Osprey chronicles comple.., p.40
Osprey Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 40
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Osprey was a large ship, but the portion of her that contained artificial gravity was comparatively small and compact. There was only one module large enough to accommodate a gathering of more than a dozen people comfortably.
Jaeger stared around the newly-repaired general crew quarters. Antiques stuffed the command crew lounge. Handmade bookshelves full of dog-eared novels, trash and classics alike, old furniture, and a small gym with well-used but high-quality equipment. Mismatched, to be sure, but reflecting an appreciation for personalization and quality.
By comparison, the general crew lounge looked like the builders had lifted it directly from a low-security prison—or perhaps a low-budget mental hospital. Soulless steel benches curved along the floor, lining low tables and flat white walls. The fluorescent tubes overhead cast everything in a harsh, blueish glow.
There was a small gaming corner, but even there, the pool table was a cheap plastic construction, the dartboard flimsy, the Indiana Jones pinball machines missing more than a few LEDs.
The newly-activated crew milled around the lounge, picking at platters of synthesized crudités, cradling mugs of sparkling water or pink lemonade. Toner had argued that a few shared beers before a dangerous mission were vital to troop morale—a tradition that Jaeger stomped out viciously and without regret.
“We’re packing out to a war zone in eight hours,” she’d told him. “It’s not a romp to the carnival. They can cut loose when we get back. Besides,” she’d added. “They’re six hours old.”
Toner had been more disappointed by the refusal than the crew members themselves, who seemed as indifferent to deprivation as excess. Listless, they milled through the lounge, eying one another warily.
Running this mission with such an anemic crew would be tricky, so Jaeger conceded that the members they did activate would need to be specialized and varied. In other words, armed to the teeth. In the case of the fellow with tusks, armed with teeth.
The twenty people arrayed before Jaeger had been drawn from seven different genetic templates and made for an awkward masquerade. Men with oversized, slit-pupiled eyes of hawks stalked around the food, brushing roughly past a pair of huddled androgynous figures crowned with dozens of undulating, mismatched antennae.
They’re barely the same species, Jaeger realized. She sipped her lemonade as she watched two crewmen sidestep their way through awkward small-talk. One of them was nearly two and a half meters tall—all skin and bones, with long, swaying legs that seemed to have too many joints. Her companion, barely more than half her height and equally wide, had a deep underbite that exposed a row of hook-like teeth jutting defiantly up toward his eyes.
They’re grown from very different templates. She’s part-spider. He’s part-bulldog. She wondered if they were even capable of producing healthy offspring, then set that unsettling idea aside for later examination.
The crowd rippled to make way for a mass of flowing tentacles. Occy greeted each new crew member with a shy smile and a nod, trying to make conversation. Some of the newcomers responded politely, but most, strangely, turned away. She couldn’t say if they disregarded him because of his childlike appearance or because he was the most singularly inhuman creature in the room—by a mile.
Painfully aware of the halo of empty space around Occy’s tentacles, Jaeger was about to rescue the boy from loneliness when the lounge door slid open to reveal Toner standing on the threshold. As the crew turned to look at him, he cupped his hands over his mouth and bellowed. “Party’s here!”
He hopped to the side, making room for Baby to lumber into the lounge. She pulled a cart piled with fresh junk from the food fabricators. A small shelving unit stacked with trays full of pizza. A small mountain of miniature cheeseburgers sliced through with pickle spears and bacon. Barrels of onion rings and French fries and cheese curds dotted with tureens of dipping sauce, all followed by a wide platter of finger-sized eclairs and chocolate-covered strawberries.
Jaeger, imagining an endless line at the toilet a few hours after the crew devoured this feast, hadn’t wanted to approve the menu, either. She’d been vigorously shouted down, with even Virgil pointing out that the genetically toughened digestive tracts of these creatures were designed to subsist on anything and everything—they could handle a bit of trans fat. Toner insisted that if they couldn’t have booze, then something worth eating was the very, very least she could give them before sending them off to die.
Now standing in the corner of the crew lounge, Toner folded his arms, his mouth curved in a self-satisfied smile, as the crew members surged forward, abandoning the platters of carrot sticks and olives in favor of pure salt and grease and sugar. He lifted an eyebrow at Jaeger as she approached.
She held up a hand, cutting off his I told you so. “I’m surprised you don’t have a barrel full of kidneys and livers in that cart too.”
Toner shrugged, watching the messy feast with satisfaction. “I ate before coming to the party. Plus, that was just the four of us. Didn’t want to scare the new crew on their very first day.”
Jaeger tried not to smile but couldn’t help it. The party had gone well. Toner had been exuberant, Seeker silent and brooding, and Occy …Jaeger had spent a lot of time with Occy listening to his concerns and letting him sit next to her all night. It felt like they’d bonded, which was important before their mission. She allowed a moment of not-quite-companionable silence pass between them. “Do you forgive me?” she asked.
“For what?”
Jaeger stared at her first mate as he watched the crew. There was no rancor on his face at all.
He means it, she marveled. He doesn’t really remember what he was so angry about.
She decided not to remind him, lest he get mad all over again.
“It’s strange that there weren’t any other templates like yours in the files,” she mused, looking for a change of subject. Not that she wanted another emotionally unstable, absentminded berserker-vampire on her crew, precisely, but she’d wondered at the absence.
Toner shook his head. “No, it’s not. You and me, we weren’t hatched. Our modifications are all custom, aftermarket. Our work might even predate the creation of all the embryos.”
“Experiments, in other words.”
“Experiments that worked out well enough, right? For you, at least. Endurance, physical resilience, resistance to illness and disease, physical strength, and enhanced eyesight in a nice little pint-sized package. Downright sneaky. People might not even notice you’re enhanced, at first.”
He shrugged. “Me? Well. I got a lot of horsepower crammed in here, but apparently, it’s too much for some people to handle.” He rubbed the back of his neck idly, touching the neural implant off-switch wrapped around his spinal cord that would activate and paralyze him if he came too close to eating things he shouldn’t. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a whole mass grave of failed vampire candidates somewhere, from back before the Tribes figured out how to control us.”
Jaeger shuddered, horrified by both his implication and the utterly casual way Toner must have evaluated the nature and rationale for his unique existence. Then something occurred to her. “I don’t have enhanced eyesight,” she said.
Toner peered down. “Come on. That’s not a natural eye color.”
“It is my natural color,” she said, startled. Even when she looked in a mirror, which was rare, she rarely gave a second thought to her golden irises.
“Sure.” Toner rolled his eyes. “Keep your secrets.”
She didn’t know why that bothered her, but it did. She elbowed him roughly. “It is. It runs in the family. My daughter has light eyes, too.”
Toner said nothing, watching as the crew dug through the mountain of sliders. On the other side of the lounge, Occy was fiddling with the audio system interface. Eighties techno-pop dance music blared through the speakers.
“You have a daughter.” Toner wasn’t looking at her.
Jaeger jumped, blushed. “Yeah.”
“You remember?”
Her blush deepened. She pushed herself away from the wall, silently vowing to let Toner in on the special lessons that were unlocking her lost memories as soon as she had time. “It’s a long story,” she said. “I’ll explain as soon as the mission is over. Right now, the troops need their pep talk.”
“I know a little about the training and experiences imprinted into your brains during the growing process.” Jaeger licked her lips. The crew stared at her, holding half-empty plates piled with chicken bones and pizza crusts. Their inscrutable gazes, both inhuman and utterly alien, weighed like anvils on her, more nerve-wracking and intimate than the still, silent gaze of the forest of Overseers.
She didn’t want to give this speech either, but she had to do it. It was the captain’s duty. It was her duty. “I know you have scripted, half-formed childhoods defined by rigid schedules and brutal training routines.”
She lifted her voice. “Where every scarce moment of joy and human emotion is something that’s stamped into your brain. Although none of it is real, it’s the only reality you know.” She drew in a deep, wavering breath. She saw Toner staring at her from where he slumped against the far wall, his gaze inscrutable.
“I wish to God it wasn’t,” she said. “I wish to God you all had families I could send you home to, right now. I wish I had time right now to have a conversation with every one of you as individuals. I wish I could get to know you all, while you get to know yourselves. I wish we could all get to know each other.”
They murmured faintly, shifting their weight, sharing uncertain glances. They understood the words, certainly, but these sorts of ideas must have been very strange to their carbon-copy soldier brains.
“This is the life we have,” she conceded, her voice falling. “These are our tools, and our clock is ticking. I can’t give you the childhoods your creators denied. I can’t give you the lives you should have had.”
She swallowed, and though her voice filled her throat like a lump of lead, she lifted it high. “All I can give you is my promise,” she called. “Work with me, and together, we can make a better future. Follow me, and I will devote my life to finding us a home where we can build the lives denied to us.
“We don’t have to follow the path laid out before us. We don’t have to be the simple, brutal tools they made us to be. We can be humans, real and complex and full of joys and sorrows and pleasures and pains. This road isn’t going to be easy. But it will be easier if we can walk it together!”
There was no cheer, no applause, not even a murmuring approval. They stared at her. She looked into their faces and saw confusion, perhaps mild curiosity. She looked into their faces and saw drones, programmed from before birth to follow orders and never wonder why.
She looked into their faces and despaired.
She snatched a glass from the table and thrust it into the air, sloshing neon pink lemonade down her face. “You deserve a better sendoff than this!” she cried. There it was. The stirring of emotion, the light coming to their faces. Interest, drawn out by a primal scream. Anger, rage, desire—these things, they understood.
“Eat,” she called. “Drink, and be happy! You deserve a feast and a revel the night before battle!”
General murmurs of interest swelled into an excited clamor. They straightened and lifted their chins, roused by nothing but pure, blind lust.
“When you return victorious from battle,” she screamed to growing howls of approval, “We’re going to have the biggest fucking party you’ve ever seen!”
She smashed the glass between her feet, creating a spray of shards and sweet pink liquid.
They roared their approval. Now permitted to be the things they had been programmed to be, the dam broke. The music surged back to full volume, thumping to the bone as they collapsed into a roiling mass of eating, drinking, dancing, and jumping with anticipation for the coming dawn and baptism by fire.
Welcome to your new world, Jaeger thought, wiping the sugary liquid from her hands as they devolved into a bloodthirsty pep rally. Alone and without a backward glance, she stalked out of the crew quarters.
It’s just like the old one.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“The party’s not the same without you.”
Jaeger lifted her head and blinked bleary, watering eyes. She was lying against Baby’s warm bulk on the floor of the observation deck, watching the stars spin around her. The background music—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, original soundtrack—had faded to silence long ago.
Toner stood in the access tunnel, a dark silhouette outlined by the light of the command center.
“Without me?” She smiled without humor, though in the darkness, she doubted he could see it. Or maybe he could. His sight, unlike hers, was remarkable. She lifted the half-empty bottle of off-brand Jim Beam from the nest of her folded legs and waggled it invitingly. “Or without this?”
Toner regarded her in silence for a long moment before stepping into the observation deck and allowing the door to slide shut behind him. The distant thump of music faded to silence.
Baby stirred as Toner approached, lifting her head and snuffling in his direction. Her petri dish was nestled fondly between her front legs.
“Hey, fartface.” Forgetting to insert the standard acid into his tone, Toner patted the rough patch of skin above Baby’s face-hole. Baby, honoring the moment, or perhaps merely tired, didn’t growl at him as was her habit.
Toner sank beside Jaeger, folding his legs beneath him. Without a word, he held out a hand.
Jaeger gave him the bottle. He sniffed it, made a face, then took an obligatory swig. “You’re a cheap date.”
She grunted.
“And you’re getting drunk six hours before going on a dangerous mission,” he added.
“I know.” She told herself she wasn’t slurring, but that was a lie. “I’m a hypocrite. Reprimand me. I deserve it.”
“Reprimand you? I’m jealous.” He cocked his head. She thought she saw the faint pinprick of his cold blue eyes reflecting starlight, or maybe it was her imagination. “Being the irresponsible asshole is supposed to be my privilege.”
She twitched, trying to laugh. “Christ,” she whispered. “They’re all robots. Robots and children and monsters. They’re all robot monster children. I built them to go into war and die and they…they don’t know any better. I try to offer them something better, and they don’t want it.”
Toner studied her in silence.
Jaeger took the bottle from him. She tipped it in another long drag. Her sinuses were on fire. Her eyes watered. The cheap, synthesized liquor went down like paint thinner, and she didn’t care. She wanted to drown in it. She wanted to die.
When finally she could swallow no more, she withdrew the bottle from her lips and gasped for air. Tears burned down her cheeks.
Toner took the bottle from her numb fingers and with those long, long arms of his, set it out of her reach.
“It’s fine,” he said brusquely. “The med bay computers have a couple of recipes for soothing over a nasty hangover. Some of them even halfway work. You’ll be ready to go when it’s time.”
Jaeger sank forward, resting her face in her palms.
“I talk about a future and joy and life, and they don’t care. I’m speaking a foreign language. But I pump my fist in the air and go rah, rah, rah, blood and thunder and guts, and they go nuts. Fuck. We’re exactly what I swore we wouldn’t become. We are the monsters.”
“Hey. Hey, hey, hey.” Toner gathered up her hands, holding her upright as she collapsed into a little puddle of despair. He gave an uncomfortable little laugh. “Fuck, Jaeger, you can’t blame them for all that. I was going to come out here and bust your balls for that little speech.”
She swallowed a lump of mucous and sniffed. “What?”
“It was a terrible speech. Your delivery was awful. I could barely hear you, and I wasn’t exactly in the back row.”
Jaeger stared at him. Then she started to laugh. It sounded a little hysterical.
Emboldened, Toner went on. “It was too repetitive and abstract. Remember, you’re talking to a bunch of jugheads, not petitioning the UN. Rhetoric, philosophy, ethics, none of that stuff is programmed into them. They don’t know what to do with it, but they can learn. Occy did. You have to tone down the highfalutin’ language and give them a bit of time to catch on to all your grand dreams. They’re not monsters, Jaeger. They’re just kind of dumb.”
Jaeger’s head fell back against Baby’s flank, her chest opening in gales of hysterical, exhausted laughter. Baby lifted her head again, sniffing worriedly at Jaeger’s hair.
“I think it’s time we acknowledge that speaking in front of crowds isn’t your strong suit,” Toner concluded. “Certainly not with your stage presence. Let me handle the speeches from now on.”
“Oh God, no.” Her chest hurt. “I might get us thrown out of the solar system, but you’ll get us all killed.”
Toner flashed a too-white, too-toothy smile. “You write the speeches. I’ll give them. I’ll mostly stick to your scripts, I promise.”
Feeling almost good enough to banter, Jaeger opened her mouth to say something clever about the value of his promises when the door to the observation deck slid open again.
A long, inhuman shadow fell over them.
“Hey.” Jaeger turned, offering Occy a half-drunk, sloppy smile. It died on her lips as her eyes adjusted to the light and she saw the expression on the little boy’s face.
Beside her, Toner stiffened. “What’s wrong, kiddo?”
Wordless, Occy shook his head. He stepped into the observation deck, dragging his tentacles behind him. The door slid shut, and he collapsed forward, throwing himself onto Baby’s broad flank. As one, Jaeger and Toner stumbled to their feet.
