Expendable - James Alan Gardner [61]
Chee had known more about Exploring than any normal Vacuum admiral. When suiting up, for example, he had known to empty his bladder during Limbo.
An Explorer. An Explorer who somehow became an admiral.
How long ago had this recording been made? The signal could have looped for decades if it ran off a reliable power source. If Chee had been one of the first marooned here, some forty years ago…yes, I could believe it. The Explorer on the screen was a veteran, probably taking YouthBoost every few months. Forty years would bring him almost exactly to the Chee who had died a few hours ago.
Forty years.
Plus ear surgery.
And some way to escape from Melaquin.
Chee’s Speech
With an effort, I forced myself to concentrate on his words, not his appearance. (Chee’s voice—it was definitely Chee’s voice.)
“…fully expect that more of us will get shanghaied here over time. If you are in that position, I invite you to join my partner and me in the enclave we’ve found. It’s an underground city, fully automated and self-repairing…centuries old. The people are humanoid but glassily transparent; all seem dormant, though we cannot guess the cause. We have had no success in rousing them to consciousness for more than a minute at a time.
“We’ve had better luck with the technical facilities here: this broadcasting station, for example. If we’ve analyzed its structure correctly, our transmissions should be going out over a high-capacity network, perhaps reaching all around the world. We have also discovered very old machines capable of space flight…or at least they were capable of flight centuries ago. If we can restore one of these ships to working condition, we might use it to get off the planet. We have yet to find a ship with FTL capacity, but we don’t need to get as far as another star system—we just have to escape the restricted airspace around Melaquin, then send a mayday.
“Therefore, fellow ECMs, I invite you to help us with this project. We may not be space-tech engineers, but we’re smart and resourceful. In time, we can rebuild a ship and get out of here—if we work together.”
Chee suddenly grimaced straight to the camera. “Shit, that sounded pompous, didn’t it? But you know what I mean. We can get our asses out of here if we don’t fuck up. Some of you must have landed way to hell the other side of the ocean and you’ll never make it here under your own steam; but look around, see what you can scrounge up. This civilization had sophisticated goodies before it went to sleep. Maybe you can find a starship of your own…if not, maybe a boat or a plane that’ll bring you to us, even if you’re thousands of klicks away.
“And where is here, you might ask? To answer that, I’ll turn the floor over to my partner who’s drawn up a map to show exactly where this city is…”
Chee reached toward the camera, his hand looming in front of the lens before the shot swivelled to a new angle. In a moment, a woman came into view. She was holding a map, but that wasn’t what I was looking at.
Her left cheek had a fierce purple birthmark, twin to mine.
And beneath that birthmark was the face of Admiral Seele.
My First Admiral, Again
Admiral Seele. My first admiral. The one who spent several days with me on the Jacaranda.
The one who paid me so much attention, I thought she wanted into my bed.
“Shit,” I whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What is wrong, Festina?” Oar asked. She glanced at the screen. “Are you angry this woman has copied your ugliness?”
Yes, that’s why I’m angry, I thought. I’ll sue her for stealing my trademark.
Admiral Seele. No wonder she took such interest in me. My mark was on the right, hers on the left; we were mirror images. On screen, as she pointed to her map and blathered about landmarks, she even looked the same age as me…but the recording was made forty years ago, give or take. I could well imagine those forty years had aged the woman I saw now into the admiral who cried for me.
But how had Seele lost her birthmark? How had Chee lost those