War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  “See you, Mr. Vance.”

  “Take care, LD.”

  Two weeks later, Don called me at work. “Have you seen my boy?” he asked. Then before I could answer, he blurted, “In the last five days, I mean.”

  “I haven’t,” I allowed. My stomach clenched tight. “Why?”

  “LD’s vanished.”

  Some intuition kept me from mentioning the bike ride.

  “We just found out,” said a terrified parent. “Donnie’s failed all of his classes, and nobody seems to know where he is.”

  I had nothing worth saying.

  And then with a tight, sorry voice, Don confessed, “I just hope it’s the meth again. You know? Something small and fixable like that.”

  Five years earlier, our tiny world had changed. But it wasn’t a historic event that happened in a single day or during a tumultuous month. In fact most of humanity did its stubborn best to ignore the subject. So what if a few voices told the same incredible story? And what if astronomers and their big telescopes couldn’t entirely discount their crazy words? In our United States, the average God-fearing citizen still didn’t swallow the idea of natural selection, and that’s after almost two centuries of compelling research. Rational minds had to be skeptical. Even after the story broke, there were long stretches when I considered the whole business to be an elaborate, ludicrous joke. But the evidence did grow with time, and I had no choice but become a grudging believer. And then our friends’ son vanished without warning, and Cheryl turned to me in bed and asked when I thought LD would actually leave the Earth behind.

  My response was less than dignified.

  Thoroughly and passionately pissed, I told my wife, “He bought a bike, and he went wandering.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “That’s what he told me he was doing,” I reminded her.

  “And has anybody seen this bike?”

  I didn’t respond.

  “His parents talked to everybody,” she continued. “Girlfriends, his buddies. Professors and both roommates. They never saw a bike. Or a packed suitcase. Or anything you’d take on a trip.”

  “I know that.”

  “With the clothes on his back, he went out on a midnight walk,” she continued. “His car was still parked in the street. Nobody remembers him buying a bike or camping gear or anything else you’d want on a cross country ride.”

  “Don told me all that, honey.”

  “Did Don mention his son’s checking account?”

  I said nothing.

  And she read my expression. For an instant, she took a spouse’s cruel pleasure in having the upper hand. “LD drained it and closed it.”

  “Why not? A kid on the road needs money.”

  “Amanda just told me. LD left all that cash in an envelope addressed to them. They found it while searching his room. Eleven hundred dollars, plus a birthday check from Grandma that he never bothered to endorse.”

  Bike ride or drug binge. In neither case would the boy leave that tidy sum behind.

  Once again, Cheryl asked, “How soon does he leave the Earth?”

  In the pettiest possible ways, I was hurt that Don hadn’t mentioned finding the money.

  “What’s Amanda think?” I asked.

  “The worst,” said Cheryl.

  “Did they call the police?”

  “Last night. From LD’s apartment.”

  I had to ask, “But do the cops care? This is not a child anymore. We’re talking about a legal, voting-age adult.”

  “An adult who has vanished.”

  But citizens had rights, including the freedom to fail at college, and then out of embarrassment or shame, dive out of sight.

  I asked, “Have the police met with them?”

  Cheryl dipped her head sadly. “Amanda didn’t say,” she admitted. “She started to cry again, said it was too painful, and hung up.”

  “I believe that,” I muttered.

  “Talk to Don,” she advised.

  I nodded, wringing a sad joy out the moment, allowing myself to revel in the awful fact that I didn’t have any children of my own to worry about.

  “On average,” Don asked, “how many young men and women vanish? In a given year.”

  I offered an impressive number.

  “Multiply that by three,” he warned.

  “Is that the U.S., or everywhere?”

  “Just the U.S.”

  “I see.”

  We’d met at the coffee house for our traditional chess game. The board was set up, but neither of us had the strength to push a pawn. My good friend—a creature who could not go into a new day without clean clothes and a scrubbed face—looked awful. A scruffy beard was coming in white. The eyes were rimmed with blood, and I could see dirt under his fingernails. Where had the man been digging, and why? But I didn’t ask, watching him pick up his mug of free-trade coffee and sip it and look into the swirling blackness. Then a voice almost too soft to be heard asked, “How many go up there? Out of a thousand missing people, how many?”

  “Twenty,” I guessed.

  “Not bad. It’s ten and a half.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “There’s websites,” he explained. “Help societies and half a dozen federal agencies like to keep databases, and the answers mostly agree with each other. Most missing people are found sooner or later, and there’s some who drop off remote cliffs, and there’s always drug users who aren’t found and murder victims too.”

  My black pieces waited at attention, fearless and wood-hearted.

  “Go into space or become a murder victim: Those are about equally likely, as it happens.” In a peculiar way, the haggard face betrayed hope. Then with the earnest tone of confession, Don mentioned, “That’s what I want the cops to believe. That LD’s been killed.”

  “So they look for him?”

  “Sure.”

  I sipped my warm coffee, weighing the probabilities.

  “Of course they don’t believe me,” he continued. “But if his disappearance isn’t a crime, then they can’t do anything beyond filling out a missing-person’s report.”

  I kept thinking about tall and handsome LD, calmly lying to me about the bike and his plans for the summer. The prick.

  “He’s alive,” I said, aiming for hope.

  Don remained silent, fearful.

  “Okay,” I allowed. “Suppose he’s joined up with them.”

  I was passing into an uncomfortable terrain. Don leaned back and dropped his shoulders, and with a whisper, he said, “Okay.”

  “They don’t take their recruits off the Earth right away,” I pointed out. “I mean, they might be wizards with space flight and all. But their volunteers have to be trained first, to make sure that they can . . . you know . . . do their job well enough to make them worth the trouble.”

  “Sure.”

  “Lifting a big young man past Pluto,” I said. “It costs energy.”

  “It does,” he agreed.

  “LD is smart,” I continued. “And sure, he has a bunch of talents. But do you really think, Don—in your heart of hearts, I mean—do you believe that your son is capable of serving as a soldier in some miserable alien war . . . ?”

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause.

  Then the shaggy white face lifted, and just by looking at the sleepless eyes, I could tell we were talking about two different boys.

  “Little Donnie,” his father muttered.

  With all the confidence and horror he could muster, Don declared, “My son would make a marvelous, perfect soldier.”

  Nobody knows when the war began, and no sane human mind claims to understand the whys and for whats that keep it alive today.

  But we know for sure that the first human recruits vanished four decades ago. My father’s generation supplied that early fodder, though the world didn’t notice when a few thousand boys failed to come downstairs for breakfast. By unknown means, the Kuipers identified the ripest targets among us—always
male, always smart and adaptable—and through elaborate and almost invisible negotiations, they would winnow the field to the best of the best. Usually the boy’s mind would wander, experiencing a series of lucid daydreams. About fighting, of course. But more important, the aliens would test his capacity to cooperate and coldly reason and make rapid-fire decisions under stress. And they always made sure that he would say, “Yes,” before the question was asked. “Yes” meant that a young human was agreeing to serve one Nest for ten full seasons—a little more than three decades, Earth-time. Survive that maelstrom of carnage, and you were honored and subsequently released from service. Then according to traditions older than our innocent species, you were allowed to bring home one small sack stuffed full of loot.

  Ten years ago, a few middle-aged gentlemen reappeared suddenly. There was some interest, but not much belief: They came from the Third World, and how credible is a Bangladeshi fisherman or a Nigerian farmer? But then six years ago a Frenchman returned to his home village, and he made the right kinds of noise for the cameras. Then came a Canadian gent, and an Italian, and then a pair of handsome American brothers who suddenly strolled into a town square in New Hampshire. In the media’s eyes, these weren’t just crazy peasants rambling on about impossible things. Here stood men with good educations and remembered faces and what soon became very public stories, and if their families gave up on them ages ago, at least there were siblings and elderly parents who could say with confidence, “It is him. It is them. I know it is. Yes.”

  And they brought home their sacks of loot, too.

  Some of those possessions had obvious value—gemstones of extraordinary purity, slabs of rare-earth elements, and other materials that would have carried a healthy price on the open market. But the biggest noise came from what looked like trash: Pieces of pretty rock, shards of irradiated glass, unfathomable chunks of burnt machinery, and in a few cases, vials of dirty water.

  Each veteran looked older than his years, with haunted, spent eyes and flesh that had been abused by extreme temperatures and cosmic rays. Some had lost fingers, some entire limbs. Each wore scars, outside and in. But despite very different origins and unrelated languages, they told identical stories: About being recruited by creatures dubbed the Kuipers who taught them how to fight, and despite very long odds, how to survive.

  The Kuipers were a deeply social organism, it was explained.

  But not like bees or termites or even naked mole rats. There were no queens or castes. In their youth, every alien had a strong, vaguely humanoid body capable of modest shape-shifting. But as adults they had to find a worthy patch of ground to set down roots, interlocking with one another, forming elaborate beds that were at least as intricate and beautiful as coral reefs.

  The Kuipers didn’t refer to themselves by that name. Their original world circled some distant sun; nobody knew for sure which one. They were an ancient species that had wandered extensively, creating a scattering of colonies. For the last thousand millennia, a substantial population of Kuipers had been fighting each other for possession of a single planet-sized comet that was drifting somewhere “out there.”

  No veteran could point at the sky and say, “This is where you look.”

  Navigating in deep space wasn’t an essential skill, it seemed.

  When the story broke, good scientific minds loudly doubted that any world matched the vivid descriptions given to family members and the media. Comets were tiny things; even Pluto and its sisters didn’t possess the gravity or far horizons that were being described. And they were far too cold and airless for humans wearing nothing but self-heating armor. But then one astronomer happened to look in the proper direction with a telescope just sensitive enough, and there it was: A giant ice-clad world moving high above the solar system’s waist, carrying enough mass to build a second Earth, but built of less substantial ingredients like water and hydrocarbons laid over a small core of sulfurous iron.

  That new world’s crust, though frozen, was no colder than a bad winter day in Antarctica. A multitude of subsurface fusion reactors created a deep, warm, and very busy ocean. Ice volcanoes and long fissures let the excess heat escape upward. As promised, the atmosphere was dense and remarkable—a thick envelope of free oxygen and nitrogen laced with odd carbon molecules and rare isotopes, plus a host of other telltale signs proving the existence of some kind of robust, highly technological life.

  Moving at light-speed, more than a day was required to reach that distant battlefield.

  Human soldiers were moved at a more prosaic rate, several weeks invested in the outbound voyage. Which was still immensely quick, by human standards. The Kuipers’ ships were tiny and black, invisible to our radar and nearly unnoticeable to the human eye. They never carried weapons. Every veteran made that blanket assurance. By law or convention, spaceships were forbidden to fight, much less attack any other species. And without exception, the surrounding universe was neutral—a taboo of peace balanced by the endless war on their world.

  A curious mind could ask, “Which side did you fight for?”

  Those retired soldiers always had a name for their sponsoring nest or reef, and rarely did two soldiers use the same name.

  “How many reefs are there?” people inquired.

  “Two hundred and eleven,” was the unvarying answer.

  Hearing that, a human being would invest the distant struggle with some familiar politics.

  “So how does this play out?” they would ask. “One hundred reefs fighting the other hundred, with a few neutral cowards sitting on the sidelines?”

  Some veterans laughed off those simple, wrong-headed questions. But more often they would put on expressions of disgust, even rage. Then with a single passionate breath, they would explain that there was no such thing as neutrality or alliances, or cowardice for that matter, and each reef gladly battled every one of its neighbors, plus any other force that stupidly drifted into the field of fire.

  War was the Kuipers’ natural state, and that’s the way it had been for the last twenty million years.

  Panic is temporary; every adrenaline rush eventually runs empty. Even the most devoted parent has to sleep on occasion, and breathe, and somehow eat enough to sustain a minimal level of life. That’s why a new, more enduring species of misery evolves for the afflicted. Over the next several weeks, I watched my friends carefully reconfigure their misery. They learned how to sleep and eat again, and for a few moments each day, they would find some tiny activity that had absolutely nothing to do with their missing son. Normal work was impossible. Amanda exhausted her sick days and vacation days, while Don simply took an unpaid leave of absence. Like never before, they became a couple. A team. Two heads united by the unwavering mission—to find and reclaim LD before he forever escaped their grasp.

  “I almost envy those two,” Cheryl confided to me. “It’s sick to think this. But when have our lives enjoyed half that much purpose? Or a tenth the importance?”

  “Never,” I had to agree.

  In my own sorry way, I was angry about what LD was doing to my old friendship. After those first days of pure terror, Don stopped calling. He didn’t have the energy or need to keep me abreast of every little clue and dead end. There were many days when I didn’t once hear from the man. He was too busy researching the Kuipers. Or he had to interview experts on missing people. Or there were night flights to distant cities and important meetings with government officials, or patient astronomers, or one of the very few practicing exobiologists. Plus there were some secretive exchanges with borderline figures who might or might not have real help to offer.

  We tried to keep meeting to play chess, but the poor guy couldn’t recall what he had told me already. Again and again, he explained that his son was still somewhere on the Earth, probably somewhere close by. The Kuipers’ version of boot camp required eighty-seven days of intense simulations and language immersion, technical training and cultural blending. That was what every verified account claimed. Perhaps as many
as three percent of the recruits failed this stage, earning a scrubbed memory of recent events and transport back home again. “But those numbers are suspicious,” Don said. “There’s no telling how many young men pretend amnesia to explain a few missing months.”

  From the beginning, the same relentless rumors had been circulating about secret training bases on the ocean floor or beneath the South Pole. Various governments, and particularly the U.S. government, were said to be in cahoots with the Kuipers, giving them old air bases in exchange for top-secret technologies. The truth, however, was less spectacular and infinitely more practical for the job at hand.

  Not to mention far, far stranger.

  “LD is somewhere close,” Don kept telling me.

  And himself.

  Witnesses were scarce, and the memories of the veterans were short on details. But each would-be soldier was encased inside an elaborate suit, armored and invisible to human sensors. For the next thirty years, that suit would be his shell and home. For the moment, both it and its living cargo were buried deep in some out-of-the-way ground. There was no telling where. Somewhere within a hundred miles of our little table, LD was living a cicada’s subterranean existence, experiencing what the aliens wanted him to experience, making him ready for the adventure of a lifetime.

  “We’ve got two months to find him,” Don told me.

  If his son had actually joined the Kuipers, I thought to myself.

  Later, he announced, “We have six weeks left.”

  “Plenty of time,” I lied, looking at the fresh dirt under his fingernails.

  Then he said, “Four weeks, and a day.”

  “Maybe he’ll be one of the dropouts,” I said hopefully.

  For the first time, LD’s father was hoping for failure. But saying so would jinx everything. I could see that in his stiff mouth, in his downcast eyes. Don was turning into a superstitious old fool, not allowing himself even to smile at the prospect: The powerless victim of grand forces beyond his control, with nothing in his corner but the negligible possibility of a little good luck.