HUSH

by Craig Robert Saunders

  ‘Kiyobashi? Cassie? You good?’

  Her first reply was a grateful sigh as the suit hit her with enough meds to cover the pain.

  ‘Kiyobashi, can take Ayobami? You up to it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Just that. Her voice was strained, but she was up, only walking wounded.

  Ayobami wasn’t moving but they were groaning, saying something over and over again in a language Ulrich didn’t recognise and neither his commset or the suit was equipped to translate.

  Ayobami worried Ulrich more than Lian because the angle at which the null lay wasn’t natural, but they weren’t his problem right then. Kiyobashi had Ayobami.

  Djima was on Ulrich, and the squat man wasn’t moving. His suit was split open at the neck and blood had spread from his wound out over the ice.

  Blood didn’t run from the wound in Ulrich’s leg – the suit had seen to that – but the feeling was gone and Ulrich didn’t think that was the meds. He staggered toward Djima, and as he moved he found his feet wouldn’t quite obey him, as though his head was perfectly sober and didn’t realise his legs had snuck out to get blind drunk.

  Djima’s suit was frosting, and the snow stuck hard to his suit. It wasn’t the cold that killed him. His faceplate was full of blood, and the flexiglass cracked and turning white already. He’d bled from the neck too, but that blood was already frozen, just a hint here and there under the thick snow, falling faster than a man could bleed to death. No doubt Djima was gone. His blood wasn’t moving, and Ulrich didn’t feel the need to grunt and groan trying to get low enough to check for a pulse. Djima’s throat was torn nearly in half. In the mad tumble in the ball of Jin’s shield, Ulrich’s knife had been pulled free and sliced Djima’s throat. He’d probably died while they still rolled. A blade like that, sharpened maybe a thousand times or more over the course of centuries, didn’t make mistakes.

  In less than a minute Djima’s blood and his whole, ample body would be lost to the snow and ice, because they’d have to leave him where he lay.

  Fuck it. He’s dead anyway.

  ‘Dead,’ said Jin. Ulrich nodded. Jin’s sensors probably knew before Ulrich.

  Damn knife killed me, too, he thought, because the hole in his suit and leg must have been down to his old knife, too.

  ‘Suit integrity compromised,’ said the suit.

  ‘Shut up now, suit,’ he told it. ‘Cassie?’

  She didn’t respond.

  Ulrich turned away from Djima and stumbled, ungainly on his drunken legs, to Cassie’s side.

  She didn’t move or answer because she had problems of her own. They all had shit to shovel, didn’t they?

  Cassie held Ayobami’s hand, who was quiet now, and staring, but dying for sure. Their chest barely moved at all, mouth opening, closing, behind the flexible visor of their suit, but not far from the end.

  ‘Their spine’s broken, I think,’ said Cassie. ‘High up. Suit reads high cervical spine, breathing depressed and functions slowing.’

  Ayobami’s plight was the best chance Ulrich, and thus the other survivors, was going to get. Maybe Lian and Anna wouldn’t understand, but this was the battlefield. It wasn’t a place for morals, or honour. Cassie understood that. She saw the hole in Ulrich’s thigh as he stood beside her.

  ‘Help?’ he said.

  ‘Do it,’ said Cassie.

  What else was there to do? She started stripping the undamaged environmental suit from the dying Ayobami. All they could do was roll their eyes. Even those strange words wouldn’t come out now. Their lungs weren’t listening to their brain any longer.

  Between Ulrich’s wounds and a suit open to the elements, the old soldier wasn’t in doubt as to how close he was to his own death. If he didn’t strip, take Ayobami’s suit, he was dead, and Ayobami would die anyway.

  Ayobami was all in black, those tight underclothes they all wore, and already whitening.

  ‘Do it,’ said Cassie. Her voice was unsteady. Horror at killing Ayobami? Maybe just pain?

  Fuck it. Going to die if I don’t.

  Ulrich disengaged his helmet. The second it was clear his wounds lit up and the wind and ice tore his breath, shoved into his cuts, drove through the nerves from a tooth shattered near the front of his mouth. The cold nearly stole his will to move. Perhaps -40, maybe more. His heart skipped, his strength leeched away and if it hadn’t been for Cassie holding onto him and yanking at the connections on his suit he might have died from shock. He threw his own useless environmental suit to ice.

  Ayobami wasn’t yet dead, and their eyes wouldn’t break from Ulrich as he stepped into the new, undamaged suit. Blue eyes, sluggish from a slowing heart, lack of oxygen, lashes and eyebrows heavy with thick flakes of snow, but unable to blink. Soon Ayobami’s face and their bright salamander tattoo which ran neck to cheek, were blue, then, white.

  At least they’re not staring at me anymore.

  Whatever, Ulrich thought, and took a deep breath to steady himself. Guilt wasn’t comfortable. Shouldn’t be, either. But he carried worse, and kind words and tears weren’t going to help Ayobami.

  Ulrich made sure the suit was sealed and turned away from the corpse, moving on, as always, to the next thing.

  *

  21.

  Endless Ice

  Icefields

  Warmth from the fully-functioning suit flooded Ulrich and gave him some measure of comfort, if only a salve to his physical wounds. Soon after he felt pinpricks in his thighs, like pins and needles from the waking of nerve endings as blood returned to his legs. Even that was just a distant irritation – the hit of pain meds, endorphins, adrenaline were a great cocktail to make a man float through a beating.

  Even so, woozy from the cold to warmth, from shock to energy, Ulrich steadied his mind and assessed his team, just as efficiently as the suit assessed his needs.

  Ayobami was gone. Djima was gone. Anna wobbled but could stand unaided. Lian remained down on the ice, and was still unconscious.

  ‘Thank you,’ he told Cassie.

  Ulrich stepped beside Anna, now that they were close enough, and he reached out and pulled something organic from Anna’s shoulder. A scrap of flesh, probably from whatever had tumbled inside the shield along with them. She was pale, but she didn’t seem concussed – shocked, sure, but she’d function.

  The first few minutes were done, and like any first engagement he’d ever known the good and the lucky still lived. Same as it ever was, on Earth or this ice planet.

  Four living, one of those unconscious. Most of the team and all their equipment were lost. Anything that might prove useful was strewn over inhospitable terrain. Minimal medical supplies, no weapons, no shelter.

  They had nothing, and while those things didn’t matter to Jin, they were the difference between continuing to live and dying in the next hour for the four of them still breathing.

  Assessment - fucked.

  ‘Can you walk?’ asked Cassie.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ he said. ‘Jin? Can you carry Doctor Skerry?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jin, and picked up the unconscious doctor in one arm, cradled like an infant. She’d wake or she wouldn’t.

  We’re fucked, he thought. So what can we do to get unfucked?

  Prioritise.

  The first thing wasn’t Lian Skerry, but to save those he could.

  ‘Jin, can you detect the most likely location where we might find shelter or supplies?’

  ‘Of course,’ the Titan replied. ‘I already have. The largest section of Blue Sun Dawning is two kilometres in that direction. I can carry two and still function in reduced offensive capacity. I recommend this as the cold and your various injuries are the immediate threat and I detect no opposition or armed response of any kind up to ten kilometres.’

  Ulrich didn’t ask why Jin scanned for threats, because he knew, just as Jin knew what was necessary without being asked. Whatever took out Blue Sun Dawning wasn’t an accident, and it didn’t just take out the Blue Sun Dawning. Where were their sup
port ships? Why had none of the other ships or their passengers come to their aid?

  Because they couldn’t.

  We might be all there is left.

  ‘I can walk,’ said Ulrich.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jin, ‘and pride can kill. We can move faster if I carry you and Doctor Skerry. Anna and Cassie Kiyobashi are most capable and least in need.’

  Jin was right, of course. Ulrich wasn’t exactly willing, but he nodded and allowed Jin to carry him. He was in one arm, Lian in the other.

  Giddyup, thought Ulrich, but that was shock. He didn’t feel like laughing, or joking, or trying to make something this heavy any lighter. Instead, he thanked the Titan. They moved faster because of him. If they survived the next hour, it’d be because of Jin, too.

  *

  PART THREE

  We were born to be sushi, but we weren’t born sushi.

  -

  Pat Cadigan.

  BORN

  22.

  Jin That Was

  Earth

  2305 - 2309 A.D.

  Before he was Jin, he was Richard Chand.

  He grew up alone and abandoned on Vietnamese streets He fought for food and shelter when he had to, and sometimes when he didn’t.

  He was twenty-one years old when he saw a sign – just a small readout in a muddied store window as he stood outside with that dirt-rain pouring down his face. Asia Inter-Nation were recruiting.

  The neon all around reflected in the rain, but was swallowed and distorted by the polluted, oily mud. The mud ate everything. It seeped through holes in stolen shoes and between toes, filth sucked and sliding between toes and cell walls.

  Chand thought hard about what he wanted, and it wasn’t much more than food and boots which didn’t leak, or to sleep someplace out of the rain and mud that slowly killed everyone who lived low down. He took the test that day at a recruitment centre while rain still crusted his hair, and his scalp itched. Nothing to do but wait for the crud to dry so he could brush it loose and allow his scalp to breathe again. He was at home with discomfort, but it didn’t mean he liked where he lived. He stank – Chand was perfectly aware of himself – and when the small, erudite man who used many words Chand didn’t know sat back in a chair and regarded the street youth with shrewd, and not unkind eyes, Richard Chand was sure he would be headed straight back to the rain.

  The tester (invigilator, the man called himself) saw something in Chand, though. In the results, certainly, but in Chand’s face, too...in his eyes? Perhaps. A young man hoping for something better but who seemed just as ready to go and fight for his food and take either outcome with no complaint.

  In 2305, three days after the chance test, Richard Chand took his first job as a security guard with Asia Inter-Nation Co-operative Space Corporation.

  Most guards on the AIN Corp payroll were large, foreboding men and women; muscle stims, weights, enhanced strength modules inserted under the skin. Not many of those developments would have helped make Chand something he was not. He was a small man, unlike the majority of the security services. He was different in other ways, too. He considered himself more intelligent, whether this was an accurate assessment or not, and he was agile in both body and mind. Always cool-headed, Chand did not remember ever feeling anger, or understanding anger. It was not in his genetic build, just like drugs would never make him anything like as imposing as his colleagues.

  A small man who stood out from his contemporaries simply because of those differences, it wasn’t long until Chand was noticed. One who aroused curiosity, and then inspection and thoughts, and second and third thoughts, too, in those superior and higher within the Corporation.

  Chand was intelligent, yes, effective, yes. These things they noted easily. But Chand was a man who had no ties and that triumvirate of ruling factors bumped him to the top of a very elite group. That very trait which robbed Chand of anger and passion was an asset to the Asia Inter-Nation Co-operative Space Corporation, not a liability.

  Even then, in 2005, they were looking for leaders in a war they knew would come.

  *

  It was only two years after beginning his work with AIN Corp that Chand was offered the prestigious post on Ashok. Training and preparations for Chand were ongoing, and the orbital platform wasn’t yet functional, so it wasn’t until 2009 that Chand took up his posting.

  On his first day, Richard Chand stepped from the Dockyard shuttle along with hospitality workers, engineers, mechanics, designers, military personnel.

  The whole journey, Chand kept his eyes closed because he’d never once opened a present.

  This was his present to himself.

  Only when he stepped down from the shuttle did he open his eyes, and smile, and that smile stayed as he walked from the station to report to his superiors. When he passed along one of the open walkways joining the numerous areas, his smile changed until it was a reflection of space, and just as full of wonder. It was the only time Chand ever remembered feeling happiness – there, in space. Always he felt wonder, and honour, to be free of Earth’s grasping hands ever pulling mankind back to the mud. But joy? That smile, pure and unalloyed? That was the only time – when he walked from the shuttle with Earth forgotten at his back, and the vast, endless, miraculous landscape of the universe waited before him.

  That was three years before the outbreak of the Aug War, when humanity fought to decide who, or what, should have the right to freedom.

  But it wasn’t that...not quite. The Aug War wasn’t for Aug freedom, but value, worth, and price, and to whom that should flow. It was business, and ownership, and the very thing which mankind placed above humanity ever since property existed. The truest, basest question was whether machine belonged to man, or man to machine.

  *

  23.

  Rhetoric

  Earth

  To 2313 A.D.

  Augmentation was still nascent technology. It was expensive, prohibitively so for most civilians, but among the corporations and private contractors and militarised forces human upgrades were already commonplace...reliable, even. The unreliable upgrades were those taken from dead augmented humans. Those augments or modules were repurposed to be used by gangs or criminal syndicates, or for hack clubs and cage fights.

  The rich had their shining prosthetics, fashions changed from functional to debated beauty. Those augments used for war were functional and strong with little regard to appeal.

  The poor who stole and upgraded in dank basements or high-rise buildings stinking of despair...their bodies rejected augmentations and modules installed without the requisite care, without medical staff, without knowledge, and of course, necessity drove progress – even among the poor, back-street surgery improved.

  In a world driven by profits and payrolls, by the Company, the corporations and the wealthy, augmentations were never going to remain a matter of altruism, of human improvement, of health, or well-being, or ability, or advancement.

  The question of ownership was inevitable. They were things, and thus belonged.

  *

  Could a human, organic being be owned if the machine which preserved and augmented them belong to others?

  Offer a man missing his old legs some clever new legs, they’d sign.

  ‘Sign here,’ someone would say, and a soldier would sign.

  ‘If your legs should fail, if you should reject your legs...’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ the soldier would say and sign a waiver for that, too.

  ‘And ownership of the various and numerous materials, specific designs...’

  ‘Yeah, sure...’

  ‘Titanium seven part endo-skeletal insert, sciatic nerve bundle CPU associated drives minor pneumatic...psycho-modular rejection inhibitor...spinal clamp...graft...optional functionality...excess payment responsibility of...no indemnity against loss...neurological distress...’

  ‘Yeah...uh...’

  ‘...retained by the Company in perpetuity.’

  And by that point a soldier shru
gged, and frowned, and meds and tiredness ramped up, but there was hope dangling before them, and whatever, who gave a fuck?

  They would sign. Sure they would.

  *

  Then, the thief. A stolen module, a stolen augmentation. But, against the odds, despite substandard technological and medical abilities, the new recipient lived.

  Who owned that stolen material?

  The body? The body would die without it now that the flesh was dependent upon the augmentation, whether psychologically or physiologically dependence.

  Should the Company reclaim that part, or should the thief become property?

  If given a choice between death, or indenture to the Company?

  Would they sign?

  Sure.

  *

  Or, dead, unresponsive, and couldn’t sign?

  And so it went, from the earliest days of augmentation nearly a century before, and on into the 24th Century. Lines polarised and beliefs stuck, unwavering. Morality was discussed and shouted out with tiresome vitriol on newscasts and weblines and later, datafeeds, alter-net, free-net, and Government sponsored Audio-VL lines where politicians railed and ranted and people listened or let them drone while they ate and drove or were driven by AI cars, and while the rich gave responsibility for their day-to-day lives not to employees but to the house AP.

  The dead couldn’t sign. Where did humanity...ownership...go from there?

  The answer to that was simple. Easy as falling down.

  Where that question went was that area people convinced themselves was grey, and people could excuse all manner of grey, couldn’t they?