Low Port Part 34

The RIP transports on Fandor IV were huge oblate spheroids, flattened and wider in the middle than at the ends. Trelayne and almost one hundred other Rippers occupied the jump seats that lined the perimeter of the main bay, facing in, officers near the c.o.c.kpit. Before them, maybe a hundred Fandor natives huddled on the metal floor, eyes downcast but constantly darting around the hold and over their captors. The adults were about five feet tall and humanoid, but their soft red facial hair, pointed snouts and ears gave them a feral look. The children reminded Trelayne of a stuffed toy he had as a child.

Fresh from RIP boot camp, this was to be his first action. These Fandorae came from a village located over rich mineral deposits soon to be an Ent.i.ty mining operation. They were to be "relocated" to an island off the west coast. He added the quotes in response to a growing suspicion, fed by overheard jokes shared by RIP veterans. He also recalled arriving on Fandor, scanning the ocean on the approach to the RIP base on the west sh.o.r.e.

There were no islands off the coast.

The other Rippers shifted and fidgeted, waiting for their first hit of the day. The life support system of their field suits released Scream directly into their blood, once each suit's computer received the transmitted command from the RIP Force unit leader. If you wanted your Scream, you suited up and followed orders. And G.o.d, you wanted your Scream.

His unit had been on Scream since the end of boot camp. Trelayne knew he was addicted. He knew that RIP wanted him and all his unit addicted. He just didn't know why. He had also noticed that no one in his unit had family. No one would miss any of them. Another reason to follow orders.

Twenty minutes out from the coast, a major unbuckled his boost harness and nodded to a captain to his right. Every Ripper watched as the captain hit a b.u.t.ton on his wrist pad.

The Scream came like the remembered sting of an old wound, a friend that you hadn't seen in years and once reunited, you wondered why you had missed them.

The captain's voice barked in their headsets, ordering them out of their harnesses. Trelayne rose as one with the other Rippers, StAB rod charged and ready, the Scream in him twisting his growing horror into the antic.i.p.ation of ecstasy. The Fandorae huddled closer together in the middle of the bay.

The captain punched another b.u.t.ton. Trelayne felt the deck thrumming through his boots as the center bay doors split open. The Fandorae leapt up, grabbing their young and skittering back from the widening hole, only to face an advancing wall of Rippers with lowered StAB rods.

Some of the Fandorae chose to leap. Some were pushed by their own people in the panic. Others fell on the StAB rods or died huddled over their young.

Trelayne pulled a kit, no more than a year, from under a dead female. He held the child in his arms, waiting his turn as the Rippers in front of him lifted or pushed the remaining bodies through the bay doors. When he reached the edge, Trelayne lifted the kit from his shoulder and held it over the opening. It did not squirm, or cry, only stared a mute accusation. Trelayne let go, then knelt to peer over the edge.

A salt wind stung sharp and cold where it crept under his helmet. He watched the kit fall to hit the rough gray sea a hundred feet below. Most of the bodies had already slipped beneath the waves. The kit disappeared to join them.

A nausea that even Scream could not deflect seized Trelayne. Pushing back from the edge, he wrenched his visor up to gasp in air. A Ripper beside him turned to him, and for a brief moment Trelayne caught his own reflection in the man's mirrored visor. The image burned into his memory as be fought to reconcile the horror engulfing him with the grinning mask of his own face...

Dreaming still... falling still... falling in love...

Trelayne made captain in a year, as high as Screamers could rise in RIP. He took no pride in it. When the Scream ran low in him, his guilt rose black and bottomless. But his addiction was now complete. Withdrawal for a Screamer meant weeks of agony, without the filter of Scream, then death. The Ent.i.ty was his only source. He did what he was told.

Rippers burnt out fast on project worlds, so the Ent.i.ty rotated them off relo work every six months for a four-week tour on a "processed" world. Trelayne's first tour after making captain was on Lania, the Angel home planet, arranging transport of Angel breeding pairs from Lamia to project worlds with RIP Force units. The Ent.i.ty had found that, with Angels on-planet, concerns over Scream delivery could be put aside for that world.

s.e.x with an Angel, said RIP veterans, was the ultimate high. But upon arrival, Trelayne had found them too alien, too thin and wraith-like. He decided that their reputation was due more to ingesting uncut Scream during s.e.x than to their ethereal beauty.

Then he saw her.

She was one of a hundred Angels being herded into a cargo shuttle that would dock with an orbiting jump ship. Angels staggered by Trelayne, their eyes downcast. He had started to turn away when he saw her: striding with head held high, glaring at the guards. She turned as she pa.s.sed him. Their eyes locked.

He ordered her removed from the shipment. That is how he met her. As her captor. Then her liberator. Then her lover.

The Earth name she had taken was Philomela. Her Angel name could not be produced by a human throat. She brought him joy and pain. He was never sure what he brought her. She gave herself willingly, and her pleasure in their lovemaking seemed so sincere that he sometimes let himself believe-believe that she clung to him in those moments, not to a desperate hope for freedom. That she did not hate him for what RIP had done to her people.

That she loved him.

But Scream strangled such moments. Though not on combat doses, he still needed it for physical dependency. On low doses, depression clouded life in a gray mist. Could she love him when he doubted his own love for her? Why was he drawn to her? s.e.x? His private source of Scream? To wash his hands clean by saving one of his victims? And always between them loomed an impa.s.sable chasm: they were separate species who could never be truly mated.

The news reached him one rare afternoon as they lay together in his quarters. His PerComm unit, hanging on the wall above them, began to buzz like an angry insect He pulled it down and read the message from the Cutter, the medic in his unit.

She watched him as he read. "Jase, is something wrong?"

He had come to expect her empathy. Whether she could now read his human expressions or sense his mood, he didn't know. He threw the unit away as if it had stung him and covered his face with a hand. "Mojo. One of my men, a friend. He's Fallen."

"Is he-"

"He's alive. No serious injuries." As if that mattered.

"Do you think he tried to take his life?"

"No," he said, though the drug in him screamed yes.

"Many do-"

"No! Not Mojo." But he knew she was right. Suicide was common with Screamers, and "Joining the Fallen" was a favored method-a dive that you never came out of. The Ent.i.ty punished any survivors brutally. Screamers were easily replaced, but one LASh jet could cut the return on a project world by a full point.

"Now comes the judging your people do?" she asked.

"Court martial. Two weeks." If they found Mojo guilty they would discharge him. No source of Scream. Better to have died in the crash, he thought. He got out of bed and began dressing. "I have to leave Lania, return to my base. Try to help him."

"They will judge against him. You will not change that."

"I know. But I have to try. He has no one else."

She turned away. "We have few moments together."

She was shaking, and he realized that she was crying. He misunderstood. "I'll be back soon. It'll be better then."

She shook her head and looked up at him. "I mean that we have few moments left. It is my time."

He stood there staring down at her. "What do you mean?"

"I must produce a brood." She turned away again.

"You mean you will take a mate. One of your own kind."

"His name is Procne," she said, still not looking at him.

He didn't know what to do or say, so he kept dressing.

She turned to him. "I love you," she said quietly.

He stopped. She waited. He said nothing. She lay down, sobbing. He swallowed and formed the thought in his mind, opened his mouth to tell her that he loved her too, when she spoke again.

"What will become of me?" she asked.

All his doubts about her rushed in to drown the words in his mouth. He was but a way of escape to her. She did not love him. She would give herself to one of her own. She was alien. The Angels hated RIP for what they had done. She hated him.

He pulled on his jacket and turned away...

The trial, I tried, Mojo-but nothing can save us when we Fall, and we were Falling the moment they put it in our blood...

The day after Mojo's trial, Trelayne entered the RIP barracks pod. The Cutter and two other Rippers sat on drop-bunks watching MoJo stuff his few possessions into a canister pack. MoJo wore his old civvies, now at least a size too small. He still had a Medistim on his arm, and he moved with a limp.

The others jumped to attention when they saw their visitor. Cutter just nodded. Trelayne returned the salutes then motioned towards the door. After a few words and half-hearted slaps on Mojo's back, they filed out, leaving Trelayne and Mojo alone.

Mojo sat down on his bunk. "Thanks, Cap. h.e.l.l of a try."

Trelayne sat, forcing a smile. "You forget we lost?"

Mojo shrugged. "Never had a chance. You know that. None of us do. Just a matter of time. If the Scream don't get you, they will. No way out for the likes of us."

Trelayne searched Mojo's broad face. I have to try, he thought. We won't get another chance. "Maybe there is a way."

Narrowing his eyes, Mojo glanced at the door and back again. He looked grim. "I'm with you, Cap. Whatever, wherever."

Trelayne shook his head. "They'll kill us if we're caught."

"I'm a dead man already. We all are."

Trelayne sighed and started talking...

And so the Fallen dreamed of rising again, eh Mojo? What fools we were. But we gave them a run for a while, didn't we- * * *

Trelayne returned to Lania. In his absence, Philomela had taken Procne as her mate. She refused to see Trelayne. He added her and Procne to the next cargo of Angels being shipped to the project worlds, with himself as the ship's captain.

He did not see her until after their ship had made the first jump. Philomela was summoned to the captain's cabin, to be told to which planet she and her mate had been consigned.

She stiffened when she entered and saw him. "You."

He nodded and waited.

"Sending us into slavery to be bred and milked like animals, this was not enough? You had to be here to see it happen, did you, Jason?" She looked around. "Where is the captain?"

"I am the captain on this trip."

She looked confused. "But you have never gone on these..."

He sighed. "Please sit. I have much to say..."

Why did I risk everything to save her? Love? Guilt? As penance? For her Scream? In a desperate hope that one day she would turn to me again? Or as I fell, was I willing to grasp at anything, even if I pulled all I loved down with me?

From the ship's observation deck, Trelayne and Philomela watched a shuttle depart, carrying a "shipment" of twenty pairs of Angels for the project world below.

"Do you know why I chose my Earth name?" she asked.

Her voice was flat, dead, but he heard the pain that each of these worlds brought her as more of her people were torn away, while she remained safe, protected. "No. Tell me," he said.

"In a legend of your planet, Philomela was a girl turned into a nightingale by the G.o.ds. That image pleased me, to be chosen by the G.o.ds, elevated to the heavens. Only later did I learn that the nightingale is also a symbol of death."

Trelayne bowed his head. "Phi, there's nothing-"

"No, but allow me at least my bitterness. And guilt."

Guilty of being spared. By him. She and Procne spared, only because an addict and xenocide and soon-to-be traitor needed his drug source close. He had stopped trying to examine his motives beyond that. The Scream would mock the small voice in him that spoke of a last remnant of honor and n.o.ble intent.

"My sister is on that shuttle," Philomela said quietly.

Trelayne said nothing for there was nothing to say. They watched the tiny ship fall towards the planet below...

At each planet on that trip, we gathered to us the castoffs, the unwanted, the remnants of a dozen races, together with the Fallen. And then, suddenly, there was no turning back...

Trelayne's first officer, a young lieutenant-commander named Glandis, confronted him on the bridge. She wasn't backing down this time. "Captain, I must again register my concern over continued irregularities in your command of this mission."

Trelayne glanced at the monitor by his chair. Mojo and eleven other ex-Rippers were disembarking from a shuttle in the ship's docking bay. In two minutes, they would be on the bridge. He tapped a command, deactivating all internal communications and alarms. He turned to Glandis. "Irregularities?"

"The ip cargo we have acquired at each of our stops."

"Those people are to be transported to the Ent.i.ty's Product R&D center on Earth," Trelayne responded.

Glandis snorted. "What research could the Ent.i.ty conduct with-" She read from her PerComm. "-a Mendlos subject?"

"Physiological adaptation to high-grav," Trelayne replied.

"A Fandorae kit? A Fanarucci viper egg."

"Biotech aural receptor design, and neural poison mutagenics development." One minute more, he thought.

Glandis hesitated, some of the confidence leaving her face. "You have also protected one specific breeding pair of Angels for purposes that have yet to be made clear to me."

"They too are slated for Ent.i.ty research." Trelayne rose. Thirty seconds. "Synthesization of Scream."

"What about this stop? It was not on our filed flight plan."

"Late orders from RIP Force command." Fifteen seconds.

"I was not informed."