by Joshua Guess
“I’m still not entirely comfortable letting you guys poke around in there,” I said, pushing past it. “My superiors might not like me giving away the details of our technology.”
Rinna pulled herself free and checked the scanner. “You know as well as I do that we’ve already got one of your ships to study. Admittedly yours is newer and has some interesting improvements, but the basics of the tech aren’t unknown to us. And Jax wouldn’t be able to give us the information he’s shared if your bosses didn’t want him to. They’d have made sure to put security measures in place.”
That much was true. It wasn’t as if the folks back home hadn’t considered earthfall as an potential outcome to the Home Run mission. It was a contingency I’d had to work through in simulation a few dozen times. The logical chain was clear: if they hadn’t wanted me to share the data, I wouldn’t be able to.
I said it to myself a few more times in a vain hope it would sound more true.
“And anyway, we’re about to haul this thing to the surface. Exposing ourselves means risking attack and losing your boat, so we want to make sure every inch of it is studied first.” Rinna pocketed the scanner, the long tail of it jutting out from her back pocket.
“When did you have time to learn mechanical engineering on top of being a soldier?” I asked.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “How old do you think I am?”
“I might be a spaceman brewed up in a test tube, but even I know better than to fall into that trap,” I said. “And how old do you think I am, to expect I would?”
She laughed. “I’m genuinely curious. How old?”
I gave her a once-over. Her hair was dark, but with a strand of gray here and there. Stress could do that, though, and nothing said stress like living under an occupying alien force. Her face had faint laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, but age was more than just appearance. I might have said Rinna was in her mid-thirties, but despite her position of leadership she had the childlike playfulness of a teenager. Which she had demonstrated liberally and confusingly in the weeks we had been training together. Once Jax let slip that my ‘hormonal reaction was causing elevated heart rate and blood pressure levels’ in her presence, she had begun teasing me mercilessly.
“Thirty-three,” I guessed.
Rinna winked. “Forty-eight.” When I opened my mouth to call bullshit, she raised a hand. “Remember, the gene therapies for aging were developed on Earth. Your people don’t have a monopoly.”
“You’ve got a few years on me, then,” I said. “I’m forty-four.”
Rinna frowned slightly. “You don’t have any of the markers for gene therapy. You look like you’re in your mid-twenties.”
I nodded. “And I will for a really long time. I was put together sequence by sequence, no therapy involved. My telomeres weren’t altered to slow cell aging, they were designed that way from scratch.”
“Lucky,” Rinna said, plucking a stand of gray hair and holding it in front of her face. “You didn’t have to deal with three weeks of feeling like someone poured acid into every nook and cranny of your body.”
I didn’t have much to say to that, so with my usual skill I changed the subject smoothly. “So when did you learn engineering? Before you became a soldier and picked up how to fight?”
“All at once,” she said, leaning back against the Val. “When we started widespread use of the Sand, the brass decided it was a good idea to have those of us piloting suits of the stuff familiar with how it worked. I always liked tinkering, so when I wasn’t getting my ass handed to me in combat training, I was in a classroom learning electrical systems, physics, materials science, you name it.”
There was an expectant look on her face. “What?” I asked.
“How about you? What did you fill your time with when you weren’t learning how to be a pilot?”
I flushed. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Well, now you have to tell me,” Rinna said, childish glee on her face.
I sighed. “You already know I absorbed a couple centuries of music, television, movies, comics, books…”
“You’re a pop culture machine, yes,” Rinna agreed.
I nodded. “My obsession with Earth didn’t end there. I spent more time than you might consider healthy learning things no one on Ceres would ever need.” This answer didn’t satisfy; Rinna motioned for me to go on. “Okay, Jesus. Look, most of it I never got to practice. I taught myself to cook. How to sew. I know how to build a house, at least the carpentry part. I picked up a ton of other useless skills I’m theoretically good at but probably suck at in practice. Except for one. I spent a lot of time painting. Got decent at it.”
Rinna blinked. “Where did you get paint?”
“Made some at home. Titanium oxide isn’t hard to find, and when you mix it with the grease one particular strain of genetically engineered algae secretes, it makes a good white paint.” I smiled at the memory of figuring out how to mix that base material for the first time. “Some we traded for. There are plenty of alien species who are happy to trade lots of useful stuff for the convenience of being able to fuel up. Because of the unique circumstances the UEE is in, we always have more reactor fuel than we need.”
She was looking at me with a new expression on her face, a look I found intimidating and pleasant at the same time. It was as if she were seeing me anew, and judging what she found.
After a long but not uncomfortable silence, Rinna licked her lips and spoke.
“You know, once we get this thing to the surface and link up with that satellite, I’m gonna let you do the talking. I don’t think I should speak to whoever is in charge on Ceres.”
“Why?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“Because I think what they did to you was a fucking crime,” she said, her voice tinged with sadness. “They kept you so isolated from your home that you ended up falling in love with theirs just to cope.”
***
“Let’s see your progress,” Vera said.
We were in the training space again. Reasonable restrictions had been put in place, chief among them that I wouldn’t be allowed onto the surface without a demonstrable mastery of the Sand. I didn’t have to be an expert, but I had to meet the same basic requirements as any other soldier on the armored squads.
This was helped along by the fact that Vera, Paulson, and the rest of the important folks around Bravo 2 very much wanted me to get in touch with my people. This desire resulted in a vigorous course of training over the previous weeks.
I took my place in the middle of the circle while those august persons observed. Rinna and I had become each other’s shadows during the course of training, so she was the one running the demonstration.
“Good to go, Mars?” she asked me.
“Ready,” I replied.
“As you can see, Mars isn’t wearing a neural interface band,” Rinna began, her voice tuning to the authoritative tone she used for command. “His own interface computer takes its place. Which gives him access to the limited, predetermined shapes our system can create.”
On cue, Jax signaled the mounds of Sand nearby. The grains slithered across the ground in a low, tumbling hiss and surrounded my body. The suit raised me up, cradling my weight and removing any need for muscular effort. I was suspended inside the basic suit form, called Titan, within a few seconds. Titan stood fifteen feet high, with me cocooned in its chest.
It didn’t feel like it, though. The miracle of neural connection created the illusion that I was the suit. The small tubes of Sand contracting to send air into my body’s hiding place felt like my own lungs expanding and contracting. The field of vision, nearly three times the height of an average man, seemed to be my own eyes. In a way I was cut off from myself, though it simply felt as if I’d grown.
My Titan self moved, performing a few basic martial arts kata and ending in a delicate leap and landing. As my feet touched ground, Titan form shifted to Dancer, shedding a fifth of its mass to become sleeker, with long
er limbs.
It continued this way through the six main armor configurations, and while there were a few pleased faces in the room, no one looked super impressed.
“Now,” Rinna said, restrained pride noticeable in her voice, “let’s see what else you can do.”
“Sure,” I said, my voice magnified by my armor. “Would anyone like to sit down? This could take a few minutes.”
All around the periphery, people made a range of surprised noises as Sand formed beneath them into chairs. In a nice flourish, Jax made each one a different style, from rigid ladder back to squashy lounger.
That got a few appreciative smiles.
I lumbered across the room again, building up as much momentum as I could. When I reached a good clip, I jumped. The Sand composing my armor leaped away from my body as I twisted in the air, forming under me as a dynamic cloud. It latched onto the soles of my boots, supporting my weight and slowing my fall.
I raced across the room once more, this time not clad in a suit, but riding the Sand like a surfer on a wave. Three soldiers stepped into my path, each of them with rifles at their shoulders.
The bullets were rubber, but they’d make the point just the same.
I slid to a halt and whipped a hand up diagonally. A wave of Sand rose up and condensed into a shield as the soldiers—Williams among them—fired staccato bursts at me. Puffs flew up from my barrier, but I moved quickly. The shooters couldn’t see me through it, but I could see them just fine.
That was one of the amazingly useful features of the stuff. The central production elements which created the Sand, called Forges, made five different varieties composing the aggregate material. Mixed together as it was, any discrete chunk of Sand had the full range of functionality as any other part.
Translated: whether I was in a suit or surfing a wave, I could see through the stuff. The tiny sensors embedded in the particles created an entirely new perspective for me.
I scooped up handfuls of Sand and lobbed them in perfect, computer-assisted arcs over my barrier. The globs altered shape midair to become rods, which latched onto the rifles and hands of my attackers before being ordered into another new shape by Jax.
I saw all of this through a shield a foot thick from a distance of twenty meters with high-definition clarity. The soldiers tried to throw off the contracting shackles gumming up their guns and keeping their fingers from the triggers, but to no avail.
“As you can see, Mars, through Jax, has an advantage we are confident we’ll be able to replicate soon: the ability to create ad hoc, dynamic forms with Sand. Instead of being locked into the basic shapes and commands our neural bands facilitate, he can adapt as needed.”
Rinna, in a bit of showmanship, raised a hand toward me and bowed slightly at the waist. “I think he’s ready.”
Sixteen
We took one of the larger maglev tubes somewhere far away from Bravo 2. It wasn’t a good idea for anyone in a uniform to pop up on the surface near a hidden settlement. No one wanted to be the guy who brought a patrol down on their home.
“I still don’t get why we couldn’t have just sent a message from home,” said Durham, one of the soldiers huddled around the long cylinder of my ship.
Williams, who had a surprisingly gentle voice, answered. “You know why. It’s a bad idea to send even a tight beam from any of our bases. It gets intercepted, we’re boned.”
“I know that,” Durham said acidly. “Doesn’t mean we couldn’t have made contact on our own somewhere else.”
I cleared my throat. “What you’re really asking is why I’m insisting on using my own ship to make contact rather than give you the position data for the satellite and all of our decryption methods.”
Durham didn’t even blush, which I’d have been able to see even in the dim light of the tunnel. “Yeah.”
“Idiot,” Williams breathed. “Did you listen to what he said? We work with cells all over the country—hell, the world—but if you ended up stuck in Britain or Bangladesh or something, would you start giving away our codes to anyone who asked?”
“That’s different,” Durham began, but Rinna cut him off.
“It isn’t,” she said. “Putting aside operational security, it’s a bad idea to tempt us with that kind of access. Too much direct communication with the observation platform risks it being discovered. And I imagine it’s pretty fucking difficult to replace the thing since it was hauled twenty light years before they dropped it into orbit.”
I stayed quiet, letting the general murmur of agreement in the cramped car speak for itself. Truth was, I sympathized with the guy. I had expected people to resent me for where I came from; the UEE wasn’t the easiest life, but at least we were safely away from the Gaethe. Instead the reaction my presence garnered most often was curiosity.
The car slowed and came to a rest in what looked like a random section of track. Ahead and behind it stretched, with only a seam in the smooth curved ceiling giving away that this spot was different. Rinna tapped the flexible interface wrapped around her forearm, sending commands to the local Sand.
A deep grinding filled the space as the seams above grew into cracks, then fissures, before fully retracting into a huge set of open doors. The whole thing was surprisingly wide and gave us a broad view of the sky above. According to Paulson, this location would give me twenty solid minutes of tight beam communication with the satellite before its orbit took it out of range.
The Val was just beginning to be repaired, but the comm system was in fine shape. Rinna busied herself attaching external power from the cargo car we rode in to the Val, to prevent too much drain on the ship’s batteries. The other squad members went about their task quickly, exiting the cargo pod and releasing the clamps holding the clam shell top together before taking defensive positions.
Exposed to the naked sky, I could almost believe the ship could rise up and take off. It was only a momentary fancy, one I shook off as soon as it crossed my mind. I had hope the Valkyrie would reach space again, but not any real expectation. Certainly no time soon.
“Ready?” I asked Jax out loud. This wouldn’t be a private call, and I had gotten used to the simplicity of communicating with him that way.
“Yes,” he said from the speaker clipped to my uniform, the voice perfectly simulated if lacking inflection. “The uplink is solid. Sending ping now.”
While the communication from the satellite to Ceres was instantaneous, Val’s tight beam to the platform was in the thrall of conventional physics. The ping took a fraction of a second to leap between Earth and sky. I expected it to take a minute or so to get an answer. Someone back home would have to acknowledge the ping, open the channel, and get permission to speak or instructions on where to route the signal.
In reality, it took four seconds.
“Mister Cori?” came the voice through Jax’s speaker.
I blinked, taken completely off guard. “Doctor Kitur?” I asked, though of course no one else in the UEE could have a direct communication from one of our most secret assets ported to her location as a standing order.
“I told them you were alive,” Kitur said, her voice carrying notes of smug satisfaction and genuine happiness. “Your friend Jordan agreed with me. He was insistent you’d try to land.”
“I did, ma’am. I’m not sure how much telemetry you got, but I was being pursued. I believe the Gaethe were trying to capture me. Or at least my ship.”
Kitur sighed. “Yes, your NIC passed on that theory before we lost contact.”
“You should know we’re not alone on this call,” I said. “I have a member of the defense forces with me, and she’s listening.”
There was a pause. “Interesting,” Kitur finally said. “If we have the time I would very much like to speak with her in depth. I wasn’t aware Earth had anything as organized as a standing military.”
Rinna and I glanced at each other, and I saw a prideful little smile creep up one side of her mouth. The satellite—whose entire purpose wa
s the relentless observation of the Earth—hadn’t caught wind of the defense forces. Which meant the Gaethe almost certainly had no idea what they were actually facing.
I cleared my throat. “We don’t have a lot of time just now, ma’am, so for the moment let me catch you up…”
***
I finished my briefing ten minutes later, with a few assists from Rinna when the details escaped me. “That’s everything pertinent, ma’am.”
“I see,” Kitur said. She had digested the salient points with the rapid efficiency of the scientist she was, parsing the data without judgment. I knew she would replay the recording of the conversation back later in order to give herself more time to absorb it all. “Not that my permission matters at this point, Mister Cori, but by all means give your new friends anything they ask for. I’m transmitting the executive override for your NIC, which will remove the encryption locks preventing it from releasing classified data.”
Rinna glanced at me in confusion, her mouth open in a little “o” of surprise. I shrugged, hands raised. I knew Jax held a king’s ransom in technical data about my ship, but I didn’t know there was anything inaccessible locked away in my brain.
“We’re happy to share any technological advances,” Kitur said, oblivious to our surprised response. “I’m less inclined to allow you on this mission, however. I need more information. So far all I’ve heard are vague explanations that your NIC will give you an advantage, but no details on what the actual mission is.”
That was a bit of a sore point for me, too. I had agreed to help for many reasons ranging from self-serving to whatever nobility my sense of duty gave me, but I was far from sanguine about jumping in blind. The details were bare because Vera had known this trip was being planned. There had never been any question of whether we would contact the UEE, and that being the case, the final call was being handed over to Kitur herself.
