The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  But as Krim slipped into the telly-op couch and jacked into the artificial reality, that distance between flesh and projected reality vanished. His flesh became the reality, his eyes saw not through mere goggles or screens, but through the optic nerves. His body was a waldo, the hide the interface by which he controlled the distant fighter. His motions felt fluid, natural, not jerky. Hide and slate made a map of his body based not on tens of thousands of matrix points, but trillions. Every cell of the hide, every change in its position relative to another cell, was measured, and the movement, the map, transferred to the motion of the machine.

  Only the distant voice of Sam, his slate—and not the old Sam, not the Sam on his Beat fighter, he understood that now—seemed the same. That companion, that entity distant and yet part of him, he still felt that connection. Like a lobe of his brain, Sam flew the mission with him.

  He jacked in. No, not even “jack” worked as a verb. Beats literally plugged into the body waldos, but in these ships, in the Poddy, Krim lay down and powered up the interface. “Poddies” described them well, though accidentally, he thought. He had walked into a room somewhere in the bowels of the Kirkpatrick, to a series of couches like big eggs, like pods. He lay down in the couch, in the traditional reclining position, and the couch closed around him. Thousands of foam-tipped pistons pushed against his back, supporting him. If he’d wanted to, he could fly on his belly or standing up. The shell of the pod seemed to remove him from the outside world, even before he made the connection. He had the illusion of being in the ship, but also had privacy, so no one would see his body gyrating madly, punching imaginary buttons.

  So, Krim entered the ship. He lay down on the couch, watched the panels fold around him, felt the couch rise up to support him, and heard Sam speak in his mind.

  “Comfy?” Sam asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Closing outer hide.”

  Krim felt the silver hide ooze away from his neck and wrists, covering his head and hands as it had when they’d spaced him. The outer hide would shield him from the physical world, the real world, but it also tightened his interface with the virtual world. As the silver flowed over his eyes like a curtain of mercury, the world went black. He felt a brief skip in his consciousness, as if he had fallen into a deep sleep and then woken up abruptly. The light under his eyelids, the random flickering of his eyes’ motes, swirled before him, reassuring him he had not gone totally blind.

  He also felt something else—a presence, he thought. As the telly-op couch closed around him, it felt as though he shared it with someone else. He remembered when he had first slept with Corso, when they had first been mated, and he kept waking up in the middle of the night because there was someone in his bed. That took some getting used to—sharing such a private space. Well, maybe the couch still held some smell of its previous occupant, and he sensed that.

  Brana’s voice broke into his thoughts. “You’re cleared for a simulation, Krim. In a normal run, mission control would give you your final orders now, and then you would be on your own. Start your simulation at will. Your Sam will walk you through it.”

  “Got it,” Krim said.

  “We’ll be monitoring in real time, but other than that, you’re on your own. Go ahead.”

  “Okay on that. Start the simulation, Sam. Holy moly mark.”

  “Simulation starting,” Sam said. “Let’s begin by designing your controls, Krim.”

  “I get a choice?”

  “Whatever works for you. I’ll save the layout for further launches, and you can modify it at will.”

  “Sam, give me a Beat board.”

  “I’m not that Sam,” he said.

  “Right. I keep forgetting.” Krim thought, tried to remember the old controls. “Okay, give me a grid first, whatever perspective I’d have from the Poddy fighter.”

  “Done.”

  A series of thin red lines appeared before him, circling away like projections of latitude and longitude on the inside of a globe. He moved his head, and the lines moved with him.

  “Sam, give me some background there, starry space or whatever. And I need a target—a rock or something, right in the center.”

  “Right.” The grid moved until a clumpy asteroid appeared in the middle of it, a field of stars behind it.

  “Okay.” How do I move my perspective? he thought. He turned his head again, and the lines moved, but the rock didn’t. Turning his head to his right, he flipped his chin, and the lines flowed around, the rock and the stars drifting off to his left. His perspective kept rolling, and he turned his head to the left, catching the perspective as the rock disappeared, and then reappeared on his left. A 360-degree pan. He remembered that trick. You couldn’t physically move your head all the way around, but that little flip at the end tricked the projection into thinking you had. You had to come around to the other end of the pan and catch it.

  Same idea with a pan in the vertical plane. He moved his head up, watched the rock fall down, then when his neck had moved up as far as it could, flipped the perspective to keep going, and saw the rock disappear “under” the horizon. He quickly glanced down at his feet, caught the pan coming up, and his perspective rose to meet the rock again.

  “Give me a projection of the Kirkpatrick behind me.”

  “Done.”

  Krim panned again, first horizontally, then vertically. As the rock faded to his left, the ship came into view to his right, and he followed the pan around, the ship fading to his left and the rock coming back to his right. Same thing with the vertical pan: rock setting, ship rising, ship setting, rock rising.

  He practiced with magnification. If he squinted in, as if focusing on a near object, the rock moved toward him, until he could see every little crater. If he changed his focus, focusing far away, the rock receded, enlarging the field of vision, so that he saw the ship before him, larger than the rock, and the rock a tiny pebble far away.

  “Now, controls,” he said. “Show me my hand on the projection.” Krim held his right hand before him, and saw it not clad in silver, but bare black skin. He turned his hand over and over, saw each line and hair and vein. Clenching his hand into a loose fist, he pulled the hand toward him, feeling slight resistance as if he actually pulled against a control. “Joystick,” he said. “I pull in, I go forward, push out, go back; sideways, sideways, and so on.”

  “You’ll only go forward once the attack sequence is initiated,” Sam said.

  “Right. But I’ll have pitch, yaw, and roll?”

  “You bet,” he said. “The joystick will work for that.”

  “Okay. Test.” He rolled his fist around, thumb falling to his left, and the lines of projection rolled with him, the asteroid seeming to move to the left. His couch shuddered slightly, and he could hear a slight roar as the attitude thrusters fired. All a projection, he thought, but the audio feedback worked to show him that he moved, and not that his perspective shifted.

  “Make the rate of pull parallel to speed,” he said.

  “Right.”

  Krim pulled his hand back fast, and the lines almost blurred as they flicked back. The couch shuddered harder, and the roar became louder.

  “Good,” he said. “Good feedback. Now, targeting. Left hand’s my gun.” He held his left hand before him, index finger extended, and his other fingers pulled in. “Middle finger is my trigger.” He crooked his middle finger out. “Okay, give me cross hairs.” A circle with cross hairs appeared before him, and as he moved his index finger, the circle moved with it.

  “I’ll do the final targeting,” Sam said.

  “Right. I point, and you narrow it down?”

  “You got it.”

  “Okay. What’ve I got? Rocks?”

  “Kinetic loads,” Sam said.

  “Right: rocks. Let’s try it.” Krim pointed at the asteroid until the cross hairs lay across it, and Sam did the final adjustment until it was precisely targeted. He pulled his middle finger in, then stopped. “Too awkward. I don’t
like the feel. Index finger points and shoots. Now.”

  He pulled his index finger in, and the couch shuddered as a round ball flew out into his field of vision. The ball grew smaller and smaller, until it was engulfed by the asteroid. A dot flickered in the cross hairs, and when the ball hit the target, the cross hairs glowed red, and a puff of debris rose up from the rock. Krim zoomed his perspective in on the asteroid and saw a glowing red crater.

  “If you want to destroy it,” Sam said, “you’ll have to use a bigger cluster of rocks.”

  Krim smiled. “Give me the biggest we’ve got.” He pointed again at the asteroid, let Sam target the cross hairs, then squeezed the trigger. A cluster of kinetic loads easily ten times the size of the first one flew out, the couch shuddering more, and the ball zoomed toward the asteroid. A larger dot flickered in the cross hairs, the ball growing smaller, and again the target glowed red when it hit. This time, the asteroid exploded into a ring of expanding debris, and when the debris had faded away, there was nothing left.

  Krim smiled. “I think I’ve got the basic idea, Sam. Brana, you there?”

  A few seconds later, her voice clicked on. “Yo, Krim. I’m here, but in a normal mission you would not be able to check in with me until you had completed your assignment.”

  “Okay, I understand. I’ve designed and tested my controls here. Do you want to jack me into the training fighter? I’m ready to take that puppy out.”

  Again there was a pause before Brana responded. “Let’s have your report first.”

  The simulator’s screen flickered out, and Krim’s senses blacked out. In the darkness of his mind he again felt that presence, the feeling that he shared the simulator with someone else. He blinked away the darkness, then felt a blip of unconsciousness . . . and saw creatures standing over him, knives held high in their hands. Each rough beast came to him, and uttered its name: Glossylee, who babbled uncontrollably, her two mouths speaking out of both sides of her face; Greenknees, the woman with grass on her skin; Bludegs, whose body flowed with viscous slime; Pinkwings, she with the pink scales and the great pixy wings; In-Out, the man with nerves on the surface of his hide, muscles under that; Raven, the black-feathered man with claws; Hedda, the woman with the fluorescent pink skin and the towering cotton-candy hair; Wormy Man, Candy, and others; and finally, Zoetrope, the flickering man, the man whose skin was a canvas, image after image projected over him, scenes of horror, of disaster, of death.

  Zoetrope took the first cut, reached down and sliced a hank of hair off at the center of his forehead. A shock of pain rippled through his body. The Electric held up the trophy, a writhing, twisted blue braid, its end spurting blood. Someone else cut another braid, and they descended upon him, shearing and hacking, blood flowing down over his face and skull. He tried to close his eyes, tried to clench his teeth at the thousand burning agonies, but he could not move eyelash or mouth or eye, and had to stare at his reflection as they shaved him clean.

  His reflection . . . A mirror stood before him, and he looked up at his image, his head gleaming pale blue in the light of a bonfire. A woman looked back at him from the mirror. Her eyes followed his eyes watching her watching him. Blue skin covered her body, slight breasts on a chest that rose and fell as he gasped for air. Her waist narrowed dramatically, then her body bulged out into wide hips and great thighs and absurdly long legs. He stared fascinated at the body, her body, he saw—he stared at the curly mass of blue hair at her pubic mound as she looked down at her body. His body—her body.

  “Ah,” Zoetrope said when all the beasts had taken their trophies. “I think that will do.” He picked up a wand and waved it, and the skin healed, leaving a blue stubble on his skull “You understand? Once transformed, you cannot alter the vision unless I allow it, you see? If I give you wings, you will bleed if you pluck a feather. If I give you scales, you will scream in agony if you shed your skin. If I give you flowing hair like a cape, you must endure insufferable pain if you cut it.” He touched the wand to his lips. “Say ‘Yes, I understand.’”

  “Yes, I understand,” he heard himself say in a woman’s voice, the sound of the voice startling him. He knew that voice.

  Zoetrope smiled. “Now. Now, this is too usual. Too normal. A woman of color? Haw, who needs another woman?” He looked around his subjects, examined them as if for the first time, and smiled. “I know what we’re missing. Yes. We don’t have enough of these, do we?” He pointed at Raven. “Raven, do you need a mate?”

  “Oh, yes!” he said, clapping his little claws together.

  “Then it will be thus.” Zoetrope waved the wand one final time at him, at her, and she was transformed again, and he rose up into consciousness, into the pod. Krim could still hear that woman’s voice, the voice he had used in the vision. But as quickly as they had come, the visions faded from his memory, like dreams too swiftly filed away.

  The silver hide slid back from his face. Krim looked up at the inside of the telly-op couch. Gentle light flowed into the pod as it opened up. “Yes, I understand,” Krim whispered to himself. Lazuli. Prima—it had been Prima’s voice. The leaves of the pod spread all the way open, and Krim stared at Brana smiling down on him. She held a hand out and helped him from the pod. Krim stood up, shaking his head to clear away the fog of the simulator and of the strange vision.

  “Congratulations,” Brana said. “That was a good test run.”

  “It was only a simulation.” Krim shrugged and rolled the hide gloves up into his wrists—he’d figured that trick out.

  “Nope—the real thing. We beamed your connection out to a fighter launched yesterday.”

  Krim massaged his neck, then paused and looked over at her. “I didn’t feel a thing when I jacked in.”

  “You won’t. That’s the idea.”

  “All I did was set up a grid, and there I was. That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Oldest trick in the book. Make the trainee think he’s just running a simulation, and you give ’em the real thing. Takes away the tension.”

  “But now I know.” Krim rubbed his eyes, still trying to readjust to the shift in perceptual realities. “That connection’s sharp. The controls didn’t even hesitate—and there was always some slight delay even on the Beat fighters, when I was actually inside the ship. Hell, I felt as though I was not only in the trainer, but part of it.”

  “Wonderful technology, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Brana shrugged. “Well, anyway, now you’ve been out, and come back. You’ve shown you can fly the Poddy. Now the real training begins.”

  The Kirkpatrick plowed on through the asteroid belt, past inhabited rocks, pushing farther and farther toward the edge of the system. Training settled into a routine, with part of the class out in the trainers, the other part monitoring the missions. It soon settled into boredom: fly, analyze, learn a new mission profile. Mostly, they flew, learning how to do an attack run, how to target and throw loads, how to calculate a run so that by the end the Poddy would be down to its core, the basic unit. But they never threw that at anything; Brana said that would be done only on a real attack, since they would reuse the trainers.

  Krim wondered what the Rockers thought of this huge ship roaring through their system, pulverizing planetoids as it came through. He didn’t know what arc of the Belt they were in—Brana said all the debris from their shooting wouldn’t hit anything. But they must have been near enough to an inhabited zone, since one shift Brana called them up to the assembly deck.

  “We’re going ashore,” she said. “And, Krim, you’ll lead the shore party.”

  “Sir?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Payday’s coming up.”

  Payday, he thought. The big smelter colony out on the edge of the central arc of the belt. It had been around even in the days of the Beats. A noxious, foul place, Payday sucked in raw ore and extruded it as finished metal and steel. Fission powered, it reeked radiation and dust and debris, and no sane person went
near it except to get metals, to get what no one else had the power to get. Gold, silver, copper, spacecraft-quality steel—Payday had it, at a price.

  “You’ll go undercover,” Brana went on. “The Hidden War isn’t something we advertise, so as far as Payday knows, we’re a salvage and freight ship heading out-system, and we need steel. We’ve been herding rocks toward Payday—they know the targets we’ve been blowing are coming their way in nice manageable chunks.”

  Ah, Krim thought, that explained the interesting shooting they had done. Brana had never been satisfied with just blowing things up—they had to blow them up in such a way that the debris scattered in a particular direction. And he’d thought that had been to test them.

  “Each run we make, we collect our steel from the previous training run. The Paydayers probably don’t buy our cover, but they take our ore. And we’ll take their steel. We’re trying to set up factories out-system, so we won’t have to make as many trips in-system.”

  “Sir,” Krim asked, “why do you need me to head the shore party?”

  Brana grinned at him. “Because you’re a Beat,” she said, “or were. And Payday is where Beats go if they don’t want to fly fighters in the Hidden War. Sometimes, these Beats even wind up on salvage ships, you understand?” And Brana winked at him.

  He understood.

  Beats, he thought. Not a fake like Prima, but the real thing. Krim winked back at her. He understood perfectly.

  Chapter 7

  The Kirkpatrick moved into a Hohmann insert, so its path out-system paralleled Payday’s orbit as it moved around the plane of the elliptic. They had about ten hours to go below, negotiate terms, and load the steel. After that, the freighter would start pulling away from Payday, the distance increasing too much to make loading new steel worthwhile. Brana took Krim, Vuko, Nurel, and Zeba ashore, along with her two marines, Steem and Makk. She told them all to wear “civvies,” and what that meant, she warned them, “isn’t that gaudy crap you came on board with.”