only to knock the monster over then smash it under the tires. But he cannot reach the Mantis, which bounds toward the distant dome houses, toward the EnviroDome 4002 where Lisa still lives. In an instant, Angel crosses over the boundary between the colony and the wild Martian plain, crosses into his neighborhood, crushes the white plastic picket fence on his property, and smashes into the EnviroDome 4002. He hurtles through the windshield, smashes into a table and dies.

Stomper leaps up, clutching a fragment of the polycarbonate windshield. The Mantis tromps across the living room, lunging toward Lisa, who is screaming. Darren stands by her side. Darren, Queen Bee, who never felt danger from his distant, orbiting command station, who has treated Angel with cordiality and nothing more since the Belt, who has been comforting Lisa over cups of coffee and under silk sheets. Stomper leaps, raising his polycarbonate longsword and swinging it down onto Darren. The man crumples, and Stomper stabs and stabs, feeling weightless, obliterating. Stomper keels backward as Lisa strikes him with a dish. Stunned, he looks up. Why did she attack him and not the Mantis? She staggers and gasps as the Martian atmosphere leaks into her miniature Earth. She crawls into the closet and seals it. She has 96 hours, Stomper knows.

The Mantis crawls, too — out of the EnviroDome 4002. He cannot let it escape. As he raises his bloody blade, it catches the flickering recessed lighting and glitters. He climbs out of the house and sprints after the Mantis. His legs are bolts of lightning, his head a supernova, his heart a live wire. He is running to first base; he is pursuing the dragon; he is hunting the Mantis.