Read Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen Online
Authors: Brad R. Torgersen
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Anthologies & Literary Collections, #General, #Short Stories, #anthologies, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Anthologies & Literature Collections, #Genre Fiction, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #Hard Science Fiction
Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (35 page)
Blank time.
Next, I was on my back, and I couldn’t breathe.
How had I gotten out of my humvee?
There was a loud buzzing sound, and my kevlar was gone.
When the pain finally hit, I gagged.
• • •
“He looks like he’s going to puke.”
Visions of the past evaporated as I realized I’d been forced into the doorway of an equipment closet. This wasn’t Kurdistan, and the three people with pistols regarded me as one might regard a mental patient escaped from the hospital.
One of the women with a pistol opened the door behind me and I found myself backed inside. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the others from the graveyard shift. Mouths taped. Wrists and ankles bound tightly. There was blood on the floor. Lots of blood. Rick Tamayo looked like he’d been shot.
He was too pale. Like my truck commander’s face.
I might have been twenty years older than my foes, but I’d never stopped working out to Army standard. And even though I’d lost my knack for combatives, I’d taken up a modified form of Taiwanese grappling—after my divorce—just to keep myself sharp, and not let myself slide into blubbery oblivion.
The adrenaline rang in my veins. I spun and grabbed the woman who had been closest behind me. With both arms I wrenched, feeling a
crunch
and hearing a scream as she lost her weapon. I bore down and lunged, putting my entire body into hers and pushing her into the two who remained in the doorway. They yelled and stumbled back under the first woman’s weight.
I let go and dove for the pistol that now lay free on the cement. Rolling, I scooped the weapon up and ran back through the door. I had to get to the control room. Even one shot through the main board would do the trick. I could also pull the fire alarm, which would automatically cut main power and sound alarms back at the mouth of the tunnel.
Shouts echoed through the lab as I sprinted madly for the steel staircase that would take me up to where I needed to go. I hit the stairs, three at a time, and reached for the door handle.
It was locked.
Damn.
My access card! I fumbled at my belt, yanking the ID on its spring-loaded tether, then heard a loud and all too familiar noise split the air.
Getting shot hurt just as much as it had the first time, outside Baghdad. I wobbled and fell, barely arresting myself on the railing and feeling an immense pain in my left side.
My weapon clattered down the stairs.
Someone was screaming my name. It sounded like Lilith. I saw the two remaining pistol-wielders stop in mid-stride and throw Lilith aside as she rushed towards the bottom of the stairs. A glance at the reaction chamber showed Senator Petersen slapping the backs of her people as they rushed their final bags inside. Then she turned towards the stairs and shouted, “Leave him! Marsh, Brown, we have to go
NOW!
”
Marsh and Brown looked back up at me as I hung to the railing with one arm, the opposite hand clamped over my wound. Warm, thick blood flowed through my fingers, and I gasped.
Lilith leapt back to her feet and pelted up the stairs.
“Cody!”
Lil half-sobbed. “Didn’t you realize it wouldn’t
matter
anymore? Why did you have to do that?”
“You know why,” I whispered to her, feeling light-headed.
Her hand froze an inch from my belly, afraid to touch the blood.
“Lilith,” I said, feeling the shock overtaking me, “You must stop this.”
“No, Cody. It’s too late. I’m committed. I just … I never wanted you to get hurt!”
“Lil …”
“I won’t forget you, Cody. You were a good man.”
“Lil …”
“Cody, I am
sorry.
”
Suddenly her lips and mouth were covering mine. The electric warmth of her lips cut through the pain, if only for a moment, and I held my breath and closed my eyes to savor it. Then she released me, and I opened my eyes again. Her face was damp from weeping and she stroked my thinning hair, just like she always did. I tried to grab her but she was already moving back down the stairs, and I groaned and slapped my hand back over my side as she jumped off the bottom of the stairs and sprinted for the reaction chamber—Marsh and Brown already in the lead.
Lil dashed through the orifice without looking at me, and then only Petersen remained. The Senator watched me impassively as I struggled back up the stairs to the door, managed to get my access card to the reader plate, and spat obscenities when the plate didn’t respond. Maybe if I’d not dropped the gun I could have shot my way inside, but I was bleeding out, and every muscle was turning to water. It was all I could do to slump down on my butt and heave air.
A klaxon sounded, and an automated voice warned people to clear the area.
Lil must have set an automatic countdown.
A familiar hum filled the lab as the power of several hydrogen bombs began to crouch in the super-cooled coils that surrounded the cube-shaped reaction chamber. Soon, everything within that space, down to the last molecule, would exchange places with everything in an equivalent space, far back in time, according to calculations that took into account the relative position of the Earth, the Sun, where the solar system was now versus where it had been then, and—
I glanced towards the equipment closet. Those who could do so had squirmed their way out and were thrashing like beached fish, eyes wide in realization.
The ERAF’s execution cycle began to pitch towards crescendo. Petersen kept looking at me intently, then frowned once and raised a hand in salute. Turning, she too ducked into the reaction chamber. She never looked back at the comrade she’d left behind. The woman whose arm I’d broken lay motionless near my writhing co-workers.
I must have hurt her worse than I’d thought. I felt shame for that.
But then, I felt calm, too.
As conscious thought faded, I figured I’d probably not have to worry about it in another couple of seconds. If Lilith and the Senator were right, very shortly, everything in the current day would cease to exist. I would never be born. Nor my parents. Nor their parents. Nor their parents’ parents. The ERAF would be gone, along with everyone who had built it. The United States, and all its history, would never happen. Nor Europe’s. Nor would anything else be the same, going all the way back to when Lilith and her group suddenly popped into existence on some impossibly ancient tundra, like colonists come to settle an alien world.
The ERAF countdown reached zero. As in previous experiments, it produced a muffled thunderclap that shook the lab.
I blacked out.
• • •
Waking up was an absolute surprise.
It was Wednesday morning, and I was in a hospital bed with tubes running in and out of me. Doctors and nurses came and told me I’d been in a coma, and that they’d barely gotten me to the operating room in time.
I’d lost a kidney. Almost bled out. Lucky to be alive.
I thought,
they don’t know the half of it.
I wondered what had gone wrong.
Nobody came to talk to me, though they had hospital security guards posted at my door.
So I just kept wondering. Throughout the next week in the hospital, then home for paid leave and convalescence—or house arrest, depending on how one chooses to view unmarked police cruisers perpetually stationed at one’s curb.
I watched on television as the new Retryon Research Treaty was introduced at the United Nations, and unanimously signed by all parties. I didn’t hear a thing from anyone with the project until Bill Hideki showed up one day, seven weeks after I got shot, and told me the rest of the story as we sat in my townhome’s living room.
It all came down to a single, huge piece of ice. That’s what they found in the reaction chamber when they went in the next day to clean up the mess.
Besides myself, one other project worker got shot, and he was dead even before I got there. Damn. I knew Rick had been too pale. The woman whose arm I broke turned out to be one of Petersen’s campaign staffers. She blew air into her IV tube the moment they left her unattended.
So much for her.
Everyone else recovered, and we were all under super-strict orders to not say a damned word about anything to anyone. There was a lot of hush money to make it worth our while, too.
Fine with me.
Late morning wore on, into afternoon.
The whole time Bill talked, I kept going back in my mind to that huge block of ice he’d mentioned.
No wonder history survived.
Somewhere back in time, Lilith and the Senator had found themselves transported into the belly of a glacier, with possibly a mile or more of frozen water above their heads. They’d have needed heavy equipment and explosives to bust their way out. Assuming melt water—raining in from the bottom of an exposed crevasse—had not drowned them first.
The glacier’s movement had doubtless ground their remains and equipment into powder. Nothing left for anyone to discover.
I shuddered.
Time travel stories never get old. Pun fully intended.
Only, when time travel is too easy, or too commonplace, or behaves without rules, it’s boring. For time travel to be intriguing, there have to be boundaries and limits. I wondered what might happen if nuclear physics theory stumbled across a kind of time travel where unique “tunnels” to the past could be accessed? Most of them are far too short to be of any possible use. They are burned up once they do get used. Who might want to take a “long” tunnel, presuming such a tunnel went deep into the past? And why? Especially if it was a once-on-this-lifetime chance?
I’m a fan of post-Ice Age North America, replete with giant animals and the many huge freshwater lakes that existed at that time. If there is a single place I’d want to go, given a chance to travel back into time, I’d want to go to the shores of Lake Bonneville about five hundred years before the lake cut loose and flooded out through Red Rock Pass. I imagine it’s colder than it is now. Lots of snow in the winter. And the mountains are covered in trees. With the lake itself stretching away to the horizon, gorgeous and blue. An inland sea, unspoiled by ships or industry. What if a small band of modern humans—carting along the collected knowledge of the modern age—went back to that time, and started over? We’d know how to avoid many of the mistakes industrial society has made, getting from the 16
th
century to the 21
st
century. With sufficient equipment and weapons we might be able to take over and interbreed with whatever bands of primitive humans we come across; assuming there are such bands to be had. The descendents of that fusion—ancient, and modern—would have (theoretically) all our knowledge at their fingertips, and an entire world of mostly untamed and fresh resources at their disposal. With no competition. But an enlarged and much more careful perspective.
Can you see it?
I can!
Alas, that spells doomsday for you and me. We’d never exist. Wouldn’t that be a kind of genocide, to wipe all modern humans from the face of the Earth? Even if it meant getting to have a clean slate?
There are a few people—mostly at the edges of the environmentalist movement—who would literally kill for just such a clean slate.
One of the readers who first read this story, said she had a hard time with it precisely because she sympathized—not with Cody—but with the Senator!
I suppose I do too, on a certain level. I’d love to see Lake Bonneville. But I’d not want to have the fate of the entire 21
st
century on my conscience either. Our present state of affairs may not be perfect, but each and every one of us is an individual with rights and dignity. We are not a pestilence on this planet. Nor are we a mere commodity. I fear sometimes the “planners” of our world forget these facts. And so I chose to bury the Senator in the heart of a glacier. As a kind of just punishment for her zealotry and hubris.
Brian Lewis took this story for his
Spark: A Creative Anthology
project, the foreword to which was written by my friend and mentor Kevin J. Anderson. I was honored that Brian wanted to include me (and “Hideki”) as something of a veteran presence. I have several friends in that volume as well. I hope my continued success has helped the Spark books by association.
Thanks, Brian.
***
Peacekeeper
(with Mike Resnick)
It was a normal duty day in the city until the Earth limo showed up. It glided through the chaotic
s’ndar
traffic that bustled across my assigned six-way intersection. Flow control was provided by a single
s’ndar
of the city’s provisional constabulary, who jerked his brightly-colored paddles to and fro over his bug’s head, herding his people this way and that.
Since the cease-fire, my squad and I didn’t mess with the locals unless we had to. We kept out of the way, as back-up for the traffic cop in case of real trouble.
I exchanged glances with Corporal Kent, who’d seen the limo. Her facial expression said,
You’re the boss, you figure it out
.
I sighed, then got up out of my sandbagged security position and began walking towards the vehicle as it ground to a halt a few meters away.
The
s’ndar
traffic cop watched me, decided it was none of his business, and went back to waving his paddles.
Low-rise commercial and residential structures sprouted around the intersection like mushrooms, their hemispherical roofs designed to shelter pedestrians from the daily monsoon. Along the boulevards poles rose up from the pavement at regular intervals to support endless rows of electrical conduit, phone conduit, and fiber optics.
A slight haze of smog hung over the
s’ndar
city. It was impossible to ignore how similar, and yet also totally different, the scene was from the average urban center on Earth. Humans and
s’ndar
had reached roughly equivalent technology levels.
Then the Interstellar Conglomerate intervened.
The smooth hum of the limo’s twin engines quit, and the man who stepped out of the car was someone I was familiar with only from the news feeds. Senator Jeff Petersen had played football in college, and still kept reasonably fit. Tall and broad-chested, his full head of pepper-tinged hair was trimmed close. He had on a khaki field vest—one of the Earth embassy models that contained ballistic armor plating in addition to being festooned with pouches and pockets. He also wore neatly-pressed khaki shorts and high-topped boots.
Given the oppressive humidity, I envied his wardrobe.
Two similarly-dressed Secret Service personnel—one male, with a pistol on his hip; the other female, with a submachine gun in her hands—flanked the Senator as he strode toward me. Other Secret Service agents stepped from the car and scanned the surroundings cautiously, their mirror sunglasses and straight faces making them seem somehow robotic.
I saluted the Senator when he drew near.
“Sergeant Colford!” yelled Petersen over the din of traffic as he extended his hand. He’d obviously read my name tape on my armor. Good politician’s reflex. Made it seem like he really gave a damn who I was.
I rapidly chow-slung my rifle and shook Petersen’s hand. He had a surprisingly strong grip. Well, maybe not so surprising, given his profession. His smile was amiable, and his nicely-capped teeth sparkled in the oppressive sunlight.
I strongly resisted the urge to like him.
“Senator,” I said formally, “I wish I’d known you were coming.”
“You guys always say that,” Petersen said, continuing to smile. “But how am I supposed to talk to you candidly if your Commander or First Sergeant is warning you at morning briefing?”
It was a good point. But if I knew my corporal, she was already calling in to the Tactical Operations Center. Headquarters would have our asses if we didn’t report the Senator’s arrival ASAP.
Petersen surveyed my semi-hardened position.
“A bunker and eleven troops. Kind of overkill, don’t you think? The
s’ndar
in this city are pro-Conglomerate now. They’re our friends.”
“Maybe, sir,” I replied. “But you weren’t here six months ago.”
“I read about that. Did you see a lot of fighting, son?”
Son?
Hell, I was almost thirty.
“I saw my share,” I said evenly. “My rifle company trained
en
route
. Our Conglomerate transports already had mock-ups of
s’ndar
urban terrain onboard. We
thought
we’d be ready.”
“But you thought wrong,” the Senator said.
“Yah,” I replied, grimacing at the memory.
Petersen waited, as if expecting me to say something more. When I didn’t, he ran a hand over his scalp and then folded his arms across his chest.
“So, you’ve seen some rough fighting. Okay. Do you at least feel like it was worth it?”
“Worth
what
, sir?”
“Earth’s involvement in
S’ndar-khk’s
civil war.
America’s
involvement in the CEMEF—the Combined Earth Military Expeditionary Force.”
“I don’t make policy, sir,” I told him noncommittally. “I just follow orders.”
“Fair enough. But the UN’s bargain with the Conglomerate is costing American lives. Do you think it’s worth it?”
I frowned, remembering my sister Karen. She’d been an officer in the Air Force, and had wanted to be an astronaut too, before the Conglomerate established their first contact with Earth. The interstellar robotic transports the Conglomerate sent to us made Earth’s space stations look like toys. We’d not even put a man on Mars yet, and the Conglomerate was picking us up and hauling us off in whole battalions—over 300 light-years, to this obscure little planet, where my sister had been thrilled as hell to see actual aliens.
Now she was buried back home, her skull split by a
s’ndar
bullet. It had been a closed-casket affair, given the damage. Mom and Dad still weren’t over it.
“I’ve lost some friends here,” I said. “And family too. Things were a mess on this planet when we showed up. Lots of killing all over the place. Now there’s not so much. But only because we’re still alert every hour of every day. You ask me if it’s worth it … I sure as hell hope so.”
Petersen’s brow furrowed. He reached out and put a hand on my shoulder, his face turning empathetic.
“I’m sorry for your friends, and whoever else you lost in your family, too. Part of the reason I’m here is to assure you and the other troops that you’re doing truly important work. You’re saving lives.
Human
lives. We help the
s’ndar
establish and keep the peace, and the Conglomerate helps Earth. We
need
the Conglomerate’s clean fusion technology to reverse the economic and political damage from the Oil Crash. You’re standing guard on this intersection so that you—or someone like you—doesn’t have to stand guard over a few barrels of crude in the Person Gulf or Venezuela.”
“Militia coming!” yelled one of my privates.
Senator Petersen and I turned our heads to see a small patrol of
s’ndaran
-make armored personnel carriers maneuvering towards us through the hubbub. The large-wheeled, tank-like vehicles took a few minutes to reach our position, and when they did, several armed
s’ndar
climbed from the hatch on an aerial-spiked APC, and approached my squad.
The
s’ndar
in the lead looked older than the rest. It was a female. Hell,
all
the authority figures in the insectoid race from sergeant on up were females, just like the ants and bees back on Earth. Her chitin was grayed at the edges and had several wounds that had been puttied over with artificial quick-cure ceramic, now weathered. Her thorax bore the militia-equivalent of a Non-Commissioned Officer, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out she’d seen her share of combat.
Sergeant to sergeant, we saluted, the
s’ndar
in its form, me in mine.
As I lowered my rifle from the vertical, my Conglomerate-manufactured Translation Application Device—TAD—began speaking into my helmet’s earphones. Emotionless metallic English filled my ears as the
s’ndar’s
mandibles clicked and scratched consonants in between flute-like vowels.
“Good morning, Staff Sergeant,” she said.
“Good morning, Primary Sergeant,” I replied, my TAD turning my English into
s’ndar
words.
“My soldiers and I arrive in coordination with the Senator’s visit,” said the primary sergeant.
I studied her. You could never really be sure about the militia. They worked for the provisional government, who worked with the Expeditionary Force. But that didn’t mean much on the street. I’d learned that first-hand. A few of the militia were quality. Many of them were either incompetently hazardous or deceitfully dangerous. It was best to be cautious.
Petersen turned back to me.
“Do you mind if I go talk with your people?”
“Feel free, sir,” I said
I watched Petersen navigate away from my fighting position, chatting briefly with privates, specialists, and my corporal.
Finally the
s’ndar
sergeant spoke. “I apologize for this nuisance,” she said.
“Not a problem,” I answered, grateful my TAD didn’t translate my distaste. We’d come to
S’ndar-khk
to help, and the various
s’ndar
hives had fought us tooth and nail—in the middle of their own stupid hive-on-hive war. They might have gone nuclear on each other if the Conglomerate hadn’t established first contact, and intervened for humanitarian reasons.
I heard some loud, rumbling engines, and turned to see a series of large trucks maneuvering into the intersection. They were flatbeds of
s’ndar
construction, weighed down with large, square containers. I frowned. Any kind of large-scale commercial traffic like this should have been cleared with the Tactical Operations Center well beforehand. The native traffic cop out in the intersection knew it too, and began waving his paddles furiously, signaling for the trucks to stop.
Their drivers obeyed—
—and the traffic cop exploded in a spray of barking rifle fire.
After that everything became a blur.
I remember the sides of the shipping containers splitting open and a small swarm of
s’ndar
pouring out. Civilians on foot began to scatter while vehicles attempted to either halt, or speed off. The air buzzed with countless
s’ndar
voices that overwhelmed my TAD. I switched over to the squad channel as I brought my weapon from off my back and pulled the charging handle.
The turrets on the
s’ndar
APCs—armored personnel carriers— rotated and began hammering heavy rounds towards the flatbeds, only to be hit by rocket-propelled grenades.
The APCs burned.
I couldn’t determine which of the attacking
s’ndar
had fired. In the panicked crowd, it was impossible to tell the attackers apart from the civilians. I saw the primary sergeant hunched and firing her rifle, so I got down on one knee and began firing likewise. Whoever she shot at, I could shoot at, at least according to the rules of engagement—
s’ndar
being better able to tell one another apart.
Corporal Kent was taking care of the squad. Her bellowing voice was comforting through the speakers in my headset.
Using the laser sight on my weapon, I drew a bead on a
s’ndar
moving hurriedly towards me, while the crowd scrambled in the opposite direction. My finger gave a near-motionless trigger pull and my target’s carapace cracked hideously as the jacketed round tore through its thorax.
I fired at another one, also moving against the crowd. And another. And another.
There were so many trying to converge on us at once!
The Senator!
I thought.
They’re after the Senator!
His armored car was in flames, along with the militia’s APCs, and I heard the popping of the Secret Service’s pistols, punctuated by the occasional rip of their submachine guns.
From somewhere in the chaos of the crowd, numerous small objects catapulted. For an instant they looked like opaque mason jars, then one was smashing onto the pavement two meters from me.
Grenades?
I stopped firing and turned to see other such objects cascading across our sandbagged position.
I crouched down and began to move towards my people when I caught a deep whiff of a sickly-sweet chemical. The contents of the mason jars had spilled wetly on the ground, vapors pluming, and I suddenly found myself rolling helplessly onto my side, arms and legs twitching sporadically.
The
s’ndar
had never used chemical weapons against us before. Neural agents which were effective against
s’ndar
didn’t work against humans, and vice versa.
Until now, anyway.
My instinct was to reach for the unused protective mask in my thigh pouch, but the pouch was pinned under my bodyweight and I didn’t have the strength to roll over. It was as if all the signals traveling from my brain to my body had been roadblocked.
Darkness began closing in on me from all sides, and I thought about how stupid it was to be snuffed like this.
The screams of my squad fell quickly silent, and the last thing I remembered was the murky shape of a
s’ndar
leaning over me.
It was not a member of the militia.
• • •
“Staff Sergeant?”
I didn’t move.
“Staff Sergeant!”
I still didn’t move. The neutered voice did not compute.
Something like a tree branch raked my face.
That
computed.
I reflexively opened my eyes and tried to bring my arms forward in self defense, only to find them shackled over my head. Short, rusted iron chains kept me pinned against a cold wall. A single hole in the high ceiling allowed a broad-based shaft of sunlight to penetrate, forming a too-bright circle on the cracked cement floor, and leaving the perimeter of the room in near darkness.
A sudden wave of nausea hit, and I coughed violently, my nose and eyes running—doubtless a final reaction to the residue of the chemical attack. For a second I thought I was going to pass out again, but the nausea slowly subsided and I began blinking the tears from my eyes.
“He is alert,” said the mechanical voice. “Go inform the others.”
I kept blinking until a
s’ndar
silhouette took shape before me. The rotund, beetle-like being was resting on its lower motile legs with one utensil arm poised, ready to strike. The stiff hairs along that arm had stung mightily when it swiped me the first time. I’d have been happy to swing back, if only I wasn’t chained.