The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  His capsule hurtled out beyond the edge of the world, beyond the sky’s edge limits, and into the deep purple and then black of space. Inside his helmet and spacesuit, the projection of the universe beyond the capsule filling his perspective, Krim saw the moon fade away to his right, the sun at his back, and the widening dark of extraterrestrial space looming ahead.

  A dark shape blocked his view of the moon. The shape moved up from behind, passed him to starboard, and then pulled in front. As it passed, Krim saw its pitted hull, the scars of battles silver scorches in the flat-black skin where bare steel had been revealed. An oblong cone, its diameter slightly larger to aft than at the bow, it passed him, meter upon meter, its great length seeming never to end. As it pulled forward, matching his velocity, he recognized its colors, its shape, and its name. The Kirkpatrick, the ship that had captured him before, now captured him again. She matched his speed, his position, her stern filling his view until he saw the four great engines and the tiny maw in the middle, the aft docking bay. As he watched, the doors of the bay slid back, four jack-o-lantern teeth descending into their sockets, and he fell into the beast yet again.

  Krim’s capsule came to rest in the bay of the Kirkpatrick. For a moment he saw the struts of the vast hangar, tiny tear-drop ships hanging everywhere in the hold, and then the doors slid shut, and it became dark again. Sam showed him his real perspective: the inside of the capsule. He heard thuds and clanks as someone secured it, and then he heard the hatch being unscrewed. Light streamed into his tiny space. Two dark-suited people crawled in, unfastening his belts, and carried him out into the bay. They gently helped him to his feet, escorting him to a side chamber. Air cycled into the lock, and another door slid open. One of the suits tapped Krim on his helmet, tapped his own helmet, and unscrewed the globe from over his head.

  And there he was.

  Admiral Thom.

  Krim thought of spitting at him again, remembered his helmet, remembered trying to spit in the hide, and nodded instead. He unlatched his helmet so Thom could see his face better, so he could see Thom better.

  “You bastard,” Krim said. “You were right. I came back.”

  Thom smiled. Later, Sam had to play back the crystals so Krim would believe it, but he didn’t, not at the time, because he didn’t feel it—but Krim smiled, too.

  Because, he would later come to understand, Thom had been right. He was a space pilot, a fighter pilot, and down in the hard gravity well of Earth was no place for a pilot to be. Earth meant nothing to him now—if it had ever meant anything.

  He had come home. Out.

  Thom took Krim to his office, rough quarters toward the bow of the Kirkpatrick, clearly temporary in its absence of placards or adornment. Thom looked upon him more as an equal, Krim thought, as if Thom had set him up for some test the rules of which Krim could not know—and he had passed. Thom had given him the world, had given him freedom in a world bound by its own luxuries, and Krim had denied it, and come to do what Thom had wanted him to do. The bastard, Krim thought again.

  “You are the last,” Thom said. “The last of the Beats on the planet, the last to be released from prison, and the last to return to the fight.” Thom smiled then, the way a father might smile upon a wayward boy, but Krim glared back. He was not ready to accept Thom’s blessing.

  “I thought I had found another Beat,” he said.

  “Oh, her. Prima. I saw the tape from the Needle’s portal. Doubtless many think themselves Beats. But you’re the last. We have kept good track of your kind. Trust me on this. We know exactly where every Beat is. Every last one of you.”

  Maybe, Krim thought, still holding out hope that the Jack had escaped into Ur. “Thank you. You have saved me the worry of wondering if one of my sisters or brothers had been trapped by the likes of a Zoetrope.” Krim settled back in the hard seat before Thom, held his hands out palms up before him. “You have me again. I have willingly enlisted in your service. So what now?”

  “We train you to become a real pilot,” Thom said. “And we go farther out, beyond the influence of this corrupt gravity well—out to the battle at Beyond.”

  Admiral Thom led him up to the assembly deck. As the lift doors slid open, two men in flat-black hides, their bodies impossibly muscled, snapped to attention.

  “Admiral on deck!” one shouted.

  “As you were,” said Thom, waving them back. A tall woman in silver hide, only her shaved head bare, saluted Thom. “Lieutenant Brana, this is a new recruit: Krim, no first name. He’s a Beat. You know about them?”

  “Sir. Finest damn fighter pilots in the known system, second to mine.” She smiled slightly. “Sir.”

  “Good. Mr. Krim has served his debt to society and has consented to join us in our struggle. You will teach him to be a pilot again. His skills may be a little rusty.” Thom glanced at a wing of new recruits. “Are these the latest batch?”

  “Sir, they appear despicable and useless, but I believe I can make something of them. Sir.”

  “Best of luck to you then, Lieutenant.” He turned to Krim. “Mr. Krim, you’re in Brana’s hands now. She will make you a pilot if you are not already one.” Thom held out a hand. “Good luck to you, then.”

  Krim looked at the hand, the hand that had conquered the Beats but never destroyed them, sighed, then shook it. “I just want to fly,” he said under his breath, as Thom left the deck. “It’s all I have left.”

  “Krim!” Brana shouted at him. “Get in formation—there!” She pointed at a spot next to a man with snakes writhing on his hide.

  Krim nodded and stood at a spot equidistant from the man and a woman to his side. The man smiled, and the snakes smiled. Krim smiled back at the snake man, then glanced at the woman. Hedda, he thought, the name coming from some memory he did not know. Like Hedda, he realized, with her hair blue in a cottony cloud. But who was Hedda? All of the other recruits looked like most anyone he’d seen on the surface, except for the Naturals. He saw a gray figure in back, and realized, well, yeah, a Natural had made it up, too.

  “Eyes front!” Brana shouted.

  Krim turned toward the flight instructor, looked at her closely since that was all he could do. She wore a silver hide, he saw, silver to her neck and wrists, with only her head and hands exposed, her skin its natural—he thought—oak-brown color. Brana’s silver hide also had long, knotted lines marring the smooth surface. “What you see is what you get,” Sam reminded him. In the military tradition, hide did not cover imperfections. Brana wore her slate coiled around her neck and flattened, like a breastplate.

  “Trainees!” she said, again shouting. She always shouted, Krim had begun to realize. “You are lowlife scum unworthy of becoming pilots, so I do not hold out much hope of instructing you to perform that task. Nonetheless, it is my duty to try. You will do exactly as I tell you and behave with the utmost decorum and you will act as pilots should until you become pilots or I space you, whichever comes first. Is that clear?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” they shouted. Krim knew the routine. It had been basic prison performance, and the others must have had instruction somewhere along the way. Nonetheless, Brana was not satisfied, so she had them go through it again six more times until they got it more or less right.

  “It’s the best that can be expected. All right, Makk, Steem,” she said to the two marines in black. “Strip ’em.”

  The marines moved up the lines of trainees, one marine starting at the back and the other at the front. They each had a short wand, and as they walked by the trainees, they touched them with the wand. Since Brana glared at Krim, he dared not divert his eyes, so he couldn’t see what the guards did exactly. As one of the marines touched him, Krim felt his hide quiver and tighten, and his face and head suddenly felt cold. Sam oozed down to his forearm, and locked around it like a brace, the surface of the slate a dull, dusky gray—standby state.

  “I’ve been hacked,” Sam said, subvocalizing. “Sorry, guy—it’s a military hack. Pretty damn good.”


  “Give me a room projection,” Krim said.

  “Can’t. But they’ve shaved everyone, I can tell you that. Bald as babies.”

  Brana shifted her gaze slightly, and Krim tried to glance over at the snake man, but found his muscles had locked up, his chin up and his back rigid. The marines finished with their stripping and moved back, one to either side of Brana. “All right. At ease,” she said, and at the words they all relaxed, her command letting their bodies take over. Krim turned around, saw the blue-haired woman next to him was now bald, but her skin was blue, and the snake man had lost his snakes. They all had silver hide, necks to wrists, and as Sam had told him, not a hair on their bodies. In that gesture so familiar to generations of recruits, they all rubbed their bald skulls.

  “You now look like pilots,” Brana said, “which may be a slight improvement. You are dressed in a pressure-suit version of the hide, and you will not—cannot—transform this while you are on this ship or on duty. This uniform will allow you to survive should this ship lose pressure, or should you be accidentally thrust into space. For the moment your slates have been hacked so that you respond instantly to my commands, or the commands of any superior on this ship. Do you understand? Attention!”

  At the word, Krim felt his spine snap straight again, and when he said, “Sir, yes, sir!” he found his voice boomed louder than he had intended—all their voices boomed.

  “Very good. Grab a partner and head for the couches, two to a slab, and prepare for acceleration.”

  Krim reached out for the snake man but found he’d already claimed a partner, so he turned instead to the blue-skinned woman. He smiled at her, her breasts flattened and nippleless under the thin silver coating, looked at the lines of her skull, so delicate at the mastoid, hard at her chin, at her small-lobed ears and the flat of her brow and the smooth dome of her head.

  “And don’t think you’re getting an excuse for some fun time,” Brana said. “You’re in couches in pairs for safety, not for slutting around. Couldn’t do it anyway, if you’ll check between your legs.” She smiled.

  He’d already figured out this would be a celibate run. Still, he looked at the blue woman again and tried to imagine arousal, just to spite Brana, but he felt nothing. He thought of Corso, though, and then looked at his hand, at his fingers, and at the ring, still there, unmoved and even shinier, and turned it around and around his bare black fingers.

  “I’m Krim,” he said to the blue-skinned woman.

  “Nurel,” she said. She pointed out four of the others standing nearby. “Zeba, Vuko, Tesh, and Diz.” Nurel glanced over at Brana, saw that she looked away, then reached out and touched Krim’s chin and his flat, large nose, to establish contact of a sort, Krim hoped, to make him human in his conformity. “Never mind Brana. She has her delusions, but we have our ways.” And she winked at Krim.

  “I want you bedded down and floating in those couches in three minutes,” Brana said. “Get moving. Your slates will walk you through it. The Kirkpatrick fires in five minutes. You had better be ready to burn, ladies and gentlemen, because we’re going to do some heavy time.”

  When the Kirkpatrick had ended its acceleration, and the G-forces waned enough so that they could move around comfortably, Krim got the tour of the ship. When he had been captured fifteen years ago, Krim had spent most of his time in the brig, a dark cell aft toward the drives, and he had seen little of the ship. The old battle cruiser had been stripped, reduced to hauling freight and passengers, but mainly freight. Her guns, her torpedo bays, all her armaments had been scrapped. The ship’s batteries and armories had been converted into freight bays. The Kirkpatrick’s sole mission, Brana told them, was hauling pilots out to the redoubts and picking up new Podhoretz fighters built at the LaGrange space docks between Earth and the Moon. “A trawler,” Brana said, banging the solid decks. “That’s all she is.”

  And training center, Krim found out.

  Outbound, a week into their journey to the edge of the system, Brana assembled the pilots for the start of their actual training.

  “Everything you know is wrong,” Brana told them, looking at their faces one at a time, studying them, and then moving to the next. She looked at Nurel, rebar straight next to him, and locked eyes with her. “Some of you in-system jockeys who’ve been doing puddle jumps think you know how to fly.” Brana flicked her gaze to Krim. “This asshole is lucky, since he won’t have to unlearn what he thinks he knows already. Been a while since you’ve flown, hasn’t it?”

  He’d flown every day, Krim thought, flying always in that cell for fifteen years—it was how he’d kept sane. But he knew better than to say that. “Sir, yes, sir!” he shouted, because that routine had been established early. The FI was always a sir even if she was a ma’am, and you shouted it.

  “Things have changed since you last went out,” Brana said. “The battle has changed and the technology has changed, and the Poddies you will fly when we get out to the Oort will already be obsolete when we get there. But they will be the best you have, better than anything you have ever flown before.”

  Brana moved down the line, glaring at Zeba to Krim’s right, then glancing back over to Nurel. Then she smiled at Krim and touched his chin. “Still, you’ve never flown for the Alliance, have you, Beat?”

  “Sir, no, sir!” Krim shouted.

  “So you haven’t tasted space then—haven’t gone out. You’ve never had one of these wonderful suits, this hide?”

  “Sir, no, sir!”

  Brana nodded, reached down, and yanked Krim’s slate—Sam—off his arm. “Space the sucker,” she said, waving at the two guards in the flat-black hides, Makk and Steem.

  They grabbed him, one to an arm. Krim whirled, kicked, shoved Makk sprawling away from him. Steem hung on, yanking his arm back, and Krim moved up with his free arm to push him away. As his arm came up, Makk grabbed it, wrenching it back, then Steem had his leg. They dragged him to a lock on the far bulkhead. Brana stood by the lock, and she cycled it open. They shoved him in, and the hatch slammed shut behind him.

  “Don’t think,” Makk said to him just before Brana hit the hatch button.

  Krim whirled around at the slamming door, tried to get an arm in before it slid shut, but had to pull his hand back before the door sliced it off. The inner air lock clicked shut and then the outer door burst open.

  The pocket of air in the lock expanding into the vastness of space blew Krim out, away from the ship. His face and hands went numb in the hard cold, and he felt air being sucked from his lungs, felt the moisture on his skin sublime, and his bare skin begin to dry up. No, he thought, remembering that the hide covered every bit of his body, no, that shouldn’t happen. His skin might be exposed to light but not to vacuum. He tumbled over and over, the light of the sun a distant warmth. Concentrating on his hands, on his face—on the cold—he thought the hide should cover them, too. There should be a membrane, he thought, a slight barrier between his body and space.

  Yes, he thought, relaxing. Okay. He tried to breathe but could not. Good, though; good. He shouldn’t be able to breathe, shouldn’t be able to inhale empty vacuum, shouldn’t be able to exhale into vacuum. Okay, that barrier held. His blood would not boil away, and his body would not explosively decompress—had not. Okay.

  Krim stared at his hands, at the bare black skin. Moisture steamed away, but not from his skin, he thought. No, there would have been moisture on the surface, on the hide; that was what steamed away—froze, then steamed. He saw the tips of his fingers turning chalk-white, imagined his nose and ears doing the same. But the silver, the rest of his body . . . His toes did not freeze, his penis did not freeze, nor his testicles.

  How did the hide move on his skin? he thought. Sam, his slate, controlled it—that’s what he’d learned. But they’d ripped Sam off, had taken away even his hacked control. “Don’t think,” Makk had said. He looked at his hands, imagined them warm and protected, more than bare hide shielding them. Warmth, move down to the cold, he though
t, thinking of the hide as a creature—was it a creature?—oozing down his hands, up his neck to his skull. As he stared at his hands the silver line at his wrist flowed down to his fingers, over the backs of his hands, but as he stared the line moved back up the wrist.

  Don’t think, don’t think.

  He closed his eyes, imagined warmth all over, imagined himself hanging in a gossamer body stocking, rotating and flailing through space. Warmth, warmth. He felt warmth move down his hand, to his fingers, up over his neck and face and skull, imagined the silvery skin meeting to a narrowing hole at the crown of his head, at the tips of his fingers, until it closed, an envelope of warmth. There. There. He opened his eyes.

  Silver hands, silver fingers. Good. Good. Krim smiled, felt his face tighten in the protection of the hard silver skin, the space skin, he knew now. A pressure suit. And now . . . ?

  He flailed still, the sun a whirling dot in his mind, that alone bright in his dervish. Krim flung out his arms and legs, spreading them and pulling them in, trying to slow his manic rotation, until he got himself on a stable axis, rotating slowly in a cartwheel. He’d continue to roll like that, he thought, with little in the way of friction—what stray molecules could stop his revolution?—to slow him down. But good, good, revolving was good, it would keep him from being blasted hot on one side by the sun, frozen on the other in shadow.

  Breathe, he thought, and then, No, don’t breathe. You cannot breathe. The strange mechanism of the hide would have to do that for him, exchange waste gases for oxygen, supply his blood with air from the resources within. How long could it do that? He had no idea—he had not learned the limits of the hide. Was that the point of this? To test his knowledge, to teach him?

  Krim sought out the Kirkpatrick, saw the dull glow of the ship moving with him—no, he with it. He was floating, moving at the same acceleration as the ship, perhaps klicks out, but he would be its companion until the hide could no longer make air for him, or food, or water. He had no idea of its limits—no sense of when it would finally shut down, shut his body down.