In Transit
an extract from the novella
by Keith Brooke and Eric
Brown
 Eric
and I started writing together back in 1995; before that we had been
early readers - and critiquers - of each other's work pretty much since
we first met in 1989. The first edition of our joint collection, Parallax
View (Sarob Press, 2000), had the unfortunate effect of drawing
a psychological line under our collaborations - gathering all the stories
to date together into one volume was a kind of closure. We'd always
planned to work together again, and the prospect of a new edition of
PV from Immanion Press was all the spark we needed: dropping
the two solo stories from the Sarob edition, we decided to write a new
novella for the 2007 edition. "In Transit" was the result
- the novella started off as a brainstorming session in a pub called
the White Swan, and was written over the winter of 2006/07. We hope
you like this extract enough to go and buy the book!
Keith Brooke, April 2007
The White Swan left the war zone and burst through
the Jehovah wormhole with an actinic explosion of supercharged particles.
Abbott clutched the arms of his seat and closed his eyes as the swirling
fire of the membrane swallowed the shuttle and spat it out the other
side, five hundred light years along the galactic rim. The transition
seemed to twist him inside out and wring his soul dry. It left him light-headed
and nauseous, his head fizzing with static.
When he opened his eyes, he was amazed to see the crew going about
their business as if nothing had happened. They hung in their slings,
slaved to the shuttle's smartware nexus, hands drifting across touchpads
and parallel sensors with the dreamy grace of narcoleptic ballerinas.
The pilot was setting course from the Jehovah wormhole to its twin,
a thousand parsecs across the star system, while an engineer and a smartware
specialist communed with the shuttle as if in comas.
Abbott's head still reeled.
Through the forward viewscreen, a delta strip above the command slings,
he made out the main sequence primary, its lone planet in transit across
the sun's fiery disc. Ahead, a mirror image of the wormhole they had
just left, its twin was a coruscating oval interface through which they
would pass in six hours en route to Earth.
At least, he thought with relief, they were out of Kryte-controlled
territory now. This intermediate system was technically in no-man's
land, strategically important and sporadically fought over.
"... though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,"
a woman's voice intoned to his left.
He turned. Some neurological side-effect of the transition had blitzed
his short-term memory.
"...I will fear no evil."
He fingered his crucifix, where it rested on an inflamed area on his
chest. Memory started to kick in... The smartware implant, fed in through
his chest wall, from where it had infiltrated his entire body. The slave
device.
He'd been in conversation with Major Travers, he recalled. Just before
the jump. Something about a briefing...
"...For thou art with me."
It came back to him now. Travers, a blocky grunt who did nothing to
disguise her disdain of civilians in general and xeno-psychologists
in particular, had been filling him in about the captured Kryte in the
shuttle's hold.
"You okay, Abbott?" Travers looked across at him now, her
superior expression putting him in his place. She was an uncompromising-looking
woman, with the look of a street-fighter, only accentuated by the reconstructive
surgery that left half her face composed of n-gel - so nearly natural-looking,
but not quite. Responses on that half of her face lagged a split second
behind so that an expression would start on one side of her face and
migrate to the left, a peristalsis of the self. "You look rough."
"I'm fine. Where were we?" He sat up, attempting to look
competent.
Travers smiled, her time-lagged smile that Abbott tried hard not to
find disturbing. "I was telling you about the Devil," she
told him. "I was telling you about your Devil..."
Abbott held up a hand. "Please. I know they're the enemy, but
demonising them like that does nothing to foster understanding."
Travers sneered. "I don't want to understand the bastards, Abbott.
I want to eradicate them." As she said this, she ran a finger across
the crucifix tattooed on her left forearm.
"The best way to win the war, or even to contain it, will be
to come to some understanding of how the enemy works, how it thinks.
Reducing a dangerous foe to stereotypes is self-defeating and foolhardy."
Something flared in Travers' eyes, a fighter's response, an unthinking,
uncomprehending reflex. "Listen, Abbott. I lost an entire platoon
capturing that fucker back there. Twenty-five fine men and women, blitzed
in an instant. If you think I give a damn about what I call the..."
Something in Abbott's expression halted her tirade.
He reached out and laid a hand over hers. The touch froze her. He
wondered at the last time she'd felt the contact of human flesh.
"Major, ten years ago an advanced strike of the Kryte's rim division
killed five thousand colonists on New Hampton. My wife and two year-old
son were among the fatalities. Please don't doubt my enmity towards
the Kryte."
She had the good grace to looked away, cowed.
Abbott went on, "So... where did you say we'd got to?"
"I was describing the... the Kryte. We're of the opinion that
it wasn't a combat soldier."
"I thought all Krytes in the forward sector were militia?"
She shook her head. "Not this one. It didn't have battle armour,
and wasn't equipped with phase array nucleonics. It was in a sub-light
shuttle, grounded behind the front line. It was attempting to get away
when we broke through and disabled the ship."
"So what do you think it was doing there?"
"Beats me," Travers said. "Anyway, it didn't have time
to kill itself. We took it by surprise. It put up a hell of a fight,
but we quelled the bastard. We contacted the sector base unit immediately.
The rest you know."
"This is our big chance, Major," Abbott told her. "Our
big chance to understand."
He saw in her eyes that she knew that this time his use of the word
understand had a more specific meaning. The Kryte were known
to be extremely long-lived, under normal circumstances - perhaps even
immortal. Humankind had never even come close to understanding the secret
of this longevity until now. Only three Kryte had ever been captured
alive before, so badly wounded that they'd died a few hours later without
yielding their secret.
Travers was looking at him, her lop-sided expression unfathomable.
"Do we really want to understand?" she asked, her tone
even, controlled.
Abbott studied her face, his eyes drawn to the join between natural
flesh and n-gel reconstruct. He knew the Major was uncompromising, but
he hadn't had her down as a fundamentalist. There were some - including
Travers, it appeared - who thought immortality was a temptation too
far. How would you ever reap your reward in Heaven if you were forever
bound to mortal existence? In his head he continued the Twenty-third
Psalm that Travers had been recounting earlier:
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
Travers and her like wanted to dwell in the Lord's house; life was
but a step along the way.
"I want to understand," he finally answered. "I have
to understand these ... Devils, as you call them. They destroy lives..."
He had been waiting for an opportunity like this for years.
...continues
© Keith Brooke and Eric Brown 2007.
"In Transit" is published in full in Parallax View
(Immanion Press, April 2007).
Order online using these links and infinity plus
will benefit:
...Parallax View from Amazon.com
or Amazon.co.uk
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