Warchild

by Karin Lowachee

  If you didn’t shout it out with conviction the jet felt justified to compel fifty or more push-ups on the spot, usually with a boot on your back. If they felt vindictive they made you recite the entire jet manual. Depending on their mood they stopped you after five or ten minutes. And good luck if you didn’t know each and every word, because they corrected you more or less violently, or made you strip and say it to the wall while everyone else watched your bare ass.

  I had never been so grateful for Niko’s slatework. I had that damn manual memorized in two weeks.

  Macedon was still in dock (the captain had family on Austro, Nathan said, a son and a wife), but not everybody got leave, and certainly not all at the same time. “The war ain’t on leave,” a jet sergeant yelled to his squad, when Schmitt let us peek into a simroom so we could see how the big people played.

  The simrooms were equipped to mimic station or on-ship scenarios, since those were the fields in which jets mostly fought. Planets were a rare environment, though not totally unheard of, so one of the rooms was alternately decked out using vid industry-type set dressings in various simulated conditions—desert, forest, mountain, or arctic. Stepping into the other simrooms, however, was like entering Chaos or a smaller ship or an industrial colony. The accuracy of objects was kind of impressive. Some engineer somewhere, not to mention maybe an artist, had taken pains to reproduce the look, smell, and feel of a generic station and ship and mining depot, right down to the bolts in the walls. These three simrooms were by far the largest, cavernous in fact, and must have taken up at least two deck levels on the schematics, somewhere near the center of the ship.

  Macedon’s jets had a reputation for being the elite of the elite. Holosims weren’t enough.

  Nathan was right about the deep-space captains funneling nonmilitary funds into personalizing their ships. This was a sophisticated setup that I couldn’t imagine EHAF implementing on every carrier, at least not to this extent.

  One of the small simrooms was set aside for the recruits, mostly filled with obstacles like steel walls, netted pits as if someone had blown a hole in the deck, wild wire we had to crawl under, and fallen debris we had to negotiate within a certain time index. Somewhere in week six, SJI Schmitt said, we would be introduced to the zero-g chamber.

  By week four, after a lengthy training mission brief that encompassed everything from our objectives and safety (they harped on this quite a bit) to boundaries, passwords, and codes, I wondered aloud how the carrier could stay in dock so long.

  “You ever seen Cap’s wife?” Nathan said, when we gathered in the Training Bay for our pre-mission pep talk. “Major solar flare, mano.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a war on.” I found it hard to believe the man was married, or much less had a kid. He didn’t seem capable of that kind of emotion. And I tried to put that young face together with a twelve-year-old son, which apparently was the kid’s age.

  Aki, sitting on my right, leaned into the conversation.

  “Macedon doesn’t hit Austro except once in five years. Give Cap a break.”

  “I agree with Musey,” Iratxe said, sitting behind us with Cleary and Kris. She rested a hand on the back of my seat. I put my elbows on my knees so I wouldn’t feel her breath on the back of my hair. “Enough of this sitting around. I want to get out there.”

  “You’re still in diapers,” Nathan said. “It ain’t like you’ll be seein’ any action ’til we graduate.”

  “Don’t we have orders?” Kris asked. We as in Macedon, he meant.

  “Screw orders.” Nathan snorted. “This is Cap’s ship. They’d have to send some admiral out here to make him move.”

  Cleary yawned and stretched his arms. “She’s getting repairs and a major resupply, anyway. Haven’t you guys noticed all the maintenance?”

  “I noticed the resupply in galley,” Nathan said. “I’m dreamin’ of some chocolate ice cream as we speak. But I think Iratxe here ate it all. Those’re some hips on you, girl.”

  ‘Too bad this isn’t a live fire sim,“ she said back.

  Live fire or not, we had to treat it as real.

  Apparently there was more striv activity by the Rim than ever before, which the Send attributed to the Warboy’s encroaching on Hub space with the intention of taking over some stations, not just disabling them—blatant propaganda on their part, since I knew Niko had no such intention. Trying to maintain a Hub station, in Hub territory—even on the fringes—would be ridiculous considering his already-strained fleet and personnel resources. Of course the Send reporters didn’t know a lot about the state of the Warboy’s fleet, but even with that ignorance they made a lot of assumptions.

  The military reports, which weren’t necessarily what the civilian population got, said the stations were military supply and repair depots. If they were hit, the deep-space carriers couldn’t patrol the DMZ for long periods and that gave the striv fleet some breathing room to regroup.

  Because of these “breaking” developments in the war—I was so sick of the hyperbole from the meedees—our sims revolved around station defense.

  Keg parties, Nathan called them. Crack open the cans.

  Our “enemy” in the sims was usually the other platoon. Sometimes we played the enemy. We dressed up in strit-style robes—not exact, but close enough for effect—and tried to take out the other recruits. My kill points were higher in that scenario than the other. I didn’t aim for it, but it was kind of fun sneaking around like an alien or a symp, cleansing “jets.” Kris said he was glad I was on their side.

  Most of the recruits treated the training seriously, though at the end of the shift a playful attitude came out. We were all still in dress-up and the real enemy was more of a meedee-indoctrinated idea.

  Or my fellow recruits were just too naïve, despite the fact most of them were orphans like me. Iratxe thought that once we graduated she would gung-ho herself to a few citations and notoriety as a strit-killer. It wasn’t much of a surprise that she thought Corporal Erret Dorr was beyond a solar flare and more like a supernova. Sometimes he dropped in to spy on the training platoons. We saw him standing by the simroom doors, talking to JJI Theron, when we dragged our overworked bodies from the latest training mission. Dressed as good guys this time, our platoon had “won” the objective—the capture of an escaped symp commander. I tugged off my helmet and gingerly pressed a throbbing bruise on my forehead, earned by a piece of falling debris in the station sim.

  “I heard Dorr’s scoping for drafts,” Iratxe said, eyes bright. “He lost a couple people on his team in their last mission. Think I should campaign?”

  “Maybe he shot them,” I said. I hadn’t forgotten the way he beat me in the gauntlet.

  “Sheez, Musey.” Aki laughed. “You know,” she said to Iratxe, in a tone they sometimes used when they wanted to nauseate the guys in our group, “he is pretty fine. Tall, and a body—”

  I increased my stride and caught up with Kris, Nathan, and Cleary.

  Nathan was eavesdropping on the girls. “He’s outta your league.” He sniffed his clothes and muttered, “And I’m outta clean air, aye.”

  “He’s looking our way,” Cleary said. “So place your bets.”

  I glanced at Dorr. He and Theron watched our little procession. I broke ahead of my berthmates toward the exit. The shower was the only place I had any consistent space to myself and it was always better if I got there first and took my time.

  But Dorr snagged my sleeve as I passed. “Good run,” he said. “Theron’s tellin’ me you got an eye for sniping too.”

  You couldn’t exactly keep walking when a superior was addressing you. So I said, “Yes, sir,” and shifted on my feet. Theron had taken a certain shine to me because I showed rapid improvement in the shooting gallery and he was himself a marksman. JIs liked nothing if not improvement and a steady show of enthusiasm for being where you were. I was adept, by now, at faking both. In reality I could probably compete with any jet easily.

  Behind Dorr, but i
n my line of sight, Nathan stood with the others making fish-kiss faces at me.

  These people were all crazy.

  “I run a class,” Dorr was saying, so I dragged my eyes back to him. “Shotokan. You know it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Theron says you catch on quick so maybe you can join my class once you graduate. We’d give you a challenge above your fellow sprigs.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted one, but I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He laughed. “You oughtta feel privileged. It’s invitation only.”

  I wished he hadn’t asked, and wondered if I could say no. He saved me the trouble and just waved me on. By the time I got to the showers, they were all occupied.

  “So you got a date with long-blond or what?” Nathan said as I tried to beat him at a flight game in the RRC later that shift. With the holointerface over his eyes like two disks of ruby-tinted glass and his hands like two separate entities, Nathan flew through the false landscapes as if he’d been born in a cockpit. He was equally adept in the simulated vacuum of space as he was on any planet environment; he flew me in circles. I made a horrible pilot.

  “It’s not that,” I said irritably. “Iratxe can have him.”

  Nathan glanced at me with a raised eyebrow. “He’s a throwaway you don’t wanna catch back, if you know what I mean.”

  After the fifth crash and burn I raked off the interface and hung it by its wire straps over the rim of the simstation. I couldn’t talk and fly at the same time. “What d’you mean?”

  Jelilian laughed and flipped up one of the glass “eyes.” He slapped my shoulder, all gracious magnanimity.

  “Your reflexes and hand-eye are good but you just dunno how to handle the metal, mano. Must be too much hardware for you.” He grinned at his double entendre.

  A lot of what jets and recruits alluded to involved sex.

  And I was the youngest in the group; with their pack mentality, that meant I was the best one to tease.

  “What d’you mean about Dorr?” I wasn’t going to be in training forever and the corporal seemed to have me marked.

  Nathan poked the game console, resetting it. “Iratxe says—and you know she’s researched—Dorr’s brass balls got him on this ship ’cause he went right up to Cap and asked. Then he got in some jets’ faces on purpose and started his own gauntlet run to prove it. And he was fifteen at the time. Can you believe that?”

  I did. “What’s a throwaway?”

  “You don’t ever get tired of asking questions, do you?”

  “That’s why I’m smarter than you.” I walked away from the simstation to get a drink from the dispenser. Jelilian followed, laughing to himself.

  The RRC had a wide window facing out to the stars, which was a nice touch on a ship so generally claustrophobic. Right now the view was the starboard flank of Archangel, which sat in dock beside Macedon. Since the rec served the entire training deck it sprawled large, with well-used black couches facing each other and ten round tables scattered like game pieces across the floor. A simstation and vid provided the main entertainment, and a chow dispenser supplied free amounts of salty, sometimes dried snacks and liberal liters of caff in various forms—hot, cold, and fizzy.

  I sat at an empty table near the bulkhead and nursed my hot caff. There hadn’t been anything like caff on Aaian-na and I’d quickly developed a taste for it here. Nathan plopped down beside me and lit a cigret. His chatty mouth was the only reason I bothered to be with them in rec; if I stayed long enough, useful information usually dropped out.

  Pretty soon the others drifted over from other parts of the room, except Cleary. Cleary was deep in conversation with another recruit on the couch, though what could possibly interest him that completely was the entire squad’s guess.

  “Throwaways,” Nathan carried on, eager as always to show me how much I didn’t know. “Iratxe, where you from? Where’s your family?” He knew; he only asked for my benefit. And they humored him. Or me.

  “Meshica Station.” That was a Spokes mining colony. “I don’t know where my mother is. My father’s in a veterans’ hospital.”

  “Aki?”

  Aki shrugged a little and shifted. “Dead.”

  “Kris?”

  “My dad died in a terrorist dock bombing a few years ago. Symps.” He practically spat the word. “My mom’s on Earth.”

  Nathan looked at me, blowing out a long stream of smoke. “And I’m from the streets of London.” I didn’t know where that was; Earth, I assumed. “My point is—most of us, and by us I mean we recruits, and probably most of the crew, are throwaways. The kids nobody else wants. Talk to any of us who served on ships before, most woulda heard that Cap takes the hard cases. That’s why we try to transfer here. It’s a lot less brass to bother with. They wear the stripes but they know where you’re comin’ from. I dare you to find a rich stitch on this crew, somebody from Austro’s elite or some general’s son. You’ll look long and hard, mano. Ain’t that why you came aboard?”

  “Not exactly. I kind of just closed my eyes, turned around, and pointed.” Humor usually tossed them off the scent. “But why would Azarcon want the troublemakers?” I recalled what Dorr had said when I was in brig, that Macedon was the second chance.

  “He got his own reasons, prolly.” Nathan shrugged. “Maybe ’cause he’s an orphan himself.”

  You’d think Azarcon was a saint from the way some of them talked. “Yeah, an orphan making more orphans. Between him and pirates there’s a lot of us to go around in the war.”

  As soon as I said it I knew better.

  “You mean pirates and strits,” Kris said.

  “The strits go without saying,” I said dismissively.

  Without warning the shipcomm (or godcomm, as Nathan called it) beeped and Azarcon’s voice came through, all around us.

  “This is the captain. All nonessential personnel move to quarters. Crew prep for undock. We break in twenty.”

  People started to get up, chairs scraping, then clicking back into their claws for safety if the ship lost gravity.

  “That’s us,” Nathan said, tossing his cigret in the trash vent. “Nonessential sots.”

  We tramped to quarters. My thoughts still strayed to Azarcon and the fact all of this intel was going nowhere because I still didn’t have access to outgoing-capable comps.

  Nathan climbed into his bunk and immediately buried his nose in his comics.

  “Wanna play some poker?”

  It took me a moment to realize Kris was speaking to me.

  “I’m in,” Aki said.

  “Let’s use Musey’s bunk,” Kris volunteered, and sat on the floor beside my rack before I could say anything, a deck of worn cards in his hands that he flipped and shuffled like a casino dealer.

  “How ’bout I sleep,” I said, sitting on the blankets on the area they planned to use as a table.

  “Aw, c’mon.” Aki gave my foot a shove. She kept shoving me until I slouched against the bulkhead by my pillow. She appropriated the foot of my bunk and left a small space in the middle to lay the cards. Iratxe sat beside Kris on the floor and produced a small case of poker chips that she began to dole out. Cleary had long since disappeared beneath his blankets. I looked over enviously.

  “This is stupid. Those chips aren’t worth anything and we’re all broke anyway.”

  “Consider it credit. When we get on the payroll, then everybody can collect. I’ll keep tally.” Kris showed me his slate.

  “It’s lights out in fifteen mikes.”

  “The jets’ve buttoned us in and gone to quarters. Nobody stands in the corridors during dock break.”

  I’d read that in our manual but it was a good reminder for later use. The locks on the hatches throughout the training deck could be easily bypassed with some hotwiring. I’d scoped the control panels already on a march when one of the crew was doing maintenance; all I needed were the tools to pry the panels open.

  “Muse, you’re about as much fun as a rectal exam.”
That from Kris.

  Nathan’s voice drifted down. “Don’t knock it ’til you try it, Rilke.” He laughed.

  “Mano, shut up.”

  The ship gave three sharp beeps from the godcomm. For a vessel this large, with its crew complement of more than six thousand, I hardly thought we’d feel the unclamping or the drift from Austro unless something went wrong. As Kris dealt the hands I listened. Nothing sounded or happened. We played standard five-card and I won the first round. After a few more rounds with the chips piling on my side of the bunk I became aware of their declining chatter and the probe of their eyes.

  “Look at you,” Aki said. “Where’d you learn to play like that?”

  They didn’t know about my link to Falcone and I had no intention of ever telling them. “Nowhere. You all just play like shit.”

  “Somebody needs to teach this boy how to smile,” Iratxe said. “So serious. This is fun, you know.”

  “Where d’you think we’re headed?” I asked, idly looking over my cards.

  Nathan, the eavesdropper, answered from his lofty perch. “Deep space, naturally. Where there be Dragons.”

  “Oh, all of the Dragons,” Kris said blandly, “or just the one small corner of it?”

  “Try the area near the strits. Azarcon’s a hunter and we’re lookin’ for some ducks.”

  As if to emphasize his point, the bulkhead suddenly came alive with sound, a deep thrumming pulse.

  “Drives are active,” Nathan narrated. “We’re headin’ to a leap.”

  Underneath the pulse was a higher, grating whine.

  “Goin’ faster.”

  The ship seemed a living thing, louder than Niko’s Turundrlar, as if it brayed its power out to the galaxy like a war cry. Once Macedon reached its intended rate the engines would cut and we’d shoot through the stars on inertia. I knew the rhythm. The noise was a lull, one I’d heard since in the womb. Like falling asleep to a rainstorm smacking your windows or thunderheads booming over your roof. No ship could totally muffle the sound from traveling up through the decks. Kris, Aki, and Iratxe sat still, cards forgotten in their hands, just listening to the harsh symphony reverberating through the bulkhead in muted growls.