The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  “Sixty seconds to launch,” Sam said.

  “I’m going in,” Minae said. “You’ll follow in thirty seconds. See you at the bogey.”

  “Holy Moloch,” Krim whispered. He felt the fighter jolt and jerk, and then it settled on a hovering cushion of magnetism. The railgun shuddered as it shot Minae’s fighter, and then the action pulled him forward. Fifteen seconds, then ten, and at three he closed his eyes, and waited for the kick.

  As Krim’s fighter came out of the railgun and Redoubt Ya, he brought up the display. A thousand meters in front of him, he saw a distant dot suddenly decelerate, and almost instantly heard Minae scream in his internal comm to follow her maneuver. He saw his fist and arm before him—the real things, not constructs—and at the command he pulled back, slowing down and shedding energy with Minae. Increasing the range of his visuals, he saw the bogey, dark and imposing, but dead-on in his screen. A bright orange ring circled it, the same clear foe-identifying system he’d used on the tele-presence Poddies. Even without the ring he could have tagged it. Kinetic rounds from the railgun screamed down on a central point, and as they got closer, the bogey disintegrated them. A nimbus of blazing lights surrounded the bogey, the sphere of its destruction.

  “Stand off,” Minae said. “They’re launching another wing of Poddies.”

  In between the dumb rocks came an assault of telly-op fighters. Zooming in on a live fighter, his flesh and body alive and in a spaceship, Krim saw the Poddy fighters for what they really were: smart rocks, human operated rocks, but rocks nonetheless. He figured the Poddies to be trainers, reusable fighters that could be returned. But they’d be wiped, he knew, as the trainers always were. Poor suckers, he thought. They didn’t know—couldn’t know. Even at such close distances, they were tele-presences in a can.

  The wing roared down on the bogey, the classic spiral attack Krim had used on the Kirkpatrick. Splitting into two wings, the wave of Poddies came down on the alien in two drilling cones. Lances of energy shot out from the alien ship, quick darting flashes that eviscerated the attack. Either the slates had taken over, or Shuka and her other wing commanders had imposed hard discipline. Not a Poddy broke off, not one moved its position. The bogey seemed to play with them, taking them at random, and destroying the lead fighter as it came down on its attack run only seconds before it would have rammed the alien.

  An Ur weapon, Krim thought—two narrow beams pumping energy out from the vast Dirac sea. The bogey didn’t move, didn’t stray. It just let the attacks come until it had destroyed every Poddy fighter in sight. Krim winced at the devastation, even though he knew back on the redoubt the pilots would be safe. They wouldn’t even have lost more than an hour of experience, and the pain of the being in the fighter would be lost on them. But those things suffered, artificial as they were—the lives, the beings suffered.

  “How are we going to get that?” Krim asked. “It’s too fast.”

  “Nah, it’s letting some of the rocks go by.” Minae played back a recording of the kinetic round assault, the one they had come out with. “See?” Five dots lit up, and the recording showed them tumbling beyond the target, away. “It didn’t bother.”

  “We just tumble by?”

  “You got it.”

  Krim watched her projection, saw her showing them rolling by the bogey as another wave of dumb rocks coasted toward it. The railgun had accelerated them to the bogey, but they had already arrested their motion so they seemed like stray debris. Two arrows showed them coming in with the dumb rocks, and then rolling away and coming up toward the alien.

  “We go in at its belly?”

  “At the right angle, it can’t hit you.”

  “Well, maybe nothing has come in like that.”

  “No, the Poddies have,” Minae said. “It can’t swivel its blasters or whatever past a certain angle. Let’s do it.”

  “Holy moly,” Krim said, thinking of all the other attacks he had made.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Redoubt Ya sent another salvo of dumb rocks at the alien, and they followed the swarm in. The bogey picked off rocks around them, to the left and right, up and down. Minae moved into the shadow of a rock, and Krim saw her idea: use it as a shield. He followed, keeping pace with the rocks as they neared.

  “Hang on,” Minae said. “On my count: three, two, one.”

  Krim jerked his fist hard to his left, following Minae around and under the bogey, down under the swath of destruction as the bogey wasted the rocks. She kicked in her drive then, came up like a dolphin toward the ventral surface of the long cylinder. At full magnification, he could see it, could see the ugly, spidery protrusions along its body, the tentacles waving in mad gyrations as the weapons at the ends of the legs shot out at the rocks. A harpy, he thought, the metaphor becoming real then.

  “Gotcha,” Minae shouted, and she threw her nukes at the bogey, toward its unprotected belly. The harpy turned one of its tentacles at them, seeming to notice them then. The harpy shimmered, the alien ship shimmered, and space turned pink.

  Pink. Krim saw the glow, saw the deep darkness of other space vanish. He glanced at his dials, saw the acceleration the drives had kicked them up to: ten G’s. Ten G’s. They seemed to have stopped, his fighter and Minae’s fighter almost instantly dead in space—not in other space, in Ur space, he realized. The bogey floated ahead, its tentacles waving slightly. Minae’s fighter floated next to him, barely ten meters away. It glowed blue, bright blue, and it came back to him—he knew what that meant.

  “Eject!” he screamed. “Minae, eject!”

  She couldn’t hear him, the comm-link was down—of course, in Ur it wouldn’t work. He brought up the handle, pulled it down, saw the canopy roll away from above him. He stood in the open cockpit of the fighter, saw the bogey turning to him, one eye, one scanner on a tentacle seeming to watch him. Krim stepped out of the fighter, lightly shoved it away as he pushed toward Minae’s fighter. She had to see him, had to be monitoring him. He hit her fighter, grabbed on to some knobby protrusion just behind the canopy, and then banged on the hard shell. Minae banged back. Placing his hand on the canopy, his slate hand, he tried again to link with her.

  “Minae, eject!”

  “Eject?”

  Krim relaxed at the sound of her voice. “Now. We’re in Ur space. The kinetic energy we’ve just brought into Ur is going to build up. Most of the mass is in the fighter. If you eject, you won’t burn up. I don’t know when that bogey is going to pop us out, or where, but when it does, you’ll die in the fighter. Eject! Raise the canopy.”

  “Raise it?”

  “It’s as if you’re standing still. I’m hanging outside. Raise it.”

  The canopy rolled forward, and Minae’s silvered body stood up, looked at him, her face blank, his reflection mirrored in her face. They’d both puffed up like sausages to take the acceleration. He pushed toward her, grabbed her, and they floated away from the fighters, toward the bogey.

  “You okay?” he asked. Krim clutched her tight and felt their hides link, their slates connect through the hide.

  “Yeah.” Her head turned toward the alien ship. “For now.”

  The harpy shoved the fighters aside as they drifted toward it, then moved toward them—slowly, slowly, Krim noticed. It extended four long arms, claws at the end of claws as it moved to embrace them.

  “Oh, crap,” Minae said.

  “No, no, I think it’s okay.” Holding her, in her embrace, he felt no fear. Should have died long ago, he thought, and all this is gravy. Did die, he remembered, on the Poddies. Died once, maybe twice. “If the Terroron wanted us dead, it would have killed us already.”

  A hatch opened in the harpy’s end, a mouth with wedge-shaped teeth sliding back. The claws gently grabbed them and pulled them to the mouth, pulling them in. They floated inside, and the claws retracted and the mouth closed.

  “I think we’re safe,” Krim said. “For the moment.”

  “Ah,” a familiar voice said, a human voic
e. “I thought it might be you.”

  And then the harpy took them . . . someplace else.

  Chapter 14

  A light came on in the alien hold, and Krim saw that they had been brought into a cabin barely large enough for the two of them to sit up. He let go of Minae, who, like him, was still covered by her outer hide. They could sit with their legs stretched out across from each other and had room to lie down. Some sort of soft foam lined the hexagonal-shaped bay, but there were no ports, just the hatch where they had come in, and a bank of protrusions at the other end—sensors, Krim guessed.

  He felt a slight shudder as the ship moved, and then it stopped. The hold seemed to get hot for a brief moment; their hides shed the excess heat, briefly glowing pale red. Krim had Sam do a quick environmental check, backed up by Minae’s slate’s analysis.

  “Earth normal atmosphere, one G,” Sam said. “You can lower the outer hide.”

  Krim felt his body relax, felt the G-suit shrink down until he and Minae looked like normal people again. He pulled his hood and mask down, looked over at Minae’s bare scalp as she dropped her own hood. She rubbed her pate.

  “I forgot how the hood itches,” she said. “Did we move?”

  “I think we’re out of Ur,” Krim said.

  “You’re right,” the familiar voice said again.

  Minae stared at him, up at the ceiling, back at him. “Did you say that?”

  “No . . .” Krim looked around. “No, that was . . . the alien.”

  “It sounded like you.”

  “Me?”

  “You,” the voice said again. “I, us, we.”

  “I don’t think we’re in an alien ship,” Krim said. He touched the walls, felt the humanness of them. The shape, the dimension, the feel.

  “Sure looked like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  A handprint glowed among the bank of knobs. “Put your slated hand there,” Krim’s voice said again.

  Krim glanced at Minae, at the glowing hand, then crawled over to it—crawled, he realized, in gravity. His slate oozed onto his left hand, gloving it, and he placed his hand gingerly against the glowing handprint . . . and squeezed the trigger. The nuclear-tipped round fell straight down upon the harpy, never wavering, until just as it came upon it. As the harpy shoved the nuke out of its way, the nuke exploded. Screaming in agony, the harpy broke into pieces, wings and legs and claws breaking apart.

  Another harpy appeared, right behind the second one. Krim glanced at his magazine count: ten loads left. Moving the sight, now red again, he fired as soon as Sam made the lock, five bursts, one-two-three-four-five. The rounds rolled off the harpy, and she seemed to laugh.

  Krim’s fingers flew as he powered up more options. Nothing. He’d expended his rounds. “Ram it,” he said. “Prepare final download. Initiate auto-destruct sequence.”

  “Download: done. Preparing upload. ADS on.”

  “ADS in—when will we ram it?”

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  “At ram impact. Upload in ten.”

  “We must confirm kill,” Sam said.

  “Damn that. We go back whether it’s a kill or not.”

  “Negative,” Sam said. “Mission parameters do not allow that.”

  “Sam, we’ve got to make that upload.”

  “Uploading mission recording.”

  “Thanks. Make the disconnect in ten.”

  “Negative. We cannot disconnect until we ram. Five seconds.”

  “Override.”

  “Negative. Three seconds. Two.”

  A quick flicker of light shot out from the harpy, and Krim’s vision went dead.

  “Two,” Sam said. “Two seconds to impact. Two. Two. Two seconds to impact. Two.”

  “Override. Power up vision.”

  “Vision powering up. Filters down. Two seconds to impact.”

  The bogey appeared, the real object, in real space. The stars flowed before him, short tails of their redshift trailing behind, and rocks tumbled away. A great crater yawned in front of him, deep and dark. Beyond he could see the expanse of the ship, a cylinder—no, a cone, he realized, a narrow cone, its point chopped off, and the maw before him the circle where the tip would have been. The alien ship turned to him, the maw opening.

  Krim yanked his hand back. He looked up at the hold, at the glowing handprint, at his gloved slate. Minae reached out and stroked his cheek. “What?” she asked.

  “It’s me,” he said. “I think—I think this ship is my Poddy.”

  “And more,” his voice said. “We’re here.”

  The hatch slid open, and the two pilots turned to face the Terrorons.

  Krim came out in a large hangar, almost twenty meters high, bigger than on the Kirkpatrick, but unlit and dim, only a ruddy light illuminating the vast hold. Minae ducked as she exited the ship that stood on two rows of legs or manipulators, with another two rows on its top. A long arm bent toward them, a sensor at its end, looking at them, watching them. Flat black, the ship had been dented but hardly scratched by the Poddy assaults, not one ping deeper than a hand width along its entire ten meters of length. Like the hold of the black ship, the hangar had an Earth-normal atmosphere and gravity.

  A door slid open behind him, and he turned at the sound. Two figures walked toward him, beings with legs and arms and heads—a head each, two pairs of arms and legs each. Humanoid, but he couldn’t tell anything further in the dim light.

  “Is that him?” a man’s voice asked.

  Human, Krim thought. Standard English.

  “It’s him,” the black ship said.

  “And the other?” the man asked again.

  “A woman. She came with him. I could not separate them without destroying her.”

  A beam of light shone down from the ceiling of the hangar. “Come forward into the light,” the man said. He turned to the other figure as Krim stepped into the light, the spot blinding him as he looked at the two people. “Is that him?”

  “Yes,” the other person said. A woman. Yes, Krim thought, listening to that one sound. Yes. “Come here, Krim,” she said, and at his name something stirred within.

  He turned back to Minae, saw the light reflecting off her silver hide, then turned to the woman, taking slow steps. Yes, she had said, and Krim, and he thought he knew the voice, knew the inflection. Krim moved toward her. As he moved, another spot came up over her, illuminating her, then lighting up the entire hangar. She raised her right arm, and a gold ring caught the light and flashed.

  Krim held up his own hand, his own ring glinting, and stopped before her. In the light he saw the ring and held his hand to it—to the ring alone, dangling on a chain from a hook where her hand had been. His breath sucked in at the missing hand, but then he put his hand up to her prosthesis. Palm to hook, fingers to her claws, he touched her, felt the end of her stump, looked at the ring and the familiar etchings on the band, the same etchings on his band, but her face not as familiar—changed as he must appear changed.

  Corso.

  He held the formal greeting, the formal touch, that link as if he really touched an alien, he thought. For hadn’t he become something alien; hadn’t she become something alien? Hadn’t they grown apart, separated, been lost to each other? Krim closed his fist around her hook, then lifted the ring up and placed the chain back around her head. As his hands slid behind her neck, he pulled her to him, cheek to cheek, hugging her tight.

  “You’re alive,” she said. “You—it, the ship—said you were. Here, your body.”

  “Corso,” he whispered. Turning her face toward his, he ran his fingers through her wavy black hair, black speckled with gray. Her skin seemed to sag a bit more at the chin, and there were wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead. Her voice seemed huskier, deeper. “Corso.”

  “Krim. I thought I’d lost you, as I lost”—she held up her right arm—“this.”

  “Me? I thought you had vanished—disappeared, been destroyed.”

  “No. No, you saved us. We made
it in—the home, the whole Jack rock, it made it in. To Ur.”

  Krim turned to the man, smiled, let Corso go then, but held her hand still. With his free hand he took the man’s outstretched hand, then hugged him with one arm. “Snyder, of course. Snyder.” He clasped him on the back. “Damn it—you’re all alive.”

  “Krim,” Snyder said.

  Krim turned back to Minae, waved her forward. “This is . . . one of the pilots,” he said. “Minae.”

  Minae turned to him, shook her head. “Let me guess? Terrorons?”

  “Terrorons,” Krim said. “And Beats: Snyder and Corso, my, uh, mate.”

  “Ah,” Minae said. She pointed back at the black ship, watching them with its extended eye. “And that thing?”

  “That would be you,” Corso explained, pointing at Krim. “That’s Krim, too.”

  “My lost Poddy.”

  The ship coughed. “Just a sliver of your life, man.”

  Minae looked at the Poddy-Krim and Krim, at the Beats, at the vast hangar, and then sucked in a great gasp of breath. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Son of a bitch.”

  Corso led them up through the ship, through its many corridors and shafts, and to a cabin just off what she said was the bridge. The ship seemed as huge as the Kirkpatrick, even as large as Redoubt Ya. Krim looked at her as she walked, at the hook hanging down, at the wires that ran just under her skin from the manipulator at the end of the stump and into her body, up into her chest. He had to breathe deeply to understand it, as if the rush of strange things sucked air from his lungs. Corso, alive, the Jack, alive, and they . . . they were the Terrorons.

  Snyder left them at the cabin, taking Minae somewhere else in the ship, “for refreshment,” he explained. The paintings on the walls, the books—real books of pulp and hardboard—on the shelves, the colors and smell of the room, he knew it was Corso’s. She sat on a chair, motioned him to sit in a chair next to it, and they sat, knees touching.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well.” Where to begin?