by Ken MacLeod
“How’s the war out there?” she asks.
“Can’t tell, ma’am. Just back and still groggy.”
They don’t let us know all we want to know, barely tell us all we need to know, because we might start speculating and lose focus.
She and I don’t talk much after that. Fidging Titan. Sounds old and cold. What kind of suits would we wear? Would everything freeze solid? Mars is bad enough. We’re almost used to the Red. Stay sharp on the dust and rocks. That’s where our shit is at. Leave the rest to the generals and the Gurus.
All part of the deal. A really big deal.
Titan. Jesus.
Grandma in the too-quiet electric drives me north to Spring Street, then west to Pike and First, where she drops me off with a crinkle-eyed smile and a warm, sad finger-squeeze. The instant I turn and see the market, she pips from my thoughts. Nothing has changed since vac training at SBLM, when we tired of the local bars and drove north, looking for trouble but ending up right here. We liked the market. The big neon sign. The big round clock. Tourists and merchants and more tourists, and that ageless bronze pig out in front.
A little girl in a pink frock sits astride the pig, grinning and slapping its polished flank. What we fight for.
I’m in civvies but Cosmoline gives your skin a tinge that lasts for days, until you piss it out, so most everyone can tell I’ve been in timeout. Civilians are not supposed to ask probing questions, but they still smile like knowing sheep. Hey, spaceman, welcome back! Tell me true, how’s the vac?
I get it.
A nice Laotian lady and her sons and daughter sell fruit and veggies and flowers. Their booth is a cascade of big and little peppers and hot and sweet peppers and yellow and green and red peppers, Walla Walla sweets and good strong brown and fresh green onions, red and gold and blue and russet potatoes, yams and sweet potatoes, pole beans green and yellow and purple and speckled, beets baby and adult, turnips open boxed in bulk and attached to sprays of crisp green leaf. Around the corner of the booth I see every kind of mushroom but the screwy kind. All that roughage dazzles. I’m accustomed to browns and pinks, dark blue, star-powdered black.
A salient of kale and cabbage stretches before me. I seriously consider kicking off and swimming up the counter, chewing through the thick leaves, inhaling the color, spouting purple and green. Instead, I buy a bunch of celery and move out of the tourist flow. Leaning against a corrugated metal door, I shift from foot to cramping foot, until finally I just hunker against the cool ribbed steel and rabbit down the celery leaves, dirt and all, down to the dense, crisp core. Love it. Good for timeout tummy.
Now that I’ve had my celery, I’m better. Time to move on. A mile to go before I sleep.
I doubt I’ll sleep much.
Skyrines share flophouses, safe houses—refuges—around the major spaceports. My favorite is a really nice apartment in Virginia Beach. I could be heading there now, driving my Cougar across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, top down, sucking in the warm sea breeze, but thanks to all that’s happened—and thanks to Joe—I’m not. Not this time. Maybe never again.
I rise and edge through the crowds, but my knees are still shaky, I might not make it, so I flag a cab. The cabby is white and middle-aged, from Texas. Most of the fellows who used to cab here, Lebanese and Ethiopians and Sikhs, the younger ones at least, are gone to war now. They do well in timeout, better than white Texans. Brown people rule the vac, some say. There’s a lot of brown and black and beige out there: east and west Indians, immigrant Kenyans and Nigerians and Somalis, Mexicans, Filipinos and Malaysians, Jamaicans and Puerto Ricans, all varieties of Asian—flung out in space frames, sticks clumped up in fasces—and then they all fly loose, shoot out puff, and drop to the Red. Maybe less dangerous than driving a hack, and certainly pays better.
I’m not the least bit brown. I don’t even tan. I’m a white boy from Moscow, Idaho, a blue-collar IT wizard who got tired of working in cubicles, tired of working around shitheads like myself. I enlisted in the Skyrines (that’s pronounced SKY-reen), went through all the tests and boot and desert training, survived first orbital, survived first drop on the Red—came home alive and relatively sane—and now I make good money. Flight pay and combat pay—they call it engagement bonus—and Cosmoline comp.
Some say the whole deal of cellular suspension we call timeout shortens your life, along with solar flares and gamma rays. Others say no. The military docs say no but scandal painted a lot of them before my last deployment. Whole bunch at Madigan got augured for neglecting our spacemen. Their docs tend to regard spacemen, especially Skyrines, as slackers and complainers. Another reason to avoid MHAT. We make more than they do and still we complain. They hate us. Give them ground pounders any day.
“How many drops?” the Texan cabby asks.
“Too many,” I say. I’ve been at it for six years.
He looks back at me in the mirror. The cab drives itself; he’s in the seat for show. “Ever wonder why?” he asks. “Ever wonder what you’re giving up to them? They ain’t even human.” Some think we shouldn’t be out there at all; maybe he’s one of them.
“Ever wonder?” he asks.
“All the time,” I say.
He looks miffed and faces forward.
The cab takes me into Belltown and lets me out on a semicircular drive, in the shadow of the high-rise called Sky Tower One. I pay in cash. The cabby rewards me with a sour look, even though I give him a decent tip. He, too, pips from my mind as soon as I get out. Bastard.
The tower’s elevator has a glass wall to show off the view before you arrive. The curved hall on my floor is lined with alcoves, quiet and deserted this time of day. I key in the number code, the door clicks open, and the apartment greets me with a cheery pluck of ascending chords. Extreme retro, traditional Seattle, none of it Guru tech; it’s from before I was born.
Lie low. Don’t attract attention.
Christ. No way am I used to being a spook.
The place is just as I remember it—nice and cool, walls gray, carpet and furniture gray and cloudy-day blue, stainless steel fixtures with touches of wood and white enamel. The couch and chairs and tables are mid-century modern. Last year’s Christmas tree is still up, the water down to scum and the branches naked, but Roomba has sucked up all the needles. Love Roomba. Also pre-Guru, it rolls out of its stair slot and checks me out, nuzzling my toes like a happy gray trilobite.
I finish my tour—checking every room twice, ingrained caution, nobody home—then pull an Eames chair up in front of the broad floor-to-ceiling window and flop back to stare out over the Sound. The big sky still makes me dizzy, so I try to focus lower down, on the green and white ferries coming and going, and then on the nearly continuous lines of tankers and big cargo ships. Good to know Hanjin and Maersk are still packing blue and orange and brown steel containers along with Hogmaw or Haugley or what the hell. Each container is about a seventh the size of your standard space frame. No doubt filled with clever goods made using Guru secrets, juicing our economy like a snuck of meth.
And for that, too—for them—we fight.
BACKGROUNDER, PART 1
ATS. All True Shit. So we’re told.
The Gurus, whose real name, if it is their real name, is awful hard for humans to pronounce—made their presence known on Earth thirteen years ago, from the depths of the Yemeni desert, where their first scout ship landed. They wanted to establish a beachhead, make sure humans wouldn’t find them and overrun them right away.
They made first contact with a group of camel herders who thought they were djinn, genies, and then, when they judged the time was right, reached out to the rest of humanity. As the story goes, they hacked into telecoms and satlinks, raised a fair pile of money by setting up anonymous trading accounts, then published online a series of pretty amazing puzzles that attracted the attention of the most curious and intelligent. They recruited a few, gave them a preliminary cover story—something about a worldwide brain trust hoping to set up offices in m
ajor capitals—and sent them around the planet to organize sanctuaries.
In another online operation, the Gurus and their new recruits led a second select group—military, clandestine services, political—on a merry geocache chase, in quest of something that might point to a huge breach of national security. There was a breach, of course.
It was the Gurus.
Working in this fashion, it became apparent to a few of our best and brightest that they were not dealing with an eccentric rich hermit with an odd sense humor. And there were genuine rewards, rich Easter eggs waiting to be cracked. Linking the most interesting puzzles led logically to some brilliant mathematical and scientific insights. One of these, quantum interlacing, showed the potential of increasing bandwidth in any Shannon-compliant network by a millionfold.
Only then did the Gurus reveal themselves—through another specially trained group of intermediaries. They came in peace. Of course. They planned on being even more helpful, in due time—piecing out their revelations in step sequence, not to upset proprietary apple carts all at once.
World leaders were gradually made aware of the game change, with astonishing tact and political savvy. Citizen awareness followed a few months later, after carefully coached preparation. It seemed the Gurus knew as much about our psychology and sociology as they did about the rules of the universe. They wanted to take things gradual.
And so over a period of six months, the Gurus came forward, moving out in ones and twos from their Yemeni Hadramaut beachhead to world capitals, economic centers, universities, think tanks—transforming themselves into both hostages and indispensable advisors.
The Gurus explained that they are here in tiny numbers because interstellar travel is fantastically difficult and expensive, even at their level of technology. So much had been guessed by our scientists. We still don’t know how many Gurus came to Earth originally, but there are now, at best estimate—according to what our own governments will tell us—about thirty of them. They don’t seem to mind being separated from each other or their own kind, but they keep their human contacts to a few dozen. Some call these select emissaries the Wait Staff.
It took the Gurus a while to drop the other shoe. You can see why, looking back. It was a very big shoe, completely slathered in dog shit.
Just as we were getting used to the new world order—just as we were proving ourselves worthy—the Gurus confessed they were not the only ones out there in the dark light-years. They explained that they had been hounded by mortal enemies from sun to sun, planet to planet, and were in fact now stretched thin—left weak, nearly defenseless.
Gurus were not just being magnanimous with their gifts of tech. They needed our help, and we needed to step up and help them, because these enemies were already inside the far, icy margins of our solar system, were, in fact, trying to establish their own beachhead, but not on Earth.
On Mars.
Some pundits started to call this enemy the Antagonists—Antags. The name stuck. We were told very little about them, except that they were totally bad.
And so our first bill came due. Skyrines were volunteered to help pay. As always.
THE SUN SETS watery yellow in a pall of Seattle gray. Night falls and ships’ lights swim and dance in my tears. I’m still exuding slimy crap. Spacemen can’t use drugs the first few days because our livers are overworked cleaning out residue. It comes out of our skin and sits on our breath like cheap gin and old sweat. Civilian ladies don’t like the stink until we remind them about the money, then some put up with it.
It’s quiet in the apartment. Empty. Spacemen are rarely alone coming or going or in the shit. If we’re not in timeout, there’s always that small voice in the ear, either a fellow Skyrine or your angel. But I don’t really mind being alone. Not for a few hours. Not until Joe comes back and tells me how it all turned out. What the real secret was—about Muskies and the Drifter, the silicon plague, the tower of smart diamonds.
About Teal.
And the Voors, nasty, greedy SOBs who lost almost everything and maybe deserved to lose more. But they didn’t deserve us.
I curl up in the Eames chair and pull up the blanket. I’m so tired, but I’ve got a lot on my mind. Pretty soon, I relive being in the shit.
It’s vivid.
By Ken MacLeod
THE FALL REVOLUTION
The Star Fraction
The Stone Canal
The Cassini Division
The Sky Road
ENGINES OF LIGHT
Cosmonaut Keep
Dark Light
Engine City
Newton’s Wake
Learning the World
The Execution Channel
The Night Sessions
The Restoration Game
Intrusion
Descents of Light
Book Title
THE CORPORATION WARS
Dissidence
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Chapter One: Back in the Day
Chapter Two: We, Robots
Chapter Three: Dancing in the Death Dive
Chapter Four: The Ghost Resort
Chapter Five: Learning New Things
Chapter Six: The Digital Touch
Chapter Seven: Team Spirit
Chapter Eight: Sympathetic Resonances
Chapter Nine: Live Fire Exercise
Chapter Ten: Coming Attractions
Chapter Eleven: Worlds of the War
Chapter Twelve: Unity Is Strength
Chapter Thirteen: Swarm Intelligence
Chapter Fourteen: Die for the Company, Live for the Pay
Chapter Fifteen: Arcane Disputes
Chapter Sixteen: There’s a Hard Way, and an Easy Way
Chapter Seventeen: Peripheral Damage
Chapter Eighteen: War News
Chapter Nineteen: Back to the Front
Chapter Twenty: Moonlets and Roses
Chapter Twenty-One: The Old Man of the Mountain
Chapter Twenty-Two: Sendings
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Unpleasant Profession of Nicole Pascal
Chapter Twenty-Four: Off-Nominal Situation
Chapter Twenty-Five: Slingshot Orbits
Acknowledgements
Extras Meet the Author
A Preview of The Lazarus War
A Preview of War Dogs
By Ken MacLeod
Orbit Newsletter
Copyright
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Ken MacLeod
Excerpt from The Lazarus War: Artefact copyright © 2015 by Jamie Sawyer
Excerpt from War Dogs copyright © 2014 by Greg Bear
Cover design by Bekki Guyatt – LBBG
Cover images © sakkmesterke, mazalis, Ociacia, and Aphelleon (Shutterstock)
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of
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First eBook Edition: May 2016
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ISBN: 978-0-316-36366-2
E3-20160415-JV-PC
