The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  Krim floated, head tucked toward his chest, and felt the warm fluid squirm over and around his body. Now it worked itself into his skin, like some salve or ointment, easing away the kinks in his back, the knots in his muscles. Stiff joints and battered knees, a persistent ache in his chest, sore gums, a tender tooth—all the pains and agonies of his years in the dark cell seemed to wash away. As the fluid oozed into his body, he felt not just warmth, but a tingling, like being gently tickled with a fine feather.

  The fluid worked itself farther into his body, down into his ear canals. It squirmed its way through his intestines, and Krim felt his rectum tighten, then relax as he excreted the fluid out his anus. The fluid dribbled through his urethra, out his penis, and he felt that slight shiver as the last drops of urine and fluid spat out.

  Slowly the fluid drained away, leaving his body sticky and clammy. He felt as if he had been dipped in oil, as if he had been blown up and stuffed like a sausage, every crevice of the world inside his skin filled with the odd broth. Warm jets suspended his body inside the sarcophagus, drying him off, seeming to suck away the foam inside him so he felt more normal.

  “Keep your eyes open,” the woman said.

  Krim stretched his eyelids wider, trying not to blink away the gunk in his sockets. A bright light flared before him, sudden, intense heat, the heat causing the mud around his body to tighten and then relax. The world darkened for a moment, and then his eyes opened up or his pupils irised and he saw again, saw the clear lid of the sarcophagus and the woman in white standing before him. The jets of air faded, and he settled down to the bottom of the box as the woman slid the lid back.

  “It’s done,” she said. “You’re protected, now.”

  Krim sat up, and as he rose, the liquid erupted from his throat. He spat the warm, thin mud into the sarcophagus, snorted it out his nose, and excreted it again through penis and anus. His lips and tongue felt numb, the lining of his mouth thick and tasteless.

  The woman hosed away his effluvia, then helped him out of the sarcophagus, walked him across the room, and stood him before a mirror. In the mirror Krim saw an alabaster mannequin, sexless and bald. He reached out to touch it, and jumped back when the reflection reached out to him. Him. The white liquid over his skin had thickened into a sheath covering every centimeter of his body. It covered his chest and crotch and thighs, his legs and arms, hands and feet, his face and ears and skull. He looked down at his hands and saw only a little depression at the ends of his fingertips where nails had been. He ran his hands over his body, over the clean white tissue covering him, and felt something like skin, only a degree or two colder and smoother and hairless.

  Krim rubbed at it, tried to smear it off, tugged at it, yanked it, but it was as if he were pulling his own skin. He touched his nipples and they felt cold, seeming to disappear as he rubbed them between thumb and forefinger. His face looked dead and lifeless, with white lips and no eyelashes or eyebrows. Rubbing his scalp, he felt only smooth skin, no trace of even his old prison crewcut.

  Finally, Krim ran his fingers over his crotch, like his head clean of any curly black hairs. He touched the bulge where his penis should be, then his scrotum. At his touch his testicles descended, his penis enlarged, but when he let go, his genitals retreated into a small pouch.

  He looked over at the woman then, and realized he had assumed she was a woman only because she seemed to have no real bulge at her crotch, small breasts, and a smooth face. Krim looked at his reflection and then at her and realized she could just as easily be a man, or he a woman.

  Staring at his reflection, Krim breathed, and saw that his chest rose and fell. Opening his mouth, he watched himself breathe, saw the white tissues at the back of his throat expand, curled his white tongue up to touch white gums and white teeth and white lips. Air, warm and moist but strangely tasteless, flowed down his throat.

  The air itself felt warm, pleasantly warm, not damp and chilled like his cell, not blazing hot like the courtyard outside. Strange as the weird mud felt, it also felt pleasurable, he thought. His new skin felt like the silk underwear the Beats wore under their body waldos, smooth and rippling with every twitch of his muscle—only warmer, lighter, sheerer. As he moved, the skin seemed to stretch and massage each muscle. His bladder twinged, and as an experiment, he tried to pee. He could feel the hot urine flow out of him, looked down at the slight bulge of his penis, but did not see anything come out. It felt as though his piss got sucked back into him, under the skin and back inside.

  “What is this?” Krim asked.

  “It is the thing that protects us,” the woman said. “The hide, the covering, the skin. No illness can penetrate its covering, no element may harm it. It feeds off sunlight and any organic matter. It filters out harmful pollutants and expels cancers and toxins the body creates. It enhances your senses, allows you to see clearer and farther, to sense greater and more wonderful things.”

  “Hell,” Krim said. “I didn’t ask for this colorless covering.”

  “Nobody should have to,” the woman said. “It is your right as a free citizen.”

  That word again: free. “I am a free citizen?” Something tickled in his throat, like a fish bone, and Krim began to gag.

  The woman smiled, the first time she had smiled at him.

  “You are now,” a voice said. Something resonated in that voice, the sound stirring some memory. “A free man, Krim.”

  Krim turned to face him. Him, his torturer, his tormentor, his nemesis, his enemy, the object of his hatred and anger and pain. Him.

  Commander Thom.

  The Admiral, Krim corrected himself, looking at Thom. Of course. Admiral Thom. The thing in his throat irritated him more, and he repressed a cough.

  Thom stood in the doorway of the room, another doorway leading down another corridor. He held out a large hand, a fat Annapolis ring hugging a knuckle. Time had ravaged him, too, fifteen years of savagery and nastiness. Thom had gone bald, not like the deliberate baldness of Krim’s attendant, but the baldness from aging. Thom, who had pushed and poked and teased a jet black forelock as though it were his baby, had lost that forelock and every hair on his head except for a downy fringe over his ears. A thin white scar cut across his forehead where his widow’s peak had been, a scar for the peak. Admiral Thom, formerly Commander Thom, formerly of the Jeane Kirkpatrick: the man who had captured Krim, had tortured him, who had done his best to extract every bit of information out of him on the long trip back to Earth. Thom, who had sent him to prison.

  The thing in his throat worked its way up. Krim coughed again, began hacking, trying to dislodge the obstruction. A wad of phlegm surrounding the object came up. Sticking out his tongue, Krim leaned over, and spat the thing into Thom’s outstretched hand. A glob of that hideous crap they had dunked his body in dribbled through the Admiral’s fingers. Thom picked out a disk no larger than his fingernail, and held it up.

  “Your tracking chip, Krim,” he said. Thom wiped his hand off with a neatly folded handkerchief from the jacket pocket of his dress whites. “You’re free, now, no longer a zek. The hide repels all foreign objects, you see? We could not let you have its pleasure and protection as a prisoner. But, the war’s over.” He dropped the chip to the floor and crushed it under a boot heel, then put the cloth away and motioned for Krim to follow him down the corridor, into another room, his office.

  “The war never ended, Thom,” Krim said. “I told you that.”

  The Admiral raised an eyebrow, nodded. “That’s true, in a way. But your war is over, Krim. And your war has just begun, too.” Thom walked around a gray steel desk and waved at a gray steel chair. “Sit.”

  Krim stood. Thom glared at him, smiled a smile Krim knew well, and Krim sat. The Admiral leaned against his desk, crossed his arms.

  “You’re looking good, Krim. Unlike many of your fellow convicts, you have kept yourself in shape.” He waved a hand at Krim, clean and smooth in his gleaming white hide. “The exit attendants have done well, have
clothed you in the proper dress of a decent citizen of the Solarian Alliance.” He chuckled, picked up a cylindrical object from the desk. “Damn puritans. You’ll see how narrow their real perspective of the world is. This white-bleached hide—I will do you a favor.”

  Thom swung the cylinder toward Krim, and before he could leap away, touched it to his chest. A shiver rippled through him. Krim looked down at his body, saw himself naked again, black again, the nipples of his breasts erect, a gray stubble of shaved hairs now at his crotch, and his penis and scrotum dangling. Naked as he had come from his cell, but not battered and bruised and dirty.

  “This ‘hide’ is gone?” Krim asked. Yet he could feel something as his skin, still inside him.

  “Oh, no, not gone.” Thom chuckled. “You will never lose the hide; it is a part of you forever. It’s just transparent, now. That white purity is so unlike you, Krim, and yet this present lack of adornment does not suit you, a refugee of the Jack.” Thom pushed a wrapped package toward him, and waved at it.

  Krim snorted, then grinned, realizing Thom had made him naked to assert power over him, and yet his nakedness offended Thom, just as it had offended the white attendant. He did not open the bag.

  “A revolutionary of the Jack, Thom.” Krim ran a hand over his skull, felt the slight stubble of his normal prison cut. “What would you know about what suits me?”

  “Oh, I know. I know.” He touched a finger to his desk monitor, and a flicker of numbers and figures appeared. “Your file.”

  Krim shrugged, crossed his legs. “It’s noise, Thom.” He waved at the figures. “Get to the point. Am I free, Admiral? Can I go from this prison?”

  “Of course you can go,” he said. “Are you free? No, you are not free. No one is free, Krim. I thought you had learned that by now.”

  “My people are free.” He thought of the Jack disappearing into Ur space, wondered where it had gone and if it still survived. It had to have survived. Had to.

  “The Jack was destroyed, Krim. You know that. We blew it when we captured you. Everyone you ever knew has been captured or killed, has been rotting in prison—has been, until now. You, Krim, you are the last to be released.”

  “To be freed?”

  “Released from prison, yes, but not to be freed.” Thom shook his head, the way he might shake his head at a dog that persisted in peeing on the carpet. He walked over to Krim, stood over him, lifted his chin and raised his face so he stared down into Krim’s eyes. Krim looked up at him, tried to hold his gaze. “No one is free anymore, Krim.” He glanced away and stepped back.

  “We are free from hunger,” he went on. “Free from cold and snow and rain. Free from hurt, free from ignorance. Every human need has been taken care of. Our citizens are free to strive, free to labor, free to work toward that which makes them better, or happier. We are free to think, free to speak, free to not speak. But there is one freedom we do not have: freedom from fear.”

  “Fear? Fear, Admiral? Ameruss rules the world, you told me when I was captured. None in this solar system dare oppose it, not since you”—he gulped, afraid to speak it—“eliminated the Jack.”

  He nodded. “There is fear nonetheless.” Thom turned from him, and tapped out some commands on his desk keyboard. An image flickered before them.

  A thing oozed in the projection, a gruesome, hideous thing. It had six legs, massive, boil-encrusted legs, a thick head, two long arms, four hands with five fingers and two thumbs to each hand. Four yellow eyes, like egg yolks, stretched around the fat head, and a mouth lined with sharp teeth yawned and snapped at the base of the thing’s neck. Orange, grotesque mushroomlike protuberances covered its body. The slate showed the thing moving across a grassy field, some sort of sword clutched in one of its arms. The thing came upon a village of furry, teddy-bear creatures. The teddy bears ran from the thing, but it moved fast on its six legs, running them down, striking them with its sword. One teddy bear—a female, by the looks of her breasts—fell before the thing, cowering, its three arms raised in supplication. The thing sliced the teddy bear’s head off, reached down, ate the head, then sliced her belly open, pulled out a naked baby, and devoured it.

  The image faded away.

  Krim shuddered. “What the hell is that?”

  Thom crossed his arms. “‘Spongers,’ some call them, or ‘Terrorons.’ Officially, they’re Taurus-Orions.”

  “Aliens. Yeah, right. Any decent animation program could create something like that.”

  Thom shook his head. “Maybe, but if the signal comes from beyond the solar system, from where we’ve never been . . . Extraterrestrials—well, extrasolarians, to be more precise. Not of this solar system.”

  “An alien signal? But from where? When?”

  “We don’t know exactly where—somewhere from the direction of Taurus and Orion. About five years ago we began getting their signals. Our astronomers haven’t narrowed the star system down yet, but they have a general idea of the direction. Taurus and Orion. We haven’t cracked their language yet, either, but the images they’ve sent speak volumes. Those things are savage.”

  Krim leaned back in his chair, rubbed his hands on the smooth metal of the armrests. “But you said a war . . . ?”

  “Not yet. But we have to be ready.” He turned and stared out a window overlooking the prison complex. “We have to keep them from finding us.”

  Krim chuckled, thought of the light-years between Sol and Taurus and Orion, thought of the vast area and the puny planets hidden among the vastness. “How could they?”

  Thom whirled, walked behind his desk, pounded it. “There’s a chance . . . a horrible, horrible chance.” He touched his keyboard again. “That.”

  The monitor showed a line drawing of a naked man and woman, his right arm raised in greeting, his other arm straight to his side, his left leg pointed outward. Behind them was something that looked like a radar dish, lines bursting outward from the left side of the image in rays, and on the bottom several dots of varying sizes. An arrow went out from the third dot, below the fourth and fifth dots, between the fifth and six dots; it pointed to the radar dish object behind the man and the woman. Krim stared at it, shrugged.

  “How come the woman doesn’t have any genitals?” he asked. “Did her hide cover her crotch?”

  Thom smiled. “No such thing. The person who drew that thought it might be too improper for the times.”

  “The times?”

  “Nineteen seventy-three. When this was launched.”

  Krim stared at it again. “Launched?”

  “Pioneer Ten. A few years later, Pioneer Eleven. Planetary probes. They both had this drawing on them—on a plaque. Some scientists at the time thought it might be cute to let aliens know who and where we were. The American space agency that launched the probes agreed, and put the plaque on the two probes. A more complicated version went on the Voyager probes a little later. You see those dots?” Krim nodded. “That’s our solar system. If the Terrorons find this—hell, it will be a road map to Earth.”

  Krim felt a shiver run up his spine, then thought about it. “That’s crazy. If they find it. It took you guys fifteen years to find the Jack, and that’s fifty klicks long. What do you mean?”

  “The old probes are heading in the general direction of the transmissions. They haven’t even gotten to the Oort Cloud yet; if we’re lucky, they’ll get pulverized as they go through. But if they get beyond the edges of our system, and if the Terrorons somehow pick them up . . . we’re done for.”

  “How long will that be?”

  Thom shrugged. “A million years, maybe.”

  “A million years?” Krim shook his head, thinking. Unless the aliens knew where to look, they’d never stumble on the old probes in all the vastness of space. “Do you realize what could happen in a million years? I doubt you’ll be worried about two little probes by then. Hell, if I know mankind, someone will probably try to sell the Terrorons Earth long before that.”

  Thom grinned, nodded. “Th
at’s the way we first figured it. Only, the Terrorons are closer than we thought—much closer. Their latest transmission shows pictures from a space probe in what appears to be the Oort Cloud. We hope they haven’t figured out they’re near a habitable solar system yet.”

  “But they could have—the bubble of communications from here must spread at least a hundred light years.” Krim rubbed his chin. “That should tell them they’re near some civilization.”

  “It should, but what direction does that signal come from? And the source—Earth—has moved in that time, and as the sphere spreads, the signals weaken, so if you could figure out the direction, you’d still have to narrow a source down in an area a hundred light years wide. Plus, radio and television broadcasting was replaced by fiber optic links a hundred years ago, so that bubble of transmissions is fairly finite. The odds are we’re safe, and I would accept those odds—except.”

  “Except?” Krim asked.

  “We keep finding Terroron probes. We think they send them in waves. You know the old expression ‘like a note in a bottle’?” Krim shook his head. “An old Earth custom. Drinks used to come in glass bottles, and sailors would seal notes in the bottles and toss them overboard. The bottles drifted and sometimes people on far-off shores found them. The Terroron probes are like that. They just send them out until they find a habitable solar system, and the probes scream their message back. We can’t risk them getting farther in-system than they are.

  “Maybe they already know we’re here,” Thom continued. “Maybe a probe got through long ago. That’s all the more reason to be ready—to destroy them if we can find them. They’re at our back door, Krim. We have to destroy those probes—the ancient ones and theirs. We can’t let them know we’re here until we’re ready to fight them. That’s why we need you.”

  “Me?” Krim ran a hand over his stubbly scalp. “What the hell do you need me for—assuming I’d help you?”

  “Oh, you’ll help us.” Thom glared at him. “You’ll help us.” He stood up, punched his monitor again. Another image flickered before them of a silvery egg, one end flattened, projections and pylons bristling all over it. “Pilots. We need pilots. This is a Podhoretz-class fighter.” He pointed to the fatter end of the egg, the end not flattened. “It’s a lot like the Jack fighters you flew—we borrowed some of your ideas. These suckers are highly advanced, though. They’ll get up to a quarter light speed, and when they make their runs, can kick in to almost half a C. The AI is autobionic, much like the hide: it can repair itself and rebuild the ship within certain parameters. The Podhoretz fighter throws kinetic rounds, simple but effective, considering the punch they can pack at those speeds. Pretty neat, huh?”