Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  “Too bad violence believes in them ,” Folsom said. “Of course, you never know what you’re seeing these days on the merci. Bunch of propaganda for the civs.”

  Here was something interesting. Folsom must really trust him to be talking so loosely. Still, he’d better stay in his role of naif.

  “You sure you should be saying stuff like that, Sarge?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Aschenbach, and let me worry about what I say,” she replied sharply. “You should listen and learn, and maybe you’ll pull through when we see action. You can’t afford to go into battle all fuzzy-headed about reality. At least nobody in my platoon’s going to, if I can help it.”

  “Sure, Sarge.”

  “Don’t sure me, you shit. I know what I’m talking about. We lost three soldiers and two decent goddamn officers on Titan, and half of the rest fighting around Jupiter.”

  “I guess you’re not an effective fighting machine if you’re dead,” Leo said.

  “Damn straight,” Folsom replied without a trace of irony in her voice. “Keep that in mind.” She looked over at the turning bearings, each the size of a small mountain. “Anyway, I can’t wait to get done with this fucking nonsense.”

  “Kind of bored, Sarge?”

  “I’ll be bored when I’m dead. No. We’re a good platoon. I personally screened the new reinforcements, like you, Llosa, Oatribbon. Just want to be used properly by the management.”

  “You’re a goddamn idealist, Sarge.” Leo held back any hint of laughter, but Folsom smiled.

  “Fuck you very much, Aschenbach.”

  They spoke some more about the bolsa in the Vas where Folsom was from. Leo had, of course, been there. He’d been just about everywhere in his former life as a travel journalist. He remembered Folsom’s hometown as something of a wasteland—big vats of churning grist making packing materials and shipping containers. There was also a sock factory, with spider silk microlooms turning out pairs by the millions. Folsom’s mother was a shop bookkeeper at the sock plant, and her father was a foreman at a transfer station where bubblewrap flowed to its end users throughout the Met via gigantic pipes under enormous pressures. “Once there was a leak,” Folsom told Leo, “and Pop’s whole crew was jammed into the station house as tight as sausage before they shunted the flow. Not a bruise on any of them, though.”

  Leo expressed disbelief, but Folsom swore it was so. She was a pretty good raconteur, and better when she had a bit of an alcohol buzz on. Just a kid, really, Leo thought. Barely nineteen, and she’s been to war, killed people, and watched her own platoon die around her. Even though she was ostensibly his superior in rank, Leo felt a brotherly protective urge toward her.

  He’d told her some bullshit story about Aschenbach’s past—a carefully prepared story, nonetheless—but mostly he listened to Folsom talk about home. She was the perfect kid from the Met—bright, wise before her time, a merci addict.

  Why the hell was she fighting in the army of a megalomaniac? Leo wished he could put the question to her directly. But he knew the answer. She had been a bored kid. She was probably going to end up doing about the same thing as her mother or father. She had a lifetime of sameness to look forward to. The Enforcement Division was something different. It was something you didn’t have to go out and find or get for yourself. It was handed to you with a beautiful recruitment brochure that even gave you a small taste of the Glory that was the soldier’s reward.

  Marketing. Amés was good at it.

  It was something the outer system was going to have to learn to do if it wanted to change the hearts and minds of people like Dory Folsom.

  If Leo knew his father, and he was sure he did, he knew the Old Crow would be doing his best to get as far away from marketing as possible—and losing the propaganda war as a result.

  After Leo’s guard shift, he checked his weapons back in and carefully put away his uniform. He looked down at his smooth chest. Aschenbach had a lot less hair than Leo. And underneath that hairless chest was the urn that Leo had been given by the mysterious master spy who called himself C. It was allegedly packed with complex grist containing a copy of C himself. And it was Leo’s job—a duty he’d sworn to—to see the urn across the front line and into “enemy” hands.

  Into the hands of Leo’s own father, as a matter of fact. A man Leo hadn’t spoken a word to for over ten years.

  Leo crawled into his bunk for some sleep. The remainder of the platoon had come in from leave during his guard shift, and they were all doing the same thing. If he could go right to sleep, he’d get at least four hours.

  Three hours later, however, he was awakened with a start. The override alarm. After all the waiting, it was time to bug out.

  The platoon trundled sleepily into their uniforms, compressed their sea lockers down to pack-sized containers, and mounted them on their chests. They rolled their bedding up and stood at attention as Folsom, now in full sergeant mode, inspected them all. She presented them to the lieutenant, a woman named Chatroom, who informed them that they were now assigned to the DIED transport Marat. The destination was classified, but they had better get themselves ready for the smell of sulfur and some heavy fighting.

  So it’s the Jupiter system, Leo thought. We’re headed for Io.

  PART TWO

  THE FALL OF IO

  October 3016, E-standard

  One

  General Meridian Redux was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She just knew it. Damn Roger Sherman! This was what happened when you put an iconoclast in charge. All that rot about not following the herd, thinking outside the box—goddamn independence!

  A good general was prudent, conservative, careful to sacrifice her troops only when she could promise them a chance of success. Above all—only fools tried something new in the midst of war when the old ways worked just as well.

  What could be simpler than the concentration of force? Calculations showed that, given the current state of technology, five attackers would have to be expended to take out one defender. The math was on the side of concentration. Common sense and good judgment were on her side as well! But would the Old Crow listen? Not a chance.

  She’d passed him over in promotion e-years ago—e-decades ago, now! She had even had a hand in making sure he never rose above colonel. But then had come this damnable attack from the Met. And, like the loose cannon he was, Sherman had rolled the dice at Neptune and come up a winner. Meanwhile, she’d been caught in the real firefight, the attack on Jupiter. She’d held the DIED forces off three of the four Galilean moons. But Ganymede, the largest and most populous, had been lost. And so a dark cloud had fallen on the entire Federal Army command.

  Ridiculous!

  Unfair.

  That was what it really was. Bad luck. And now somehow Sherman had been promoted by the ad hoc government above her. Unthinkable. If Jupiter hadn’t been reeling from the loss of Ganymede, the so-called Solarian Republic wouldn’t have had a chance of exerting its influence here. Who did the cloudships think they were, deciding for Jupiter what was good for it? The nerve! The patronizing nerve of those nebula-sized windbags!

  And yet the populace seemed to accept it. To embrace it. Hadn’t they ever even considered states’ rights? There was a reason it was called the Federal Army, after all— federalism ! Now she was in the Army of the Solarian Republic, and fighting for the rights of goddamn Pluto. Of the Oorts. It was all such nonsense. But what was the alternative? Go over to the Met? Become a cog in the machinery of the Department of Immunity after being general in the grand Federal Army? Not a chance.

  Ack! The bile rose in her throat, and Redux swallowed it down. She was a soldier; she would follow orders. Even if they came from a man who should be a colonel still. But she didn’t have to like her orders.

  Oh, they were clear enough. She’d give Sherman that. He didn’t waste words. “Defend Io. Defend Europa. Do not withdraw to Callisto except to avoid complete destruction.”

  The attack was coming. She didn’t need
secret intercepts of communiqués to tell her that. A bit of merci and vinculum traffic analysis showed that Zebra 333 was calling in reinforcements and vectoring them for Io. If he gained possession of Io, Europa would be seriously threatened. Io was the closest moon to Jupiter, with Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto on the outside. Because of the varying revolution rates, supplying Europa would still be possible, of course, if a bit more difficult. There would be times when Callisto had a clear shot at Europa. But they ought to evacuate Europa as well. Hem in the DIED forces by concentrating on Callisto. Cut the DIED off from their supplies.

  There was the additional problem that Io was the prime power source for the entire Jovian system. It was the only Galilean moon that wasn’t pretty much ice through and through. Io had a magnetic field, and because of that, Jupiter had the largest magnetosphere in the solar system. And one pole of that magnetosphere was Io.

  And where there was magnetism, there was electricity. The power plant on Io generated enough energy to power the cities on the other three inner moons. Ganymede, in Met hands, was running on all-nuclear at the moment—and all because Redux had ordered the microwave transfer station that beamed power to that moon to be shut down as soon as Ganymede fell to DIED forces.

  But was she given credit for that quick action? Not enough. She’d probably single-handedly saved the system, if the fools could only see. History would judge her. History. That’s what she was going to have to trust despite her following Sherman’s foolhardy orders. History would vindicate her stand against them.

  She was tempted to help history along, but no. She’d follow the damn orders to the best of her ability.

  Redux gazed around her situation room in Telegard, the principal city of Callisto. Staff scurried to and fro about a bare room. She enabled the virtual displays, and the place lit up with troop information, communications data, scenario enactments.

  She turned to Major Antinomian, her principal staff officer. It had been Antinomian whom she’d sent to inform the cloudships of Ganymede’s fall. That move had perhaps been a mistake on her part, a moment of panic. The merci had been jammed in the vicinity; she’d thought the whole Jovian system was going down. Now she understood that the Met forces, while very powerful, were not at the moment of a strength to keep and hold the entire system. After the mysterious merci jamming had stopped, the standoff became evident. But it was far too late to call Antinomian back.

  “Give me an update on Io,” she said to Antinomian.

  “Troops are on high alert. We’ve got all jump craft ready to go. The rocketry defense shield—what there is to it—is up and running after that glitch in the number two battery yesterday.”

  “What was that?”

  “Some infiltration grist-mil got through the security. It built itself into an access window, then shattered when a maintenance crew was passing by. Wasn’t pretty. Most of the crew was nonadapted, and their pellicles couldn’t handle the toxic load. You know Io. Sulfur dioxide poisoning.”

  “Poor bastards.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But the problem is solved?”

  “So far as we can tell. They’ve run a triple sweep for any more of the stuff.”

  “Very good,” said Redux. “What about intelligence?”

  Antinomian folded her hands, then spread them, revealing a three-dimensional graph between her two outstretched palms.

  “Vinculum traffic has increased within the last two hours, General,” she said. “Notice the spikes here and here.” She highlighted them with red sparks within the graphics.

  “It was already high…”

  “Looks like an attack is imminent. Captain Leadcore has projected a statistical window, with a ninety-eight percentile initiation probability within thirty minutes, plus or minus five.”

  Leadcore was a free convert. He was a math coprocessor, a doubled copy. He had no regulators on either copy. Redux didn’t know how she felt about this. While legal here in the outer system, such an unrestricted copy would be absolutely prohibited in the Met. But there was no denying that the captain was a magician with statistics.

  “Communicate those probabilities to captains and above on Io,” Redux said. “Put them on proximate alert.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Antinomian stood still, gazing straight ahead, but Redux knew she was off in the virtuality of the knit, linking with the Ionian field officers.

  Redux took a final look around the situation room. Detectors at one hundred thousand kilometers out from Io were reporting five ships approaching from Ganymede. Not enough resolution to identify.

  The war for Io was starting.

  She felt both dread and excitement. Her troops were as ready as she could make them. But she had the nagging notion that she’d missed something. No, that couldn’t be. Her strongest point was logistical preparation. You give the troops the tools they need, then they get the job done. Logistics. Efficiency. Efficiency was how she’d made her name in the first place. Efficiency would win the war. Good generalship based on age-old principles.

  What was it she’d forgotten?

  Damn that Sherman! It was all his fault for putting doubts into her head.

  The long-range sensors reported five ships. Two Dirac-class, two Dabna-class. And a carrier. Must be the Schwarzes Floβ. Then the sensors went silent, destroyed. The next ring of sensors discovered the ships soon enough. Fifty thousand kilometers.

  It’s going to be a hell of fight, Redux thought. Maybe we’ll actually win.

  Two

  Sulfur. You can’t get the stink off your skin, out of your clothes. Hell, out of your lungs. Whole fucking moon’s a stink bomb, but they say it’s our stink bomb, so I get the chance to die for it, hooray! Shit, report over the knit that the Metties are coming. Battle stations. So I’m off to my bubble on the north wall of the Polar Magnetosphere Facility, or, as everybody around here calls it, the Capacitor.

  Corporal Vladislav Carkey double-timed down the access corridor and slid into his gunner’s chair just as his bubblemate, Dowon, slid into hers. You could run very fast in 0.18 Earth gravity, but you had to have resin on your shoes to keep from pushing yourself into the ceiling with every step you took and banging your head.

  “How’s it going, Corporal Carkey?” she asked him. “I see you didn’t get your beauty rest.”

  “Same to you, Dowon,” he replied, blinking up the virtual display for his cannon controls. “Systems check, okay?”

  “Systems check,” said Dowon.

  The both ran down their respective lists as the cannon hissed, rumbled, burped. Then the click, like a light switch, when the antimatter suddenly existed in the firm enclosure of the containment bottle. The room went dark, and Carkey switched from visual light to infrared. His displays in the virtuality retained their original color, but the remainder of the room took on a magenta hue.

  Outside the bubble, Io seethed, flowed, and spewed. The moon was one of the most geologically active bodies in the known universe. The enormous tidal forces set up by Jupiter not only generated the largest planetary magnetosphere in the solar system, they also created tremendous heat under the surface of Io.

  It was a place of extremes: volcanoes, foul-smelling geysers, lakes, colder, solidified plains. Sulfur was the primary component of this moon. On Io the element and its compounds could exist, depending on conditions, as solid, liquid, or gas. Io itself was so much like the traditional conception of hell that nobody even bothered to make the comparison anymore.

  Yellow, red, green (the green of copper compounds, not the green of life), and white, these were the colors of the place. Yet there was something about the moon that Carkey liked. It wasn’t like Europa—it wasn’t trying to tease you into believing you could live here comfortably. Carkey’s two uncles, his mother’s brothers, had settled there fifty years ago, and the old guys still talked as if they were fighting the place to get a living.

  What they were actually doing was harnessing it. Because all of the activity meant energy—
energy that could be gathered and used by the remainder of the Jovian system. Carkey had heard his uncle Yoland and uncle Hors enough on the subject. Plus, Carkey himself had been studying mechanical engineering at his free grange. Well, he hadn’t done a great deal of studying, to tell the truth—mostly partying and flunking tests that would have been a breeze back in his primary school. Of course, back then he’d actually sat down and studied every once in a while. After two years, he had dropped out of the lyceum and joined the army.

  Except for the fact that he might die at any moment, it hadn’t been so bad. The discipline had been good for him. Anyway, once you got the idea how things worked, it was quite possible to slack off and not get caught when you absolutely needed a break. He had to admit that slacking off had less and less appeal to him these days. He was even entertaining thoughts of going back to engineering school after all this was over. Maybe signing on with the uncles’ firm here on Io after that. Become a god-damn pioneer.

  If I survive, of course. Shouldn’t think about getting killed—bad luck, they say. But how the hell can I not, with the entire Met Army headed in this direction? Those DI commandos—if they’re half as good as they show them on the merci, I’ll be done for in half a second, and that’ll be that.

  Outside, the Capacitor began to glow. A charge was building up for transmission. Carkey remembered enough of his electrical engineering course to figure out the basics of the device. Energy from the Jovian magnetosphere was collected and dumped into the Capacitor, which served as a kind of temporary reservoir until the charge reached a certain voltage. Or was it amperage? Whatever. Then it would spark the energy up to a polar satellite array, which would convert it to microwaves and beam it either back to the surface cities and habitats for use or off to the relays that would convey it to the other moons in the system.