Free Short Stories 2013 Read online

  "Vanya." Kostya waited for the response but none came. "Vanya!"

  "Not dead yet, you ass?" The signal was strong, with almost no static.

  "Clear the topside, I'm coming back soon."

  "What?" asked Vanya. "You'll need us to help you through the fence. What's wrong with you, Kostya, what did you find?"

  He thought for a moment, considering the option of telling Vanya about the tiger and his find, everything, before Kostya had the flash of an idea, one that might mean their survival. But if he told them what he had found -- or even hinted at what he was he was thinking about doing with it -- Kostya knew Vanya and the others wouldn't take the risk. They'd incinerate him at the fenceline.

  "I'm not sure, but I think it's something that could help. You need to trust me on this one, Vanya. Get underground and wait for me to radio once I'm inside the fence."

  There was another moment of silence before he responded. "I don't like it, Kostya. You probably don't have enough gel to make it back, and we have a wager on how close to the fence you'll get before they rip you apart."

  Jesus Christ. "Clear the topside or we're all dead. If I'm right, and what I've found can help, we won't need the fence anymore."

  "If you make it back and I lose my bet, you'll be assigned to latrine-burning duty, topside, for a damn month. Vanya. Out."

  There were only a few hours of sunlight left, and Kostya didn't like the idea of being caught outdoors, at night, with them. He had to hurry.

  He pushed the tanks of gel from the cart and began lifting the crates, not even careful this time to avoid raising dust. It didn't matter. The suit didn't have great intake filters and by now he could taste the stuff as he inhaled it, at the same time feeling strangely exhilarated by the pure oxygen secreted by the crumbs, the only reason none of the colony had suffocated once vegetation vanished. After he finished loading the crates, he tested the wagon -- to make sure it would move normally -- and then sighed.

  "Now or never," said Kostya. He picked up handfuls of dust and threw them over the cart, then over himself, making sure that the particles coated his suit completely. By the time he finished, the sun had slipped lower.

  Kostya stepped outside and pulled the cart with him. As if testing the water of a cold pool, he approached the line of green crumbs and lifted his foot, inching it toward them. The things anticipated his movement and rolled in, tumbling over themselves so that the edge of their field thickened.

  One of them rolled onto his foot, sat still, and then, just as quickly, rolled off. When the rest of them moved away, Kostya grinned. "That's more like it." He stepped toward them and they parted.

  On the way back, he smiled. Kostya imagined that he could already feel it -- the chill of an oncoming cold -- an illness that would take a miracle to survive, and for which he would have to somehow convince Vanya and the chief administrator to spare colony antibiotics. Given his discovery, it was the least they could do. Why hadn't he thought of the answer sooner? He was supposed to have been the biological genius of the crumbs’ development team, and Kostya should have realized that despite being impervious to most organisms, they would be susceptible to at least some. Then again, nobody else had considered it. Why should they? Most, Kostya suspected, were like Vanya: scared of biology or any technology, and trusting in the judgment of non-scientists, any non-scientist, in this post-modern world. Being stupid, he concluded, was an advantage these days.

  But not for long. The cart and what it held, Kostya knew, were his tickets out.

  "I'm at the fence, power down."

  Vanya sounded angry. "No. They'll get through. I'll send another team topside, you know the procedure."

  "They won't get through. I brought something back -- something that will make it so we won't have to worry about crumbs ever again. Power down."

  "When you get back inside . . ." said Vanya. But he didn't finish, and as soon as Kostya saw the fence lights flick off, he quickly picked his way through the wires, pausing only for as long as it took to pull the cart clear.

  "I'm through, you can turn it on again." Kostya sighed with relief when he crossed the ruined highway, making his way toward the closest airlock.

  "Is the great Kostya going to tell me what he discovered?" Vanya asked.

  "Anthrax."

  At first there was nothing. Kostya grinned widely inside his helmet, barely able to hold back a chuckle at what he knew would be an initial moment of disbelief, followed by Vanya's near homicidal rage.

  The man's voice trembled. "Are you crazy? You'll wipe out the rest of us, there is no way I'm letting you back in."

  "I'll give you ten minutes." Kostya had anticipated the response, and sighed. He popped his helmet open with a hiss, pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pocket, and lit it before continuing. "If you don't open up, I'll dump a handful of anthrax spores into the air intakes. Use airlock seven; it leads to one of the old decontamination rooms, we can use it to clean me and the equipment off."

  "You're dead," said Vanya.

  "You know what? I'm sorry the crumbs went bad."

  "Kiss my ass."

  "No, I'm serious." He hadn't planned on apologizing to anyone, but Kostya at least enjoyed the fact that Vanya couldn't do anything for the moment, had to sit and listen for once. "Someone invented them for deep mining, to recover metals from depths we couldn't reach, and for terra-forming. But then the military got involved, saw the crumbs as an offensive opportunity, and looked for someone to make it work. I did it. Anna and me, and her husband, and fifty other egg-heads. But it turned out that we unintentionally altered the design so that they would consume living tissues to maintain organic systems and replicate, rather than depend on us to provide them with amino acids and other nutrients. If not for us, the crumbs never would have attacked, and none of us ever imagined it would have all happened so quickly. I'm sorry, Vanya. You'll never know how sorry I am. But I did it out of duty, the same reason you do your job now for the administrator."

  After Kostya reached the top of the mountain, he paused to watch the sunset. He hadn't seen one in . . . forever. It looked better than he had remembered, the air clearer in an atmosphere unpolluted by industry.

  "What are you planning?" asked Vanya.

  "First, let's talk about what I want. I want my own lab and my own quarters -- I'm not spending another second in one of those damn cubicles. Second, I want the rank of scientific supervisor, with a team of my own choosing, in charge of the plan to re-take Earth. Third, I'll need authorization for a full treatment of intravenous antibiotics. And I want it all in writing, an order from the chief administrator himself."

  "He'll never agree to it," Vanya said.

  Kostya nodded, knowing that it would be difficult. "That's your problem, not mine. While I'm waiting, I'll work out the next steps."

  "Next steps? You want to bring anthrax into the colony, which will kill us all. There are no next steps."

  "Think about it, you fat idiot." Kostya was getting angry now, hadn't believed that even Vanya was that dense. "A biological weapon. Spores that remain viable for years, and which we can sow over the earth, infecting crumbs at will and driving them away. Crumbs don't evolve. There's no way for them to develop immunity or fight the infection, and they sense this stuff is dangerous. First, we throw this stuff around and the crumbs that live will back off, never to return. Then we plant foliage in the areas we reconquer so that we have an atmosphere. And of course there's the problem of how to keep ourselves from dying of infection."

  "I'm going to get the administrator," Vanya said. "For now, we'll leave you topside."

  "I wouldn't have it any other way. But let the administrator know that should you two decide to go back on the agreement, and lock me up without trying to save me, that I have a plan for just such a contingency." Kostya didn't, but he figured they were too stupid to realize it. "Kostya. Out."

  While he waited, he sat on the ground and leaned against the concrete airlock. Kostya didn't know if they'd be able to s
ave him, and suspected that they couldn't -- one didn't inhale this much weaponized agent and walk away, even with antibiotics. But it didn't matter. This was the way his people would make it, with or without him, and at least one of the other scientists would see the truth of it. They would see the plan through, and daytime scavenging patrols would soon be a thing of the past because now they had a way to scout for, and reach, the crumbs' storage points.

  It occurred to Kostya that he had forgotten something. "Vanya," he said.

  "What?"

  "There's something else I want."

  "I'm listening," said Vanya.

  Kostya smiled and took a last drag, inhaling deeply before he responded. "Ludy. I want Ludy."

  He finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in the grass, taking a moment to identify the new feeling that filled him. Promise. Maybe he would make it, along with everyone else and stranger things had happened: seven miles hadn't been a detour at all.

  To Spec

  By Charles E. Gannon

  Mendez, the newest guy in the squad, had been jumpy ever since the worsening solar weather updates started coming in. The most recent message—that Priestley’s replacement wouldn’t show up for at least another three hours—just made him more anxious. As Eureka command post signed off, Grim saw Mendez hold his new rifle—a flimsy piece of experimental junk called the Cochrane XM 1—a bit too tightly. So, in an effort to get the newbie’s mind off his fears, Grim asked him, “What’s on the ‘other’ radio today?”

  A tentative grin twitched at the right corner of Mendez’s mouth. “It’s against regs to listen to—”

  “I’m a sergeant, Mendez: I’m too stupid to remember all those ‘regs.’”

  Mendez needed no further encouragement: he made a fast, flat zero-gee hop over to the control panel. Steadying himself on a handhold, he pushed a preset button, jumping the radio over to the Commonwealth Armed Forces frequency.

  But instead of plaintively wailing guitars, the two of them heard a painfully jocular deejay working his way through the end of the news. First, Mendez looked like the kid who got coal for Christmas—but then he went rigid as the announcer segued into the weather:

  “Hey, here’s a CWAF flash from our siblings-in-arms guarding the Big Secret out at Eureka. ‘Quaff’ this one, grunts: they tell us that it’s another beautiful February day out at the Mars L-5 point, with the mercury peaking at minus 215 Celsius. There’s good visibility despite average dust densities and a continued surge of downstream trash sent by some unknown admirers near Mars. But for everyone out here in the fourth orbit, remember: that huge solar storm-front we’ve been watching will move on through in just an hour or so. So come on inside before the weather turns and send a shout out to the folks back home. Don’t let that half AU stop you.”

  Great: now Mendez looked more anxious than ever. Sergeant Eldridge Grimsby—-“Grim” to all who knew him and wanted to avoid a fistfight—reached out a brown, blunt-fingered hand and shut off the radio. Reflecting that this might be the right moment to employ some of the conversational and psychological subtlety for which sergeants have always been famous, he leaned forward: “What the hell is wrong with you, Mendez?”

  Mendez looked gratifyingly startled, then abashed. “Well, sir—”

  Grim sighed. "Mendez, don't offend me with that 'sir' crap: I'm not an officer. I work for a living."

  "Yes, si—Master Sergeant Grimsby."

  Grim grunted at the narrow margin by which Mendez had avoided a repetition of the original slur, nodded for him to continue.

  “Sarge, it makes me nervous—guarding the Big Secret they’re building on Eureka. If it’s as important as the security precautions seem to indicate, someone out there”—he swung an arm at the space beyond the bulkhead—“could have us in their crosshairs now, this very second.” When Grim failed to respond in any way, Mendez added, “Sarge, we could die without warning—and without ever knowing what it was we were guarding.”

  Grim stared at him. “And your point is?”

  “Well—that’s an awful lot of risk without an awful lot of information.”

  “Mendez, if the vacc suit you’re wearing hasn’t tipped you off just yet, you’re in the ExoAtmospheric Corps, and we don’t get information; we get orders. And bad food and worse pay. What part of this have you failed to understand?”

  But Mendez’s gaze wandered away-—meaning that he hadn’t exposed what was really eating at him: beyond his general anxiety about the duty, Grim sensed a more specific and deeper fear. And the best way to unearth it was to keep the newbie talking: “Okay, Mendez, so why are you more worried today than yesterday? Which is to say, what’s you’re latest theory about how the Big Secret is going to get us all killed?”

  Mendez folded his hands and stared at them. “Sarge, I was floating watch outside the comcenter yesterday and heard the staff officers getting briefed by a pair of civvies. One was some kind of spook, I think. Name was Darryl Wilder; mean anything to you?”

  Grim felt his stomach contract. “Yeah; security specialist. Ex-Air Force. Then ex-FBI.”

  “Who’s he with now?”

  “Wish I knew.”

  “Private contractor?”

  Grim emitted a rumbling set of grunts; he was secretly proud of having a laugh that sounded like an irritated crocodile. “Mendez, guys like Wilder don’t retire. Ever.”

  “So—”

  “So he’s interagency, or an errand boy for the Joint Chiefs, or carrying out an Executive Order.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  “Right after we started setting up shop out here, he was on-station for about a month: always sniffing around, like a security inspector or engineer. Didn’t talk much, never gave an order, but always looking, examining, watching. He was the one who wrote the specs on the facility’s secrecy protocols: that if any of us entered the Restricted Work Zone—the lair of the Big Secret itself—that we had to be removed from general circulation. At least until the Big Secret isn’t a secret any more. I think he was also the one who suggested building it out here on Eureka in the first place.”

  “Well, he sure as hell picked a crappy place.”

  “Which was his intention, I’m sure. Easy enough to get to Mars from here, and vice versa, but not really on anyone’s flight path, so you see intruders well in advance. Now, you said you heard a second name?”

  Mendez looked sideways at Grim. “You know that guy Wasserman, the professor who—”

  Grim leaned forward before he could stop himself. “Robert Wasserman? The physicist?”

  “High energy physicist—and engineer. Nobel nominations last two years in a row.”

  “So you think the minority scuttlebutt is true?”

  Mendez shrugged. “Well, I guess the Big Secret could be a starship, Sarge.”

  Grim leaned back so energetically that he almost floated into a backwards somersault out of his seat. Robert Wasserman. And Darryl Wilder. Both out here in the Martian L-5 wasteland. What besides a secret FTL project could explain their presence? And it would also explain why the other blocs were having trash-heaving hissy fits about being kept at arm’s length. If they knew that the Commonwealth was getting close to achieving faster than light travel—

  But Mendez wasn’t done. “And everyone at the debrief was worried, Sarge. Real worried.”

  Hearing Mendez’s tone and words, Grim suddenly felt the first creeping fingers of contagious anxiety. “They were worried? About what?”

  “About this solar storm.”

  Grim tried not to scowl, failed. “Jee-zus; what the hell is it with this storm? With these hourly updates on expected EMP and rad levels, you’d think we’d never seen a flare before.”

  “Sarge, this isn’t a flare: this is a CME. A big one.”

  When transferred hastily into the brand-new ExoAtmo Corps six years ago, Grim had managed—blissfully—to sleep through all the space science crap served up by the rear-echelon weenies, so now he was compelled to ask: “
So remind me: what’s the science behind a . . . a—?”

  “A CME. A coronal mass ejection.”

  “I know what it’s called,” Grim lied. “I asked for the science of it.”

  Grim immediately regretted making that request, because Mendez—otherwise a good kid—sat a little straighter, and readied himself to deliver a Recitation of The Facts, as was his wont: he was bucking for OCS so hard that Grim wondered if he sometimes got whiplash from the effort. “A coronal mass ejection occurs when the sun actually heaves out a jet of plasma. Much worse than a flare: lots of EMP, hard radiation, and—-” Mendez actually shivered “—a big increase in cosmic rays.”

  Now, finally, Grim understood Mendez’s anxiety. In the flippant vernacular of the Service, radioactive emissions were collectively known as “zoomies.” Cosmic rays, however, had their own special category: they were “ultra-zoomies.” Unless you were safe inside a (fantastically expensive) electromagnetically-shielded hull or habitat, you just prayed that the water tankage arrayed as shielding stopped all of those little nano-scale laser beams. And if it didn’t, you added a novena that the ultra-zoomie wouldn’t hit a chromosome and clip one of your telomeres too short, thereby kicking off the runaway cellular replication commonly known as cancer. Fortunately, that kind of damage was beyond prediction or control and was, therefore, just part of the random nonsense of the job. So Grim—a hardened veteran—wasn't disposed to worry about it. Much.

  However, it meant they might have to wait out the storm in their one-room rad shack, safe behind its multi-layered radiation shielding. Designed to house—barely—a three-man team, its interior was an inhumanly cramped collection of long-range guidance and tracking computers, sensor and drone control consoles, and a single bunk. Its head was a constant source of black humor and savage derision: by comparison, the fresher of a commuter jet seemed positively palatial. On extended watches in the shack’s claustrophobic interior, even Grim had found himself beginning to reconsider the hazards of a spacewalk in exchange for a little extra room to stretch, and a change of scenery. But now he was about to find himself the middle of the biggest solar storm on record. He sighed, and found a way to conceal the rest of his ignorance: “Review time, Private Mendez: what are the special protocols for a CME?”