War Surf

by M M Buckner

  Despite our secrecy, news of our attempt had spread like a virus through the surfer underground, and some of our fans chartered a big Dolphin 88 to follow along and watch us dodge bare-assed through Provendia’s missile fire in nothing but our flimsy EVA suits. Fame. Huah! We waved our fists and preened for the crowd.

  Five of us were making the run. Me, of course. Grunze, Kat, Verinne—and Sheeba. We made Win stay behind to drive the shuttle.

  Looking back, I ask myself many questions. Why did we violate common sense and bring a beginner to the riskiest Class Ten in the solar system? Well, it was Kat who stirred Sheeba up with wild rumors about the place, and Grunze who showed her the schematics, and Verinne who took her to practice space-diving in a simulation tank. Winston bought her a smartskin longjohn to keep her snuggly warm. And me, what can I say? I let her eagerness cloud my judgment.

  In a matter of weeks, Sheeba had moved from outsider newbie to become the warm magnetic core of our crew. For so many years, it had been just us five. Then subtly, all our positions shifted to align with Sheeba’s fresh new field of energy. At least, I think so. Nothing I remember is firm, except how lovely Shee looked in her new EVA suit. It was white with black piping, the same as mine.

  “Nasir, thank you.” That day, she was all peachy blond, and her nervous fidgeting made her seem more vulnerable than ever. “This is the darkest thing I’ve ever done.”

  She wasn’t wearing contact lenses, and I remember falling under the spell of her naked eyes. Streaks of gray, green and gold rayed out from her pupils like reflections on water. Why did she ever cover those amazing eyes?

  “You can still stay behind. It’s not too late.” I’d taken every precaution I could think of to keep her safe, yet my neck still knotted.

  Sheeba leaned against me and let me feel the weight of her robust young body. “Beau, there’s a force building around this trip. We’re meant to be here now.”

  How strangely her words ring in my memory as I wait through this acid fluorescent flicker. The four steel walls of this anteroom are not thick enough to hold my contrition. My remorse leaks through the vents and filters into the corridor. But the end hasn’t come. I have still more time to wait, and to remember.

  I want to tell you about Sheeba. I want to stick her to this page with words as sharp as diamonds. But every time I try, she vaporizes into waves of frothy, unfixed conjecture. I can’t even describe the shade of her skin. I used to believe she was too young to be anyone in particular. All that wide-eyed bliss about seeking the dark—just a Net fad. Junior execs blogged “endarkment” the same way my friends and I used to blog transhumanism when we were kids. Sheeba was still growing. She hadn’t finished becoming herself.

  Or maybe it was me. Maybe I just couldn’t see her.

  At the time, I saw only that she needed looking after. There she was, virgin spacer, circling way outside the G Ring toward a mega-serious, legally proscribed war zone, thousands of kilometers from easy rescue, because of me. For the fortieth time, I rechecked her settings, really just an excuse to touch her.

  “We’ll dive through the fire zone, but you’ll lurk at the edge, Shee. Understand? No one expects you to take the hero route.”

  “Yeah, I got it the first time.” The briefest hint of annoyance twisted her lips. Then she beamed like the sun. “Silly beau, you stress too much.” She grabbed my trembling hands and stooped to kiss me. Right then, I promised myself that after this surf was over, I would get another spine extension.

  The gawky Dolphin 88 slowed us down—we felt obliged to wait for our fans—so it was past midnight, local Mira, when we intercepted Heaven’s orbit. At first, we watched the action from about five hundred kilometers. While the fans in the Dolphin tried repeatedly to hack our conference call, I chugged cola through a low-gravity straw and squinted through the shuttle’s small round window. Chad kept breaking my train of thought with last-minute questions about stock trades and wall-fabric choices. Grunze hovered weightless beside me, clinging to a grab-loop. His purple EVA suit scintillated with the silver and red paisleys. He looked like a carnival performer.

  A13 and its rock chunk spun around each other like two balls on a chain, whirligigging their way across the familiar smoggy wad we called Mother Earth. Though the schematics showed A13 as a bullet-shaped tower, it actually lay parallel to Earth’s surface, so that one side always faced “down” toward the planet while the other faced “up” toward the sun. And since the factory’s strange polar orbit kept it in sunlight most of the time, the “up” side blazed almost constantly white while the “down” side hung in near perpetual shade. For only three hours in every twenty-four did Heaven dip through Earth’s shadow and lose the light.

  Provendia’s gunship moved in unison with A13, keeping station half a kilometer off the tank’s base and closely tracking its spin. A thin glossy ovoid, the ship looked like a drop of oil that had leaked from the bottom of the tank. Tracers of missile fire arced from the gunship to a cluster of solar panels mounted on the tank’s sunny side, near the base. That was our war zone. We followed and waited. When Heaven moved out of the light, behind Earth’s protective shield, then we would go.

  “How the hell do we dock? It’s spinning too fast,” Grunze said.

  Verinne arched one eyebrow and spoke like a schoolteacher. “If we wanted to dock, we’d match A13’s spin and use a soft umbilical collar. But since we’re doing a flyby, we don’t need to dock.”

  “What was that?” Grunze poked his finger at the thick window glass. “Did you see that?”

  “I caught it on video.” For once, Verinne sounded excited. “Do you want a replay?”

  In the tiny cabin, we pushed off from the window, sailed toward Verinne’s workstation, and bumped into various pieces of equipment before coming to rest. Kat was buckled into the pilot’s seat, while Sheeba floated, directly above, turning slow playful somersaults to get a feel for weightlessness. Win lay Velcroed in the passenger bunk, lightly snoring. Everyone else gathered around Verinne’s monitor to watch the replay. For an instant, tiny blue flames flashed along the side of the tank.

  “Guidance rockets.” Kat elbowed Verinne aside. “They’re adjusting A13’s orbit”

  The tank jerked at its tether. Then a ripple ran visibly down the length of the flexing cable toward the asteroid chunk. We knocked our heads together, watching that ripple move. When it reached the end, the rock jerked, too, and that set up a reflex wave that rippled back toward the factory. For about two minutes, an interference pattern of waves propagated back and forth along the tether, and Heaven shuddered.

  Verinne checked her notes. “The factory’s guided by an Earth-based signal. That’s a scheduled orbit correction.”

  Kat said, “Does it always jerk like that?”

  Verinne cleared her throat. “The guidance rockets on the factory and counterweight should fire together. A synchronizer must have failed.”

  Grunze bumped me and messed with my hair. “You’d think those Provendia dickheads could do a smoother job.”

  “Factory owners should replace worn-out parts.” Kat looked pointedly at me. “People can’t expect things to last forever.”

  “Yes, well, maybe that would cost too much.” I checked Sheeba’s reaction. She still didn’t know my role on Provendia’s board.

  As the last of the waves rippled back and forth along the tether, I wondered what that adjustment must feel like inside the tank. Heaven quakes? Gradually, the ripples lost head, and the factory settled into stasis.

  “How often do they make those adjustments?” Sheeba asked. Her loose blond hair drifted around her peachy face like seaweed.

  Verinne let Sheeba’s hair stream through her fingers. “Every 216 hours, dear. The schedule’s regular as clockwork. I’ve checked data going back three months.”

  “That’s every nine days,” Sheeba said, almost to herself.

  Kat broke open her compression gun and loaded a transponder in the chamber. “Those solar panels are taki
ng the fire. One thousand says my flag lands there first.”

  Verinne dabbed moisturizer on her lips. “Eat my fumes, Katherine.”

  “Yeah, two to one says I plant my transponder by hand square in the middle of the panel array.” Only Grunze would make a bet like that.

  Win was still out cold. My turn. To preserve my status, I had to top Grunzie’s wager.

  Usually, this was the point at which I began to feel the old charge of anticipation. Raw hormonal heat would spread through my loins, and I would experience a primal urge to swagger. Then I would spout some insane bet, for instance, that I would reach the zone ahead of everyone and sit smack on top of a solar panel, as still as a smiling Buddha, for a full sixty seconds.

  In fact, that is the insane bet I did spout. But not with zest. Sheeba threw off my focus. There, I admit it. I was worried about her, so I kept watching her expressions, glancing aside at critical moments. Sheeba’s presence was the cause of everything that happened. She wanted to come. But still, I won’t say it was her fault.

  “I’ve been timing the volleys,” Verinne said. “My calculations put them roughly 6.45 minutes apart. That’s our window.”

  “Right. We go after the next round of strafing.” Kat edged her shuttle a few kilometers closer to the action, as close as she dared with that Provendia gunship standing guard. Only my stupendous bribes kept us from immediate arrest and prosecution, and we knew better than to push our luck.

  Kat said, “Somebody wake up Winston.”

  Sheeba kicked off the ceiling, floated down to Win’s couch, and gently shook his shoulder. “Winny, we’re about to exit. We need you to drive the shuttle.”

  Win sat up and blinked. “Sheeba.”

  The way he murmured her name. The way they touched foreheads. That intimate exchange. A crunching noise growled inside my head, which turned out to be my porcelain dental implants grinding together. Had Winston slept with Sheeba? When he sat up in the couch and pinched her bottom, I wanted to knock his bloody teeth in.

  “Here’s how we’ll exit” Verinne called out our names according to a random computer generation, our standard ritual.

  “Huah!” Grunze and Kat answered in zone-blissed hilarity, but my mouth had gone dry. Sheeba would be exiting second, after Grunze. I was going last. While everyone ran final suit checks, I watched Win take the pilot’s chair, and the palms of my hands started aching. Had that old sod screwed my virgin Shee?

  “Bring me a souvenir,” Winston joked. Lecherous bastard.

  Outside the window, the factory and gunship whirled in unison across Earth’s bleary belly, and the silent tracers of gunfire looked like fairy beams. Then, in the blink of an eye, Heaven slipped into darkness, and the firing halted.

  “That’s our cue.” Grunze raised his fist, and we shouted together, “WAR SURF!”

  In a rush, we crowded into the airlock, and Sheeba gave me a tender, hurried hug. ‘Take care of yourself, beau. I slipped an ankh in your pocket for good luck.”

  “You did?”

  She pecked her helmet playfully against mine and made kissing sounds. Why had I doubted her? She couldn’t have slept with Winny. Stress was warping my imagination. My gloved fingers closed on the dear little talisman she’d dropped in my pocket, and my heart eased.

  “Fly around the fire zone, Shee. Not through it. Promise.”

  “God, how many times do I have to promise?” She made funny faces at me through her visor.

  “On your mark.” Kat opened the outer hatch.

  Then I forgot about Winston. All I could see was infinity. Cold boundless space yawned around us. At a distance beyond comprehension, Earth’s nighttime face loomed like a huge smoldering coal dotted with a billion flecks of firelight. Its eastern rim glowed amber with the setting sun, and that thin arc of light blotted out the stars. Together, we climbed out onto the hull and clung to the handgrips. Since our craft was tracking Heaven’s rapid circular whirl, the angular momentum slung me out and almost dislocated my shoulder. My mind stopped working. I think I was holding my breath.

  Kat said, “Now.”

  And then I was streaking full speed, pushing my thruster to the limit, over the limit, crazy to get there, make my touchdown, count sixty, then get the hell out.

  Our fans in the Dolphin had succeeded in hacking our conference call, and they were critiquing our moves, but I barely heard them. All four of my thruster nozzles screamed full bore. Verinne estimated six-plus minutes between rounds of fire, but that was just an average. I wanted to make it out and back in under three.

  It takes longer than you think to cover twenty kilometers in a thruster-powered space suit. Far behind, Sheeba was doing her first EVA, and I glanced over my shoulder to keep her in sight. I was still a klick away when the gunship opened fire again. So much for averages. Missiles the size of my forearm streaked around me, and as their silent glittery tracers crisscrossed my view, I imagined one of them slicing through my EVA suit and blasting me to bloody crumbs.

  I might have veered off, but Verinne was right behind me. Ye golden gods, that woman had grit. Seeing her there gave me a lift, so I kept heading in, tracking through the fire zone, dodging, diving, pirouetting like a fiend to avoid those pretty beams. What a rip!

  “Hey, sweet-piss, I’m winning,” Grunzie taunted over the phone.

  “It ain’t over, burly boy.”

  Grunze was way ahead, but I didn’t care. He might beat me to the objective, but he would never sit still under fire for sixty seconds.

  Ahead, the tank swung toward me, looking older, shabbier and more dilapidated the closer we came. The gunship kept pace like a magnet, strafing the solar panels. Square and red, the panels clustered along the tank’s sunward face like a patch of poppies. One of them took a hit, and shards of plastic went spinning into space. Explosion without noise, way weird. I dodged through the debris field.

  Most of the missiles detonated against the tank’s base, leaving dents and scars. I couldn’t hear them, but anyone in that satellite would certainly feel their thunderous compression waves. The gunship was laying down nuisance fire, pummeling the protes with noise. Provendia didn’t intend to do real damage to this high-ticket asset.

  All at once, the strafing stopped. Did my bribes do that? Verinne shot her transponder toward the panels, then saluted me, swerved away and rocketed out of the zone. As I watched her go, the old love welled up inside and made my eyes water. Her last war surf. Good for you, Verinne. You did it

  Kat had fallen way back. Too slow, she’d missed the whole firefight. Grunze was already through. And Sheeba? I went inverted and looked around, but I couldn’t see her. She must have circled wide.

  Since the fairy beams were on pause, I took my time steering down toward the center panel, pinging the hull with a locator fix, and setting my thruster navigation to synchronize with Heaven’s spin. Once my trajectory stabilized, I arranged myself in a slightly unhinged lotus position just above the center panel and set my stopwatch for sixty. Still no sign of Shee. Dear child, she’d kept her promise and steered clear of the zone.

  Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven…easy as falling off a log-on queue. I placed my magnetized transponder and made sure it stuck fast to the panel frame. Score! Then I shook my fist in the air for the fans’ benefit. Next, I considered what gift to buy for Sheeba with my winnings.

  No way could she have slept with mat old puttybrain Winston. She was mothering him. A nurturer, mat was my Shee. Once, believe it or not, she confided to me that her ovaries were still fertile. Does that appall you? When I asked why she hadn’t suppressed her hormones like any normal executive girl, she said she was keeping her options open. She actually considered live mammalian birth an option. I knew Shee went in for fringe theories, but that was molto screwy.

  Thirty-five. Thirty-four. Thirty-three.

  Her flaky ideas had made her a target for sexual predators before. Father Daniel, for one. That smarmy con artist, with his yoga chants and chest hair. Of course, I�
��d hired investigators and brought his devilish tricks to light. The dear girl needed a guardian. When we got back from this surf, I would invite her to live in my condo. She’d be safe there, and I would—

  Noisemakers fractured my thoughts. They rained down on the panels where I sat and shook me like tactile megaton thunder. The compression waves vibrated through my spine. Missiles peppered the butt end of the tank, and I could hear in my bones how the factory rang beneath me like a xylophone. Nearby, a solar panel took a solid impact, and jagged pieces flew in all directions. Something heavy walloped my thigh.

  Pain fell like an axe blow. My IBiS started vibrating, but I couldn’t look at my thumbscreen. Then a wild keening noise shrilled inside my suit. Escaping air. That shard had ripped my Kevlax. Ye graven gold, I was losing compression! The jet of escaping air whipped me around like a toy, and I had just enough wits to grab the solar panel so it didn’t spin me out of control. Missiles continued to pound the panel array, and my thigh throbbed with anguishing pulses, as if someone were amputating my leg with a nail file.

  “Nasir’s hit. He’s bleeding.” Winston was monitoring everyone’s biosensors from the shuttle. At least, the old fart was still awake.

  “Fifty thou says he blacks out, and we have to send a robot,” said Kat.

  “It’s a bet,” Verinne said.

  “Better deploy it now,” said Grunze. “Sweety-pee faints at the sight of his own blood.”

  “Nasir?” That soft, dewy voice.

  “Sheeba,” I wheezed. In my compromised suit, drawing breath took hard labor. After seconds that felt like eons, my suit finally self-sealed, and the shrill noise faded. “Norphine,” I croaked, hooking my good leg around the collector panel to hold my position. The satellite’s powerful angular momentum pulled against me like gravity. Those noisemakers must have knocked out my thruster’s synchronization with Heaven’s spin. As the array vibrated under the flogging of Provendia’s guns, I struggled to hold on. Then the Norphine kicked in, and my leg felt numb relief. Twenty-seven, twenty-six, twenty-five…