Slow Bullets Read online

So it was just me on the piss-smelling bed.

  They had not bothered tying me down. With the bullet in me they knew I stood no chance of catching up with them. They had also not left me with any sort of weapon or communications device. They had every reason to assume that I would be dead by the time anyone found the bunker.

  They were wrong about me.

  I waited until I was certain they were gone. Then I tried to move. It was hard because of the pain in my leg, and at first all I could do was whimper against the agony. Then I tried curling into a ball, hoping that would make it more bearable. When that failed, I slumped back onto the bed in despair and exhaustion. The bullet was still maggoting its way up the inside of my leg. I did not want to wait until it reached my pelvis.

  I swung myself off the bed. I screamed with the movement but that actually seemed to help. I got both of my feet onto the rubble-strewn floor. They had taken my boots but I barely registered the cold or the sharp-edged things against my skin.

  I propped myself up by my arms, able to get a much better look at my leg. The bump under my flesh had moved about half the distance to my upper thigh. I could measure its progress if I watched it against the hairs and blemishes on my skin.

  My gaze settled on the trolley Orvin had been using. The injector was on it as well as all the sharp things. There was also the knife that Orvin had used to gash open my trousers. Next to the knife was a roll of surgical bandage, and next to that was a flask of disinfectant.

  I thought of Orvin torturing people, but not wanting them to die of infection before he had had his enjoyment.

  My attention returned to the moving bulge. I knew what I would have to do. Using the knife was going to hurt more than the bullet itself, and if I cut an artery I might end up killing myself anyway. Once I started, I would not want to continue. But I would have to force myself. The war was over and I wanted to get back to my old life, the planet where I had been born. I wanted to return to my mother and father, and let my father know that I did not blame him for my conscription. He had walked the hard path of the good and incorruptible man. He deserved better than to lose another daughter.

  I took the knife and began to cut the bullet out of me.

  ______________

  You know of the wakening. You either lived through it or you read of it in the other mandatory texts.

  But we had no name for it then. It was a thing that happened to us in ones and twos, rather than a collective experience. And to begin with, none of us had the faintest idea where we were or what had happened.

  I can only tell you how it was for me.

  ______________

  After I pushed the knife into myself there was an interval of darkness, and then I woke somewhere. It was cold and there was no light. I imagined that I might have blacked out from the pain and come around again only a few minutes later.

  But once I was able to assess my condition I realised that there was no longer any pain anywhere in my leg. I felt neither the bullet nor my wound.

  I was still on a sort of bed but it was soft and it did not smell of piss. It felt as if it had been made for me, shaped exactly for the contours of my own body. I was thirsty, my throat uncomfortably dry, and I was cold enough to shiver. Wherever I was, it was not quite silent. From a distance I heard a sort of continuous low drone, like machines. Once in a while, as I lay there, I thought I heard a human voice.

  I reached out and felt curving surfaces of metal and plastic. They enclosed me like an egg. My egg—what I guessed must be a hibo capsule—made a sudden noise and opened itself. It came apart in two halves and a red light shone through the widening gap. The light must still have been dim but I had been in the dark long enough that I needed to squint.

  I did not have my uniform or combat equipment on. Someone had dressed me in silver trousers and a silver top. The material felt strong and clean, but it was also very thin. The top had short sleeves and was done up with a simple sash around the middle. I felt as if it was the sort of thing a child or a sick person would be made to wear.

  It was useless against the cold.

  Gradually my eyes began to pick out more details of my surroundings. My capsule was one of many in a long, curving corridor. Of course you know these corridors for yourself. When I say “curving,” I mean that it curved up and out of sight in both directions. On the opposite wall of the corridor lay another row of hibo capsules. It was not only mine that had come open in two halves: there were about a third of them already open. You may think I was instantly at home in the ship but it was not like that at all. I had travelled in skipships before, but I had never been awake for any part of the journey.

  I could still hear sounds. Mostly it was the systems of the ship, churning away in the distance. But there were also voices coming from somewhere not too far away. The voices sounded as if they were having an argument.

  I lifted up the fabric of my trouser. I made out the trace of the wound where the bullet had gone in and the place where I had cut it out. Or at least begun to cut it out—I could not be sure that I had succeeded by my own efforts. I ran my finger over the healed skin. It did not feel like scar tissue.

  We had good medicine in those days. They could do anything, over and over again.

  Still not quite trusting my leg—it would take my brain a little while to accept that it was healed—I began to walk along the up-curving corridor. It was an odd sensation to be walking up a slope that never stopped getting steeper.

  You get used to it.

  I passed many of the open and closed hibo capsules. There were still people in some of them—I saw their cold, still bodies through windows in the black shells of the egg. We were all wearing the same kind of silver clothes. I noticed also that writing glowed on the shells of the capsules. I paused to read some of it. The capsules all contained someone who had something to do with the war. The writing revealed what side they had been on, Central or Peripheral, and what their rank and service history had been. I read the names of their homeworlds: places like Travnik or Yargora or Arbutax.

  Supposedly we were being sent to Tottori, a place I certainly had heard of.

  I needed to know more so I decided to find the voices. They seemed to be coming from further around the great curve of the wheel. I walked past capsule after capsule, noticing as I did that behind the capsules—half hidden by them—lay a series of gold and silver murals. Sometimes there was a picture of a stilt-legged bird or a building or a pleasant landscape. The black eggs had tubes and pipes coming out of them that went through holes in the wall.

  The voices were coming closer and now they sounded much angrier. I heard the sound of someone running, hard shoes clattering on the metal floor. I heard a sharp raised voice in an accent not like my own.

  I squeezed into the space between two of the capsules and crouched down.

  I risked a glance and saw a man coming around the curve of the corridor. As he ran, the man kept twisting around to look at the people coming after him. His black outfit looked much warmer than my own silver clothes. The man was very thin, with a bald, sharp-boned head. He wore boots and carried a small gun in his hand. He was about twenty paces ahead of a group of shoeless people all dressed in silver. There were women and men of various ages in the party. One of them held a hand to her forearm where it had been bloodied.

  The man stopped at a part of the corridor where the walls squeezed in from either side. The man aimed his gun at the group.

  “Get back!” he shouted, in a high, scared voice. “Get back or I will shoot!”

  There were eight people after him. They had slowed but not stopped completely. Perhaps they doubted that the man really meant to shoot them again. The man aimed the gun and seemed to shoot past the group. The way his hand shook as he held the gun, the way he flinched at the blast, made me doubt that he had ever been a soldier.

  I listened to the voices in the party. It was hard to be sure, but their accents sounded like the enemy to me.

  The man touched a control
in the wall where it squeezed in. A metal door slid across the width of the corridor. There was a small window in the door. The man stepped up to the glass and looked through, needing to stand on the tips of his toes.

  I barely dared move. The people were hammering on the other side of the door and I saw a hand pressed against the glass.

  The man still seemed tense to me. He touched a different control and leaned in to speak.

  “This is Prad! I’m in wheel three. Where is everyone? We’ve got a breakout here! Dregs are awake!”

  I heard the same words booming through the corridor, coming out of the walls at amplified volume.

  Prad moved away from the door. He still had the little gun in his hand but now it was aimed at the floor. He wiped his other sleeve under his nose. He made me think of a rat. He was lean, frightened and unsure of himself.

  Keeping very still, I waited until Prad was level with me. Then I sprang out as fast as I was able and threw myself at him. I knocked him off balance, sent him tumbling into the capsule on the other side of the corridor. I landed on top of him and twisted the little gun from his grip, the way you take a rattle from a child.

  I sprung back onto my feet and levelled the weapon at Prad.

  “Don’t shoot,” he pleaded.

  My throat was still dry but I had to talk. “Who are you?”

  “Prad. Service technician Pradser Hebel. I’m crew. Propulsion section. There’s been a problem with the ship. A serious problem. We’re drifting somewhere and there’s been a power restart. None of you should be coming awake like this.”

  I did not care for any of this. I wanted certainty, authority, not more doubt.

  “Tell me what ship this is.”

  “Skipship. Military transport. We’re supposed to be on our way to Tottori.”

  “I know. What happens when we arrive—do we get to go home? Are we being repatriated?”

  “No. Why would you think . . .” But then he thought better of that line of questioning. “No. Not repatriation, exactly. This isn’t just a military transport. It’s a prison ship. The Caprice. That was her old name; they just kept it after the refit.”

  “There’s been a mistake.”

  “Most definitely.”

  “I mean, I’m a soldier, not a prisoner. I should not be on any military prison ship. I’m not a . . . what did you call those people? Dregs?”

  “It’s just a word. I’m sorry. I didn’t think . . .”

  I jabbed the weapon at him. “Who’s operating this fucking thing?”

  “Peacekeeper authority.” He was still down on the ground and cowering. “Converted starliner. Used to carry passengers before the war, luxury end of the market. Hundred Worlds Circuit. Appropriated and outfitted for prisoner transport and civilian repatriation.”

  “The dreg run.”

  “I said I’m . . .”

  “How big?”

  He swallowed hard. “Very. Refitted for bulk capacity. Nearly a thousand sleeper berths.”

  “You said drifting. Are we close to Tottori?”

  “I don’t think so. We skipped, maybe more than once. It was a long haul, all of us in hibo, even the crew. Then this. Total power blackout. No idea how long it’s been. Ship’s coming back to life piece by piece.” He swallowed again. “Staggered system recovery, to manage power consumption until all reactors are back to capacity.” He looked at me with a sort of pleading desperation. “That’s all I know. I’ve been trying to reach the rest of the crew, trying to find someone who knows more than I do.”

  “Get up.”

  “Please do not hurt me.”

  “I’m a soldier, not a criminal. I don’t hurt civilians. Those other people. Why were they chasing you?”

  He risked a shrug. “Like you, like me. Scared and not sure what is happening.”

  “I used to fight those people.”

  “When I ran into them they had already met five prisoners from your side. You’re Peripheral, right? There had been a fight. I think one man may have been killed.” He was calming now, but he still had a very high, quavering voice. I began to think it was his natural register. “They’ve split apart now, bulkheads down, interlocks sealed. But there will be more trouble until we can get some kind of authority.”

  I looked at the little gun. It was the sort of weapon safe to use on a pressurised spacecraft. Low energy yield and a low cyclic fire rate. It would stop a person but not go through armour.

  I doubted it would be much use against three people, let alone eight.

  “Do you know there are other crew?”

  “I hope so,” Prad said.

  “Hope so. But you’ve seen none of them.”

  Prad gave a twitch, confirming that this was correct.

  “You said you were propulsion section. Does that mean you know how to operate this ship?”

  “Some systems.”

  “So where were you hoping to get to?”

  This ratty man looked at me with renewed fear, as if I might decide his fate on the basis of his answer.

  “A control station,” Prad said, with a tremble in his voice. “Not the main bridge. That’s too far away. But I thought there might be more crew at the control station. Thought I might be able to see how bad the damage is and where we are.”

  “Then we should go there now. Show me the way.”

  “It’s not too far from here. We have to use the elevator to go back up to the hub.”

  “Will we run into anyone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A little way around the wheel was another door blocking the corridor. Prad looked through the window before making the door open. Beyond was another corridor flanked by the open and closed hibo capsules.

  “Only crew can work these doors,” Prad said. “It will buy some time.”

  Soon we came to a door set into the side of the corridor. I kept my attention on Prad as we went into the gold and silver elevator. I worried that he might overcome his fear and try to take back the gun from me. But Prad only pointed to a picture of the ship etched into a rectangle on one of the walls.

  “This is where we are. Three centrifuge wheels along the spine, we’re in the last of the three. That little light moving up the spoke, that is us.” He blinked. “Are you definitely sure that you are not going to hurt me?”

  “Tell me about the ship. Beginning with why you’re so afraid of me.”

  Prad told me that the ship was one of hundreds being used to move people around at the end of the war. This was an unusual transport, though. It was not just prisoners. There were some ordinary soldiers and civilians among the frozen—innocent cases. But they had been put aboard just to bring the berths up to capacity.

  “And the rest?”

  “Difficult cases.”

  “Dregs.”

  Prad swallowed. “What they told us was, most of them were soldiers who’d committed acts against the laws of war. Crossing the line, exceeding sanctioned force. Whatever that means. The rest . . . I gather they’re mostly worse. Traitors, mercenaries . . . civilian criminals. Rapists, murderers, black marketeers. A shipful of headaches, for the peacetime administrations. They would need to be put through courts, and people wanted quick justice.”

  “The worst of the worst.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Fine. But this you need to understand. I am not one of them. I am—was—just a soldier. I didn’t “exceed sanctioned force,” or any of that crap. I just did my job, and got cut off from my patrol, and caught by the enemy. Nothing else. I shouldn’t even have been conscripted.”

  “Then you were one of the soldiers who just happened to be carried aboard to make up numbers.”

  “Yes.”

  Prad started saying something, then caught himself.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Where you found me. That part of the wheel.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that close to where you came out?”

  I thought of how far I had walked since e
merging from my egg. “Not far.”

  “Then it doesn’t fit. That whole area . . . I spent enough time in it to read some of the histories on the hibo caskets. Those were the problem cases. That whole section was full of military prisoners, scheduled for war crimes tribunals.”

  “Then you’re saying I’m lying?”

  “No!” Prad said. “Just that something doesn’t fit. Just that someone must have made a mistake.”

  “I am not lying.”

  “Then you were assigned to the wrong section of the ship.” Then he touched his forehead. “Your bullet.”

  “What about it?”

  “We can read it out, access your core history. It’ll tell us what you were doing right up to the moment you were injured, and your subsequent medical treatment, and the reason you were put aboard.”

  “You mean, it will vindicate me.”

  “Yes,” Prad said, a touch too hastily. But what he meant was, it would let him see if I was telling the truth or not.

  Which might be the last thing he learned.

  ______________

  When we stepped out we had much less gravity than before, since we were now much closer to the middle of the ship. I did not care for the sensation of being nearly weightless. It was only a little like swimming and my combat training brought no advantage in this unfamiliar environment.

  Prad, by contrast, seemed much more at ease. He pushed himself out of the elevator on his fingertips and walked in long drifting arcs.

  I kept my eyes on him.

  “You’re used to this.”

  “Should be. Served on this ship long enough.”

  “Long enough to remember life before the war?”

  “None of us served on this ship during its civilian days, although I met a couple who did, back when I was starting out. They say it was very beautiful, when it worked the Hundred Worlds Circuit.”

  The control station was a large room shaped like a hexagon. In the middle was a console and some seats. The walls were covered in moving writing and numbers and drawings—you will have seen something of that, sometimes, but it was different in those days, when the ship remembered more of itself. I found it hypnotic, like listening to the purr of a dreaming cat.