Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  ###

  Baker and Jackson got Berry out of the pool of polystyrene balls and helped him totter on shaky legs up the ramp to the outside. He flopped down on the grass like a pink barrage balloon and demanded that Jackson rub cream into his skin. That took a while, Berry grunting and sometimes giggling as Jackson rubbed coconut-scented cream into the hectares of his pink flesh. Baker was pretty sure it would end in some kind of sex and wandered off, taking big floating steps, and found some shade under a stand of umbrella trees. A herd of miniature red-haired mammoths was grazing off in the distance, moving in tentative tip-toe slow motion. A vine twisted around one of the umbrella trees and Baker picked at its grapes, each a slightly different flavour bursting on his tongue, wondering if he should reactivate his sidekick. The truth was he didn’t want to hear what it would say; it wasn’t programmed to take risks. He used his net to dial into Phoebe’s infoweb, and did a little research of his own. At last Jackson floated down beside him and told him that Berry was asleep.

  “So,” she said, “will you do it?”

  “Remind me of the percentages again.”

  “Twenty per cent goes to you, less any costs. But that’s still a lot of credit.”

  “Sure. I mean, yes, count me in.”

  He realized that he’d been thinking about it while seeming not to think about anything at all. His net was very sophisticated. It was risky, but the potential—not the silly scheme of Jackson’s—was huge.

  Jackson leaned over and kissed him; he kissed her back.

  “He’s sleeping now,” she said, after a while. “All that drinking and floating and floating and drinking does tire him out.”

  “He hasn’t asked why I’m here?”

  “I said you were my brother. He accepted that. Berry doesn’t like to think too hard about things. He’s like a kid. When he wakes up he’ll want a drink, and I’ll put something in it that’ll keep him quiet so we can get him aboard.”

  “We have to take him?”

  “I don’t like it either. But it’s the only way we can file a flight plan, and we’ll need to prove that we really do have him when we get there.”

  ###

  Once they were aboard the scow and had everything squared away, Jackson stripped off her jumper and trousers and they fucked. Baker couldn’t think of it as making love; it was as much a business transaction as his wedding night with the youngest wife of the collective. Jackson wanted to interface systems during sex, the way they used to, or so she claimed, but Baker held back. She fell straight asleep afterwards, and Baker thought about it all over again, looking for loose threads and unexpected angles.

  They had gone aboard late at night. Jackson had slipped a tranquilizer into Berry’s nightcap and he had fallen asleep almost immediately. They had used a luggage cart to get him to the docks, no problem there; the Redeemers didn’t care what was loaded onto ships as long as they got their tax. That was another reason why Phoebe was so successful.

  There hadn’t been a problem stowing Berry away, either; Jackson had already thought of that.

  As for the rest, the run itself was fairly simple, and Baker had already filed a flight plan, getting clearance with Berry’s identity code just as Jackson had said he would. If Sri Hong-Owen had an agent in the intelligence network of the pan-Saturn flight control system, she’d already know someone was on the way; she might already be taking countermeasures. Baker would have to think of what she might do, and how to get around it.

  He was scared but also elated. After going over everything in his head, he could at last fall asleep.

  But when he woke up, things had gone badly wrong.

  ###

  He woke up because Jackson was slapping him, slapping his face, slapping him hard in a back-and-forth rhythm with the same angry intensity with which she had attacked the servitor, saying over and over, “You fucker. Come on out of it, you fucker. Come on. Don’t die on me.”

  He tried to get away but he was trussed like a food animal in the web hammock in the centre of the scow’s compact lifesystem. Jackson’s left hand gripped his right wrist tightly. His head hurt badly and behind the pain there was a terrible absence. Stuff hung in front of Jackson’s angry, intent, face—columns, indices, a couple of thumbnails. She had jacked her net into his, broken into it using some kind of Trojan horse, and was using it to run the ship. Hand-holding, the pilots had called it, a kind of piggy-backing that had been used in training.

  The soundscape of the scow had changed. Beneath the usual whir of fans, the steady chug of the humidifier and the nearly subliminal hum of the lights were the intermittent thump of attitude thrusters and a chorus of pings and popping noises.

  Barker jerked his head back so that Jackson’s next blow missed; she swung halfway around with the momentum. “What,” he said, so full of fear that he thought for a moment he would start to cry. He swallowed something salty and said, “What have you done?”

  “You work it out,” she said, and let go of his wrist and turned her back on him.

  It took him less than a second to call up the data. The scow was in orbit around Phoebe, docked with its chain of cargo pods and slowly rotating in barbecue mode.

  A thumbnail picture showed the patchwork of the little moon’s tightly curving globe. Only 200 kilometres in diameter, it was a captured unmodified primitive object, mostly carbonaceous material mixed with water ice, almost entirely grown over with vacuum organisms which used the energy of sunlight to turn methane ice and carbonaceous tars formed five billion years ago, when the Solar System had first condensed, into useful carbon compounds. The patches were of all shapes but only four muted colours; orange-brown, reddish-brown, sooty black, mottled gray. Phoebe was like a dented and battered patchwork ball or a gigantic version of the four-colour map problem, curving away sharply in every direction.

  Another thumbnail showed Berry floating in faint red light, half-filling the scow’s water tank. An air mask was clamped over his face. Baker had objected to Jackson’s idea on hygiene grounds, but she had pointed out that the water was recycled anyway, and the filter system could easily be rerouted to clean the water coming out of the tank as well as that going in. Berry seemed to be asleep, curled up like a huge late-term embryo, the umbilical cord of airline and nutrient feed connected to his face rather than his belly, hands clasped piously under his chins, a continuous chain of bubbles trickling from the vent of his air mask.

  Baker clicked everything off. Jackson was hunched up at the far end of the cramped lifesystem, an arm’s length away. She had livid marks on her throat and deep scratches on her arms were still oozing blood into the air. She said, “You almost died. Your net shut down your vagus reflexes when I hacked it. And when I tried to revive you, you tried to kill me. Don’t you know what they did to you?”

  “You shouldn’t have messed with it,” Baker said.

  “I did it to free you!”

  Jackson’s face was pinched white, harsh and old-looking; only her bright blue eyes seemed alive. She shuddered all over and said more quietly, “They made you into a slave. A thing.”

  They had both had military neural nets installed when they had been inducted, but Baker’s net had been considerably upgraded after his accident; it was now more like a symbiont than a machine enhancement of his nervous system. When Jackson had jacked into it, she had been able to access only a few of its functions. She had got the ship up into orbit, and docked manually with the train of cargo pods, but she hadn’t been able to activate the flight plan he’d filed. And when she had tried to hack into its root directory, his net had easily repelled her efforts and had triggered a number of defense routines.

  Baker said, “Why are you doing this? Aren’t we friends?”

  “Because I’m tired of giving blow-jobs to Berry. Because I can’t bear to see an old comrade turned into a zombie so dumb he doesn’t even know what he is. Because I was in prison in Angola for ten years and I’d sooner die than go back.”

  Half of the Redeemer
s’ business was running the port. The other half was running the correctional facilities for the Saturn system—the vacuum farms. Angola was the worst of them; eight out of ten prisoners died before completing their sentence.

  Baker said, “Well, I did wonder about the tattoos. What were you in for?”

  “Just load and run the flight plan,” Jackson said, and smiled bloodlessly. “Okay, maybe I got greedy and fucked up. I need you, and I won’t let you back out.”

  Baker said, “I wasn’t your first choice of pilot, was I? You had an agreement with someone else, and I bet that’s why you were in the pilots’ canteen. But then you saw me, and thought you could make a better deal.”

  “I still rescued you,” she said.

  “How much were you going to get? From the first deal.”

  “It was the same as the one we made, except I was to get the 20-percent cut. But that’s blown away. We’re in this together or we’re both dead, and Berry. too. Your call.”

  It might be a bluff, but Jackson didn’t look like the kind of person who would start something she couldn’t finish. Baker pulled down the flight plan, checked it over out of habit, and activated it.

  The rumble of the scow’s motor filled the lifesystem. Acceleration gripped Baker; he drifted gently onto the padding at the rear of the cabin. Jackson hooked an arm around a staple and stared at him from what was now definitely the ceiling. And in the tank, Berry woke up amidst clashing pressure waves which distorted the red light into clashing lines and sheets and plaintively asked what was going on.

  ###

  Neither Baker nor Jackson slept during the 65 hours of the flight. Their military nets could keep them awake for more than a week, switching consciousness back and forth between the right and left hemispheres of their brains. Sometimes Baker would feel a little sluggish and his saliva would taste strange, but there were no other side effects.

  Jackson didn’t stay mad at him, but she remained wary. It wasn’t his fault that she had activated the defense routines. They were there to protect the collective’s investment. He told her this, and that he was happy and liked the life he had been given, but it only provoked a torrent of abuse. He wished that he had his sidekick to explain things, to help sort out the muddle, but Jackson had suppressed it—he had the horrible feeling that she had in fact erased it. When he asked her about this, she said that it was time that he started thinking for himself. He could never be the man he’d been when she had known him, but he could be his own man now.

  She did unbend enough to tell him a little of her life. While he had been drifting in the crippled singleship, neither alive nor dead, she had used her sign-off pay to start up a haulage company. When that had failed, outcompeted by rail guns, she had joined a collective long enough to know that it wasn’t for her, and then had become a smuggler, intercepting packages of forbidden technologies in the rings while on apparently innocent cargo runs. An industrial spy had broken up the cartel she had mostly worked for, and someone in the cartel had given her up to protect himself, and that was how she had ended up in the vacuum farms of Phoebe.

  She was still bitter about it. During the Quiet War, the Outer System colonists, split into more than a dozen rival enclaves, had hardly been able to fight back at all. In only three months, their infrastructures had been so devastated that they had been forced to surrender their hegemony. But what had happened since made you wonder who had really won after all, Jackson said. The tweaks had the upper hand in the Outer System, even if their various assemblies, moots, councils, conclaves and congresses were now in principle subservient to the Three Powers Occupying Force. Despite incentives and tax breaks, the various emigration schemes sponsored by the victors of the Quiet War had mostly failed; new settlers couldn’t compete with established cooperatives and collectives, and unless they signed away their right to return to Earth in exchange for engineering, they were not allowed to have children and tended to die young of problems associated with living in microgravity. Meanwhile, the central administration of the Outer System was falling apart as adapted colonists began to spread through the thousands of dirty snowballs and rocks of the Kuiper Belt. There was talk of another war, one in which Jackson wouldn’t be able to fight. She was too old and slow for combat now; she had been sidelined by history.

  Baker listened patiently to her rants. He tried to talk with Berry, too, but Jackson had set up a feed of lemon-flavored alcohol and the man was only partly coherent. In one of his more lucid moments, he said, “You shouldn’t go near my mother. She’s dangerous. All of her are dangerous.”

  “You mean she has other children?”

  “You could call them that,” Berry said. “They’re crazy bad.” His voice, muffled by the airmask, sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a well.

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

  “It isn’t like that. Alder would know, I guess . . . They look after me, always have, so maybe they’re not so bad. Not to me. They saved me other times . . .”

  Baker felt a faint stirring, as if his sidekick was about to waken. He wished it would, if only to say that it told him so. When nothing happened, he said, “Other times? What happened, Berry?”

  Berry was silent for a while. Then he said, “I should get out of here now. My skin is all puffy.”

  Baker tried to imagine what the lifesystem would be like with 160 kilos of dripping wet Berry crammed into it. He said, “You hang in there. Play your sagas.”

  “It isn’t the same,” Berry said. “The emulation in this system is horrible. When can you get me back to the hotel?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. Soon.”

  “I’d like margarita. That always goes down smooth.”

  “Maybe you should stop drinking.”

  “What’s the point of stopping? Get me some margarita and I might help you out.”

  Jackson was amused by Baker’s attempts to talk with Berry. She said that you couldn’t get any sense out of the man. His brain had been fried in alcohol, most of the switches jammed open or jammed closed, whole areas dead and blasted. Like a low-grade robot, he could follow his routines, but had trouble with anything outside them.

  “You want to know anything, you ask me,” she said.

  Baker thought that he had already learnt something useful from Berry. He said, “What will happen after we insert into orbit?”

  “I’ll tell you on a need-to-know basis, just like the old times.”

  But the old times were gone forever. His original self must have loved her fiercely for a residue of that love to have survived death, and Baker, who was vicariously fascinated by other peoples’ lives, and watched a lot of the old psychodramas when he wasn’t working, thought wistfully that once upon a time they must have been like Romeo and Juliet. But whatever they’d once been, that was then and this was now.

  ###

  The scow accelerated for more than 40 hours. The idea was to come in on a fast, short trajectory, decelerating hard at the last moment. Baker spent much of that time watching the view, a thumbnail of the lifesystem in one corner to let him keep an eye on Jackson—he was worried that she might suddenly try something stupid.

  Phoebe’s orbit was not only retrograde, but inclined to the equatorial plane of Saturn. As the scow drove inwards, the entire system was spread out ahead and below, nine major moons and more than a hundred smaller bodies, Saturn a pale half-disc at the centre, circled by his rings like an exquisite bit of jewelry.

  Baker never tired of this privileged view. He spent a lot of time watching it while working through his options. He wasn’t as brain-damaged as Jackson thought, and the enhancements to his net gave him a lot of computational power. He worked up several scenarios and played the simulations over and over, finally choosing the simplest one with a sense of doors closing irrecoverably behind him. He wondered if Jackson had inserted a parasitic eavesdropper into his net; if she had, she gave no sign that she knew what he was planning.

  As Saturn grew closer, th
e ring system began to resolve details in the sunlit arc that swept out beyond the planet; two unequal halves separated by the gap of the Cassini division, each half further divided into fine parallel bands, with dark irregular spokes in the bright B ring that could be seen to rotate if watched long enough.

  Then the motor cut out and they were in freefall again. There were only a couple of hours in turnover. Jackson spent much of them supervising the decoupling of the scow from the cargo train. Normally, it would recouple on the other end of the train, thrusters pointing ahead for deceleration. But Jackson’s manual link closed down halfway through the maneuver and the scow fired off several orientation bursts, turned end-for-end and immediately lit its main engines in a brief burn. At the same time, the thrusters of the cargo train started to fire.

  Berry started complaining over the link; Jackson snarled at him to shut up and was suddenly right in Baker’s face, swarming down the lifesystem cabin against the pull of the thrust and grabbing his right wrist. A Trojan horse smashed its way into his net, spilling voracious subroutines. For a panicky minute, he was deaf and dumb and blind—it was like being raped from the inside out.

  Light and sound came back. Baker discovered that he was in freefall again. Jackson had shoved away from him and was studying him intently, her blue eyes cold behind the tendrils of red hair that drifted loose over her face.

  Baker closed up all the indices and files she’d pulled open and said shakily, “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Christ, they really did a number on you, Baker. You’re not a man any more. You’re a bundle of routines. You’re a lapdog. This is your chance to get free of the leash, and you’re fucking it up.”