Lights in the Deep

by Brad R Torgersen

  “Yes ma’am,” Stoddard and I both chimed in unison.

  “The Orbital Defense Initiative Station is an experiment,” McConnell said. “When Congress and the Senate jointly agreed to dismantle NASA, much of the prior funding and all of the facilities were consigned to the Department of the Navy. Since the Air Force already had a strong space interest, the Secretaries of the Air Force and the Navy put together a unified program designed to protect United States interests in orbit, and beyond. But the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t sign off on it—nor could he dig up additional funding—unless our cousins the Army and Marine Corps could tag along for the ride, too. This means what while you both are here as a favor from us to your respective services, I expect no less from you than I expect from any of my other Operators. I am tough, but I am fair, and if either of you have a problem with anything or anyone, I expect you to come to me with it first. Copy?”

  “Roger that,” I said.

  “Yes ma’am,” Stoddard replied more formally.

  The colonel looked at us both, then took a deep breath, and continued.

  “My full resume is posted on the ODIS intranet, but just so you know, I did two combat tours—one in the Middle East and one in Africa—as well as three trips to the International Space Station.

  “It’s because I’ve got the space rating and the flight hours that they assigned me to head up ODIS. My Operators never climb into a cockpit nor a space suit, but you’re every bit as vital to ongoing United States space readiness as any astronaut ever was. The public doesn’t give a damn because people long ago decided space was boring and run-of-the-mill. But since the Chinese put their first probe on the Moon, the politicians in Washington D.C. have been nervous about us losing our edge in a new space race.”

  I nodded, knowingly.

  The Peoples Republic of China had been announcing plans for a lunar base, even before their first successful robotic landing. With the Russians doing most of the heavy lifting to the aging International Space Station, it was left to America’s military establishment to decide if free men would walk on the moon, or take a back seat to the world’s newest assumed superpower.

  “Unlike the last time America went to the moon,” the colonel continued, “this time we’re doing it in steps. Not one-shots. And because the entire thing is rolled up under the significant umbrella of the Department of Defense, there’s not been as much sensitivity to cutbacks as during the Apollo years—though certain politicians, and a certain President in particular, have done their worst.”

  Again, I found myself nodding.

  “Don’t wake the Chinese dragon,” one notable political blogger had shouted when news about the creation of ODIS had gone public.

  Thankfully, for my sake, such alarmism had been ignored.

  We were definitely going back.

  But not before there was enough infrastructure in orbit—Earth’s, as well as the Moon’s—to ensure that we were going for keeps.

  Which is where ODIS came in.

  “We don’t fly the usual ROV here,” the colonel said, her eyes piercing as she looked at us, “The stuff we run is actually two or three generations past anything either of you have ever flown or driven in your careers. This is not joystick work. The ODIS environment is immersive, because the machinery you’ll be piloting is billion-dollar stuff, and designed to work in one of the most hostile environments possible. The training is also immersive—’train as you fight’, I think the Army always says? Well, here at ODIS we train as we Operate, and you’ll have plenty of time to work the kinks out and make all the usual beginners blunders before we let you at the real thing.”

  I momentarily looked up at the white-tiled ceiling, imagining that I could peer through the roof and up through the sky, to where ODIS Operators were busily putting together the several orbital docking and receiving platforms that would be taking on material and manpower bound for the Moon.

  Cybernauts, one Army Times headline had quipped, when the basics of the ODIS mission were made publicly known.

  I’d taken one look at the program—concluded it was by far the coolest thing I’d ever seen—and immediately determined that, one way or another, I was going to be a part of it.

  • • •

  Each of the Chinese suits had the familiar hammer, sickle, and stars of the Peoples Republic of China emblazoned across a breast. The troops slipped out of their capsule—a solid dozen of them!—and began tethering themselves to Grissom Platform. They didn’t have guns that I could see, though if there was a gun that functioned in vacuum and microgravity, I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to recognize it in any case. I guessed that the Chinese had banked on their electromagnetic pulse weapon to do their dirty work for them, and because my proxy was—for all intents and purposes—still motionless on the solar panel boom, they probably assumed my circuits had been turned to toast along with all the rest.

  Somewhere out there, though I couldn’t detect or see her yet, Chesty was coming in hot. I held myself still and waited, watching the Chinese move closer to me and then, white-knuckled moments later, over me, advancing towards Grissom Platform’s central modules. Those modules were uninhabited at the moment—no astronauts on staff for a thing only half built—but they could be made to power up and provide life support in a pinch. The Chinese moved with such rapidity and purpose, I began to wonder how much information about the platform’s engineering had been leaked or smuggled to the PRC prior to this, their most brazen attack on the United States to date.

  Did they worry that anyone back on Earth might notice? Or care? Or were they so convinced that the EMP had eliminated all electronic eyes and ears that they were willing to just walk in and take the platform—daring someone on the ground to say or do anything about it?

  There was a whoop—no, not quite, more like a cry; a war cry.

  “OOOOORAHHHHH!”

  Chesty—or rather, her proxy—appeared for an instant, her experimental maneuvering pack’s micro-jets blasting tiny trails in the emptiness of space. She shot past me and thunked into the side of the enemy spacecraft. I watched Chesty hang there on the capsule’s side for a moment, her contorted body depressed into the ablative shielding. Had she overshot the mark and terminated herself?

  With relief, I saw her begin to move—servo-assisted joints flexing as she picked herself up out of the depression and turned around.

  The Chinese had seen her too, and were not amused.

  Half their squad began reeling themselves back towards the capsule.

  I waited like a spider, just aching for a chance to strike, then shot up from where I’d been laying prone on the solar panel boom.

  Two of the six got my titanium fists in their face bowls.

  The crunch on my knuckles was ever so satisfying.

  They flailed and reflexively pulled their hands up to their faces. I couldn’t tell if I’d actually cracked the bowls badly enough to vent atmosphere—unlikely, given the fact each bowl was supposed to be meteorite-proof—but I’d definitely given them something to think about.

  Chesty was prepared for the remaining four. She’d crouched directly in front of the mouth to the capsule’s hatch, like a wrestler—her mechanized head swiveling this way and that as she sized up her four on-rushing opponents.

  “I’ve got these,” Chesty said. “You better check on the others, before they do something both of us will regret.”

  “Roger that,” I said, and spun to face the remaining Chinese.

  Rather than come for me, however, they’d redoubled their efforts to break into Grissom Platform’s central modules. Two of them had unfurled computer pads with ribbon cables, each cable snaked out and plugged into the now-exposed electronics near a main airlock. I began advancing on them—pulling myself hand-over-hand and foot-over-foot like a chimpanzee—when the world suddenly turned to grainy static. I yelled in frustration, feeling all my senses go dead. Had the Chinese set off a second EMP? And what about Chesty? If my proxy was kaput, that left
her and her alone to combat the enemy—12 to 1. And even a Marine has her limits.

  • • •

  With the Operator suit on, I looked like a lab rabbit.

  Hundreds of thin wires and cables snaked away from the one-piece body suit that hugged me uncomfortably in all the wrong places. Chesty was in the same predicament, though I had to admit the suit was much more flattering on her than it was on me. We were each standing on a yellow line with two yellow-painted footprints in front of it—to note our starting positions. Three meters in front of us, also poised on yellow-painted footprints, were our proxies.

  Robots, really. Man-sized and fully articulated in ways not even the real thing had ever been. I experimentally snapped my right fingers a few times, and watched as my proxy’s hand made the same motions, and even achieved a similar effect, though its plastic, ceramic and metallic flesh clanked and dinked more than it snapped.

  “Please don’t do that,” said an Air Force master sergeant who’d been supervising Chesty and I during our first day in the suits. We’d already logged two weeks going over mechanics and theory, hitting the books and soaking our brains in math, diagrams, and history lessons on the development of these, the United States’ most sophisticated remotely-operated vehicles in existence. Even a single arm from one of the proxies was worth more than my retired mother’s 5-bedroom McMansion in the Bay Area.

  I rightfully quit my fooling around and waited for further instructions from the master sergeant—just one of many technically-savvy non-commissioned offers who prowled on the sidelines. The closed hangar in which we all stood was part of the ODIS simulator—a place where new proxy Operators could get a feel for their machines, and the body suits could be “tuned” to their wearers. No human being’s electromagnetic or physiological signature being quite the same as any other’s.

  “Lift your right legs please,” said the master sergeant. “Keep your knees about waist level and balance for thirty seconds.”

  I did as instructed, and so did Chesty. I was amazed to see my proxy emulate me exactly, even down to the minor shimmying I was doing as I tried to keep from dropping my leg or toppling over. For an insane instant I wanted to call out PT cadence—One thousand, one! One thousand, two! One thousand, three!—and decided against it. The Air Force NCOs might not grasp the humor of the moment, and I certainly didn’t need to magnify the reputation I’d already earned as something of a goof.

  If I’d been somewhat cocky about my ROV experience coming into ODIS, that cockiness had gradually crumbled as the magnitude of what I’d be doing became clear. ODIS wasn’t about sitting in a trailer and guiding a mini-helicopter, armed with cameras and third-generation Hellfires slung under its stubby wings—prowling for insurgents. ODIS was as close as I’d ever get to actually becoming what I drove. Or Operated, according to the correct term, which Valkyrie was insistent that we use.

  She watched us now, sitting back a bit from the NCOs who worked and tapped at keys on their portable laptops, their own sets of wires and cables trailing this way and that across the floor. Mobile servers on wheels had been rolled in to handle the software aspect—human nerve impulse being wickedly difficult to accurately transform into data the proxy’s motors and servos could recognize. Fans in those servers hummed gently, and despite the superb air conditioning of the simulator, I felt myself begin to sweat.

  “Okay,” said the master sergeant. “Left legs down, and right legs up.”

  Chesty and I did as instructed, and our proxies mirrored us exactly.

  “Won’t the distance cause enough signal lag to give us issues?” I asked the master sergeant, who’d so far proven to be fantastically knowledgeable about his subject of assignment. I’d have tried talking him into going warrant if the Air Force had had the good sense to keep its warrants, instead of retiring them out of the service so that every pilot could claim to be a college graduate.

  “Some,” said the master sergeant. “But the proxy is only a few hundred miles up, at most. Not even the blink of an eye for round-trip transmissions. And we won’t be operating these on the moon from this building. Sooner or later some of you are going to have to go up.”

  Go up…I let myself thrill for the moment at the prospect of being assigned to honest-to-gosh-damned astronaut training. Would I even pass the harder parts of the physical? Would it matter? Now that the Navy and Air Force were calling the shots, a lot remained uncertain. But at least you didn’t need a doctorate in the sciences to get to orbit anymore, as had been the case when NASA’s astronaut feeder program had been clogged to the rafters with PhDs.

  “Right leg down,” said the master sergeant.

  Chesty and I did it. Our proxies did it too.

  “Now jog in place,” said the master sergeant.

  Chesty and I began to lightly pad up and down on the balls of our feet, not daring to get any more vigorous about it because our proxies were doing precisely as we did, and neither of us was sure how much terrestrial stress they’d been designed to take—despite what the factory specs said.

  “Good,” said the master sergeant. “Leap forward a few times.”

  Chesty and I looked at each other, but didn’t move.

  “It’s cool,” said the master sergeant, smiling. “They’re expensive as hell, but then again they ought to be. They’ll withstand 7.62 automatic fire, and come back for seconds. You could drop one from three thousand feet, and all you’d do is scratch the paint job.”

  Emboldened by the master sergeant’s words, Chesty and I began to leap forward. Rather comically, I am afraid to admit, stretching our bodies out and curling back, covering several feet in each bound.

  The proxies mirrored us beautifully.

  Too beautifully for my taste, as I landed awkwardly on the third jump and fell on my ass.

  My proxy emulated me, thunking loudly onto the rubberized floor.

  Chesty couldn’t help herself. She laughed loudly.

  I looked over at her and ruefully pushed myself to my knees.

  All enlisted eyes darted to my proxy as it began to flop and flail like a fish on dry land.

  “Oh crap,” I said. “Did I—?”

  “No sir,” said the master sergeant. “It’s fine. Hang on a sec….”

  He began hammering keys almost too quickly for the eye to see, and the spasming proxy relaxed and lay flat.

  Valkyrie stood up and approached, with her habitually-attached clipboard under one arm.

  “It’ll be like that for awhile,” she said. “It’s going to be days before each of you have fed enough data into the system for the proxies to read your movements correctly in all circumstances. It’s a bit like voice recognition software, if you’ve ever used that. The basic setup is pre-packaged for a certain set of sounds matched to a certain set of words, but until the software learns you, it’s going to mess up as often as not. Same here, with the proxies.”

  “Still,” Chesty said, “this is flat-out remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Truly space-age.”

  “Yes it is,” said the colonel. “And unlike an astronaut who has to be supplied with food and air and water, a proxy can remain in orbit for months or years without needing to do much more than take naps while tied to the nearest solar collector or fuel cell. The batteries in those proxies are space-age too. In the end, it’s much cheaper and more effective to Operate in space, and I say that with no small regret, because once you’ve been up there—” I noticed Valkyrie’s eyes had started to sparkle a bit, “—you won’t ever be the same person again.”

  • • •

  I was blind and nearly deaf. The light-weight audiovisual hood was feeding me static. My heart told me there was nothing much to be done. If the Chinese had set off another EMP—lethal, I thought, at that range; for them as much as us—then both Chesty and I were cold turkey. And we’d just have to wait and wonder what the Chinese did with Grissom Platform.

  Suddenly my visual picture blinked, went black, then blinked again.

 
“Hang on,” I said. I could vaguely hear the rapid speech of the Air Force and Navy people who’d clustered around Chesty and I as we Operated from our booths. They’d already assumed the worse, and rightly so. With the other Operators out of the picture, it seemed unlikely that Chesty or I could do much to change the present verdict.

  Color swam back into my “eyes” and very quickly I realized I was staring up at a Chinese troop who’d bent over me. He was tugging at my torso with a tool of some sort. I could feel it, as if someone was trying to pry between my ribs with a pair of needle-nose pliers. I jerked and kicked—in the booth as well as via proxy—and the Chinese space soldier spun away from me, his tool lost to vacuum and only his tether keeping him from being similarly orphaned in orbit.

  Chesty grunted and growled.

  I re-orientated myself so that I could see what was happening down by the combat capsule. No less than six of the Chinese had piled on top of Chesty’s proxy, which struggled mightily to break free. One of the enemy had a hand-held device of some sort and was trying to keep it applied to Chesty’s upper torso.

  “I’m losing it!” I heard her say in panic, as much through the Operating room as through the speakers in my ears. “Signal’s breaking up!”

  The situation quickly became clear.

  Not only were the Chinese trying to take Grissom Platform intact, they were trying to take the proxies too. Which explained why they’d not so much as laid a pipe wrench on us during the melee. Probably they were under strict orders not to damage anything they came across, even if we fought back. They were trying to neutralize us instead.

  Not thinking, I began my hand-over-foot-over-hand race back down the solar panel boom. Something latched hold of me from above, like a sack of cement stuck to me with duct tape. I ignored it and kept moving, intent on distracting the soldier who had the neutralizer in his hand and was trying to use it to knock Chesty out of the fight.