Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Nervously now, Irravel and Markarian advanced round the tunnel’s bend, cleated shoes whispering through ice barely more substantial than smoke. They had to keep their suit exhausts from touching the walls if they didn’t want to get blown back by superheated steam. Irravel jumped again at the pattern of photons on her visor and then forced calm, telling herself it was another mirage.

  Except this time it stayed.

  ###

  Markarian opened fire, squeezing rounds past the servitor. It lurched aside, a gaping hole in its carapace. Black crabs came round the bend, encrusted with sensors and guns. The first reached the ruined servitor and dismembered it with ease. If only there’d been time to activate and program the greenfly machines they’d have ripped through the pirates like a host of furies, treating them as terraformable matter.

  And maybe us too, Irravel thought.

  Something flashed through the clouds of steam; an electromagnetic pulse that turned Irravel’s suit sluggish, as if every joint had corroded. The whine of the circulator died to silence, leaving only her frenzied breathing. Something pressed against her backpack. She turned slowly around, wary of falling against the walls. There were crabs everywhere. The chamber in which they’d been cornered was littered with the bodies of the other crew members; pink trails of blood or ice reaching from other tunnels. They’d been killed and dragged here.

  Two words jumped to mind: kill yourself. But first she had to kill Markarian, in case he lacked the nerve himself. She couldn’t see his face through his visor. That was good. Painfully, she pointed the gun toward him and squeezed the trigger. But instead of firing, the gun shivered in her hands, stowing itself into a quarter of its operational volume. “Thank you for using this weapon system,” it said cheerfully.

  Irravel let it drift to the ground.

  A new voice rasped in her helmet. “If you’re thinking of surrendering, now might not be a bad time.”

  “Bastard,” Irravel said softly.

  “Really the best you can manage?” The language was Canasian—what Irravel and Markarian had spoken on Fand—but heavily accented, as if the native tongue was Norte or Russish, or spoken with an impediment. “Bastard’s quite a compliment compared to some of the things my clients come up with.”

  “Give me time; I’ll work on it.”

  “Positive attitude—that’s good.” The lid of a crab hinged up, revealing the prone form of a man in a mesh of motion-sensors. He crawled from the mesh and stepped onto the ice, wearing a space suit formed from segmented metal plates. Totems had been welded to the armour, around holographic starscapes infested with serpentine monsters and scantily clad maidens.

  “Who are you?”

  “Captain Run Seven.” He stepped closer, examining her suit nameplate. “But you can call me Seven, Irravel Veda.”

  “I hope you burn in hell, Seven.”

  Seven smiled—she could see the curve of his grin through his visor; the oddly upturned nostrils of his nose above it. “I’m sensing some negativity here, Irravel. I think we need to put that behind us, don’t you?”

  Irravel looked at her murdered adjutants. “Maybe if you tell me which one was the traitor.”

  “Traitor?”

  “You seemed to have no difficulty finding us.”

  “Actually, you found us.” It was a woman’s voice this time. “We use lures—tampering with commercial beacons, like the scavenger’s.” She emerged from one of the other attack machines, wearing a suit similar to Seven’s, except that it displayed the testosterone-saturated male analogues of his space-maidens; all rippling torsos and chromed codpieces.

  “Wreckers,” Irravel breathed.

  “Yeah. Ships home in on the beacons, then find they ain’t going anywhere in a hurry. We move in from the halo.”

  “Disclose all our confidential practices while you’re at it, Mirsky,” Seven said.

  She glared at him through her visor. “Veda would have figured it out.”

  “We’ll never know now, will we?”

  “What does it matter?” she said. “Gonna kill them anyway, aren’t you?”

  Seven flashed an arc of teeth filed to points and waved a hand toward the female pirate. “Allow me to introduce Mirsky, our loose-tongued but efficient information retrieval specialist. She’s going to take you on a little trip down memory lane; see if we can’t remember those access codes.”

  “What codes?”

  “It’ll come back to you,” Seven said.

  They were taken through the tunnels, past half-assembled mining machines, onto the surface and then into the pirate ship. The ship was huge: most of it living space. Cramped corridors snaked through hydroponics galleries of spring wheat and dwarf papaya, strung with xenon lights. The ship hummed constantly with carbon dioxide scrubbers, the fetid air making Irravel sneeze. There were children everywhere, frowning at the captives. The pirates obviously had no reefersleep technology: they stayed warm the whole time, and some of the children Irravel saw had probably been born after the Hirondelle had arrived here.

  They arrived at a pair of interrogation rooms where they were separated. Irravel’s room held a couch converted from an old command seat, still carrying warning decals. A console stood in one corner. Painted torture scenes fought for wallspace with racks of surgical equipment; drills, blades and ratcheted contraptions speckled with rust.

  Irravel breathed deeply. Hyperventilation could have an anaesthetic effect. Her conditioning would in any case create a state of detachment: the pain would be no less intense, but she would feel it at one remove.

  She hoped.

  The pirates fiddled with her suit, confused by the modern design, until they stripped her down to her shipboard uniform. Mirsky leant over her. She was small-boned and dark-skinned, dirty hair rising in a topknot, eyes mismatched shades of azure. Something clung to the side of her head above the left ear; a silver box with winking status lights. She fixed a crown to Irravel’s head then made adjustments on the console.

  “Decided yet?” Captain Run Seven said, sauntering into the room. He was unlatching his helmet.

  “What?”

  “Which of our portfolio of interrogation packages you’re going to opt for.”

  She was looking at his face now. It wasn’t really human. Seven had a man’s bulk and shape, but there was at least as much of the pig in his face. His nose was a snout, his ears two tapered flaps framing a hairless pink skull. Pale eyes evinced animal cunning.

  “What the hell are you?”

  “Excellent question,” Seven said, clicking a finger in her direction. His bare hand was dark-skinned and feminine. “To be honest, I don’t really know. A genetics experiment, perhaps? Was I the seventh failure, or the first success?”

  “Are you sure you want an honest answer on that?”

  He ignored her. “All I know is that I’ve been here in the halo around Luyten 726-8—for as long as I can remember.”

  “Someone sent you here?”

  “In a tiny automated spacecraft; perhaps an old lifepod. The ship’s governing personality raised me as well as it could, attempted to make of me a well-rounded individual.” Seven trailed off momentarily. “Eventually I was found by a passing ship. I staged what might be termed a hostile takeover bid. From then on I’ve had an organization largely recruited from my client base.”

  “You’re insane. It might have worked once, but it won’t work with us.”

  “Why should you be any different?”

  “Neural conditioning. I treat the cargo as my offspring—all 20,000 of them. I can’t betray them in any way.”

  Seven smiled his piggy smile. “Funny; the last client thought that, too.”

  ###

  Sometime later Irravel woke alone in a reefersleep casket. She remembered only dislocated episodes of interrogation. There was the memory of a kind of sacrifice, and, later, of the worst terror she could imagine—so intense that she could not bring its cause to mind. Underpinning everything was the certainty t
hat she had not given up the codes.

  So why was she still alive?

  Everything was quiet and cold. Once she was able to move, she found a suit and wandered the Hirondelle until she reached a porthole. They were still lashed to the comet. The other craft was gone; presumably en route back to the base in the halo where the pirates must have had a larger ship.

  She looked for Markarian, but there was no sign of him.

  Then she checked the 20-sleeper chambers; the thousand-berth dormitories. The chamber doors were all open. Most of the sleepers were still there. They’d been butchered, carved open for implants, minds pulped by destructive memory-trawling devices. The horror was too great for any recognizable emotional response. The conditioning made each death feel like a stolen part of her.

  Yet something kept her on the edge of sanity: the discovery that 200 sleepers were missing. There was no sign that they’d been butchered like the others, which left the possibility that they’d been abducted by the pig. It was madness; it would not begin to compensate for the loss of the others—but her psychology allowed no other line of thought.

  She could find them again.

  ###

  Her plan was disarmingly simple. It crystallized in her mind with the clarity of a divine vision. It would be done.

  She would repair the ship. She would hunt down Seven. She would recover the sleepers from him. And enact whatever retribution she deemed fit.

  ###

  She found the chamber where the four Conjoiners had slept, well away from the main dormitories, in part of the ship where the pirates were not likely to have wandered. She was hoping she could revive them and seek their assistance. There seemed no way they could make things worse for her. But her hopes faded when she saw the scorch marks of weapon blasts around the bulkhead; the door forced.

  She stepped inside anyway.

  They’d been a sect on Mars, originally; a clique of cyberneticists with a particular fondness for self-experimentation. In 2190, their final experiment had involved distributed processing—allowing their enhanced minds to merge into one massively parallel neural net. The resultant event—a permanent, irrevocable escalation to a new mode of consciousness—was known as the Transenlightenment.

  There’d been a war, of course.

  Demarchists had long seen both sides. They used neural augmentation themselves, policed so that they never approached the Conjoiner threshold. They’d brokered the peace, defusing the suspicion around the Conjoiners. Conjoiners had fuelled Demarchist expansion from Europa with their technologies, fused in the white-heat of Transenlightenment. Four of them were along as observers because the Hirondelle used their ramscoop drives.

  Irravel still didn’t trust them.

  And maybe it didn’t matter. The reefersleep units—fluted caskets like streamlined coffins—were riddled with blast holes. Grimacing against the smell, Irravel examined the remains inside. They’d been cut open, but the pirates seemed to have abandoned the job halfway through, not finding the kinds of implants they were expecting. And maybe not even recognizing that they were dealing with anything other than normal humans, Irravel thought—especially if the pirates who’d done this hadn’t been among Seven’s more experienced crewmembers: just trigger-happy thugs.

  She examined the final casket; the one furthest from the door. It was damaged, but not so badly as the others. The display cartouches were still alive, a patina of frost still adhering to the casket’s lid. The Conjoiner inside looked intact: the pirates had never reached him. She read his nameplate: Remontoire.

  “Yeah, he’s a live one,” said a voice behind Irravel. “Now back off real slow.”

  Heart racing, Irravel did as she was told. Slowly, she turned around, facing the woman whose voice she recognized.

  “Mirsky?” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s your lucky day.” Mirsky was wearing her suit, but without the helmet, making her head seem shrunken in the moat of her neck-ring. She had a gun on Irravel, but the way she pointed it was half-hearted, as if this was a stage in their relationship she wanted to get over as quickly as possible.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, Veda. Trying to figure out how much shit we’re in; how hard it’ll be to get this ship moving again. Guess we had the same idea about the Conjoiners. Seven went berserk when he heard they’d been killed, but I figured it was worth checking how thorough the job had been.”

  “Stop, slow down, start at the beginning. Why aren’t you with Seven?”

  Mirsky pushed past her and consulted the reefersleep indicators. “Seven and me had a falling out. Fill in the rest yourself.” With quick jabs of her free hand she called up different display modes, frowning at each. “Shit, this ain’t gonna be easy. If we wake this guy without his three friends, he’s gonna be psychotic; no use to us at all.”

  “What kind of falling out?”

  “Seven reckoned I was holding back too much in the interrogation, not putting you through enough hell.” She scratched at the silver box on the side of her head. “Maybe we can wake him, then fake the cybernetic presence of his friends—what do you think?”

  “Why am I still alive, if Seven broke into the sleeping chambers? Why are you still alive?”

  “Seven’s a sadist. Abandonment’s more his style than a quick and clean execution. As for you, the pig cut a deal with your second-in-command.”

  The implication of that sunk in. “Markarian gave him the codes?”

  “It wasn’t you, Veda.”

  Strange relief flooded Irravel. She could never be absolved of the crime of losing the cargo, but at least her degree of complicity had lessened.

  “But that was only half the deal,” Mirsky continued. “The rest was Seven promising not to kill you: Markarian agreed to join the Hideyoshi, our main ship.” She told Irravel that there’d been a transmitter rigged to her reefersleep unit, so that Markarian would know she was still alive.

  “Seven must have known he was taking a risk leaving both of us alive.”

  “A pretty small one. The ship’s in pieces and Seven will assume neither of us has the brains to patch it back together.” Mirsky slipped the gun into a holster. “But Seven assumed the Conjoiners were dead. Big mistake. Once we figure a way to wake Remontoir safely, he can help us fix the ship; make it faster, too.”

  “You’ve got this all worked out, haven’t you?”

  “More or less. Something tells me you aren’t absolutely ready to start trusting me, though.”

  “Sorry, Mirsky, but you don’t make the world’s most convincing turncoat.”

  She reached up with her free hand, gripping the box on the side of her head. “Know what this is? A loyalty-shunt. Makes simian stem cells; pumps them into the internal carotid artery, just above the cavernous sinus. They jump the blood-brain barrier and build a whole bunch of transient structures tied to primate dominance hierarchies; alpha-male shit. That’s how Seven had us under his command—he was King Monkey. But I’ve turned it off now.”

  “That’s supposed to reassure me?”

  “No, but maybe this will.”

  Mirsky tugged at the box, ripping it away from the side of her head in curds of blood.

  ###

  LUYTEN 726-8

  COMETARY HALO—AD 2309

  Irravel felt the Hirondelle turn like a compass needle. The ramscoops gasped at interstellar gas, sucking lone atoms of cosmic hydrogen from cubic metres of vacuum. The engines spat twin beams of thrust, pressing Irravel into her seat with two gees of acceleration. Hardly moving now, still in the local frame of the cometary halo, but in only six months she would be nudging lightspeed.

  Her seat floated on a boom in the middle of the dodecahedral bridge. “Map,” Irravel said, and was suddenly drowning in stars; an immense 30-light-year-wide projection of human-settled space, centred on the First System.

  “There’s the bastard,” Mirsky said, pointing from her own hovering seat, her voice only slightly strained under t
he gee-load. “Map, give us projection of the Hideyoshi’s vector, and plot our intercept.”

  The pirate ship’s icon was still very close to Luyten 726-8; less than a tenth of a light-year out. They had not seen Seven until now. The thrust from his ship was so tightly focused that it had taken until now for the widening beams of the exhaust to sweep over Hirondelle’s sensors. But now they knew where he was headed. A dashed line indicated the likely course, arrowing right through the map’s heart and out toward the system Lalande 21185. Now came the intercept vector, a near-tangent which sliced Seven’s course beyond Sol.

  “When does it happen?” Irravel said.

  “Depends on how much attention Seven’s paying to what’s coming up behind him, for a start, and what kind of evasive stunts he can pull.”

  “Most of my simulations predict an intercept between 2325 and 2330,” Remontoire said.

  Irravel savoured the dates. Even for someone trained to fly a starship between systems, they sounded uncomfortably like the future.

  “Are you sure it’s him—not just some other ship that happened to be waiting in the halo?”

  “Trust me,” Mirsky said. “I can smell the swine from here.”

  “She’s right,” Remontoire said. “The destination makes perfect sense. Seven was prohibited from staying here much longer, once the number of missing ships became too large to be explained away as accidents. Now he must seek a well-settled system to profit from what he has stolen.”