Forge and Steel

by David VanDyke

  He examined his hands, then the rest of his body, finding real, variable flesh, skin and hair, where before it had been minimalist and plastic, like a mannequin. Finding tweezers in a drawer, he stabbed himself in the forearm and drew blood from the tiny wound, blood which glistened for a moment before he smeared it to clotting. Then he sucked on his finger, smelling and tasting the iron.

  Real. It was real.

  Or a high-resolution sim, he told himself. Don’t get your hopes up too high. This may be simply one more test.

  Showering and dressing hurriedly, he found others in the hallway already talking earnestly. Some slapped back and spoke joyously, loudly. Others seemed intent on examining everything up close. He saw Token take down one of the pictures on the wall and look behind it, touching the hook that had held it there.

  Arms grabbed his waist from behind and he turned to find Stevie wrapping herself around him. An unexpected surge of desire flooded toward his groin.

  “Is that a pickle in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?” she said.

  Vango grinned. “Very glad to see you.” He leaned down to kiss her, and it lasted a while.

  “Break it up, you two,” Lock said from arm’s length. “How do we know this is real?”

  “Aren’t you the buzz kill,” Butler said, coming up to bump the tall woman with his shoulder. “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters,” she snapped.

  “Why?”

  “Because...” Lock trailed off. “It just does.”

  Vango disentangled himself from Stevie. “How can we know?”

  Lock frowned. “We can test the limits of this virtuality, if there is one. If we find things that make no sense in the real world, we know we’re still inside.”

  “And if not, we’re still not sure.” Vango shrugged and raised his voice. “Listen up, people. Spread out and try doors. Find windows or exits or...something, anything that proves we are – or aren’t – still inside a simulation.”

  Five minutes of exploration were all it took to return the verdict: not real. No windows had appeared in their rooms. No exits could be found. And the room at the end of the hallway that had until now contained the flight simulators...

  “Not what I expected,” Vango said as the others ushered him into a room grown large, a hall now overflowing with the trappings of a feast. High ceilings supported chandeliers, and a banquet had appeared on one long heavy polished wooden table. Linen tablecloths and napkins set off silver flatware, crystal goblets and porcelain plates. Bottles of wine, beer and liquor vied for space with whole roast fowl, haunches of beef, pork and lamb, and mounds of side dishes. Off to the side he saw a dance floor outfitted with a music system. A robotic bar stood nearby.

  “It’s a party!” Stevie said. “And look what I found!”

  Vango turned to see the woman dressed in a hot red number that showed a lot of skin and seemed to be supported by sheer willpower. Matching heels and clutch, plus a diamond necklace and bracelet combo, completed the outfit. “Very nice.”

  He noticed others had changed their clothing as well. They must have found the civvies in their rooms, or.... Experimentally, he tried to conjure a lit cigar, a common VR trick for programs that allowed it.

  The stogie appeared in his hand.

  He willed it away, worried. “What the hell does this mean?” he said to Lock.

  The tall woman surveyed the scene, and Vango followed suit. Many of the group were sampling food and drink. Canyon had taken a seat and begun eating as if he feared the banquet would disappear. Stevie had a highball glass in one hand and a bottle of Scotch in the other and had cranked up the music. Now she swayed, her eyes closed, dancing alone on the parquet floor.

  “It could be a graduation party...or our last meal,” Lock said. “A transition of some kind.”

  Token stepped nearer with narrowed eyes. “Or a reward, like Pavlov’s dogs. Maybe they decided to spare some processing power, give us a night of fun, and tomorrow we’ll be back to the training regimen.”

  “No matter what, I suppose we should enjoy it. But it makes me uneasy,” Vango said.

  Lock and Token nodded.

  “Go play along,” Vango ordered. “Don’t spoil it for the others. We’re dancing to their tune in here, so let’s make the best of it.” With mixed emotions, he walked over to Stevie and took her in his arms.

  Later, they lay in Vango’s bed, wrung out from athletic lovemaking.

  “Not bad for a dead woman,” Stevie said.

  “Yeah, we’ve been ignoring that, but...how do we explain it?”

  Stevie shrugged. “Who cares?”

  “I care. It’s an anomaly, and it must mean something. I feel like if I could only figure that out, I’d have a big piece of the puzzle.”

  “Oh, Vee, why can’t you just live in the moment? Enjoy life as it comes and quit thinkin’ so much.”

  “I’m not built that way, Stevie.”

  “Well, I am, and I’m not tired. Let’s go back and get plastered.”

  “What if the sim is so good we’re hung over in the morning?”

  “All part of the fun.”

  “You’re a lunatic.”

  “Like I ain’t heard that before. Come on.” She leaped up, tugging on his hand.

  “No, you go on. I need to think for a while.”

  Pouting, Stevie flounced off.

  Later, Vango dressed and looked in on the party. He didn’t see Stevie, only about half of his people in various states of debauchery, depending on their inclinations. He found Token nowhere in evidence, which didn’t surprise him. The man was happily married and Vango had never seen him drunk or out of control, despite the high-pressure lifestyle of an aerospace pilot.

  Well, good for him.

  Knocking on the door to Stevie’s room brought no answer, but a memory and a premonition made him ease the door open – they had no locks – and let the light from the hallway spill onto her bunk. Though it didn’t surprise him, he felt his heart clench anew as he saw the lighter, the spoon and the needle still clutched in her hand.

  They – whoever they were – had allowed the full range of human vices, it seemed. Vango found it still hurt that he wasn’t enough for her, but not as much as the first time around. And, at least in this incarnation, she wasn’t being carried out on a stretcher.

  Suddenly afraid, he stepped over to put a finger on her neck. Thankfully, her pulse beat strongly. Would they let her overdose and die? Certainly not.

  The limits of the virtuality dragged at him, frustrated him with his own helplessness. The only place he felt freedom and power was within the flight sim, which was undoubtedly what they wished. Already he felt a Pavlovian urge to find a simulator and lose himself in flight.

  Instead, he shut the door and went to bed. For the first time in what seemed like days, sleep fled. Eventually, though, he caught it.

  Chapter 5

  When he awoke, the lack of detail and the flatness of affect within him told Vango that those in control had withdrawn the brief grant of near-normalcy, restoring the sensation of inhabiting a plastic simulacrum again. Well, at least now he didn’t need to eat, drink, or pee. He sighed and rolled out of bed.

  When he led his assembled comrades into the room full of simulators, it took him a moment to identify the difference in the room.

  Then it hit him. The shield, Earth and orbiting warship of EarthFleet hung on all four walls, along with the flags of the nations of all the pilots present. Vango’s eyes teared up with the display, calling forth a surge of patriotic and martial pride that threatened to overwhelm him. The others seemed to be sharing the experience.

  The cynical part of him wondered if they weren’t being manipulated even beyond the obvious. Would the controllers insert such emotions into their minds, despite all law and regulation to the contrary?

  But what could he do about it except try to maintain his bearing and dispassion, and to help the rest do the same?

  “All right,
people, snap out of it,” he said with a voice like a whip. “Maybe the controllers thought we needed some extra motivation today, and that’s all very nice, but none of us are cadets, saluting flags and singing songs. We’re professionals, and we know why we fly. I have to believe what we’re doing here is critical to our fight against the Meme. So let’s play their games again, and by God we’ll show them that no matter what they throw in our way, we’ll win. Board your simulators. Good luck, and good hunting.”

  With that, he climbed into the simulator and plugged in his link, feeling the expansion of the senses that came with it. His vision now extended millions of kilometers and encompassed thousands of objects – rocky asteroids, icy comet bodies, the moons of nearby Jupiter, incoming Meme ships and the friendly task force from which he prepared to launch.

  This time he found himself strapped onto an interceptor of some sort. Was this a new way of deploying fighters? Vango searched his HUD for weapons, but still, the game gave him only a highly maneuverable fuselage, sensors and communications.

  The comms linked him with his comrades, but no amount of trying would raise the Fleet net or any other entity. So, they were still on their own, except for the mission brief display, which changed with the objective.

  This latest scenario showed a monstrous incoming Meme fleet, at least sixty Destroyers plus attendant smaller craft, speeding directly toward Earth, though still out beyond Saturn’s orbit. The EarthFleet task force was already maneuvering to interpose itself.

  “Everybody see that?” he said, marking the enemy with a caret. “That’s what we’ll be flying against.

  A series of double clicks came back, shorthand for acknowledgement. “Looks ugly,” Token said, an understatement no doubt voicing the thoughts of many.

  “Ain’t nothin’ but a thang,” Stevie chimed in, and her boundless confidence cheered him. “We score high enough and maybe we get another party tonight.”

  Vango couldn’t fault her logic. “The primary objective’s a little different this time,” he pointed out. “Token, me, Lock and Stevie are directed to get within five thousand meters of Destroyers, but separately. The rest of you get to run interference.”

  “Five thousand meters? Easy peasy,” Stevie said.

  “Don’t get cocky,” Lock said. “Nothing’s been easy so far. There must be other factors that make it harder. I mean, look at the screening forces.”

  “Good thinking. Everyone stay on your toes.”

  “Hey,” said Token, “You guys notice they upped the simulator resolution? Everything looks full standard now, like it’s almost real.”

  Vango checked his. “Now I see. Maybe that’s the point of this mission, to get us used to the real thing again.”

  A moment of quiet passed. “Any chance this is real?” Lock asked. “I mean, real real, as in happening in real life?”

  “If it is,” Vango said, “why wouldn’t they give us any weapons? And there’s no way our bodies could take the Gs these things pull, even with gravplate compensation. We can’t be inside real ships.”

  “Could we be in remote control, and these are missiles? Maybe they’re using our minds and skills while our bodies are in regen.”

  Token spoke up. “Nope. It’s been tried. We’ll be operating light-seconds away from the cruisers. The delay is too great for anything but close-in work. That’s why all EarthFleet missiles have the best self-guiding algorithms possible, including true random evasion generators. Although...now that you mention it, these birds do seem more like missiles than anything.”

  Vango experimented with his time sense and found that he could control it, for the first time since he woke up here. In fact, it appeared he was in charge of everyone’s temporal speed, so he sped things up tenfold in order to make the inevitable maneuver-to-contact phase pass faster. When the interceptors carrying his squadron – that was how he thought of them now – entered the engagement envelope, they kicked him free with a blast of fusion gases.

  Vango slowed the temporal ratio to one-to-one, and then further to ten-to-one, giving everyone an order of magnitude more time.

  Lock spoke into the calm. “Look at your mission brief. Notice anything different about it?”

  Vango did as she suggested. It took him a moment. “There’s a date. May 11, 2110.”

  “Decades in the future,” Token said. “Wonder why?”

  “More head games,” Stevie replied. “Just quit wonderin’ and fly, boys and girls.”

  Vango said, “Good advice. Fly now, speculate later. We’re coming up on the merge. Dropping to temp standard.”

  Now each pilot could control his or her own time sense, allowing for maximum effectiveness as they approached the engagement zone. Vango slowed the world by a factor of more than 100 as a flock of stingships closed in.

  These were semi-intelligent sharks of the void whose sole purpose was to screen the larger ships against missiles and small craft. They used short-range biolasers and tiny countermissiles to thin out their enemies.

  Normally the stingships died in droves when faced with sophisticated EarthFleet fighters, but they were cheap, they absorbed firepower, and now and then they killed something, especially missiles. And they never hesitated to collide with their targets, kamikaze fashion.

  Faced with thousands of them in a broad cloud, Vango directed four of his twenty-four to sacrifice themselves, detonating their powerful suicide fusion bombs to clear a path through the mass.

  The remaining twenty drove through the hole, and the stingships couldn’t follow fast enough, not with these new hot birds.

  On the other side a picket wall of a dozen living frigates waited, each slim Zeppelin shape crewed by a trium of Meme. These ships launched sprays of tiny countermissiles. When the human craft dodged them easily, they opened up with their fusors, incandescent blasts of superheated plasma, like flamethrowers in space, reaching tens of kilometers before dissipating.

  These caught two of Vango’s comrades, and then they were eighteen.

  “Not bad,” Vango said over the net.

  “We’re kickin’ ass!” cried Stevie.

  Lock said, “They won’t make it that easy. Something’s going to spring.”

  “She’s right. Stay frosty,” Vango said.

  Token marked ships ahead on their HUDs. “Cruisers coming up.”

  “Bypass them,” Vango ordered. “The mission objective specifies only Destroyers get us the win, and only us four.”

  “Yeah, and I want to win,” Stevie replied.

  She wants to earn another rendezvous with her vices, Vango thought. At least we’re in VR, so she can’t overdose...and one of those vices is me. But what about when we’re done? They’ll have to put her in rehab or something. Obviously they know about her addiction. I don’t want to lose her again.

  The cognitive dissonance of that thought, the nonsense of Stevie being alive when he knew she was dead, threatened to undo him. He froze, trying to make sense of these conflicting thoughts.

  “Vango, pay attention!” Lock snapped, and Vango threw his craft into a violent spiral to avoid an incoming trio of hypers. “Get your head in the game!”

  “Thanks,” Vango said. “Sorry.”

  He analyzed the cruiser pattern and decided to do something different this time, something he’d thought about but hadn’t tried. “Canyon, you and Slapshot suicide on the center cruiser. We’re punching straight through before they recover. We’ll lose fewer that way than everyone running the gaps.”

  “Right, boss,” Canyon said, and led his wingman on a mad spiral path toward the midsized ship. He was picked off by a fusor ten klicks out, but Slapshot made it to impact.

  The result was spectacular, far greater than Vango expected. The simulated suicide charge must have been increased to at least a hundred megatons, and the cruiser crumpled and died in a fusion fireball.

  “Woohoo!” yelled Stevie. “Destroyers, here we come!”

  Sixteen pilots and their suicide craft dove for the
hole in the line, easily outracing the ships that tried to slide over and fill the gap. Beyond, the Destroyers came on in a compact mass, at least forty of them.

  “This is insane,” Vango muttered. “Too many in too small a space. They’ll blanket each other with defensive fire. We can’t dodge all those fusors.”

  “That’s the twist,” Lock said matter-of-factly. “Last I remember, it took everything we had to take down one Destroyer. How can anyone fight so many?”

  “We don’t have to fight so many,” said Token. “This is a game, remember? All we have to do is get us each of us four to within five thousand meters of a Destroyer.”

  Vango grunted. “Token’s right. We can do that.”

  “Still gonna be hard,” said Wild Bill from up ahead. “We should perform a rolling detonation to white out their sensors. These uprated suicide charges should pump out a hell of a lot of EMP interference, assuming the sim takes that into account.”

  “Good idea. Give me a minute and I’ll set it up.” Vango further slowed the world outside himself, yielding enough time to run 3D calculations and issue instructions to his twelve sacrificial lambs. “See you all back at the barracks,” he said as he sent the data packets. “Drinks are on me.”

  Clouds of countermissiles issued forth from the Destroyer mass and closed in on the EarthFleet squadron. One by one, Vango’s people detonated their ships to clear the way through and provide enormous electromagnetic pulses, blizzards of jamming that blinded the enemy. They tended to blind his people as well, but all they had to do was fly their courses toward the huge targets.

  Belatedly, those targets began to maneuver. If this were real, Vango would have laughed at the idea that ships two kilometers in diameter, with armor five hundred meters thick, would run from a few fighters, even armed with hundred-megaton fusion warheads. An explosion of that size would still need to be nearly in contact to do significant damage, because the vacuum of space provided no medium to carry a blast wave. Five-kilometer-distant detonations wouldn’t even singe the enemy.

  Good thing it wasn’t real.