“Yes. How’s your shoulder?”
“Clean wound,” he said.
Jacoba debated speaking, decided she had to. “Hyun told me you defended the drive.”
“I defended myself,” he said, “and the Captain. The drive was just another weapon.”
She rested her fingers for a moment on the edge of the table, as if that was the same as thanking him.
He took a deep, uneven breath. “Can you—I mean…”
That was permission, and she slid one arm under his shoulders and propped him against her as he sat up.
He didn’t like to be touched when he was weakened; as soon as he could, he leaned away.
“They know we’ve seen it,” he said, carefully, around what sounded like a broken rib. “They’ll recover from this, and then they’ll be back. It’s useless to pretend we don’t know what we know.”
She’d figured as much.
Then he said, without looking at her, “You might as well ask to stay on.”
Jacoba didn’t have an answer for that.
After the silence had gotten uncomfortable, David said, “Just as long as it takes for us to patch up the ship and for Shahida to get the drive back. She got attached to it when they tried to take it—she’ll want to have that information.”
“Noted,” Jacoba said.
After everyone had treated their wounds, there were a few hours of ship diagnostics and some emergency patches to the outer hull. Without mechs it was slow and slipshod going, with Hyun and Jacoba knocking sheets of metal into place and welding them by hand.
Jacoba waited until the repairs were finished and the crew had assembled before she told the Captain that Arva carried a copy of the drive.
It was the most verbal Jacoba had ever seen her.
“Arva’s not your property,” snapped the Captain, backed against one of the consoles like she was protecting it with her body. “I should have you under arrest for compromising her that way—this is an absolutely unauthorized act that shows a disturbing lack of trust in your colleagues and your Captain, and I am furious that, in light of events, it has turned out to be justified.”
Marcus startled at the conclusion, looking up from where he sat in one corner, hands bound with wires.
Jacoba nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
Shahida turned to Ruth, Hyun, and David, whose shoulder was tightly wrapped.
“We don’t have long,” she said. “As soon as they regroup, they’ll be looking for us. We have to patch up Coppelia, reach a decent city that isn’t deep-orbit away, and find the right people to give this to.”
It was no longer a question that they would be handing the information to someone. It was no longer a question that it was war.
It was no longer a question that Jacoba would remain Coppelia crew.
“It might not go well,” Shahida said, and now it was the voice that Jacoba remembered from that port city seven years ago, the voice that had drawn her to the Coppelia over every other ship. It carried, and was final. “Does anyone object?”
Jacoba glanced at David. He met her eye a moment too long, looked away.
No one raised a hand.
Shahida bit back a smile. “Places, then.”
They stepped around the dust and wires to their consoles. Jacoba stood next to Marcus, who ventured a smile at her. She nudged his knee with hers.
Shahida said. “All ahead full.”
Hyun reached into the chaos and flipped the fuel circuit by hand.
Jacoba kept her eyes fixed out the viewer. The sunlight was fading, and the red algae beneath them was just beginning to glow, mapping their course across the surface of the water.
Then the engines roared to life, and the Coppelia began its last run.
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, was recently published by Prime Books. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from magazines such as Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod, and in many anthologies, including Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Federations, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, among others. Her story “Light on the Water” was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at genevievevalentine.com.
Death Reported of Last Surviving Veteran of Great War
Dan Abnett
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, March 19)—America’s last known Great War veteran, Cpt. Arlen Howardine, died Sunday at the age of 314.
Howardine died of natural causes at his accommodation in Longview, WV, according to a spokesman for the home, who added funeral arrangements would be announced later this week.
Howardine enlisted at the age of 17 by reportedly convincing an Army captain that he was older. He was the last living American to have served in Europe during The Great War and the last of 670 servicemen who elected for the famous hardshell program.
The President released a statement today that recognized Howardine and affirmed the “enduring inspiration of Captain Howardine’s life and service.”
I never married. I understood that limitation when I enlisted. Some of the other boys, they always said they were married to their shells, but it wasn’t like that for me. The shell was just what it was, though I know I surely missed it when it was gone. When they took me out of it in ’68, I felt like I’d been crippled. You get used to that potential. That power. I don’t mean the big stuff. I mean the thought of it, the knowledge that the capacity is there. When you raise your right hand, you don’t have to level a town to know what that hand is capable of.
So yes, sir, I missed it. But getting rid of the shell, in the end it was the right thing to do. It was just getting in the way, and there were defects and infections. I didn’t need it anymore, and the Air and Space Museum did. So what do you do?
We were popular with the girls. Yes, sir. Ladies would regularly send me photos, and billet dos, and sometimes items of undergarment. It was fun, and it reminded us we were appreciated. But, lord, if I’d ever turned up on the doorstep of any of those young ladies with a bunch of flowers…Like I say, we understood the limitations. We understood what we were forgoing when we took on the shell. We were accepting that we’d lose most if not all of the normal and regular expectations of a man’s life.
And there lay the great irony too, of course. When the process was first developed, it shortened a man’s span. If you volunteered for one of them early shells, you were looking at ten more years max, what with the surgical trauma, the cardiac stress, the organ function, the stress disorders, everything. It was a burden. It burned men out.
By the time my generation came along, the process had been refined. This was the time of the Great War. Technology had advanced. And there it is, that’s the irony for you. In taking the shell, we accepted a life that would be empty of all the usual experiences and milestones offered to a man. And we also accepted that the empty life we had chosen would run longer than normal. They fortified and enhanced us to receive the burden of the shell, and that made us last forever.
Or near enough. I am three hundred fourteen years old. I have outlived thirty-seven presidents and seen twenty-four—twenty-four—generations of my family go by.
They say I’m the last, the last one still going. I believe that’s so. I stayed in touch with the other boys for a while, a decade or two, then fewer and fewer of them over the passing years. Some died, of course, but mostly, we just drifted apart. Hank Peterson, in Pittsburgh, I wrote him quite often, and he would write back. I understand cancer got him in the end. Mark Remy, he was in San Diego for the longest time, and we would sometimes talk on the telephone. But then he got moved to sheltered housing, and that was all I knew until suddenly I was informed he had died. Benham, John Handley Benham—he was the last I knew of. He was in Philadelphia. We never spoke or kept up. We’d never been particular buddies. He made it to…what was it? Last year?
The fall before? They came to interview me at the time, because I had become the last one, as if that was some prize, some tremendous achievement all of itself. That was not how it seemed to me. I felt like I had come in last place, dragging my heels, and that everyone else had got their reward first.
The Great War was not the only service I saw. You shell up a man and bless him with longevity, he keeps going for a long while. I saw several theaters. Fifth Iraq. Ivory Coast. The Police Action of ’40. I did a lot of tours. We all did a lot of tours. Latterly, it was for show. I mean, the shells wore out long before we did. Obsolete. Old fashioned and heavy. Inefficient. By ’55, you understand, your basic grunt could outperform us with his second skin and his biometrics. That’s progress for you. But they would bring us out for a fly-past or a photo opportunity. We’d get a new paint job, and we’d pose with some movie star, or lift an APC full of cheering troopers above our heads and smile for the reporters. They were always draping us with flags. Sometimes they’d even load us and let us cut loose at selected targets, but it was all for show. All of it. Everything was carefully staged. They wouldn’t have let veteran shells go against real, live targets. Getting one of us killed in India or South China by a separatist with a pen laser would not have furthered patriotic propaganda.
I made the cover of Time twice. Twice. I have a feeling that in a few weeks, I may make it once more.
I remember The Great War, but not well. When they unshelled me, they had to take modules of memory that had become impacted. I’m blank on a lot. Most of it, in fact. Ivory Coast, I remember a little. Not much. I don’t have stories because they uploaded them from me for the public archive, and I wouldn’t recognize them as mine anymore.
I have, of course, watched the footage. I’ve seen myself and been surprised. It doesn’t remind me of anything I ever did or any place I ever was because the memories are simply gone. They tell me raising the flag was me, but I only have their word for that. I suppose The Great War is the one that endures in the imagination because it was the only time we went up against our own kind. The tech wasn’t the same, but the capabilities were comparable, and the design philosophy pretty much identical. I always thought they looked rather more stylish than we did. More streamlined.
I met one of theirs after the war. Theirs didn’t last very long, just like our prototypes hadn’t. He was interned, and he was sick. He struck me as a decent man. He was hard to look at because they’d unshelled him and there was so little of the original man left. But I saw decency. He was hard to look at because I saw myself.
He said he missed it. He missed the sense of possibility. I still had my shell, so I didn’t truly appreciate what he meant. Later, after ’68, I certainly did. I’ve spent most of my life missing the shell, feeling slow and weak and flightless, heavy, like I was leaden, but not powerful. Helpless. It’s not an enjoyable sensation.
We used to know the world was looking at us. We were iconic. We were a statement of our country’s technological superiority, of its moral fortitude. Don’t let anyone tell you that the sacrifice was some kind of a surprise. We weren’t naive, sir. We weren’t stupid. Well, not all of us. We understood what we were getting into. We got to serve our country for a few good years, and we got to taste, for that short time, what it felt like to be that capable. Then, after that, we got many, many more years to reflect upon that experience.
We were built to endure, and so we have endured. I’m fairly anxious for it to be over now. I’ve been in this sheltered accommodation one hundred fourteen years, and before that a care home. I served my country willingly and obediently. I feel, with the benefit of hindsight, that most of the effort of that service took place after ’68.
Sometimes I dream, but dreaming’s not enough, not when you haven’t got enough memories to build the dreams upon. I’m not bitter, but sometimes all I truly want is to properly recall what it felt like. I’m not trying to put it all behind me and forget. Being able to remember would be a great consolation.
I won’t be sorry when this is over.
Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written forty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His latest novel for the Black Library, Prospero Burns, topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. His novel Triumff, for Angry Robot, was published in 2009 and nominated for the British Fantasy Society Award for Best Novel, and his combat SF novel for the same publisher, Embedded, was published in spring 2011. He has written The Silent Stars Go By, the 2011 Christmas Doctor Who novel for the BBC. He was educated at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, and lives and works in Maidstone, Kent. Dan’s blog and website can be found at danabnett.com. Follow him on Twitter @VincentAbnett.
The Cat’s Pajamas
Jack McDevitt
It was like approaching a cosmic lighthouse. Jake would have enjoyed watching Palomus through a viewport, but viewports didn’t provide sufficient protection against the local radiation, so they’d all been covered. He had to settle for the monitors.
Palomus was a pulsar. Its twin beams swept through the night in majestic synchronicity, first one, then the other, not quite two seconds apart. They were anchored at the magnetic poles of an invisible neutron star, an incredibly dense hulk only about twenty kilometers across, all that remained of an ancient supernova.
Hutchins caught her breath. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Jake smiled. He’d seen pulsars up close before, had seen this one not that long ago, but he had never gotten used to them. “The ultimate light show,” he said.
“It’s beautiful. I don’t think I realized they move so fast. The beams—”
He checked the gauges. “Actually, Hutch, these are pretty slow compared to most. There’s one out near Mikai that’s just a blur. The beams rotate thirty-some times per second.”
“You’re kidding.”
He enjoyed watching Hutchins sit entranced. She’d known what was coming, of course. But knowing about it, even seeing a virtual presentation of it during the prep, wasn’t the same as actually experiencing it. “Benny,” he said, addressing the AI, “have we picked up the station yet?”
“Negative, Jake. It’s difficult to get a read in all this interference.”
“Okay. Let us know.” He looked across at his trainee. “You ready?”
Her dark eyes met his. “I’ve got it, Jake.”
She had a lot of self-assurance for a twenty-two year old. But taking the Copperhead into that swirling mass had to be scary. And if she was telling him yes, those eyes were sending a different message. Well, if she wasn’t a bit nervous, she wouldn’t have been human. But it really wasn’t as difficult or as dangerous as it looked. If it were, he wouldn’t let her near the pilot’s seat.
“We have it,” Benny said. The navigation display lit up. “Range four million kilometers.”
Hutchins glanced at the navigation screen. “Set for rendezvous.”
“Will do, Hutch. Estimate arrival time approximately two days.”
“Okay, Benny. Open a channel.”
“Done.”
“Oscillation, this is Copperhead.” The station had once been the Grosvenor, a cargo vessel. Its current name, Ossila, derived from Lauren Ossila, who’d managed the financing and pushed the Pulsar project to completion. But it had morphed quickly. “Oscillation, do you read?”
It would require a minute or two before they could expect to hear a response. While they waited, Jake wondered what sort of research the three physicists orbiting the pulsar were actually doing. He’d done some reading on the way out, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It had something to do with comparing misalignment of the collapsed star’s magnetic poles with the pulse ratio and God knew what else.
They waited, talked about how spectacular the view was, and drank their coffee. After a few minutes, Hutchins tried again: “Oscillation, this is Copperhead. Can you hear me?”
The Co
pperhead was not named after the snake. It had been designed specifically to support missions in areas of high radiation. The ship was heavily shielded. Not with copper, of course. But that was a detail.
Priscilla Hutchins was Jake’s third student pilot. It had been years since the last one. He hadn’t liked it then, and didn’t care for it now. He’d requested they spare him. Frank Irasco, the director, said no. Maybe, he said, with that queasy smile, they could find him another assignment in a month or two. Jake had never liked Irasco.
So here he was. It had been working out, though. Hutchins was smart for a kid. And Jake was more patient now than he’d been in the old days. Maybe he was getting a bit of perspective with age.
“Still no response,” she said.
It’s always a good idea to give a trainee some time alone on the bridge. Makes her feel as if she’s really in charge. “Kill the acceleration for a bit,” he said. “I’m going down to cargo and check the lander.”
Hutchins looked good, he thought. Her black hair was cut short, and she appeared trim and athletic in her uniform. It was the eyes that stood out. And it wasn’t simply that they were pretty, or that they suggested intelligence. She had that, of course, or she wouldn’t have gotten this far. But there was an enhancement of some sort, a level of vitality that left him with a sense that she could be trusted. He didn’t see that very often.
It was a relief. He wouldn’t have wanted to flunk her. He’d been through that with one of his earlier charges, and he still wasn’t certain whose fault it had been.
He released his belt and floated out of his seat. “I wonder,” he said, “if we’re ever going to get the antigravity they keep promising.”
She grinned. “I doubt either of us will live long enough to see that.”
She was right, of course. He nodded and went back through the passenger cabin, and drifted down the tube into the cargo bay. The lander, loaded with food and general supplies, would be their delivery vehicle when they reached the station. It was, like the Copperhead, heavily armored.
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