The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  “Destination, please,” the voice said, again from inside his head. This time, lights flickered from the console in the car.

  “I wonder if the slate can speak with another voice.” Krim grinned. “That was a real question.”

  “Yes,” a man’s voice said from inside his head.

  Krim smiled. Ah-hah. “Uh, who’s the dominant terminal here?” Was “terminal” the right word?

  “Your slate is an independent computing device with access to additional information systems,” the man’s voice said. “The car’s terminal is merely an input device for the transportation mainframe system.”

  “Destination, please,” the console said again.

  “It is also extremely simpleminded,” the slate added.

  “Can you override?”

  “Gladly.” The console blipped off. “Destination, please,” the slate then said.

  “In a minute.” Krim looked down at the slate, at its flickering lights. Have to figure out how this system works, he thought. “Okay. You need another voice.” Krim thought of Sam then, the animated mode of his fighter ship. “Can you give me a range of men’s voices?”

  “Like this?” the slate said, in a high squeaky child’s voice.

  “Older.”

  “Older,” the voice repeated, now sounding like an ancient man.

  “Younger.”

  “Younger.”

  “Good,” Krim said. “Say, ‘Hello there, Krim.’ Keep repeating.”

  “Hello there, Krim.”

  “More bass—just run through the range.”

  “Hello there, Krim. Hello there, Krim. Hello there, Krim. Hello there—”

  Krim shrugged. “Close enough.” Back on the Jack, it had taken him an entire afternoon to get Sam’s voice right, but he didn’t want Sam’s voice coming from this slate, not exactly. “File that; that’s the voice I want you to communicate to me with—slate? What do I call you?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Sam, then.” Slate’s Animated Mode. Everybody on the Jack called his personal data assistant Sam. He was used to it.

  “Hello there, Krim,” Sam said. “Destination, please?”

  “Hello, Sam. So, which way do I go from here?”

  “That depends a good deal on where you want to go,” Sam said again.

  “That was a rhetorical question,” Krim said again.

  “You forgot to say ‘I wonder,’” Sam said.

  Krim smiled. “No, I didn’t.”

  “I see.” The lights on the slate blinked. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know. Where would you suggest?”

  “Options can be displayed.” The console lit up, and ghostlike images flickered on the little stage: a plaza of thousands of steps, like an inverted pyramid; a sea coast, great waves crashing into rocks; odd trees with fanned leaves rustling in the wind; a desert with bizarrely shaped rocks; a grassy plain with herds of animals running across it; and great towering trees, impossibly tall, impossibly large, with shafts of sunlight beaming down to the forest floor. Trees, Krim thought. In all his life he had never seen trees—had never seen a planet’s surface beyond the prison of the desert.

  “That last one,” he said, pointing at it. “The trees.”

  “The Forest,” Sam said. “A good choice. Station 37, right outside of Sea City.”

  Krim stared at the image of the towering trees. A forest. Yes. He remembered what Thom had said: Go out, see the world. Enjoy it. Learn about it. And he would be back. Right, Krim thought. Right. A whole planet to explore, a whole world of life he had never known. Sure he’d be back. . . . Another thought occurred to him.

  “This forest,” Krim asked. “It has people? It’s not just trees?”

  “Everywhere on this planet has people,” Sam said. “Yes, it will. Strange people . . . Well, Krim, they’re all strange.”

  “Trees and people.” And women, he thought, thinking of Corso, long gone now, he knew. Women. “The Forest, then.” The car did not move. “Something wrong?”

  “You must initiate a command,” Sam said. “A phrase.”

  Right, Krim thought. Even on his old fighter, he had to give the command. What was the one he used with Sam? Ah. “My command sequence will be as follows, Sam: ‘Holy moly’ sets up the command, and ‘mark’ initiates it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Input command sequence.”

  “Command sequence: Holy moly, mark.”

  “Command sequence initialized.” The car still did not move.

  “Uh, Sam . . . ?” Krim asked.

  “That was the command sequence for the command sequence,” Sam said.

  Damn literal machines, Krim cursed silently. “Okay. Destination: The Forest, Station 37. Holy moly, mark.”

  The car hummed for a moment, Krim felt himself kicked back into the couch, and then the car was on its way.

  Krim rose up into The Forest, rose up from the deep earth like magma. The car popped up from the ground, out of the long tunnel leading off tunnels that connected the prison to the main tubeway that connected to The Forest, somewhere beyond. North, perhaps, Krim figured, if he remembered his geography correctly. Musty, stale air—old air, ancient air—wafted into the car as its doors slid open.

  “Station 37,” the voice of the car said. “The Forest.”

  As it had at the prison, the car came out before another patio, this one made of wooden decking, with the same low wall around it except for the opening. Station 37 opened up into a dense rain forest of ferns, firs, towering green trees, and thick ground cover that spread left, right, ahead, and behind him. A straight path cut through the trees, discernible only by a slight alteration in undergrowth, the path less grown up, the surrounding underbrush thicker. Strange miniature trees grew horizontally from tree trunks lining the path, their leaves a bright orange.

  Krim stepped out of the car, onto the deck, and turned to see the car fall back down into the earth, off to find another passenger, perhaps, or to stay there, silent, ready forever and ever. He sat down on the low bench around the platform.

  For the first time in fifteen years, Krim realized, he had done something willingly, of his own will. I entered the car, he thought, made a choice, and something followed my choice. Something let me tell it what to do. He had been given his freedom, and now he had acted upon it.

  Sucking in the moist air, he absorbed The Forest. On the Jack, the air had smelled of the sweat of his brothers and sisters, had smelled dank and old, scrubbed thousands of times until you quit smelling it. The prison had always smelled dry, dusty air sucked down from the desert, reeking of piss sometimes. But this air had weight; it smelled of rotting things, of leaves wasting into the forest floor, or of the sea, perhaps—a salty tinge to it—of life, even. It smelled like, he supposed, a planet. Not like ships, not like stations, not like prisons.

  A planet.

  Krim drank it in, absorbed the life, the energy. The sun shone through the canopy, dappled by leaves, casting a green light, beams dancing with motes of dust from dirt or pollen or insects. Life! Insects or small animals, not like the microbots of the Jack or a station—live things, things that skittered. He looked down at his foot and saw a thing with six legs and big eyes crawl over his toe. The thing had eyes with thousands of tiny, hexagonal facets. Fine hairs rustled on its legs, on the proboscises on its face. . . . Krim rubbed his eyes, focused back on his foot, trying to just see the foot and not the ant on it. The binocular magnification of his hide would kick in without his realizing it.

  “So, where do I go from here?” he said aloud.

  The lights on the slate blinked. “Where do you want to go?” Sam asked.

  “People.” Krim looked around the clearing, at the immense forest. He thought of what Thom had said, that he had released other zeks, other Beats. Where would they be? How would he find them?

  “Follow the path,” Sam said. The funny orange trees rustled. “Follow the flagging.”

  Krim shrugged and proce
eded into The Forest.

  Chapter 3

  A blue-haired woman ran screaming up the path toward him. The orange flagging rustled as she went by, tendrils reaching out to grab her. She brushed by the flags and grabbed Krim. He stopped, startled, about to push her away, but first trying to understand what she yelled.

  “—back! Go back, go away, do not go down there, you must help me, go back!”

  “It’s okay,” Krim said. “I won’t go down there if you don’t want me to.” He took her shoulders gently, steadying her and looking at her.

  What he had thought was blue hair covering her body turned out to be fine feathers, even on her face. Long feathers flowed back from her forehead and down her back. A bright blue beak covered her mouth, as if the lips had turned to hard chitin. Blue scales covered her hands and fingers, and her feet and toes, and her nails had become claws. Around her right wrist was a thin band of gold.

  “You cannot go down that trail,” she said. “You must go away—I must go away.”

  “It’s all right. You’re safe. I’ll take you away. What’s down that trail?”

  “The Electric man—Zoetrope. He made me into this.” She spread her arms to show wings stretching below them. “If I go farther and farther away, his power fades. You must keep me from going back.”

  Krim looked down the path, at the flagging beckoning at him still. “Maybe we should see this Zoetrope?” He wondered about a man who would have such power. How did he do that?

  “No!” the blue-feathered woman said. “He would change you into something hideous, like me. You must take me to Sea City. It is safe there.”

  “Sea City?” he asked Sam subvocally.

  “The nearby metropolis,” Sam said. “Ten klicks distant.”

  “Call a car, Sam.”

  “The car will take you, but not her,” Sam said. “She has no slate.”

  “No slate? Shouldn’t everyone have a slate?”

  “She has no slate. That metal band on her wrist seems to be picking up a signal, but it’s not a slate.”

  “You don’t have a slate?” Krim asked her.

  “What’s a slate?”

  “Sheesh.” Krim shook his head. “Okay, I’ll go with you to Sea City.” He put an arm around her, steered her away from the flagging. “Which way, Sam?”

  A tone pinged inside Krim’s head, and he turned to the sound. In his field of vision, pale-pink cross hairs lit up and blinked. “That way,” Sam said.

  “Right.” Krim turned to the woman. “You have a name?”

  She looked at him, and for a moment Krim thought she was going to say “Name?” Finally, she nodded. “Lazuli, Zoetrope called me. Lazuli.”

  Krim walked with Lazuli deeper and deeper into the forest. Sam’s compass kept him on track as they picked their way along faint trails winding among towering trees. He stared up in awe at the giant columns, amazed by the thick bark, the branches jutting out, the way the needles on the evergreens hung stiffly, each tip seeming to reach for the warmth of the sun. Through the thick canopy of the coastal rain forest the light fell down in dappled shafts.

  Lazuli stumbled through the forest, seeming not to see anything, her eyes blank. After she tripped for the tenth time, her claws raking his hide as she grabbed him, he took her left claw in his right hand and led her through the woods. They came to a clearing, a hundred-meter circle of grass and low shrubs. At the edge, Lazuli stopped and leaned forward, claws on her knees and grimacing in apparent pain.

  “Ah,” she said. “Hold me, please.” Krim came from behind her and put his arms on her shoulders. “You must take me farther, even if you have to carry me. Do this?”

  “I—I don’t get it.”

  “Do it, please?”

  Krim looked at her, at her odd golden eyes, at her strange body. “Sure.”

  Lazuli looked up at him, over his shoulders and back into the forest. “The aching. Oh, I knew if I went away I would lose it. . . . You don’t feel it?”

  “Feel what?”

  “The Electric man. I want him, want the others. I cannot feel them. I feel adrift, alone, like being in a vast desert with no one around. It’s like sleeping under a pile of blankets and suddenly waking and finding yourself naked and exposed—cold, alone. I know it is only an illusion, that Zoetrope sends out false feelings of being wanted, of the security of the group.” She reached down, plucked a feather, and held it up. Its quill shone pale in the light of the clearing. “I don’t bleed. I am beyond his power.” She turned her head away, forward. “We must go on.”

  “Right. Of course.” Krim looked at her. He had no idea what she was saying. Forward, if she wanted it.

  Krim pulled her through the clearing, up a slight hill and over the top. They came down the other side of the rise, faces into the afternoon sun. A broad inlet from the ocean spread before them, islands on the other side of the sound. Mist obscured the water and coastline, but through the haze Krim could see a city on the edge of the water. The cross hairs in his vision lined up over the city when he stared at it. Sea City.

  Lazuli had grown quiet, almost catatonic, and Krim had to shove her forward to keep her going. She walked stiffly, whimpering when he pushed her. The farther they went down the hill, the less she moaned, and the less she looked back. A trail led them down the hillside toward a ravine cut through the mountainside. Krim looked back, up the hill. The side of the mountain now stood between them and the trail where Krim had met Lazuli. He barely had to touch her to keep her moving. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and some feathers fell away at his touch. Once gleaming and oily, the feathers covering her body now seemed dusky, lifeless.

  “Must stop,” she said. Lazuli sat down on a flat rock overlooking the ravine. A creek tumbled down the incline, with a small waterfall roaring before them into a shallow pool below. Steam rose from the pool. She scratched at her feathers, began yanking out clumps of them. “It’s safe here, I think. Can you watch me while I rest?”

  “I’m tired myself,” Krim said.

  “I’ll monitor her,” Sam told Krim.

  “Fine,” Krim said. “Take it easy. I’ll watch you.”

  Lazuli nodded, then stretched out on the rock. Waves of heat rose up from the granite. She curled into a feathery ball, knees to chest, and tucked under her wings. As the sun set, the low light made Lazuli’s feathers glow pink, the blue fading as the feathers dried up. Krim watched her, wondering who she really was and how she had become this way. It seemed he would find out soon enough. He stared at her until his fatigue caught up with him, too. His day had begun with being freed from prison, and now here he was, on a forested hillside with a woman who seemed to be a bird. Krim fell asleep next to her, the gentle hiss of Sam in his ear.

  That night he dreamt of Corso.

  When day broke, Krim rolled away from Lazuli. She lay next to him, one pale arm spread over his chest. Her right hand lay on his slate. Gray dust flaked her skin, her face, her scalp, as if a thousand moths had chosen to die on her body. Krim picked up her arm, scattering the dust and revealing clean, baby-pink skin beneath. When he lifted up her arm, he felt a faint charge rush through his body and his slate, and up into a ring on her right hand. He broke the connection; Lazuli’s eyes fluttered, and she woke up.

  “I think you got far enough away from that Electric man,” he said.

  She rose, stared down at herself in the flat calm of the pool of water. “What?” Lazuli looked up at Krim. “Electric man? What are you saying?” She rubbed at the gray dust on her body. “What is this? How did I get so dirty?”

  “It’s the feathers,” Krim said. “From this Zoetrope’s transformation, I think.”

  “Zoetrope?” She looked at him, shook her head. Patches of ashes flaked off her bare scalp. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Krim.” He touched her with a finger. “You’re, uh, Lazuli, you said.”

  Lazuli looked around, at the bluff above, at Krim. “I don’t understand.” She reached into the pool and began cuppin
g handfuls of water onto her face, washing away the dust. Shaking her head again, she let her hand hang beneath the water, then fell into the pool.

  “Hey—” Krim shouted, and then Lazuli came to the surface, water beading off her hairless head.

  “Water’s warm,” Lazuli said. She held up a hand, clawless now, and steam rose up in the cold. “You, whoever you are, get in here.”

  “Krim,” he said. “I told you that.” He shrugged off his body waldo and jumped in.

  “Zoetrope?” Lazuli asked again. “That shimmering man?”

  “Yeah. That’s what you said.” He sat down in the shallows of the hot springs. Something seemed odd about Lazuli. He stared at her further. Without the blue feathers and the beak, Lazuli looked familiar somehow. She rubbed at her scalp with her right hand, and the flash of gold on her middle finger stirred something in Krim.

  “Huh,” Lazuli grunted. “Still have my old prison haircut.”

  “Like me,” Krim said, then looked at her ring, at her face. “You were a zek?”

  “You wouldn’t know about it.” She dropped her head below the surface, sucked in water, then spat it out. “Sulfur. Yeah, that’s where they put all of us, the—”

  “Beats,” Krim finished. “You’re—” He tried to visualize her, imagined a short corona of stiff brown hair framing her face—right, that was her. “Prima, from the Ferlinghetti.”

  “Prima?” She rolled the words around in her mouth, as if tasting them. “Prima. Yeah, the first—hah! That’s me, one of the first captured. Seventeen years. Crap.” Prima rubbed her right hand across her head, the gold ring glinting again. Krim wondered why he hadn’t seen it through the feathers before. “Man, I spent years in that rat hole, and then they let me free, and I came out at that damn station, and Zoetrope—that’s his name—nabbed me, and the rest is a blur.”

  “They turned you into a bird,” Krim said. “You got away, though.” He held up his hand, with the ring like Prima’s ring. “They just let me out. I ran into you outside the station, along the path to this Zoetrope’s camp. You kept me from going down there.” Krim shook his head. “It’s amazing, an incredible coincidence. My first day out, and I run into another Beat. I’m Krim, from the Screaming Angel.”