Charlotte's Army Read online

  The new patient lay on the examination table in the lab, peaceful and still. His face was more refined than that of the previous soldier, whom I had moved into the general hospital section after I'd finished in the theatre. Never mind that I hadn't been able to get any sensible information out of his mindbase. That was going to be a much more lengthy process than the top brass would appreciate.

  The skin of this man had a soft olive tan. His eyebrows, dark and heavy, curved in a graceful arc.

  I sank down at the computer and read all his modules. Nav1, Nav2 and Nav3, that latter quite expanded. Soc1 and Soc2, also substantially expanded. This man was a leader, an elite soldier. I even found traces of the Elec1 module fluttering over the screen and I definitely hadn't installed that. He had learned this since we put him in service. I was impressed.

  I rose from my seat and dialled down the sedative supply. To download his mindbase, he would need to be conscious, but there was no need for him to be in pain, so I injected a painkiller into the soft skin on his thigh and sat down to watch his signals wake up on the computer.

  [Kali?...Kali]

  A shiver went through him.

  [Kali, you did good. I think... I think I'm in the right place]

  The constructs often had such confused thoughts when they woke up. They fascinated me.

  But then an intruding line trailed across the screen.

  [Aidin? What are you doing here?]

  [Rane?]

  I sat there, heart thudding. At least one of those responses hadn't come from my patient.

  I waited for more, but his eyelids fluttered, half-opened, revealing doe-coloured eyes.

  "What..." His voice rasped, rough through the passage of a tube through his windpipe.

  "Do you want some water?"

  He swallowed hard. I could see it hurt him.

  Silence. Eyes opened fully and widened.

  "Charlotte?" His mouth curved into a smile, and his eyes glittered with delight.

  "Yes, it's me." A chill went over my back.

  Remembering the way the other construct soldier had grabbed me, I put the water on the bedside table and backed away. He reached out, but his hand trembled too much to hold anything.

  "Charlotte?" He sounded so weak, so helpless.

  In this condition, he couldn't possibly be a danger to me. I picked up the glass and held it to his lips, keeping one eye on the sedative dispenser. He made no move to grab me, but drank eagerly, a dribble of water running down his cheek.

  I wiped it off with a cloth, which rasped over his stubbled chin. "What is Kali?"

  "Not what, who. Kali is... a mate."

  Heavens, the constructs had given each other names. "And Rane?"

  "Rane?" He tried to lift his head to look around, but he was too weak. "Rane was shot last week. Stupid argument. Won't happen anymore."

  The man who lay in the regular hospital room nextdoor.

  I had always suspected that some constructs were telepathic. Here was my evidence.

  "You are Aidin?"

  He nodded.

  My hands trembled when I opened the drawer next to his bed, took out the headband with the thought sensors and looped it around his head. It flattened his curls, which felt rough and greasy under my hands. Dirty, from having lived in the maintenance tunnels of the ship. I should give him the dignity of a wash and a shave.

  "What is this?" he asked, reaching up to feel the band. I moved my fingers out of the path of his touch.

  He pulled at the band, his eyes wide. 'What are you doing to me?' Like a little boy afraid to go to the dentist.

  The constructs hadn't always been so reluctant to face medical treatment either. I remembered impassive faces I had taught and treated last year. Questions about war. Where to aim to make sure an opponent was killed. That sort of thing. No mention of love, pain, or dying. They had sat, impassively, as I took blood samples. Normal people, even soldiers, hated needles and would flinch. I'd taken enough blood samples to know that even Carla Avery couldn't stand too look at the needle going into her skin.

  Back then, the constructs had not been normal people. It seemed they had learned. My stomach squirmed uncomfortably.

  "Please leave the band on your head. I'm..." How could I say, we made you and therefore I have the right to know exactly what you're thinking?

  His eyes met mine, frightened. "Charlotte, I..."

  I hit the "activate" key on the mind-reader.

  A look of confusion drifted over his face. I hated myself, but only for a short moment, because something had come up on the screen.

  Charlotte, my Charlotte, with the heavenly smile and the amber hair. Charlotte, the incarnation of the goddess of autumn, will you go through winter with me?

  7

  Dr Spencer looked up from his screen, dishevelled, his hair a mess from passing his hands through it so many times. Deep bags marked the skin under his eyes and the light from the computer screen in front of him made them look worse. "You found something?"

  "Yes." My voice was no more than a whisper. I went into his office and slid the door shut. He pushed his chair away from his workstation and faced me, his eyes worried and questioning.

  "Both men know me. They know things about me that they can't possibly know, like that I used to go out to dinner at Pete's, back when we worked at the university. How do they know that? How do they know my name?"

  "Your name?"

  "Yes, look." I went to the other workstation and brought it to life with a single touch of my hand.

  He rose from his chair and came to look over my shoulder at the screen. It displayed the text I was too embarrassed to say out loud, of my hair being the colour of autumn leaves, of their love declarations. "Why should they..."

  Silence.

  Now it was my turn to look at him. He stared at the screen, eyes wide.

  "Dr Spencer?"

  He licked his lips and swallowed. His Adam's apple bobbed.

  He staggered back to his chair, sank down and hid his face in his hands, letting out a groan. "Oh Charlotte. I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

  My heart was just about doing loop-de-loops in my chest. "You're sorry about what? Start making sense to me. What is going on? Why is my name in there?" I knew I sounded more angry than I intended, but the deep affection in the men's voices, men I didn't know, disturbed me more than I wanted to admit.

  "I... I..."

  The truth struck me.

  The mindbase I had been using in my postgrad research was rather old and academic. It sufficed for dementia patients, but I remembered how Dr Spencer had said in meetings with ISF staff that it needed a few updates. I remembered the arguments about the time frame in which we were to complete this monumental task. It seemed he had been forced to make some shortcuts.

  "You used your own mindbase."

  He looked away from me. "The constructs needed to have a certain level of education. A certain intelligence. I swear I wiped all my personal memories and intermeshed my knowledge with our old database."

  "But somehow you copied your feelings for me."

  He said nothing, his shoulders shaking.

  "Did you?" I almost screamed. I was feeling cold, ice cold.

  His voice came out strangled. "I swear, it was an accident. I don't know how it happened. Charlotte, it's inappropriate. I would never have told you. It would have ruined your career. I would never harm you."

  Well, I'd heard that before. A succession of men had said that to me, starting with my father.

  "How bad is it? What else is in there?"

  I saw the reaction on his face. The adoration, the fear that I would take a job outside the military, walk out of his life when we got to Taurus. I should have seen it much earlier. I hadn't. And now... We had used the standard mindbase for all constructs. There were seven thousand soldiers out there with an obsession about me. All they had to do was slow down and we'd soon enough catch up with them. One ship with seven hundred of them was already on its way.

 
I would never harm you. No, maybe he wouldn't, but what about them? Highly specialised fighters who could put any of our trained personnel to shame. Who were no longer listening to commands.

  Abruptly, Dr Spencer rose and left the room.

  8

  I didn't know what to do, apart from reporting what I'd found to Carla Avery. She was remarkably silent through our short conversation over the com system. I was glad I wasn't face-to-face with her, because her silence was worse than her outbursts of anger.

  I administered a sedative to the construct, as he was in pain from his wounds, and aimlessly scrolled through the information I downloaded from his mind, reading that poetic piece of text over and over.

  It revolted me that Dr Spencer thought of me in that way. He was almost twenty years older than me.

  Then again, we had worked together for many years, and his feelings had remained a deep secret, buried in his subconscious. That was probably why the sentiment was so strong in the constructs, and why it had been so deeply embedded in the mindbase file that a strip action hadn't removed the data.

  Dr Spencer had been betrayed by his own mind.

  And this man... I checked the soldier's monitors. With his muscled body made for war and his sharp mind, did he have a clue what it was like to be in love? Would he know how to act upon that feeling? Was it an experience he should be denied? Did we have a right to deny him the joy?

  Aidin. Even his name rang bells.

  In the year I spent at Melbourne Uni, I had a pathetic relationship with a boy called Ayden, whom I'd met on campus. His intense eyes had captivated me and I'd tumbled head-over-heels into a relationship. One day, he asked me out, a week later, he wanted to marry me. That was how he lived his life: to the full. Study, art and a plethora of interest groups. Plenty of money, too, since he came from a rich family. Too late, I had realised that he had a pacifist agenda. He probably still went to all the anti-war protests we didn't get to see in our onboard newsfeeds. He was deep into the New Pure movement. Prayer, not war. Very well, but I lived on Mars Base and had met Allionists. I had attended some of their meetings. I still remembered their slogans. Progress for everyone, never mind that everyone who didn't want 'progress' to invade their lives was 'dealt with'. To the stars and the edge of the universe, never mind that they had done so by declaring war on many peaceful colonies, and Earth as well. Just like the New Pure, the Allionists were zealots, not to be stopped by words of peace and a few Bible quotes.

  Show your meekness Ayden would say, and the enemy will sit down and talk. And then he quoted some Bible text and said prayers.

  What an idiot.

  Ayden. Aidin. If Dr Spencer had feelings about me back then, he would have been jealous. The name had stuck somewhere in his subconscious and had come to the surface in these men.

  There was a click at the door. I unballed my fists, letting slide uncomfortable memories.

  The door opened and Julia came in with the sample trolley.

  "Hey Charlie, don' look so frightened. Just checkin' the blood, y'know."

  I pushed my chair away from the bed. "Sure, he's all yours."

  Aidin.

  Julia clicked the brakes onto the trolley and fiddled about with the syringe, her back to me. A sharp smell of disinfectant, the sound of a squirt of spray-on plaster from the can.

  "All done." She smiled. "This one's a spunk, isn't he?"

  I forced a smile.

  "Honestly, Charlie, have you ever wondered what any of them are like, y'know, in bed?"

  I had, but I wasn't going to tell her that. I shrugged. "Their minds are far too immature for sexual feelings."

  She put the dark red tubes in a basket in her trolley. Then frowned at me.

  "Are you all right, Charlie?"

  "Yeah." And when she continued frowning at me, I added. "A bit tired."

  "You should have a bit more fun. I know some of the guys. . . make stupid jokes about 'Hollywood ranks' and all that, but they're all right, really. They'll get sick of it pretty quickly once you show your face a bit more often at our social nights."

  "Thanks, Julia. I'll think about it."

  It wasn't just the business about how Dr Spencer and I had acquired our ranks after six weeks of military training, which the regular military called Hollywood ranks. It was also that both me and Dr Spencer outranked them and were legally their superiors, which created uneasiness. I understood that very well.

  She nodded and left.

  Anyway, I needed to speak to Dr Spencer. If the "fault" in the construct mindbase was common to all soldiers, we couldn't afford to waste any time finding a solution.

  I went to his office, but he hadn't come back from wherever he had gone. He wasn't in the lab or in the hospital either.

  I went to his cabin, but when I knocked on the door, no one answered. Where then? The library? I ran through the corridors. By now, I felt sick. Oh, I hoped he hadn't done anything stupid.

  I charged into the library and had gone a few paces before I noticed the tense atmosphere. The librarian at the desk and a few people at the workstations were all staring in the same direction, the material on their screens forgotten.

  Carla Avery had Dr Spencer holed up beside a workstation against the far wall. Dr Spencer had backed into a cubicle partition, and Carla Avery was pointing her finger at his chest and shouting at him.

  "This is deplorable! You hold us all ransom to your childish fancies. Lord help the poor girl. The Lord help us in trying to fix it up. If we have to call this attack off, it will all be your fault, you stupid son-of-a-bitch. Billions and billions we've spent on this project, and..."

  I'd heard enough.

  I thought it wise to retreat before anyone noticed my presence. I went to my office in the hospital, but couldn't concentrate on anything. We had a problem to solve, and meanwhile, a whole ship full of construct soldiers was on its way.

  Dr Spencer didn't come to dinner and wasn't in the lab when I went back there afterwards. The construct lay on the table, with his heart monitor blipping steadily. I opened the file again and stared at those words

  Charlotte, my Charlotte, with the heavenly smile and the amber hair. Charlotte, the incarnation of the goddess of autumn, will you go through winter with me?

  I sat there for most of the night, watching his chest rise and fall with regular breaths, wondering what the words would sound like when coming from his lips.

  The situation was ridiculous. They had inherited the emotion, but couldn't understand what it meant. They had the emotional maturity of a six-year-old. They were fighting machines, not made to question and weigh up orders.

  What could I say in response that wasn't going to make all of them angry?

  9

  I slid the door to the meeting room aside, adjusting my hastily-retrieved jacket.

  The message had said, Meeting room 653, 10.30 hours. Standard uniform.

  My standard uniform wasn't something I wore regularly in the hospital, so I had to run back to my cabin to get it, all the way wondering what was going on, and why Dr Spencer hadn't come into work yet.

  Carla Avery was in the room, as well as two top brass officers I recognised as Commander Ehrlich, Carla Avery's superior, and Captain Josephine Mayfair. At seeing her, my heart jumped. I had never spoken to her in person. She was one of the upper military officers who hung out on the flight deck, where medical grunts like myself weren't allowed.

  Dr Spencer wasn't there.

  That didn't do much for my nerves.

  "Sit down please, Lieutenant West," Carla Avery said.

  I sat and wondered. She had rarely honoured me with my name let alone rank, which she probably didn't think I deserved, like most of the other crew.

  It was Josephine Mayfair who spoke. "I gather you know what this is about."

  Did I? "I'm not... entirely sure Ma'am."

  I glanced around again, but no amount of looking was going to produce Dr Spencer.

  She pushed something across the table,
and only when she had removed her hand did I see that it was a badge. "Or, should I say Lieutenant Commander West."

  I gaped at her. That was the position normally held by...

  "In case you're wondering, Dr Spencer came to me this morning, admitting to having made a grave mistake. I've temporarily relieved him of his duties and will rely on your expertise to help us solve this... situation."

  I wondered how much he had told her.

  "Congratulations. You are now our fleet surgeon."

  She shook my hand. I was too stunned to say anything.

  "As you may know, the Starship Forward broke formation and is on its way to us. We expect to catch up with them within twenty-four hours. The message the bridge has received from the Forward is that they have more injured men aboard and they wish to collect the men you have in the hospital. That is correct?"

  "We do still have him. I didn't know about the other injured."

  "Neither did we." Did she imply that the constructs might be lying? That would be a first. "They've asked for permission to dock with us."

  "You are not giving them that permission, are you, Ma'am?" There was a surprised look on Carla Avery's face. "I mean—we've been unable to talk to Captain Crozier for two days now."

  "Depending on what Lieutenant Commander West can tell us, I'm considering the option."

  "These men are our troops, not our enemies," Commander Ehrlich said.

  "But they've broken rank! They're deserting, bringing our operation into danger—"

  "We're not sure what has happened," Captain Mayfair said. "Our communication with the Forward has been scant. As Commander Ehrlich pointed out, they are our troops, not our enemies. What their intentions are at this point in time matters little. What does matter is that they obey our orders and will have to be ready for their job when we arrive at Taurus. They've asked to dock to collect their mates; I understand that brotherhood is very important to them, so we may give permission—"