The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  Every two hours, almost to the minute, they could feel the whine of the railgun charge up and launch yet another Poddy out to a future mission. Redoubt Ya’s previous battery of Poddies would be launched until they were used up. When they were done, the railgun and launching tubes would be shut down for maintenance and retooling to accommodate the new generation of Poddies the Kirkpatrick had just brought out. Even though Krim’s class had trained on the new Poddies, they wouldn’t fly them until two more tours.

  Shuka took them to billeting to get temporary quarters. The changeover of crews meant a minor revolt in housing. Choice housing got assigned by seniority in missions, and with the senior pilots headed home, the junior pilots jockeyed for their old quarters, which meant Krim and his wing couldn’t get settled in until everyone above them had shuttled around. They knew they’d get the back-alley quarters, but not which ones. In the meantime, they settled for billeting, which suited Krim fine. He took a two-bunk room with Nurel.

  Redoubt Ya had a slight spin to create some gravity, but it really only meant that things would fall to the floor—eventually—instead of drifting away. Their individual slates processed a download and adjusted the intra-muscular hide so they could function in the low gravity. Whereas their bodies in high-G had been squat and muscular, the low gravity made them lean. The hide expanded into their muscles to create more tension, so that every movement they took increased resistance nearly tenfold.

  While the new pilots lay on couches in sick bay, their bodies adjusting to the new gravity, Shuka laid out the rules for them on Redoubt Ya. For the next two weeks they would run simulations and get settled in. After they’d been vetted on the simulators, their mission rotation would start. Each pilot would fly a day-long mission a week. Every day they would report for training in the morning—tedious simulation exercises, mostly—and the rest of the time was theirs. The lieutenant made it clear they would fly more if they could, but the telly-ops strained them; they would need the slack time to recover. That suited Krim, too. Shuka also said their lives were their own, with not a lot of military crap out on the edge, so whatever they did and whomever they did it with was their own damn business. That suited Krim a lot.

  Later, after the initial adjustment had been complete, Krim sat on the edge of his bunk, watching Nurel grow her hair out. She had pulled her hood up over her scalp, up over the nape of her neck and to her hairline around her forehead and ears. They had noticed the other pilots did that: wore the hoods up all the time, not covering their faces but covering their scalps. Brana had explained that the silver hood had to make contact with the underlying skin and the inner hide, which was why they always had hairless skin. But if you kept the silver hood up, you could extrude hair over that.

  Some of the senior pilots just kept their heads shaved, but when Krim and the other new pilots reported to billeting, it was made clear to them that only the really hard-core did that, and as new meat, they had better not be too presumptuous. No problem, Krim thought. He didn’t like a shaved skull anyway. Sam grew him short dreadlocks over his hood, but he kept his face beardless.

  Nurel sat on a stool opposite him, her eyes fixed beyond his. She clasped his hand, jacked into his slate so she could see herself as he saw her. Millions of coils of hair in strands ten or so thick snaked out from her scalp, writhing around until each one hit the proper length for whatever effect she was aiming for. Finally, she shook her head and the silver hairs fell into place, a short brush at the crown and over the ears, long at the back and curling down over her collarbone. Nurel turned around slowly on the stool, so he could see her and she could see herself.

  “Okay?”

  “Fine.” He shrugged.

  “Let me get the color right.”

  Her hair flickered gold, then red, black, green, purple, blue, a panoply of shades, but he wasn’t sure if it was her hair changing colors or just his perception of the colors. She went back to blue, then purple, then black, then silver, and settled on silver.

  “That okay?”

  “Silver’s fine. It brings out the motes in your eyes.” Krim smiled, remembering Corso. You always had to say something like that—make a comment so women knew you cared.

  “Thanks, babe.” She pulled her hand away from his, and for a moment he saw himself as she saw him: silver and gold cornrows wound in a spiral around his head. He shook his head, saw the braids bounce.

  “I didn’t—” He held out his left hand, the slate wrapped around his wrist, and scanned his image: twisted ropes of hair in five-inch lengths. Krim touched his head, felt it. Yeah, that’s what was there—why had he seen something different? He had seen what she wanted to see.

  “Somethin’ wrong?”

  “I don’t have cornrows, Nurel.”

  “What?” She stared at him. “Oh, of course. I just thought for a moment—it was an idea. Silly.” She touched his hair, stroked the dreadlocks. “No, no, you’re fine.” She slid off the stool, moved onto the bunk next to him. “Really fine, babe.”

  Her fingers ran down his chest, her touch opening a gap in the silver outer hide, the hide flowing back from his sternum, and she pushed him down. Krim reached up, stroking her sternum, her navel, little touches that pushed the silver away. His hand fell lower, and with his other hand he reached up for her hair, the soft silver strands, running his fingers through her scalp and down to her back, pushing away the exterior hide, the covering, until she fell down onto him and opened up to him, her slate winding around his slate, her body winding around his body, until they saw each other in their clasp, and they became one.

  “The Hidden War has changed since you left Earth,” Shuka explained to the new pilots as they prepared to run their simulations. “It is no longer just a survey to intercept alien probes, but constant patrol to make initial, and destructive, contact with anything alien that might come through the Oort.”

  Krim remembered his first interview with Thom, those many months ago. “Those old earth probes—are they still out there?” he asked.

  Shuka smiled. “We took those out within the first year. It wasn’t hard to find them—the trajectory was known, and they rather nicely kept pinging out a signal, after all these centuries. No, we have to worry about Terroron probes, or ships.”

  The lieutenant stood before them on a round, raised stage. Broadcast beams flowed out from a projector on the stage, and though Krim knew the image wasn’t physically there, Shuka pointed to a schematic floating before her on the round stage. The pilots’ slates projected the image into their optical nerves.

  “We don’t know what the probes will look like, and you won’t know if you’ve hit one until it’s been destroyed. If the Terroron probes aren’t shielded, they should be pretty obvious. They will not look like the usual space debris.” She pointed at a series of objects: silicate and nickel-iron asteroids, burnt-out comets, irregularly shaped rocks of various forms. “If it does not look natural, it is a probe, and you will kill it.”

  Shuka blinked her eyes, and the image of a comet with a tail appeared. “The most likely object coming in from the Oort will be a comet.” The tail blinked out, and a dirty gray round rock appeared. “It will not develop a definite tail until it gets closer to the system. Some friction as comets plow into the heliosphere will give them a slight corona.” The comet now showed a dirty haze fluttering back from it. “Our intelligence suggests that these are the most likely forms in which the Terroron probe will appear: comets. Of the ninety-three anomalies so far encountered and suspected or known to be of alien origin, eighty-two have been comets. If you encounter a comet, destroy it.”

  “Do we attempt to intercept and capture a probe?” Vuko asked. Krim knew what he meant—the Poddies they’d used to rescue Nurel had grappling arms.

  “Negative. First, that is the mission of our long-range survey ships. Second, you cannot risk bringing a probe in close enough that the Terrorons can discover an inhabited system. Third, you do not have return capabilities with these Poddies anyway.
I know the training Poddies returned to your cruiser. These cannot and will not. They do not have the power to come back. It’s a one-way mission: search, destroy, and end.”

  Shuka brought up another image, that of a Mark VI Poddy fighter being launched from a redoubt. “The Poddies you will be flying were launched two years ago and are now within the inner edge of the Oort Cloud.” The Poddy picked up speed as a continual burst of fission bombs exploded behind it, the Dyson drive system accelerating the little fighter to half light speed. “You will take over operation of the Poddy after it has fired its last fission charge. Your attack mission will run for a redoubt day, or until you have exhausted all your kinetic loads.”

  As the image moved, the Poddy burst ahead, small lumps shedding off of it and hurtling toward a rapidly approaching comet. Shuka pointed at empty space before her, and Krim saw her finger tap the image of the Poddy soaring through space. “Remember that the Poddy, and its kinetic loads, have been accelerated to one-half the speed of light,” Shuka said. “As an exercise you may want to calculate the kinetic force of a one-kilogram rock at one-half C, but a rough estimate will show you that it is probably sufficient to destroy most anything that gets in its way.” Krim saw the rock tumble at the comet, hitting it and causing the comet to disintegrate into white dust. More such images followed as the Poddy continued exploding rocks and comets.

  “When all the charges have been expelled, the operator will initiate auto-destruct, and break the connection. I cannot overemphasize this: You must break the connection before auto-destruct. If the Poddy blows and you’re still on it—still connected—it will not be pleasant. You will experience the destruction, and you may also experience physical, not virtual, effects.” The presentation continued, and the Poddy exploded into a blazing sun. “Once every charge has been expelled, auto-destruct begins anyway, but it will begin faster if you manually initiate it. Even if Poddies do not finish their runs, they auto-destruct inside of a day. We do not let the Poddies get captured.” Shuka turned the images off in their minds. “Questions?”

  “Wouldn’t the debris of an explosion indicate some intelligence?” Nurel asked.

  Shuka nodded. “Good point. It may happen that the Terrorons have begun to notice a profusion of nuclear explosions on the edge of a star system. This may bring the system to their attention. Nonetheless, we are working on the assumption that they have approached our system, and that they would eventually probe inside the orbit of Pluto. We cannot allow this to happen. We also hope that the explosions might serve to deter them—that they will become convinced we are a hostile system and avoid us. But the debris left over by a nuclear explosion will not give them any hard intelligence. Perhaps if they came upon the debris within minutes, they might gain some basic knowledge. The solar wind will scatter it quickly enough.”

  “Have any attempts been made to contact the Terrorons?” Zeba asked.

  “Have you seen their broadcasts?” Zeba nodded. “You can understand why we do not care to make contact with them. They are barbarians.”

  “But what if that’s all propaganda? What if they’re peaceful beings, and they just want to spook us?”

  Shuka nodded. “A good point. If so, we may be passing up the opportunity to make civil contact. That has been considered. Since the alternative—revealing information about our system, and possibly entering into an even worse war—is so dreadful, we do not dare attempt contact. They have effective star drives; we do not. They are an advanced civilization. We cannot risk encountering them. We must destroy their probes, if only to buy time until we can risk encountering them—and are able to defend ourselves if the Terrorons turn out to be as savage as we believe.”

  “Those broadcasts . . .” Krim asked, “if we encounter another such probe, will we pick up the broadcasts?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, uh, any such intelligence should be uploaded?”

  “Yes. When you disconnect, you will do a final upload back to the redoubt that will include a recording of the entire mission.”

  “Can the Terrorons attempt to psychologically influence the pilots?” Krim continued.

  Shuka paused and stared straight ahead for a moment. Krim understood the movement: she was consulting the redoubt’s central computer. “Possibly,” she said. “There could be, uh, feedback through the telly-op system. If any such contact is made, the connection will be broken, and auto-destruct initiated.” She looked over at them. “Any other questions?”

  “Yeah,” Diz asked. “I never quite understood why the Poddies couldn’t just be run by computers and sentient animated modes.”

  “Because they do not care about the human race,” Shuka said. “They do not have the will to fight and to defend humanity. You do.” She glared at them, her eyes lingering on them one by one. “And if you don’t, you don’t belong here, or out there.” She smiled and cut the connection to the projector. “Dismissed. You run simulations for the next week. And when I’m convinced you can handle it . . .

  “You fly.”

  PART III: BEYOND

  Chapter 10

  Again Krim fell into the vast comforting darkness of the telly-op couch. Like the couches on the Kirkpatrick, Redoubt Ya’s telly-op couch surrounded him. He could have jacked in anywhere, Shuka had explained; all he had to do was pull down the hood, and he would be sealed under the silver skin of the outer hide. But unlike the other couches, these couches also took care of the body, assisting his hide in keeping him alive and alert. The runs took twenty-five hours, a space day; he would be awake for the entire run. Shuka had warned them about the stress, but he wouldn’t know what she meant until he actually flew his first mission.

  The remote operations level was closer to the surface than the living quarters, and just above the hospital ward, or what Sam called “the augmented care facility.” A wing of ten pilots would go out at a time, each pilot in one of the ten couches, with a wing monitor to run them through the linking procedure.

  As the couch closed around him, Krim pulled the outer hide down over his face and hands, shutting out the last light of the redoubt. Fluid filled up the couch, sloshing around his body, the slight warmth of the nutrient bath seeping through his hide. He looked up into the deepening darkness of the virtual world. “Blue Wing Six logging in,” Krim said.

  “Transmitting,” said Shuka, at the monitor. “Blue Wing Six, you’re on the way. Good hunting.”

  “Copy and confirm.” Krim felt a brief jerk of sensation as his perspective shifted from inside the darkness of the couch to the cockpit of the distant Poddy. In the moment between the darkness of his real vision and the coming light of the remote Poddy simulation, Krim again felt that presence. Two presences, he thought: someone unfamiliar, and another presence, someone known. Then the feeling faded away, and the familiar grid of his Poddy came up. He saw a whirl of stars, white pinpoints with brief red tails trailing behind them. “Logged in and taking my run.”

  “Confirmation burst sent,” Sam said. “You’re on your own now, dude. No further communications.”

  “Copy.” With the tight telly-op link he had to maintain with the fighter, Krim understood, there would be no room on the band for continuous communication with the redoubt. Shuka had explained that it was no different from when fighter wings went out in the old primitive wars, their radio links unreliable past a certain distance.

  On his own. For the next space day, he’d be on his own.

  “Powering up remote sensors,” Krim said. Shuka had told them to say the commands aloud, not only for the record, but to keep alert. “Talk to yourself,” she’d said to him. “Talk to your Sam.”

  “Remotes on,” Sam said.

  The stars in his image flickered for a moment, briefly changing place as the red streaks grew longer, until they resumed their usual appearance. He would see a few light seconds ahead, the distance it took for his forward sensors to scan before him and then transmit back. Out at the end of its run, the Poddy had slowed to nearly a quarter l
ight speed, down from its original acceleration of a half-C. It retained ample kinetic energy to do some damage, but slowed enough that he could react.

  “Position verified,” Sam said. A grid of stars blipped on, confirming his location.

  “Load targets.”

  “Loading targets.” Six distant red dots appeared, the dots moving in varying paths toward him. Poddy runs for each sector were always done in twos, with a lead Poddy starting its run a week ahead. The tail Poddy would run sweep-up, picking off the targets the leader had missed, but that it had identified. As rookie pilots they would run sweep-up on their first tour, until Krim and his wing earned the experience to take point.

  A number flicked on beneath each target, Sam showing him the order in which he should shoot. Number One moved quickly toward him, rising up and starting to pass under and behind him. “Engage targeting.” Cross hairs popped up, centering on the target. “Okay, like before, Sam—my finger squeezes the shot.” He squeezed, and felt a brief shudder as the kinetic load spun away.

  Krim knew that the Poddy’s dumb-brain would do the throw calculation, that he didn’t aim at, but locked on and identified, the target. He remembered when Brana had explained their function, and he had asked why they didn’t just send out smart probes that would blast everything in their path. She had looked stunned at the question and started to say something else, then shook her head. It had been an awkward moment, and then she had recovered herself. “Humans are better at it,” she had said finally. Krim also remembered what Shuka had told them: humans care, machines don’t.