Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  With the taxi gone, the stars seemed remote. Unreal.

  They used to mean so much to me, those faraway stars. What happened to the boy who would stand alone on a midnight hillside, warm wind curling round him, looking up at this same clutter of stars, imagining himself out among them? Gone, I suppose. Erased along with the hillside, with the world on which it sat, gone with all the people who lived there, ground away to ashes and dust. Gone to nothing along with so much else, until I sometimes imagine only I remain.

  Foolishness.

  The taxi pilot, a Spinfellow who’d looked to me like nothing so much as an old brass bed frame collapsed against the ship’s control nexus in a shambles of broken coil springs, had been some kind of a soldier in the war, though clearly not the same kind as me. A pilot, I guess, killing clean and cold.

  Hard to tell with something so utterly alien as a Spinfellow, a grammatical voice chattering in my head like the screeching bedsprings of a remote, manic fuck, but he’d seemed almost sorry about the way his people had used mine to break the age-old deadlock of a war that went on and on. Sorry, but it’s what you get, showing up at just the right moment, humanity at the bloated endstage of an expanding-shell culture, just when cannon fodder was needed most.

  Not so many of us now, hm?

  I’d tried to accommodate his wish to talk, telling about all the wonderful battles I’d seen, all the Starfish I’d killed, but I kept falling silent, going away. Finally he gave up, glad to abandon me here on the edge of the void with my pitiful pile of junk.

  It’s funny how what I remember most now is just waking up at a repair station, glitter-eyed unmod nurse bending over me, seeing me awake. “Welcome back, Mr. Ashe.”

  Welcome the hell back.

  Your Squadmates? No, sorry, you were the only one who made it.

  I didn’t find out ’til much later that the Starfish had found our little corner of space, had come in and cleaned out humanity’s clustered homeworlds, hoping to stem the tide of cannon fodder and turn back a sudden, improbable Spinfellow victory.

  Remembered battles? No. They all smear together now, as if there were only one, full of fire and pain, very little of it my own.

  As I stood still, looking at nothing, I could see the stars turn, counter to the habitat’s slow spin, rising up from below my feet, crossing straight up, disappearing somewhere behind me. No sun. No other light. This had been an interstellar depot out on the edge of what’d once been human space, seven light-years from the nearest star system, abandoned now for centuries, its running lights gone dark.

  I’d seen these sorts of things before. Knew what I’d find inside.

  Knew what I hoped to find.

  Finally, stars grown stale as everything else, I picked up my gear and turned away, facing the dark habitat, letting my eyes see infrared so I could locate the door.

  There.

  Might as well go on in.

  ###

  From the heights of the end-cap mountains of an old-style cylindrical habitat, even under the bright midday glare of full stemshine illumination, you can see details almost five hundred kilometers away, tall structures like mountains peeking out of the haze, floating like dull purple ghosts behind Rayleigh-scattering sky.

  This had been a big residential-industrial complex, one of the biggest they made in the old days, out on the expanding frontier, when humanity was mighty and young, giant freighters pushing lightspeed as they plied the void between the suns, bold explorers plumbing the remotest deep, in our thousand years as a starfaring species pushing hundreds of light-years in all directions away from old Earth.

  I could feel the stemshine’s light prickling on my skin, turning me green wherever it touched. I pulled off my tunic and dropped it on top of the backpack, pack sucking it in, tucking it away, and watched the fuzz of downy hair on my chest turn from coal black to spun gold, pallid skin underneath suffusing briefly pink, then pale spring green slowly darkening.

  Organelles. Cellular well-being. As if God were in his Heaven and everything was right with this world, any world, even with my world.

  I can picture what the habitat must have been like before the war, back when I was a boy. It was in this sector of the frontier that First Contact came, and how excited they must have been, receiving news that one of our explorer fleets had stumbled on the wreck of an alien starship.

  Imagine the scene. That ruined ship, complete with survivors, sprawled on the surface of an inhospitable world. And those lovely, grateful aliens, little beings like turquoise wolves, with spindly arms where their ears should be and great, golden, many-faceted eyes, bursting through a tissue-thin communication barrier with their superior data-processing capability, then carefully explaining that their ship, once repaired, could go faster than light, and would we be interested in the technology?

  I remember how excited my father was when the news came through the datawarren. Yes, we’d fix their ship, help them go home, and then the stars would be ours, more stars than ever populated any of our dreams.

  Down in the lowlands, landscape curving up to right and left, stretching out straightaway into the mist ahead as far as the eye could see, disappearing in blue, there were clouds, white and gray, and green jungle, blotched with the shadows of those clouds, patches of fog, the twisted lightning bolts of artistically laid-out rivers, sandhills, dune fields, red rock canyons, and the dark, misty crags of faraway mountains.

  At the end of the world, so remote its foothills were lost in the mist, one mountain seemed to have a pennon of snow blowing from its peak.

  When I was a boy, living on the skin of a eutropic habitat, with its down-curving horizon like a natural world cast in miniature, we had mountains like that. Exactly like that, modeled, I’m sure, on the same original.

  That was the world where I lived, still growing up, when the first Spinfellow scoutship nosed into human space, long before we managed to fix the refugees’ ship, before we even understood they were refugees, or what they were running from.

  Straight down, looking down the sheer crags of the end-cap mountains, a tiny dot circled, rising and falling on the thermals. Probably as high as it can go, air thinning out after only a few dozen kilometers. And big, whatever it was, visible without magnification from so far away. Do I want to see it? No, though it might be just what I’m looking for.

  I shouldered my pack, picked up the rest of my gear in one hand, turned and started walking, clockwise, in the direction of spin, looking for the elevator down. It would be broken, most likely, but I knew I could jump down the shaft, slowing myself as necessary by squeezing the railguide.

  Sooner or later, I’ll get where I’m going.

  No hurry.

  No Goddamned hurry at all.

  ###

  From down on one of its floor panels, a cylinder habitat’s not that different from a natural world. To be sure, the world rises around you like an English saddle, but you might be in a big valley, after all, and . . . well. A human being’s like a bug in the grass, more concerned with his own little space than the grandeur beyond.

  I got out my gun and assembled it, rearranged my pack, tucking other gear in to take its place, took a long look up into brilliant blue heaven, shimmery stemshine hanging like a bar of molten gold trying to hide behind the sky, then set off down the game trail.

  There were patches of forest separated by broad, grassy fields, fields dotted by thousands of little yellow flowers. Here and there were odd piles of ruin, things that looked a little bit like collapsed buildings and broken-down bulldozers, crawled all over by red strangler vine.

  I wonder how long it took to get like this?

  How long did it take for the trees in the parks to realize they were free, free to seed the winds, be fruitful, multiply, and cover their world? How long before the grassy walkways jumped their fences or tunneled underneath the way gramineae will, taking over every space in sight? What job did the strangler vines have, back when they were slaves?

  I wonder
how long it took this world to grow so beautiful.

  Something tiny and black arrowed toward me, arrowing out of the misty blue sky, circling my head, round and round, fluttering like a bat lost in daylight.

  It screamed something, wordlike, shrill, laughing, hysterical, laughing at me, cartoon creature imposed on an Impressionist’s overwrought landscape, then banked away, soaring between two copses of tall, thin, swaying brown trees, up, up, gone.

  From far away, far in the same direction, there came a brief rat-a-tat-tat, like someone imitating machine-gun fire on a child’s tin drum.

  I stood still, not really waiting for it to come back and talk to me, breathing in the scent of a broken-down world. Here was the turpentine smell of old pine trees. There the fresh stink of new-mown hay. Behind both, almost hidden, a soft, alluring tang of half-burnt silicone lubricant.

  Used to smell that a lot, when we worked with the tank companies. A reassuring smell. Infantrymen and tanks. The smell of history, I can see them now, down all the centuries, marching together into the guns.

  Beyond the trees there was a boulder field, uptilted rock hiding the forward horizon. Not that you’d call it that, landscape just going on and on until it faded away, fading into the sky. I found a way up, hopping from stone to stone, and . . .

  The thing reared in front of me just as I crested the highest rock, casting a giant’s shadow. Thing like a dinosaur, I guess you’d say. Red eyes and scaly skin, blotched and freckled with a thousand metallic tints. Clutching hands and broad, toothy jaws.

  Silver teeth like so many triangles, one just like the next, shining in the stemlight, dripping pale yellow oil like saliva.

  Red eyes looking down at me.

  Seeing me.

  Knowing me for what I am?

  I’d heard this place had been used for a military hardware dump, not long before the end of the war, just for throwing things away, useless things that were too hard to destroy.

  Things you wouldn’t want to bring home with you.

  Especially if you still imagined you had a home.

  So what would this be, with its red eyes rolling, hungry jaws opening and closing like that?

  I remembered a construction battalion I’d run across once.

  Yeah. Maybe one of those things.

  I thumbed the charge button on my gun and listened to the condenser whine.

  There! That caught its attention.

  Put the gun to my shoulder and looked through the sight.

  The green light winked once. Ready.

  We stood still, two old war machines, locked in one last tableau.

  Red eyes looking at me, waiting.

  Oh, God.

  Red eyes full of fear.

  I lowered the gun and looked up at the thing, smelling its hot oil breath, breath like summer sunshine.

  I thumbed the détente button, feeling the gun’s charge dissipate.

  Go ahead then.

  Red eyes staring down at me.

  For Christ’s sake.

  Just a digging machine, that’s all.

  It turned and scrambled away, claws crackling in the dirt, kicking up a sandstorm that obscured half the sky, kicking up boulders the size of cars as it fled, boulders bounding around, crashing down on my pile of rocks, boulders exploding, splinters flying.

  None of them managed to crash down on me.

  Not that it would have done any good.

  After a while, I shouldered the gun, hanging it from the strap, and walked on, emptying myself of useless feeling.

  ###

  Toward the end of a long afternoon, twilight’s first glimmer signaled by the stemshine’s gold taking on a sullen, brassy hue, I found the valley of my dreams, gentle vale dropping down from the endless plains, slim indigo rivers winding across a hilly lowland, dotted with clusters of trees in the lesser vales between, valley opening on a northward vista, landscape fading out in blue as always.

  I picked a campsite at the crest of a low hill, close by the side of the river, hill caught in a little oxbow bend, dropped my pack, and watched the tent erect itself, supports walking like insect limbs, shell slithering into place, stakes screwing themselves deep in the dirt.

  There was a soft breeze blowing down the valley, taking me from behind, warm on my bare skin, skin made a rich, blackening green by the long day’s ultraviolet blaze, gust of wind tossing my hair, then running away down the valley and away, marking its passage through waves of grass.

  Distant buzzing.

  I turned toward the sound, and there was a tiny biplane dipping over the landscape, up and down, back up again, wings painted white, flashing in stemlight, a red stripe here, another one there, swooping low over pale splotches in clustered bits of forest, dusting them with a transparent gray nutrient cloud.

  Like a living thing.

  Living and wise.

  Soft buzzing like a faraway insect.

  I opened my scanner array and listened for him over the sudden roar of the datawarren. There. Discordant robot chatter, no one talking to no one listening, remarks addressed to the ghosts of long-erased controllers.

  Snap.

  Silence again.

  Fading buzz of a toylike engine.

  Nearby chitter of something small. A clatter of little tin gears.

  I went down to the riverside, knelt on crunchy gravel, thrust my head into the deep blue water and drank. A hint of metallic salt. The strong flavor of gasoline, gasoline cooked up from old cometary CHON, leaking from something dead, way upstream.

  I opened my eyes underwater, shifting my visual peak away from green, on toward blue, and watched shadows materialize out of the murk. There, there, and there. Sleek shapes, not so much like fish, but close enough.

  Who knows what they might originally have been for? Holding position against the sluggish current with their lazily turning propellers.

  I stood, cold water streaming down my chest and back, soaking into the waist of my pants, walked back up onto the bill, and rummaged in the pack. Cookstove? Well, maybe later. Get it out, anyway. I found the case with my fishing gear, tucked it under my arm and walked down to the river, started walking upstream aways, water bubbling softly on my right, looking out at the rocks and eddies.

  Cluster of roots over there. Lots of shadows underwater.

  Some flat land there where the soil had washed away, covered up with water now, forming something like a swamp in among the trees. Farther in, some of the trees had been gnawed around the base by something that must imagine it could play at being a beaver. Maybe if I looked long enough, I might find a dam and pond, pond on its way to becoming a meadow.

  That’d be nice.

  There was a cloud of . . . I don’t know, call them midges, little black dots rising and falling over the swamp. Microscopic vision, quickly tuned, showed me a glint of chromium steel, little blue glass eyes, the transparent blur of tiny silver wings.

  It’s so Goddamned pretty here.

  After a while, as the sky slowly turned from brass to lustrous red-gold, I found a big, flat black rock sticking out into the river, rock warm as a dying griddle from daylong stemlight. Water was flowing around the rock, humped up into a long, arcing bowshock, curve broken farther out by a string of rounded boulders.

  I put the case down and opened it up, pulling out rod and reel, unfolding it, snapping everything into place, stood again and played its preylight out over the river. There. Things clustered beyond the rocks, floating in quiet lee water. Some bigger fish, if that’s what you want to call them, deep down, over by the far bank.

  I put my thumb on the bait button and slid one finger through the flycaster’s trigger guard. Made my fisherman’s stance and stood still, not quite taking aim.

  Overhead, the sky was turning to muddy orange, stemshine a broad, hazy band of crimson, sky around it stained pale brown. Nothing else. No clouds. No . . .

  High, high up, a silent vee of black dots, drifting along.

  My eyes zoomed in, uninvited, s
howing me the shape of each black dot.

  Balloonsailers, half black shark, half dirigible, half jet engine, soaring through the sky, each one twenty meters from stem to stern. See their gaping mouths, the dark serrated shapes of matte-gray berylloceramic teeth? See the glimmer of their silver eyes?

  If I listened carefully, I could hear the intermittent mutter of their engines, driving them against the wind.

  Their fins twisted and the vee arced, turning away, sinking deep in the dull mist of nightfall.

  What if they’d seen me?

  Was I ready?

  Don’t know.

  I looked back down, at the flycasting rod in my hands, line unfired, baits unmounted, looked out across the now black water, water picking orange-and-red highlights from the sky.

  In there somewhere, the first surrogates were waiting, undead.

  I sat down, laying the rod gently by my side, lay back on the warm surface of the rock, warm stone like blood against my skin, cradled the back of my head in one palm, and looked up into the sky, watching it darken.

  Soon, I thought, the stars will come out.

  Surely they made this place have a night full of stars.

  I remember once, on leave, how some of us went spearfishing in a zero-gee habitat we’d found. Not a human habitat. Not human at all. No, this was far from the homes we knew, deep in what had once been Starfish territory, now in Spinfellow hands, thanks in no small measure to us. It was a wonderful place, a great big bag of a world, full of thick, sweet air, floating globule ponds, seas made entirely of mist.

  We swam among them, jetting stretches of air with our backpacks, exploring airy tangles of seaweed jungle. Diving deep in great, clear, undulating amoebas of water.

  I don’t know where we found the spearguns.

  I remember we had fun, shooting those silvery things, things that screamed as they died, even under water. Killing them, cutting them up, cooking them, eating them.