Trident's Forge, page 42
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. Maybe even more than me.”
“No argument here.”
I let it go. We arrived at a large tent shelter serving as a command post. A short queue stood off to one side. Under guard, I couldn’t help but notice.
“What’s up with them?” I asked Sergeant Lantz conversationally.
“Stand-by passengers,” he said. “If one of you doesn’t turn up, they’re the replacements.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“More than you’d think.”
A couple of the men in line shouted angrily as we passed, but most of them just sat in resigned silence as two more chances for survival evaporated. A fresh worry shot through me. It was easier to justify taking someone’s spot when it was an abstract concept. But, faced with living, breathing people? I looked over at Barbara, trying to gage if her guilt was about to make her do something stupid, but her face was a mask. She wasn’t looking at the alternates. Maybe that was a good sign.
“Your disk, please.”
I’d been so distracted, I hadn’t noticed the bald man sitting at a table. He appeared all the shorter by the tall chair he sat in. Focus, Max. You belong here. No one will question it as long as you’re confident.
“Of course.” I offered the disk to him. He plugged it into a complicated device that looked like one of the eye-checkers at the DMV cross-bred with an espresso machine.
“Please look into the opening and place your right hand on the scanner.”
I did so. Inside the little box there was a 3D picture of a small house.
“Focus on the house and try not to blink. There will be a flash in three…”
A white light like a camera flash burned into my retinas, leaving a glowing orb floating in my vision. At the same instant, something stabbed my middle finger. I pulled back from the scanner squinting and clutching my hand.
“Your fingerprint scanner stabbed me.”
“I didn’t say it was a fingerprint scanner,” the humorless little man said dryly. An icon on his screen turned green. “Ah, here we are. Retina and DNA are both a match to the disk. Welcome aboard, Mr. Benson.” He waved me through the turnstile deeper into the compound.
“Thanks, but I’d like to wait for my wife, if that’s okay.”
“Your wife?” The bald man took Barbara’s disk and pulled up a passenger list. “Well, that’s a first. Some people have all the luck, eh?”
“Yeah. Luck,” she mumbled. My jaw tensed, but I forced myself to relax. Nothing to see here. The statistically improbable happened a million times a day. She repeated the process then stood back to wait for the results, shivering like a mouse in a snake cage.
“Nervous, Mrs. Benson?” The little man asked her with a cocked eyebrow.
“I should’ve brought a coat is all.” Her answer sounded less than convincing. Not a great liar, my wife.
“We were in a firefight on the way over here,” I hurried to add. “We’re still pretty shaken up.”
“I can imagine,” he said. Which was funny; I doubted the diminutive twerp had any imagination to speak of. A yellow icon popped up on his screen. He adjusted his glasses. “Well, that’s peculiar. Her retina scan is a match, but I’m seeing some discrepancies in the DNA profile.”
“Discrepancies?” I managed to say it without my voice cracking like an adolescent.
“There’s some small genome variance.”
“Maybe there’s contamination in the scanner. This isn’t exactly a clean-room out here.” I could feel my hands getting clammy with nervous sweat. I put them in my pockets, trying to look unconcerned.
“Maybe…”
Dread spread through my body like an electric shock, threatening to paralyze me where I stood. Somewhere along the line, somebody had fucked up. Our lives were in the hands of this paper-pushing pipsqueak, and it was all about to come flying apart. I wanted to scream, to run straight for the rocket, to grab Sergeant Lantz’s sidearm and fight our way to freedom, or go down in a blaze of glory.
Instead, I stood there, silent and immobile as a statue. Impotent.
Barbara stepped up to the table and leaned a hand on it. “I had a blood transfusion a couple months ago after a car accident. Is that what you’re seeing?” I was surprised by her improvisation. Maybe she wasn’t such a bad liar after all.
“I don’t know. I guess it could be…”
“Is there a problem here?” Sergeant Lantz came forward with is palm not-so-discreetly resting on the handle of his pistol.
“No,” I said. “No problem. This man is just having some difficulty telling if my wife is really my wife.”
“Is she?” The question barely concealed the threat behind it.
“Of course.” I leaned in and whispered to him. “Honestly, I’d have swapped her out already if I could’ve gotten away with it.”
The threat hovered in the air until my heart was about to beat its way out of my chest. Finally, the tension in Lantz’s shoulders relaxed and his hand dropped away from his gun.
“I saw them come in together, Doc. What’s the issue with her disk?”
“Her disk is fine. It’s just a small variance in the DNA match that I can’t account for.”
“How small?”
“Point zero zero three five percent.”
Sergeant Lantz’s eyes rolled like bowling balls. “That’s it? C’mon, Doc. We’re on a tight schedule here, and we still have to process the alternates. Green out her screen and let’s go.”
The little man waved an arm dismissively. “Fine, fine. Who’s next?”
Behind us, four people were cut from the front of the stand-by line and brought forward. Four people had won the lottery, but didn’t survive long enough to collect their reward. I saw the two people left at the front of the line. The first losers. The two whose places we’d stolen. I’d live with those faces forever.
Barbara and I walked through the turnstiles together and didn’t look back. And that was it. No fireworks. No trophy. No cooler full of Gatorade poured over my head in celebration of victory. I reached over to hold Barbara’s hand as we walked, like we used to down by Clearwater beach late at night to watch the sunset, but she pulled away.
I’d won, against the longest odds anyone had ever faced. So why did it still feel like I’d lost everything?
About the Author
Patrick S. Tomlinson is the son of an ex-hippie psychologist and an ex-cowboy electrician. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, with a menagerie of houseplants in varying levels of health, a Ford Mustang, and a Triumph motorcycle bought specifically to embarrass and infuriate Harley riders. When not writing sci-fi and fantasy novels and short stories, Patrick is busy developing his other passion for performing stand-up comedy.
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patrickstomlinson.com • twitter.com/stealthygeek
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Copyright © Patrick S Tomlinson 2016
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Patrick S Tomlinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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UK ISBN 978 0 85766 486 0
US ISBN 978 0 85766 487 7
EBook ISBN 978 0 85766 488 4
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-85766-488-4
Patrick S. Tomlinson, Trident's Forge
