The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  “She’s got you by the throat.”

  “Can’t do it, Krim.” Thom took a breath, then bit his lip. “Even if I wanted to. You think I want people to die? But the hide’s not for trade. Everyone here has a military version, with slates that can manage it. There are some pretty sophisticated nanobots running through our system, and the symbiotes we’ve designed would wreck anyone who didn’t have the slate to manage it.

  “It would kill them. That’s why we can’t do it.”

  “They’re dying already,” Krim said, “at least some of them. Don’t you have any civilian stuff?”

  “Just what you recruits gave up.”

  “Krim got a military system at the prison, Admiral,” Brana said. “I ran an analysis when he came aboard.”

  “But the others,” Krim asked, “they’d have civilian codes?”

  “Yeah, Zeba, Nurel,” Brana said. “They would have, but their hides got reprogrammed when they came aboard, and the new programming purged their systems of the old stuff.”

  “There you go,” Krim said. “Give the Belters that.”

  “Uh, it got disposed of long ago,” Brana said. “Spaced, like all possible toxic organics.”

  “Damn.”

  “But, uh, there could still be some material left in them,” Brana continued. “The new programming purges the old stuff out of the organs, and it works its way to the surface. It would be in the outer skin, false epidermis . . .” She smiled. “Hair.”

  “Makk, Steem, Nurel, the Lieutenant,” Krim said. “They all grew hair so Brigid wouldn’t think they were military. Some of the old hide would be in that, right?” He looked at Thom. “Sir?”

  He sighed. “It’s garbage. The Lieutenant doesn’t have enough for a sample, but the others—they’d be in civvies?”

  “Last I looked,” Brana said. “We don’t go back into uniform until we leave Payday. Some of the Belters will come on board to off-load the steel.”

  “Okay. Only if it’s extruded hide. Take a sample, and if it’s old stuff, then Brigid can have it.”

  “Makk? Steem?” Krim asked Brana.

  She shook her head. “Not those guys. Nurel. She’s your donor.”

  Krim found Nurel in the ship’s mess, playing Go with Zeba. He handed her a vial of the lime-green fluid Brana had made him drink after he’d been spaced. Hide nutrient, she had told him, to replace expended organics. “Here.” Krim pushed the fluid toward her. “Drink up.”

  She took the glass, looked at it. “Uh, why?”

  He remembered the rush he’d felt when the fluid coursed through him. The hide absorbed nutrients so fast that it made you giddy, even blew off endorphins, if he understood the process correctly. No one really refused it. “Uh, we need you to grow some hair.” Krim explained the situation.

  “Sure.” Nurel shrugged. “Got to get that old stuff out of me anyway. And we go back in uniform soon, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Okay.” She took the glass and drained it, shivering as the soup went through her. “But, uh, let’s do this in my quarters, huh?”

  Krim blushed, then smiled. “Anything for steel.”

  In the privacy of her cubicle, Nurel sat down on a backless stool by her bed. She handed him a wooden-handled brush, with stiff boar’s hairs for bristles. “From Earth,” she said. “My grandmother’s.” She whirled around on the stool, her back to him. “Brush.”

  He took the brush, ran it through the frizzy blue curls. She’d grown out her hair for shore duty, just a foot or so for the effect. As Krim pulled the brush through her hair, the blue mass seemed to untangle, becoming smoother and less curly. As he stroked, the hair grew, flowing out in inches from her scalp, each stroke lengthening it, so that if he kept brushing at one section, that section would grow faster. He pulled the brush through from scalp to tip, then kept moving around her head, from crown to nape and side to side.

  “Ahh,” she said, letting her head fall back. “That feels nice. More, Krim.”

  He remembered the feeling then, the way Corso had groaned when he ran his fingers through her hair, how she would smile and arch her back as he slipped under her . . . Krim stopped, felt himself go warm.

  “Hey, keep going—that feels good.” Nurel turned to him. “Somethin’ wrong?” Her hide, the silver covering, had rolled back, exposing her breasts and her crotch, so that the silver only covered her shoulders and arms and legs. “What’s this?”

  Krim looked down at his own body, at the way its silver covering had flowed back, too, like an ocean receding from the shore as the tide shifted. His chest lay exposed, his belly and crotch lay exposed.

  “Nice,” she said, running a bare finger down the center of his chest, to his navel, and lower. “You didn’t have to get all dressed up for me.” Nurel flicked her hair over her shoulders. It had grown to thigh length in thick waves. She pushed him down onto her bunk, slipped off the stool, and straddled him, her hair falling down on his face and covering him like a shroud.

  “I . . .” He thought of Corso then, thought of her still alive, maybe, still out there, but maybe not alive, and it had been so long, so, so long.

  “Shhh, Krim. You’re just doing your duty, honey.” She opened her lips, falling back and pulling him into her. “That’s it, babe,” she said, and he fell into her embrace.

  Brana’s voice, coming loudly over Nurel’s slate, broke into their reverie. “You grown that sample yet, Nurel?” she asked.

  “Working on it,” she said. Nurel rolled off Krim, sat back on the stool. She tapped her slate, now coiled around her wrist, and her hide opaqued silver again. “Krim’s here to collect it.”

  “Well, hustle it, then. We’re going to start on-loading as soon as we vet that sample.”

  Nurel handed Krim the brush, then sighed. “We’re on it now.” She tapped her slate again and cut the connection to Brana. “Braid it, lover. I like the feel of that. Then take your sample.”

  “Sure.” He brushed her hair again, untangling the mess from their passion, parted it into three sections high on the back of her head, and quickly braided it into a long rope. She reached into a drawer in her locker, pulled out a short piece of ribbon.

  “Tie it off, babe, and then let’s do it.”

  “Yeah.” He tied a tight knot in the end, then took up a small wand like the one Makk and Steem had used on them when they had come aboard.

  Nurel turned around again, facing him. She took the wand, held it. “Wait. I want to see you do this.” A red dot glowed on her slate, a tight beam running from her slate to his, and Sam let her in. She’d see through his eyes. “Low power, just run it over the scalp.”

  “Uh-huh.” He took the wand, its end flat and slightly curved, and ran it in short strokes, from forehead back, from over the ears back. As he cut, the hair curled away, the ends held together by the braid, the shaving so close that nothing showed but skin. With his left hand Krim held the braid, and when he was done, he lifted it gently away as the last stroke sundered it. The braid still felt warm, and seemed to writhe.

  “Thanks, sweetie,” Nurel said, rubbing her hand over her smooth scalp. “I’ll get you for this.” She grinned, took the wand from him, and waved it at him, its hum threatening.

  “Better get the sample to them,” he said. He stopped at the hatch, looked back at her, remembered her naked body. “You’re blue all over,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because I’m so sad to see you go,” Nurel said. She grinned. “Made that way. Two generations back, my momma did it, got her genes hacked that way.” She shrugged. “Just wanted to be different, is all.”

  Blue, he thought, as he took her hair, the braid, to Brana for analysis.

  Later, in Brigid’s office, Krim handed her Nurel’s braid, the last fifteen centimeters of new hide organics cut away, only the old hide left. “Will this do?” he asked.

  Brigid held it up, hefted it. “That blue one’s sample?”

  Krim nodded.

  “Yeah, it wi
ll do.” She smiled, turned to Sherl. “Get this to the vats and start a new batch.” Brigid stood, held out a hand to Krim. “Tell your captain he’s got some steel.”

  It wasn’t until he had thought of Nurel’s comment, and had Brana explain a few things about the hide, that he understood the joke they had pulled. The hide took a sample of the body it inhabited, snipped a bit here and a bit there of its DNA to reinforce its symbiosis. And when that sample got passed on, it took some of that DNA as feed stock. Unless the Belters hacked the hide, changed it to fit their own body perceptions, if they only went with what the hide made of itself, and not some other covering . . .

  If they did that, the Belters would be like Nurel: blue hair, blue skin, blue all the way through.

  Chapter 8

  Once again the Kirkpatrick fired its engines, and once again they did heavy time. Krim lay in his acceleration couch, next to Nurel. As the engines kicked in, he reached out and squeezed her hand gently. The decks rumbled and they squeezed each other harder. At the clasp of hands their slates made contact, each slate extending a tendril to the other. They monitored each other’s systems as backup. A necessary intimacy, it had become more: a pleasure to connect with her, Krim thought, his body literally part of hers, connected not in the raw act of copulation, but through the hide, through the computer net that coursed through the hide and even into their very brains.

  It was as if his body was a waldo and Nurel was a remote he operated—no, not operated: felt. He could no more operate her than he could a cat, but he could feel her, sense her, and she him. Just before the force hit and their hoods opaqued, he glanced over at her. He met her eyes and she looked at him, his glance becoming hers. Krim saw himself through her: his scalp now smooth, his chin and cheeks and upper lip shaved. In her glance he recalled her touch as she shaved him and made him a pilot again. As they looked at each other, the silver suits flowed up over their faces and heads, and except for slight facial differences—a higher brow, a flatter forehead, a larger nose—in their shared vision his face became hers.

  And then the blast hit.

  The Kirkpatrick kicked, a final boost out of the planetoid belt, beyond the brief stopover and on a long haul past Jupiter and Saturn and the outer planets, toward the next belt of planetoids, toward the Oort and the heliosphere. Beyond.

  Their hides tightened with the blast, the artificial tissue dampening the increased G-forces, buttressing soft organs within. He could feel Sam thinking, monitoring his body and shifting a muscle here, oozing a finger of hide under a rib there, or adjusting Nurel’s own slate as a lull in Sam’s activity let it aid Nurel’s slate, as her slate aided Sam.

  Seconds or minutes or even hours later—Thom would not tell them, and Krim learned not to ask Sam—the drives stopped. With the second burn they would stay at a steady two G’s of acceleration until they were beyond Neptune, and then the acceleration would slow. Thom gave the all clear and they rose from their couches.

  For a moment Krim and Nurel held the connection, their clasp separating, but a thin wire of connection remaining. Even that was broken, but they maintained a remote connection, two red dots flickering on their slates as the connecting beams flashed back and forth. They monitored each other, examining their adjustment to the higher acceleration, and in Nurel’s vision he saw himself: squat, not shorter, but stockier, legs and chest and arms heavily muscled, his neck and even his jaw muscles thicker, it seemed. Their silver hoods flowed back, and he saw her: blue-skinned, still, her breasts almost vanished in her heavy-G chest muscles, her forearms firm and corded with added strength, her neck thick, too. Krim felt himself stir at the sight of her, then suppressed the thought.

  He held out a fingertip to hers, touching for a moment, the connection now through fingers alone, and they pulled back, thin bulges of hide and slate hovering in the space between fingertips, and then they reluctantly broke the connection, and he was alone, and yet not alone. Sam held a core of Nurel’s slate, as it did of his. Buddies and perhaps more, a low-level monitoring beam—weak, almost unnoticeable—would flicker between them, even between the others. The pilots moved in a subtle connection of mind and body, dimly sensing each other’s presence, needs—or distress.

  “Chow time,” Brana announced over the hailing comm that ran in their heads.

  As they gathered in the ship’s mess, Brana briefed them on their next training run. The pilots gorged themselves on protein supplements, vat-grown meats, pasta, fresh vegetables from the ship’s greenhouse, and draught after draught of the slimy green shakes. Except for Makk and Steem, everyone had bulked out. The two marines already had bodies that could stand the G-stress and hadn’t changed much at all. Krim thought they all looked like squat elephants, with massive legs and arms. It took him a few moments to reidentify everyone by voice and mannerism, so changed had they become.

  “The next run’s a bit practical,” Brana said. “We’ll work in half-squadrons, six to each. No shooting this time, just maneuvering. You’ll work on scoops and returns—pick up and come back to the ship.”

  Vuko raised his hand. “I thought we would always be shooting.”

  “Generally, yeah. That’s your primary mission. But if you pick up an alien probe, we might want to try to recover it for the intelligence. This mission will work on that skill.”

  “What are we going to scoop this run?” asked Zeba. “Ice?”

  Brana shook her head. “That’ll come when we pass Saturn. No, this one’s a bit trickier. You’re going down into Jupiter to scoop deuterium.”

  “That’s suicide,” said Nurel.

  “No such thing as suicide in a telly-op ship,” Brana corrected. “There’s a high probability of fighter failure, though. That’s why you go out together—you’ll monitor each other. We’ll do two runs. The probes are on their way. You’ll enter the telly-op couches in two hours and make the transfer.” She smiled at them as they continued eating. “Bon appétit.”

  Krim went into the couches with Nurel next to him, and the other four in their group—Zeba, Tesh, Diz, and Vuko—in the telly-op bay with them. All their runs before had been done solo, never even in pairs, but solo runs would always be the mission profile out in the Beyond. The Beat fighters had always fought in squadrons, like the final attack had been . . . but that had been with Beats. Krim wondered if they could forge the unity here—wondered if he could. With Nurel, yeah; but with the others, he didn’t know.

  He lay down in his telly-op couch. The leaves of the pod closed around him. Pulling his hood up over his face and hands, Krim stared into the darkness of his own mind. Again he felt that vague sense of another presence as he eased into the artificial reality of the Poddy.

  “Ready?” Brana’s voice said inside his head. “Count off.”

  “Diz, check.”

  “Krim, check.”

  “Nurel, check.”

  “Tesh, check.”

  “Vuko, check.”

  “Zeba, check.”

  “Okay. On my mark, prepare for transfer. Three, two, one, mark.”

  They transferred into the remote Poddies. Krim’s grid came up, and then Sam slowly brought up the visuals. A vast gas-filled horizon occupied the lower half of his perspective, pale-tan Europa rising over Jupiter’s horizon dead ahead. The heavy planet swirled before him, tornadoes of glowing red gas rising up above anvilheads of purple clouds. Lightning crackled from cloud to cloud, sheets of luminescence flickering through Jupiter’s upper atmosphere as they moved down to one hundred fifty klicks above the planet surface.

  Five dots blipped on before him, four at each point of his grid, one before him and slightly ahead of the other points. Labels flickered on below each dot: Nurel in the forward Poddy, the others at each point of the cross. The wing moved down toward the gas giant below.

  “Krim, you’re the wing leader,” Brana said.

  “Check.” He’d figured that out already from his position.

  It took a few seconds for Brana to respond. “You’ve got
the mission parameters on your slates,” she said. “You’re running modified Poddies: no kinetic loads, a cargo shell, and ram scoops in the front. You’ll run down to the troposphere, fill up the fighter tanks, and come back. It’ll be a bit—” Brana’s voice broke off, then came on a few seconds later. “—hard radiation, so I’ll be off and on. Krim, the only thing to be sure of is that every Poddy comes home. Blow your loads if you have to, but I don’t want anyone left out there.”

  “Roger on that,” he said. Again, there was that nagging pause as he had to wait for his reply to send to her and her reply to come back. That bugged him, that he could make control shifts instantly, but communications with Brana had a lag.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  “Check.” Krim powered up his joystick—his fist before him—and practiced a few maneuvers. The other fighters stayed on course while he swung toward them and around. “Slave your control to my stick,” he said. “You can seize control, but I’ll fly us in.”

  “Got that,” Nurel said, and the others followed.

  He tried it again, maneuvering up and down, and this time all five dots followed his control. The grid stayed the same, but the planet shifted.

  “Okay, good on that,” Krim said. “Nurel, pull your perspective back so you can see us all.” As the forward Poddy, she would not be able to see them unless she transferred her perspective to a point of view just behind Krim—she’d have to combine both forward and backward perspectives.

  “Okay,” she said. “Feels as if I’m craning my neck, though.”

  “Well, don’t look too far back,” Krim said. “Let’s start. Mission parameters are loaded.” He stopped, listened as Sam ran the basics through his head. “We’ll head down a hundred klicks and start a scoop. Watch your radiation counts. Let’s go in.”

  He pushed his fist forward, and they all fell down in a steep dive toward one of the red anvilheads. An array of silver dots blipped up on his view, one clump concentrating in the anvilhead: pay streaks of deuterium, Sam told him. Krim moved toward one thick pay streak, and as they came down on it, a vast nebula of flickering silver motes seemed to fill the screen.