War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  Carter said, “You have to get that close?”

  “The half-life of the strange photons will be very short, a little less than a millisecond.”

  “I get it. They won’t travel much more than a few hundred kilometres before they decay.” Carter grinned when the scientist stared at him. He said, “Speed of light’s one of those fundamental constants every sailor has to deal with.”

  “It means that we have to get close to the source, but it also means that the photon flux will increase anomalously just above the photosphere. There should be a sudden gradient, or a series of steps . . . It was one of the experiments my probe carried.”

  Carter said, “But it was destroyed, so we have to do the job instead. It’s going to get pretty hot, that close to the star. What kind of temperatures are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know. The average surface temperature of the red dwarf is relatively cool, a little over 3000 degrees Kelvin, but it’s somewhat hotter near the base of the flare, where we have to make our pass.”

  “Why don’t we just skim past the edge of the flare itself? The flare might be hotter than the surface, but our transit time would be a whole lot less.”

  “The magnetic fields are very strong around the flare, and spiral around it. They could fling us in any direction. Outward if we’re lucky, into the star if we’re not. No, I’m going to aim for a spot where the field lines all run in the same direction. But the fields can change direction suddenly, and there’s the risk of hitting a stray plume of plasma, so I can’t fire up the motors until we’re close.”

  Carter thought of his cutout. He said, “If you have to hit a narrow window, I’m your man. I can put this ship through the eye of a needle.”

  The scientist said, “As soon as I see the chance, I’ll fire full thrust to minimise transit time.”

  “But without the thermal protection of the comet nucleus it’ll still be a lot worse than waving your hand through a candle flame. I suppose I can set up a barbecue-mode rotation, run the cooling system at maximum. Your box will help keep you safe, and I’ll climb into one too, but if the temperature doesn’t kill us, the hard radiation flux probably will. You really think you can learn something useful?”

  “This is a unique opportunity, sailor. It’s usually very difficult to study Transcendent engineering because they keep away from star systems that have been settled. Some of us think that the Hundred Minute War was fought over the fate of the human race, that the Transcendents who won the war and quit the Solar System believe that we should be left alone to get on with our lives.”

  “But this one didn’t leave us alone.”

  “Strictly speaking, it did. Forty Eridani B and C, the white dwarf and the red dwarf, are a close-coupled binary. Keid is only loosely associated with them. And they’re a rare example of the kind of binary the Transcendents are very interested in, one in which the masses of the two components are very different. We have a unique opportunity to study stellar engineering. The Fanatics know this, which is why they’re so keen to destroy anything which comes too close.”

  “They want to keep the Transcendents’ secrets secret.”

  “They’re not interested in understanding the Transcendents, only in worshipping them. They are as fixed and immutable as their belief system, but we’re willing to learn, to take on new knowledge and change and evolve. That’s why we’re going to win this war.”

  Following the scientist’s instructions, Carter dismantled three cameras and rejigged their imaging circuits into photon counters. While he worked, the scientist talked about her family home in Happy Valley on Neuvo California. It had been badly damaged in one of the first Fanatic attacks, and her parents and her three brothers had helped organise the evacuation. Her mother had been an ecosystem designer, and her father had been in charge of the government’s program of interstellar commerce: they were both in the war cabinet now.

  “And very proud and very unhappy that their only daughter volunteered for this mission.”

  Carter said that his family were just ordinary folks, part of a cooperative that ran a vacuum organism farm on the water- and methane-ice plains of San Joaquin. He’d piloted one of the cooperative’s tugs, and had volunteered for service in the Keidian defence force as soon as the war against the Fanatics began, but he didn’t want to talk about the two inconclusive skirmishes in which he’d been involved before being assigned to the mission. Instead, he told the scientist about his childhood and the tented crevasse that was his family home, and the herds of gengineered rats he’d helped raise.

  “I loved those rats. I should have been smart enough to stay home, raise rats and make babies, but instead I thought that the bit of talent I have for math and spatial awareness was my big ticket out.”

  “Shit,” the scientist said. “The singleship just passed through your debris field.”

  She opened a window, showed Carter the radar plot.

  He felt a funny floating feeling that had nothing to do with free fall. He said, “Well, we tried.”

  “I’m sure it won’t catch up with us before we reach the star.”

  “If we make that burn now—”

  “We’ll miss the chance to collect the photon data. We’re going to die whatever we do, sailor. Let’s make it worthwhile.”

  “Right.”

  “Why did you like them? The rats.”

  “Because they’re survivors. Because they’ve managed to make a living from humans ever since we invented agriculture and cities. Back on Earth, they were a vermin species, small and tough and smart and fast-breeding, eating the same food that people ate, even sharing some of the same diseases and parasites. We took them with us into space because those same qualities made them ideal lab animals. Did you know that they were one of the first mammal species to have their genome sequenced? That’s why there are so many gengineered varieties. We mostly bred them for meat and fur and biologicals, but we also raised a few strains that we sold as pets. When I was a little kid, I had a ruffed piebald rat that I loved as much as any of my sisters and brothers. Charlie. Charlie the rat. He lived for more than a thousand days, an awfully venerable age for a rat, and when he died I wouldn’t allow him to be recycled. My father helped me make a coffin from offcuts of black oak, and I buried him in a glade in my favourite citrous forest . . . ”

  The scientist said, “It sounds like a nice spot to be buried.”

  Carter said, “It’s a good place. There are orchards, lots of little fields. People grow flowers just for the hell of it. We have eighteen species of mammals roaming about. All chipped of course, but they give you a feeling of what nature must have been like. I couldn’t wait to get out, and now I can’t wait to get back. How dumb is that?”

  The scientist said, “I’d like to see it. Maybe you could take me on a picnic, show me the sights. My family used to get together for a picnic every couple of hundred days. We’d rent part of one of the parklands, play games, cook way too much food, smoke and drink, play tig and futzball, and generally get outside of ourselves.”

  “My father, he’s a pretty good cook. And my mother leads a pretty good choral group. We should all get together.”

  “Absolutely.”

  They smiled at each other. It was a solemn moment. Carter thought he should say something suitable, but what? He’d never been one for speeches, and he realised now that although the scientist knew his name—it was stitched to his suit—he still didn’t know hers.

  The scientist said, “The clock’s ticking.”

  Carter said, “Yes ma’am. I’ll get this junk fixed up, and then I’ll be right back.”

  He welded the photon detectors to the blunt nose of the pod, cabled them up. He prepped the antenna array. After the pod grazed the base of the flare, its computer would compress the raw data and send it in an encrypted squawk aimed at Keid, repeating it as long as possible; repeating it until the Fanatic singleship caught up. It was less than ten thousand kilometres behind them now. Ahead, the red dwarf f
illed half the sky, the jet a slender white thread rooted in patch of orange and yellow fusion fire, foreshortening and rising above them as they drove towards it. Carter said that its base looked like a patch of fungal disease on an apple, and the scientist told him that the analogy wasn’t far-fetched; before the science platform had been destroyed, one of the research groups had discovered that there were strange nuclear reactions taking place down there, forming tonnes of carbon per second. She showed him a picture one of the pod’s cameras had captured: a rare glimpse of the Transcendent. It was hard to see against the burning background of the star’s surface because it was a perfectly reflective sphere.

  “Exactly a kilometre across,” the scientist said, “orbiting the equator every eight minutes. It’s thought they enclose themselves in bubbles of space where the fundamental constants have been altered to enhance their cognitive processes. This one’s a keeper. I’ll send it back—”

  A glowing line of gas like a burning snake thousands of kilometres long whipped past. The pod shuddered, probably from stray magnetic flux.

  Carter said, “I should climb inside before I start to cook.”

  The scientist said, “I have to fire up the motor pretty soon.” Then she said, Wait.”

  Carter waited, hung at the edge of the hatch.

  The scientist said, “You switched on the antenna array.”

  “Just long enough to check it out.”

  “Something got in. I think a virus. I’m trying to firewall, but it’s spreading through the system. It already has the motor and nav systems—”

  “I also have control of the com system,” another voice said. It was light and lilting. It was as sinuous as a snake. It was right inside Carter’s head. “Carter Cho. I see you, and I know you can hear me.”

  The scientist said, “I can’t fire the motor, but I think you can do something about that, sailor.”

  So she’d known about the cutout all along. Carter started to haul himself towards the stern.

  The voice said, “Carter Cho. I will have complete control of your ship momentarily. Give yourself to us.”

  Carter could see the singleship now, a flat triangle at the tip of a lance of white flame. It was only seconds away. He flipped up the panel, plugged in a patch cord. Sparce lines of data scrolled up in a window. He couldn’t access the scientist’s flight plan, had no nav except line-of-sight and seat-of-the pants. He had to aim blind for the base of the flare and hope he hit that narrow window by luck, came in at just the right angle, at just the right place where parallel lines of magnetic force ran in just the right direction . . .

  “Carter Cho. I have taken control. Kill the woman and give yourself to us, and I promise that you will live with us in glory.”

  Or he could risk a throw of the dice. Carter ran a tether from his p-suit utility belt to a nearby bolt, braced himself against a rung. With his helmet visor almost blacked out, he could just about look at the surface of the star rushing towards him, could see the intricate tangles of orderly streams that fed plasma into the brilliant patch of fusion fire at the base of the jet.

  “Kill her, or I will strip your living brain neuron by neuron.”

  “Drop dead,” Carter said, and switched off his com. The jet seemed to rise up to infinity, a gigantic sword that cut space in two. The scientist had said that if the pod grazed the edge of the jet, spiralling magnetic fields would fling it into the sky at a random vector. And the star took up half the sky . . .

  Fuck it, Carter thought. He’d been lucky so far. It was time to roll the dice one more time, hope his luck still held. He fired attitude controls, aimed the blunt nose of the pod. A menu window popped up into front of his face. He selected burn and full thrust.

  Sudden weight tore at his two-handed grip on the rung as the motor flared. It was pushing a shade under a gee of acceleration, most humans who had ever lived had spent their entire lives in that kind of pull, but Carter’s fingers were cramping inside the heavy gloves and it felt as if the utility belt was trying to amputate him at the waist. The vast dividing line of the jet rushed towards him. Heat beat through his p-suit. If its cooling system failed for a second he’d cook like a joint of meat in his father’s stone oven. Or the Fanatic could burn him out of the sky with its X-ray laser, or magnetic flux could rip the pod apart . . .

  Carter didn’t care. He was riding his ship rodeo-style towards a flare of fusion light a thousand kilometres wide. He whooped with defiant glee—

  —and then, just like that, the pod was somewhere else.

  After a minute, Carter remembered to switch on his com. The scientist said, “What the fuck did you just do?”

  It took them a while to find out.

  Carter had aimed the pod at the edge of the jet, hoping that it would be flung away at a random tangent across the surface of the red dwarf, hoping that it would survive long enough to transmit all of the data collected by the scientist’s experiment. But now the red dwarf was a rusty nailhead dwindling into the starscape behind them, the bright point of the white dwarf several seconds of arc beyond it. In the blink of an eye, the pod had gained escape velocity and had been translated across tens of millions of kilometres of space.

  “It had to be the Transcendent,” the scientist said.

  Carter had repressurized the pod and the cooling system was working at a flat roar, but it was still as hot as a sauna. He had taken off his helmet and shaken out his sweat-soaked dreadlocks, but because the scientist’s coffin was still sealed because her burns made her sensitive to heat. He hung in front of it, looking at her through the little window. He said, “I took the only chance we had left.”

  “No magnetic field could have flung us so far, or so fast. It had to be something to do with the Transcendent. Perhaps it cancelled our interia. For a few seconds we became as massless as a photon, we achieved light speed . . . ”

  “My luck held,” Carter said. “I hit those magnetic fields just right.”

  “Check the deep radar, sailor. There’s no sign of the Fanatic’s singleship. It was right on our tail. If magnetic fields had anything to do with it, it would have been flung in the same direction as us.”

  Carter checked the deep radar. There was no sign of the singleship. He remembered the glimpse of the silver sphere sailing serenely around the star, and said, “I thought the Transcendents wanted to leave us alone. That’s why they quit the Solar System. That’s why they only reengineer uninhabited systems . . . ”

  “You kept rats, when you were a kid. If one got out, you’d put her back. If two started to fight, you’d do something about it. How did your rats feel, when you reached into their cage to separate them?”

  Carter grinned. “If we’re rats, what are the Fanatics?”

  “Rats with delusions of grandeur. Crazy rats who think they’re carrying out God’s will, when really they’re no better than the rest of us. I wonder what that Fanatic must be thinking. Just for a moment, he was touched by the hand of his God . . . ”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve finished processing the data stream from my experiment. When we encountered the edge of the flare, there was a massive, sudden increase in photon flux.”

  “Because of this is this symmetry breaking thing of yours. Have you sent the data?”

  “I still have to figure the details.”

  “Send the data,” Carter said, “and I’ll button up the ship and put us to sleep”

  “Perhaps there are some clues in the decay products . . . ”

  “You’ve completed your mission, ma’am. Let someone else worry about the details.”

  “Jesswyn Fiver,” the scientist said. She was smiling at him through her little window. For a moment he saw how pretty she’d been. “You never did ask my name. It’s Jesswyn Fiver. Now you can introduce me to your parents, when we go on that picnic.”

  The Political Officer

  Charles Coleman Finlay

  Maxim Nikomedes saw the other man rushing towards him, but there was no r
oom to dodge in the crate-packed corridor. He braced himself for the impact. The other man pulled up short, his face blanching in the pallid half-light of the “night” rotation. It was Kulakov, the Chief Petty Officer. He went rigid and snapped a salute.

  “Sir! Sorry, sir!” His voice trembled.

  “At ease, Kulakov,” Max said. “Not your fault. It’s a tight fit inside this metal sausage.”

  Standard ship joke. The small craft was stuffed with supplies, mostly food, for the eighteen month voyage ahead. Max waited for the standard response, but Kulakov stared through the hull into deep space. He was near sixty, old for the space service, old for his position, and the only man aboard who made Max, in his mid-forties, feel young.

  Max smiled, an expression so faint it could be mistaken for a twitch. “But it’s better than being stuck in a capped off sewer pipe, no?”

  Which is what the ship would be on the voyage home. “You’ve got that right, sir!” said Kulakov.

  “Carry on.”

  Kulakov shrunk aside like an old church deacon, afraid to touch a sinner less he catch the sin. Max was used to that reaction from the crew, and not just because his nickname was the Corpse for his cadaverous and dead expression. As the Political Officer, he held the threat of death over every career aboard: the death of some careers would entail a corporeal equivalent. For the first six weeks of their mission, after spongediving the new wormhole, Max cultivated invisibility and waited for the crew to fall into the false complacency of routine. Now it was time to shake them up again to see if he could find the traitor he suspected. He brushed against Kulakov on purpose as he passed by him.

  He twisted his way through the last passage and paused outside the visiting officers’ cabin. He lifted his knuckles to knock, then changed his mind, turned the latch and swung open the door. The three officers sitting inside jumped at the sight of him. Guilty consciences, Max hoped.

  Captain Ernst Petoskey recovered first. “Looking for someone, Lieutenant?”