Wilks turned around to let the water play on his neck and back and Billie glanced down. If he thought of her in a sexual manner, it sure didn’t show. It was kind of difficult for a man to hide that kind of reaction. Not that she had all that much experience with men, there had been a few, but one didn’t grow up in a hospital without learning a little anatomy. She knew what went where, and what it had to look like before it could get there. There was no salute from Wilks to show any interest in her as a woman.

  “How long were we asleep?”

  Wilks, eyes closed against the stream of hot water, shrugged. “I dunno. I didn’t check the meter. But if the ship woke us up, we must be close to where we’re going.”

  “What now?”

  “We finish our showers, get something to eat. Figure out our next move after that. One thing at a time.”

  Billie nodded, leaned forward a little so the water could trickle down her spine. Maybe that was the only way to get through life without going crazy. Take it one thing at a time, little bites you could chew without choking.

  Spears made the discovery almost by accident. He’d been awake for six hours, had cleaned up and eaten a meal, dressed in ship fatigues and run a few system checks. This latter was more for his peace of mind than anything else, the ship’s operational computer being sufficient to handle virtually all the chores without regulation from him. But being a careful man, he occasionally checked to be certain things were running as they should.

  In this case, things were not running as they should. A tracking system on the cargo ship floating there a couple of klicks behind the Jackson said that two of the sleep chambers had been activated and utilized during the trip through hyperspace. Water had been drained from the storage tanks and then fed back into the recycler. Power consumption was up slightly from that necessary to maintain the troops in their suspension tanks. Oxygen consumption was also higher than it should be.

  On the face of it, there were two scenarios that came to mind: one, a malfunction either in his computer or the internal systems on the MacArthur; or, two—

  Somebody unauthorized was on that ship. They’d slept in the chambers, and were now breathing the air, drinking the water, and using the lights. There would be food stores being eaten, too.

  Other than the drive, Spears had not thought to slave the ship’s internal controls to his board, it hadn’t seemed necessary. He had no eyes on the cargo ship, no way to shut down the air or power.

  True, he did have some weaponry on the Jackson capable of disabling or even destroying his companion vessel, but the last thing he wanted was for anything to happen to his precious cargo.

  He leaned back in the form-chair and looked at the computer-generated infocrawl. All right.

  So there were a couple of stowaways on the ship behind him. No big deal. They didn’t know he knew they were there. When he put down on Earth, he would take care of the problem before they knew what hit them. A pair of deserters, of frightened human troopers, wouldn’t give him any trouble. A concussion grenade through the hatch and anybody standing around would be out of it.

  The tactical advantage was his. They were still a couple of weeks away from landing; he had plenty of time to plan the best way to take care of sniveling ship rats. Meanwhile, there were other things to do. He had to get himself prepared for the coming battle. War was imminent. And about damned time, too.

  Wilks exercised, using parts of the ship not designed for such activity but things that could be made to work. A thick pipe for chins. A pair of stools for dips and push-ups. Anything he could hook his feet under for crunches. He worked hard at it, harder than he would have had he been alone on the ship. That episode with Billie in the shower had called up a bunch of mixed emotions.

  On the one hand, he remembered her as a ten-year-old child, crying in fear as he saved her from the death her parents had suffered. On the other hand, standing naked next to her in the shower, he saw that she was a grown woman, attractive, and it had been too long since he had been with somebody that way. Billie had done it with Bueller, Wilks knew that.

  But—Jesus. He was old enough to be her father. And for a brief time had more or less functioned in that role. True, he hadn’t seen her for a decade or so after he rescued her, and that child and this woman hardly seemed related. Still, it wouldn’t be good to let these thoughts continue.

  Not at all.

  He finished his third set of fifty crunches. His belly burned, the muscles dancing on the edge of cramps. He lay on the deck, sweat beaded all over him. He’d been working out for about an hour, he was done. He’d run the water cold in the shower this time.

  * * * * *

  Billie opened a meal packet. The reconstituted and heated food in the plastic container smelled like meat and gravy, with vegetables on the side, though it was all soypro.

  Wilks entered the galley and nodded at her. She opened a second packet for him.

  They ate in silence for a minute. It had been three days since they’d dropped out of warp.

  Wilks had spent much of the time exercising.

  “Are you avoiding me?” she said.

  He looked up from his food. “No. Why do you ask?”

  “You seem distracted.”

  He stared at the brown goop in his container.

  “No, I was just working on a plan, that’s all. Thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to let me in on it?”

  “Well. It’s a little rough.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Okay. I’m pretty sure we’re in the Solar System. I can’t do shit with the instruments, they’re all locked out, but it makes sense. With the gee drive it won’t take long for us to get to Earth.

  Couple weeks, tops. We’ll be moving along at a good piece of light-speed, and the last few days we’ll be coasting, then using retro drive to slow down.”

  “All right, I follow that.”

  “So once Spears puts it into reverse, we’re decelerating at the same rate. The ships, him, us. If we suit up and go EVA, we can use the suits’ squirters to accelerate. We’re all moving faster than a speeding bullet, but it’s relative.”

  “So we suit up, jump off, and catch up to Spears. Then what?”

  “Well, since he doesn’t know we’re here, maybe we surprise him long enough to make it there.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Uh, yeah, he’ll have proximity mass detectors. Plus radar and Doppler and luxflect. If he happens to be sitting in front of a sensor screen, he’ll see us coming. Or probably there’s an alarm rigged to tell him something is coming if he happens to be on the crapper.”

  “Then he shoots us to pieces, right?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe he just cuts the retros and leaves us hanging in vac with no place to go.

  Assuming our ship doesn’t splatter us like bugs on a flitter’s windscreen when it “speeds up” and zips on by.”

  “Why does this not sound like a good idea to me?”

  “Or we could wait until we get where we’re going and clonk him over the head when he opens the door to our ship to let his tame monsters out to pee.”

  “That’s Earth, right, where there are a few million more monsters, none of them tame? No, thanks.”

  “All right. His detectors are likely set to pick up ship-size masses or stuff approaching at high speed, asteroids, space crap, like that.”

  “So?”

  “If we catch up real slowly, maybe the system doesn’t kick in until we’re right on top of him.”

  “Sounds kind of iffy,”

  “I could go down into the engine room and take a hammer to the drive. If it didn’t go spastic and warp us into a “supercompacted ball, which it could, maybe we could disable it and make him come to see what’s wrong. He doesn’t want to lose this cargo.”

  “I don’t like that plan much at all.”

  “Me, neither. So unless you got something better, I say we wait until he hits the brakes and then we go to him.”

  Billie sighed. “It’s always something, isn’t it, Wilks? Never boring, being around you.”

  “That’s me. Life of the party

  In his cabin, Spears laid out his uniform for the initial upcoming battle on Earth. He’d saved one dress uniform, the billed cap with the gold braid and his star, the regulation black silks with his ribbons and medals, the evershine orthoplast over-the-calf boots. He’d wear a belt with his two antique revolvers, and the uniform’s dress sword. Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t SOP to wear dress blacks and ceremonial weaponry into a combatsit, but while he was going to be on-scene, he wasn’t going to lead the new troops into battle. No, he would command from the rear this first time, he was too valuable to risk himself in this foray. Too bad. He’d never considered himself a REMF—a rear echelon motherfucker—no armchair commander. But in this case, he would have to forgo the pleasure of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his men when the guns began to speak. He would be the most valuable man on the field not simply because he was the only man on the field, but because if something happened to him the war was over. Only he and the queen could command these soldiers and he could hardly trust her to continue the fight if he were gone.

  No, he would stand back, this once, until he had more troops, more humans to help him. He was, after all, the commanding general of the Colonial Marines now, indeed, commander-in-chief of all military forces. And why not? Once he brought back records of his success, once he showed whoever was left how the job had to be done, who would dare to deny him the rank? And if anybody could be that stupid, a wave of his hand would remove the obstacle. Sic “em, boys.

  Spears smiled. It was all going so well. Aside from a couple of minor glitches back at Third Base, nothing the historians would linger over unduly, everything had run as smoothly as lube on glass. It was only a matter of days now. All the years of preparation were about to pay off.

  He rehung the uniform, put the sword and boots away.

  He had decided to land in South Africa, a northeastern section of which was once called the Natal province. In the late 1800s, the area had been ruled by a native named Cetshwayo, who commanded a large army of warriors known as the Zulu. They were fierce fighters, the Zulu, and there had been a lot of them, but even so, they’d been no match for the technologically advanced British when it came to war. In one famous battle, a small unit of British soldiers withstood an assault against a vastly superior number of Zulu for some days, due to their better weapons, tactics, and training.

  Spears related to that. A tiny force, well directed and focused stopped an entire army. All things being equal, it was the commanders who decided battles. The aliens were fierce, savage, hard as iron, but they fought like ants. They had not learned the arts of war as had men, and few if any men knew those arts as well as Spears did.

  Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the galaxy, Spears thought. He had his place. His lever flew in the ship behind him. He was so full of anticipation he could hardly breathe.

  27

  “You awake?”

  Billie rolled over on the pad and looked up. She was in her underwear, the room was warm enough so she didn’t need any covers, Wilks stood there, dressed in a spacesuit liner, white stretch that fit him like paint.

  “I am now.”

  “We’re decelerating,” he said.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. Time to get dressed for the party, kid.”

  Only a week away now, Earth loomed large ahead of Spears. He tried to settle down with a history of the Gladitorial War, but the text did not hold his interest. Over the years he’d forced himself to learn patience, to wait, but it was hard now that he saw the goal so tantalizingly close.

  Here was the light at the end of the tunnel, the finish line for a race run long and hard. He found himself staring at the image on the viewer and when that wasn’t enough, lifting the outer armor and looking directly at the distant planet through the thick, hardened glass.

  Don’t worry, I’m coming to save you. I’ll be there soon. A few more days and your liberation will begin.

  Wilks knew he couldn’t think of everything that might go wrong. And even if he could he didn’t really want to anyhow. If he knew all the pitfalls, he probably wouldn’t go. But hey, fuck it. If you sat around worrying all the time, you’d never get anything done. Get a plan and move on it, that was the way.

  The two of them stood in the lock, mostly suited, carrying what they thought they would need.

  Strapped to them with cro-tape were extra oxy bottles, their carbines and ammo, all the squirters they could find. They were joined to each other by a three-meter length of cable, connected to lock rings on the hips, his on the right, hers on the left. There wasn’t really any way to judge their relative speed once they left the ship, hell, even while they were on the ship, but Wilks was hoping to move slowly, to make up the two klicks or so in an hour, no faster. They had enough air for three hours and if they hadn’t managed to get inside Spears’s ship by then, well, too bad. Wilks had rigged both suits with grenades from the carbine’s launcher. If he ran out of air, he wasn’t going to choke to death slowly out there. Move a protective cover and a sharp rap with the suit’s pliers and boom, end of story.

  “Billie?”

  She was fiddling with her crotch plate, still unsealed.

  “I can’t get this damned plug in right. Do I have to use it?”

  “Unless you want yellow globules floating up in front of your eyes if you have to pee, yeah.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair to me,” she said. “This operation must have been designed by a man.”

  “Nature of the plumbing, sorry. You need a hand?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “If you do that, maybe we won’t get out of here for a while.”

  Well, there it was. Wilks nodded, managed a smile behind his faceplate. So the thought had crossed her mind, too. Made him feel a little better, for some reason he couldn’t quite figure out.

  Kind of like, well, if they both saw it, they didn’t have to follow up on it.

  Billie returned his smile, and Wilks felt as if she understood what he was thinking.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Yee, it’s a cold little devil.”

  “It’ll warm up. You ready?”

  “As I’m going to get, yeah.”

  “Okay. Seal it up and start your air flow. Might as well get this show on the road.”

  Billie smiled at Wilks’s back as he moved to the outer door to open the lock. So that’s what all those push-ups were all about. He’d thought about sex, too.

  Maybe in this case the thought was better than the act. Not doing it, but afterward. Somehow the idea of waking up next to Wilks the morning after seemed utterly strange. And maybe what she had felt had something to do with putting her life on the line again. That urge to reproduce yourself when you thought you weren’t going to be around much longer. She’d learned about that in a class at the hospital. It was, so they had said, a common reaction to near-death experiences, especially in sudden and violent confrontations with the grim reaper. Something about releasing stress.

  The hatch slid open. A little flurry of air blew out and turned into white crystalline swirls. Wilks stepped out, used his magnetic boots, and stood on the side of the ship, sticking out like a thorn on a stem. Billie followed him.

  When they were both outside, free of the ship’s faux grav, Wilks turned so that his back faced the distant dot of the other ship. “You okay? Don’t speak, just nod or shake your head.”

  Billie nodded. He’d told her they’d be using line-of-sight laserlight corns, short range and focused in the same direction that the speaker was looking. That was so Spears couldn’t overhear them. If you can see Spears’s ship, Wilks had said, don’t open your mouth, don’t say a word. The corns were supposed to be good for a couple hundred meters, no more, but you never knew. If he knew they were out here, it could get real tricky real fast. If she wanted to speak to him, they had to take turns looking away from the Jackson when they did it.

  Wilks clumped along the side of the ship. Without anything to relate to, up and down didn’t have much meaning, and Billie quickly adjusted her mind-set so it seemed she wasn’t walking on the side of the vessel but on top of it.

  It took a couple of minutes to get to the front of the MacArthur. When they were perched on the nose like flies on the end of a banana, Wilks turned around to look at her. “Okay, you remember the drill?”

  Billie nodded.

  “All right. Cut the power to your boots and use the squirter, on three. One … two… three!”

  Billie shut off her magnetics and triggered the squirter. It looked like nothing so much as an indoor plant sprayer; there was a narrow neck with a lever, a kind of handguard loop over that, and underneath, a small thick plastic tank with the compressed gas in it.

  The squirter tried to pull itself out of her hand, but she tightened her grip and stiffened her arm and was lifted clear of the ship. She twisted slightly, saw Wilks pointing behind them, and aimed her squirter that way and depressed the control again.

  The gas made faint sparkles as it spewed and froze.

  It took a little adjustment but after a couple of minutes she and Wilks evened out and flew side by side, the thin coil of line connecting them left a bit slack. He faced forward more than Billie did, but she could shift her head enough inside the suit to peripherally see the ship ahead of them. All too quickly their own ship seemed to drop into the distance behind them, dwindling to the size of a toy model.

  Wilks puffed out a couple of short bursts on the squirter and turned himself so he could speak.

  “Might as well relax and enjoy the ride,” he said.

  Billie nodded. She realized she was breathing too quickly and made an effort to slow that down. It really was something, to be floating along in the middle of nowhere like this, soaring like some magical bird across the bleakness. Whatever else happened, this was truly something.