Space Soldiers
Page 1
SPACE SOLDIERS
Edited By
JACK DANN & GARDNER DOZOIS
Space Soldiers
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
THE GARDENS OF SATURN
Paul J. McAuley
SOLDIERS HOME
William Barton
LEGACIES
Tom Purdom
MOON DUEL
Fritz Leiber
SAVIOR
Robert Reed
GALACTIC NORTH
Alastair Reynolds
MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT
Fred Saberhagen
TIME PIECE
Joe Haldeman
ON THE ORION LINE
Stephen Baxter
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
UNICORNS!
MAGICATS!
BESTIARY!
MERMAIDS!
SORCERERS!
DEMONS!
DOGTALES!
SEASERPENTS!
DINOSAURS!
LITTLE PEOPLE!
MAGICATS II
UNICORNS II
DRAGONS!
INVADERS!
HORSES!
ANGELS!
HACKERS
TIMEGATES
CLONES
IMMORTALS
NANOTECH
ARMAGEDDONS
ALIENS AMONG US
GENOMETRY
SPACE SOLDIERS
Edited by Terri Windling
FAERY!
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-1-62579-153-5
Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
First printing: April 2011
Cover art by: Ron Miller
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Electronic version by Baen Books
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS MADE FOR PERMISSION TO REPRINT THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL:
“The Gardens of Saturn,” by Paul J. McAuley. Copyright © 1998 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, November 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Soldiers Home,” by William Barton. Copyright © 1999 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Legacies,” by Tom Purdom. Copyright © 1993 by Bantam Doubleday Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Moon Duel,” by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in If, September 1965. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate and the agents for that estate, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc.
“Savior,” by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Galactic North,” by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 1999 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, July 1999. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Masque of the Red Shift,” by Fred Saberhagen. Copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. First published in If, November 1965. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Time Piece,” by Joe Haldeman. Copyright © 1970 by Universal Publishing & Distributing Corp. First published in Worlds of If, July 1970. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“On the Orion Line,” by Stephen Baxter. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.
PREFACE
If a realistic appraisal of human nature and the lessons of history lead you, as it has led us, to the reluctant conclusion that as long as human beings are still human beings as we understand them, then war—of one sort or another, on one scale or another, in one arena or another—will probably always be part of the human condition . . . and as long as you postulate that our high-tech civilization will remain intact and keep on growing and evolving (instead of suffering some kind of disaster or societal crash—such as a too-catastrophic war, for instance—that dumps us back to the Dark Ages or wipes us out altogether) . . . and if you then assume, as seems likely, that in that high-tech future the human race will continue to expand into space, with more and more people living on the moons and planets of the solar system, and eventually perhaps even reaching toward the stars . . . then, inevitably, one is led to conclude that the future will include war in space as well . . . and that therefore soldiers will be needed to fight those wars in space.
Space soldiers. The poor bastards who will have to put their lives on the line to enforce policies made by politicians millions of miles—or perhaps even millions of light-years—away, the ones who will do the actual fighting, and the dying, whether it’s in deep space, on an alien world, or on the airless surface of some frozen moon or asteroid. The ones who by battle’s end will be just as dead as their distant comrades on uncountable battlefields back to the dawn of time, no matter that they’re killed by a high-intensity plasma burst or the impact of an antimatter pellet rather than by a stone ax. The ones who will have to try to kill some other soldier before they can succeed in killing them, no matter if the weapon they take in hand to do that is a bronze spear or a laser gun. The ones who will wonder if they’ll live to see another dawn, whether they’re in orbit around a star in the Vega system or trudging across the frozen surface of one of Jupiter’s moons.
These space soldiers will be fighting on battlefields totally unique in the bloody history of warfare, facing tactical problems and technical challenges that no soldier has ever had to face before, wielding weapons that it may be literally impossible for us to imagine, even here at the threshold of the twenty-first century . . . but the nine science fiction writers in this book, daring and expert dreamers, take their best shot at imagining these unimaginable futures for you, in the process delivering some of the most exciting, suspenseful, action-packed, and intensely imaginative science fiction ever written.
So turn the page, and enjoy the fictions you’ll find here while they are still fictions, before they’re drafting you to take part in a campaign in Luna’s Sea of Tranquility, or around the rings of Saturn . . .
For other stories of high-tech futuristic warfare, try the Ace anthologies Future War, Invaders!, Hackers, and Isaac Asimov’s War.
THE GARDENS OF SATURN
Paul J. McAuley
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. He is considered one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that sort of revamped, updated, wide-screen Space Opera sometimes referred to as “radical hard science fiction,” and is a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick award. His other books include the novels Of The Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel; two collections of his short works, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country; and an original anthology coedited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel, Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His most recent books are Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars, which comprise a major new trilogy of ambitious scope and scale; and Confluence, set ten million years in the future. In the lushly inventive story that follows, he shows us that sometimes the aftermath of war can be every bit as deadly as the c
onflict itself . . .
###
Baker was in the pilots’ canteen, talking about the price of trace elements with a couple of factors, when someone started making trouble at the servitor. A tall skinny redhead in baggy flight pants and a tight jumper with the sleeves torn off had hooked her left arm around one of the servitor’s staples and was kicking the hell out it with her bare feet, bouncing hard each time and coming back, shouting at the machine, “You want how much for this shit?” and kicking it again.
Obviously, she hadn’t been on Phoebe very long, or she would have known that for all their girder-up-the-ass morals, the Redeemers were gougers of the worst kind. It was Baker’s nature to try and like everybody, but even he had a hard time being charitable about them. His collective could afford only basic environmental amenities when visiting other habitats, and on Phoebe those were very basic indeed—tank food and a coffin not much bigger than the lifesystem on the scow. If you wanted a shower you paid for two minutes and a hundred liters of gray water; beer or any other luxury goods were available only at premium rates. It was take it or leave it, and everyone had to take it because Phoebe’s orbit and the Redeemers’ expertise in cargo-handling and routing made it the prime resupply, rendezvous, and transfer site in all of the Saturn system.
Baker could have stayed on board his scow, of course, but even he needed to get out and about occasionally. At least here you could raise your arms over your head, and sculling about the public areas cost nothing. And besides, he liked talking to people. He had a lot of friends. He had friends everywhere he went in the system. It was the way he’d been rebuilt.
People all around the canteen started to cheer every kick the woman gave the servitor, happy to get some free entertainment, to see someone vent the frustration they all felt. “That feisty little old thing could come and work me over anytime,” one of the factors at Baker’s table said; her partner, a scarred and wrinkled woman about a hundred years old, cracked a grin and told her that it would be like setting a Titan tiger against an air cow.
At the same moment. Baker got a tingle of recognition. Like most of the public areas of the Phoebe habitat, the canteen was a basic microgravity architectural sphere, and Baker was tethered to a table upside-down above the woman, like a bat hung from the ceiling, but there was something familiar about her . . .
“I have called for help,” the servitor said in a monotonal foghorn voice. “Please desist. I have called for help.”
The woman grabbed a black cable studded with lenses which had snaked out to peer at her, said “Fuck you,” and got a round of applause when she broke it off. People, mostly men, started to shout advice to her, but then everyone fell silent, because one of the supervisors had swum into the canteen.
The creepy thing about the Redeemers wasn’t that they all had been chopped to look alike, or that you couldn’t tell which had once been male and which female, or even that they all had gray skin the colour of the thermal paint that goes over a hull before its final finish, but that they provided no cues at all as to what they might be feeling.
This one was as long and skinny as the rest, in a one-piece suit that looked as if it was made out of bandages. It moved swiftly, flowing through the air straight at the redheaded woman, who recoiled and said loudly, “This fucking machine sucked the credit out of my chip and won’t give it up.”
Everyone was looking at her as she hung with one arm casually locked around the one of the staples in the servitor’s fascia, her head turned up now to glare at the Redeemer, who kept his place in midair with minute swimming motions of one long, spidery hand, like a reef barracuda wondering whether to attack or pass by, and Baker undipped his tether because now he knew that he knew her.
Jackson. Vera Flamillion Jackson. Colonel Jackson.
Don’t do anything dumb, his sidekick said, and when Baker told it that she was an old friend, it added, Everyone’s your friend, but it isn’t good to get involved.
The woman was talking fast and low now, stopping when the Redeemer said something, shaking her head and talking again, her words lost in the hum of the fans which were pushing warm stale air about and the chatter of the people all around. Baker kicked out from the table, turning neatly in midair so he landed right-side-up by the woman, hooking an arm through the same staple from which she hung and seeing her turn and grin, recognizing him at once, as if the past thirty years had never happened.
They exchanged life stories over a couple of bulbs of cold beer. Baker’s treat because Jackson had no credit on her. It pretty much wiped out the small amount he’d set aside to spend here; against the advice of his sidekick he’d also paid the fine the Redeemer had insisted on levying. He’d have to check out of the coffin hotel and go sleep on the scow, but he didn’t mind. Jackson was an old friend, and if he remembered her, then once upon a time she must have been important to him.
They’d been teenagers in the war and although Jackson was pushing 50 now, she still looked good. Maybe a little gaunt, and with lines cross-hatching her fine-grained milk-white skin, but she still had a flirtatious way of looking at him from beneath the floating fringe of her red hair. Baker didn’t remember too much about his life before the accident, but he remembered that look, and seeing it now made him feel strange. There were black tattoos on her neck and upper arms, crude knotted swirls lacking animation, and she was missing her little finger on her right hand, but, yes, she looked good. She’d been married, he learned, her way of joining a collective that had built a habitat inside a hollowed-out asteroid. That hadn’t worked out, she wasn’t exactly clear why, and now she was here.
Once or twice their fingers brushed together and he got a tingle as her net tried to access his, but his sidekick blocked the attempts easily. Her net hadn’t been modified, it said, and just as well, because she’s dangerous.
She’s an old friend, Baker insisted, irritated by the side-kick’s paranoia. I’m not going to do anything crazy. Just talk about old times, about who I used to be.
What’s the point of that? the sidekick said. She’s trouble, and don’t say I didn’t warn you.
“I got bored with it,” Jackson was saying, meaning the collective she’d left. “Spending most of the time worrying about stabilizing the ecology. Might as well have settled down on a rock.”
“Instead of in one,” Baker said, and laughed at his own joke.
“In, out, same thing. Too many people to deal with, too much routine. I mean, have you ever tried to grow plants?” Before he could answer, she leaned at the rail of the promenade and added, “You ever get claustrophobic in a place like this?”
They were on one of the upper levels of the Shaft. It had been bored two kilometres into Phoebe’s icy mantle with a singleshot fusion laser and was capped with a diamond dome; you could look up through webs and cables and floating islands of plants and see Saturn’s small crescent tipped in the black sky. Each level was ringed around with terraced gardens glowing green under sunlamps, neatly planted out with luxury crops, even flowers, level after level of gardens ringing the well of the Shaft. Parts of the upper levels were open to visitors, but most was exclusive Redeemer territory, unknown and unknowable.
Baker said, “I used to help in the farms, but I like what I do now better.”
He was married into a collective, but he didn’t think he needed to tell her that. It was a business thing; he hardly saw any of his wives or co-husbands from one year to the next and he certainly couldn’t fuck anyone in the marriage—or vice versa—without permission from one of the elders. There’d been a sweet honeymoon week with the youngest of the collective’s wives, but that had pretty much been it.
That isn’t what counts, his sidekick said, and Baker brushed at his ear in annoyance.
Jackson said, “In the war we could go anywhere. That’s what I miss.”
“Well, we went where we were told.”
“Yeah, but we did it our way. We fucked the enemy up pretty good, too. You still see any of the guys?”
“Me either. Remember Goodluck Crowe? He must surely be dead the way he was going.”
Baker shrugged and smiled.
“That time he came in with his bird’s venturis fucked, spinning eccentrically? Crashed into one of the ports and the last of his fuel went up and bounced the remains of his ship straight back out? And then he’s found down in one of the cargo bays in his p-suit, lost in pitch darkness because his suit light got smashed. The explosion shot him out and he was so dazed he didn’t know where he was? He banged up his knee I recall, floating about in there, but that was all.”
“Well,” Baker said, still smiling, “I guess he went back to Earth.”
“How many missions did you fly?”
“I think six.” He knew exactly because he’d once paid a data miner to look up his combat record.
She said, “Do you still do that counting thing?”
“Counting thing?”
“You know, with potatoes. One potato, two potato. To count seconds. Three potato, four. You don’t remember?”