The Rescue Read online

  “He’s not actually a Martian,” David said. “He’s a Kalira. From one of the planets up there.” He pointed upward.

  Even though they were in the cargo hold, Howard got the idea. “Oh. Well, he ain’t from around here, that’s for sure. That’ll probably do.”

  David cinched the tourniquet down again and tied it off. Harxae let out a ragged breath and slumped back against Boris, who winced in pain but said nothing.

  “How you doing?” David asked him. “Where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere,” Boris said. “I think I break ribs, maybe hip. I also bit tongue.”

  Howard chuckled softly. “Insult to injury. Well, welcome to the U.S. of A. We’ll patch you back up good as new in no time.”

  David didn’t think it would be wise to remind him that the U.S. of A. was no longer a nation. It was just part of the North American Union now. Apparently Boris didn’t think it wise to point that out, either. He just nodded weakly and said, “Spa—thank you.”

  “How close is the nearest hospital?” David asked.

  “Missoula,” said the farmer. “ ’Bout fifty miles.”

  David had to make the conversion to kilometers in his head. Either way, it was half an hour in a hovercar, but they didn’t have a hovercar.

  “Will that truck of yours make it that far?”

  “Prob’ly. I’ll have to stop and recharge ’fore we go.” He frowned, and added, “It’ll be a bumpy ride.”

  “Let’s check on the cavalry first,” Raedawn said. She stepped past them into the control cabin and keyed the transmitter. “Union Command, Union Command, come in Union Command. This is Mars vessel Shadow One.”

  “Come in, Shadow One.”

  “What’s your E.T.A.? We’ve got two wounded, and we’re forty-five minutes or so from the nearest hospital.”

  “We’ll be there in fifteen. Hold tight.”

  “Roger.”

  She leaned back into the cargo hold. “You heard?”

  “Yeah.”

  Howard didn’t look happy. “What’s the matter?” David asked him.

  Howard walked over to the airlock’s outer door and looked out, silhouetted against the bright green wheat field and the mountains beyond. “I imagine they’ll crush another acre when they land.”

  He was probably right. “I imagine the government will pay you for the damage,” David said.

  “Ain’t worth the paperwork,” Howard replied. He sighed, then looked back in at the three Martians and the Kalira. “What the hell. Think of it as my contribution to the cause. If you can actually put us back where we belong, I’ll give you the whole harvest. But see if you can’t manage to leave those damned mountains behind.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” David said, eyeing them dubiously through the airlock. To someone who planned to move a planet, moving mountains should be a piece of cake. If he told himself that often enough, he might even start to believe it.

  15

  Their ambulance turned out to be a sky-blue troop carrier. Its camouflage was so good and its agrav approach so silent that they barely realized it was there before the vehicle settled down beside their shuttle and the door rolled up into the hull. Two soldiers in khaki stepped out, carrying a stretcher.

  “Where’s the wounded?” the first one asked. She was a big, round-faced woman with hair even shorter than Raedawn’s and an equally no-nonsense expression.

  The other soldier was a young man, barely in his twenties, who couldn’t have weighed sixty kilos. David wondered how he could lift his half of the stretcher when it was empty, much less occupied, but he trotted along behind the woman without apparent effort.

  They entered the ship and stopped dead at the sight of Harxae. The woman was better at hiding her shock than the young man was. He began to shake. She turned to him and said sharply, “We’ll take the human first.” He struggled to pull himself together as they helped Boris onto the stretcher.

  The two of them carried Boris across to their ship, then came back for Harxae.

  The stretcher was too short for the Kalira. “Could you scrunch up a little?” the woman asked him, not waiting to see if he understood before she took him by the shoulders and scooted him upward so his head was right at the top of the webbing. He cried out when they taped his legs to the handles so his feet wouldn’t drag on the ground, but he let them do it, and a moment later they lifted him up and carried him away.

  David and Raedawn had gotten their travel bags out of the pile of webbing. They carried those across to the other ship, along with Harxae’s food. His talisman had been lost in space when he was hit, and their own weapons they left on board, along with the scientific instruments. They could retrieve those later.

  “We’ll get this ship out of your field as soon as we can,” he told Howard, offering his hand to shake.

  The farmer had a strong grip. “Take your time,” he said. “I ain’t doin’ nothin’ with this part of it ’til the grain ripens anyway.”

  Raedawn closed the airlock, and David noticed that she palmed the security plate as she did. So did Howard, but if he was offended, he didn’t show it. “I’ll keep an eye on ’er for you, missy,” he said. “Won’t nobody mess with it while I’m around.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” said the lady medic.

  They climbed inside the vehicle, David and Raedawn holding on to the walls for support in the high gravity. Boris and Harxae were side by side on exam tables; the woman began cutting off the leg of Harxae’s spacesuit and the man did the same for Boris’s entire suit.

  “Can we help?” David asked.

  “Nope,” said the woman. “Just grab a seat and hang on. We’ve got it under control.”

  There was a bench running along both side walls. Raedawn and David settled gratefully onto the end of the one closest to the door and pulled the flight harnesses down to buckle themselves in against turbulence. They felt a moment of extra weight as the pilot—hidden behind a closed door—lifted off and angled them forward under heavy acceleration, then it eased off and the ride steadied out. There were no windows, so they couldn’t see where they were going, but David remembered a name.

  “Grand Falls?” he asked.

  “Great Falls,” the woman replied. “Space Force base there. General Lamott wants to talk to you.”

  The name rang a faint bell. David knew a Lamott once, back in college. The idea of Perry working his way up the military structure quickly enough to be in command of a Space Force base seemed ludicrous, but he supposed Perry might think the same thing about David’s assignment to the secret Mars mission.

  “Did you say ‘Lamott’ or ‘Lamont’?” he asked.

  “Lamott.”

  How many Lamotts could there be? It wasn’t that common a name. “Perry Lamott?”

  “Yep.” She loosened the tourniquet on Harxae’s leg, then immediately tightened it again when blue blood squirted straight up to the ceiling.

  David winced, but the woman hardly batted an eye, so he asked, “Short guy? Red hair if he’s not bald by now? Goofy grin?”

  “I’ve never seen him smile, but the rest of the description matches.”

  The other medic said, “That’s him. He grins a lot when he’s out on maneuvers. He likes to be up front where the action is.”

  “That’d be him,” David said. “He always loved things that make a big bang. He and I blew up a physics lab once.”

  Raedawn leaned back against the hull. “Wonderful. Two nutcases in the same room. You want to drop me off somewhere along the way?”

  Neither medic replied to that. The one working on Harxae cleaned off the skin around his wound and pressed a gauze pad against it, then tried loosening the tourniquet again. She had to push with both hands to keep the blood from seeping out, but Harxae’s leg regained its normal greenish color. His breathing quickened as he fought to keep from screaming.

  “I wish I could give you something for the pain,” she said, “but I have no
idea what would work or what would kill you.” She looked up at David and Raedawn for a second. “What can you tell me about him?”

  “His name’s Harxae,” David said. “He calls his race the Kalirae, and says they’ve been stuck here for over two and a half centuries. We met him and a companion just after we came through from the solar system, but . . . uh . . . their ship was damaged, and Gavwin was killed in the spatial anomaly that brought us here. So we decided to bring Harxae home with us, and we had a little run-in with the Neo-Sov welcoming committee, and here we are.”

  Raedawn nudged his net bag with her right foot. “We brought his food, which might give you a clue to his body chemistry, but he’ll probably be able to tell you himself when he calms down. He’s telepathic.”

  The medics exchanged glances, clearly wondering if Raedawn needed medical help as well.

  “It’s true,” David said. “And yes, that might pose a security risk. You should probably call ahead and make sure nobody with sensitive information in their heads hangs around the hospital while he’s there.”

  He could tell they didn’t believe him, either, but the cover-your-ass instinct was strong in the military. Now the medics had someone to blame it on when the people at the base told them they were nuts. So the male medic took a moment to knock on the control cabin door and relay the information, then he went back to work on Boris.

  * * *

  They were met at the spaceport by a phalanx of soldiers in full body armor, carrying ridiculously large assault rifles, flamethrowers, and short-range rocket launchers. They wore full coverage helmets with their visors sealed down tight, as if that could deflect the Kalira’s psychic ability. They stood ready to fire as two more medics entered the transport and helped carry the patients out on stretchers.

  It was all David could do to keep from laughing at the sight of the Union army ready to annihilate a busted-up ex-Russian spy and a flak-wounded alien. As he hobbled down the ramp, he whispered to Raedawn, “Where were these guys when we needed ’em, eh?”

  She snorted and whispered back, “Playing with their toys, no doubt.”

  They were the only ones amused by the sight. Half a dozen grim-faced MPs surrounded the two of them and led them off toward a waiting hovercar, while Boris and Harxae were carried in the opposite direction to an ambulance.

  “I’d like to go with them,” David said.

  “They’ll be taken care of,” said one of the MPs.

  David was sure they would, but this excessive show of force made him wonder just what “taken care of” meant to these people. He couldn’t imagine them being stupid enough to kill their patients just for being foreigners, but it sure didn’t look like they planned to treat them well, either.

  “They’re friends of mine,” he said. “And as soon as the general finds out who they are, they’re going to be friends of his, too, so be sure to treat them right.”

  “They’ll be taken care of,” the MP said again.

  There was no use arguing. David and Raedawn climbed into the car and rode with two of the MPs in the seat across from them as a third drove them down a tree-lined grass hoverpath through the base.

  The buildings they passed showed evidence of earthquake damage: broken windows, cracked walls, and the like. One had collapsed entirely.

  “What was the transition like?” David asked.

  The same MP—he was apparently the designated speaker for the group—said, “The Change? It was . . . strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Dark. There was lightning all over the place. We had earthquakes, weird noises, wind; you name it. Kalispell got a rain of frogs, only the frogs had three eyes and spit acid. Half the trees in the Bob Marshall Wilderness turned to crystal. Stuff like that.”

  “We saw the mountains that rose up near where we crashed.”

  “That, too. We took rock samples, and they’re not terrestrial. Not Lunar, either.”

  “I’d like to see the specimens,” David said.

  “You’ll have to talk to the general about that.” The MP cleared his throat, then said, “What did it look like from Mars?”

  David told him about the black cloud and the lightning-filled tendrils of darkness. Raedawn added her observations as well. When David described his experiments with the fusion generator in the lab, the MP said, “You left it on after you saw what it was doing? Sounds like you got more balls than brains.”

  David felt a moment’s anger, but he let it go. People never seemed to understand his determination to discover how the universe worked. Nor his desire to find a place where he could live in peace while he did it. “Maybe so,” he said, “but what I learned just may help get Earth back where it belongs.”

  The MP shook his head. “I don’t know if I want to go through that again.”

  “Talk to the alien we brought with us. If what he says is true, we really don’t want to stick around here.”

  The car slipped into a parking spot near a four-story brick office building. More MPs waited there to escort David and Raedawn inside, where they were taken up to the top floor and whisked straight into an office that looked more like a corporate president’s than a military general’s. Their feet sank into thick carpeting as they crossed the outer office, soft music played through recessed speakers in the ceiling, and overstuffed couches waited for them to sit in.

  The adjutant at the reception desk—looking no more military than the office in her form-fitting blue dress uniform—waved them toward an inner office, saying, “He’s expecting you.”

  They passed through the mahogany double doors into an office big enough to have an echo if it hadn’t been filled with more soft furniture and models of spacecraft and paintings on the walls. A massive mahogany desk stood at the far end of the room, set sideways so a person sitting there could look out the window without having his back to the door. The desk chair was turned toward the window, and the top of someone’s head was just visible over the back of the large chair. The view overlooked a grassy parade ground, empty at the moment save for a flock of blackbirds pecking around for food.

  From here it seemed as if nothing was wrong with the world. There was no sign of environmental disaster, no sign that the Union and the Neo-Soviet empire were at war, nor that the Earth had joined a maelstrom of other captured planets slowly spiraling into a planet-eating maw of destruction.

  “Hello?” said David. Their escort had stopped at the door, letting him and Raedawn go ahead.

  “By God, it is you!” said a familiar voice as the chair wheeled around. The man stood and David saw the familiar face that went with the voice: Perry Lamott had bulked out a little in the chest and let his hair grow, but otherwise he hadn’t changed much since their college days.

  “It’s me,” David said. “And this is Raedawn Corona. She’s our intelligence officer. Good pilot, too.”

  “Pleased,” said Lamott.

  “Likewise,” said Raedawn. They looked at one another for a few seconds, sizing each other up in a way that made David feel like he wasn’t even in the room.

  “So how’d you wind up here?” David asked.

  Lamott glanced over at him, then back at Raedawn. “You mean as opposed to a lab somewhere?” He shrugged. “I got drafted. Decided I didn’t want to be cannon fodder, so I went into R and D and took officer candidate school on the side. Got lucky a couple of times and got promoted to a desk, and then found out I was actually pretty good at telling people what to do. Who’da thunk, eh?”

  “You always were good at getting other people into trouble.”

  “True. It’s a gift. So how’d you get here? I imagine your story is a little more exciting.”

  David shrugged. “Oh, just the usual harrowing trip through a rift in space into an alternate dimension. No big deal.”

  Raedawn didn’t look like she thought it was so funny, and asked permission to use the facilities.

  “Through there,” Perry said, pointing to a door that stood ajar behind the desk.
>
  She walked across the office and slipped through the door.

  Lamott watched her until she closed the door behind her. Then he held out his hand to David, and the two shook hands. “It’s been a long time, Dave. If anybody can figure out how to put us back where we belong, you’re the guy.”

  “Maybe,” said David. “I’ve got a couple of ideas, but even if they work, it’s not going to be easy.”

  “What sort of ideas?” Perry asked.

  “Electromagnetic pulse bombs. Thousands of EMP bombs all over the planet, and thousands of plasma bombs in space just ahead of it in orbit. If we can stretch what’s left of the anomaly close enough when we blow the EMP bombs, it should swallow the planet just like it did before, and then when we’re in it good and deep, the plasma bombs will blow the anomaly apart. When the Kalirae missile did that to the little one we came through, we could see stars for a second where it was. I think the middle of it went back into normal space.”

  “Kalirae missile?” asked Perry. “I thought these aliens were supposed to be friendly.”

  “It’s a complicated story,” David said. “According to them, they’re about as friendly as anybody here, but that’s a relative term.”

  Perry walked over to a cabinet next to the couch and opened it to reveal a well-stocked bar. “Drink?” he asked.

  David hadn’t realized how tense he was until he felt it sliding away. The world was still in peril, but for a moment he had found an island of calm amid the craziness. For a moment he could relax and let someone else be responsible for holding things together.

  He settled into the couch, grateful for its support in Earth’s heavy gravity. “Make mine a double,” he said.

  16

  They were already deep in discussion of the anomaly and David’s theories for how to go back through it when Raedawn rejoined them.

  “Vodka tonic,” she said before Lamott could ask.

  “Not many people drink vodka these days,” he said, nonetheless finding a bottle of Stolichnaya in his cabinet and mixing her drink with a generous jigger.