War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  Octa makes rounds to all the ships. She’s the only one of them who does it, and it works. Canis Major sent us help once, when we had the ventilation problem on the storage levels. She didn’t ask for help; they’re not obligated to share anything but information. But when she came back, an engineer was with her.

  “Trust me, I know everything about refrigeration,” he said, and after the computer had translated the joke everybody laughed and shook his hand.

  Octa stood beside him like a mother until they had taken him into the tunnels, and then she tucked her helmet under her arm like she was satisfied.

  “They’re good people,” she said to the shuttle pilot, who was making a face. “With no ambassador to keep them going, they must feel so alone. Give them a chance to do good.”

  “I’ve got the scan ready,” I said. (I scan her every time she comes back from somewhere else. It’s a precaution. You never know what’s going on outside your own ship.)

  “Let’s be quick, then,” she said, already walking down the corridor. “I have to make some notes, and then I need to talk to Centauri.”

  (Centauri’s AI is Octa’s favorite ship; she’s there far more often than she needs to be. “Easier to come to decisions when it’s just a matter of facts,” she said.)

  Octa did a lot of planning, early on, like she had a special purpose beyond what Alpha had promised—like time was short.

  Of all the copies, she was the only one who ever seemed to worry that her clock was ticking down.

  All the Yemennis have been different, which is unavoidable. Even though each one has all the aggregated information of previous iterations without the emotional hangover, it can get messy, like Hepta and Dorado 214. Human error in every copy. It’s the reason her machines all have parameters instead of specs; some things you never can tell. (Poor Hex.)

  It’s hard on them, of course—after fifty years it all starts to fall apart no matter what you do, and you have to shut one down and start again—but it’s the best way we have to give her a lifetime of knowledge in a few minutes, and we don’t want Carthage to come when we’re unprepared.

  I don’t know what’s in the memories, what they show her each time she wakes. That’s for government guys; techs mind their own business.

  There’s a documentary about how they picked Alpha for the job, four hundred years back. One man went on and on about “the human aesthetic,” and put up a photo of what a woman would look like if every race had an influence in the facial features.

  “Almost perfect. It’s like they chose her for her looks!” he says, laughing.

  Like Carthage is going to know if she’s pretty. Carthage is probably full of big amoebas, and when they meet her they’ll just think she’s nasty and fragile and full of teeth.

  They have a picture of Alpha up in the lab anyway, for reference. No one looks at it any more—nobody needs to. When I look in the mirror, I see a Yemenni first, and then my own face. I have my priorities straight.

  Wren Yemenni is why we’re here, and the reason none of us have complained in four hundred years is because she knows what she owes us. She’s seen the video, too, with those ten thousand people who gave up everything because someone told them the message was beautiful.

  No matter what her failings are, she tries to learn everything she can each time, to move diplomacy forward, to be kind (except to Dorado 215, but we all hate those ass-kissers so it doesn’t matter). She knows what she’s here to do. It’s coded deeper than her IQ, than her memories, somewhere inside her we can’t even reach; duty is built into their bones. Alpha passed down something wonderful, to all of them.

  Octa doesn’t look like Alpha. Not at all.

  Just before Dorado 215 hits his twenty-year expiration, he messages a request that Octa accompany him on an official visit to the Xpelhi. There’s something he wants to show them; he thinks they’ll be interested.

  Everyone asks her to go when they have to talk to Xpelhi. We gave everyone the code once we cracked it (we promised to exchange information, fair and square), but no one else is good at it and they need the help. The Yemmenis have a knack for language.

  “I hate him,” she says as I strap her into her suit. (It’s new—our engineers made it to withstand the pressure in the Xpelhi ship. It’s the most amazing human tech we’ve ever produced. Earth will be proud when they get the message.)

  “If peace didn’t require me to go . . . ” she says, frowns. “I hope they see that what he’s offering won’t help anyone. It never does.”

  She sounds tired. I wonder if she’s been up nights with the playback again.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “You can hate him if you want. No one expected you to love him like the last one did. It’s better not to carry the old feelings around. You live longer.”

  “He’s different,” she says. “It’s terrible how it’s changed him.”

  “All clones feel that way sometimes,” I say. “Peril of the job. Here’s your helmet.”

  She takes it and smiles at me, a thank-you, before she pops it over her head and activates the seal.

  “I feel like a snowman,” she says, which is what Hepta used to say. I wonder if anyone told Octa, of if she just remembered it from somewhere.

  I stay near the bio-med readout while she’s on the Xpelhi ship; if anything starts to fail, the suit tells us. If her lungs have collapsed from the pressure there’s not much we can do, but at least we’ll know, and we can wake up the next one.

  Her heart rate speeds up, quick sharp spikes on the readout like she’s having a panic attack, but that happens whenever Dorado 215 says something stupid. After a while it’s just a little agitation, and soon she’s safely back home.

  She stands on the shuttle platform for a long time without moving, and only after I start toward her does she wake up enough to switch off the pressure in the suit and haul her helmet off.

  I stop where I am. I don’t want to touch her; I’ve worked too hard on them to handle them. “Everything all right?”

  She’s frowning into middle space, not really seeing me. “There’s nothing on the ship we could use as a weapon?”

  Strange question. “I guess we could crash the shuttle into someone,” I say. “I can ask the engineers.”

  “No,” she says. “No need.”

  It was part of the message, the first rule: no war before Carthage comes. We don’t even have armed security— just guys who train with their hands, ready in case Octa tries to shove any more people in airlocks.

  She hasn’t done that in a while. She’s getting worn down. It happens to them all, nearer the end.

  “There’s been no war for four hundred years,” she says as we walk, shaking her head. “Have we ever gone that long before without fighting? Any of us?”

  “Nope.” I grin. “Carthage is the best thing that hasn’t happened to us yet.”

  Her helmet is tucked under one arm, and she looks down at it like it will answer her.

  The Delegate Meeting happens every decade. It wasn’t mandated by Carthage; Wren Tetra-Yemenni began it as a way for delegates to have a base of reference, and to meet; no one has even seen the new Neptunian Elect since they picked her two years back, and they have to introduce Dorado 216.

  We’re not allowed to hear what they talk about—it’s none of our business, it’s government stuff—but we hang around in the hallways just to watch them filing in, the humanoids and the Xpelhis puttering past in their cases. The Centauri AI has a hologram that looks like a stick insect with wings, and it blinks in and out as the signal from his ship gets spotty. I cover my smile, though—that computer sees everything.

  On the way in, Dorado 216 leans over to Octa. “You won’t say anything, will you? It would be war.”

  “No,” she says, “I won’t say anything.”

  “It’s just in case,” he goes on, like she didn’t already give him an answer. “There’s no plan to use them. We’re not like that—it’s not like that. You never know what Carthage’s p
lans are, is all.” Then, more quietly, “I trusted you.”

  “215 trusted me,” she says. “You want someone to trust you, try the next Yemenni.”

  “Watch it,” he says. A warning.

  After a second she frowns at him. “How can you want war, after all this effort?”

  He makes a suspicious face before he turns and walks into the reception room with the rest of them.

  Octa stands in the hall for a second before she follows him, shoulders back and head high. Yemmenis know their duties.

  After the Delegate Meeting, Octa takes a trip to the Centauri AI. She’s back in a few hours. She didn’t tell anyone why she was going, just looks sad to have come back.

  (Sometimes I think Octa’s mind is more like a computer than any of them, even more than Alpha. I wonder if I made her that way by accident, wishing better for them, wishing for more.)

  In the mess, the pilots grumble that it was a waste of shuttle fuel.

  “That program shows up anywhere they need it to,” one of them says. “Why did we have to drive her around like she’s one of the queens on Sextan? They should expire these copies before they go crazy, man.”

  “Maybe she was trying to give us break from your ugly face,” I say, and there’s a little standoff at the table between the pilots and the techs until one of the language ops guys smoothes things over.

  I stay angry for a long time. The pilots don’t know what they’re talking about.

  Yemennis do nothing by mistake.

  Alpha was the most skilled diplomat on the planet.

  They don’t say so in the documentary; they talk about how kind she is and how smart she is and how she looks like a mix of everyone, and if you just listened to what they were saying you’d think she hardly deserved to go. There were a lot of people in line; astronauts and prime ministers and bishops all clamoring for the privilege.

  And she got herself picked—she got picked above every one of them; she was the most skilled diplomat who ever lived. She could work out anything, I bet.

  There’s an engineer down five levels who looks good to me, is smart enough, and we get married. We have two kids. (Someone will have to watch over the Yemennis when I’m gone, someone with my grandfathers’ talents for calibrating a needle; we’ve been six generations at Wren Yemmeni’s side.)

  We celebrate four hundred years of peace. All the delegates put a message together, to be played in every ship, for the civilians. For some of them, it’s the first they’ve heard of the other languages. Everyone on the ship, twelve thousand strong, watches raptly from the big hangar and the gymnasium level, from the tech room and the bridge.

  They go one by one, and I recognize our reception room as the camera pans from one face to another. They talk about peace, about their home planets, about how much they look forward to all of us knowing the message, when Carthage comes.

  Wren Octa-Yemenni goes last.

  “I hope that, as we today are wiser today than we were, so tomorrow we will be wiser than we are,” she says. Dorado 216 looks like he wants to slap her.

  She says, “I hope that when our time comes to meet Carthage, we may say that we have fulfilled the letter and spirit of its great message, and we stand ready for a bright new age.”

  Everyone in the tech room roars applause (Yemennis know how to talk to a crowd). Just before the video shuts off, it shows all the delegates side by side; Octa is looking out the window, towards something none of us can see.

  One night, a year before she’s due to be expired, I find Octa in the development room. She’s watching the tube where Ennea is gestating. Ennea’s almost grown, and it looks like Octa’s staring at her own reflection.

  “Four hundred years without a war,” she says. “All of us at a truce, talking and learning. Waiting for Carthage.”

  “Carthage will come,” I promise, glancing at Ennea’s pH readout.

  “I hope we don’t see it,” she says, frowns into the glass. “I hope, when it comes, all of us are long dead, and better ones have taken their places. Some people twist on themselves if you give them any time at all.”

  Deka and Hendeka are in tubes behind us, smaller and reserved, eyes closed; they’re not ready. We won’t even need them until I’m dead. Though it shouldn’t matter, I care less for them than I do for Ennea, less than I do for Octa, who’s watching me.

  Octa, who seems to think none of them are worthy of Carthage at all. She’s been losing faith for years.

  None of these copies are like Alpha. They all do their duty, but she believed.

  At the fifty-year mark, Octa comes in to be expired.

  She hands over the recording device, and the government guys disappear to their level to put together the memory flux for Ennea, who will wake up tonight and need to know.

  “You shouldn’t keep doing this,” she tells me as we help her onto the table and adjust the IV.

  There are no restraints. The Yemennis don’t balk at what they have to do; duty is in their bones. But Octa looks sad, even sadder than when she found out that the one before her had loved someone who was already dead.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “It’s the best way—one session of information, and she’s ready to face Carthage.”

  “But she won’t remember something if I don’t record it? She won’t know?”

  Octa’s always been a little edgy—I try to sound reassuring. “No, she won’t feel a thing. Forget Dorado. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Octa looks like she’s going to cry. “What if there’s something she needs to know?”

  “I’ll get you a recorder,” I say, and start to hold up my hand for the sound tech, but she shakes her head and grabs my sleeve.

  I drop my arm, surprised. No one else has even noticed; they’re already starting the machines to wake up the next one, and Octa and I might as well be alone in the room.

  After a second she frowns, drops my hand, makes fists at her sides like she’s holding back.

  The IV drips steadily, and around us everyone is laughing and talking, excited. They seem miles away.

  Octa hasn’t stopped watching me; her eyes are bright, her mouth drawn.

  “Have you seen the message?”

  She must know I haven’t. I shake my head; I hold my breath, wondering if she’s going to tell me. I’ve dreamed about it my whole life, wondering what Alpha knew that made her cry with joy, four hundred years ago.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says, and her eyes are mostly closed, and I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or just talking. The IV is working; sometimes they say things.

  She says, “I don’t know how anyone could take up a weapon again, after seeing the message.”

  Without thinking, I put my hand over her hand.

  She sighs. Then, so quietly that no one else hears, Octa says, “I hope that ship never comes.”

  Her face gets tight and determined—she looks like Alpha, exactly like, and I almost call out for them to stop—it’s so uncanny, something must be wrong.

  But nothing is wrong. She closes her eyes, and the bio-feed flatlines; the tech across the room turns off the alarm on the main bank, and it’s over.

  We flip on the antigrav, and one of the techs takes her down to the incinerator. He comes back, says the other delegates have lined up in the little audience hall outside the incinerator, waiting to clap and drink champagne.

  It’s always a long night after an expiration, but it’s what we’re here to do, and it’s good solid work, moving and monitoring and setting up the influx for Yemenni’s first night. Nobody wants a delay between delegates. You never know when the Carthage is going to show up. We think another four hundred years, but it could be tomorrow. Stranger things have happened.

  Wren Ennea-Yemenni needs to be awake, just in case; she’ll have things to do, when Carthage comes.

  Rats of the System

  Paul McAuley

  Carter Cho was trying to camouflage the lifepod when the hunter-killer found him.

>   He had matched spin with the fragment of shattered comet nucleus, excavated a neat hole with a judicious burn of the lifepod’s motor and eased the sturdy little ship inside; then he had sealed up his pressure suit and clambered out of the airlock, intending to hide the pod’s infrared and radar signatures by covering the hole with fullerene superconducting cloth. He was trying to work methodically, clamping clips to the edge of the cloth and spiking the clips into the slumped rim of the hole, but the cloth, forty metres square and just sixty carbon atoms thick, massing a little less than a butterfly’s wing, warped and billowed and twisted as gas and dust vented from fractured ice. Carter had managed to fix two sides and was working on the third when the scientist shouted, “Heads up! Incoming!”

  That’s when Carter discovered she’d locked him out of the pod’s control systems.

  He said, “What have you done?”

  “Heads up! It’s coming right at us!”

  The woman was hysterical.

  Carter looked up.

  The sky was an apocalypse. Pieces of comet nucleus were tumbling away in every direction, casting long cones of shadow through veils and streamers of gas lit by the red dwarf’s half-eclipsed disc. The nucleus had been a single body ten kilometres long before the Fanatic singleship had cut across its orbit and carved it open and used X-ray lasers and kietic bomblets to destroy the science platform hidden inside it. The singleship had also deployed a pod of hunter-killer drones, and after crash deceleration these were falling through the remains of the comet, targeting the flotsam of pods and cans and general wreckage. Carter saw a firefly flash and gutter in the sullen wash of gases, and then another, almost ninety degrees away. He had almost forgotten his fear while he’d been working, but now it flowed through him again, electric and strong and urgent.

  He said, “Give me back my ship.”

  The scientist said, “I’m tracking it on radar! I think it’s about to—”

  The huge slab of sooty ice shuddered. A jet of dust and gas boiled up beyond a sharp-edged horizon and something shot out of the dust, heading straight for Carter. It looked a little like a silvery squid: a bullet-shaped head trailing a dozen tentacles tipped with claws and blades. It wrapped itself around an icy pinnacle on the other side of the hole and reared up, weaving this way and that as if studying him. Probably trying to decide where to begin unseaming him, Carter thought, and pointed the welding pistol at it, ready to die if only he could take one of the enemy with him. The thing surged forward—