War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  “You’re dismissed from duty until Doc says you’ve recovered. And Simco or one of his men will stay with you at all times.”

  That was not what Max wanted, not at all. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  Petoskey nodded, dismissing him.

  Max began to wish that whoever had attacked him had done a better job.

  He went to the secure radio room and all three of the Intelligence officers stopped talking and turned towards the doorway. It’s the Political Officer Effect, thought Max.

  “What happened to your face?” Lukinov asked.

  “I fought the law and the law won,” Max answered impulsively.

  Burdick burst out laughing. Even Lukinov smiled. “Why does that sound so damned familiar?” he asked.

  “Judas’s Chariot,” answered Burdick. “The vid. It was one of Barabbas’ lines.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember that one now. It had Oliver Whatshisname in it. I got to meet him once, at a party, when he did that public information vid. Good man.” He twisted around. The smell of his cologne nearly choked Max. “Seriously, Max, what happened? And why has the Captain put a guard on one of my men?”

  “Someone tried to kill me.” Max was disappointed with the surprise in Lukinov’s expression. In all of their expressions. Intelligence was supposed to know everything. “Captain suspects the ensign here.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Lukinov rolled his eyes. Anger flashed across Reedy’s face.

  “It wasn’t my suggestion,” Max replied. “But if you don’t mind my asking, which one of you is just coming on shift?”

  “I am, sir,” Reedy answered immediately.

  “And where were you?”

  “In her quarters sleeping,” interjected Lukinov. “Where else would she have been?”

  “You were there with her?” No one wanted to answer that accusation, so Max slid past it. “You two usually work one shift together, and Burdick takes the other, right?”

  The senior officer hesitated. “I doubled shifted with Burdick because of the information we were getting.”

  So. Reedy had been alone. Not that Max suspected her of the attack. But now he’d have to. Maybe he’d misestimated her in the first place. “What information is that?”

  “The other Outback ship is doing some kind of military research defending the wormhole. Based on what we’re overhearing from observers in the shuttles. We’ve got a name on the second ship. It’s the Jiang Qing, same class as the other one.” He paused. “You aren’t going to try to tell me that Jiang Qing was one of Napoleon generals too, are you Max?”

  “Why not?” asked Max flatly. “Historically, Earth has had women generals for centuries. Jesusalem was the only planet without a mixed service.”

  Lukinov’s lip curled. “We finally tracked down Deng Xiaopeng. He and this Jiang Qing woman were both part of the Chinese revolution. Reedy found the information.”

  “The Chinese communist revolution,” clarified the ensign. “They were minor figures, associated with Mao. Both were charged with crimes though they helped bring about important political changes that led to the second revolution.”

  “Ah,” said Max. A wave of pain shot through him. If his legs had been supporting his weight, they would surely have buckled. “Please cooperate with Sergeant Simco until we can get this straightened out. Now if you will excuse me.”

  He didn’t wait for their response, but turned back to the hall. Simco waited at parade rest, his hands behind his back. Another trooper stood beside him.

  “I’m going to return to my cabin now,” Max said.

  “I’ve detailed Rambaud here to watch you while I begin my investigation,” Simco replied. Rambaud was a smaller but equally muscled version of his superior officer. “I’ll be rotating all my men through this duty until we find the culprit.”

  “Keeping them sharp?” Max said.

  Simco nodded. “A knife can’t cut if you don’t keep it sharp.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.” Max barely noticed the other man shadowing him through the narrow maze of corridors. When he reached his room, he took a double dose of the doctor’s pain killers, added one from his own stock, and washed them all down with a gulp of warm, flat water. He looked in the bathroom mirror at his damaged eye. That’s when he started to shake. He had the ludicrous sensation that he was going to fall down, so he grabbed hold of the sink and tried to steady himself. Eventually it passed, but not before his breath was coming out in ragged gasps.

  He’d come too close to dying this time. And why?

  The rumor of the suicide mission still bothered him, and so did the problem of Reedy. When he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed that he was wandering an empty vessel searching for someone who was no longer aboard, through corridors that were kinked and slicked like the intestines of some animal. They started shrinking, squeezing the crates and boxes that filled them into a solid mass, as Max tried to find his way out. The last section dead-ended in a mirror, and when he paused to look into its silver surface an eye above a pyramid filled his damaged socket.

  He woke up in a cold sweat. According to the clock, he’d slept nearly four and a half hours, but he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t inclined to believe anything right now.

  He rose and dressed himself. He needed better luck. If it wouldn’t come looking for him, he’d have to go looking for it.

  Down in the very bottom of the ship rested an observation chamber that contained the only naked ports in the entire vessel. Max went down there to think, dutifully followed by Simco’s watchdog.

  Max paused outside the airlock. “You can wait here.”

  “I’m supposed to stay with you, sir.”

  “The lights are off, it’s empty,” said Max, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth what had happened the last time he went into a dark room alone. “If someone’s waiting in there to kill me, then you’ve got them trapped. You’ll get a commendation.”

  Rambaud relented. Max entered the room, closing the hatch behind him. It sealed automatically reminding Max of the sound of a prison cell door shutting.

  Outside the round windows stretched the infinite expanse of space. The sun was a small, cold ember in a charcoal-colored sky dominated by the vast and ominous bulk of Big Brother. They were close enough that Max could see crimson storms raging on its surface, swirling hurricanes larger than Jesusalem itself. He counted three moons spinning around the planet, and great rings of dust, as if everything in space was drawn into satellite around the self-consuming fire of its mass.

  A quiet cough came from the rear of the compartment.

  Max pirouetted, and saw another man floating cross-legged in the air. As he unfolded and came to attention, light glinted off the jack that sat lodged in his forehead like a third eye. It was the spongediver, the ship’s pilot, Patchett.

  “At ease, Patchett,” said Max.

  Patchett nodded toward the port as he clasped his hands behind his back. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s no place for a human being to live,” Max said. “Give me a little blue marble of a planet any day instead.”

  The pilot smiled. “That figures.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a Political Officer, and politics is always about the place we live, how we live together.” He gestured at the sweep of the illuminated rings. “But this is why I joined the service—to explore, to see space.”

  “Has it been worth it?”

  “Too much waiting, too much doing nothing.” He shifted in his seat. “The diving makes it worthwhile.”

  “Good,” murmured Max, looking away.

  “You and I are alike that way,” Patchett said. “We both are the most useless men on the ship except for that one moment when we’re the only one qualified to do the job.” He stared out the port. “What happened to you, that was wrong, sir.”

  Max gazed out the window also, saying nothing.

  “I’d guess I’ve been in the service as long as yo
u have, nearly twenty years.”

  “Just past thirty years now.” It wasn’t all in the official records, but thirty years total. A very long time. Patchett clearly wanted to say something more. “What is it?” asked Max. “Speak freely.”

  “Things have been going downhill the past few years, sir. The wrong men in charge, undermining everything we hoped to accomplish in the Revolution. They all want war. They forget what the last one was like.”

  “Are you sure you should be telling this to your political officer?”

  “You’re the political officer. You have to know it already. You may be the only one I can say it to. Petoskey’s an excellent Captain, don’t get me wrong, sir. But he’s too young to remember what the last war was like.”

  They hung there, in the dark, weightless, silence, watching the giant spin on its axis. If Patchett was right, there was one moment in the voyage only when Max’s skills would make a difference. But what moment, and what kind of difference, there was no way to know in advance.

  Simco was in the med bay when Max went to check in with Noyes. “I’d salute,” said the Sergeant, “but Doc here’s treating a sprain.”

  “Dislocation,” corrected Noyes.

  “What happened?” asked Max.

  Simco grinned. “I scheduled extra combat training for my men. Want to make sure they’re ready in case they run into whoever attacked you. It doesn’t really count as a good workout unless someone dislocates something.”

  Noyes snorted.

  “Plus, Doc here says that we have to exercise at least an hour a day or we’ll start losing bone and muscle mass.”

  “Nobody’s had to deal with prolonged weightlessness in a couple of hundred years,” added Noyes. “I’m only finding hints of the information I need in our database. The nausea, vertigo, lethargy, that I expected and was prepared for. But we’re already seeing more infections, shortness of breath, odd stuff. And we’ve got orders to spend months like this? It’s madness. Take it easy on this thumb for a few more days, Simco.” He went to lay his stim-gun on the table and it floated off sideways across the room. “Damn. Not again.”

  Max snatched it out of the air and handed it back to the Doc. “Any word on who my attacker was?” he asked Simco.

  “No.” The Sergeant blew out his breath. “But I did hear that you picked a fight with Chevrier down in Engineering.”

  “Nothing even close to that.”

  “Good. He’s a big man, completely out of your weight class.”

  “Right now, we’re all in the same weight class.”

  That won Max a laugh from both Simco and Noyes. “Still, if you go see him again, about anything, please inform me first,” the Sergeant said.

  “You’ll know about it before I do,” promised Max.

  After the Doc was done checking him, Max went back through the crate-packed corridors towards his quarters. On the way, he passed Reedy, whose mouth quirked in a brief smile as Max squeezed past her.

  “What do you find so funny, Ensign?” Max growled.

  Reedy’s eyes flicked, indicating the trooper following her and the one behind Max. “For a second there, sir, I wondered which of us was the real prisoner.”

  Very perceptive. She had an edge to her voice that reminded him of Chevrier. He recalled that she had shown a strong aversion to confinement after the incident with Vance. “Remember who you’re speaking to, Ensign!”

  “Yes, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”

  “See that it doesn’t.”

  He went into his room and swallowed another pain-killer. Even if the moment came when he could make a difference, would he be able to get away from his minders long enough to do it?

  Eight more shifts, two more days, and nothing.

  Max had no appetite, the food all tasted bland to him. He couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. If he turned the lights off, he’d wake in a panic, disoriented, unsure of where he was. But if he slept with the lights on, they poked at the edge of his consciousness, prodding him awake. He tried to exercise one hour out of every two shifts, but everything seemed tedious. It just felt wrong, empty motions with nothing to push against.

  On the bridge, he asked Petoskey if it was still necessary to have a guard.

  “The attack’s still unsolved,” Petoskey said. “Until Simco brings me the man—or woman—who did it, I want you protected.”

  Max had the sinking feeling that might be for the rest of the voyage. “How are the repairs going?”

  “Chevrier replaced all the chips in the dead array with new ones, but something failed when he tested it. He has an idea for rebuilding the chips with some kind of silicon alloy crystal. Says he can grow it as long as we stay weightless. Some other kind of old tech. Inorganic. He tried to explain it to me, but he’s the only one that really understands it.”

  “Can we wait that long?”

  “We can’t power up to jump as long as those Outback ships are in the vicinity. They’d see us—and the wormhole—in a microsecond. So far they still haven’t detected our buoy. Or if they have, they just took it for a pulsar signal.” Which was the idea, after all. Petoskey tugged hard at his beard. There were dark stains of sleeplessness under his eyes. “Don’t you have some work to do, some reports to write?”

  He meant it as a dismissal. Max was willing to be dismissed. He was still no closer to catching his traitor, and his luck couldn’t have been more execrable.

  He went to the ship’s library to read. Rambaud, his trooper again this the shift, had no interest in reading or studying vids of any kind. He writhed in almost open pain as Max made it clear that he intended to stay at a desk alone for several hours. Max decided that it wouldn’t be murder if he bored Simco’s men to death.

  He sat there, scanning Fier’s monograph on the Adarean war, skimming through the casualty lists in the appendixes, thinking about some of the worst battles, early on, and the consequences of war, when a voice intruded on his contemplations.

  “ . . . bored as hell down here. Uh-huh. Wargames. That sounds interesting. Can you understand that Outback lingo?”

  Rambaud was whispering on the comlink to his compatriot in charge of Reedy. Max let the conversation turn to complaints about the exercise regimen and weightlessness before he flipped off his screen and rose to go.

  The Intelligence radio room was on his regular circuit of destinations, so he made no excuse for heading there now. The door was propped open, and the scent of Lukinov’s imported cologne hit Max’s nose out in the corridor. He paused in the doorway. The trooper stood behind Lukinov and Reedy, with a pair of headsets on.

  “So this is how well you keep secrets?” asked Max.

  The trooper saw Max, yanked the earphones out of his ear, and handed them back to an ebullient Lukinov. “Wait until you hear this, Max!” Lukinov said.

  The trooper who tried to squeeze by Max without touching him. Max stayed firmly in his way, making him as uncomfortable as possible. “Rambaud,” he said to his own man, “I believe I left my palm-pad down in the library by accident. Retrieve it for me and bring it to this room immediately so I can record this conversation.”

  Rimbaud hesitated before answering. “Yes, sir.”

  The other trooper took up station outside the door. Max kicked the door shut and latched it.

  “What’s going on with the spongediver?” asked Max.

  “They’re testing a new laser deflector, using it for wormhole defense.” Lukinov grinned. “Go ahead and listen.”

  Max picked up the headphones and fit the wires into his ears. Pilots chattered with tactics officers, describing the kind of run they were simulating. No wonder Outback outfitted their survey ships with the newest military equipment. The blind side of a wormhole dive was probably the only place in the galaxy they could test any new weapons without being observed. “Very standard stuff here,” he said after a moment. “Is there just one channel of this?”

  “Their scientists are on the other channel, the one R
eedy’s monitoring. But don’t you see what an advantage this gives us if we can steal it? We can attack Adares with impunity and keep them from diving into our system.”

  Max switched the channel setting to the one Reedy listened to. “Do unto others before they do unto you?”

  “Exactly!” replied Lukinov.

  Reedy’s eyes went wide open. She started tapping the desk to get their attention. “Sir,” she said. “There’s something you should . . . ”

  “Not right now,” said Max.

  Lukinov frowned at him. “Now see here—”

  “No, you see here. Has the Captain been informed of this?”

  “Not yet,” replied Lukinov.

  “You invite some grunt in here to listen to information that will certainly be classified top secret before you notify the Captain?” He sneered at Lukinov, pausing long enough to listen to the scientists talk. “You can be sure that my Department will file a record of protest on our return. In the meantime, I better go get the Captain.”

  Lukinov popped out of his seat. “No, I’ll do that. I was just planning to do that anyway, if you hadn’t interrupted.”

  “Sir,” repeated Reedy. “Sirs.”

  “Ensign,” said Max, “Shut. Up.”

  The ensign nodded mutely, her eyes shaped like two satellite dishes trying to pick up a signal.

  “I’m coming with you, Lukinov,” Max said.

  “No, you aren’t, Lieutenant,” snapped the Intelligence officer. “I’m the one man on this ship you can’t give direct orders to and don’t you forget it.”

  Max saluted, a gesture sharp enough to have turned into a knife hand strike at the other man’s throat. Lukinov stormed out of the room. Max turned back to the ensign, who simply stared at him.

  “They just broadcast the complete specifications,” said Reedy. “They were checking for field deformation—”

  “I know that,” said Max. And then he did something he never expected to do, not on this voyage. He said aloud the secret Intelligence code word for “render all assistance.” Silently, to himself, he added a prayer that it was current, and that Reedy would recognize it.