The Drift Wars

by James, Brett

  She sat there for over an hour, panting heavily, then lay back and fell into a troubled sleep. Peter sat beside her, watching her chest rise and fall, and listening to the rattle of her breath. He spread out the medical kit and tried to guess what might help.

  Linda woke up feeling better, but her skin was pale and she could barely talk. She guided Peter as he injected her with painkiller, but she wouldn’t allow anything else. When he pressed her, she only looked away.

  Peter wanted to leave, to give her a moment alone, but there was nowhere to go. He turned away and kept quiet.

  Another hour passed and he grew restless. He got up and mixed some food; the scraping sound of the spoon filled the room.

  “Thank you,” she said, taking a bowl from him and setting it, untouched, at her side.

  — — —

  Three days after they entered their own universe, Peter put on his combat suit and went outside. He told Linda he was going to inspect the hull, but the truth was that he just had to get away. Linda was very sick. He could smell the decay on her breath, the sickness inside, but she refused to talk about it. It was dismal. It was driving him crazy.

  Stepping outside of a moving ship was jarring. The stars streaked past, racing from the glowing white mass in front of the ship, arcing overhead, then melting away behind. Peter clung dearly to the hull as he climbed to the roof.

  The ship was encased in the shimmering bubble of a warp envelope. Green dots flashed in the air—microscope particles incinerated by the force of the ship’s passing. They reminded Peter of the fireflies that swarmed the fields of Genesia on warm summer evenings.

  Home, Peter thought, settling on the roof. They would be there soon, and he was nervous. He’d been so young when he left, and the war had barely started. Would he even recognize it?

  — — —

  “Are you excited to see your homeworld again?” Peter asked over breakfast. They had been in their own universe for three weeks now, and while Linda’s condition hadn’t improved, last night they had detected a large energy source that had to be the Great Barrier, the giant shield that protected the entire Livable Territories.

  “It isn’t really my homeworld,” Linda said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Linda said, nodding. “But to be honest, I’d rather not go.”

  “Really?”

  “My memories of that place…her memories. They aren’t mine, but they’re just as real. Just as inescapable. I was relieved to learn I am a clone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Peter said, thinking back to the drawings in her desk, the dark images in heavy pen.

  “Don’t be. That was a long time ago. And as for my original, I’m sure she’s long dead.”

  “Why?” Peter asked.

  “Do you have any idea how old I am?”

  Peter shook his head.

  “I’m ninety-two, Peter. Not counting the age of my original.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “Clones don’t really show their age, but we do wear out. We last about a century.”

  “And you’re still on your first body?”

  “My only body. Technician-grade clones don’t have a neural web. There’s no way to get my memories out.”

  “So then what? You just die?”

  Linda stared at him, sober, then coughed into a bloodstained napkin.

  Peter looked away, stirring the yellowish paste on his plate. Several minutes passed before he said, “He married you anyway. Even though you only have a few years left.”

  “Yes,” Linda said. “Even though he would have to watch me die. Even though I would forget everything. Do you know how much that means?”

  Peter shook his head. “No,” he admitted.

  Linda gave him a hard look, probing, and smiled. “You might just, someday.”

  “Someday? How old am I?”

  “You have thirty months of active service. Add that to the age of your original and you’re about twenty.”

  “Not that. The real total.”

  “Active service is all that matters.”

  “For others. Not for me.”

  Linda shook her head, but Peter only waited. She gave in: “I was seventy-four the year they rolled out your line.”

  “Eighteen years?” Peter asked. “We’ve known each other that long?”

  “I’ve known you that long. You’ve only known me as long as you remember. And you’ve forgotten a lot.”

  Peter nodded.

  “And the war?” he asked.

  “I arrived at the base when I was twenty-two,” Linda said, “and even back then nobody could say when it had started.”

  — — —

  Peter spent as much time as he could outside. It was painful to watch Linda waste away, painful that he couldn’t help. That she wouldn’t let him.

  Her attitude was frustrating. She was a nurse. She knew about medicine, but she refused to take any. And she wouldn’t even discuss finding help when they reached the Livable Territories.

  “I don’t want to die in a hospital,” she said. “Besides, I don’t know what you think will happen when we get there. It’s not like an unidentified ship coming out of the Drift is going to be met with a hero’s parade. There’s a war on.”

  — — —

  Peter had been napping on the ship’s roof when he woke to a warm glow. He squinted at the shimmering green wall in front of him, a plasma shield so broad that it sliced apart space itself. He scrambled inside.

  He found Linda in the cockpit, examining the shield with the optical enhancer. The shield was an epic polygon, flat triangles interconnected by satellite. And there were millions of satellites, their protective green bubbles studding the massive sphere. It was the Great Barrier.

  “Any sign of the Riel?” Peter asked.

  “No other ships in range,” Linda replied. “Maybe they’re not coming.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that, but at least we beat them here. Where are we headed?”

  Linda pointed at a large rectangular frame. “Looks like a gateway,” she said. “It’s sending us a transmission, either asking for identification or an access code.”

  “Is there one in the computer?”

  “I checked,” Linda replied with a shrug. She was wrapped in a blanket that had worn to the shape of her body. Her skin was chalk white and her lips were stained brown.

  “You’d better cut the autopilot,” Peter said. “I doubt they’ll just let us in.”

  “You’ve got some clever idea?”

  “Extremely.”

  — — —

  A few hours passed before a ship appeared on their long-distance scanner. It was a large one, judging from its energy signature, and it was coming toward the gateway.

  Peter worried it was the Riel battlecruiser, but the computer identified it as a cargoship, the same model that supplied the base. Maybe even returning from it, Peter thought.

  — — —

  Peter’s plan required that they make themselves hard to detect, which meant getting back into their suits and turning off the ship’s life support. Peter encased Linda and strapped her in the back, then wedged himself in the doorway to the cockpit, freeing both hands to fly. He backed the ship up beside the gateway and killed the engines.

  Six hours later the running lights of the cargoship twinkled in the distance. Another hour and its hull glittered in the shield’s green light.

  The cargoship was headed straight toward them with no sign of slowing down. Peter’s hand hovered over the throttle. He didn’t want to risk detection, but the alternative was worse: they would shatter across the larger ship’s bow.

  The proximity gauge switched from miles to yards. The ship filled the cockpit window and grew larger still. The vacuum of space was dead silent,
but the large ship’s engines thundered in Peter’s mind. The distance dropped to double digits, then single. The U on the cargoship’s hull looked to be thirty stories tall.

  Peter yanked the throttle back, but just then the cargoship stopped.

  He reset the throttle before the engines could fire; then he watched the cargo ship pivot toward the gateway.

  — — —

  Peter was hit by a blast of light as the cargoship’s twenty-story impulsor stack swung into view. He threw the throttle forward, flying in its wake. His ship was engulfed in white tachyon exhaust.

  The small ship was getting tossed around, so Peter jerked the stick to compensate. He stayed in the middle of the turbulent exhaust, where his own engine would be undetectable.

  Once their speed matched the cargoship’s, Peter dove, breaking free of the light storm and into the quiet shadow below. He cut the engine and the ship seemed motionless as it flew alongside the other. They were close enough, he hoped, that the gateway’s sensors would register the two ships as one.

  The shield approached slowly, growing razor-thin as they passed through. Peter craned his neck and looked back. From the inside looking out, the shield was translucent; the stars shone like reflections on a shimmering green sea.

  — — —

  Once inside the Great Barrier, the cargoship turned, steering toward its final destination. Peter let his own ship glide until he was certain they were out of scanner range of both the cargoship and the shield; then he reversed the throttle just enough to stop.

  “We’re in,” he said over the comm.

  “Congratulations,” Linda replied. “You want to get me out of this suit now?”

  “I want to wait a few minutes, to be sure we weren’t noticed.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  — — —

  Peter spent a quarter of an hour tracking all the ships nearby until he was certain that none were headed his way. At the same time, he sifted through the incoming radio transmissions, gathering the names and coordinates of the occupied planets: Anteries. Sakazu. Carallaries. And, finally, Genesia. He had never realized how close they were to each other.

  No other ships approached, so he removed Linda from her suit. Dark bile had collected on her chin; she wiped it away as soon as her arms were free.

  “Just to be clear,” she said firmly, “I’m never doing that again.”

  “I promise,” he said, sliding her from the suit to the mattress.

  “So what does it look like out there?”

  “Like space,” Peter said, “but crowded.”

  “I want to see,” she said.

  Peter found her blanket and helped her to the cockpit. Her arms were thin, her skin tight to the bone.

  Outside the window the lights of a thousand ships moved through the system. “Oh, Peter,” she gasped.

  “This is only the very edge,” he said.

  “So many ships.”

  “And planets,” Peter added. “Hundreds of them.”

  Linda furrowed her brow. “That’s a lot more than I remember,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Peter replied. “Me too.”

  [01.14.6.3::9234.1427.937.5L]

  The Nav Computer had nothing to offer about the interior of the Livable Territories, so they studied the flight patterns of the other ships. The only thing out there was civilian craft—if the United Forces were preparing to repel a Riel invasion, they were doing it somewhere else.

  Linda flew the ship in a small circle while Peter triangulated on Genesia’s radio transmissions; it seemed like the safest bet. It took an hour to fix the planet’s coordinates, after which Linda felt weak and had to lie down, leaving Peter at the controls.

  At the core of the Livable Territories, a dozen suns were tightly clustered. Each was surrounded with planets that revolved on several axes or, in one case, were strung along the same orbit like a pearl necklace. It was as if humanity had designed the heavenly bodies for its own convenience.

  Peter expected to continue on to a more remote location, but it turned out that Genesia was inside one of the busiest systems. He trailed some larger ships as they passed the planet, then he circled back, approaching in the shadow of a smooth white moon the way transportships approached Riel-controlled planets. He couldn’t hope to avoid detection but saw no reason to be obvious.

  He circled the planet to find a landing site as Linda sifted through the terrestrial radio signals. She was looking for Peter’s hometown, but the closest she found was Bentings Naval Base, from where he had left Genesia all those years ago.

  Peter remembered Bentings surrounded by farmland, but as they approached he saw it was buried in the middle of a city. In fact, the whole planet was just one endless metropolis.

  — — —

  They decided to land near the base, in what appeared to be a large city park with a small forest inside. Peter would have preferred somewhere more remote, but there weren’t many choices.

  The ship wasn’t streamlined for planetary entry and the Nav System rejected any course to the surface. Peter knew nothing about landing a ship except that there was a strong danger of burning up if you descended too fast. So he aimed the ship away from the planet and backed into the atmosphere with a heavy burn of the tachyon drive. It wasn’t subtle—the engines scorched the air, creating a thick column of smoke—but no ships came to investigate.

  At a thousand feet he cut the engines for fear of burning down the forest. With only the stabilizers to slow their decent, they plunged through the trees and smashed to the ground. The rear hull crumpled, cushioning the impact. The ship teetered for a moment, then flopped down to its landing gear.

  The computer screamed at Peter in a language he didn’t understand, but nothing was on fire. He switched it off and went to check on Linda.

  — — —

  The two of them stood in the doorway, gazing out at the trees. Peter was in a black thermal bodysuit—the underlayer of his combat suit—and Linda wore an oversize camouflage coat like a dress. The air here was crisp and wet, alive. After so many years of filtered air, it was intoxicating. Peter drew deeply though his nose, taking in the smell.

  “You first,” he said, waving her outside.

  “Help me,” Linda replied. Peter stepped out and lifted her down. She tested the ground with her feet, checking that it was really there. “It’s marvelous,” she said, threading her arm through his for support.

  They walked through the woods, treading over soft pine needles. They came across a gravel path and followed it to a field of manicured grass. Next they trudged up an embankment that overlooked a blue lake. Finally, Linda dropped onto a bench, panting. Peter joined her, surprised to find himself also out of breath.

  The late-afternoon sun was warm and the park’s colors were bright and rich. It was a little overwhelming—back on the base, everything that wasn’t steel was colored to match.

  Peter threw his arm over Linda and she curled into him. They looked up at the moon high overhead, half faded against the pale sky. But it wasn’t the moon. It was too big, and patched in blue and gray. It was a planet. And there was another one nearby, smaller or more distant. Peter knew this wasn’t right, but he didn’t care. He was happier now than he’d been his whole life. Or, at least, what he could claim as his own.

  Linda suddenly turned away, coughing sharply into her towel.

  “So what’s next?” she asked, mopping her chin.

  “One of us should scout around,” Peter said.

  “And that should be you,” Linda said. “I’m happy right here.” She stretched out her arms, embracing the sun.

  Peter smiled, her joy feeding his own. He didn’t want to leave her, but she was in no condition to travel. He had to find help.

  “I’ll show you around later,” he said, getting to
his feet.

  “I’d like that,” she said. Peter waited awkwardly, wanting to say more, then turned down the path. “Peter,” she called after him. He looked back.

  Linda sat framed by the green grass and the blue lake, the sun highlighting her hair. “This is really lovely,” she said. “Thank you for bringing me.”

  Peter nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and continued on. The sound of her cough faded behind him.

  — — —

  Once he was out of Linda’s sight, he started jogging, then running. At the end of the path was a high brick wall over which the city rose like endless smokestacks in a gray haze. Peter slowed to a walk and passed through a gate.

  Everything outside the park was paved. The trees that lined the sidewalks were plastic, planted in green cement. The air was burned, and the relentless din of cars’ horns and engines filled his ears. Peter searched for anything familiar.

  Two small women shoved past him. They looked like miniature humans, no taller than Peter’s waist. The older lectured the younger in a thick accent that he didn’t recognize. The younger looked back, ogling Peter. She tapped her companion’s shoulder and pointed. Peter escaped into the street, dodging traffic.

  — — —

  The street was ten lanes in each direction. Peter worked through the slow-moving traffic. A tiny car screeched to a halt in front of him, and the driver gaped at him in horror. Peter ran faster.

  More cars stopped and more little people got out to look at him. At the far side of the street he ducked into an alley where impossibly tall buildings blocked out the sun. Small shops lined both sides of the alley, but he saw nothing that could help Linda. He looked into a window; the man inside was startled by the sight of him and ducked behind a counter.

  Then a small woman came out of a doorway. She had dark hair and a low-cut, strapless dress that was black against her smooth, tan skin. She walked right up to Peter, chasing him back a step.

  “You look like you could use a stiff one, friend,” she said, raising a clear bottle. Slivers of ice slid down the side.