Zombie Starship Page 17

  On his way back to the hotel, he had his hands in his pockets. His fingers encountered the small paper packet, and he threw it impulsively into the street. He glanced back and saw it soaking up water and ruining the pills inside that offered a Venable-style solution. Ridge marched all the more stubbornly, rejecting any solution that negated who he and she were...not he and she as generic experiments that could be rebirthed at will without regard for their humanity, but unique, one-time and never-again human beings like any others who had lived from generation to generation during the Holocene Era of Old Earth-the time between the Ice Ages and the departure of mankind to the stars.

  As he entered the quiet, lovely atmosphere of the hotel, he held the assault rifle cautiously before him. He stared around corners and looked left and right down hallways before proceeding to the next room or the next level. He took the stairs rather than let himself be trapped in the elevator. If ever Venable needed to do away with him, it was now.

  He walked through the steaming swim-room and noted that Lantz's body was no longer in the bottom of the pool. The cleaners must have seen to that during Largo's sleep cycle, when even he and Brenna had dozed. After all, in the final hours of a temp's day, the nutrients started wearing down and temps began to yawn and thinking about lying down to sleep. Temps began to dream about dreaming.

  He found Brenna on the bed where he'd left her. She had turned onto her other side. A large stain of yellowish plasma water, inset with a thin puddle of blood, stained the sheet and the pillow on the side where she had been facing when he left. Now she faced the other way. He leaned lovingly over her and used the side of his sleeve to wipe flecks of blood from her lips and chin. "Brenna!"

  She moaned in her sleep. Her eyes fluttered partially open. "So tired."

  "I know, Brenna. We're going to take a little trip. Come along." He tried to help her up, but she flopped listlessly. He slung the needler over his shoulder so it dangled down his back. He picked her up and carried her on his arms. Her head cradled against his chest, and he kissed her rich umber hair. Her legs dangled to his left, and one arm hung straight down. He was too heavily burdened with the guns and ammo and Brenna to be able to shift her arm up onto her sleeping form.

  He carried her down the stairs, through the lobby, and out into the street. The load was heavy, and he walked to one of the small cars by the curb. He slung Brenna over one shoulder and tried to pull the door open. It appeared to be locked. He kicked at the passenger side window, but it wouldn't break. Keeping Brenna over his shoulder, he recovered the assault gun from his back in a twirling motion that brought its barrel up, he stepped back and aimed from an angle to deflect the resulting energy. He fired several bursts. The window exploded in myriad tiny glass crumbles that fanned over the sidewalk in one direction and blew into the car in the other, which couldn't be helped. The glass was designed to shatter without being sharp. He opened the door and gently placed Brenna on the bed of torn upholstery and harmlessly piled glass crumbles. Then he got into the passenger side. There was no key, so he hotwired the electric connections underneath. It was just like driving any car on Old Earth, and he had memories of how to do that. He did a U-turn and drove down the street in a spray of rain. A large fishtail of water cut the moist air behind him as he raced along.

  At the train station, he drove directly onto the sidewalk and braked with squealing tires directly before the steps. Wielding his gun and watching on all sides for cleaners, he walked around to the passenger side. He saw no evidence of mudmen or any other life form, but he wanted to take no chances. Carefully, gently, he lifted Brenna from the car. She moaned softly and put her arms around his shoulders. "It's going to be okay," he said, "we are halfway there." In response, she lost consciousness again. Her loose arm dangled once again, while the other was crushed against his stomach. He carried her through the echoing main hall and around to the elevator lobby in back, where he had arrived from WorkPod01.

  He gently lowered Brenna onto the floor of the still-open pod in which he had arrived. He unloaded his heavy arsenal onto the floor around her. Keeping one handgun in his hand in case of ambush, he carefully backed into the pod. The rudimentary controls were simple, but he used voice commands. "Close," he said, and the door slid quietly shut.

  "WorkPOd01," he said while trying to make her comfortable. He sat down on the rolled-up bandoliers and cradled her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. "Return," he said because the first command had not worked. He shouted: "Venable! I am the only hope for this ship!"

  At that, the pod swept into motion, and for a second Ridge thought the Captain meant to dash him to his death. The Captain said nothing. The pod flew through hidden pneumatic shafts in the walls of the bow section and in the hull itself, and then wrenched to an over-torqued stop that pressed Ridge against the wall. He felt his body compress in multiple G-forces and held on to the bench behind him with both hands. Brenna's unconscious weight pressed against him and threatened to suffocate him, but the pod stopped and the deceleration G-forces ended as abruptly as they'd begun.

  The door opened without a word from either Ridge or Venable, and Ridge stepped out into WorkPod01. Another team must have just left, because the incubators were newly horizontal and just half-way full of water. Ridge blocked the transit-pod door with his body and with the assault rifle as he lifted Brenna out. With Brenna slung over his shoulder, he pulled his weapons and ammo out. The door slid shut, sealing the transit pod.

  Ridge carried Brenna to the incubator whose lid-markings bore the same designation as her jumpsuit collar. He was sure she had been born in this incubator. Ridge pulled at the lid but it wouldn't open. "Venable," he said in a warning voice.

  No answer. He laid Brenna on the floor, picked up his assault rifle, and tapped repeatedly, sharply, against the side of the lid. Sweat poured down his face, and his stomach was in knots. "Venable, help me!" He bit his lip with concentration as he tapped again and again. Finally the seal popped with a sigh of wet air, and the lid unlocked. He raised it up. Stripping Brenna naked, he placed her gently in the still rushing, foaming fluid. He gave her one last hug, one last kiss, and she barely seemed to know who he was. He slammed the lid down and saw the seal reform. He looked for a second or two at her sleeping features as she sank into the engulfing waters. More water rushed in over her face, and bubbles floated across her features. She opened her eyes and mouth once-just for a second-in a horrified moment of realization that she was drowning-before she relaxed and sank down into the oxygen-rich liquid. Ridge gasped at his own recklessness. This immersion would either kill her, or save her life. There had been no alternative.

  Angrily, he stormed to the wall where he knew the opening into the CP was. "Venable!" He banged on the wall. "Let me in!"

  Silence.

  Ridge picked up the grenade launcher. "Venable, I'm going to count to three. One way or another, I'm coming in there. I don't really care what happens to you, which is fine because you do not care what happens to me or her."

  "You must not do this," came the feeble voice.

  "There is no choice and no time." He stepped back as far as he could and released a round. The gun barked in his hand. The air between gun and wall flared in white light. The door blew out in a mass of twisted metal and plastics. All around the opening, tortured and damaged controls sparked. Of the door itself, little more remained than some fine black mesh that hung down as acrid smoke drifted away from the impact and was sucked up by air-conditioning vents.

  "Please stop," Venable said.

  Ridge climbed into the cramped little CP. As he did so, he laid the launcher down on the doorframe to make sure the ship could not somehow close him in.

  "Ridge!" the face of Venable cried out from its tray of fluids. "Please, let's figure this out."

  "Right," Ridge said. "Let's do it my way, shall we? We've been doing it your way." He reached behind the tray and yanked on the tubing there. Water splashed all around. Quickly, Ridge used his fingers to sort through the surpr
isingly flimsy plastic hoses bundled in padded harness-clips. The face in the tray drifted from side to side on wildly patterned ripples with an anguished impression. Ridge figured out which of the nutrient water hoses went to which incubator. Rummaging in drawers of spare parts that looked like the plastics kits at some neighborhood department store, particularly in the garden department, the section he remembered in which one found all the parts for a lawn sprinkler system. In hasty, bitter triumph, he held up a Y-joint with one hand and a can of purplish join-sealer with the other. He had to lean down with his teeth and rip the plastic of the hose going to Brenna's incubator. When that didn't work, he sawed frantically with a little file. The tray with Venable's face and organs in it shifted ever closer to the edge and looked ready to fall off. Venable's mouth moved in panicked gasps for oxygen or attempts to tell Ridge something, and his eyes were large, and finally his eyes started looking glazed and the mouth stopped moving. Ridge saw the edge of a wooden knife handle protruding from the bric-a-brac on the counter under the tray. In a single motion of his arm, he swept the tray away. The tray sailed through the air, twirling, losing its fluids. The tray bounced off wireframe shelving, twirled some more, and hit the wall. The tray bounced off. There was a large shiny wet spot on the wall, and a mass of grayish tissue and purple matter like kidneys dripping down the walls. Rolled up in a mass where it had slid down to come to rest in a dusty, dirty box full of screws and bits of wire and half-empty tubes of this and that was Venable's face, with one blank eyeball staring away at the wall.

  Ridge used the newly found knife to sever hoses and hook up new connections. It was a desperate gamble, more likely to fail than succeed, but it was the only hope. Ridge could only pray now that the ship still had enough fuzzy logic or meme programming or fuzzy logic problem solving abilities to make the necessary adjustments after reading the new situation.

  Multiple hoses, albeit smaller ones, had fed into Venable's tray and into canisters under the table where his nutrients had been mixed. Ridge disconnected that system and yoked the canisters into the system feeding Brenna's and one other receptacle. When it was all done, when the joints were sealed and the system was bubbling happily and there was nothing else he could think to do, Ridge wiped his hands on a rag and muttered to the ship in general and to Brenna in particular: "Now we'll see if we wake up at all, and if we remember who we were, or if we go to sleep and never wake up and eventually this whole rusting hulk goes sailing, baseball-heads and all, into some blazing sun somewhere that will never even notice that the entire human race just did its final fire dance."

  So saying, Ridge went back outside to check briefly on Brenna. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully-or was she dead?-in her incubator awaiting the time a hundred or a thousand years from now when the ship went into orbit around a New Earth, and Largo woke up to a new dawn. Ridge went to his own incubator. Struggling for a few minutes, he managed to raise the lid. He took off his clothing and climbed inside. Water splashed around his naked body parts as he turned over onto his back. He lowered the lid down on himself and went to sleep amid the sweet soft white light and churning air bubbles that saturated the faintly pink broth in which he was about to steep himself.

  Chapter 17

  Ridge sat at the table in WorkPod01, eating cereal, and reading The Odyssey on a digitablet. As he read about the violent and gory battles on primordial Holocene Earth, he was rapt and lost in that world where wind keened through rolling grasslands and cattle lowed on distant hills while warriors clashed and died. He could almost hear the whinny of horses, the crackle of burning walls, the cries of wounded and dying men. A voice speaking nearby pulled him out of that reverie.

  Venable, wearing an officer's black Class B jumpsuit, sat across the white tabletop from him. Venable folded his hands on the table. He was a handsome young man in his mid-30s, with dark brown hair cropped close, and dark blue eyes in a lightly tanned skin. "Can you feature all that?"

  "What do you mean?" Ridge put a tongue depressor in the book as a mark, closed the book, and put the book on the shelf under the table.

  "The sights and smells. Do you relate to them?"

  As the two spoke, various crewmembers came and went between their moon doors and the common quarters such as bathrooms, showers, and weight room. They all looked vaguely familiar, though none were from the last iteration except one. There was no Tomson, no Lantz, no Mahaffey. He thought he did see Brenna beyond the rippled glass door of the shower area, combing her hair and singing to herself as she looked into a mirror surrounded by little round light bulbs. Again and again she ran the brush through her thick hair which was deep blood red like autumn leaves.

  "It's as if I'm there," Ridge told Venable, thinking of the unpleasantness at Bronze Age Hissarlik.

  "Excellent. The ship did a good job putting us together."

  Ridge looked around. "This is a broth."

  "Yes." Venable looked at him thoughtfully. The faint flicker of his eyes betrayed complex criss-cross considerations, not all happy ones.

  "Are you part of this iteration?"

  Venable shook his head. "I don't think so." He turned his head to look at, and guide Ridge's gaze to, the open door far off in a corner. Ridge looked at the door with the hint of jumble in the small room, and the yellowish light pouring out. "I go back there."

  "I thought I pulled your hoses."

  "You did. We're all part of the ship though. You knew that."

  "Yes. I didn't mean to terminate you. I figured the ship would take care of you."

  "It's not the ship so much," Venable said. "It's about the genetic broth, and the ship's mission. I just want you to understand."

  "I understand, or maybe I don't. Why?"

  Venable leaned forward. His collar was casually open, revealing stray comma-like hairs against dusky skin. "Ricardo had persuaded Brenna to leave her modeling job in New York City and move to Buenos Aires to marry him. They were happy together and she was pregnant when the comets appeared without warning, coming up at a near perpendicular angle to the solar system ecliptic."

  "So there was at least one set of child genes," Ridge said. He lost interest in eating and pushed the cereal bowl aside. With one finger, he idly traced sharp jaggy figures in the bluish milk spilled on finely rippled white plastic. Little bits of soggy cereal were stuck in there; good detail, he thought, nicely done, ship.

  Venable continued: "The angry one was Venable, who had loved Brenna from the first and was determined to steal her from Ridge. The old gaucho, Caulfield--"

  "Uncle to both Ricardo and Venable," Ridge offered.

  "-Exactly. Caulfield owned significant portions of the global economy, including trade, hospitals, blood banks, and shipping, just for example. Caulfield had one huge ship plying the planetary trade run. In fact, Caulfield had a monopoly on the Neptune run. His ship was just arriving in orbit of L5 near Luna when word of the comet swarm first made the news. It was academic that Caulfield would refit Neptune Express for a desperate gamble to take a few thousand colonists to the stars. With enough genetic material in racks to furnish unique DNA for a million persons, and the finest wetware including AI, wormware, you name it, Caulfield was the only one who could get a ship ready. With no habitable worlds in the solar system to make a new home, mankind needed to break out into the Milky Way."

  "Yes," Ridge said, "and the new ship, Nebula Express, set off on a course running counter to the stellar vortex of our galaxy, thereby multiplying her effective speed in searching for the best new world. Have we found it yet?"

  "Yes," Venable said. He sat back with his hands in his pockets and looked at Ridge with his chin resting in the deceptive informality of his open collar. "We make orbit in another fifty years, and at that point Venable will be the master of the ship, and Brenna will be at his side. There will be no place for Ridge in that scenario."

  "You are telling me this--why?"

  Venable grinned and folded his hands between his knees. He leaned over his knees as if he held
the secret of fire between them. "I want Ridge to know he lost."

  Ridge nodded. "I see. The victory is no good unless the loser knows he is getting creamed. Sort of like Achilles slicing Hector up with his sword."

  Brenna came walking out. "Ridge, I thought we were waiting for Largo to come to life." She looked ravishing in her pink slip. Her figure moved like shadowy music against the back-glow of light from the shower. She was still pulling the brush through her hair, and smelled like damp flowers from her morning shower. "Why are we back in this workpod?"

  Ridge shrugged. Venable had left, disappeared, gone back into his room, whatever-that distant corner door was closed. "The ship wants to dump our genes, I think. The ship wants to flush us out. I'm supposed to get terminally wiped on this iteration. I don't know what they have in mind for you." A horrible suspicion dawned on him, and he did not want to scare her with it.

  She sat down where Venable had just sat. "Darn this hair," she said making a pained face as she pulled on the brush and it only inched through her hair without coming out. "I'd give anything for a decent wash and perm on uptown Santa Fe or Campos."

  "I'm sure we will find a decent hairdresser on Largo," Ridge said. "Why don't you go in your cube and lock yourself in? You'll be safe there. Maybe you can skip going out on the job."

  "Oh no," she said, "they won't let anyone stay. You know the workpod gets locked up tight as a drum. Now we know why."

  Other team members were starting to appear, buttoning uniforms and adjusting hats or carrying web gear in preparation for the day's work. Already, a red light flashed its silent alarm. An image appeared on the view screen near the portal, and the team leader appeared beside it. It was a young, earnest man with short blond hair and sincere Boy Scout eyes. "He knows nothing," Brenna said.