Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  The Conjoiner looked completely normal at first glance—a bald man wearing a ship’s uniform, his expression placid—but then one noticed the unnatural bulge of his skull, covered only in a fuzz of baby hair. Most of his glial cells had been supplanted by machines which served the same structural functions but which also performed specialized cybernetic duties, like interfacing with other commune partners or external machinery. Even the organic neurones in his brain were now webbed together by artificial connections which allowed transmission speeds of kilometres per second; factors of ten faster than in normal brains. Only the problem of dispersing waste heat denied the Conjoiners even faster modes of thought.

  It was seven years since they’d woken him. Remontoire had not dealt well with the murder of his three compatriots, but Irravel and Mirsky had managed to keep him sane by feeding input into the glial machines, crudely simulating rapport with other commune members. “It provides the kind of comfort to me that a ghost limb offers an amputee,” Remontoire had said. “An illusion of wholeness—but no substitute for the real thing.”

  “What more can we do?” Irravel said.

  “Return me to another commune with all speed.”

  Irravel had agreed, provided Remontoire helped with the ship.

  He hadn’t let her down. Under his supervision, half the ship’s mass had been sacrificed, permitting twice the acceleration. They had dug a vault in the comet, lined it with support systems, and entombed what remained of the cargo. The sleepers were nominally dead—there was no real expectation of reviving them again, even if medicine improved in the future—but Irravel had nonetheless set servitors to tend the dead for however long it took, and programmed the beacon to lure another ship, this time to pick up the dead. All that had taken years, of course—but it had also taken Seven as much time to cross the halo to his base; time again to show himself.

  “Be so much easier if you didn’t want the others back,” Mirsky said. “Then we could just slam past the pig at relativistic speed and hit him with seven kinds of shit.” She was very proud of the weapons she’d built into the ship, copied from pirate designs with Remontoire’s help.

  “I want the sleepers back,” Irravel said.

  “And Markarian?”

  “He’s mine,” she said, after due consideration. “You get the pig.”

  ###

  NEAR LALANDE 21185—AD 2328

  Relativity squeezed stars until they bled colour. Half a kilometre ahead, the side of Seven’s ship raced toward Irravel like a tsunami.

  The Hideyoshi was the same shape as the Hirondelle; honed less by human whim than the edicts of physics. But the Hideyoshi was heavier, with a wider cross-section, incapable of matching the Hirondelle’s acceleration or of pushing so close to C. It had taken years, but they’d caught up with Seven, and now the attack was in progress.

  Irravel, Mirsky and Remontoire wore thruster-pack equipped suits of the type used for inspections outside the ship, with added armour and weapons. Painted for effect, they looked like mechanized Samurai. Another 47 suits were slaved to theirs, acting as decoys. They’d crossed 50,000 kilometres of space between the ships.

  “You’re sure Seven doesn’t have any defenses?” Irravel had asked, not long after waking from reefersleep.

  “Only the in-system ship had any firepower,” Mirsky said. She looked older now; new lines engraved under her eyes. “That’s because no one’s ever been insane enough to contemplate storming another ship in interstellar space.”

  “Until now.”

  But it wasn’t so stupid, and Mirsky knew it. Matching velocities with another ship was only a question of being faster; squeezing fractionally closer to lightspeed. It might take time, but sooner or later the distance would be closed. And it had taken time, none of which Mirsky had spent in reefersleep. Partly it was because she lacked the right implants—ripped out in infancy when she was captured by Seven. Partly it was a distaste for the very idea of being frozen, instilled by years of pirate upbringing. But also because she wanted time to refine her weapons. They had fired a salvo against the enemy before crossing space in the suits, softening up any weapons buried in his ice and opening holes into Hideyoshi’s interior.

  Now Irravel’s vision blurred, her suit slowing itself before slamming into the ice.

  Whiteness swallowed her.

  For a moment, she couldn’t remember what she was doing here. Then awareness came and she slithered back up the tunnel excavated on her fall, until she reached the surface of the Hideyoshi’s ice shield.

  “Veda—you intact?”

  Her armour’s shoulder-mounted comm laser found a line-of-sight to Mirsky. Mirsky was 20 or 30 metres away, around the ship’s lazy circumference, balancing on a ledge of ice. Walls of it stretched above and below like a rockface, lit by the glare from the engines. Decoys were arriving by the second.

  “I’m alive,” Irravel said. “Where’s the entry point?”

  “Couple of hundred metres upship.”

  “Damn. I wanted to come in closer. Remontoire’s out of line-of-sight. How much fuel do you have left?”

  “Scarcely enough to take the chill off a penguin’s dick.”

  Mirsky raised her arms above her head and fired lines into the ice, rocketing out from her sleeves. Belly sliding against the shield, she retracted the lines and hauled herself upship.

  Irravel followed. They’d burned all their fuel crossing between the two ships, but that was part of the plan. If they didn’t have a chance to raid Seven’s reserves, they’d just kick themselves into space and let the Hirondelle hone in on them.

  “You think Seven saw us cross over?”

  “Definitely. And you can bet he’s doing something about it, too.”

  “Don’t you do anything that might endanger the cargo, Mirsky—no matter how tempting Seven makes it.”

  “Would you sacrifice half the sleepers to get the other half back?”

  “That’s not remotely an option.”

  Above their heads crevasses opened like eyes. Pirate crabs erupted out, black as night against the ice. Irravel opened fire on the machines. This time, with better weapons and real armour, she began to inflict damage. Behind the crabs, pirates emerged, bulbous in customized armour. Lasers scuffed the ice; bright through gouts of steam. Irravel saw Remontoire now: he was unharmed, and doing his best to shoot the pirates into space.

  Above, one of Irravel’s shots dislodged a pirate.

  The Hideyosh’s acceleration dropped him toward her. When the impact came she hardly felt it, her suit’s guylines staying firm. The pirate folded around her like a broken toy then bounced back against the ship, pinned there by her suit. He was too close to shoot unless Irravel wanted to blow herself into space. Distorted behind glass, his face shaped a word. She got in closer until their visors were touching. Through the glass she saw the asymmetric bulge of a loyalty-shunt.

  The face was Markarian’s. At first it seemed like absurd coincidence. Then it occurred to her that Seven might have sent his newest recruit out to show his mettle. Maybe Seven wouldn’t be far behind. Confronting adversaries was part of the alpha-male inheritance.

  “Irravel,” Markarian said, voice laced with static. “I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself you’re the reason I’m here, Markarian. I came for the cargo. You’re just next on the list.”

  “What are you going to do—kill me?”

  “Do you think you deserve any better than that?” Irravel adjusted her position. “Or are you going to try and justify betraying the cargo?”

  He pulled his aged features into a smile. “We made a deal, Irravel; the same way you made a deal about greenfly. But you don’t remember that, do you?”

  “Maybe I sold the greenfly machines to the pig,” she said. “If I did that, it was a calculated move to buy the safety of the cargo. You, on the other hand, cut a deal with Seven to save your neck.”

  The other pirates were holding fire, nervously marking them.
“I did it to save yours, actually. Does that make any sense?” There was wonder in his eyes now. “Did you ever see Mirsky’s hand? That was never her own. The pirates swap limbs as badges of rank. They’re very good at connective surgery.”‘

  “You’re not making much sense, Markarian.”

  Dislodged ice rained on them. Irravel looked around in time to see another pirate emerging from a crevasse. She recognized the suit artwork: it was Seven. He wore things, strung around his utility belt in transparent bags like obscene fruit. She stared at them for a few seconds before their nature clicked into horrific focus: frozen human heads.

  Irravel stifled a reaction to vomit.

  “Yes,” Run Seven said. “Ten of your compatriots, recently unburdened of their bodies. But don’t worry—they’re not harmed in any fundamental sense. Their brains are intact—provided you don’t warm them with an ill-aimed shot.”

  “I’ve got a clear line of fire,” Mirsky said. “Just say the word and the bastard’s an instant anatomy lesson.”

  “Wait,” Irravel said. “Don’t shoot.”

  “Sound business sense, Captain Veda. I see you appreciate the value of these heads.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Mirsky said.

  “Their neural patterns can be retrieved.” It was Remontoire speaking now. “We Conjoiners have had the ability to copy minds onto machine substrates for some time now, though we haven’t advertised it. But that doesn’t matter—there have been experiments on Yellowstone which approach our early successes. And these heads aren’t even thinking: only topologies need to be mapped, not electrochemical processes.”

  The pig took one of the heads from his belt and held it to eye level, for inspection. “The Conjoiner’s right. They’re not really dead. And they can be yours if you wish to do business.”

  “What do you want for them?”

  “Markarian, for a start. All that Demarchy expertise makes for a very efficient second-in-command.”

  Irravel glanced down at her prisoner. “You can’t buy loyalty with a box and a few neural connections.”

  “No? In what way do our loyalty-shunts differ from the psychosurgery which your world inflicted on you, Irravel, yoking your motherhood instinct to 20,000 sleepers you don’t even know by name?”

  “We have a deal or not?”

  “Only if you throw in the Conjoiner as well.”

  Irravel looked at Remontoire; some snake part of her mind weighing options with reptilian detachment.

  “No!” he said. “You promised!”

  “Shut up,” Seven said. “Or when you do get to rejoin your friends, it’ll be in installments.”

  “I’m sorry,” Irravel said. “I can’t lose even ten of the cargo.”

  Seven tossed the first head down to her. “Now let Markarian go and we’ll see about the rest.”

  Irravel looked down at him. “It’s not over between you and me.”

  Then she released him, and he scrambled back up the ice toward Seven.

  “Excellent. Here’s another head. Now the Conjoiner.”

  Irravel issued a subvocal command; watched Remontoire stiffen. “His suit’s paralyzed. Take him.”

  Two pirates worked down to him, checked him over and nodded toward Seven. Between them they hauled him back up the ice, vanishing into a crevasse and back into the Hideyoshi.

  “The other eight heads,” Irravel said.

  “I’m going to throw them away from the ship. You’ll be able to locate them easily enough. While I’m doing that, I’m going to retreat, and you’re going to leave.”

  “We could end this now,” Mirsky said.

  “I need those heads.”

  “They really fucked with your psychology big-time, didn’t they?” She raised her weapon and began shooting Seven and the other pirates. Irravel watched her carve up the remaining heads, splintering frozen bone into the vacuum.

  “No!”

  “Sorry,” Mirsky said. “Had to do it, Veda.”

  Seven clutched at his chest, fingers mashing the pulp of the heads, still tethered to his belt. She’d punctured his suit. As he tried to stem the damburst, his face was carved with the intolerable knowledge that his reign had just ended. But something had hit Irravel, too.

  ###

  SYLVESTE INSTITUTE, YELLOWSTONE ORBIT, EPSILON ERIDANI—AD 2415

  “Where am I?” Irravel asked. “How am I thinking this?”

  The woman’s voice was the colour of mahogany. “Somewhere safe. You died on the ice, but we got you back in time.”

  “For what?”

  Mirsky sighed, as though this was something she would rather not have had to explain this soon.

  “To scan you, just like we did with the frozen heads. Copy you into the ship.”

  Maybe she should have felt horror, or indignation, or even relief that some part of her had been spared.

  Instead, she just felt impatience.

  “What now?”

  “We’re working on it,” Mirsky said.

  ###

  TRANS-ALDEBARAN SPACE—AD 2673

  “We saved her body after she died,” Mirsky said, wheezing slightly. She found it hard to move around under what to Irravel was the ship’s normal two and a half gees of thrust. “After the battle we brought her back on board.”

  Irravel thought of her mother dying on the other ship, the one they were chasing. For years they had deliberately not narrowed the distance, holding back but not allowing the Hideyoshi to slip from view.

  Until now, it hadn’t even occurred to Irravel to ask why.

  She looked through the casket’s window, trying to match her own features against what she saw in the woman’s face, trying to project her own fifteen years into Mother Irravel’s adulthood.

  “Why did you keep her so cold?”

  “We had to extract what we could from her brain,” Mirsky said. “Memories and neural patterns. We trawled them and stored them in the ship.”

  “What good was that?”

  “We knew they’d come in useful again.”

  She’d been cloned from Mother Irravel. They were not identical—no Mixmaster expertise could duplicate the precise biochemical environment of Mother Irravel’s womb, or the shaping experiences of early infancy, and their personalities had been sculpted centuries apart, in totally different worlds. But they were still close copies. They even shared memories: scripted into Irravel’s mind by medichines, so that she barely noticed each addition to her own experiences.

  “Why did you do this?” she asked.

  “Because Irravel began something,” Mirsky said. “Something I promised I’d help her finish.”

  ###

  STORMWATCH STATION, AETHRA, HYADES TRADE ENVELOPE—AD 2931

  “Why are you interested in our weapons?” the Nestbuilder asked. “We are not aware of any wars within the chordate phylum at this epoch.”

  “It’s a personal matter,” Irravel said.

  The Nestbuilder hovered a metre above the trade floor, suspended in a column of microgravity. They were oxygen-breathing arthropods who’d once ascended to spacefaring capability. No longer intelligent, yet supported by their self-renewing machinery, they migrated from system to system, constructing elaborate, space-filling structures from solid diamond. Other Nestbuilder swarms would arrive and occasionally occupy the new nests. There seemed no purpose to this activity, but for tens of thousands of years they had been host to a smaller, cleverer species known as the Slugs. Small communities of Slugs—anything up to a dozen—lived in warm, damp niches in a Nestbuilder’s intricately folded shell. They had long since learned how to control the host’s behavior and exploit its subservient technology.

  Irravel studied a Slug now, crawling out from under a lip of shell material.

  The thing was a multicellular invertebrate not much larger than her fist; a bag of soft blue protoplasm, sprouting appendages only when they were needed. A slightly bipolar shadow near one end might have been its central nervous system, but
there hardly seemed enough of it to trap sentience. There were no obvious sense or communicational organs, but a pulsing filament of blue slime reached back into the Nestbuilder’s fold. When the Slug spoke, it did so through the Nestbuilder; a rattle of chitin from the host’s mouthparts which approximated human language. A hovering jewel connected to the station’s lexical database did the rest, rendering the voice calmly feminine.

  “A personal matter? A vendetta? Then it’s true.” The mouthparts clicked together in what humans presumed was the symbiotic creature’s laughter response. “You are who we suspected.”

  “She did tell you her name was Irravel, guy,” Mirsky said, sipping black coffee with delicate movements of the exoskeletal frame she always wore in high gravity.

  “Among you chordates, the name is not so unusual now,” the Slug reminded them. “But you do fit the description, Irravel.”

  They were near one of the station’s vast picture windows, overlooking Aethra’s mighty, roiling cloud decks, 50 kilometres below. It was getting dark now and the stormplayers were preparing to start a show. Irravel saw two of their seeders descending into the clouds; robot craft tethered by a nearly invisible filament. The seeders would position the filament so that it bridged cloud layers with different static potentials; they’d then detach and return to Stormwatch, while the filament held itself in position by rippling along its length. For hundreds of kilometres around, other filaments would have been placed in carefully selected positions. They were electrically isolating now, but at the stormplayer’s discretion each filament would flick over into a conductive state a massive, choreographed lightning flash.

  “I never set out to become a legend,” Irravel said. “Or a myth, for that matter.”

  “Yes. There are so many stories about you, Veda, that it might be simpler to assume you never existed.”