Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

  I could plead engine trouble, she thought. Except that I have this feeling he’d know there wasn’t any. And I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing I was having trouble carrying out this mission. . . . Besides, wasn’t she a good member of the Fleet, always doing her duty without stint or shirk? What kind of chance would humanity and its allied species have against the Ichtons if everyone just quit working whenever they wanted to?

  “All set,” she said.

  They jumped. The jumps had been bothering Maura more and more over the past couple of days, while Ran sat there as unmoved as if he were watching an entertainment. It was not so much the physical sensation of the jump anymore, but the sure knowledge of what they would find on the other end of it. Maura prayed for uninhabited planets, for mistakes in the list—there had been a couple of these, and they had come out to find no planets around a star at all—but these were unmercifully few . . .

  “Here we are,” Ran said. She looked around, got a glimpse of the star, a ravening-hot blue B2, and scanned for its planets. Found three of them, gas giants, and the fourth, a barren rock swinging in close orbit: and the fifth—

  Baleful, a single huge, gibbous eye, faceted, it glittered at her. There was no land to it, no sea, no icecap, no air. Nothing but the hard outline of glass and plex against naked space: a million million domes, overlaid on the corpse of a world, dry, empty, dead. . . .

  She began to weep.

  Ran was staring at her.

  Maura didn’t care. She moaned, and sobbed, and cried, and the inside of her hull rang with it. System alarms went off as her blood chemistry and EEG went askew; she ignored them. Ran sat and watched her column, and Maura spared only a second to wonder why he looked so horrified, yet still so calm—then lost herself in her grief again. Death, nothing but death, that’s all we’ll find from here to the Core. We’ve watched this problem get worse and worse as we’ve come farther and farther up this arm of the galaxy. The Ichtons have left nothing but corpses from here to the heart of things. If we had hopes of settling anyone out this way, they’re dead now. And what will happen when they finally come upon the Alliance worlds, and Earth?

  That was when more alarms started going off, and there was abruptly something to look at besides the poor husk of a planet that hung below them. Maura wished there weren’t. She had to fight with her grief now, try to force it down. She thought she had had enough practice at that, but it was harder work than she thought. “What is it?” Ran was saying, up out of his seat now and looking really upset for the first time. “Maura, listen to me! What’s happening?”

  “Trouble,” she said, and gulped, still looking for control. “Far perimeter.”

  “What is it?” Ran headed back for the control seat.

  “Ichton fleet. What else, out here where there’s nothing but us?” She paused, gulped again, straining her “eyes” out into the darkness. The traces were faint as yet.

  “How many?” Ran said.

  “Hard to tell. They’re out at the far fringe. Could be a hundred—could be two.” She reached a finger of probe back into the engines, feeling for their readiness. They were ready enough—She poked them again. There was a slight sluggishness about them—“Not now,” she muttered. “Oh, not now, when you didn’t show anything all the rest of the time!”

  Ran watched her, then looked over at the small screen by the command chair. “Do they usually move that fast?” he said.

  She glanced back at the Ichton fleet. “No, they don’t!” she said. They were coming up much faster than usual, faster than she had ever seen in many engagements. “This is no time to act this way,” she said to her engines, poking them again, more sharply, trying to jar that abnormal wave form out of existence. “Wake up!”

  They came on-line, but not at the level of response she would have liked. “Shall I take gunnery?” Ran said.

  Maura burst out laughing. “Against them? Here,” she said, patching the controls for gunnery through to his console. “Do what you like. I’m leaving!”

  And she ran. There was nothing decorous about it; she just ran. The problem was, the Ichton ships were running right up behind her. Second by second they slipped away from the fringes of her sensor perimeter, into prime-detail sensing range. There were a hundred fifty-four of them. They had been massed, originally, in their usual free-flight “pack” formation. They were spreading now, the first of three steps toward an englobement. Then after they englobed, they turned their weapons onto any unfortunate ship in the middle, and blew it away. Was this how Loni went? Maura thought. Likely enough. Caught all by herself, out in the rear end of nowhere—

  Maura had no desire to stay around for such a party. But it began increasingly to look as if she was not going to be offered a choice. She went on standard evasive for a few minutes, changing course four, five times. Distantly, from Ran’s cabin, came a muffled crash; she looked for a fraction of a second and saw the crockery dog lying on the floor in pieces. Too bad. . . . She had other worries. She was trying hard to give the Ichtons the impression of a ship running panicked and with no plan in force. The second wasn’t difficult, since, distraught as she was, she had no plan. This situation had been in many a mission simulation, but the results had always been so hopeless that Maura had long since decided the best solution to an englobement was to be several parsecs to one side of it, and accelerating outward. She was in no position to do that; the Ichton left flank of the englobement group was reaching out toward her. Now she ran, just ran, channeling power to the engines, pushing them as hard as she could. And triggered the jump—

  —and nothing happened—

  She was so shocked, she couldn’t even swear. Maura looked at Ran, but there was no help there: he was busy at the gunnery console, programming her few bombs for what looked like an optimum spread, a pitifully ineffective stroke against the force that was chasing them. The beam weapons wouldn’t be much help, either. She flipped desperately into diagnostic mode, and her world filled up with numbers and figures. That suspicious wave form was missing now, missing completely—but at the same time, she couldn’t jump. Don’t tell me the thing was necessary to the engines’ functions, there was nothing about that in the docs—! Maura began stepping down power to the jump engines, taking pressure off the systems she had been poking before, while at the same time pushing herself along at conventional boost, as fast as she could. Even without the new equipment I should be faster than any Ichton—

  No one seemed to have told them that, however. They were gaining, and the righthand side of the englobement was catching up to her now. Another lobe coming in at twelve o’clock— Dimly she could sense Ran firing several of the beam weapons in chord: there was a strike on one of the Ichton ships “above” and behind them. Then another, and two ships of the hundred fifty-four puffed into vapor and vanished.

  As if it’s going to be much help—the globe was tightening around them. The beams lanced out again, and another ship vanished: one of the “coordinator” ships, Maura suspected, for the lobe of Ichton ships “above” them began to fall back slightly from the others, and lost some of its coherence. “There!” Ran shouted.

  It was the only chance she would get. Maura turned all her attention inward, ignored Ran and space and the Ichtons and their billions of dead; looked for that wave form, and when she couldn’t find it, picked another and coaxed it, willed it, pulled it into the right shape. Down in the engines, something felt as if it turned over and started to wake up—

  “Now! Maura, for God’s sake, now!” She ignored him. Not ready yet—not ready—almost out of reset—

  “MAURA!”

  Her engines opened their eyes and looked back at her.

  Reset—

  As the righthand and lefthand arms of the restored englobement locked around her, Maura jumped, hard and high. The wrong feeling twisted her gut, harder than she had ever felt it.

  They came out in clean space, empty of stars, or planets, or Ichtons.

  For a few mi
nutes Maura just drifted, and made no sound. Ran was looking at her in concern; she let him. Her navigational systems spent the time finding several Cepheid variables they recognized, and determining position from them. They were a long way from the Core.

  “Maura?” Ran said at last.

  She was almost too tired to answer him. And too frightened, and too sad, and too upset.

  “What, Ran?” she said finally. It came out sounding more like a moan than anything else. And then, to her utter surprise, a joke occurred to her. “You’re going to tell me we should get back to work on the rest of the list, huh?”

  “No,” Ran said. “We can go home now.” He got up from the control chair, went over to the main console, and tapped at the console keyboard, just a few characters. “The mission’s over.”

  The knowledge came on in the back of Maura’s head, like a light. She gazed at it in horror and growing anger.

  “You are from Psych,” she whispered.

  Ran nodded. “Personal Intervention,” he said.

  “A fardling shrink! So the whole new-kid act was just that. The tantrums, the nerves . . . and the engine malfunctions were your fault, then. . . .”

  “Judiciously applied stress,” Ran said, “is one of the best ways to produce a result. Striking at the heart of someone’s strength. In your case, the engines . . . and your perceived ability to get out of any problem that came after you, or just generally ‘rise above it.’ Impair that, and all kinds of interesting issues come up to be handled. Like your detachment from your work, which has been increasing noticeably over the past few years.”

  “’You could have gotten us both killed!” she yelled.

  “Of course,” Ran said. “I was willing to take that chance, for both of us. Me, I’m expendable. But a dysfunctional brainship is worse than a dead one, in Fleet’s opinion.”

  He got up from the console and walked back to his cabin. She stared at him as he went, shocked speechless for a moment. But only a moment. “Well, isn’t that just fine!” she shouted after him, making her voice follow him down the hall by the speakers set there. “And what goddamned sonofabitch sent you here to do me over? What gives you the right—”

  “No one sent me,” Ran said. “You can’t be ‘sent’ on a kill-or-cure. You volunteer.”

  She stared at him. Ran stood in his room and gave her camera pickup a crooked sort of smile. “You wouldn’t make it easy for me, either,” he said. “I could have done all this in virtual experience, if you’d let them knock you out to put the engines in. But no, you had to play it stoic. Typical of you, actually.”

  She fumed, but helplessly. That was the worst part of it. He was right. “Too much detachment,” Ran said, “is a bad thing for brain or brawn. You get callous, you get uncaring, your reaction speed goes down, you get one or both of you killed. Why do you think Cecile left you? She saw what was coming, and didn’t feel like getting killed. Fleet Psych noticed the problem. Decided to do something about it. The only question was what.”

  “So they sent you to freud me over,” Maura said.

  “Don’t talk dirty. Who has time to freud people anymore? We need cures, not progress. For too much detachment, the cure is reattachment to the realities of the world, by the most violent means possible. The Ichtons seemed like a fair bet. Not combat with the enemy, by preference—that’s only made you more detached, in the past. But rather, contact with their victims. Intensive contact, the worst that could be found. And when Hawking Defense let it be known that they had this mission waiting, well, you were the obvious choice.”

  “Two birds with one stone,” Maura said sourly.

  “Two birds,” Ran said, “yes.” He bent down to pick up one of the shards of the china dog, and turned it over in his hands. “As I said, we would have preferred to do this in virtual reality, controlling the circumstances more carefully.”

  “ ‘Virtual,’ ” Maura scoffed. “Not much danger in that.”

  “Cures work there,” Ran said. “But so does death. If you had died, so would I have. Just as if it were real.”

  He kept smiling that annoying smile at her. She wished she could say something that would wipe it off his face, that would let him know how upset she was, how she hurt. But then again. . . . how long had it been since she hurt, since anything hurt? There had to be something wrong with that. . . . “I suppose I should thank you,” she said, “for risking your life for me.”

  “Don’t bother practicing manners on me, Maura,” Ran said. “You’re much too angry to care about being polite at the moment. I would say rather that you’re more concerned about seeming sane to other people, when you’re none too sure yourself that you are. As for me, I was doing my job. So were you, both while we were out there, and all the times before I met you . . . while what you experienced was crippling you slowly. The Fleet takes care of its own, dead and alive. Even if sometimes the caretaking does annoy the shit out of them. So jump for Hawking, now, and get this information back where it will do someone some good. And then, after you’ve dropped me off, you go back out again and do what you have to do—taking care of yourself, now, as well as of your brawns. That’ll be thanks enough for me. And now, with your permission, I’ll start clearing my things out.”

  He had never asked her for permission for anything before. It was a little strange. Maura watched him start putting things away. I’ll be glad to see the back of him, she thought.

  All the same . . . I wonder what the next brawn will be like?

  NO WIN

  The meeting was short and the conclusion clear. They had fought over twenty Fleet actions, won almost every one of them, and saved over a dozen worlds, temporarily. They were also losing the war. There was no way that the Hawking and any number of Star Central allies would be able to stop the Ichtons using only military intervention. There certainly had been limited successes, thousands of Ichton ships destroyed at the cost of only a few dozen Fleet vessels lost. That wasn’t enough. There were tens of thousands more and the Ichtons had infested so many worlds it was likely they were building warships faster than the Fleet and all their allies were destroying them.

  Another solution had to be found. To do this a lot more had to be learned about the Ichtons. And they had to find these things out quickly, while there were still worlds in Star Central left unmolested, no matter what the cost or sacrifice necessary.

  THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOUL

  by Janet Morris

  One minute, Sergeant Dresser missed his human body. The next, he didn’t. Loss. Relief. Pain. Pleasure. Awkwardness. Dexterity. Confusion. Command.

  Command. He must take command of his body. Of his mission. Of his emotions. Of his life.

  But he couldn’t. He was lost, twice lost, and deep in an alien jungle that fouled his feet and arms and dragged nearly invisible tendrils across his face, trying to scratch him and catch him.

  Dresser was lost and alone. So alone. Barefoot and nearly naked. Exposed.

  His breathing was too loud. His heartbeat was out of sync. His stride was uneven.

  Where was everybody?

  He thrashed before him with his arms, trying to beat back the jungle. He mustn’t get caught here. Caught in a web of sticky stuff that would hold him forever. . . . Caught, and prey to the hairy carnivores of this stinking, rotting world.

  If he could have managed it without falling, he would have run. But he couldn’t run without falling, not in this weak light of an alien sun; not in this jungle so hungry to eat him. If he fell, something in the murk might jump out and wind him up in its arms or its leg or cocoon him in some viscous mass and he would be trapped.

  Trapped until eaten. Trapped and struggling.

  He was whistling in fear. He could hear the pathetic sound of it. The keening of his heart came up through his body and made an awful sound that was not the sound of a soldier.

  Take command. Take control. The hairs on his head itched. He rubbed them against each other. . . .

  He stopped short and st
ood there, as still as he could manage, wavering on his feet. Sergeant Dresser stood there, counting his arms. Two too many. His head itched.

  Remember who you are. What you are.

  Take command. Take control.

  Dresser was a volunteer for a mission too terrible to be contemplated, not that there was any way out but to go on with it.

  Remember what you aren’t: a human being. Not anymore.

  Breathing hard and listening to his own pulse that pounded so wrongly, he wanted to retch. But his head itched too much. And the sound of fearful whistling wouldn’t stop.

  Then he remembered that the hairs that itched weren’t on his head: they were on his antennas. It was the itch of terror and it was nearly overwhelming. And the terrible squeak of fear, so paralyzing, a sound that might give him away, came from rubbing those antennas together.

  He had to stop it. The sound of so much fear made him ashamed. The sound of it could give him away.

  He was still a soldier, even if he was a bug soldier. He reached up with his combat knife and began hacking at his own antenna, sawing away at the base of his skull. The pain took a long time to run down into his brain, and . . .

  . . . He had to stop the sound, before it brought all his enemies down on him . . .

  The pain finally stopped him. Blood rushed into his eyes and made everything twice as dim and ominous.

  His gut churned. He was bleeding. He could hardly see. He could barely smell. He couldn’t hear the keening sound anymore, though.

  That was something.

  He dropped to his knees and hung there, on fours, staring at the knife in his hand. There was flesh on the knife. His flesh.

  He had to get hold of himself. He needed his antenna; he needed every sensory clue he could get to help him maneuver this alien body through a twice-alien landscape not its own. He needed every edge he could get.

  The knife edge glittered in his gray hand. Ugly hand. Alien hand. Bug hand. But a knife was a knife, all over the galaxy—maybe all over the universe. He needed the knife and he was willing to see it through faceted eyes as long as he could take comfort from having it in his hand.