The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  “Okay, start the scoop,” Krim said.

  A gauge lit up in his perspective, a simple 360-degree circle. Similar gauges popped up above the representations of the other ships. A roaring began in the ship, like a jet sucking in air, and thin slivers like pie slices began to be colored silver on his gauge. When his tanks read over quarter-full, the wing moved through the cloud, and the sucking slowed down.

  “Okay, let’s find another pay streak,” he said. He shifted his perspective, scanning up and around and behind, and saw another glow of silver farther down. Krim pushed his fist forward.

  “Radiation increasing,” Sam said, “atmospheric density increasing. Go much farther and you’ll burn up.”

  “Okay.” He eased up on his fist, scooped along the upper edge of the silver cloud. The gauges began filling again: half, two-thirds, three-quarters. Again they slowed down.

  “One more scoop,” he said. Krim had Sam do a quick analysis, and figured out the size of a cloud they’d have to suck up. A pay streak glowed just a bit farther down. He marked it, queried Sam. “That one safe?”

  “Marginal,” Sam said.

  Krim scanned farther up, beyond. Nothing. “Okay, we’ll try it. Down.”

  He pushed his fist forward, descending. A red glow crept around the edge of his perspective as the Poddy began to heat up. He could feel the weight of the planet pulling them, heavier, more massive even than their latest acceleration. The pumps whined again, sucking in the last of the pay streak. The glow increased, and Sam began chirping.

  Krim yanked back on his fist, pulling them out, the Poddy’s drive roaring, but slower with a full weight. He saw the outer four rise up, but Nurel kept falling.

  “Nurel! Override my slave—pull up!”

  “I’m trying to,” she said. The nose of her Poddy rose up slightly, then dropped. “I’ve got it—damn.”

  “Blow your aft tanks.”

  “Venting,” she said.

  “Blow ’em!” he shouted. “You’ve got to dump weight. Shit, blow them all.”

  Her gauges dropped back to empty, and ten dots tumbled away from her fighter. Nurel rose up finally, then started to fall again.

  “I can’t pull out,” she said. “I think I’m getting sucked down by a storm.”

  “Damn.” Krim thought for a moment. “Brana, can we just cut Nurel’s connection—let her Poddy go?” He waited a few seconds for her reply. “Brana?”

  “Comm-link is down, Krim,” Sam said.

  “That doesn’t make sense, Sam. We’re connected. Can I send a message back that way?”

  “Negative.”

  “What the hell? Okay, can we break Nurel’s connection from here?”

  “Negative.”

  “Okay, let’s just let her go. It’s only a telly-op probe.” Krim baited Sam.

  “Negative. Telly-op connection must be broken at the transmission end. An uncontrolled return of the, uh, operator may result in cerebral distress.”

  “Cerebral distress?” Something seemed wrong here.

  “Death.”

  “Damn,” Krim muttered. “Okay, we’ve got to get her. Zeba, take Diz and Tesh out. Vuko, come down with me. We’ll try to pull her up manually. Vuko, shoot our tanks with ’em—we’ll try to recover once we get into the tropopause. Nurel?”

  “Still here.”

  “We’re coming in after you. Vuko, blow those tanks.”

  “Got it.” Three of the dots peeled away, and Krim saw his tanks tumble after them, along with Vuko’s loads. Vuko’s Poddy remained slaved to his still, and the two fighters fell down to Nurel. “Take your comm,” Krim said. He looked at Nurel’s dot, falling. “Nurel, blow your hull—blow everything but your drive and the C-cube core.”

  “Blowing hull.”

  “That’ll take out her shielding,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Krim muttered. “Okay, Nurel, push your stick all the way forward, and just shoot your drive—one big blast and then eject it. Got it? Mark!”

  A flame shot out from Nurel’s dot, and then a smaller dot fell away. Her Poddy rose up. “Okay, okay, I’m heading up.”

  “Good. Vuko, run around to her port side. I’ll take the starboard and we’ll ease in on her.” Krim pulled around to her right, and saw Vuko come around to her left. He moved toward her, moving his fist slowly, until her ship became more than a dot, became a long cylinder: the C-cube core.

  “Moving in,” Vuko said.

  “Okay, Nurel, we’ve got you.” Sam pulled up another control for Krim, and he took it with his left hand, pushing a set of grapples out toward her. Vuko moved his own grapples—two long claws—toward Krim. They’d clasp them around the core, hold her, and take her in. “Steady, steady.” Krim moved his grapples toward her, their long flexible fingers flailing, one under, one over. “Two meters . . . one. Gotcha!” Their grapples wrapped around her, locking under and over, and the two Poddies held the core.

  “Yee-hah!” Krim yelled. “Nurel, you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Why couldn’t I just jack out? My slate said I couldn’t.”

  “Too much radiation,” Sam said. “You couldn’t have broken the connection.”

  “Brana could have sundered me at the ship.”

  “Uncontrolled telly-op disconnection can lead to cerebral distress,” Krim said, paraphrasing Sam. “Death.”

  “That’s crazy,” Nurel said.

  “Yeah.” Krim locked the grapples, pulled back on his fist. “Vuko, slave back to me. Let’s go home.”

  Vuko and Krim eased Nurel’s C-cube core back into the Kirkpatrick’s main hangar. As the Poddies snuggled into their cradles, the other trainees took fighters out to recover the blown deuterium tanks. With Nurel safely on board, the three pilots transferred out of the remote ships. Krim watched the image of the hangar fade away, with the grid and gauges remaining, and then that faded out until he saw only black. He heard the telly-op couch open up, and he rolled the hood of his hide back from his face. Brana stood over his couch as he sat up.

  “What the hell went on out there?” she asked.

  He shook the fog from his eyes, glared at the flight instructor. “My question exactly. What the hell did go on out there?”

  “You almost lost Nurel. I told you not to lose anyone and to bring them back.”

  “We brought her back.” Krim shoved her out of the way, went to Nurel’s couch. It had opened, and she sat up, rubbing her eyes. “You okay?”

  “Fine. Thanks for bringing me back.” She shook her head. “I think.”

  Vuko had come out of his couch, too. The other couches had opened before Krim had come to. Tesh, Diz, and Zeba remained in their pods, still out chasing tanks through the remote ships.

  “I don’t get it,” Vuko said. “The Poddies are telly-op ships, you said. We just jack in and run them, only now they’re more than that.”

  “My question exactly,” Nurel said. She glanced at Krim, who nodded.

  “Why couldn’t you jack her out?” he asked Brana. “You had mission ops. We had a comm-link until we went down into the lower atmosphere. What happened?”

  “Magnetic storms. Radiation. Jupiter’s a boiling mass of nasty particles.”

  “Yeah, and we were in it,” Krim said. “Operating at a distance. So how come we can do telly-op from the ship but you can’t set up a comm-link? That seems damn stupid. What about this wonderful ‘tachyon’ link?”

  “I can’t talk about it,” said Brana. “The comm-link and the telly-op link are different, that’s all.”

  “So we need a comm-link to jack out?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. It has to be controlled from mission ops.”

  “That’s crap. It’s a dangerous system and it’s crap.”

  “It’s the way it works. I can’t tell you more.”

  “Hey,” Vuko said, “it seemed pretty safe out there before. If the Poddy goes, hunh, no big deal. Now you’re saying if we don’t get a controlled jack-out, we—what’s that phrase, Krim?”
<
br />   “Cerebral distress.”

  “That. We die?”

  “Lots of ways to die,” Brana said. “Okay, okay, it’s not as safe. You would have learned that in your training eventually.”

  “Thanks,” Krim said, snarling the words. “I ought to file a report with the Admiral.”

  “Do that,” Brana said. “He’d be happy to know I’m following the training schedule.” She smiled. “We set it up this way. You have to learn the limits of the Poddies, of the whole system. Now you know.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Krim said quietly. “Back on the Jack, I knew what I knew, the whole world inside a rock. Here? All I know is that I don’t know. I don’t know what’s true, what’s right, or what works.” He looked down at his silver-skinned body, at the others, all squat and muscled. “Look at us. We’re not who we are—bulked out like this, parodies of the bodies we started out with, I started out with. You’ve got us stripped and shaved so we all look the same. Crap. It’s just crap.

  “I don’t know who I am, who you are, or you, Nurel, or Vuko, or the rest of you.” He waved his hand at the outer bulkhead. “I don’t even know what’s real.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Brana said. “By the time we get to the Beyond, you’ll find out. Those beasts, those aliens—they’re real. And I’m going to make sure you can handle that.” She stood up to Krim, eye to eye. “I’ll make damn sure of that.

  “Hit the chow. Debriefing in an hour. Dismissed.”

  Later, after Brana had grilled them and grilled them again about the mission, Krim sneaked down to the hangar bay. The three Poddies he, Vuko, and Nurel had taken out still lay in their cradles; the more intact Poddies still had the grappling arms unfolded. Krim ran his hand over his Poddy—the starboard one to Nurel’s—and felt the hard steel of it. At the stern was the drive unit, a huge fusion engine, with fuel tanks just forward of the drive. A hull surrounded the C-cube core, with sensor arrays and clusters on the outside of the hull.

  He looked at Nurel’s Poddy, now down to just the core. The core was a long cylinder, a meter in diameter and two meters long. A square panel flickered at the forward end of the core. Krim ran his left finger over the flickering dots.

  “What’s this, Sam?” he asked.

  “Controls. It opens it up.”

  “Open it, Sam.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Krim.”

  “Sam . . .”

  Krim’s slate curled down over his hand, and he touched the panel so Sam connected. Lights flashed on the panel, and the top quarters of the cylinder opened up. Inside at the front of the core was a maze of electronics. In the aft end a shimmering web of silver threads wound around a pulsating icy-blue crystal.

  “Interesting,” Krim said. “Sam, what’s that?” Krim touched one of the silver threads.

  “It appears to be some sort of slate mixed, with, uh, hide.”

  “Is it alive?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Jack in.”

  “I’m not sure that would be wise, Krim.”

  “Jack in, Sam.”

  Sam made the connection, and the crystal pulsated slightly, growing brighter. He felt some sort of a—a presence, he thought. A familiar presence, but whose or what, he couldn’t say. It felt like the same presence when he entered the darkness of the telly-op couch. At the aft end of the hangar bay he heard a hatch hiss open. Krim broke the connection. He quickly ran his fingers over the controls and closed the panel. Glancing up at the opening hatchway above, he saw a dark silhouette shadowed within. He ducked down behind the Poddies and eased back into the darkness of the hangar.

  The figure walked into the bay, reached for a panel by the door, tapped some buttons, then left the way he or she had come. When the hatch door hissed shut again, Krim rose up, moved toward the forward hatch, not daring to open the Poddy again. As he left, he glanced back at Nurel’s Poddy, at the bare command and control core. Again he recalled the touch of that strange being.

  What are those things? he thought. What strange things do we fly in when we go into deep space?

  Chapter 9

  As the Kirkpatrick neared the outer edge of Pluto’s orbit, Admiral Thom fired the engines one final time, slowing the ship down into an orbit beyond Pluto’s, above the plane of the elliptic, and on a rendezvous with one of the outer redoubts. The redoubts were stray or snagged minor planets, shoved in-system from the Kuiper planetoid belt, or pushed out from one of the asteroids in a Trojan orbit around Jupiter. Brana explained that the Alliance military command kept setting up redoubts at 35-degree increments of arc around the outer edge of the system, each redoubt a base for the Poddy patrols out into the Oort.

  From Krim’s perspective at one of the forward viewports, Redoubt Ya seemed to come down from above the ship. A twenty-klick-long rock that had been beaten into a rough cylinder, it had impact craters dotting one side. As the cylinder turned, Krim saw that Redoubt Ya had fission plants like Payday—the same canyons of venting tubes and radiating fins. He could understand why a backward Belter plant might have fission plants, but the Alliance normally had fusion generators.

  “Breeder reactors,” Sam answered at his query.

  It had puzzled him, the things Sam could know or not know and when he learned it. As they came closer to Redoubt Ya, Krim guessed that Sam accessed the redoubt’s central computer. Probably by the time he got down into the redoubt, Sam would have learned where every toilet was on the fort.

  “Breeder reactors make fuel,” Sam explained further.

  One end of Redoubt Ya pointed toward the sun, while the other pointed to the Oort beyond. The Kirkpatrick parked at the in-system end, and as they maneuvered into a stable dock, a tiny pellet shot out of the other end, a glowing rock accelerating at well over ten G’s, Krim guessed.

  “There goes another one,” Vuko said next to him, “Poor bastard.”

  Krim nodded, and watched the Poddy disappear into the vastness of space. He might be operating a Poddy like it soon enough, though he knew that it would be well over a year before that particular Poddy was in any sort of an attack position. A series of fission bombs would blow behind the Poddy, boosting it up toward near-light speeds. As he watched in the Poddy’s direction, the first of its nukes fired, a sudden pinprick of light that quickly faded.

  A shuttle came out toward them, towing a thin cable. Krim heard a distant clank as it locked on to the forward gangway bay, the ship’s lights reflecting briefly off the cable as it tightened up, making a thin link between base and ship.

  “It’s show time,” Brana shouted to the pilots watching in the observation deck. “Suit up and hit the dirt. This is what you’ve been training for.”

  When the shuttle had brought them down to the surface, they were met inside Redoubt Ya’s main hangar by a lieutenant roughly Brana’s height, but stockier, with a dusky gray hide, her slate around her waist like a belt, and her external hide split lower down her neck to just above the top of her sternum. She had blond hair barely an inch long at her forehead, but it was longer at the crown and actually inches long at the back, curling around her neck and nape. The lieutenant saluted as Brana brought the trainees in.

  “Lieutenant Brana, sir,” she said.

  “Lieutenant Shuka.” Shuka looked each of them over, her eyes remaining on each for a long second before she glanced at the next in line. Krim felt his spine stiffen—Brana was making sure they presented a proper face. “These any good?”

  “Bunch of crap, sir, but as good as they come.” Brana smiled.

  “I’ll take them. Don’t have much damn choice anyway.” She shook her head. Krim hated it when military types played these games.

  Ten pilots moved from behind Shuka. Like her, they had dusky gray hides, as if the shine had worn off their suits. They didn’t wear their slates in the standard shoulder sash, but had them wrapped around arms, waists, legs, in girdles around their hips, even in helmets on their heads. Like Shuka they wore their hair loose, w
ith mustaches and beards on the men—even on some of the women—and in all colors. The fat seemed to have been sucked from their faces, Krim thought, and their eyes looked old, though their skin still remained tight and unwrinkled.

  The veterans looked over at the new pilots, their eyes hard, and as the two groups stared at each other, the vets grinned, shook their heads. New meat, old meat. Krim looked at their hands, searching for the telltale gold ring on the middle finger.

  One vet caught Krim’s stare, looked up at him, and came over. “What are you looking at?” he asked.

  “For—a brother, a Beat.”

  The vet looked down at Krim’s hand, nodded at the finger. “You’re a Beat, huh?” His gaze seared into Krim’s face, then he jerked his chin up. “I heard about that war you idiots fought. No Beats here on this rock, but I flew with one on my first tour. Those five years you fought off the Ameruss? That’s about a tenth of what your first tour will be like.” The vet reached out and clamped a hand on Krim’s shoulder. “Brother, we’re all Beats on this rock. But not me.” He looked over at the shuttle, at Brana. “Uh-uh. I’m going home. I’ve done my tours, and I’m out of here.” He went back over with the other pilots, and they walked off toward the shuttle.

  Brana walked down the ranks of her pilots, checking them out one last time. She stopped and said their names as she went by, as if by saying their names she would still be with them. When she had done one final inspection, she nodded, turned to Shuka.

  “Take good care of them.” She turned back to the pilots, and saluted them. “You might do okay.”

  Krim felt her slate’s commands click off, and his spine relaxed for a moment. He straightened it, as did the others. At Brana’s salute, they all saluted back, and then she turned to take over her new charges.

  “At ease,” Shuka said when Brana had gone back onto the shuttle. “You’re on a redoubt now. Let’s get settled in.”

  Less than a klick of the in-system end of Redoubt Ya contained living quarters, and most of the rock held the fission plants, construction yards, and Poddy storage bays at the Oort end. At the solar end of the planetoid a big sphere had been blasted for living quarters, with a central greenhouse and six levels of housing based around that. The greenhouse held not only vegetables, but a pocket park with trees, a fishpond, and an artificial sun that rode across the sky on a twenty-five-hour cycle.