Jacob wasn’t stupid, that day or this one, and he did keep an inside eye on what was going on under his helmet. What old Sergeant Melford did for him was mainly to make him glad that he wasn’t crazy too, and no matter how bad things got, at least Jacob wasn’t enjoying it like that crazy laughing grinning old Sergeant Melford.
He wanted to tell Addison and ask him why sometimes you were really scared or sick and you would look up and see Melford laughing his crazy ass off, standing over some steaming roasted body, and you’d have to grin, too, was it just so insane horrible or? Addison might have been able to tell Jacob but Addison took a low one and got hurt bad in both legs and the groin and it was a long time before he came back and then he wasn’t young-old anymore but just old. And he didn’t say much anymore.
With both his hands good and dirty, for a good grip on the plastic handles, Jacob felt more secure and he smiled back at Sergeant Melford.
“Gonna be a good one, Sarge.” It didn’t do any good to say anything else, like it’s been a long march and why don’t we rest a while before we hit them, Sarge or, I’m scared and sick and if I’m gonna die I want it at the very first, Sarge: no. Crazy old Melford would be down on his hunkers next to you and give you a couple of friendly punches and josh around and flash those white teeth until you were about to scream or run but instead you wound up saying, “Yeah Sarge, gonna be a good one.”
We most of us figured that what made him so crazy was just that he’d been in this crazy war so long, longer than anybody could remember anybody saying he remembered; and he never got hurt while platoon after platoon got zeroed out from under him by ones and twos and whole squads. He never got hurt and maybe that bothered him, not that any of us felt sorry for the crazy son of a bitch.
Wesley tried to explain it like this: “Sergeant Melford is an improbability locus.” Then he tried to explain what a locus was and Jacob didn’t really catch it, and he tried to explain what an improbability was, and that seemed pretty simple but Jacob couldn’t see what it all had to do with math. Wesley was a good talker though, and he might have one day been able to clear it up but he tried to run through the tanglewire, you’d think not even a civilian would try to do that, and he fell down and the little metal bugs ate his face.
It was twenty or maybe twenty-five battles later, who keeps track, when Jacob realized that not only did old Sergeant Melford never get hurt, but he never killed any of the enemy either. He just ran around singing out orders and being happy and every now and then he’d shoot off his projector but he always shot high or low or the beam was too broad. Jacob wondered about it but by this time he was more afraid, in a way, of Sergeant Melford than he was of the enemy, so he kept his mouth shut and he waited for someone else to say something about it.
Finally Cromwell, who had come into the platoon only a couple of weeks after Jacob, noticed that Sergeant Melford never seemed to zero anybody and he had this theory that maybe the crazy old son of a bitch was a spy for the other side. They had fun talking about that for a while, and then Jacob told them about the old improbability locus theory, and one of the new guys said he sure is an imperturbable locust all right, and they all had a good laugh, which was good because Sergeant Melford came by and joined in after Jacob told him what was so funny, not about the improbability locus, but the old joke about how do you make a hormone? You don’t pay her. Cromwell laughed like there was no tomorrow and for Cromwell there wasn’t even any sunset, because he went across the perimeter to take a crap and got caught in a squeezer matrix.
The next battle was the first time the enemy used the drainer field, and of course the projectors didn’t work and the last thing a lot of the men learned was that the light plastic stock made a damn poor weapon against a long knife, of which the enemy had plenty. Jacob lived because he got in a lucky kick, aimed for the groin but got the kneecap, and while the guy was hopping around trying to stay upright he dropped his knife and Jacob picked it up and gave the guy a new orifice, eight inches wide and just below the navel.
The platoon took a lot of zeros and had to fall back, which they did very fast because the tanglewire didn’t work in a drainer field, either. They left Addison behind, sitting back against a crate with his hands in his lap and a big drooly red grin not on his face.
With Addison gone, no other private had as much combat time as Jacob. When they rallied back at the neutral zone, Sergeant Melford took Jacob aside and wasn’t really smiling at all when he said: “Jacob, you know that now if anything happens to me, you’ve got to take over the platoon. Keep them spread out and keep them advancing, and most of all, keep them happy.”
Jacob said, “Sarge, I can tell them to keep spread out and I think they will, and all of them know enough to keep pushing ahead, but how can I keep them happy when I’m never very happy myself, not when you’re not around.”
That smile broadened and turned itself into a laugh. You crazy son of a bitch, Jacob thought and because he couldn’t help himself, he laughed too. “Don’t worry about that,” Sergeant Melford said. “That’s the kind of thing that takes care of itself when the time comes.”
The platoon practiced more and more with knives and clubs and how to use your hands and feet but they still have to carry the projectors into combat because, of course, the enemy could turn off the drainer field whenever he wanted to. Jacob got a couple of scratches and a piece of his nose cut off, but the medic put some cream on it and it grew back. The enemy started using bows and arrows so the platoon had to carry shields, too, but that wasn’t too bad after they designed one that fit right over the protector, held sideways. One squad learned how to use bows and arrows back at the enemy and things got as much back to normal as they had ever been.
Jacob never knew exactly how many battles he had fought as a private, but it was exactly forty-one. And actually, he wasn’t a private at the end of the forty-first.
Since they got the archer squad, Sergeant Melford had taken to standing back with them, laughing and shouting orders at the platoon and every now and then loosing an arrow that always landed on a bare piece of ground. But this particular battle (Jacob’s forty-first) had been going pretty poorly, with the initial advance stopped and then pushed back almost to the archers; and then a new enemy force breaking out on the other side of the archers.
Jacob’s squad maneuvered between the archers and the new enemy soldiers and Jacob was fighting right next to Sergeant Melford, fighting pretty seriously while old Melford just laughed his fool head off, crazy son of a bitch. Jacob felt that split-second funny feeling and ducked and a heavy club whistled just over his head and bashed the side of Sergeant Melford’s helmet and sheared the top of his helmet off just as neat as you snip the end off a soft-boiled egg. Jacob fell to his knees and watched the helmet full of stuff twirl end over end in back of the archers and he wondered why there were little glass marbles and cubes inside the gray-blue blood-streaked mushy stuff and then everything just went
Inside a mountain of crystal under a mountain of rock, a tiny piezoelectric switch, sixty-four molecules in a cube, flipped over to the OFF position and the following transaction took place at just less than the speed of light:
UNIT 10011001011MELFORD ACCIDENTALLY DEACTIVATED.
SWITCH UNIT 1101011100JACOB TO CATALYST STATUS. (SWITCHING COMPLETED). ACTIVATE AND INSTRUCT UNIT 1101011100JACOB.
and came back again just like that. Jacob stood up and looked around. The same old sun-baked plain, but everybody but him seemed to be dead. Then he checked and the ones that weren’t obviously zeroed were still breathing a bit. And, thinking about it, he knew why. He chuckled.
He stepped over the collapsed archers and picked up Melford’s bleedy skull-cap. He inserted the blade of a knife between the helmet and the hair, shorting out the induction tractor that held the helmet on the head and served to pick up and transmit signals. Letting the helmet drop to the ground, he carefully bore the grisly balding bowl over to the enemy’s crapper. Knowing exactly where to look, he fishe
d out all the bits and pieces of crystal and tossed them down the smelly hole. Then he took the unaugmented brain back to the helmet and put it back the way he had found it. He returned to his position by Melford’s body.
The stricken men began to stir and a few of the most hardy wobbled to their hands and knees.
Jacob threw back his head and laughed and laughed.
SPIREY AND THE QUEEN
by Alastair Reynolds
New writer Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov’s Science Fiction and elsewhere. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from Wales, but lives in the Netherlands.
In the slam-bang, relentlessly paced adventure that follows, he throws us headlong into the midst of a bitter and long-term war being fought in deep space, and shows us that the smallest of actions can set in motion a chain of circumstances that can eventually have the largest and most unexpected of consequences—for both good and ill.
* * *
Part One
Space war is godawful slow.
Mouser’s long-range sensors had sniffed the bogey two days ago, but it had taken all that time just to creep within kill-range. I figured it had to be another dud. With ordnance, fuel and morale all low, we were ready to slink back to Tiger’s Eye anyway; let one of the other thickships pick up the sweep in this sector.
So—still groggy after frogsleep—I wasn’t exactly wetting myself with excitement; not even when Mouser began spiking the thick with combat-readiness psychogens. Even when we went to Attack-Con-One, all I did was pause the neurodisney I was tripping (Hellcats of Solar War Three, since you asked), slough my hammock and swim languidly up to the bridge.
“Junk,” I said, looking over Yarrow’s shoulder at the readout. “War debris or another of those piss-poor chondrites. Betcha.”
“Sorry, kid. Everything checks out.”
“Hostiles?”
“Nope. Positive on the exhaust; dead ringer for the stolen ship.” She traced a webbed hand across the swathe of decorations which already curled around her neck. “Want your stripes now or when we get back?”
“You actually think this’ll net us a pair of tigers?”
“Damn right it will.”
I nodded, and thought: she isn’t necessarily wrong. No defector, no stolen military secrets reaching the Royalists. Ought to be worth a medal, maybe even a promotion.
So why did I feel something wasn’t right?
“All right,” I said, hoping to drown qualms in routine. “How soon?”
“Missiles are already away, but she’s five light-minutes from us, so the quacks won’t reach her for six hours. Longer if she makes a run for cover.”
“Run for cover? That’s a joke.”
“Yeah, hilarious.” Yarrow swelled one of the holographic displays until it hovered between us.
It was a map of the Swirl, tinted to show zones controlled by us or the Royalists. An enormous slowly rotating disc of primordial material, 800 AU edge to edge; wide enough that light took more than four days to traverse it.
Most of the action was near the middle, in the light-hour of space around the central star Fomalhaut. Immediately around the sun was a material-free void which we called the Inner Clearing Zone, but beyond that began the Swirl proper; metal-rich lanes of dust condensing slowly into rocky planets. Both sides wanted absolute control of those planet-forming Feeding Zones—prime real estate for the day when one side beat the other and could recommence mining operations—so that was where our vast armies of wasps mainly slugged things out. We humans—Royalist and Standardist both—kept much further out, where the Swirl thinned to metal-depleted icy rubble. Even hunting the defector hadn’t taken us within ten light-hours of the Feeding Zones, and we’d become used to having a lot of empty space to ourselves. Apart from the defector, there shouldn’t have been anything else out here to offer cover.
But there was. Big too, not much more than a half-light-minute from the rat. “Practically pissing distance,” Yarrow observed.
“Too close for coincidence. What is it?”
“Splinter. Icy planetesimal, if you want to get technical.”
“Not this early in the day.” But I remembered how one of our tutors back at the academy had put it: Splinters are icy slag, spat out of the Swirl. In a few hundred thousand years there’ll be a baby solar system around Fomalhaut, but there’ll also be shitloads of junk surrounding it, leftovers on million-year orbits.
“Worthless to us,” Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair which ran all the way from her brow to fluke. “But evidently not to ratty.”
“What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl.”
Yarrow gave me her best withering look.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Not my smartest ever suggestion.”
Yarrow nodded sagely. “Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours is to fire and forget.”
* * *
Six hours after the quackheads had hared away from Mouser, Yarrow floated in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath. She resembled an inverted question mark, and if I’d been superstitious I’d have said that wasn’t necessarily the best of omens.
“You kill me,” she said.
An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren—first to swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin which let us tolerate cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the billions of molecule-sized demons which coursed through our bodies, or the combat-specific psycho-modifications. But swapping your legs for a tail touched off too many queasy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve, though.
“What?” I said.
“That neurodisney shit. Isn’t a real space war good enough for you?”
“Yeah, except I don’t think this is it. When was the last time one of us actually looked a Royalist in the eye?”
She shrugged. “Something like 400 years.”
“Point made. At least in Solar War Three you get some blood. See, it’s all set on planetary surfaces—Titan, Europa, all those moons they’ve got back in Sol system. Trench warfare, hand-to-hand stuff. You know what adrenaline is, Yarrow?”
“Managed without it until now. And there’s another thing: Don’t know much about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three.”
“It’s conjectural,” I said. “And in any case it almost happened; they almost went to the brink.”
“Almost?”
“It’s set in a different timeline.”
She grinned, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, you kill me.”
“She made a move yet?” I asked.
“What?”
“The defector.”
“Oh, we’re back in reality now?” Yarrow laughed. “Sorry, this is going to be slightly less exciting than Solar War Three.”
“Inconsiderate,” I said. “Think the bitch would give us a run for our money.” And as I spoke the weapons readout began to pulse faster and faster, like the cardiogram of a fluttering heart. “How long now?”
“One minute, give or take a few seconds.”
“Want a little bet?”
Yarrow grinned, sallow is the red alert lighting. “As if I’d say no, Spirey.”
So we hammered out a wager; Yarrow betting 50 tiger-tokens the rat would attempt some last-minute evasion. “Won’t do her a blind bit of good,” she said. “But that won’t stop her. It’s human nature.”
Me, I suspected our target was either dead or asleep.
“Bit of an empty ritual, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“I mean, the attack happened the best part of five minutes ago, realtime. The rat’s already dead, and nothing we can do can influence th
at outcome.”
Yarrow bit on a nicotine stick. “Don’t get all philosophical on me, Spirey.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. How long?”
“Five seconds. Four . . .”
She was somewhere between three and four when it happened. I remember thinking that there was something disdainful about the rat’s actions: that she’d deliberately waited until the last possible moment, and that she’d dispensed with our threat with the least effort possible.
That was how it felt, anyway.
Nine of the quackheads detonated prematurely, way beyond kill-range. For a moment the tenth remained, zeroing in on the defector—but instead it failed to detonate, until it was just beyond range.
For long moments there was silence, while we absorbed what had happened. Yarrow broke it, eventually.
“Guess I just made myself some money,” she said.
* * *
Colonel Wendigo’s hologram delegated appeared, momentarily frozen before shivering to life. With her too-clear, too-young eyes she fixed first Yarrow and then me.
“Intelligence was mistaken,” she said. “Seems the defector doctored records to conceal the theft of those countermeasures. But you harmed her anyway?”
“Just,” said Yarrow. “Her quackdrive’s spewing out exotics like Spirey after a bad binge. No hull damage, but . . .”
“Assessment?”
Future War Page 12
