by Jean Roberta
“So fast? That’s bad, boss.” Laporte watches her captain, pale lanky daughter of Marineris sprawled across three seats in the half-shed tangle of her flight suit, and makes a fearful search for damage. Radiation poisoning, or worse. A deeper sort of wound.
In the beginning Simms was broken and Laporte saved her, a truth Simms has never acknowledged but must must know. And she saved Laporte in turn, by ferocity, by hate, by being the avatar of everything Laporte didn’t know.
And here in the sunglare Laporte is afraid that the saving’s been undone. Not that it should matter, this concern of hearts, when they’ll all be dead so soon—but—
“Hey,” Laporte says, catching on. “You sneak, boss. I call bullshit.”
“Got me.” Simms pushes the bottle cap (ARD/AE-002 ANTI RADIATION, it says) across. A little tremble in her fingers. Not so severe. “They’re all too busy to sleep.”
The caps game is an Ubuntu game, a children’s game, a kill-time game, an I’m-afraid game. Say something, truth or lie. See if your friends call it right.
It teaches you to see other people. Martin Mandho, during a childhood visit, told her that. This is why it’s so popular in the military. Discipline and killing require dehumanization. The caps game lets soldiers reclaim shared subjectivity.
“Your go, Morrigan,” Simms says, shuffling her pile of ARD/AE-002 caps. The callsign might be a habit, might be a reminder: we’re still soldiers.
“I was in CIC. Think I saw Captain Sorensen tearing up over a picture of Captain Kyrematen.” Yangtze’s skipper, Sorensen’s comrade. Lost.
Simms’ face armors up. “I don’t want to talk about anything that just happened.”
“Is that a call?”
“No. Of course it’s true.”
Laporte wants to stand up and say: Fuck this. Fuck this stupid game, fuck the rank insignia, fuck the rules. We’re falling into the sun, there’s no rescue coming. Boss, I—
But what would she say? It’s not as simple as the obvious thing (and boy, it’s obvious), not about lust or discipline or loyalty. Bigger than that, truer than that, full of guilt and fire and salvation, because what she really wants to say is something about—
About how Simms is—important, right, but that’s not it. That’s not big enough.
Laporte can’t get her tongue around it. She doesn’t know how to say it.
Simms closes her eyes for a moment. In the near distance, another radiation alarm joins the threnody.
•
Things Laporte already knows how to say—
I’m going to kill that one, yes, I killed him. Say it like this:
Morrigan, tally bandit. Knife advantage, have pure, pressing now.
Guns guns guns.
And the ship in her sights, silver-dart Atalanta built under some other star by hands not unlike her own, the fighter and its avionics and torch and weapons and its desperate skew as it tries to break clear, the pilot too—they all come apart under the coilgun hammer. The pilot too.
Blossoming shrapnel. Spill of fusion fire. Behold Laporte, starmaker. (Some of the color in the flame is human tissue, atomizing.)
She made her first kill during the fall of Jupiter, covering Third Fleet’s retreat. Sometimes rookies fall apart after their first, eaten up by guilt. Laporte’s seen this. But the cry-scream-puke cycle never hits her, even though she’s been afraid of her own compassion, even though her callsign was almost Flower Girl.
Instead she feels high.
There’s an Ubuntu counselor waiting on the Solaris, prepared to debrief and support pilots with post-kill trauma. She waves him away. Twenty years of Ubuntu education, cherish all life hammered into the metal of her. All meaningless, all wasted.
That high says: born killer.
She was still flying off the Solaris here, Kassim on her wing. Still hadn’t met Simms yet.
•
Who is Lorna Simms? Noemi Laporte thinks about this, puzzles and probes, and sometimes it’s a joy, and sometimes it hurts. Sometimes she doesn’t think about it at all—mostly when she’s with Simms, flying, killing.
Maybe that’s who Simms is. The moment. A place where Laporte never has to think, never has a chance to reflect, never has to be anything other than laughter and kill-joy. But that’s a selfish way to go at it, isn’t it? Simms is her own woman, impatient, profane, ferocious, and Laporte shouldn’t make an icon of her. She’s not a lion, not a war-god, not some kind of oblivion Laporte can curl up inside.
A conversation they have, after a sortie, long after they saved each other:
“You flew like shit today, Morrigan.”
“That so, boss?”
Squared off in the shower queue, breathing the fear stink of pilots and Indus crew all waiting for cold water. Simms a pylon in the crowd and dark little Laporte feels like the raven roosting on her.
“You got sloppy on your e-poles,” Simms says. “Slipped into the threat envelope twice.”
“I went in to finish the kill, sir. Calculated risk.”
“Not much good if you don’t live to brag about it.”
“Yet here I am, sir.”
“You’ll spend two hours in the helmet running poles and drags before I let you fly again.” Simms puts a little crack of authority on the end of the reprimand, and then grimaces like she’s just noticed the smell. “Flight Lieutenant Levi assures me that they were good kills, though.”
Laporte is pretty sure Simms hasn’t spoken to Levi since preflight. She grins toothsomely at her Captain, and Simms, exasperated, grinning back though (!), shakes her head and sighs.
“You love it, don’t you,” she says. “You’re happy out there.”
Laporte puts her hands on the back of her head, an improper attitude towards a superior officer, and holds the grin. “I’m coming for you, sir.”
She’s racing Simms for the top of the Second Fleet kill board. They both know who’s going to win.
•
I’m in trouble. Say it like this:
Boss, Morrigan, engaged defensive, bandit my six on plane, has pure.
And Simms’ voice flat and clear on the tactical channel, so unburdened by tone or technology that it just comes off like clean truth, an easy promise on a calm day, impossible not to trust:
Break high, Morrigan. I’ve got you.
There’s a little spark deep down there under the calm, an ember of rage or glee. It’s the first thing Laporte ever knew about Simms, even before her name.
•
Laporte had a friend and wingman, Kassim. He killed a few people, clean ship-to-ship kills, and afterwards he’d come back to the Solaris with Laporte and they’d drink and shout and chase women until the next mission.
But he broke. Sectioned out. A psychological casualty: cry-scream-puke.
Why? Why Kassim, why not Laporte? She’s got a theory. Kassim used to talk about why the war started, how it would end, who was right, who was wrong. And, fuck, who can blame him? Ubuntu was supposed to breed a better class of human, meticulously empathic, selflessly rational.
Care for those you kill. Mourn them. They are human too, and no less afraid.
How could you think like that and then pull the trigger, ride the burst, guns guns guns and boom, scratch bandit, good kill? So Laporte gave up on empathy and let herself ride the murder-kick. She hated herself for it. But at least she didn’t break.
Too many people are breaking. The whole Federation is getting its ass kicked.
After Kassim sectioned out, Laporte put in for a transfer to the frigate Indus, right out on the bleeding edge. She’d barely met Captain Simms, barely knew her. But she’d heard Simms on FLEETTAC, heard the exultation and the fury in her voice as she led her squadron during the Meridian ambush and the defense of Rheza Station.
“It’s a suicide posting,” Captain Telfer warned her. “The Indus eats new pilots and shits ash.”
But Simms’ voice said: I know how to live with this. I know how to love it.
•
I’m with you, Captain Simms. I’ll watch over you while you go ahead and make the kill. Say it like this:
Boss, Morrigan, tally, visual. Press!
That’s all it takes. A fighter pilot’s brevity code is a strict, demanding form: say as much as you can with as few words as possible, while you’re terrified and angry and you weigh nine times as much as you should.
Like weaponized poetry, except that deep down your poem always says We have to live. They have to die.
For all their time together on the Indus, Laporte has probably spoken more brevity code to Simms than anything else.
•
People from Earth aren’t supposed to be very good at killing.
Noemi Laporte, callsign Morrigan, grew up in a sealed peace. The firewall defense that saved the solar system from alien annihilation fifty years ago also collapsed the Sol-Serpentis wormhole, leaving the interstellar colonies out in the cold—a fistful of sparks scattered to catch fire or gutter out. Weary, walled in, the people of Sol abandoned starflight and built a cozy nest out of the wreckage: the eudaimonic Federation, democracy underpinned by gentle, simulation-guided Ubuntu philosophy. We have weathered enough strife, Laporte remembers—Martin Mandho, at the podium in Hellas Planitia for the fortieth anniversary speech. In the decades to come, we hope to build a community of compassion and pluralism here in Sol, a new model for the state and for the human mind.
And then they came back.
Not the aliens, oh, no no, that’s the heart of it—they’re still out there, enigmatic, vast, xenocidal. And the colonist Alliance, galvanized by imminent annihilation, has to be ready for them.
Ready at any price.
These are our terms. An older Laporte, listening to another broadcast: the colonists’ Orestes at the reopened wormhole, when negotiations finally broke down. We must have Sol’s wealth and infrastructure to meet the coming storm. We appealed to your leaders in the spirit of common humanity, but no agreement could be reached.
This is a matter of survival. We cannot accept the Federation’s policy of isolation. Necessity demands that we resort to force.
That was eighteen months ago.
A lot of people believe that the whole war’s a problem of communication, fundamentally solvable. Officers in the Solaris’s off-duty salon argue that if only the Federation and the Alliance could just figure out what to say, how to save face and stand down, they could find a joint solution. A way to give the Alliance resources and manpower while preserving the Federation from socioeconomic collapse and the threat of alien extermination. It’s the Ubuntu dream, the human solution.
Captain Simms doesn’t hold to that, though.
A conversation they had, on the Indus’s observation deck:
“But,” Laporte says (she doesn’t remember her words exactly, or what she’s responding to; and anyway, she’s ashamed to remember). “The Alliance pilots are people too.”
“Stow that shit.” Simms’ voice a thundercrack, unexpected: she’d been across the compartment, speaking to Levi. “I won’t have poison on my ship.”
The habit of a lifetime and the hurt of a moment conspire against military discipline and Laporte almost makes a protest—Ubuntu says, Martin Mandho said—
But Simms is already on her, circling, waiting for the outspoken new transfer to make one more mistake. “What’s the least reliable weapons system on your ship, Morrigan?”
A whole catalogue of options, a bestiary of the Federation’s reluctant innovations—least reliable? Must be the Mulberry GES-2.
“Wrong. It’s you. Pilots introduce milliseconds of unaffordable latency. In a lethal combat environment, hesitation kills.” Simms is talking to everyone now, making an example of Laporte. She sits there stiff and burning, waiting for it to be over. “If the Admiralty had its way, they’d put machines in these cockpits. But until that day, your job is to come as close as you can. Your job is to keep your humanity out of the gears. How do you do that?”
“Hate, sir,” Levi says.
“Hate.” Simms lifts her hands to an invisible throat. Bears down, for emphasis, as her voice drops to a purr. She’s got milspec features, aerodyne chin, surgical cheekbones, and Laporte feels like she’s going to get cut if she stares, but she does. “There are no people in those ships you kill. They have no lovers, no parents, no home. They were never children and they will never grow old. They invaded your home, and you are going to stop them by killing them all. Is that clear, Laporte?”
Willful, proud, stupid, maybe thinking that Simms would give her slack on account of that first time they flew together, Laporte says: “That’s monstrous.”
Simms puts the ice on her: full-bore all-aspect derision. “It’s a war. Monsters win.”
•
The Alliance flagship, feared by Federation pilot and admiral alike, is Atreus. Her missile batteries fire GTM-36 Block 2 Eos munitions (Memorize that name, pilot. Memorize these capabilities). The Atreus’s dawn-bringers have a fearsome gift: given targeting data, they can perform their own jumps. Strike targets far across the solar system. The euphemism is “over the horizon.”
Laporte used to wonder about the gun crews who run the Eos batteries. Do they know what they’re shooting at, when they launch a salvo? Do they invent stories to assure each other that the missiles are intended for Vital Military Targets? When they hear about collateral damage, a civilian platform shattered and smashed into Europa’s ice in the name of “shipping denial,” do they speculate in a guilty hush: Was that us?
Maybe that’s the difference between the Alliance and the Federation, the reason the Alliance is winning. The colonists can live with it.
She doesn’t wonder about these things any more, though.
One night in the gym the squadron gets to sparring in a round robin and then Laporte’s in the ring with Simms, nervous and half-fixed on quitting until they get into it and slam to the mat, grappling for the arm-bar or the joint lock, and Laporte feels it click: it’s just like the dogfight, like the merge, pacing your strength exactly like riding a turn, waiting for the moment to cut in and shoot.
She gets Simms in guard, flips her, puts an elbow in her throat. Feels herself grinning down with the pressure while everyone else circles and hoots: Morrrrrrigan—look at her, she’s on it—
Simms looks back up at her and there’s this question in her wary wonderful eyes, a little annoyed, a little curious, a little scared: What are you?
She rolls her shoulders, lashes her hips, throws Laporte sideways. Laporte’s got no breath and no strength left to spend but she thinks Simms’s just as tapped and the rush feeds her, sends her clawing back for the finish.
Simms puts her finger up, thumb cocked, before Laporte can reach her. “Bang,” she says.
Laporte falls on her belly. “Oof. Aargh.”
It’s important that Simms not laugh too hard. She’s got to maintain command presence. She’s been careful about that, since their first sortie.
•
You need help, Captain Simms. Say it like this:
This is the first time they flew together, when Laporte saved Simms. It happened because of a letter Laporte received, after her transfer to Indus was approved but before she actually shuttled out to her new post.
FLEETNET PERSONAL—TAIGA/TARN/NODIS
FLIGHT LIEUTENANT KAREN NG [YANGTZE]
//ENSIGN NOEMI LAPORTE [INDUS]
Laporte:
Just got word of your transfer. You may remember me from the Nauticus incident. I’m de facto squadron leader aboard Yangtze. Lorna Simms and I go way back.
Admiral Netreba is about to select ships for a big joint operation against the Alliance. Two months ago the Indus would have been top of the list, and Simms with it. But they’ve been on the front too long, and the scars are starting to show.
I hear reports of a 200% casualty rate. Simms and Ehud Levi are the only survivors of the original squadron. I hear that Simms doesn’t give new pilots callsigns, that she won’t let
the deck crew paint names on their ships. If she’s going to lose her people, she’d rather not allow them to be people.
It’s killing morale. Simms won’t open up to her replacements until they stop dying, and they won’t stop dying until she opens up.
I want the Indus with us when we make our move, but Netreba won’t pick a sick ship. See if you can get through to Simms.
Regards,
Karen Ng
Laporte takes this shit seriously. When Simms takes her out for a training sortie, a jaunt around the Martian sensor perimeter, she’s got notes slipped into the plastic map pockets on her flightsuit thighs, gleaned from gossip and snippy FLEETNET posts: responds well to confidence and plain talk, rejects overt empathy, accepts professional criticism but will enforce a semblance of military discipline. No pictures, though.
She knows she’s over-thinking it, but fuck, man, it’s hard not to be nervous. Simms is her new boss, her wartime idol, the woman who might get her killed. Simms is supposed to teach her how to live with—with all this crazy shit. And now it turns out she’s broken too? Is there anyone out here who hasn’t cracked?
Maybe a little of that disappointment gets into Laporte’s voice. Afterwards, because of the thing that happens next, she can’t remember exactly how she broached it—professional inquiry, officer to superior? Flirtatious breach of discipline? Oafishly direct? But she remembers it going bad, remembers Simms curling around from bemusement to disappointment, probably thinking: Great, Solaris is shipping me its discipline cases so I can get them killed.
Then the Alliance jumps them. Four Nyx, a wolfpack out hunting stragglers. Bone-white metal cast in shark shapes. Shadows on the light of their own fusion stars.
Simms, her voice a cutting edge, a wing unpinioned, shedding all the weight of death she carries: “Morrigan, Lead, knock it off, knock it off, I see jump flash, bandits two by two.” And then, realizing as Laporte does that they’re not getting clear, that help’s going to be too long coming: “On my lead, Morrigan, we’re going in. Get your fangs out.”
And Laporte puts it all away. Seals it up, like she’s never been able to before. Just her and the thirty-ton Kentauroi beneath her and the woman on her wing.
