The Seventh Science Fiction Megapack Read online

  “Was he D.O.A.?” I asked.

  “Close to it,” replied the orderly. “He was sure someone was coming to be with him, and was desperate to make sure everyone at Admissions knew where to send her.”

  “Her?”

  “I think it was a her.” He shrugged. “I could be wrong. He wasn’t making much sense. I thought he couldn’t remember his name for a couple of minutes. Turns out he was right and I was wrong. Daniel Daniels. Funny name.” His companion started shifting his weight uneasily. “If you don’t have any more questions, we’ve got to schlep this guy down to the basement for an autopsy. We were on our break, but we’re a little short-handed this week.”

  I stepped aside to let them go into the room, and decided it was time to return to the spaceport. But just for the hell of it, I stopped by Admissions before I left and asked if anyone had inquired about Seymour.

  No one had.

  * * * *

  When I got back to my office, I was still curious, so I had the computer hunt up with little there was on Seymour and on Daniel Daniels. Seymour was easy; born and raised in Miami, went to college here, spent nine years in the space service, honorably discharged after getting shot all to hell in a firefight on Kobernykov II, informally known as Nikita. Came back home, got a realtor’s license, and was selling beachfront property until two years ago, when he suddenly seemed determined to prove he was either a hero or bulletproof or both. Since then he’d tried to throw his life away three different times; the first two times the hospital made him keep it, this time they didn’t.

  Daniels was harder. There were actually four Daniel Daniels living in Miami at the start of the year. You’d think their parents would have had a little more creativity. Two were still around. One had died of relatively natural causes at the age of 93. And then there was the one the orderly had told me about.

  He was 33 years old. Dropped out of school at 16, signed a couple of minor-league soccer contracts, got cut both times, joined the space service when he was 20, served seven years, got out on a medical discharge, and had been going from one menial job to another ever since.

  I checked the medical discharge. He got it after catching some serious flak on Nikita. He recovered physically, but he’d been seeing a shrink for depression for four years before the night he tried to take on a gang of teenaged hoods and got turned into an animated cinder for his trouble. It took them a year to put him back together with a brand-new epidermis—and damned if he didn’t go out and do something equally suicidal a month later. Even the police weren’t sure what happened—they found him after all the shooting was over—but he was filled with so much lead of so many different calibers that he had to have taken on at least six armed men.

  And that was it: two unexceptional men who had nothing in common but the town they lived in and the planet they’d served on, each willingly faced certain death for no apparent reason—and then, when they were saved, went right out and faced it again.

  I was still pondering it when Captain Symmes called me into his office to give him my report. I told him what I’d observed, which matched all the other reports, and then figured I was done.

  “Just a minute,” he said as I was turning to leave.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “You accompanied him to the hospital. Why?”

  “I was hoping he might be able to tell me why he willingly put himself at such risk,” I answered. “I thought maybe he knew something about the men we killed.”

  “And did he?”

  I shook my head. “We’ll never know. He only regained consciousness for perhaps a minute after surgery, and then he died.”

  “I wonder what the hell made him do it?” mused Captain Symmes.

  “I wondered, too,” I said. “So I ran computer checks on him and on Daniels…”

  “Daniels?” he said sharply. “Who’s Daniels?”

  “Another man who threw his life away the same way,” I said. “But the only things they had in common were that they lived here and they both saw action on Kobernykov II.”

  “Kobernykov II,” he repeated. “Is that the one they call Nikita?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, that’s interesting,” said Captain Symmes.

  “What is, sir?” I asked.

  “About two years ago I was running security at Marsport, and the same kind of thing happened. Four men were robbing one of the restaurants there, and this guy, he was just waiting for his flight to Titan, decided to take them out single-handed. They shot him before he got close to them. We nailed all four of them before they could harm anyone else, but the man had taken too many bullets and energy pulses. He died a few hours later.” Captain Symmes paused and frowned. “I had to fill out a report, and that meant I had to find out who was killed. The reason I’m mentioning it at all is because he spent some time on Nikita.”

  “Medical discharge?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “Curious, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” I said. “Do you know if that was the first time he’d risked his life like that?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Captain Symmes. “I assume you have a reason for asking?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Give me a minute and I’ll check the record. Like I said, it was two years ago.”

  He activated his computer, instructed it to pull up the file in question, then told it to run a biographical search on the dead man. Eleven seconds later it had the answer.

  Creighton Mortenson Jr. had willingly faced what seemed like certain death on four separate occasions. Only after he’d miraculously survived the first three did Fate finally deliver on its promise at MarsPort.

  “Captain,” I said, “what would you say if I told you that Seymour and Daniels had also tried to throw their lives away prior to actually succeeding at it?”

  “I’d say that something very interesting must have happened to them on Nikita,” he said, and instructed his computer to produce a readout of Kobernykov II. He studied it for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s about three-quarters the size of Earth, lighter gravity, a bit less oxygen but breathable. During the war with the Patruka Alliance we found they were using Nikita as an ammunition dump, we landed a small party, we blew the ammo dump, each side suffered serious casualties. The few survivors were scattered all the hell over, we found them over a period of maybe three weeks, and eventually they rejoined their main units. There’s some plant and animal life there, but no humans and no Patrukans.”

  “I wonder what the hell went on there,” I said. “Most men who get shot up in wartime don’t ever want to experience it again—and here were three men who went out of their way to walk into enemy fire or its equivalent again.

  “Have your computer hunt up the survivors and ask,” he said.

  When I went back to my office I filed my report, then tried to find the survivors of Nikita, as Captain Symmes had suggested. The Patrukan War was over, so all the documents and records were declassified, but it didn’t help much. We’d sent in a covert team of 30 men and women. It was an exceptionally bloody action. 25 died on Nikita, and the other five—which included Seymour, Daniels and Mortenson—were wounded pretty badly. Evidently they’d become separated, and each managed to survive on his own until a rescue mission arrived a few weeks later.

  I tried to track down the other two survivors. They’d both courted Death until it inevitably caught up with them.

  There was nothing in any of their histories to indicate that they were either exceptionally brave or exceptionally foolish. Except for Daniels’ depression, none of them was being treated for any emotional or psychiatric problems. As far as I could tell, none of them kept in touch with any of the others after they were discharged from the service.

  And within six years of the firefight on Nikita, every one of them was dead, having placed themselves in what could only be termed suicidal situations until even the best surgeons and hospitals could no longer keep them alive.

  I reported my findings t
o Captain Symmes the next day. I could tell he was as fascinated as I was.

  “What do you suppose could have made them throw their lives away?” he mused. “And if they were so damned set on dying, why didn’t they just put a gun to their heads?”

  “There’s one way to find out, sir,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I can’t send you to Nikita,” he said. “We’re OceanPort security, and Nikita is more than a thousand light years from here.”

  “But if there’s something on the planet that caused this behavior…”

  “Forget it. If there was anything in the food or water or air, the space service or the navy would have found it.”

  But I couldn’t forget it. How do you forget a bunch of totally dissimilar people with one brief shared experience who suddenly act in the same, totally self-destructive manner?

  Each evening when I got off work I’d go back to my quarters and try to find out more about the planet and the survivors. The problem is that there simply wasn’t much to find. They’d been there for three weeks, maybe four at the outside, there were only five of them, the planet had been deserted by the Patruka Alliance after the battle, and no one had been back since.

  And then I thought of the one line of inquiry I hadn’t considered before. We were no longer at war, so I wrote a couple of Patrukan historians and asked them if they could supply any accounts, not of the action on Nikita, but on the whereabouts of the survivors.

  It took a week before I got an answer, but finally one of them, a being called Myxophtyl—at least that’s the way my computer translated his name—informed me that of the four survivors, two had died of natural causes, and two had died heroically, one saving a child who had wandered into the enclosure of a herd of vicious carnivores at a local zoo, the other trying to protect a Mollute who somehow offended a crowd of Patrukans that had instantly turned into an ugly and bloodthirsty mob.

  “It didn’t just affect humans, sir,” I reported to Captain Symmes the day after I heard from the historian. “Whatever’s on that planet affected everyone.”

  “I know that look,” he said. “I’m as interested as you are, but as I told you before, I don’t have the authority to send you there.”

  “I’ve got vacation time stored up,” I said.

  He checked his computer. “Your vacation’s not for five months.”

  “Then I’ll take a leave of absence.”

  “Think it through,” he said. “Nothing on that planet harmed anyone. Do you really want to go there, bore yourself to tears for a week or two, come home, and then one day decide to prove that you’re invulnerable to bullets and lasers?”

  “No,” I admitted. “No, I suppose I don’t.”

  I thought it was the truth when I said it, but with each day I became more obsessed with what could have turned otherwise normal men into weapon-charging suicides. And in the back of my mind I kept coming back to Captain Symmes’ question: if they really wanted to die, why not just put a gun to their heads, or take an overdose? And then I remembered Myron Seymour lying on his bed in the recovery room. He didn’t want to die; he wanted to see this woman he was sure would somehow know he was in the hospital. Okay, he may have been fantasizing about the woman, but he wasn’t fantasizing about wanting to live.

  I’d never thought of myself as obsessive, but as the next three weeks sped by I found myself obsessing over the mystery of what happened on Nikita, and finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told Captain Symmes that I was putting in for a one-month leave of absence, and that if I didn’t get it I was fully prepared to quit my job.

  “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “That’s an awfully big step to take, just to chase a fantasy. Besides, I already reported your findings to the navy and the space service. I’m sure they’ll look into it.”

  “I’m sure they will, too,” I said. “Just not necessarily in our lifetimes.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We’ve got ten or twelve minor wars going on right now,” I said. “They’ve got more important things to do than examine a planet that nobody’s set foot on in six years.”

  “I gave them all the details,” said Captain Symmes. “If they think it’s important, they’ll get out there pretty damned fast.”

  “And if they find whatever it is that caused this behavior, they’ll make it Top Secret and won’t declassify it for a century,” I shot back. “I want to know what happened.”

  “I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?” he said after a long pause.

  “No, sir, you’re not.”

  “All right. You’ve got a month, starting tomorrow.” He handed me a small cube. “There are no direct flights. This’ll get you free passage on any ship owned by Earth or its allies.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  “The codes will vanish in exactly thirty days, so don’t stay any longer than that unless you’re prepared to pay your passage back.”

  “I appreciate this, sir.”

  “You’re a good security man,” he said uncomfortably. (Praising people always made him uncomfortable.) “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t,” I promised him. “I’ll be back less than a month with the answers to what happened.”

  “Good health,” he said.

  “Not good luck?”

  “I think you might be luckier if you never find what you’re looking for,” said Captain Symmes seriously.

  * * * *

  The non-traveler tends to think that between FTL speeds and wormholes you can get anywhere in the galaxy in a day’s time, but of course it isn’t so. Wormholes go where they want to go, not where we want them to, and even when you’re traveling at multiples of light speed it’s still a big galaxy. It took me a day to get to Antares III, where I changed ships and proceeded to Buckingham IV. I laid over for a day until I could transfer to a ship that took me to Mickeleen, and from there I had to charter a private ship for the last leg of the journey.

  “I want you to burn this location into your mind,” said the pilot when the small ship touched down on Nikita. “I’ll be here in exactly ten days. If you’re not at this spot, I have neither the time nor the inclination to embark on a one-man planetary search, which means you’ll be stranded here, probably for the rest of what remains of your life. You got that?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “You sure you have enough supplies?” he asked, looking at my pack.

  “Food and water for twelve days, just to be on the safe side.”

  “If you’re not here ten days from now, there won’t be anything safe about it,” he said. “It could be decades before another ship touches down here.”

  “I’ll be here,” I assured him.

  “You’d better be,” he said.

  Then the hatch closed and he was gone, and I was alone, the first human to set foot on Nikita in six years.

  I felt good. Hell, at 82% of Earth’s gravity, everybody feels good. This was exactly the kind of world they used for recuperating heart patients. The oxygen content was a little light, but the gravity more than made up for it.

  The world itself seemed pleasant enough. There was a brownish, grasslike ground cover in most places, a few clusters of oddly-shaped trees here and there, and a type G sun that provided plenty of daylight without making Nikita uncomfortably hot. I saw a few small, rodent-like animals peeking at me from behind shrubs and trees, but when I turned to get a better look they ducked into their burrows.

  I knew there was water on the planet. There were a pair of freshwater oceans, and a quartet of snow-topped mountain ranges that produced rivers with their runoff. My research told me that it smelled bad and tasted worse, but that it was drinkable. I had no idea if there were any fish, but I suspected there were. One thing we’ve learned since first reaching the stars is that life not only takes the strangest forms, but sprouts up in the oddest places.

  According to my charts, I was about four miles from the site of the conflict, which
is to say, the ammunition dump. I was retracing the steps of our team. They’d actually started on the far side of the planet, maybe three thousand miles away, and taken a high-speed aircar here under cover of night, but they’d gone the last few miles on foot.

  I looked for signs of a camp, but then realized that a covert attack team wouldn’t make a camp, but would just continue to their target before they were spotted.

  The ground was level, not overgrown at all, and I just kept walking until I came to it. It wasn’t hard to spot. There was a raw crater close to 500 yards in circumference and maybe 40 feet deep, the remains of the ammo dump. Evidently the rescue ships on both sides couldn’t handle both the living and the dead; there were skeletons of both men and Patrukans littering the place, picked clean by small animals and even smaller insects. The Patrukans’ bones had a blue-green tint to them; I never did find out why.

  I walked the area. It must have been one hell of a battle. There was absolutely no place to hide, nothing to duck behind. A night attack shouldn’t have made any difference: if the Patrukans had FTL ships and pulse cannons, they sure as hell had all kinds of vision aids that could turn night into day. I remember once, when I was a kid, standing at the top of Cemetery Ridge and wondering how Pickett ever got his men to charge up the long, barren slope where they were just sitting ducks; I felt the same way looking at the site on Nikita.

  The other thing I wondered about was how surviving this kind of battle could give anyone a taste for charging men with loaded weapons or otherwise risking their lives. They should have been so grateful they lived through it that all they wanted to do was celebrate each day they were still alive.

  Those were my first impressions. Then I began analyzing the site as a soldier. You wouldn’t want to get too close to the dump, because you didn’t know what was in it or how big an explosion it would make. And you didn’t want any survivors picking your team off, so you’d have tried to surround the place so you could shoot any Patrukan who lived through it. The crater was more than a quarter of a mile across, so you’d want your men stationed perhaps a mile and a half across from each other, or given the accuracy of their weapons, maybe even farther. Say, two miles or a bit more.