Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  All the fear went away. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of togetherness, of us all being in this crap together. I had no thought of dying. Just: let’s get through this.

  “Yes, sir!”

  Pael finished his countdown.

  All the lights went out. Detonating stars wheeled.

  And the ship exploded.

  ###

  I was thrown into darkness. Air howled. Emergency bulkheads scythed past me, and I could hear people scream.

  I slammed into the curving hull, nose pressed against the stars.

  I bounced off and drifted. The inertial suspension was out, then. I thought I could smell blood—probably my own.

  I could see the Ghost ship, a tangle of rope and silver baubles, tingling with highlights from the fortress star. We were still closing.

  But I could also see shards of shattered lifedome, a sputtering drive unit. The shards were bits of the Brightly. It had gone, all gone, in a fraction of a second.

  “Let’s do it,” I murmured.

  Maybe I was out of it for a while.

  ###

  Somebody grabbed my ankle and tugged me down. There was a competent slap on my cheek, enough to make me focus.

  “Case. Can you hear me?”

  It was First Officer Till. Even in the swimming starlight, that burned-off scalp was unmistakable.

  I glanced around. There were four of us here: Till, Commissary Jeru, Academician Pael, me. We were huddled up against what looked like the stump of the First Officer’s console. I realized that the gale of venting air had stopped. I was back inside a hull with integrity, then—

  “Case!”

  “I—yes, sir.”

  “Report.”

  I touched my lip; my hand came away bloody. At a time like that it’s your duty to report your injuries, honestly and fully. Nobody needs a hero who turns out not to be able to function. “I think I’m all right. I may have a concussion.”

  “Good enough. Strap down.” Till handed me a length of rope.

  I saw that the others had tied themselves to struts. I did the same.

  Till, with practiced ease, swam away into the air, I guessed looking for other survivors.

  Academician Pael was trying to curl into a ball. He couldn’t even speak. The tears just rolled out of his eyes. I stared at the way big globules welled up and drifted away into the air, glimmering.

  The action had been over in seconds. All a bit sudden for an earthworm, I guess.

  Nearby, I saw, trapped under one of the emergency bulkheads, there was a pair of legs—just that. The rest of the body must have been chopped away, gone drifting off with the rest of the debris from Brightly. But I recognized those legs, from a garish pink stripe on the sole of the right boot. That had been Halle. She was the only girl I had ever screwed, I thought—and more than likely, given the situation, the only girl I ever would get to screw.

  I couldn’t figure out how I felt about that.

  Jeru was watching me. “Tar—do you think we should all be frightened for ourselves, like the Academician?” Her accent was strong, unidentifiable.

  “No, sir.”

  “No.” Jeru studied Pael with contempt. “We are in a yacht, Academician. Something has happened to the Brightly. The dome was designed to break up into yachts like this.” She sniffed. “We have air, and it isn’t foul yet.” She winked at me. “Maybe we can do a little damage to the Ghosts before we die, tar. What do you think?”

  I grinned. “Yes, sir.”

  Pael lifted his head and stared at me with salt-water eyes. “Lethe. You people are monsters.” His accent was gentle, a lilt. “Even such a child as this. You embrace death—”

  Jeru grabbed Pael’s jaw in a massive hand, and pinched the joint until he squealed. “Captain Teid grabbed you, Academician; she threw you here, into the yacht, before the bulkhead came down. I saw it. If she hadn’t taken the time to do that, she would have made it herself. Was she a monster? Did she embrace death?” And she pushed Pael’s face away.

  For some reason, I hadn’t thought about the rest of the crew until that moment. I guess I have a limited imagination. Now, I felt adrift. The Captain—dead?

  I said, “Excuse me, Commissary. How many other yachts got out?”

  “None,” she said steadily, making sure I had no illusions. “Just this one. They died doing their duty, tar. Like the Captain.”

  Of course she was right, and I felt a little better. Whatever his character, Pael was too valuable not to save. As for me, I had survived through sheer blind chance, through being in the right place when the walls came down. If the Captain had been close, her duty would have been to pull me out of the way and take my place. It isn’t a question of human values but of economics: a lot more is invested in the training and experience of a Captain Teid—or a Pael—than in me.

  But Pael seemed more confused than I was.

  First Officer Till came bustling back with a heap of equipment. “Put these on.” He handed out pressure suits. They were what we called slime suits in training: lightweight skinsuits, running off a backpack of gen-enged algae. “Move it,” said Till. “Impact with the Ghost cruiser in four minutes. We don’t have any power; there’s nothing we can do but ride it out.”

  I crammed my legs into my suit.

  Jeru complied, stripping off her robe to reveal a hard, scarred body. But she was frowning. “Why not heavier armour?”

  For answer, Till picked out a gravity-wave handgun from the gear he had retrieved. Without pausing he held it to Pael’s head and pushed the fire button.

  Pael twitched.

  Till said, “See? Nothing is working. Nothing but bio systems, it seems.” He threw the gun aside.

  Pael closed his eyes, breathing hard.

  Till said to me, “Test your comms.”

  I closed up my hood and faceplate and began intoning, “One, two, three . . .” I could hear nothing.

  Till began tapping at our backpacks, resetting the systems. His hood started to glow with transient, pale blue symbols. And then, scratchily, his voice started to come through. “. . . Five, six, seven—can you hear me, tar?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The symbols were bioluminescent. There were receptors on all our suits—photoreceptors, simple eyes—which could “read” the messages scrawled on our companions’ suits. It was a backup system meant for use in environments where anything higher-tech would be a liability. But obviously it would only work as long as we were in line of sight.

  “That will make life harder,” Jeru said. Oddly, mediated by software, she was easier to understand.

  Till shrugged. “You take it as it comes.” Briskly, he began to hand out more gear. “These are basic field belt kits. There’s some medical stuff: a suture kit, scalpel blades, blood-giving sets. You wear these syrettes around your neck, Academician. They contain painkillers, various gen-enged med-viruses . . . No, you wear it outside your suit, Pael, so you can reach it. You’ll find valve inlets here, on your sleeve, and here, on the leg,” Now came weapons. “We should carry handguns, just in case they start working, but be ready with these.” He handed out combat knives.

  Pael shrank back.

  “Take the knife, Academician. You can shave off that ugly beard, if nothing else.”

  I laughed out loud, and was rewarded with a wink from Till.

  I took a knife. It was a heavy chunk of steel, solid and reassuring. I tucked it in my belt. I was starting to feel a whole lot better.

  “Two minutes to impact,” Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been counting the seconds.

  “Seal up.” Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub . . .

  When we were sealed. I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.

  The Ghost ship filled space. The craft was kilometres across, big enough to have dwarfed the poor, doomed Brief Life Burns
Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope of depthless complexity, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. Bulky equipment pods were suspended in the tangle.

  And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding like beads of mercury. I could see how the yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of Ghosts, so they looked like sprays of blood droplets across that shining perfection.

  “Ten seconds,” Till called. “Brace.”

  Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky.

  And we were thrown into chaos again.

  ###

  I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.

  The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum.

  But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard.

  The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upwards. There was a sudden pain in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.

  I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s chair, which had collapsed.

  I looked up. We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. There were shining threads arcing all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.

  Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced. But she ignored me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.

  Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.

  Jeru knocked his hand away. “You always use the casualty’s,” she hissed. “Never your own.”

  Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. “Why?”

  I could answer that. “Because the chances are you’ll need your own in a minute.”

  Jeru stabbed a syrette into Till’s arm.

  Pael was staring at me through his faceplate with wide, frightened eyes. “You’ve broken your arm.”

  Looking closely at the arm for the first time, I saw that it was bent back at an impossible angle. I couldn’t believe it, even through the pain. I’d never bust so much as a finger, all the way through training.

  Now Till jerked, a kind of miniature convulsion, and a big bubble of spit and blood blew out of his lips. Then the bubble popped, and his limbs went loose.

  Jeru sat back, breathing hard. She said, “Okay. Okay. How did he put it?—You take it as it comes.” She looked around, at me, Pael. I could see she was trembling, which scared me. She said, “Now we move. We have to find a LUP. A lying-up point, Academician. A place to hole up.”

  I said, “The First Officer—”

  “Is dead.” She glanced at Pael. “Now it’s just the three of us. We won’t be able to avoid each other anymore, Pael.”

  Pael stared back, eyes empty.

  Jeru looked at me, and for a second her expression softened. “A broken neck. Till broke her neck, tar.”

  Another death, just like that: just for a heartbeat, that was too much for me.

  Jeru said briskly, “Do your duty, tar. Help the worm.”

  I snapped back. “Yes, sir.” I grabbed Pael’s unresisting arm.

  Led by Jeru, we began to move, the three of us, away from the crumpled wreck of our yacht, deep into the alien tangle of a Silver Ghost cruiser.

  ###

  We found our LUP.

  It was just a hollow in a somewhat denser tangle of silvery ropes, but it afforded us some cover, and it seemed to be away from the main concentration of Ghosts. We were still open to the vacuum—as the whole cruiser seemed to be—and I realized then that I wouldn’t be getting out of this suit for a while.

  As soon as we picked the LUP, Jeru made us take up positions in an all-round defense, covering a 360-degree arc.

  Then we did nothing, absolutely nothing, for ten minutes.

  It was SOP, standard operating procedure, and I was impressed. You’ve just come out of all the chaos of the destruction of the Brightly and the crash of the yacht, a frenzy of activity. Now you have to give your body a chance to adjust to the new environment, to the sounds and smells and sights.

  Only here, there was nothing to smell but my own sweat and piss, nothing to hear but my ragged breathing. And my arm was hurting like hell.

  To occupy my mind I concentrated on getting my night vision working. Your eyes take a while to adjust to the darkness—forty-five minutes before they are fully effective—but you are already seeing better after five. I could see stars through the chinks in the wiry metallic brush around me, the flares of distant novae, and the reassuring lights of our fleet. But a Ghost ship is a dark place, a mess of shadows and smeared-out reflections. It was going to be easy to get spooked here.

  When the ten minutes were done, Academician Pael started bleating, but Jeru ignored him and came straight over to me. She got hold of my busted arm and started to feel the bone. “So,” she said briskly. “What’s your name, tar?”

  “Case, sir.”

  “What do you think of your new quarters?”

  “Where do I eat?”

  She grinned. “Turn off your comms,” she said.

  I complied.

  Without warning she pulled my arm, hard. I was glad she couldn’t hear how I howled.

  She pulled a canister out of her belt and squirted gunk over my arm; it was semi-sentient and snuggled into place, setting as a hard cast around my injury. When I was healed, the cast would fall away of its own accord.

  She motioned me to turn on my comms again, and held up a syrette.

  “I don’t need that.”

  “Don’t be brave, tar. It will help your bones knit.”

  “Sir, there’s a rumour that stuff makes you impotent.” I felt stupid even as I said it.

  Jeru laughed out loud, and just grabbed my arm. “Anyhow, it’s the First Officer’s, and he doesn’t need it anymore, does he?”

  I couldn’t argue with that; I accepted the injection. The pain started egging almost immediately.

  Jeru pulled a tactical beacon out of her bell kit. It was a thumb-sized orange cylinder. “I’m going to try to signal the fleet. I’ll work my way out of this tangle; even if the beacon is working we might be shielded in here.” Pael started to protest, but she shut him up. I sensed I had been thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict between them. “Case, you’re on stag. And show this worm what’s in his kit. I’ll come back the same way I go. All right?”

  “Yes.” More SOP.

  She slid away through silvery threads.

  I lodged myself in the tangle and started to go through the stuff in the belt kits Till had fetched for us. There was water, rehydration salts and compressed food, all to be delivered to spigots inside our sealed hoods. We had power packs the size of my thumb nail, but they were as dead as the rest of the kit. There was a lot of low-tech gear meant to prolong survival in a variety of situations, such as a magnetic compass, a heliograph, a thumb saw, a magnifying glass, pitons and spindles of rope, even fishing line.

  I had to show Pael how his suit functioned as a lavatory. The trick is just to let go; a slime suit recycles most of what you give it, and compresses the rest. That’s not to say it’s comfortable. I’ve never yet worn a suit that was good at absorbing odours. I bet no suit designer spent more than an hour in one of her own creations.

  I felt fine.

  The wreck, the hammer-blow deaths one after the other—none of it was far beneath the surface of my mind. But that’s where it stayed, for now; as long as I had the next task to focus on, and the next after that, I could keep moving forward. The time to let it all hit you is after the show.

  I guess Pael had never been trained like that.

  He was a thin, spindly man, his eyes sunk in black shadow, and his ridiculous red beard crammed up inside his faceplate. Now that the great crises were over, his en
ergy seemed to have drained away, and his functioning was slowing to a crawl. He looked almost comical as he pawed at his useless bits of kit.

  After a time he said, “Case, is it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you from Earth, child?”

  “No. I—”

  He ignored me. “The Academies are based on Earth. Did you know that, child? But they do admit a few off-worlders.”

  I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I could care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, “Where are you from, sir?”

  He sighed. “51 Pegasi. I-B.”

  I’d never heard of it. “What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?”

  “Is everything measured relative to Earth? . . . Not very far. My home world was one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered—or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.”

  I knew what that meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.

  He looked up at me. “Where you grew up, could you see the sky?”

  “No—”

  “I could. And the sky was full of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometres wide, tacking this way and that in the light. But you can’t see the sky from Earth—not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.”

  “Then why did you go there?”

  “I didn’t have a choice.” He laughed, hollowly. “I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious Commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think—and we can’t have that, can we? . . .”

  I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t “my” Commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument. Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who knew too much about science and technology. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.