The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  He’d barely had time to watch the round move to the target when the second one came up. He aimed at it and fired. His screen showed him the first target rolling underneath him, four pebbles shattering into it and blasting it. The next load spun toward the second target, splitting into shots, each load like a shotgun round, a spread of ten shots that guaranteed one would hit. All it took was one.

  Again—target three, and he squeezed. Four, five, and six, in rapid shots, his hand whirling around before him: aim, squeeze, aim. The Poddy sped on, with no immediate targets in sight.

  “Crap, they come fast,” Krim said.

  “Faster,” Sam said. “Wait until you take a lead run.”

  A dot blipped on dead ahead. “Target,” Krim said. “Identify.”

  “It’s a fresh one, not on the books.”

  “Lock on. Verify foe.”

  “Verify—” Krim prepared to squeeze. “Abort, abort,” Sam said. Krim unclenched his finger. “It’s a friendly, friendly.”

  Krim squinted, and the magnification increased. “A survey ship,” he said. “What the hell are they doing in the middle of a combat sector? Send a beacon out to them, Sam.”

  “No need,” he said. The survey ship blipped off the screen.

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  “A test, Krim. Keep you on your toes. Those will come up now and then, partly for amusement.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It could have been real.”

  “I appreciate that.” He lay back in the cockpit of the Poddy—or, imagined he lay back, he thought, remembering that he was only a presence some several trillion klicks distant from his body. “How many sweepers on this run?”

  “Eighty-seven, but there may be unidentified targets that have drifted in since the leader went through.”

  “Can you let me know when they’ll be coming up?”

  “Negative. Only in groups. You have to take them as they come. Floaters might come in between groups.”

  “Sheesh.” He blinked his eyes and felt a slight burst of adrenalin wash through his body. Wake up, he told himself.

  “Next batch, these are live.”

  Eight more targets came up. Fourteen so far, he calculated. Seventy-three to go. He aimed, squeezed, and aimed.

  Again.

  And again.

  Krim continued his attack. War, Brana had often told them on the Kirkpatrick, war consisted of long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. That seemed to fit with his experience in the Poddy, at least the boring times. Between batches, he would drift for hours, minutes. He had no idea, since Sam had shut down his clock. If he grew tired, or slacked off, a floater would pop up, and he’d shoot it, knowing that it might be a dummy, but not always sure. Roaring through the edge of the solar system at a quarter-C, waiting for targets to pop up, he drifted in his thoughts.

  Why, he wondered, did he feel tired, if he was only a presence? He knew his body and brain physically remained back on the redoubt, connected only by a thin comm-link, supposedly instantaneous. It felt instantaneous, and yet there should be a slight lag, he thought—something. And there was nothing. He reacted immediately, swiftly, as if he were there. He felt there, he could not sense his own body lying back in the redoubt. He felt as if he were physically in the Poddy, as if all that existed for him was a screaming tin can loaded with kinetic power. In the Beat fighters, with their crude virtual technology, he’d felt his body even as he absorbed additional information from the computer-manipulated world. But that was different—he still flew the ship live and in the immediate present, not remotely, like now, with the Poddies.

  It made no sense—none at all.

  “Next batch,” Sam said.

  A cluster of sixteen targets popped up, and he searched for the first one, locked on it, aimed, and fired. Krim whirled around in his perspective, shifting his gaze from one target to the other, scanning a full 270 degrees, up, back, down, to the right, to the left, searching for each rock, and initiating its destruction. He had no idea what he hit. Did he destroy probes? Did he destroy comets? Did he destroy some alien Poddy, some entity in a can roaring at him? Or did he just destroy some presence, some remotely operated being like him?

  “Fifteen,” Krim counted, making the next hit. He always counted, though Sam clearly kept score. “Lock. Fire. Sixteen. Seventeen. Lock, fire.”

  “Fifteen destroyed. Sixteen, seventeen destroyed.” A light blipped on before him. “Known sweepers destroyed. Main mission complete. Time remaining in attack: twenty-eight minutes. Loads remaining: twenty-two.”

  “We finish the run?”

  “To the maximum,” Sam said. “Each Poddy represents an investment of over 3500 human work hours, not counting your training. It would be a waste of resources not to continue.”

  “Of course.” In Sea City he had seen untold thousands of what could have been human work hours wasted in utter sloth and depravity, but when someone did work, it would be a sin to waste it. Well, perhaps that made human labor all the more valuable.

  The fighter continued its flight. Krim had noticed the red streaks of the stars growing fainter, shorter; their speed had dropped to nearly a tenth-C. What would the relativistic effects be for him back on the redoubt? Would any time have actually passed? But it must have—he would physically have operated the Poddy, and though time might flow differently between his presence and his body, it would be the subjective time of his body that would experience it—wouldn’t it? His head always spun when he contemplated relativity, and the peculiar effects of near-light-speed travel.

  “Floater,” Sam said. A dot blipped on the screen.

  Krim swung his fist up, locking on to the object. The red cross hairs hovered on it. Although a distant dot, it appeared different than the other rocks—another color or shape. “Verify.”

  “Verifying.” The image enlarged. A cylindrical object moved toward them, bursts of flame kicking out at its bow as it turned to intercept. “Foe. Foe.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Krim muttered. “It looks like a Poddy, Sam. Verify again.”

  “Foe. Foe,” Sam said again, more insistently. “A Poddy would not be coming in-system.”

  “I can grapple it—it’s on an intercept for us.”

  “Destroy it.”

  “It might be a friendly.”

  “Negative,” Sam said. “Operations procedures require destruction. You have targeted it. Overriding human operator.”

  “Sam, you can’t do that.” He swung the cross hairs away.

  “Retarget object. Loss of intercept in fifteen seconds. Retarget. Twelve seconds.”

  “Do it yourself.”

  “Retarget. It’s a foe; you must destroy it.”

  Krim increased the magnification, saw the object heading dead on. A flare of light blipped from the object, and something moved toward him. “Shit, shit,” he yelled. He swung his fist around, targeted, squeezed once, twice, three times. “Triple load, Sam.” He squeezed again. “One more—evasive maneuvers.”

  The rounds kicked out, and Krim turned his fist hard to starboard, toward the object, and squeezed two more random rounds. The rocks flew away, pushing the Poddy out of the path of the invader, just as Sam blew a nuke behind them. He felt the explosion push him forward, the shock wave rippling behind him as the Poddy rode it. Krim swung his perspective aft, saw the expanding gas cloud of the nuke and the object being shredded, the wave of the nuke scattering the pulverized probe.

  “Analysis,” Sam said. “Manufactured metals. Plastics. Radioactives. No organics present.”

  “That was a real one. Shit—shit. They’re not supposed to shoot back.”

  “Apparently they can.”

  “Damn. That changes the game a little.” Probes that shoot back? They weren’t supposed to run into many probes, none at all if he could believe some pilots’ complaining. His first mission, and he’d run into one that could shoot back.

  “Download analysis. How soon are we to end of mission?�
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  “Five minutes.”

  “Loads left?”

  “Ten.”

  One good burst, he thought. “Okay, begin end of mission upload. We’ll continue our final run in case we see anything, but I think we had better send what we have now.”

  “Upload ready. Sending. Mission report sent.”

  “Okay. Prepare for separation.”

  “Ready for separation.”

  “Prepare for auto-destruct.”

  “Auto-destruct ready.”

  “Okay, Sam, let’s just ride this out.”

  Krim sped on, beyond the exploded probe and the blast of that one quick acceleration. At extreme magnification he could see more objects, distant rocks or debris or possibly more probes, more alien beings slouching toward earth. Who knew? What strange war did these aliens fight? A moment ago he had not even believed there were aliens, that they were the product of a paranoid society, but he had seen one, had seen it fire upon him, and he knew—he knew they were real. He knew he did not fight for the glory of flying, of becoming alive in a quick burst of acceleration. He now flew to fight—flew to keep some horrid beings from destroying humanity.

  “End of mission in one minute,” Sam said. “Deploy rounds.”

  Krim swung his fist before him, locked on a random spot in space, and squeezed his trigger until the rocks quit kicking away.

  “Rounds deployed. Auto-destruct ready, on your signal.”

  “Engage auto-destruct. On my mark. Three, two, one: engage.”

  “Auto-destruct sequence initialized. Beginning. Destruction in thirty seconds.”

  “Okay, Sam,” Krim said. “Begin final upload and separation.”

  “Final upload running. Separation initialized.”

  “Engage separation. On my mark, Sam. Let’s blow this sucker. Holy moly—three, two, one: mark.”

  “Separation engaged,” Sam said. “We’re out of here.”

  And again Krim fell into the black void of his mind and saw . . . her self, transformed again, blue feathers hanging from his body, claws on his fingers and toes, a rough beak on his lips. She looked over at the black bird, at Raven, sleek and glossy in his purple-tinted feathers. Raven, his love, her love, asleep. Shushing the rustle of his feathers, she rose and crept from the hut. The others lay around the dying fire, asleep. From another hut he heard Hedda, the woman with the cotton candy hair, giggle, Hedda who had been her love, Hedda strong and tall until Zoetrope hacked him and made him his love.

  Zoetrope’s light glowed in the doorway of the hut. She sneaked by the doorway, careful not to wake the others, not to arouse the wrath of the shimmering man. She pulled a glowing stick from the fire and held a hand around the light to keep anyone from seeing him.

  Out, out to the edge of the camp and to the brambles . . . She held up the ember to the thick brush and with quick puffs caused the stick to glow into a torch, then held the torch to the hedge. The hedge pulled away from the fire as she touched the leaves and made the hole wider and wider, until he could slip through and escape.

  Out and beyond he ran from the clearing, from the transformed and the man who transformed them, who held them in his power. She ran down the path, faster and faster. As she ran she plucked feathers, their quills dripping with blood, until no quill bled at all. Safe. Beyond Zoetrope’s power, she was safe, he was safe. The bird woman stopped, gasped for breath, and then felt it.

  Felt the loneliness, the grief, the incredible abandonment. Gone. Tossed out. No, he reminded himself, escaped. He had escaped. He had left Zoetrope’s captivity. Left! Escaped! A light glowed on the distant horizon, toward the camp. She turned to it, felt him call. No, she thought, and then, yes, yes. The thick forest enveloped her, evil things crawling among the leaves, beasts lurking toward her. That light on the horizon . . . They loved her there, would protect her, would save her. She turned to the light, to her friends, to her lover Raven and his black feathers, to the light once again, and he woke up in the telly-op couch as the panels folded back.

  Krim rolled back the outer hide from his face and hands, and looked up in the light of the redoubt. Prima, he thought. He had felt her memories again. How had that come to happen? he wondered in the dim twilight of his awakening consciousness. And why?

  He shook off the last fog of the mission and sat up. Looking out on the dim light of the telly-op bay, he saw Shuka. She stood over his couch with her arms crossed. Krim rubbed his eyes, still groggy from the separation, his body fresh but his mind frazzled. Shuka tapped her chest, pounding on her slate.

  “You got shot at,” she said. “You didn’t shoot back fast enough. What the hell were you doing?”

  Krim blinked, then nodded. “What—oh, you downloaded the log already.”

  “Just the key parts. You could have let an alien through. You held back. I should ground you and send you back. Hell, I am grounding you until you’ve done five more simulations.”

  “I needed to verify friend or foe.”

  “Like hell.” Shuka pointed at him, at Nurel coming out of her couch, and Diz and Tesh. “You, you, you, you: debriefing in ten. We’re going to go over a few things.”

  Nurel looked at him, still groggy herself. “What?”

  “I got me a bogey,” Krim said. He shrugged. “Not soon enough, I guess.”

  Shuka had them all jack into the stage projector, and she played Krim’s attack on the alien probe. The projector showed the same cylindrical object moving toward him, turning to intercept. The image had been enhanced and blown up, and he could see it better now: cylindrical, not egg-shaped like the Poddies, with sphere-shaped rocks clustered around its forward end. The alien object turned, rockets firing, and it accelerated toward them.

  Krim heard Sam’s voice and his own voice as the tape played again. “Foe. Foe,” Sam said, and his own reply: “Son of a bitch. It looks like a Poddy.” But now he could see it wasn’t a Poddy. The recording kept playing, damning him further. “Destroy it,” Sam was saying, and he heard his even stupider reply: “It might be a friendly.” An enhanced shot showed the alien probe firing one of the spheres at him, and there was a sudden blur as the projection showed him taking evasive maneuvers and whirling away. It closed with a shot of his kinetic rounds hitting the probe—and doing nothing to it—and then one of the rounds intercepting the alien’s missile, and the missile and the probe exploding in a sudden nova of white light. The projection clicked off.

  “At least you did something right,” Shuka said.

  “That was enhanced,” Krim said. “I hadn’t identified it as a foe.”

  “Your slate did. Your slate saw it as enhanced—what you saw was the real-time information your slate had. It had identified it as a foe. You attempted to override.”

  “It was an alien, but how do we know that it was a Terroron?”

  “Krim’s got a point,” Diz said. “Maybe it was a friendly.”

  “Until we make safe contact with a friendly race far from our system, we must assume all aliens encountered this close are hostile. You may destroy friendlies in the heat of an attack, but that’s an acceptable loss. It is better to destroy a hundred foes and one friendly than it is to not destroy a hundred friendlies and miss destroying one foe.

  “You do not question your mission parameters. Upon clear identification by your slate, you destroy the target. If it’s not another Poddy—and it won’t be, because we send you out in sectors one at a time, and the remote Poddy gets destroyed at the end of its run—if it’s not another Poddy or a survey ship, you destroy it.”

  “The rocks didn’t even hit it,” Krim pointed out.

  Shuka nodded. “This is a problem. You got lucky. Our mission analysts haven’t figured out why or how you managed to destroy the probe. When we figure it out, you’ll be briefed. The point here is that Krim did not fire at the target immediately upon foe identification, he attempted to override his slate, and he almost violated the two most vital orders of any mission: to safely break the tele-presence link, and
to destroy the Poddy upon completion of mission.” Nurel raised her hand, and Shuka pointed at her. “Yeah, Nurel?”

  Nurel glanced over at Krim, smiled, then looked up. “Lieutenant, I don’t see how Krim could have violated the main parameters.”

  “He almost got hit. That’s one—no successful mission break. If the hit hadn’t destroyed him, that would have been two. We don’t know that the aliens weren’t trying to disable his Poddy for analysis. Now—” Shuka glared at the rest of them. “Those are court-martial offenses, but Krim also redeemed his sorry ass.” She looked at him, her eyes seeming to lock on to his visual cortex. “Krim got him a kill, which makes him an ace, and if you’ve been listening to any of the cocky jerks with two tours under their belts—which is damn stupid—an ace can do just about anything the idiot wants to do. There’s only one ace on Ya now, and all of twenty in the whole damn service, because we just haven’t seen that many probes. And even though the only reason you got fired upon is because you didn’t fire soon enough, you’re the only one who has met and destroyed a hostile target. If it were up to me I’d burn you, but it’s not, and so I guess you’ve just become an idiotic, stupid hero.”

  Krim grinned at the word, and even though Shuka still stared at him, he held the grin until he saw her mouth turn up just a hair, and then quit smiling. No sense pushing it, he thought. He felt himself jerked upright and to his feet as Shuka did something to their slates.

  “That’s it for now. You’ll prepare your reports and give me an after-action inside of two hours, and then you can take a day’s R and R. Everyone hits the simulators daily until your next mission, and our hero here”—she looked at Krim—“will have the added honor of doing double-time until he figures out how to ID friend or foe without even thinking about it, am I clear?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” they found themselves shouting.

  “Dismissed, then. Your next mission is in six space days.”

  When Krim went to his quarters, a junior warrant officer, Leetso, met him at his door. “Sir,” she said, “you’ve been assigned new quarters. Come with me.” The warrant officer wore the dull blue hide of the service staff, not the silver of a pilot. She turned and started down the hall.