We All Died at Breakaway Station (16 page)

He did not remember the ’bots that scurried out of their waiting places to grab his burning and mutilated corpse and stuff it into an open cold-sleep coffin. He was dead then.

One thousand eighteen. One thousand nineteen. One thousand twenty.

The battered, very nearly beaten Jillie warship limped off, away to whatever place it is that damaged Jillie warships go for repairs, wherever it is that wounded, mutilated Jillie starmen go to be rebuilt again. And the wreck of the LSS
Crecy,
crewed by half-operating machines and dead men in cold-sleep coffins, fell into a fairly stable orbit around UR-399-72-IV, and there she remained until she was found some weeks later by a second warship from Adrianopolis. What was left of the
Crecy
’s crew was taken aboard the newcomer and carried back to Adrianopolis, cold and dead, where some of them, like Absolom Bracer, were returned to a semblance of life.

One thousand ninety-eight. One thousand ninety-nine. Two thousand.

He had lived it again.

Then Absolom Bracer slept.

Bracer stood alone in the officers’ galley, stood because it was impossible for him to sit, and sipped at a cup of coffee.

The doctors back on Adrianopolis had told him that it would still be possible for him to eat and drink most of the foods he had always enjoyed, for his stomach was still his own, even if his intestines were tubes of plastissue. However, alcohol had been forbidden since the linings of his artificial intestines found it somewhat difficult to cope, and it did tend to have a corrosive effect. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, he wanted a drink of whiskey very badly, and the sight of the row of bottles along the shelf across from the bar upon which he rested his elbows did very little to lessen that desire.

After a while he pulled a cigarette pack from his jacket pocket, knocked a white cylinder out into his hand, and studied it for a few moments, thankful that his lungs were still his own and could handle the smoke of a certified-cancer-free Adrianopolitan cigarette.

He had taken but one full drag from it when the galley’s hatch opened and Communications Officer Eday Cyanta came into the room. When she caught sight of the admiral there, she paused, began a retreat, then asked. “Will I bother you, sir?”

“Certainly not, Miss Cyanta,” he replied. “Come on in.”

Like a number of others aboard the
Iwo Jima
, Eday Cyanta’s injuries were not immediately apparent at a casual glance. She had been relatively lucky. When she had been crushed by an exploding building during the first Jillie attack on Midwood, and her legs carried away by the debris, she had retained her hips and a good portion of the bones of her thighs. Of course, she had bled to death before the rescue workers had gotten to her, but they did get to her in time to prevent serious brain deterioration and had her placed in cold-sleep immediately. Once her body had been filled with borrowed blood and she had been revived, she was fitted with artificial legs that looked very much like real ones, though she still walked awkwardly on them, and awaited the day when real, living legs could be grafted back onto the stumps that remained of hers.

“What may I offer you?” asked the mechanical bartender as it rolled along the edge of the bar and stopped near the place where the communications officer stood.

Bracer glanced down at his own cup of coffee, then back to her. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “You’re off duty. Have a drink if you like.” He said this because he sensed the discomfort she felt in considering drinking alcohol before the admiral who could not.

“Oh, very well,” she said. “Ah‌—‌an old fashioned, please.”

“Coming right up, ma’am,” said the smiling voice of the crablike bartender as its long, telescoping claws reached down under the bar and began their work.

What do we talk about now? Bracer asked himself, embarrassed at not knowing what to say, aware that there was something in the air between himself and Eday Cyanta, something that he had been unwilling, unable to bring into his own mind. And then he cursed himself for considering that something did exist, could even exist. Don’t you have enough misery?

“How are things on the bridge?” he asked her at last since she had just completed her duty there and it
was
something to talk about.

“Well enough when I left, sir,” she said. “Things are really going very well.”

“That’s good,” Bracer said, taking a drag from his cigarette while Miss Cyanta sipped at the glass the bartender had sat before her.

“Admiral,” she said hesitantly, then was silent.

“Yes?” he asked.

She turned up her glass and drank almost its full contents before she finally asked her question: “Admiral, will we really make it to Earth?”

The question that everyone was asking now, Bracer thought, and what can I say in answer? Hypocrisy?

“Yes,” he said, forcing a smile onto what there was of his face, “I think we will. I’m counting pretty strongly on it myself.”

Eday Cyanta managed a smile in return, but she would not let her eyes meet his.

“Do you doubt that we will?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said flatly, staring down into her glass. Then she lifted it, finished it, and asked for another.

For an instant Bracer thought of cautioning her against drinking too much, too quickly, then told himself that he shouldn’t. It might be better for her to go on and get herself drunk, if that’s what she wanted. It just might help some. Oh, he knew the platitudes. How drinking never solved anything. Well, maybe it didn’t, but there were times when it helped to blow off tensions, to say and do things you’d be too inhibited to do cold sober, and for some people that helped a hell of a lot. Maybe she was one of them.

But then, he asked himself suddenly, even if it did her good to blow it off‌—‌what about him? What was it going to do to him when she said‌—‌said what? What could she possibly say that could matter to him? But he knew, he knew.

“Sit down,” he said at last, gesturing toward one of the bar stools.

Eday smiled in his direction, vaguely, keeping her eyes averted from his mechanical ones, and did sit down and looked away.

“Is something troubling you, Miss Cyanta?” he heard himself asking as if another person were speaking through his lips. He didn’t
want
to know.

“No, sir,” she answered quietly.

“Something is,” he said with the same remote feeling, “besides what you just asked me about.”

Dammit, keep your mouth shut, Absolom, a part of his mind told him. This can’t help anybody.

“Please, sir,” she said. “It’s not important.” And she returned her gaze to the glass.

Funny, Bracer told himself, looking at her profile, she does look a lot like Donna.

Donna, Donna, his mind said slowly. Oh, Donna, why did it have to happen to you?

He tried not to think of Donna and of what had happened to her, what the Jillies had done to poor, lovely Donna on that cold and distant world‌—‌but his mind would not let him forget, as it would not let him forget so many things.

Major Donna Britt had been in the Communications Corps and had contracted marriage with Commander Absolom Bracer shortly after his assignment to Valforth Garrison on Adrianopolis. She had been small and dark and lovely like Eday Cyanta, a communications officer like her. And then she had been assigned to the communications station on Port Abell, the outermost planet of the Adrianopolitan system, back in the days when men believed that the Jillies would not dare approach Adrianopolis. God, how wrong we were! Bracer thought.

The Jillies were braver than men had thought, or perhaps more foolish, more lucky, for they had slipped into the planetary system of Adrianopolis, had made a sudden sneak attack against Port Abell, knocking down her guarding warships, blasting away her ground defenses, landed, and in hand-to-hand combat had overrun the soldiers and marines who guarded her. Killing most of the station’s defenders, the Jillies had captured the remainder, and most of the secret, sophisticated communications gear of the station, and then lifted starward with their captives.

Commander Absolom Bracer had been in command of the patrol ship
Koniev
that had been a part of the squadron Adrianopolis sent after the fleeing Jillies, that had caught the Jillies a dozen light-hours out of Adrianopolis and destroyed them. Not a single ship escaped from the human avengers.

Commander Bracer had been among the first to enter the wreck that had been the flagship of the small Jillie fleet that had raped Port Abell, had been among the first to discover the stolen communications equipment and what was left of the human captives.

What was it about the Jillies that made them so desirous of disassembling human beings? Was it perhaps that by doing so they expected to learn to understand us? Did they think that by vivisecting us they could grasp our minds and learn how
we
thought, why we did the things we did? It would be so easy to chalk it up to malice, to unutterable evil, so easy, but probably so inaccurate. They probably had their reasons, reasons that made sense to them, though we could never expect to understand them.

That is what Bracer and his crewmen found‌—‌captives now mercifully dead in the vacuum of the ruptured Jillie hulk, captives whom the Jillies had begun disassembling as a man might disassemble an engine to see how it worked. And he did not recognize Donna Britt at first. She lay naked on a table, her body open from breastbone to hip and her internal organs, still attached, laid neatly out around her.

And when he did recognize her, he screamed, and he did not stop screaming until he was again inside the
Kornev
, the medical officer filling him with sedatives that mercifully dimmed the memory of what he had seen aboard the Jillie warship.

And now, standing in the officer’s galley of the
Iwo Jima,
he felt like screaming again.

“Admiral,” Eday Cyanta asked slowly, “why must it be like this?” There were tears streaming down her face.

Absolom Bracer would have wept too, had he been able.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, and reached out with his real arm and placed it around her shoulder and drew her close to him. “God help me, I don’t know.”

Finally she raised her eyes to peer into his mechanical ones. “Admiral, there is something I must say. I‌—‌I know I shouldn’t, but‌—‌but I don’t know whether I’ll ever get a chance to say it again.”

There was a clamminess within Bracer’s chest, a tightening of his heart. No, don’t say it, he said to himself, though he could not say it aloud. Such things should not be spoken, not here, not now. No…

“Admiral, I‌—‌I love you.” The words came out slowly, painfully, fearfully.

“You can’t,” he said flatly. He did not remove his arm from her shoulder, though he knew that he should.

“I do, sir.”

She was not drunk, but the alcohol had lowered her inhibitions enough to let her say those words.

“You can’t love a thing like me,” he said. “I can’t return your love.”

And he remembered the last time he held Donna in his arms, how soft and warm she had been under him, how yielding and demanding she had been in their love-making, and he thought how he would never hold another woman as he had held her then.

“Some day, sir,” Eday Cyanta was saying, “when we get back to Earth, when everything is made right, then‌—‌then, sir, could you?”

How was such a question to be answered. What does a mechanical man, an electronic eunuch say to a lovely woman?

“Someday, Miss Cyanta. Someday when we are back on Earth, I will love you.”

And he turned away from her and wished to all the gods in all the universes that he could cry.

There was much disaffection aboard the three starships. A minority, but apparently an extremely vocal and argumentative minority of the crew of the
Iwo Jima
was beginning to make plain its disagreement with the decision of its senior officers. The disgruntled crewmen of the
Iwo
were led, at least nominally, by the new first officer, Commander Cling Reddick, a once excellent combat officer who now lived only through the courtesy of an intricate series of artificial nerves that coordinated the involuntary actions of his body, replacing destroyed portions of his nervous system.

Reddick was aware of his responsibilities as first officer, Bracer knew, but still could not keep his mouth shut about his feelings concerning the decision to remain at Breakaway until the relief convoy arrived from Earth. His argument, and the arguments of those who followed him, was substantially the same as that Roger had used during his recent conversation with Bracer: What can we really do to help Breakaway Station? And the admiral was fully and uncomfortably aware of the logic of that argument. There really wasn’t a great deal he could say to counter it, but that wasn’t his job anyway. He had his hands full without wasting time arguing with the officers. That was Maxel’s job now, if anyone’s; let him worry about Reddick, and keep him and those who agreed with him in line.

In actuality, Bracer wasn’t too worried about Reddick. He had an excellent record, and the
Iwo
’s medical officer testified that Reddick was as well balanced mentally as was anyone else aboard the starship. Reddick would gripe and bitch‌—‌and Maxel would reprimand him‌—‌but it would probably never come to anything more than that.

Such was not the case board the
Pharsalus,
though Bracer did not know it until it was too late.

Hybeck watched the ships dwindling in the rearward tank until they were nothing more than three tiny specks no brighter than the stars, and then they were lost among those stars. Scanners, sensors, scopes could still detect them, would be able to follow them for some hours yet as the
San Juan,
the
Hastings
and the
Chicago
microjumped into and out of reality at pseudospeeds many times that of light. They were going home, and Lieutenant Commander Kamani Hybeck wasn’t. He was waiting. Just waiting.

“Hy, I’m scared,” Naha said softly.