The Hidden War

by Michael Armstrong

  Corso reached out and touched his skin, traced her left hand up to the line where the silver hide turned into bare skin—into the inner layer of the hide. She frowned as she came to the line, ran her finger along it, then switched to her right hand, to a probe at the end of the manipulator. “It’s . . . there’s only a slight barrier. What is this suit?”

  Krim opaqued his hide, pulled the silver covering up over his head, then back down, exposing his chest. She jerked back, then ran the probe along his bare skin. “There’s something still there.”

  “It’s a covering,” he said. “They gave it to me when I got out of prison. ‘Hide,’ they call it. It’s . . . a thing, a symbiote, actually, a construct that protects, feeds me. Once they threw me out into open space, and I survived with this alone.”

  “You . . . it’s in your skin?”

  Krim nodded. “The skin’s underneath. It, well, on Earth—” How could he explain Zoetrope, the Naturals, any of it? “Everyone has it. They can change their appearance.”

  Corso cocked an eye at him. “But it’s you? You are not someone else?”

  “Of course not.”

  “How would I know?”

  Krim thought about it, understood what she meant. Zoetrope had been able to do that, change one person into the semblance of another. “My memories. I would share my memories with you.”

  “You already have.” She waved off toward one bulkhead. “I mean, the other Krim. Not everything—it did not tell me of this hide.”

  “No, I could share everything with you, more than I ever did before.” He held up his right hand, gloved now with the slate. “It’s—they call it a slate. It’s a Sam, a connection to the universal net, to the entire matrix of computers the solar system shares.” Krim turned the hand around, looked at it. “Except it’s away from the net here. All I can connect with is myself, or with—” He bit his lip, then went on. “With Minae.”

  “It—it connects?”

  “Neurally. Brain to brain, mind to mind, as much as each wishes to share.”

  Corso looked at her right arm, at her stump, at the wires under the skin. “I thought we were the only ones who could do that—the ship pilots. The Ur pilots.”

  “You have become one?” Krim asked. He understood the lines then, the matrix under her body.

  She nodded. “When I lost you, when I lost my . . . my hand in an accident, I requested it. They had to do the implants anyway so I could control a manipulator, so I asked to become a ship.” Corso waved at the cabin, at the walls surrounding them. “This ship. I am the ship.”

  “With the Poddies,” Krim said, thinking of the black ship, of the other fighters he had flown, “with the fighters, we become the ship. And then the ship dies.”

  “I know. We showed you—showed the other Krim. But I am an Ur pilot, you see? It is different. I become . . .” Corso focused back from him, her gaze shifting from Krim to a point seeming to float before her. “I become the universe.” She looked back at him. “Let me see your hand.”

  He held out his slated hand, the golden hand, and she laid her claw against it, the ends touching the slate. Krim felt something ease into him, a presence, and he looked up and saw himself as Corso looked at him—saw himself naked, the silver hide vanished, his hair slightly gray and his face wrinkled. The image shifted and he saw her and saw her as she was.

  “See?” she said. “I’m seeing reality, the reality of you.”

  “I am real.”

  “Outside the hide, no.” Corso shook her head, her hair flying, out. “Under the hide, yes.”

  She touched him again, the probe connecting slightly. Krim felt the slate spread over his body, a sheer surface of gold on top of the silvery hide. Corso tore off her clothes, revealing her hard, muscled body, shimmering wires underneath the skin. Dots glowed at points along the lines, like chakra points. She pulled him to her, into her, the web of her artificial neural connection making contact with his slate—with him.

  “Let me show you, love,” she said. “Voyager, come to me.”

  Corso pulled him in, into her—into everything.

  Krim saw what had happened to the Jack, to the home world. As he had blown his nuke on the old Beat fighter, as the Kirkpatrick had captured him, the planetoid had vanished into the great gap broken in the fabric of Ur space. Corso showed him, showed him the Jack entering Ur, and his fighter vanishing—captured or destroyed, she had not known. The last Beat carrier, the Screaming Angel had rendezvoused with the Jack. Afraid to lose the home world again, the Beats stayed with it in Ur, until they found a way to get out of Ur again, and go . . . someplace else.

  He saw the Jack appearing in a distant star system, a system with two suns, one cold, one hot, the smaller circling the larger. The Jack came out into this other space, into orbit around a giant gas planet. So vast an object disturbed the orbits of other moons and sent ripples through the planet’s rings. In his vision Krim walked the surface of the Jack with Corso, watching the ringed planet rise above the home world’s cratered plains, and then a moon rise between them, and the two suns rise behind the gas giant.

  Corso took him on a tour of the alien system, to the warmer planets, to a blue ocean world mottled with green islands. He walked the planet with her, touched huge ferns as big as trees and looked down at the planet’s most advanced life-form, a scuttling beetle that chased after crawling worms. They went out to another planet, the sixth, rich in metals and minerals, but void of any life.

  He saw ships being built, ships like Corso’s, or the small black ships, silent and deadly drones. She showed him the voyages she went on, showed him her hand drifting away in space, the stump cauterized and red crystals of frozen blood drifting around her. She showed him the new hand she had been given, cold and artificial though it had fingers, and how she had given it up for the hook with the tools. To remind her of her loss, she made Krim understand. With her body modified, the neural net implanted, she took him on her ship, the one she piloted in Ur space, to other systems, to untold hundreds of planets.

  Corso showed him the universe. Jacked in with her, he felt its entire structure, felt the ebb and flow of Ur as she entered Ur and became Ur. He felt the presence of alien beings far away, seen but unseen; once, he felt a being as evil as the Terrorons had seemed to be. Yet because Ur connected everything, because by entering it one became unified with all other sentient life, even the evil things became reduced to scrabbling noise. They could not resist the wrath of the All, could not subvert it.

  Seeing those evil beings, though, had given the Beats the idea, the concept for their revenge. With the universe theirs to explore, what did Earth matter? Still, they sent the black ships in, the probes, to see what had become of it, and they had seen what Krim had discovered: the Earth had become stagnant, dull, self-absorbed.

  And so, through the horror of the contrived alien attack, the Beats conspired to wake the Solarian Alliance from its utopian slumber. They showed the Alliance its place in the cosmos. They gave it a threat. The Beats had hoped that the Terrorons would force humanity to grow. They had hoped humanity would again discover the power of the universe, of Ur, as the Beats had done. Humanity had stepped a toe into the great energy sea, but would go no farther. They had learned to use it to communicate, but not to soar, to travel, to explore.

  Krim came to understand, then, why the Beats had thrown probe after probe at the solar system. They challenged humankind, made the threat more and more immediate. And still humanity had not grown, had not transcended its collective being. It was as if Earth and all its planets had come so far, then refused to cross the one little wall that remained between them and . . . everything. None of the Beats could understand it.

  And then they discovered Krim—found Krim, the first Beat to stumble across a Beat probe and be probed in return. Every transmission ever sent out to a Poddy fighter, the Beats had monitored, and they had seen other presences that seemed to be brothers and sisters. Yet they had never been sure. Then Krim came,
his first trip, and they saw him, sent the bogey to monitor him, and let him destroy the probe so he could go back. Corso had been called, because they had suspected they might have discovered a Beat pilot, and she saw Krim come out again, on the second attack—the one where his presence did not return.

  Corso showed him the Poddy-Krim, the tele-presence. He saw her connecting with his other self, with the self he had lost, and he saw them give that self a new ship, the black ship. He saw the ship return to Redoubt Ya, attack Redoubt Ya, and capture him and Minae.

  “I still do not understand,” she said to him, inside his mind. “Why has no one tried to explore farther? Why has humanity become so docile?”

  Krim understood, then, understood what the Beats could not, what humanity could not. He showed her Earth, showed her Sea City, and what Prima had shown him of Zoetrope. He showed her the hide. She shuddered as he was drowned in the vat, as the white fluid entered his body, entered every crevice and crack, becoming his body and his self. Corso swore curses at Zoetrope, at the Electrics who dominated others. He showed her the slugs of Sea City, the eternally blissed, weak, complacent, unknowing and uncaring zombies that most humans had become. She felt his surge of joy at the Naturals, at the chance and the hope, and then felt his frustration at their frustration, that they were so few in a sea of so many.

  He made her feel the hide. Krim took her into his own body, let her feel the power of the symbiote that kept him warm and fed, that protected and healed him and even allowed him untold pleasures. He let her feel the power of the net, the slate that connected everyone to everyone else. In his showing her, she showed him something else—something he had not seen, that he had not been aware of because from the day he had received the hide and the slate, he had never actually been alone.

  Corso took him into the circuits of his body, showed him the tiny beasts surging through him, and the slate that commanded and controlled them. Absent from the net, cut off, he saw how the hide sat waiting, not working, not doing. The net controlled the hide, not his self, not his body, not his slate, but the net, the vast interconnected neural network, the subtle essence that gave him life, kept him alive, gave him shape and form.

  Kept him imprisoned.

  She showed him his real self. The shell—the persona, Corso called it—had collapsed. Krim bore wrinkles, gray hair, sagging skin, and the ravages of time, no more, no less, than all the Beats. Without any instructions, the slate did not know what he should become, and so he became what he really was. Krim felt hunger and thirst and aches and pains and all the things that had made him alive, had made him human . . . had made him free.

  Corso jacked into the ship then, jacked into Ur, and showed him what it meant to know his brothers and sisters. He rediscovered the Beats, saw them on the Jack in that far-off system, saw all the ones he had loved and fought for long ago. In their thoughts he came alive, received approbation for his heroic act, the act that had truly saved them. He came home in that presence, returned home and rejoined them. Always, though, always, it was at their choice. They let him in or not, just as he had let Minae or Nurel in or not. This was different, though, not a central net, but each Beat a node in the net, each node controlling a single life. Krim felt distant nodes, blank nodes—no, closed nodes, he realized—of those who had chosen to remain aloof. Free.

  He gained power over himself again. Krim looked into his slate, into his own neural network, saw the things that were wrong, and fixed them—consciously fixed them. He had to work to fix them and make them whole. Krim had to think; that was the task now. He had to think. In thinking he took power over his life—seized power from the vast network he had never known he had given it to.

  Corso took him out, then. They disconnected and separated and fell apart. Krim found himself spread across the bunk next to Corso, still locked in her embrace, but his slate wrapped around his hand. He reached over and pushed a strand of hair back from her forehead, then smiled.

  “Welcome home,” she said.

  “I’m not home yet.”

  Rolling away from him, Corso sat up. She tapped his slate. “You’ll always be home now,” she said, “You’ve been hacked.”

  “Hacked?” Krim asked. He looked inside himself, accessed his Sam, and understood. A shape, a face, minds upon minds . . . he looked up and saw the ringed planet and the two suns, not in memory, but there, in real time. Blinking his eyes, he let the image fade away, then back, then away. “I’m connected—through Ur?”

  Corso nodded. “Now that we have bonded again, you bond with everyone. Everywhere, anywhere—you will never be separate from your brothers and sisters, unless you want to be.”

  Krim looked into his slate and saw the difference. Ur connected him to the net of all possibility and being, not an artificial net. He controlled it, and through it, his own body, his own life, his own destiny.

  “I think I see what I have to do now,” he said.

  “It’s already done, my love.”

  She swung her legs over the edge of the bunk and reached down for her coveralls. Krim glanced at her, at her hard body, at her breasts and hips and legs, at the hook on her right arm, the delicate wiring running under her skin. Her hair fell down over her face, and as she pulled the coveralls on, she flipped her hair back, glancing up at him. In her gaze he saw himself, skin darker, it seemed, hair grayer, a row of wrinkles at his forehead, and little crow’s-feet at his eyes. As he was, he thought. She smiled, and he stepped out of her vision and looked at her.

  No hide, he suddenly realized. The silver hide had—what, vanished? Gone away? Krim looked at his body and chest, saw a coil of silver winding up from his thigh and around his waist. No, still there, he thought. Just receded.

  “Here,” Corso said. She held up a pair of coveralls, black like hers. He took them and pulled them on, felt the crispness of the cloth, the smell of the cotton and the softness of its texture. Something rumbled in his stomach—his stomach itself. He heard gastric juices roil through his intestines.

  “Holy Moloch, I’m hungry,” he said. He thought of coming in from space, the hunger he had felt when they had recovered him, but this—this felt not like starvation, just good old-fashioned, normal hungry.

  “Yeah,” Corso said. “Doesn’t it feel great?”

  In the ship’s mess, Krim found Minae at a table with Snyder. It took him a second to recognize her. Her skin seemed darker, and she wore a purple jumpsuit, tight but not like the silver hide. A fuzz of reddish brown hair covered her scalp, and he saw with a shock that her eyes were brown, not green. Some wrinkles were at the corners of her eyes, but he noticed with a start that she seemed younger than before. He had thought her his senior. Minae’s slate hung from her neck like a gold torc. She glanced up at him as he came in, then turned back to a huge bowl of soup before her and continued slurping it up.

  “Hey,” he said to her.

  “Hey, yourself.” Minae nodded at him, then raised another spoonful to her face.

  “Soup?” Snyder asked.

  Krim sat down. “Yeah.” The Beat pushed a bowl toward him, and he stared at it. Steam rose up, bringing long-forgotten smells to his nose. He took a spoon, dipped it into the bowl of thick dark fluid, and raised it. Blowing on the spoon, he took it in his mouth, let the hot liquid roll down his throat. Tastes flooded his tongue and lips and mouth: onions, basil, tomatoes, lentils, pepper, and others he could not decipher, all gloriously mixed together in one swirl of pleasure. Soup! He had forgotten how good soup could taste, the way the spices thrashed against each other, the way soft beans seemed to fall apart in his mouth. Holy Jack, he thought, he had not had soup since the day of the attack on the Kirkpatrick, the day the Jack, and Corso, had vanished.

  “Damn, this is great,” he said, slurping up another spoonful. “I’d forgotten.” Krim looked across at Minae, saw her eyes moistening and realized his own eyes teared, perhaps from the onions, perhaps from the sudden rush of senses, perhaps because he was home.

  “Beans from th
e Jack and prepared by hand in our galley,” Corso said. “The only real way: slow cooked and simmered for two days.”

  As Krim looked at Minae, he saw the pleasure in her face, the joy in her eyes, joy he hadn’t seen in a long time, and he knew then what he would have to do.

  Before he could go home for the last time, he would have to return yet again to Earth.

  Chapter 15

  Krim and Minae stood in the hangar again. Like his, her slate had been changed, and she’d had to learn to control her body—her hide—herself. He could connect with her, had connected with her in Ur, and they’d taught each other the new way to control their bodies. They’d have to focus on the essential functions of the hide: to heal, to get rid of disease, to maintain warmth. Appearances would take greater power than they had.

  The black ship, Krim’s other self, was poised to take off. Corso stood with them.

  “You don’t have to go back,” she said. “Not to Earth. If the two of you return to Redoubt Ya, that ought to do it. All either of you has to do is reconnect with the net.”

  “Minae can handle the redoubts,” Krim said, “but many of the people on Earth aren’t connected to the net at all. Electrics like Zoetrope hacked a lot of slates. Someone will have to physically change those.” He paused and thought of how pathetic Lazuli—Prima had been when he helped her free herself. “Someone will have to teach them.”

  “You’ll come back, though? To the Jack?” Corso asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Krim held out his hand to Corso, touched her stump and her arm, then pulled her tight. He remembered parting so long ago, remembered promising to come back. He’d kept that promise, he thought. He could keep it again. In her embrace, even without her embrace, he felt her—would be with her. This parting would be different, for despite the distances, they would always be together.

  “Minae,” he said to his fellow pilot. She put her arms around him and held him. She had the Ur-link now, too. It seemed odd to have two of his lovers in the same room, but it felt right. The physicality of love could only be spontaneous and single, but the emotion of it could be shared without exhaustion—could flow forever among everyone. He let Minae go and returned to the black ship.