Nightside on Callisto and Other Stories

by Linda Nagata

  “Move!” Berit shouted.

  Jayne saw the bright blue light of another torch darting toward her face. She rolled. A line of heat seared her forearm, followed by a blade of cold. A muscle-assist popped her back onto her feet as two torches jabbed toward her. She jumped back, pursued by a pair of mechs, each with a torch in one hand, a saw in the other. Pain like a vice gripped her forearm.

  She glanced at the wound. The torch had cut a line in her suit, but it had not cut quite through. She pinched the burnt edges together, helping the suit’s healthy tissue to meet and seal. Then she jumped again to avoid the oncoming mechs. With chagrin, she realized they’d learned to work together in their attack—doubtless from the very recent example of cooperative assault that she and Berit had shown them.

  “Okay, Jaynie?” Berit asked.

  “So far.”

  They’d brought down one mech each, but there were still two more on the roof. Both pursued Jayne, torches out in a coordinated rush—until Berit tackled one from behind. It went down. Berit slapped open the panel, decommissioned it, and was up again in seconds, while Jayne led the last one on a merry chase.

  A column of snow marked every dropped torch. Jayne wove between them to distract the mech, while Berit stood still, trying to go unnoticed in the mech’s busy visual field. Jayne slipped past her, the mech followed, and Berit pounced. Her breathing came ragged over the com. “That’s five down, five to go.”

  Jayne made a quick circuit of the roof, gathering up the torches and switching them off before they could melt all the way down to the membrane. “Now we take care of the honey hole.”

  Berit was still pulling hard for air. “I hope you’re planning to help out a little more this time.”

  Jayne snorted. “I thought it was very noble of me, to be the bait.”

  ***

  They jumped down from the roof. Lorelei came out of the gold-foil dome of the pod. She held up a rectangular wafer for them to see. It was no more than one by two inches, thin as foil. “Light a torch,” she said.

  Jayne complied. The blue flame was a needle in the dark. “That’s it, then? That’s the source of the rogue code? And it’s the only one?”

  “It’s the only one I could find.” Lorelei laid the wafer down on the ice and stepped back. “Burn it.”

  Jayne did. Then she ground it with her boot and burned the remnants again.

  ***

  As they crossed the dusty regolith to the construction site, Jayne spotted a flock of tiny lights a few hundred yards away. “The mechs,” she announced. If not for the glowing circles dotting their legs and carapaces, they might have come unseen. “They must have been recharging in the honey hole.”

  “No,” Berit said grimly. “I think they were taking notes.”

  Lorelei stopped. “I don’t understand. Why are they hauling rebars?”

  The mechs’ legs flashed as they stepped swiftly through the dust and after a few seconds Jayne saw what Berit and Lorelei had spotted first: Three of the mechs were armed with long steel rebars from the construction site.

  “Dammit, Jayne!” Berit groused. “They saw you hit that mech with a rod.”

  Lorelei turned. Jayne couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded scandalized. “You hit a mech? I told you—”

  “This was before you told me.”

  “Did you damage it?”

  Jayne snorted. “Sadly, no. I used a plastic rod. The mechs have improved my example. They’ve got steel.”

  “We aren’t going to be able to get close to them,” Berit warned.

  By this time, the mechs were hardly a hundred yards away, and moving fast.

  “We could just walk out on the ice,” Lorelei said in a small voice. “Lead them away until they run out of power.”

  “If they’ve just come out of the honey hole they’ve got twelve hours. Our suits won’t last that long, and besides, I don’t want to give them a chance to blow the rest of the igloo.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  Jayne touched the seam that marked the healed tear in the forearm of her suit. A pressure suit was just another form of air-skin. Without power, both turned into diamond-hard crystal. “We need to incapacitate the mechs without harming them.”

  “Right,” Berit said with sharp impatience. “And how do we do that?”

  “Let’s go back to the igloo. I have an idea.”

  ***

  Jayne took everyone up to the roof. With a muscle-assist from the suits, the jump was easy.

  “There are two ways we can lose this battle,” Jayne reminded. “We lose if the mechs kill us and we lose if we kill the mechs—but if it comes down to it and we’re going to lose anyway, let’s lose the second way. Agreed?”

  “We’re going to win,” Lorelei said in a hollow voice. Berit echoed the sentiment.

  Jayne shrugged. “Fine, then. Let’s win.”

  She jumped down through the blast hole into the blown bedchamber.

  During the time Jayne had been outside, the ragged edges of the room’s air skin had knit together, joining just a few feet above the floor. With the seal complete, the flexible membrane had hardened into a smooth, curved surface. Jayne kept her feet when she landed on it, but she couldn’t stop herself from sliding until she fetched up against the exposed wall of ice.

  It occurred to Jayne that not an hour before, she’d been sleeping in this room, in the cocoon of Carly’s warmth.

  “No time for sightseeing,” Berit chided gently.

  “Hush, child. Don’t annoy your elders.”

  Jayne fired up her torch. Braced against the wall, she bent low and started cutting.

  At the first touch of the flame, the air skin caved in, dropping away from the heat. Jayne bent lower and kept cutting, until slowly, slowly, the flame sliced the air skin open. The small space enclosed by the air skin had already started to re-pressurize, so for a second ice flakes geysered through the crack. Then, along the cut edges, the air skin softened, again becoming a flexible, rippling fabric as it strove to seal up the cut.

  Jayne didn’t let that happen. She jammed her foot through the crack and kicked it wider. Lorelei jumped down to help, folding the air skin back while Jayne kept cutting, separating a large sheet of it and exposing again the remains of the room.

  Berit stayed on the roof, watching the approaching mechs and counting down the time to their arrival. “You’ve got maybe twenty seconds. Okay, ten. That’s it! The first one just jumped to the roof.”

  Jayne passed the torch to Lorelei. “Be ready to make the last cut, but only when I tell you, not before.”

  It was too dark to see her face past the helmet, but she took the torch with steady hands.

  ***

  With a corner of the membrane gripped in one mechanical hand, Jayne jumped back up through the blast hole. All five remaining mechs were already on the roof. Berit stood facing them, with the hole at her back.

  The air skin writhed in Jayne’s grip, rolling up and down her arm. She hadn’t been afraid of the mechs before—not really, truly afraid. She’d known they were dangerous. After the first bang rod, she’d known her life and Berit’s and Lorelei’s could end as quickly as Carly’s had, but the mech assault had happened so fast she’d had no time to really be afraid . . . until now.

  Of the five mechs, three held ten-foot-long steel rebars, while two used their dexterous double arms to hold torches and drills. Jayne had a nasty suspicion the drills weren’t meant for drilling.

  “Look out!” she shouted, as a mech hurled its drill dead-on at Berit.

  Berit dropped flat. The drill spun past her, disappearing into the dark as the mechs swarmed.

  “Get up!” Jayne growled as the mechs came after Berit—a pack of mechanical zombies armed with sticks and stones and fire. “Berit, move.”

  “Stop worrying about me and do your job!” Berit snapped, still lying face down.

  “Fine, then!” Jayne tugged hard on the air skin. “Lorelei—cut it and jump!”
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  Berit waited another second, until the mechs were in rebar range, then she vaulted backward, landing on her feet. The startled mechs slowed. Berit turned and ran. The zombie mob took off after her, while Lorelei shouted, “Jumping!”

  As Berit darted past the blast hole, Lorelei appeared at its mouth. She hauled herself out, clutching another corner of the air skin in one mechanical hand. They now had a sheet of it, cut free from the room. Severed from its power source, the skin had only seconds before it froze into a crystal coffin. Already Jayne felt it getting stiff in her hands. She got ready, knowing they’d have only one chance to make this work.

  Alongside the blast hole there was only a narrow strip of intact roof. The mechs bunched together as they passed around it, just as Jayne had hoped.

  “Stand firm,” she said. “I’m going . . . now!”

  With the air skin gripped in both hands, she stepped away from the mechanical mob. Lorelei held the other end and the skin became a trembling gray curtain between them. Lorelei stood behind it, but Jayne kept in sight. The mechs saw her and pursued, sweeping past Lorelei. As soon as they’d gone by, Lorelei cut behind them, bending the air skin to form a U.

  Now came the critical part. Could they close the circle? Jayne waited an extra second. Then she turned and darted back along the roof’s edge. The air skin billowed around the mechs as they turned to cut her off. And then she was past them. Lorelei was only a step away.

  “Pull it tight!” Jayne warned.

  An eight-foot rebar came spinning out of the mech mob. Jayne felt betrayed—she’d never taught them to throw a rebar! She ducked, but not fast enough. Steel slammed against her shoulder, knocking her down and sending her skidding across the ice—but she didn’t let go of the air skin. Her mechanical hands kept their grip, even as she plunged over the roof’s edge.

  ***

  Jayne stirred, wondering how she’d come to be in the easy room. She was stretched out on a couch, a blanket pulled up to her chin. Berit sat in a cushy chair a few feet away, watching her with a critical expression. Jayne tried to speak, but she had to swallow a few times before she had enough moisture in her throat to ask, “What the hell is going on?”

  Berit leaned back in her chair. Her eyes narrowed. “You fell off the roof. If you remember, that wasn’t in the plan.”

  It all started coming back. “Where’s Lorelei?”

  “I’m here, Jayne!” Her gentle voice came sailing out of HQ.

  “As it turns out,” Berit went on, “falling off the roof probably saved us all. The air skin wasn’t going to pull tight enough around the mechs to confine them—not until you went over. Then Lorelei jumped after you and dragged the mechs down with her. By the time they knew what hit them, the air skin had crystallized around them and they couldn’t move. All but one. It got out, but I tackled it and shut it down.”

  “And the rest?”

  “We cut them out one at a time and turned them off. Then we reset them all to factory specs. Lorelei’s loading some basic construction directives into them now.”

  “So we got lucky again?”

  “We got lucky. The Red didn’t beat us this time. You did good, Jaynie. I’m proud of you. You didn’t harm even a single enemy.”

  Jayne snorted. “Let’s both try to live a few years longer—and make up for it next time.”

  Linda Nagata

  Linda Nagata grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a publisher and book designer. She is the author of nine novels including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

  Author Spotlight

  In your story “Nightside on Callisto,” four female soldiers face an unexpected conflict. Why did you choose the Jupiter system to set this particular story in?

  The moons of Jupiter were on my mind because I’d just finished reading Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant, Volume 1, Refugee. I knew I wanted to tackle a story that was hard SF, and set off Earth, so why not on one of Jupiter’s moons? I have a bad habit of starting story development with setting instead of plot, and that’s what happened here. So I just kept throwing ideas at the page until I had enough to create a story for my chosen setting.

  There’s an interesting focus on the age of Jayne and the other women of her team in the story. How do you think the many years they’d lived (and what they’d seen) contributed to their reactions under pressure?

  In this story, the premise is that health care is at the point where most of the debilities of old age, both physical and intellectual, have been greatly reduced. Setting war and accident aside, people can expect to live in fair health, and to participate in and actively contribute to their society—up until the moment some part of their physiology suffers catastrophic breakdown. So once we’ve eliminated the health factors that tend to isolate older people, what we have left are elderly like those in the story: people who have been through a lot, and have had time to reflect on why they’re here and what they want to leave behind. If they were the sort to panic when things went wrong, that would be well known by the time they neared the century mark, and they wouldn’t have been selected for the mission. These are can-do survivors.

  Much of your science fiction output touches on nanotechnology. Is that what makes up the pressure suits and air skins sealing in the igloo? Will you tell us a little about your fascination with this kind of tech?

  I see the pressure suits and air skins as a kind of biotechnology that adapts and extends the tricks of living organisms. I find nanotechnology fascinating from the bio perspective, in that we—all living things—are built up from tiny components. I was a biology major in college, and took the usual classes covering physiology, cell structure, evolution, ecology, and it was fascinating stuff. Then in my last semester I took a lecture class on biochemistry and that was revelatory, because it pulled together everything that had gone before, providing a mechanism for the macro-scale effects. When nanotechnology became the buzzword, I looked at it mostly as a means toward designed life.

  I found it fascinating that the Red posed such a serious threat, although we never see it directly, only its influence, in a less-is-more kind of way. What gave you the idea of an enemy like that? Do you use the Red in any of your other stories or books (or plan to)?

  The Red was born in the writing of this story. It’s an “if this goes on” extension of some current trends. As soon as I started conceptualizing it, I began to think that maybe this was the seed for my next hard SF novel, which was an exciting moment. I’ve started a file on the idea, but at this point I’ve got several other projects to finish off before I can think about starting something new. The minimalism was a personal triumph—I’m a novelist after all, and we like to explain stuff—but I thought the suggested background was all I needed to make this story work.

  You have a background in web programming. How has that influenced your writing?

  I don’t think it has, at least not in any direct way that I’m aware of. But the more time I spent at programming, the more I started to see the parallels with writing novels. Both are intricate creative endeavors where you have to look at causes, consequences, and goals, all the while asking yourself not just “What happens next?” but also, “What can go wrong?” And both are concerned with how efficiently the story/program moves on to the next chapter/step. But in programming, it’s much more likely that you’ll know if and when you’ve got it right, because the program produces a specific, desired result. In novel writing, you might think you’ve got it right, but who really knows? The result is nebulous and entirely dependent on the perspective of the reader.

  You’re also an advocate for self-
publishing, and your fantasy novel The Dread Hammer, recently released, is published by your own Mythic Island Press LLC. Can you tell us a little bit about the decision to self-publish?

  My traditional publishing career was an emotional roller coaster, shooting regularly between triumph and disaster. It encompassed six novels, ten pieces of short fiction, and two awards, but except for some foreign translations, it ended in 2003 with the publication of Memory by Tor Books. I thought this was possibly the best of my books, but it went nowhere, and there was no interest in a sequel. To say I was discouraged is an understatement. At the same time, I was working full time while dealing with teenage children and elderly parents. I did eventually produce a fantasy novel, but this failed to sell. Fast-forward to late 2010 and the ebook revolution. I was in the process of republishing my backlist when it became painfully obvious that I needed to get something new out into the world as quickly as possible—and I was still burned out on the traditional way of doing things. So I wrote a book, intending from the beginning to publish it myself. This was The Dread Hammer (Stories of the Puzzle Lands—Book 1), a short, quirky, darkly humorous fantasy novel entirely unlike anything I’d written before. I started it in late December and published it in late April, 2011—a four month turn-around, which still amazes me. If I’d tried to market it traditionally, it probably still wouldn’t be published. I love self-publishing because of the control it gives me over my work. I own the mistakes, but I’m also in a position to fix them, which is a huge plus. But I haven’t written off traditional publishing either, and if I come up with the right book, I’ll take it to market.