Stories From The Quiet War

by Paul McAuley

  Inside, beyond a double layer of taut, transparent plastic, lit by the overlapping glare of Karyl's and Somerset's helmet lights, a girl in a prison-yellow pressure suit was curled in a nest of insulation foam between two of the anti-slosh vanes that honeycombed the interior of the tank.

  Somerset told Karyl that he'd first thought that the girl had been dead: her pressure suit's internal temperature had been barely above the freezing point of water, and she had no pulse or respiration signs. But a quick ultrasonic scan had shown that her blood was sluggishly circulating through a cascade filter pump connected to the femoral artery of her left leg. There was also a small machine attached to the base of her skull, something coiled in her stomach, and a line in the vein of her left arm that went through the elbow joint of her p-suit and was coupled to a lash-up of tubing, pumps and bags of clear and cloudy liquids, and the missing fuel cell.

  "That's what happened to the foodmaker," Karyl said. "She has some kind of continuous culture running, doesn't she?"

  He hung at the edge of the narrow circle of the hatch, amazed and frightened.

  "She is hibernating," Somerset said. "I have heard of the technique. Enemy soldiers are infected with nanotech that can shut them down if they are badly injured."

  "Are you saying that she isn't Avernus's daughter? That she's one of those creatures the enemy used to infiltrate our cities before the war?"

  "It was my first thought," Somerset said. "Now, after Mr Barrett's assertion that the other passengers were part of Avernus's entourage, I don't know what to think."

  "One thing's for certain," Karyl said. " No ordinary child could have rigged this."

  "There's something else you should know," Somerset said. "The temperature inside her suit has risen by five degrees since I last checked her. I think she's waking up."

  "You had to go and complicate things," someone said, over the common band.

  Karyl spun around and looked up and saw Ty staring down at her from the top of the radiation shield. He held a welding pistol in one hand. Its tip glowed white-hot. One swipe and it would unseam a pressure suit. Another figure raised up beside him: Bruno.

  "You two come away from there," Ty said.

  "There's no point trying to do anything foolish," Bruno said. "Mr Barrett will be here soon."

  9.

  Ty wasn't at all happy to learn that the girl was waking up. He wanted to put her back into hibernation, and he lost the last of his fragile cool when Somerset told him that the process had started back when he had first uncovered the girl's hiding place; he'd had nothing to do with starting it and he had no idea how to stop it, much less reverse it.

  "We may well kill her if we interfere," Karyl said.

  He and Somerset were squatting either side of one of the tank's support struts, their wrists lashed to it by wire pulled so tightly Karyl could feel the pressure through the cuffs of his gloves. Ty clung to another strut, his faceplate reflecting them and the curve of the motor cover. Bruno was under the tank, studying the vital signs of the girl curled inside. All around, the black sky and the constellations of dead ships slowly revolved. A spark amongst the ships was growing brighter: the supervisor, James Lo Barrett riding a scooter towards the shuttle, eager to claim his prize.

  Ty and Bruno had made a deal with him. Barrett would get all the glory of discovering Avernus's daughter; they would get their freedom. Karyl had tried to persuade them that Barrett wouldn't keep to his part of the deal. Telling them that he was no more than a prison warder, so how could he reduce their sentences, much less grant them clemency?

  But Ty was desperate and wouldn't listen to reason, and although Bruno was calmer, he had convinced himself that everyone in the gang would profit by turning over the girl to Barrett. After all, he'd told Karyl, how could they, mere prisoners, presume to contact let along negotiate with the commander of the salvage operation? As far as they were concerned, Barrett was the highest-ranking officer they could talk to, so Barrett was the person they had to deal with.

  "Just remember that it'll be your word against his when it comes to it," Karyl had said. "Think it through, Bruno. Can you really trust him?"

  "Like you said, if we stay here we'll be worked until we die. And even if we survive they'll probably dump us back in their prison system," Bruno said. "Maybe we don't have much chance of getting something out of this deal, but it's all we have."

  "We have to play it where it lays," Ty had said. "Right?"

  "Right," Bruno had said.

  Now, Bruno sculled back from the underside of the tank and pushed upright, saying that he reckoned the girl would be awake before they could get her back to the administration cluster.

  "That'll be Barrett's problem," Ty said.

  "It's his and ours," Bruno said.

  "Let me see what's what," Ty said,

  "Look all you want," Bruno said, as Ty squirmed under the tank. "It won't change anything. She's almost awake."

  "There is another option that you don't seem to have considered," Somerset said.

  "It's too late for any of your fancy ideas," Ty said. "The man will be here in a few minutes."

  "Four minutes twenty-two seconds, by my reckoning," Somerset said. "Just enough time to do what must be done."

  "You aren't in any position to do anything," Ty said. "But don't worry, Bruno and me, we'll cut you in. You too, Karyl. You don't like our deal, you'd scupper it if you could, but we'll let you in on it anyway. Because I always liked you. You were a decent boss."

  "It seems I was too trusting," Karyl said.

  "Kill the girl," Somerset said.

  There was a silence. Then Ty began laughing, and Bruno said, "I might have known. You claim to have been redeemed, Somerset, but you still have a murderer's heart."

  "Barrett knows she's alive," Ty said. "Can't undo that."

  "Then make it look like an accident," Somerset said calmly. "Like a glitch in the revival process. Think it through. If the girl is Avernus's daughter, and if she is taken alive, she will be put in prison and she will never be let out. She will be paraded like some zoological specimen. She will be tortured to make her give up everything she knows because the TPA is desperate to find Avernus. You can save her from that."

  "Barrett finds her dead, what do you think he'll do to us?" Ty said.

  "She is valuable whether she is dead or alive. Dead, she has propaganda value for the TPA. It can claim a small triumph, use the fact of her death to prove that it is making advances against the so-called resistance. And since she is Avernus's daughter, she no doubt has benefitted from unique cuts that would be of value once they are understood."

  "You're a sick fuck with a sick imagination," Ty said.

  "He's right," Karyl said. "If you let me go, I'll do it myself."

  He was as repulsed by the idea of killing the girl as Ty seemed to be, but if he could persuade Ty and Bruno to unlash him it would give him a chance to do something. His best idea was that he could deal with Barrett somehow, create a diversion, give the girl time to escape. He would most likely be killed, by Barrett here and now or by trial and execution later on, but he was sure that he was going to die anyway, if he let Ty and Bruno hand the girl over. And he didn't want to be killed while he was squatting in a p-suit, lashed to the strut of a dead shuttle.

  "I don't think so," Bruno said. "Sit quietly, Karyl. Let us deal with Barrett."

  "He'll deal with you," Karyl said. "You know it, Bruno."

  "You don't have a family," Bruno said. "If you did, you'd understand why I'm doing this."

  "If you let Barrett take the girl alive, what will your family think of you?" Somerset said.

  "They'll be glad to see me safe and well," Bruno said. "Be quiet now. You too, Karyl."

  "Her eyes are open," Ty said.

  Bruno squirmed in beside him, his breathing loud over the comm link, said after a moment that she wasn't awake yet. "She's coming around fast, though."

  "Core temperature normal, pulse low but steady, blood pr
essure 40 over 70. Looks like she's breathing on her own, too," Ty said. "Maybe we better seal this up."

  "That's not a bad idea," Bruno said. "Barrett will want to see her first. But yes, then we can seal her in if he wants, cut this whole thing free and tow it back. Let me talk to him, Ty. I can make him believe he thought of it himself, and it's our best bet. He'll need us to get this tank back, you understand?"

  "And he won't be able to do anything to us once we get back. Sounds like a plan."

  Bruno wriggled back out from under the tank and swam up to the edge of the shield, waiting for Barrett to arrive; Ty lay on his back under the tank, reporting on every incremental change in the girl's condition. Karyl and Somerset wriggled around until they could touch helmets and talk without being overheard.

  "This is the point when you tell me you have a knife, or anything else that can cut this wire," Karyl said.

  "And with one bound we are free," Somerset said.

  "Something like that. Would you really have killed the girl, if you had the chance?"

  "We are at war."

  "If there was a war, we lost it a while back."

  "We are still at war, Karyl. Those who advocate nonviolent resistance know that. Those who have fled outward know that. Even those who collaborate with the TPA know that."

  "I'm no collaborator. But I couldn't kill anyone because it would hurt the TPA."

  "She is a great prize, and I admit that's one reason why I think it would best to kill her. But it is not the only reason. A quick death, while she still sleeps, would be more merciful than allowing her to be captured, and to be tortured to death, in captivity. And the TPA would torture her, Karyl, to find out if she knows where her mother is."

  "If that's what it takes to win, then what have you won if you win?"

  "If we could ask the girl that, what answer would she give?"

  "Thankfully, we aren't going to find out."

  "We'll see," Somerset said, calm as ever.

  The little star of Barrett's scooter quickly resolved detail as it grew near and with a bright twinkle decelerated and matched the shuttle's slow revolution. The man was greedy and corrupt, but he wasn't stupid. He refused Bruno's offer to haul the scooter in and fix it to the shield, and hung a couple of hundred metres off the end of the motor casing, beyond the vent. Karyl had a good view of him, sitting inside the scooter's transparent bubble in his pressure suit, leaning in the straps of his seat as he studied the situation, asking at last why two of them were tied up.

  Bruno reminded him to use the line-of-sight comm rather than the common band, just in case someone in the administration cluster caught the conversation.

  "Right." Barrett switched over, asked again why Karyl and Somerset were tied up.

  "They disagreed with us," Bruno said.

  "Even so, they're still part of this deal," Ty said, and told Barrett that the girl was waking up, he better make up his mind what he wanted to do.

  "Mr Siriwardene means that we would like to show you what we found," Bruno said. "And then, if I may make a suggestion, we can seal up the tank. It would be best, we believe, to keep the girl inside it. To keep her safely out of sight. We can cut it free from the shuttle, and help you to tow it back."

  "I'm sure you could," Barrett said. "Siriwardene, you back away from the tank. Go join your friend while I scope this out."

  Something detached from Barrett's scooter, a little drone that scooted across the gap and glided under the tank.

  "She is who we think she is, yes?" Bruno said.

  "She has such green eyes," Barrett said. "How long as she been awake?"

  "She is not fully awake," Bruno said. "But she soon will be."

  "Somerset started the revival process," Ty said. "Ask him what he did."

  The drone drifted from the pitch-black shadow under the tank, turned through ninety degrees, began to rise.

  Barrett said, "You know why you tweaks lost the war? Aside from the fact that most of you are cowards who threw up their hands first sign of trouble, you're always quarreling amongst yourselves. I'm not interested in which of you is to blame for what. You know why? Because none of us are interested in you. That's why I can do this."

  The drone was level with the two men perched on top of the radiation shield now.

  "Wait," Bruno said, and that was all he said because the drone exploded in a flare of smoky red light, and then what was left of Bruno and Ty were tumbling away from each other end over end, spinning and jerking and twitching amidst thinning clouds of vapour and widening clouds of glittering debris as their shattered lifepacks emptied.

  Somerset banged helmets with Karyl and shouted, "Save yourself!"

  And then he pulled away, he was free somehow, scooting straight for the tank like a fish gliding over the bottom of the sea. Karyl saw something tumbling away after him, a pressure suit glove, and realized that Somerset had shucked his glove and pulled his naked and frozen hand out of the wire to give himself enough room to get free. Somerset's suit would have pinched shut around his wrist, but Karyl could only imagine how badly it must hurt, to have exposed his hand to vacuum and a temperature of minus two hundred degrees Centigrade. Like plunging it into liquid nitrogen. He started to wriggle against the slack bands of wire, managed to get an arm free. Barrett was shouting, telling Somerset to stop, but Somerset was already under the tank. Karyl shouted too, telling Somerset to spare the girl, but Somerset didn't reply. His pressure-suited figure jerked and shivered madly for a moment and then drifted backwards from the tank, turning to show the shattered visor of its helmet.

  Karyl pulled his legs underneath him in a squat, started to kick as hard as he could. The third kick freed him and as he shot straight up he pulled the reaction pistol from his belt. Barrett shouted at him and he fired the pistol and shot sideways. As he went past the top of the radiation shield he saw another drone glitter out from Barrett's scooter, and he fired the reaction pistol again and corkscrewed down past the far side of the radiation shield. Light flared above it as the drone incontinently exploded; thirty seconds later he was swimming through one of the shuttle's airlocks.

  Less than two minutes later he emerged from another airlock, on the far side of the shuttle. The side that was presently in shadow. He was carrying a welding pistol, the only tool he could find that would approximate a weapon. The radiation shield cut a sharp shadow from the starscape. He clung to the edge of the airlock and looked for Barrett's scooter but it had moved from its station beyond the end of the motor. All right. He would have to find Barrett before one of Barrett's drones found him.

  He sculled around the circumference of the shuttle's hull. Scooting from shadow to shadow, pausing to scan the sky, looking for any movement amongst the fixed stars and the slow twinkling revolutions of the wrecked ship. At any moment, a drone could sneak up on him and blow itself up. It didn't even have to get too close to kill him: one bad rip in his pressure suit would do that. He was aware, too, that he had only an hour or so of air left. If Barrett was smart, he would realize that all he had to do was wait it out. Karyl could raise an emergency flag on the comm, but how was he going to explain what had happened here three men dead, a passenger on the shuttle found alive? It would be his word against Barrett's. He'd be arrested, tried, executed. Unless he could get to Somerset's body, unless he could retrieve Somerset's lifepack . . .

  He circumnavigated the shuttle, saw no sign of Barrett. Either he'd run off, gone back to the administration cluster to get reinforcements, or he was on the other side of the radiation shield. There was only one way to find out.

  Karyl fingertip-swam up the shield, looked over the top, a quick peek. Barrett's scooter was tethered to the motor casing by a sticky line and two bodies were lashed loosely to one of the struts of the tank. One was Somerset, Karyl would recognize that scuffed white suit anywhere. The other was too big to be the girl, it had to be Barrett. Karyl eased over the lip of the shield, sculled down, turning this way and that, looking for movement. He knew what
must have happened to Barrett, and he was even more afraid, now. Barrett he knew; the girl he didn't.

  So he almost jumped out of her suit when someone said over the comm, "I won't hurt you if you don't hurt me."

  Karyl turned right and left but couldn't see anyone. Slowly and deliberately, he stuck the welding pistol in one of the loops on his belt and raised both hands to show that they were empty, and the girl shot out of shadow to his left, was in his face so fast it was as if she had teleported across the gap. She gripped Karyl's shoulders, looked straight into Karyl's face. Her eyes were chlorophyll green, large in a thin and drawn face that clearly showed the skull beneath. Although the modified foodmaker had been dripping nutrients from the yeast culture into her blood, she had used up all of her body fat and a good deal of muscle mass in her long sleep.

  She lowered her helmet so that it touched Karyl's and said, "Come with me if you want to live."

  "On the scooter?"

  'It will get us to Rhea. "We'll need to find air and fuel first. You can help me with that."

  "I'm a prisoner here. Working for the TPA. The only place to get air and fuel is the ship, and that's manned by guards."

  "The TPA?"

  "The Three Powers Authority."

  "That would be Greater Brazil, the European Community, and the Pacific Union. I was trying to escape at the beginning of the war when the shuttle was disabled by an EMP mine," the girl said. Her green gaze calm and level, locked on Karyl. "It was clear that we were losing then; it is clear now that we lost. But you can explain what happened later. That is, if you decide to come with me. What's your name?"

  "Karyl. Karyl Mezhidov."

  "A good name. From Chechnya, where they knew how to resist oppression. I need to find my mother, Karyl," the girl said. "But to begin with, I need to get to Rhea. Are you with me, or do you want to stay here?"

  Karyl remembered, in that moment, what Shizuko had told him in the garage of that little oasis, just before things changed and war came to Dione and the rest of the Saturn System. There would come a time, she'd said, when he would have to choose which side he was on. And here it was, and after trying and failing to stay out of the war it wasn't any kind of choice, not really.