The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  “Krim,” she said, and touched the probe to him. She flowed into him, jacking into him. Krim pulled her down into his circuits, into his presence, showed her his own hands and his own ring, and played forth certain memories, let her see the attack and the redoubt and the world that Earth had become. He even let her see Nurel, shared that with her, as she shared the knowledge of other lovers with him. They granted forgiveness for their doubts. They shared their losses, their fears, their pasts. He saw how she had lost her hand—an accident, a break in the glove of her spacesuit while on EVA, and the sudden shearing of the hand to save the integrity of the suit. And he saw the wiring extruded through her, the circuits that connected her to the new hand and to the virtual world she shared with the ship—the survey ship he had tried to destroy.

  The ship. Like him, she had become the ship, had taken on the body of the ship. Corso followed his memories forward to the present, and to him staring at the open hatch on the Poddy. She pulled out then, realizing, understanding, but not sharing it with him.

  “Your body,” Corso said. She stroked the hard surface of the Poddy. “Is this what they did to you? Where is your body?”

  “My body?” Krim looked up at her, found a visual circuit and another sensor in the computer on the cart, and saw himself, saw the Poddy before him. “My body is back on the redoubt. . . .” He saw the Poddy again. “My body is here—no, my presence, my consciousness . . . I don’t understand.”

  Snyder touched the quivering jelly inside the Poddy, looked up at Corso, then back at the circuits. “It’s some sort of synthetic life, some sort of AI or intelligence. It’s alive. A brain?”

  “A brain,” Krim said. “They download our intelligence, our souls, our minds, into the Poddies and we go forth and fight, and then we upload our experiences back to our bodies on the redoubt.” He understood then, could not stop the flow of understanding. “We do not control the fighters remotely, we become the fighters, we inhabit the bodies of the fighters, and when we finish our attacks and complete our missions, we return, our experiences return, and the body—the Poddy fighter—”

  Krim fought to say it. Fought to keep back the revelation. No! he screamed inside. They couldn’t do that! That was horrid—obscene, cruel. They couldn’t!

  “The auto-destruct sequence is engaged, and the Poddy, the consciousness, is destroyed.” He wept virtual tears then, tears of anger and loss. One mission already—only one he had gone out on, and then this. He had died once, never died in the training, never in the simulation. That was why they had to recover Nurel, bring her back—there would have been a void in her, and she would have known it. The pilots would have learned that to fly was to die, that each mission was death. Minae had discovered that, the ace that would never fly again, and she couldn’t tell him.

  “Only you still live,” Corso said. “When we pulled you in, we disabled your nukes. You still live. And Krim, the human Krim, the lover I know?”

  “He still lives,” Krim’s presence said. “We both live, two of us—me, in this shell, Krim in his body. Two souls split. Krim lives on Redoubt Ya.”

  Corso touched him then, stroked the quivering jelly of the artificial life. He felt the warmth of her hand, of her love, but knew that in this form he could not return that warmth, that he was but a golem, a mockery of human life.

  “Then I think we should send you back to your other self,” Corso said. And she smiled. Krim recalled that smile, the smile that would kill if you got in its way. He smiled with her, as well as he could.

  “Send me back,” Krim’s artificial self said. “I know what to do.”

  Corso, Ferlie, and Snyder eased the Poddy-Krim onto a pallet and healed him. The nuclear charges—the auto-destruct and the evasive-maneuver nukes—they had already disabled, had removed and placed in the furnace of a sun to be harmlessly destroyed. Krim lay silent, feeling them and watching them as they connected his Command-cube core into another ship, an oblong cylinder a meter wide at one end, half a meter at the bow, and five meters long.

  First, they gave him eyes, better eyes, by enhancing his visual sensors. Krim could see beyond the usual human spectrum, beyond even the infrared spectrum of the Poddy. He could see radio waves, radioactive particles, images and visions he had known only in theory. The world could become a maelstrom of glowing forces, if he so chose.

  Then, they gave him ears, audio probes that could hear not just human speech, but also the humming of a ship’s engines, the whine of distant fans, or the slightest disturbance of air by sound waves. He could hear not just what people said, but the pauses as they breathed between words, the way they breathed as they chose words.

  And a mouth. Krim would not have to speak through another machine’s vocoder, but had his own, his own voicebox that he could control. He spoke with his own voice, with the human Krim’s voice, and he could speak, too, with anyone else’s voice—any voice he had heard and remembered. They gave him not only a voice, but the ability to make sound: to create music, if he chose, or to create chaos.

  They gave him hands, too, manipulators, waldos with which he could grasp and hold objects. His hands hung about him like spider legs, sixteen in all, each with a grasp of ten meters. At the end of his waldos were more waldos, ten layers total, with the smallest manipulator able to grasp a sliver a micron in length. All the other senses they gave him, too: taste and smell and touch, and especially kinesthesia, the sense to know where to move and how he moved and where he was in the universe as he moved.

  Finally, they gave him power. Within real space he could slide gently through the ether, rushing up on spaceships or quickly evading any assault. They gave him an Ur drive, the means to go from here to there by simply opening up the delicate folds of Ur and thinking “Go there.” With the drive, he could also communicate with any other object in Ur—communicate with the Beats on their ships, or with the ships themselves. With the Ur drive came weaponry, focused energy beams potentially unlimited in power, since they had as their batteries not the forces of primitive nuclear physics, but the endless energy sea of Ur.

  In short, they made him a Beat fighter, the final technological culmination of their long exile. They made him into one of the beasts that terrorized and harassed the outer edges of the solar system, playing with the soldiers of Earth, softening them up for the final invasion by those horrid aliens, the Terrorons.

  Krim came alive in the hangar, became transformed from a simple Poddy to something new. He stretched his claws, expanded his senses, and in one quick probe felt all and knew all of the Beat ship, the ship that Corso had become. As he felt his empowered body, he searched for something missing, something gone that had been so familiar.

  Sam.

  “I need my advisor,” he said. “My Slate—Ship’s—Animated Mode.”

  “Your slate?” Corso asked.

  “My slate. It’s . . . I have become what it was, but I need that voice still. On the Beat fighter I had a Sam and on the Poddy fighters I had a Sam.”

  “What the Sam was, you have now become,” Corso said. “We reexamined the idea and found it cumbersome. The old Beat fighters had a Sam to handle parts of the fighter. The new fighters allow a much closer link between the human pilot and the ship.” She rubbed her ghost hand, the probes, and stared away. “Much closer.”

  “Still, I desire that presence—that companion.”

  Corso shrugged. “If you want it . . .” She extended a probe from the large box they had used to jack into him before, and jacked into the box herself.

  “Hello, Krim,” Sam said from inside him.

  “How’s that?” Corso asked him.

  Krim smiled—felt himself smile, at least. “Fine,” he said. “Hello, Sam.”

  “Interesting body we have here, Krim.”

  “It’ll do.”

  Corso jacked out, and let Krim absorb his old companion. “It’s the voice of your old ‘slate,’” she said, “except you’re all slate now—always have been, at least as the Poddy. The sla
te is your access to the Ameruss Dominion datanet?”

  “Yes,” said Sam. “Only it’s the Solarian Alliance net. The Alliance.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “So when the Poddy-Krim returns, Sam will access the net for you?”

  “Correct,” said Sam.

  Corso smiled, that old, evil smile again, Krim saw. “That would be good,” she said. “That would be very good.”

  Before they opened the hangar and sent him on his way, Corso slipped into Krim’s presence one last time. He felt her move through him, into his memories and feelings, deep into the very essence of his being. She gave him her memories once more, all of them, the whole lost years, so that Krim—the other Krim—would understand that she lived, that she had thought of him and mourned for him and hoped for him as he had hoped for her. Corso gave the Poddy-Krim herself—not just her image, but her essence. “If you can’t bring him back to me,” she explained, “take me to him.”

  The Beats left the hangar bay then, removed themselves to the launch room, and opened the lock. Krim raised a waldo and waved it at them, then tucked the manipulator against his black shell. He looked like a sleek cylinder, one end rounded, the waldos folded back in rows like the spines of a lizard. They shut the gravity off in the bay, and he pushed himself off the deck with gentle spurts of his jets, floating out into space.

  Krim turned on his senses, saw the dust motes float around him, heard the distant hum of the ship as the sounds battered dust enough for him to hear. He saw the ship glowing, cosmic rays rolling off its skin, and he smelled the waste exhaust shed from it—smelled faint essences of Corso among all the other smells.

  “Good hunting,” Corso said over his communicator.

  Krim looked back and saw the thread, saw the beam binding him to her, to the ship.

  “He’ll be returned,” he said.

  The ship closed its lock and moved away from him. Krim saw the fabric of Ur space glow as the ship engaged its drive, and then he turned on his own drive. They would enter the same place and then exit at different points. Ur opened up for them, a pink flickering shield, and they went in, Corso’s ship going one direction, the Poddy-Krim moving toward a blazing dot off in the distance. Krim folded Ur toward him, pulling the dot before him. The dot enlarged and became a hole. He pushed through the hole and left Ur and appeared in real space—appeared some ten thousand klicks distant from Redoubt Ya. Krim turned on his puny fusion drive, and slowly moved toward the base. When he was a mere ten kilometers distant, he stopped his drive, powered up his weapons, and waited.

  He did not think he would have to wait for very long.

  Chapter 13

  The darkness of the Poddy enveloped him still. Krim stared up at the dead field, at the moment between leaving the telly-op couch and transferring out to the Poddy fighter. “Power up screen,” he said to Sam.

  “We have a problem here, Krim.”

  “Power up screen.”

  “Negative. That function is not available.”

  “Manual override, Sam.” He waited for Sam to transfer screen controls to him, waited for the vision of his virtual hands to appear before him. “Override, Sam.”

  “The mission has been aborted, Krim.”

  “Restart mission. Show me the screen, damn it, Sam!”

  “The Podhoretz fighter has been disabled. I am unable to connect with the Podhoretz fighter. Mission aborted at twenty-four fifty-four thirty-one elapsed time.”

  “Twenty-four fifty-four?” Krim asked. Impossible, he thought. He’d just jacked in. “Sam . . . play the download.”

  “Download unsuccessful.”

  “Crap.” Krim stared up at the darkness, at the inside, he knew, of his eyes, of the darkness created by the couch. He lay inside the telly-op couch, his physical body lay inside the couch. Somewhere, his Poddy drifted, dead in space, or destroyed in space. Had it been hit by an alien? Had he—his tele-presence—blown the Poddy before he could upload and disconnect? He would never know. Never.

  He felt the exhaustion that came after a mission—the physical weariness. It had never made sense. If he operated the Poddy live, if his movements in the couch were duplicated on the Poddy, he should feel the strain, the eye aches, the sheer effort, at least, of staying awake. But all he felt—all he had ever felt—was as if he’d had a bad night’s sleep. If he continually connected with the Poddy, he should remember something. He remembered nothing—nearly twenty-five hours had been sliced out of his life.

  He knew that as the distances out to the Poddy increased, the lag time should increase, but he figured the transmissions took that into effect. He knew they had to disconnect, had to make the final upload, but he had thought that was just the final mission recording, that if he failed, at least some memories would remain.

  Nothing.

  Nothing. He might not have even gone out. What was it Minae had hinted at? She knew. Krim stared at the darkness, afraid to open the couch. His body shook, clammy and wet, and he could feel his heart beating faster and faster, the blood seeming to course through his body like a raging tsunami. He wanted to stay in the darkness, lie there until his memory came back, until he understood.

  The couch opened, and light flowed in. Krim looked through the opaque silver covering of the mask, the hide mask, and saw shapes moving above him. Still he would not lower the mask. A shape moved nearer, he felt something jack into his slate, and his mask rolled down. Minae looked down on him.

  “How ya doing, Ace?”

  “I feel wiped,” he said. “Something went wrong, Minae.”

  “Yeah, something went really wrong. But, hey, you’re gonna be all right.” She smiled, but he could see the lie in the tightness of her lips: He wasn’t going to be all right.

  Shuka leaned over him with some other people Krim didn’t recognize—some medical technicians, he realized. One of the med-techs had slapped another slate on Krim’s chest, a back-up slate to his own. The extra slate did something, for he felt calmer, relaxed, his blood pressure dropping, the shakes easing.

  “He’s coming out of it,” one of the techs said.

  “We’ve got another upload failure over here,” someone else shouted from one of the other telly-op couches.

  “Krim?” Shuka asked. “You okay?”

  “Yeah—what happened?” He let Minae and Shuka help him out of the telly-op couch.

  “Shuka!” an attendant yelled.

  She turned toward another couch. Three med-techs had opened the couch up and were working on the body inside. Shuka pushed toward them, and Krim and Minae followed. The pilot inside the couch jerked around, arms and legs flailing, head whipping from side to side against the soft foam of the bed. A med-tech slapped another auxiliary slate on the pilot’s chest, and then the new slate took over, calming the fit. One of the med-techs did something to the slate, then jacked in his own slate to the back-up, and stood silently for a moment. His face froze, blank and unseeing, and then he shook his head and jacked back out.

  “Damn,” he said. He slapped a palm on the cover of the couch. “Damn.”

  The med-techs stepped away, moving on to the other couches, to the other pilots coming out. Krim looked down at the body in the telly-op couch. Lights blinking, the med-slate monitored the body as it breathed deep, shallow breaths. The pilot’s silver hide oozed away from the face and hands, showing the face, slack, unseeing, and bare blue skin.

  “Nurel,” Krim whispered.

  “Flatline,” Shuka said. She put a hand on Krim’s shoulder as he knelt by Nurel. “There’s nothing there.”

  Krim touched Nurel’s face, still warm, touched her eyelids, and they blinked, but her eyes saw nothing as he waved his hand back and forth. He stroked her hair, cold and dull and artificial.

  “She’s dead, Krim,” Minae said from behind him.

  Shuka reached down and touched a button on the medslate. The lights blinked off and then came back on in a slow flickering. Nurel’s chest rose up once, twice, slowly falling with each breath,
until she barely breathed at all. Krim touched her eyelids, and they didn’t blink. With two fingertips, he closed her eyes.

  “Brain dead,” said Shuka. “Whoever you knew as Nurel is gone.”

  “What happened?” Krim asked.

  “Same thing that happened to you. What went on out there?”

  “I don’t know,” Krim said. “I jacked in, and then I tried to start the mission, only Sam told me the mission had been aborted.”

  “Tell him,” Minae said.

  “We lost your Poddy. Your mission timetable ran out, so we attempted contact when the upload and disconnect didn’t come in. We couldn’t find it.” Shuka looked down at Nurel. “Same thing happened to Nurel.” She glanced at the med-techs running checks on the other pilots, the shells of their Poddy couches opening and the pilots emerging, groggy but okay. “Just you two, though. Neither one of you made a final upload. The shock killed Nurel. Not you.”

  “Some people survive,” Minae said. “Tell him the truth.” She glared at Shuka. “He’s not going out again anyway.”

  “Not now.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Shuka looked at the ace, glared back. “Not here then.” She turned to the med-techs, put an arm around Krim. “Can he be moved?”

  “He’s stable. He can do it on his own.”

  “All right.” Shuka jerked her head toward the hallway. “Minae’s right. I’ll tell you.”

  They took him to a workshop, a lab off the main Poddy fighter launch area. Shuka had to pass four sets of guards, all as big as Steem and Makk, before she could get into the lab. A command-cube core lay on a cradle, the inner cylinder of a Poddy fighter. When they came into the lab, three technicians nodded, then left. Shuka picked up a probe, tapped it to the cylinder.

  “You ever see one of these?” she asked.

  “In training,” Krim said. “We almost lost a Poddy trainer on a deuterium scoop through Jupiter. Uh, that’s what we brought back.” He didn’t think he should mention his foray into the hangar later on.