Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  The rockets had little noticeable effect, and the Sciatica came in hard. Leo tried to prepare himself for the impact, but he knew it was useless.

  It was. He was staring down the fuselage of the craft at the cockpit door. This door seemed to come toward him.

  But actually the front end is crumpling, Leo thought.

  He was surprised at how lucid his conclusion was. Then the door hit him full in the face—and he was hanging on to it, like a surfer caught in a gigantic wipeout, but still clinging to his board. Leo had surfed on Earth—but only in the Atlantic. This had to be more like those killer Pacific waves that he’d heard about but never seen.

  Hang on.

  He was in a maelstrom of shredded metal. A twisting swirl, angled in a parabola over the surface of the moon. Absolute silence. Vacuum! A moment of panic before he remembered that his modified body was space-adapted.

  A scraping slap against Charon’s surface, clawing for purchase, but his momentum carrying him farther, banging him up more. The door still with him. Another, harder slap. The door banging him in the head.

  Darkness.

  Awaking to groggy silence.

  Then a crackling—as of a lake of ice, shattering.

  How can I hear this? There’s no atmosphere here.

  The sound was inside him, in his inner ear. Something was happening to his body. He raised a hand in the wan light. It was seething, as if it were covered with ants.

  Grist. Grist-mil. Oh shit.

  But something inside him wouldn’t let him succumb. He’d been rebuilt from the ground up, after all. He’d been remade by the best grist engineers and programmers in the Met. Whatever they put into his pellicle was stronger even than this military grist.

  Leo sat up. Blood rushed from his head, and he almost passed out again. Guess that wonder-grist doesn’t solve every problem, he thought. He pushed himself up again more slowly. All seemed well. He rolled over onto his hands and knees, and, after a moment, managed to stand up.

  He was on godforsaken Charon, all right. Dirty corn ice under his feet. A webwork of more dense material woven through the ice, giving the ground a checkerboard appearance. Grist. To his right and left, structures brisling with guns and antennas. Behind him the crumpled hulk of the Sciatica .

  Bodies strewn about.

  Where was his sergeant? Leo took a few shuffling steps. Not much gravity in these parts. Almost anywhere else, and he’d have crumpled back to the ground; here he stayed up. Leo hadn’t learned the names of his platoon. Every member was new except for his sergeant, Dory Folsom. Now they were all dead. Once again, the war had gone through his entire platoon and he was the only one left.

  But Dory wasn’t among the bodies, so far as he could tell. Maybe she was back in the wreckage of the Sciatica. Leo started following the debris trail back toward the crashed ship.

  “Halt!”

  What the hell? No sound could carry through this atmosphere—or lack thereof. Then he remembered.

  Oh shit, it’s in my head again. On the merci.

  “Halt!”

  “I’m halting,” Leo replied through the merci. He tried to freeze into place, but he teetered a bit. He was still shaky from—well, from everything.

  Two forms emerged from behind a walled bunker. One of them was pointing a wrist rocket at Leo’s torso.

  “Deactivate your weapons!” Leo presumed it was the guy with the wrist rocket doing the talking. “Do it now!”

  “I couldn’t hit the ground if you point me down, the shape I’m in at the moment,” said Leo. But he keyed up his weaponry override and stood down. His own rocketry weapons reencased themselves at his wrists and elbows. The bullets fell from his projectile clip, and the energy readings for his antimatter rifling lowered. He hoped the others had the ability to read the drop and understand what it meant. “I’m fully powered down,” he told them.

  “Hold out your hands.” The soldier without the rocket weapon approached him. Leo did as he was told. The soldier clipped a set of containment manacles over Leo’s wrists. He felt the grist from the manacles swarming over his pellicle. But it stopped skin deep as soon as his Aschenbach persona identified himself by DNA and serial number.

  Leo took a longer look at his captors. One was a short dark-complected woman, about Leo’s height. She was squat, but muscular. The other was a black man. You could never tell for certain with the fully space-adapted, but he looked to be in his early twenties.

  He was wearing the black and steel blue of the Federal Army. Leo glanced at the man’s shoulder insignia.

  Sergeant. Third Sky and Light Brigade.

  Thank God.

  “By the way,” Leo said, “I surrender.”

  “Good,” the man replied. “Otherwise, we’d have to blow your fucking head off.” He motioned over at the other soldier. “We still might, so don’t get any ideas.”

  “Don’t worry,” Leo said. “I’ve been trying to get taken prisoner for over a year now.”

  “Glad to oblige. But we’re not off this fucking rock yet,” said the other. He motioned toward the bleak horizon. “Now march, soldier.”

  Nineteen

  PLUTO SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 09:12, THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 3017

  DIED FLAGSHIP STREICHHOLTZER

  General Kang Blanket had decided that he was facing none other than Sherman himself. The Old Crow was out here at Pluto, and very likely inside the stolen ship that had once been the Jihad.

  Sherman was tantalizing him, of that there was no doubt. But soon he would have the man. Sherman had made an error—an understandable error, but a mistake nonetheless. He’d remained in orbit for three e-days, trying to get his soldiers off the surface of Pluto and Charon. But doing so, he’d boxed himself in.

  Something had gone horribly wrong down there—what, Blanket did not know. It had to be some kind of transmutational grist interaction. Both bodies’ surfaces were, for the most part, now inaccessible on the merci. There were a couple of gateways to the local virtuality still functioning, but the only information that was emerging was a mishmash of odd images and text statements. Blanket had his code specialists on it, but nobody had been able to crack the lockout and get back in.

  He could deal with reestablishing control of the local grist after he defeated Sherman. That time was not far off. Despite the irritating way the fremden commander was using cloudship and converted DIED cruiser as a sort of shield and spear, Blanket had seven ships surrounding his foe.

  There would be no exit.

  Twenty

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 19:44, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017

  ALLSKY’S COMPANY B

  The fight for the Sciatica attack ships was hard and bloody work for Company B. Cutting through the hulls took longer than expected, and alerted defenders inside as to exactly where the incursion would take place. There was withering fire concentrated on the troops when they burst in.

  But it wasn’t enough to stop them. The attack ships had eight to ten crew aboard. The fremden forces outnumbered them in every instance. There were plenty more DIED infantry in the holds of the destroyers, but they had not been deployed. The Sciatica crews faced an even greater problem, however: Half of them were not space-adapted. As soon as their hulls were breached and their atmospheres drained, they were literally dead meat.

  Still, those that could fought bravely. More were killed than were captured. At one point, it seemed as if they got a surge of resolve all at once, and they fought back en masse, almost overwhelming the larger numbers of their opponents. This was to happen more than once throughout the course of the war, and became known as the “Glory Surge” to the Federal forces.

  Once the infantry was in control of the attack ships, they quickly sent a free-convert specialty team into the grist of the ships. Within moments these robust, fully sentient soldiers overcame the ship’s internal security and took over all systems. The little semisentient artificial intelligences that ran the vessels stood no chance
against full free-convert v-hackers.

  Cleanup squads disengaged the harpoons, nets, and sticky tethers at a blinding speed—most of the tethers were encoded with an automatic disintegration routine that allowed them quickly to break down to constituent particles.

  Four and a half hours had passed since they had been catapulted out by Cloudship Austen.

  As one, the victorious fremden turned their captured ships toward the planet minesweeper that stood between them and Planet Neptune.

  Attacking and destroying the Debeh-Li-Zini was necessary. The Debeh-Li-Zini stood between the victorious Federals and their lost comrades.

  Company B would take out the Debeh-Li-Zini .

  And only then they would go after those who had missed the net and fallen away toward Neptune. Already it was clear that many of their mates would keep falling. Time and gravity were not on their side.

  Twenty-one

  THE OORTS

  LATE SPRING 3017, E-STANDARD

  FEDERAL NAVAL ACADEMY

  From

  The Borasca

  A Memoir

  By Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front

  All Naval Academy students, men and women, have the rank of “spacer,” which is equivalent to an enlisted rank between warrant officer and ensign. Freshmen—and all in my first class necessarily were such—are called plebes. The student body is known as the Battalion of Spacers, or simply the battalion. We call the Federal Navy the Fleet.

  The academy battalion is divided into six companies. The company command structure is headed by an outstanding spacer who is designated company commander. My fellow instructors and I determined this individual during our “Plebe Summer” exercise. In subsequent e-years, with different class levels enrolled, the task was awarded to a likely senior (although we don’t call them seniors, but spacers first class). Overseeing all company activity is the Commandant of Spacers—me—an active duty Navy officer of captain’s rank or above. I took the rank of admiral, since I was also the founder of the Navy itself. Working for the commandant, commissioned naval officers are assigned as company and battalion officers. When we started, all of these were volunteers who had served in some long-term military capacity in the past. There were seven of us: Cloudships Tolstoy, his sons Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol (the remainder of the Tolstoy boys were young enough to be in the class itself), Naipaul, Masereel, and Ortega y Gasset. For a couple of us, “long-term” was stretching the truth a bit. Nonetheless, we soldiered on and did what we could.

  We instructors concentrated on the three basics of strategy and tactics: firepower, scouting, and command and control. The youngsters all started out quite impressed with their own firepower, of course. It was necessary to leaven this belief with a little reality. One of our first exercises was a multi-e-day fox-and-hound venture out toward Alpha Centauri along the Dark Matter Road. I used old Tolstoy, the keeper of the hidden cloudship graveyard, as the fox, and sent the class after him with the instruction that they had full permission to fire upon him if they could catch him—or stop him from reaching his goal, a beacon placed two million miles out-ways, south by southwest ascending.

  Needless to say, no shot was fired. Not only did Tolstoy elude them along the way, he disguised himself as a meteor shower and took the beacon while a full contingent of seven guarded it. As he was making his escape, Tolstoy raked four of them with fire. This raised some nasty blisters along the unfortunate ones’ shiny coats, but did no lasting damage.

  There were two standouts among my spacers, and they loathed one another. One was the youngest son of Tolstoy. His name was Stone, and, as his name would indicate, he was a hard young man in every way, with a cold, imperial attitude. He went after every task with a merciless efficiency. He was the king of close-order drill, and, when he was drill captain, had been known to fire a stinging blast of e-m radiation at those who didn’t live up to his lofty standards. He was, however, intensely loyal to his small group of friends. Unfortunately, he treated everyone else as near pariahs.

  Stone’s attitude was not entirely of his own choosing. He’d been raised in a graveyard, after all, and taught to tend scrupulously to the monuments and memorials we cloudships set in place for our kind. As the youngest of thirteen sons, Stone was given all of the tasks the other boys and men did not want to do, but, at the same time, held to the yard-master, Tolstoy’s, unyieldingly high expectations. The Tolstoy clan was a stern bunch. Had I not known the family for many years, I would have pronounced them a callous lot. But this was outward appearance. They were in fact a tight and loving group—if uniformly taciturn by nature. They got this as much from their mother, Cloudship Samandacole, as from their undertaker father.

  My other star spacer could not have been more different. This was Cloudship Sojourner Truth. She was scrappy, as tough as nails, and an inspired improviser in tight situations. She was the daughter of some old friends of Tacitus whom I’d never gotten along with politically—Cloudships Kerouac and Parker. These two had been staunchly against any military action during the Council debates, but I knew it had nothing to do with undue influence from the inner system. They were committed pacifists. They had been so permissive in their upbringing of Sojourner Truth, or “Soje,” as she wished to be called, that the only way the poor girl could rebel against them was by volunteering for the Navy.

  With her free and easy way, Soje was a natural leader among the midlevel spacers, who looked to her for their attitude but didn’t choose to emulate her ceaseless drive to excel. Most of them knew about the long hours of practice and study she put in away from the group, but they didn’t hold that against her so long as she continued to make it all look easy when it counted and downplayed any accomplishment with a droll aside or two.

  Soje and Stone were in a competition from the first, and, I have to admit, I deliberately exacerbated the situation to get even better performances out of both of them. I was careful to let neither of them know the high regard in which I held them. But this was a school, and one must assign grades. I could not help giving them excellent marks. Each was fixated on the other’s ratings, and they continually worked to knock each other from the top spot during our Plebe Summer.

  Near the bottom of the heap, at least at the beginning, was Cloudship Schweick. He was a continual cutup and lazybones. Yet there was something I saw in the youngster. His pranks, practical jokes, and excuses were amazingly inventive. I knew that if he ever put the kind of effort he put into those activities into his actual duties as a sailor—well, he would be an admiral of the fleet one day. Much to each participant’s dismay, I assigned Stone, Soje, and Schweik to the same attack triad—the three-ship grouping that formed the building block of all of our tactical maneuvering. In the Federal Navy, the triad was your unit—the people on whom you depended for survival.

  Giving Stone and Soge Schweik to look after also served the purpose of holding those two go-getters back a bit, and allowing the other ships to feel as if they were still in competition to be the best (when, of course, they didn’t stand a chance). The triad was official known as Plebe Spacer Unit 5-N, but everyone called them Triple S. Schweik, merely to spite his two comrades, I’m sure, got better and better at his duties. By the end of Plebe Summer, it was obvious that, in Triple S, we had found three of the six leaders for our battalion companies when the actual Navy was formed, and battle was joined.

  Excerpt from

  The Journal of Spacer First Class Sojourner Truth

  What is Lebedev thinking? Okay, I have to admit I misjudged him a bit at the outset. He was just trying to make us understand how tough a war could be. There’s no way he could simulate a war, so he gave us the drill, and all that bullshit. Okay. I get it now.

  But oh man, how I loathe the guys in my triad! I’m stuck between a merry fool and a control-freak psychopath. I mean, both of them have a certain amount of ability and smarts, but the way they choose to employ it—they are a couple of creeps, if you ask me.

  Take the other day when we
were on maneuvers about twenty thousand klicks down the Road. The drill instructor—it was Gogol that day—had us doing dives at some godforsaken chunk of dark matter, with each of us taking turns at point. The object was to whisk away some e-m hover marker before the beacon alerts “surface defenses”—which, in this case, was a clunky old railgun from premillennial times.

  So I go about it the right way: I come in on a tangent and use the back of the asteroid for cover. I send the goony boys in on wider parabolas with apexes just outside of the railgun’s range.

  But do they follow instructions? Of course not. Ice Man Stone decides that my tactics are suspect, and he thinks he’ll just go after the beacon himself after I fuck up. So instead of drawing fire and blasting off into space while I come in, he pulls up to a full stop and turns to thrust back toward the beacon—fully expecting me to miss it, and fully expecting to save the day with his own sorry ass.

  The other goony boy dips into the railgun’s range, and takes a hit just for the hell of it. Says he wanted to know what a butterfly kiss felt like. When the DI explained to him that, in a real situation, he would have been fucking with an antimatter Auger cannon, he laughs and explains to us all that it wasn’t an antimatter cannon, now was it?

  No, jerkwad. That’s why you’re still alive, I tell him.

  So what’s the big deal with goofing off a little? he says.

  I hate them both.

  I got the beacon, of course. And so did the goony boys when their turns came. I have to admit that I pulled a couple of unhelpful stunts when it came their turn for point.

  Hey—who can blame me? I’m dealing with a couple of imbeciles here.

  After three e-months of all the hell I could dream up to put my charges through, I called an end to Plebe Summer and began academy classes proper. With the help of Cloudship Michelangelo, I created a virtual naval academy on our cloudship-restricted merci. My classrooms were austere workspaces, but the institutional campus itself was lushly designed, with lots of anachronistic motifs lifted from the great seafaring nation’s military academies on old Earth. The classes took place on the decks of virtual oceangoing ships—all of them historical re-creations. Michelangelo, a master merci designer, even threw in an occasional squall now and again, and more than one spacer faced a very real bout of seasickness as a result.