When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) by William Barton Page B
Authors: William Barton
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me, women like Violet. Broken, torn men and women, men and women praying for salvation, praying otherwise for immediate death, praying as they burned.
I clicked on the sensors, let the gun figure out what was actually burning, opened fire. Flames winked out, like that and that, the jetting plumes fell away, and Dûmnahn’s voice burbled in my ear, “Christ! Thanks! So fucking hot ...”
Twin spears of brilliant blue fire suddenly jetted from the side of his carapace and described a quick square on one reasonably intact face of the warship’s hull. Metal and plastic fell away with a faint, tinny clatterclang to the red ice ground, sounds propagated through knife-thin alien air, barely transmitted through my skinshield.
And there they were.
Soft voice, a man’s voice, from somewhere in the tangled ruin, “Oh. Oh my God.” Soft liquid coughing. Then silence.
Dûmnahn sighed, “Well. Let’s see if we can get them out of here.”
I can’t remember the rest of it.
Sorry.
o0o
A little while later, survivors and dead and all the bits and scraps of the warship’s crew we could find in our fragment of allotted time safe in Dûmnahn’s medevac lockers, I hung in my harness down in the engineering pod, worked my controls and watched my sensors and tried to think of nothing but the welfare of my machines as Athena scurried low over the landscape, heading for the battlefield.
Impossible not to think about... oh, not the horrible things I’d seen, so unexpectedly stark, so different from the homely little horrors of my father’s practice. Thought about the men and women stowed away above me. Some of them whole, merely asleep, awaiting repair. Others quite dead, awaiting hope of resurrection.
I remember suddenly picking up a hand, a little hand, as though from a child, turning it over and over, looking at long fingernails, painted powder blue. A woman’s hand. I remember a woman from the barracks we shared, a small, pretty, slim woman with small hands, a woman with long red hair and powder blue nails.
Dûmnahn’s voice: “Get aboard, Murph. We’re all done here.”
I gave him the hand without a word, got back down in my space, and Athena flew on.
Fire outside now.
Habitat 155, Iridium extraction facility, crew of 700, under assault by SOCO IX .
Brilliant blue fire; something like a pink mushroom cloud.
Crisp, terrible sound, Dûmnahn whispering, “Like lightning. Like being struck by lightning...” Then we were down, down and out on the surface, doing what we could, filling Athena ’s lockers with the meat of the fallen, fallen and slain.
This one a SOCO soldier, ours or theirs no way to tell, sprawled dead in his armor, surrounded by a hard-frozen puddle of bodily fluids, red ice hardly distinguishable from the substance of the ground beneath him. Dead. Helmet and head nowhere to be found.
Dûmnahn: “Save him for parts, I guess. Maybe his head’ll turn up someplace else.”
Save him for parts? But Dûmnahn, this is a man ...
No reply.
Just pick up the pieces.
Pick up the pieces and go.
Later, down inside the habitat among smashed furniture, melted walls, ruins blackened by fire, the command circuit opened and we heard Squadron Leader Chamônix: “We’re falling behind the timeline people, get a move on! Command directive: Pick up anything that looks like it might be part of a Standard employee. Pick up SOCO troops from either side. Leave the colonists.”
I was looking at a boy when I heard that, boy sprawled in one corner of a habitat room, holding something that might once have been a toy spaceship. How old? Nine? Ten? His eyes opened suddenly, little slits showing pale brown irises, eyes looking at me for just a second, then closing again.
Dûmnahn’s voice whispered in my ear: “We’ve got to go, Murph. Work to be done.”
Outside in the hallway lay a SOCO soldier in cracked armor who sighed when I appeared, sighed and said, “Millie Bolduc, SOCO XXIII , yielding parole. Glad to
I clicked on the sensors, let the gun figure out what was actually burning, opened fire. Flames winked out, like that and that, the jetting plumes fell away, and Dûmnahn’s voice burbled in my ear, “Christ! Thanks! So fucking hot ...”
Twin spears of brilliant blue fire suddenly jetted from the side of his carapace and described a quick square on one reasonably intact face of the warship’s hull. Metal and plastic fell away with a faint, tinny clatterclang to the red ice ground, sounds propagated through knife-thin alien air, barely transmitted through my skinshield.
And there they were.
Soft voice, a man’s voice, from somewhere in the tangled ruin, “Oh. Oh my God.” Soft liquid coughing. Then silence.
Dûmnahn sighed, “Well. Let’s see if we can get them out of here.”
I can’t remember the rest of it.
Sorry.
o0o
A little while later, survivors and dead and all the bits and scraps of the warship’s crew we could find in our fragment of allotted time safe in Dûmnahn’s medevac lockers, I hung in my harness down in the engineering pod, worked my controls and watched my sensors and tried to think of nothing but the welfare of my machines as Athena scurried low over the landscape, heading for the battlefield.
Impossible not to think about... oh, not the horrible things I’d seen, so unexpectedly stark, so different from the homely little horrors of my father’s practice. Thought about the men and women stowed away above me. Some of them whole, merely asleep, awaiting repair. Others quite dead, awaiting hope of resurrection.
I remember suddenly picking up a hand, a little hand, as though from a child, turning it over and over, looking at long fingernails, painted powder blue. A woman’s hand. I remember a woman from the barracks we shared, a small, pretty, slim woman with small hands, a woman with long red hair and powder blue nails.
Dûmnahn’s voice: “Get aboard, Murph. We’re all done here.”
I gave him the hand without a word, got back down in my space, and Athena flew on.
Fire outside now.
Habitat 155, Iridium extraction facility, crew of 700, under assault by SOCO IX .
Brilliant blue fire; something like a pink mushroom cloud.
Crisp, terrible sound, Dûmnahn whispering, “Like lightning. Like being struck by lightning...” Then we were down, down and out on the surface, doing what we could, filling Athena ’s lockers with the meat of the fallen, fallen and slain.
This one a SOCO soldier, ours or theirs no way to tell, sprawled dead in his armor, surrounded by a hard-frozen puddle of bodily fluids, red ice hardly distinguishable from the substance of the ground beneath him. Dead. Helmet and head nowhere to be found.
Dûmnahn: “Save him for parts, I guess. Maybe his head’ll turn up someplace else.”
Save him for parts? But Dûmnahn, this is a man ...
No reply.
Just pick up the pieces.
Pick up the pieces and go.
Later, down inside the habitat among smashed furniture, melted walls, ruins blackened by fire, the command circuit opened and we heard Squadron Leader Chamônix: “We’re falling behind the timeline people, get a move on! Command directive: Pick up anything that looks like it might be part of a Standard employee. Pick up SOCO troops from either side. Leave the colonists.”
I was looking at a boy when I heard that, boy sprawled in one corner of a habitat room, holding something that might once have been a toy spaceship. How old? Nine? Ten? His eyes opened suddenly, little slits showing pale brown irises, eyes looking at me for just a second, then closing again.
Dûmnahn’s voice whispered in my ear: “We’ve got to go, Murph. Work to be done.”
Outside in the hallway lay a SOCO soldier in cracked armor who sighed when I appeared, sighed and said, “Millie Bolduc, SOCO XXIII , yielding parole. Glad to
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