Butcher Block Green

by Eric Kramer

  “Lilli! There he is! He isn’t even buried!”

  <>

  <>

  “That last dune was a killer. I’m so out of shape … Wow. Pristine condition; the heat preserved everything.”

  “Jon, this is incredible. Unbelievable! Look at the holo insignia on the chassis … gorgeous. Hang on. Let me scan it.”

  <>

  “Seventy-second battalion. He definitely rode in on the dropship. This is crazy. What in the living Core is he doing on this moon? Haepko is on the other side of the spiral arm!”

  “Maybe he came from the moon’s planet? Still doesn’t make sense. At least that planet can support life; no reason to come here. Anyways, he’s what, between 5,000 and 6,000 years old?”

  “According to this, 7,841; the battle for Haepko happened right before the truce that ended the war, remember?”

  <>

  “Hollow. Looks like it’s sealed … you think he’s actually still insi— Hang on. Look at this.”

  <>

  <>

  “Seal’s good.”

  “Should we be opening this? Maybe it would be better to get it back to the Core?”

  “No way we’re getting this on the ship … the suit has to weigh what, almost half a ton? This is our shot, Lilli. If we go back without anything, word will get out. We’ll preserve as much as we can. We need to document so we can establish academic rights to the relic.”

  “Come on, Jon. There’s no way anyone will find this … I mean, it’s pure dumb luck we picked up the transponder, as weak as it is. I can’t believe that thing’s been broadcasting this long. Here, help me open this…”

  <>

  “It's stuck— “

  <>

  <>

  “I … he looks human—were they still using actual humans back then?”

  “No, not generally, I don’t think. There were some specialized units for advanced insertion … maybe he was one of them? There’s a record of a few teams utilized like that during Haepko, although I’m having trouble finding a roster.”

  “Lilli, what do you think? Should I move him? He looks like he died yesterday, except for that weird coloration of his skin. Something doesn’t feel right, though … I can’t put my finger on it.”

  “Look at the patch on the back of his skull; is that some kind of an imager?”

  “Could be; let me see if I can interface it.”

  <>

  “Lilli, it’s responding! This is great; do you think … is it possible it has retained its data?”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  “Be careful! They modded the heck out of soldiers’ brains back then. His thoughts might not even be compatible with…”

  “I’m in.”

  “Can you see anything?”

  “Hang on, let me... It’s just … the sensory interface is super primitive, so I’m binding it to the ship’s computer. I want to run it through a filter just in case there’s anything weird in there.”

  <>

  “Okay I’m going to interface with it; here goes nothing…”

  //BEGIN PLAYBACK//

  The cocoon was still solid and unyielding when the ship woke me. A bout of nausea racked my body. Stomach and lungs contracted simultaneously, heaving out blood-tinged flood of amniotic fluid. I reached up and pushed at the cocoon wall … iron. I frowned, and another spasm of coughs paralyzed further thought.

  A minute went by, and I regained my breath.

  What the … where … oh.

  Neurostasis is hell to wake up from.

  Why is the cocoon still solid?

  Usually, it softened as the battleship began bringing up metabolic processes. Full beta-wave consciousness of the occupant triggered a cascade that caused the cocoon to split, depositing its inhabitant without ceremony into a pool of regenerative nanogel waiting below. Not this time, though.

  Something is wrong…

  I pressed the wall of the cocoon again, and it shattered against the weak pressure of my hand. Blinking my eyes, I saw a dim figure outlined in the harsh shiplight, smashing the cocoon with a hammer until there was a large hole.

  Dalton 2, one of the bioengineers, offered me a hand, pulling me out of the nanogel.

  “First Spear Gan has experienced premature awakening. Ship has experienced an anomaly. Ship misinterpreted it as a Combine fleet attack. Ship has released us from the jump early. Ship says it is a week out from the target.”

  That’s right … Gan. That’s my name.

  My mind was still reeling, struggling to understand what the violet-eyed android was saying.

  “So why did you wake us, then?”

  “Bioengineering has not. Ship has proceeded halfway through the wakeup cycle. Bioengineering has been unable to override wakeup. Too late. Bioengineering has to complete the process or risk injury.”

  I grimaced, my bruised brain trying to follow the android’s peculiar speech pattern. Without another word, Dalton 2 turned and started smashing the next cocoon. Bioengineers’ social subroutines were basic, at best.

  To my left, I saw my spearmate, Saowalak, climbing into his navy workblues.

  “Have you accessed the dropship yet? I think the ship’s going to be at sub-light speeds the rest of the way there.”

  “No.” Saowalak tapped his head. “I’m still a little scrambled; I’m having trouble accessing the mainframe. I would hope they’ve opened up our mission by now. It’s not like I can run to the Combine out here and spill my guts. I need to start plotting our course so we’re ready to hit the ground.”

  Saowalak was a marine who underwent voluntary reassignment (and the requisite body modifications) to become a navigator for an insertion team dropship. It was a task that, for the most part, was taken over by engineered chimp brains that were implanted and grown from embryos inside their dropship husks, except for special tactics spears like ours. Some of his marine imprints remained, resulting in such quirks as needing to plot out insertions and waypoints by hand.

  I knew better than to argue with him, so I left him alone, and queried the battleship’s mainframe myself. I accessed it, and pinged the dropship.

  Somewhere in the belly of the gigantic spacecraft, nestled in its restraints along with nine hundred other dropships, Dropship 44147 awoke and responded, filling my retinal display with a status report.

  “Looks like 47 is having trouble authenticating your neural handshake, Saowalak. Either way, mission data is still locked. Are we even going to make the fight if we’re a week out? The main fleet is only nine days behind us in the fold; we’ll be dropping with the chimps and meat shields if we keep going at this pace.”

  As if on cue, the deck buzzed under our feet, a sign that the ship’s enormous gravity engines were beginning to spool up in preparation for a fold.

  “ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS PREPARE TO FOR IMMEDIATE AWAKE FOLD REENTRY…REPEAT, PREPARE FOR IMMEDIATE AWAKE FOLD REENTRY.”

  The battleship’s voice reverberated inside my skull. Emergency notifications tended to override my implant’s amplification dampeners.

  I looked at Saowalak and raised an eyebrow. Saowalak shrugged as he strapped himself into a crash seat next to the cocoon, as though this were a routine occurrence. He grasped underneath his seat and pulled out a red bag with “EMERGENCY USE ONLY” emblazoned on the front. Tearing it open, he reached in and took out an ampule, dropping half the contents into each of his eyes. I strapped in and did the same. Neither of us said a word for a few seconds.

  “I’ve heard folding hurts like crazy if you’re awake. Guess we’re about to find out. Supposed to be worse than Malkalvian synapse torture.”

  “I guess they—”

  Before I could finish,
the battleship’s engines flared open, and the ship folded.

  The agony was immediate; every cell and fiber of my body ripping apart. My vision blurred, and I felt myself melt into the seat. The ship’s walls flexed and lengthened as they were designed to do as enormous gravity wells opened in front of the ship. Our ship, the Ramathibhodi, was a Dreadnaught-class battleship, capable of up to ten years of interstellar travel, but even it couldn’t handle more than one folding jump every two years. This jump had been running for a year and three months, so we weren’t even close to being ready again.

  Wherever they were headed, the ship and crew were apparently worth risking.

  The pain, incredibly, was amplifying, worsening in leaps and bounds, but still I <> felt him <> screaming as <> Dalton 2’s arm jammed through <>

  //STOP PLAYBACK//

  “You okay, Lilli?”

  “Jon. Yeah. Wow. How long did you let me go?”

  “Three seconds. I didn’t want you to go beyond the ship’s neuroleptic dampening. What’s the correlation on time dilation? Are you getting good playback?”

  “I don’t know. I experienced about twenty minutes or so? Like I said, the tactile sensory memory is primitive, almost nonexistent. Thank the God, because you pulled me out right as they were going into a spacefold while everyone was still aware! Can you believe it? I have no idea how much time elapsed. Could have been thirty seconds, could have been a couple days. The data, though … the data is good, Jon. Clean, high quality. This is a huge. Whatever happened to this guy is on here!”

  “We should take the memory module and go. Stake a claim. It’s going to take us at least six days to get back to the Core. We can write it up on the way back.”

  “No. I need to see this now, while I’m standing next to him. There may be something else. Oh, I saw something about a dropship navigator? A guy named … ah, I can’t remember, Saopwael? This one’s name is Gan.”

  “There’s a record of a Dreadnaught-class battleship with an insertion team First Spear Gan Booling and Navigator Saowalak Jainukul. Looks like the battleship was one of the early predecessors to the generational long-haul warships. Ship’s name was the Ramathibhodi.”

  “Yeah! That’s it!”

  “According to what I have, the ship was part of an advance warpod tasked with landing on Haepko and planting some kind of planet-destroyer, a doomsday bargaining chip to force the Combine to the table. It failed, though. The Combine had deployed interdictors in their solar system’s outer limits that pulled the Ramathibhodi out of its fold jump and alerted the planet.”

  “So what happened? How did he end up here, almost six hundred light years away?”

  “No clue. The Ramathibhodi decelerated into a stable orbit around Haepko and was blown out of space. No survivors listed. The fleet followed a few days later, but they lost the element of surprise, and … well … a lot of people died, as you know. I’m querying everything I can, but I have nothing more about Gan here except the battleship roster.”

  “We need to find out where the navigator is. Whether he was even in the dropship. The playback feed felt stable, and it looks like our ship’s computer isn’t needing to filter or dampen it. Give me five minutes. That should be more than enough time to get the entire playback.”

  “All right. Five minutes. But if the ship’s dampeners detect neuroplastic instability, I’m pulling you. It’s not worth the risk. I’m going to try to interrogate the suit while you’re gone. You ready?”

  “Go.”

  //BEGIN PLAYBACK//

  A near eternity passed during the fold’s induction, before the ship stabilized. I was thankful for that, at least. The bizarre nature of time inside the fold meant that time sometimes extended into the infinite. Those folds, Mobius folds, were exceedingly rare, especially with the right precautions. We threw those precautions to the wind when the ship folded. Anything that went into a Mobius fold never re-emerged, and we had come as close as anyone ever had, and still made it out.

  Hundreds of years ago, the first interstellar travelers folded awake. They learned the hard way that time becomes malleable and unpredictable inside a fold. The reality of it, the limitlessness of it, turned people’s minds to mulch. As with everything else, genetics and augmentations dictated adaptability. The dreadnaught’s First Command succumbed, but the Second withstood the stress and had taken over command. So it had been all through the ranks, down to the lowest of ship’s engineers.

  Casualties had been within expectations: a full third of the crew lost to the awake fold reentry. Half of that third perished inside the fold. The other half, the unlucky half, died the folder’s death, falling apart in the battleship’s medical ward.

  It made no difference to me. I survived. My immediate concern was for 47, and prepping her for the fight ahead. When I’d tried to move, though, I found myself welded into the bulkhead of the dreadnaught from the waist down. It took eight hours for the androids to find me and cut me loose, leaving my lower torso and legs fused to the wall to be absorbed by the ship.

  After they collected the survivors, medroids kept us isolated in surgical crèches. I’d spent the last couple days few days inside the cocoon, frozen but aware, as the ship went over my body cell by cell by cell, repairing the damage from the awake fold. The incapacitation drove me crazy. I was bred for action, movement, physical exertion. Claustrophobia threatened to override my mental conditioning, sending me over the edge.

  For the millionth time, I recited from the Word, trying to focus on its teachings on peace and patience.

  I was just reaching the thirty-fifth stanza when an electric tingle engulfed my body, signaling the cocoon’s retraction from the gel.

  Finally.

  The cocoon split, revealing an androgynous medroid on the other side.

  “First Spear Gan, you are relea—”

  I was out of the cocoon before it could finish.

  <>

  Efficient, controlled chaos sprawled across the dropship launch deck—chaos replicated in each of the other eighteen launch decks as speargroups readied for insertion into Haepko’s maroon atmosphere. Praise the God, Saowalak had made it through unscathed. The complexity of the mission, and our chance of failure, would have skyrocketed using one of the base primate navs that piloted basic military dropships.

  Our dropship was in its nacelle, in a pod with ten of her sisters. Each two-person spear was huddled around their ship, prepping for when the Ramathibhodi flattened out of the fold in front of Haepko. We would have only a few minutes to release before the orbital defense matrix opened up on the Ramathibhodi, locking her and everything still inside in hard orbit.

  The war with the Combine had been going on for three generations. Haepko was the Combine’s home world, a cored out super-planet buried in the center of a network of systems that formed the nexus of their expansive thrust across the spiral arm of the galaxy. Eons ago, our ancestors had been part of them. They’d set out from Haepko in a small fleet of thousand-year colony ships to establish a new world.

  The chance of success had been slim, but, after skimming the glass ceiling of light speed for close to nine hundred years, the colony ships found a new, habitable planet. No further contact was had with Haepko, our original home, until a hundred years ago, when one of our generational colony ships encountered their expanding empire. After a brief period of harmony and knowledge-sharing, the Combine, as the core systems were now known, claimed ownership of our systems, as our forefathers had been Combine colonists.

  Of course, we resisted. War followed, for eighty years. Military command sacrificed incalculable amounts of humans over vast tracts of empty space and their sterile worlds. But now, now we had a chance. A chance for leverage.

  The Combine had one weakness: it kept power obsessively consolidated, with every minutia of the Combine’s empire under its tight control. Haepko was the physical representation of that philosophy. The only thing left of Haepko th
e planet was its crust. Below it, filling the void that used to be the planet’s mass, was the computational machinery that kept the iron grip of the Combine’s power across the galactic arm. Haepko was the heart, brain, and liver of the Combine. It was also completely impregnable.

  It appeared that Operational Command had found a weakness, because slipping into Haepko’s solar system with a ship the size of Ramathibhodi, much less an entire fleet, had been long thought to be military suicide. For this reason, all the fighting had taken place light-years away. Up until now.

  A mental buzz signaled a ship-wide announcement, and we all froze. Our mission. Finally.

  Data poured into our displays. Jump trajectories and targets, dropship loadouts, firing lines, viral deployment.

  Wait. What? Viral deployment?

  Around me, I felt others noticing the same thing. I opened the details of the deployment subheading, assimilated them.

  Wow.

  The bigger picture became clear in all our minds at once. There was a palpable shift in the air of the launch deck.

  We were on a one-way trip.

  The mission files detailed how, over the last twenty years, we had been developing a weapons platform that would disable their whole infrastructure by targeting their biggest weakness—the Haepko nexus. I and what remained of my 1,800 spearmates were to drop to the surface of Haepko and deploy the weapon. Each of us carried a small, redundant piece. Only a few of us needed to interface with Haepko to infect it.

  Once Haepko fell, our fleet, built in secret just for this mission over the last ten years, would drop out of a fold a few days behind us. The window was small; they couldn’t count on Ramathibhodi’s computers to keep Haepko incapacitated for more than a couple days after the infection took hold. Haepko’s power was just too great. The fleet contained a couple of scrambler ships capable of prolonging the planet’s suppression, but only if they got there in time. If not, any number of weapons platforms would emulsify the entire fleet as soon as they dropped the fold.

  Assuming success, the fleet would take the incapacitated Haepko hostage, holding the Combine’s millennia of stored knowledge at gunpoint until the diplomats and bureaucrats negotiated an end to the war.