Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  Karyl said, "How about this: are my chances of surviving less than fifty per cent?"

  "Don't worry," the officer said. "It's much higher than that."

  Karyl was sure that he was lying, but agreed to go anyway. Working on badly damaged ships in vacuum and freefall was bound to be dangerous, but it was better than wasting six years of his life in a labour camp, and anyway, what were the chances of surviving that?

  So he went out and up, into orbit around Rhea. The ships, more than a hundred of them, were parked in orbit around the Lagrangian point sixty degrees of arc behind Rhea, scattered across a roughly spherical volume some two hundred kilometres in diameter. Coming out of the airlock of the cluster of living modules hung at the heart of this junkyard Sargasso, looking in any direction, Karyl could see ships silhouetted in exquisite detail against Saturn's pastel storm bands, or flashing like fugitive stars as they slowly tumbled through raw black space. Sturdy little tugs and broomstick freighters. Shuttles that had once woven continuous, ever-changing paths between Saturn's moons. Spidery surface-to-orbit gigs. A couple of aeroshells that had ferried passengers and cargo through Titan's frigid atmosphere. Even the elegant clipper built by a cooperative just two years ago to ply between Saturn and Jupiter, a golden arc like the crescent moon of a fairy-tale illustration.

  Whenever he caught sight of the clipper, Karyl felt a catch in his throat, a forlorn sense of loss and longing. Before the Quiet War, he'd been planning to visit Callisto for the first time since he'd left ten years ago. That was impossible now, under the restrictions imposed by the Three Powers Authority, the occupying administration formed by the major power blocs from Earth that had mounted the war. No one knew when the restrictions would be lifted, or when communication between the Jupiter and Saturn systems would be restored. Karyl believed that it was safe to assume that everyone in his extended family on Callisto had survived the war because Rainbow Bridge had offered no resistance when hostilities had broken out, but he still didn't have any news and the uncertainty nagged at him. Perhaps he would never know. Perhaps he would never be able to go home again.

  All of the ships were casualties of war, retrieved by robot tugs and pushed into low energy orbits that had eventually intersected the orbit of Rhea, but only a few showed obvious signs of damage. A shuttle whose lifesystem had been unseamed by a string of bomblets in a kamikaze act of sabotage that had killed every member of the fleeing government of Baghdad, Enceladus. A freighter wrecked by a low-yield nuclear device, the cargo pods attached to its long spine peeled back and half-melted like Daliesque flowers. Tugs that had been hastily converted into singleship fighters drilled by X-ray lasers or riddled by smart rocks.

  The fusion and attitude motors of ships damaged beyond repair were dismounted, reusable components and rare metals were stripped out, and lifesystems, hulls and frames were rendered into chunks of scrap steel, fullerene composite and construction diamond. But most of the ships, including the first three that Karyl helped salvage, were simply brain dead, cybernetic nervous systems zapped by microwave bursts or EMP mines during the investment of the Saturn system, powerless and frozen but otherwise intact.

  In these cases, the salvage and refurbishment process was pretty straightforward, not much different from Karyl's work in the shipyards. Apart from having to deal with the dead, of course. Every ship was a tomb, and the dead had to be located and documented and removed before any work could begin. It wasn't physically unpleasant. After their AIs had been killed and their nervous systems had been crippled, the ships had lost power and life support, and bodies had had little time to decompose before they'd been frozen solid. But it was quite clear that crew and passengers had lived for hours or even days after their ships had been crippled beyond repair. They had composed with varying degrees of resignation and despair and anger last messages to their families and friends. Some had zipped themselves into sleeping niches and taken poison or cut their wrists or throats or fastened plastic bags over their heads; others had climbed into pressure suits, hoping to survive for a few days more, hoping against hope for rescue. In one ship people had fought over pressure suits because there had not been enough to go around.

  Karyl didn't contribute to the forensic speculations about what might have happened on the crippled ships in those last desperate hours, with no power or air circulation, and temperatures plummeting towards minus two hundred degrees Centigrade. Nor did he take part in the gossip and rumours the salvage gangs exchanged by clandestine laser blink whenever they were out of the line-of-sight of the supervisors' ship. He poured scorn on the rumours of ghosts and hauntings, of curses worked by dying crews, of hatches mysteriously locked or unlocked, machinery suddenly starting up or breaking down. He ridiculed the vivid stories that Ty Siriwardene, the youngest member of salvage gang #3, liked to conjure up, told him that the last thing anyone needed on a job like this was an imagination. The signs and traces of the last desperate moments of the dead were poignant and harrowing enough. He didn't even want to know the names of the dead, and tried to avoid looking into their frosted faces because there was always the constant, low-level dread that he might recognize someone.

  After the dead and their personal possessions had been removed, the black boxes containing the ship's logs and flight data were dismounted and handed over to the Greater Brazilian officer who supervised the salvage operation, and any cargo was catalogued and removed. Damaged AIs and control system components were replaced, lifesystems were stripped out and refurbished and quickened, fusion motors were given static tests, and the ship was handed over to the Three Powers Authority.

  So it went for the first three jobs, the first hundred days of Karyl's commuted sentence. And at first the fourth job didn't seem to be any different, except that it was a small shuttle that he had helped to build more than twenty years ago, in the shipyard orbiting Callisto. Ty Siriwardene said that the coincidence was deeply spooky; Karyl said that it was ridiculous to make anything of it. He'd worked fifteen years at the yards. It was a statistical inevitability that sooner or later he'd find himself dealing with a ship he had once helped assemble or repair, and he was determined to treat the job like any other.

  After their supervisor had sent in his drones to check for weapons, Karyl did the initial internal survey of the dead shuttle with Somerset, while Ty Siriwardene and Bruno Peterfreund checked the integrity of the hull. Somerset was the newest addition to salvage gang #3, a replacement for poor Jak Pretorius, who had died at the end of their last job when the lifepack of her pressure suit had suffered a catastrophic failure. Karyl wanted to find out how the new man performed.

  Pretty well, as it turned out. Somerset knew how to handle himself in free fall, and had a quick grasp of the work. Together, they established that the ship seemed to be grossly intact, undamaged by kinetic or energy weapons, and although the lifesystem was colder than any ordinary deep freeze it was still pressurized. The only potential problem was the thick black crust that coated much of the visible parts of the fusion motor, some kind of fast-growing vacuum organism that was probably subsisting on water vapour leaking from the attitude motor tanks. Somerset, who had been a data miner before getting religion, plugged the memory core from the shuttle's dead AI into a slate and pulled the logs from the memory core. The shuttle had departed from Dione in the middle of the battle for the moon's chief city, Paris. It had been scheduled to transport miscellaneous agricultural supplies to the Jupiter system, but no doubt its cargo had been dumped when it had tried to flee. It wasn't a big jump in logic to assume that the vacuum organism had somehow escaped then, and contaminated it.

  The bodies of eight people, the three crew and five passengers, all in sealed pressure suits, were huddled together in an equipment locker around some kind of impedance heater lashed up from cable and an exhausted fuel cell. The locker, the heater and the pressure suits had been their last stand against the inevitable after the shuttle's systems had been fritzed by an EMP mine. One by one, they had succumbed to hypothe
rmia's deep sleep, and their corpses had frozen solid. The inner surface of their visors were thickly coated with frost, so Karyl was spared the sight of their faces.

  Watched by one of the half dozen drones that were floating about the lifesystem, Somerset identified each of the bodies, collected and documented their personal effects, and then Karyl helped him seal them into plastic coffins. Once the coffins, personal effects, and the ship's black box had been sent on their way, Ty Siriwardene and Bruno Peterfreund came aboard. They rigged lights and a power supply, collected drifting trash, vented the lifesystem, and generally made the lifesystem safe, so that they could begin the second stage of the salvage operation, removing the shuttle's defunct control systems and stripping the lifesystem to its frame.

  It was Ty Siriwardene who noticed that the shuttle's foodmaker had been dismantled and its yeast base block was missing. He told Karyl about it at the end of the shift, as they rode the little robot transporter back to the living modules; Karyl said that it couldn't be due to one of his famous ghosts, because it was well known that ghosts didn't eat. Ty was the one of the youngest people in the salvage crews, an eighteen-year-old kid who like Karyl had been caught with embargoed material, although in Ty's case he'd been trying to impress some girl he was infatuated with. He was a romantic, and a sucker for the spooky stories circulating amongst the gangs.

  "The stuff's not there, someone or something took it," he said. " I'm not making this up."

  "Maybe the crew ate the yeast because the maker couldn't synthesize food without power," Karyl said.

  "They didn't live long enough to finish the food paste in their suits. And if they did want to scarf up pure yeast for some reason, why did they go to the trouble of dismantling the maker? Parts of it are missing, too," Ty said. "And that's not the only thing missing. Bruno told me that all the fuel cells in the back-up power system are gone."

  The transporter was nothing more than an impulse motor and a slim shaft ten metres long, studded with spars and straps and cargo nets. Karyl and Ty were sprawled side by side in one of the nets as the transporter dropped through eighty kilometres of black space towards the silvery asterisk of the living module cluster. Their helmets were touching so that they could speak without using their radios. Ty's voice sounded muffled and intimate; Karyl could hear the smacking noise he made as he chewed gum.

  He said, "The crew moved them inside after their ship was crippled. We found one right by their bodies."

  Ty said, "Yeah, but where are the other three?"

  Karyl had been working for twelve hours straight, was looking forward to the oblivion of sleep, and didn't have time for Ty's spooky shit. He said, "Maybe you should concentrate on the work at hand rather than waste your time making mysteries out of thin air."

  "You really don't feel it? It's not just that something weird happened on that shuttle. It's as if something's still here. A presence, a ghost."

  "That would be Barrett. You know he's always on our tails to keep to schedule. We have thirty days to strip the shuttle. It's a pointless and arbitrary schedule because the TPA doesn't give a shit about the ships, just like it doesn't give a shit about fixing up Paris or anything else it wrecked. But thirty days are what we've got, Barrett is a stickler for the rules, and if we fall behind, he'll make our lives even more miserable than they are now. Forget about the maker. Forget about the fuel cells. It's nothing. Let me hear you say that."

  "It's something," Ty said.

  "If you think it's something, write up a report for Barrett."

  Ty didn't write it up, of course. The officer in charge of the salvage gangs, Captain James Lo Barrett, was an inflexible bureaucrat obsessed with targets and timekeeping who had no idea of the practical difficulties of the work. But Ty didn't let it go, either. The next day, mid-shift, Karyl caught him and Bruno Peterfreund having a private conversation in the service core that ran through the middle of the shuttle's lifesystem, their suits linked by a patch cord. He pulled a cord and plugged into Bruno's suit: the two men told him that they had just spent a couple of hours combing through the shuttle's lifesystem, and presented him with an inventory. The comms module was gone; pumps and filters from the air conditioning system had been dismounted; tools were missing.

  "I want to know just one thing," Karyl said. "I want to know if this is some kind of joke on me. If you're all winding me up because I helped build the ship, and I've bored you to death about why I don't believe in ghosts. If that's what it is, ha-ha, you've all made your point, and I'm wiser for it. But we have to get back on schedule."

  "The stuff, it is not floating around somewhere," Bruno said. "It's gone. I swear on the life of my family, no joke."

  "Someone took all this stuff," Ty said, "and made themselves a nice cozy nest."

  "First, we would have found this nest, if it existed. Second, the shuttle was zapped right at the beginning of the war," Karyl said. "It's been falling around Saturn ever since. Nothing could have survived out here for two hundred days."

  "Nothing human," Ty said.

  "He could be right, boss," Bruno said. "Maybe it's one of those spooky spies the Greater Brazilians used against us. Maybe it's hiding in the shadows, waiting to jump our asses."

  "The war's over," Karyl said, and told the two men to get back to work. But he knew this wouldn't be the end of it. Ty and Bruno had wasted precious time chasing a ghost that couldn't possibly exist. They had fallen behind on the job.

  Sure enough, at the end of the shift, a soldier intercepted Karyl before he could follow the others into the airlock of the cluster and told him that Captain Barrett wanted to see him. He was handcuffed and given a ride in one of the little scooters the navy personnel used and, still handcuffed, dragged through the fallways and corridors of the Greater Brazilian ship to Barrett's office. The soldier unlatched his helmet, attached one ring of the cuffs to a steel loop in the wall, and left him hanging there.

  Barrett swam in thirty minutes later, moving clumsily in freefall to the sling seat on the other side of the little room, settling into it and taking a sip from a foam-insulated bulb as he regarded Karyl. Barrett didn't offer to unhandcuff Karyl, and Karyl didn't ask. At last, Barrett said that he'd checked the day log, and wanted to know why Karyl's gang were still stripping out the control systems when they should have started to check the integrity of the fusion plant.

  Karyl wasn't prepared to expose the others to Barrett's petty spite, so he flat-out lied. Told him that the calibration of the portable refinery that boiled metals off the circuitry and separated and collected them by laser chromatography refinery had drifted, that there had been cross-contamination in the collection chambers, that he'd had to run everything through it all over again.

  "I don't want to punish you," Barrett said, 'but I'm going to have to do all the same. You've gotten behind, Mezhidov. You have lost a day, so you will all have to give one back. I am adding one day to each of your sentences, and if your gang don't have the fusion plant dismounted by the end of tomorrow, I'm afraid that I'll be forced to add another day. I don't want to do it of course, but regulations are regulations."

  Captain James Lo Barrett, the smug bastard, sprawling in the sling seat and giving Karyl a synthetic look of soapy sympathy. He was a heavily-built man with a fleshy face and a skinny little beard that was no more than a braid hung off his chin and wrapped in black silk thread. He looked, Karyl thought, like a foetus blimped up by some kind of accelerated growth program. When he took a sip from the insulated bulb he cradled in his podgy hands Karyl caught a whiff of coffee that brought saliva to the back of his throat.

  He said, "We'll get back on schedule. No problem."

  "Work with me, Mezhidov. Don't let me down."

  "Absolutely," Karyl said, thinking that it would be so much easier if Barrett had been a tough son-of-a-bitch. He could deal with sons-of-bitches you always knew where you were with them. But Barrett pretended that he was not responsible for the authority he wielded, pretended that punishing his crews hurt
him as much as it hurt them, demanding their sympathy even as he sequestered money that was needed to feed starving children. His spineless mendacity made him a worse tyrant than any bully.

  "If there's a problem," he said, "you know I'm always here to help."

  As if. Karyl knew that if there really was a problem, Barrett would send him down to one of the labour camps without a qualm. He gave his best smile, and said, "The refinery threw a glitch, but it's fixed now. We'll get on top of the schedule first thing."

  "You take pride in your work, I know. And I want you to know that I approve."

  Karyl didn't know what to say to that, so he didn't say anything.

  Barrett took another sip from his bulb. "As for me, I don't give a fuck if these ships are fixed or not. But those in charge tell us that some kind of normality needs to be established, that cooperative cities need to be rewarded. The Saturn System needs ships to function properly, and those ships were either stolen by the cowards who fled to Neptune and Uranus, or they are casualties of war. So here we are, we have a schedule to maintain, and I will not be made to look bad by a bunch of tweaks. I will not tolerate any sign of this famous non-violent resistance on my watch. So get on top of your work, Mezhidov, or I'll find someone else to do it, and you can spend six years working on one of those so-called farms."

  "Whatever you say."

  "Yes indeed. Whatever I say. I can condemn you in a moment. On the other hand, if you help me, then I can help you."

  Karyl didn't say anything to this, either, although he was wondering what Barrett was leading up to.

  "Those dead people on the shuttle," Barrett said. "Did you happen to recognize any of them?"

  "I never look too closely at them. I document their possessions and put them in coffins and hand them over to you and hope that you do the right thing by them."

  "There were three crew, and five passengers," Barrett said. "But it is the passengers I'm interested. We're interested in."