War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  It lived as it could for a while, hiring itself out for high-altitude or delicate work that clumsy fingers could not perform. But there are many drifters on a space station like TwiceFar, and people hire their own kind. It was not until it met the manager here that it realized uniqueness could be an asset.

  The Universe is large, and the war of its people and that race of soft-fleshed is very far away now. But Six’s race remembers its missing member, the one who they believe sold them all for life. Its image hangs on their corridors amid the words of war, and tangles of foul scent adorn it.

  Without the touch of its clutch-mates, it feels its intelligence fading, but each time the webs rouse it for a moment, and remind it who it is, who it was. And then it goes downstairs and finds a patron who wishes it to bring him pleasure, to torture him, or be tortured, or who will pay it to say what he wishes, and earn enough to keep it alive another day.

  It has six drawers in its room holding the emotions that keep it alive—the thoughts of those who would see it dead.

  It has six drawers. Soon all six will be full.

  A Soldier of the City

  David Moles

  ISIN 12:709 13” N:10 18” / 34821.1.9 10:24:5:19.21

  Color still image, recorded by landscape maintenance camera, Gulanabishtiïdinam Park West.

  At the top of the hill is a football court, the net nearly new but the bricks of the ground uneven, clumps of grass growing up from between the cracks. On the same side of the net are a man and a young girl. The hollow rattan ball is above the girl’s head, nearing the apex of its trajectory; the girl, balanced on the toes of her bare right foot, her left knee raised, is looking toward the man.

  The man is looking away.

  Cross-reference with temple records identifies the man as Ishmenininsina Ninnadiïnshumi, age twenty-eight, temple soldier of the 219th Surface Tactical Company, an under-officer of the third degree, and the girl as his daughter Mâratirsitim, age nine.

  Magnification of the reflection from the man’s left cornea indicates his focus to be the sixty-cubit-high image of Gula, the Lady of Isin, projected over the Kârumishbiïrra Canal.

  Comparison of the reflection with the record of the Corn Parade ceremonies suggests a transmission delay of approximately three grains.

  1. Corn Parade

  In the moment of the blast, Ish was looking down the slope, toward the canal, the live feed from the temple steps and the climax of the parade. As he watched, the goddess suddenly froze; her ageless face lost its benevolent smile, and her dark eyes widened in surprise and perhaps in fear, as they looked—Ish later would always remember—directly at him. Her lips parted as if she was about to tell Ish something.

  And then the whole eastern rise went brighter than the Lady’s House at noonday. There was a sound, a rolling, bone-deep rumble like thunder, and afterwards Ish would think there was something wrong with this, that something so momentous should sound so prosaic, but at the time all he could think was how loud it was, how it went on and on, louder than thunder, than artillery, than rockets, louder and longer than anything Ish had ever heard. The ground shook. The projection faded, flickered and went out, and a hot wind whipped over the hilltop, tearing the net from its posts, knocking Mâra to the ground and sending her football flying, lost forever, out over the rooftops to the west.

  From the temple district, ten leagues away, a bright point was rising, arcing up toward the dazzling eye of the Lady’s House, and some trained part of Ish’s mind saw the straight line, the curvature an artifact of the city’s rotating reference frame; but as Mâra started to cry, and Ish’s wife Tara and all his in-laws boiled up from around the grill and the picnic couches, yelling, and a pillar of brown smoke, red-lit from below, its top swelling obscenely, began to grow over the temple over the temple, the temple of the goddess Ish was sworn as a soldier of the city to protect, Ish was not thinking of geometry or the physics of coriolis force. What Ish was thinking—what Ish knew, with a sick certainty—was that the most important moment of his life had just come and gone, and he had missed it.

  34821.1.14 10:9:2:5.67

  Annotated image of the city of Isin, composed by COS Independence, on Gaugamela station, Babylon, transmitted via QT to Community Outreach archives, Urizen. Timestamp adjusted for lightspeed delay of thirteen hours, fifty-one minutes.

  Five days after the strike the point of impact has died from angry red-orange to sullen infrared, a hot spot that looks like it will be a long time in cooling. A streamer of debris trails behind the wounded city like blood in water, its spectrum a tale of vaporized ice and iron. Isin’s planet-sized city-sphere itself appears structurally intact, the nitrogen and oxygen that would follow a loss of primary atmosphere absent from the recorded data.

  Away from the impact, the myriad microwave receivers that cover the city’s surface like scales still ripple, turning to follow the beams of power from Ninagal’s superconducting ring, energy drawn from the great black hole called Tiamat, fat with the mass of three thousand suns, around which all the cities of Babylon revolve. The space around Isin is alive with ships: local orbiters, electromagnetically accelerated corn cans in slow transfer orbits carrying grain and meat from Isin to more urbanized cities, beam-riding passenger carriers moving between Isin and Lagash, Isin and Nippur, Isin and Babylon-Borsippa and the rest—but there is no mass exodus, no evacuation.

  The Outreach planners at Urizen and Ahania, the missionaries aboard Liberation and Independence and those living in secret among the people of the cities, breathe sighs of relief, and reassure themselves that whatever they have done to the people of the cities of Babylon, they have at least not committed genocide.

  Aboard COS Insurrection, outbound from Babylon, headed for the Community planet of Zoa at four-tenths the speed of light and still accelerating, the conscientious objectors who chose not to stay and move forward with the next phase of the Babylonian intervention hear this good news and say, not without cynicism: I hope that’s some comfort to them.

  2. Men giving orders

  Ish was leading a team along a nameless street in what had been a neighborhood called Imtagaärbeëlti and was now a nameless swamp, the entire district northwest of the temple complex knee-deep in brackish water flowing in over the fallen seawall and out of the broken aqueducts, so that Ish looked through gates into flooded gardens where children’s toys and broken furniture floated as if put there just to mar and pucker the reflection of the heavens, or through windows whose shutters had been torn loose and glass shattered by the nomad blast into now-roofless rooms that were snapshots of ordinary lives in their moments of ending.

  In the five days since the Corn Parade Ish had slept no more than ten or twelve hours. Most of the rest of the 219th had died at the temple, among the massed cohorts of Isin lining the parade route in their blue dress uniforms and golden vacuum armor—they hadn’t had wives, or hadn’t let the wives they did have talk them into extending their leaves to attend picnics with their in-laws, or hadn’t been able to abuse their under-officers’ warrants to extend their leaves when others couldn’t. Most of the temple soldiery had died along with them, and for the first three days Ish had been just a volunteer with a shovel, fighting fires, filling sandwalls, clearing debris. On the fourth day the surviving priests and temple military apparatus had pulled themselves together into something resembling a command structure, and now Ish had this scratch squad, himself and three soldiers from different units, and this mission, mapping the flood zone, to what purpose Ish didn’t know or much care. They’d been issued weapons but Ish had put a stop to that, confiscating the squad’s ammunition and retaining just one clip for himself.

  “Is that a body?” said one of the men suddenly. Ish couldn’t remember his name. A clerk, from an engineering company, his shoulder patch a stylized basket. Ish looked to where he was pointing. In the shadows behind a broken window was a couch, and on it a bundle of sticks that might have been a man.

  “Wait here,” Ish said.


  “We’re not supposed to go inside,” said one of the other men, a scout carrying a bulky map book and sketchpad, as Ish hoisted himself over the gate. “We’re just supposed to mark the house for the civilians.”

  “Who says?” asked the clerk.

  “Command,” said the scout.

  “There’s no command,” said the fourth man suddenly. He was an artillerist, twice Ish’s age, heavy and morose. These were the first words he’d spoken all day. “The Lady’s dead. There’s no command. There’s no officers. There’s just men giving orders.”

  The clerk and the scout looked at Ish, who said nothing.

  He pulled himself over the gate.

  The Lady’s dead. The artillerist’s words, or ones like them, had been rattling around Ish’s head for days, circling, leaping out to catch him whenever he let his guard down. Gula, the Lady of Isin, is dead. Every time Ish allowed himself to remember that it was as if he was understanding it for the first time, the shock of it like a sudden and unbroken fall, the grief and shame of it a monumental weight toppling down on him. Each time Ish forced the knowledge back the push he gave it was a little weaker, the space he created for himself to breathe and think and feel in a little smaller. He was keeping himself too busy to sleep because every time he closed his eyes he saw the Lady’s pleading face.

  He climbed over the windowsill and into the house.

  The body of a very old man was curled up there, dressed in nothing but a dirty white loincloth that matched the color of the man’s hair and beard and the curls on his narrow chest. In the man’s bony hands an icon of Lady Gula was clutched, a cheap relief with machine-printed colors that didn’t quite line up with the ceramic curves, the Lady’s robes more blue than purple and the heraldic dog at her feet more green than yellow; the sort of thing that might be sold in any back-alley liquor store. One corner had been broken off, so that the Lady’s right shoulder and half her face were gone, and only one eye peered out from between the man’s knuckles. When Ish moved to take the icon, the fingers clutched more tightly, and the old man’s eyelids fluttered as a rasp of breath escaped his lips.

  Ish released the icon. Its one-eyed stare now seemed accusatory.

  “Okay,” he said heavily. “Okay, Granddad.”

  BABYLON CITY 1:1 5” N:1 16” / 34821.1.14 7:15

  “Lord Ninurta vows justice for Lady of Isin”

  “Police to protect law-abiding nomads”

  “Lawlessness in Sippar”

  —Headlines, temple newspaper Marduknasir, Babylon City

  BABYLON CITY 4:142 113” S:4 12” / 34821.1.15 1:3

  “Pointless revenge mission”

  “Lynchings in Babylon: immigrants targeted”

  “Sippar rises up”

  —Headlines, radical newspaper Iïnshushaqiï, Babylon City

  GISH, NIPPUR, SIPPAR (various locations) / 34821.1.15

  “THEY CAN DIE”

  —Graffiti common in working-class and slave districts,

  after the nomad attack on Isin

  3. Kinetic penetrator

  When Tara came home she found Ish on a bench in the courtyard, bent over the broken icon, with a glue pot and an assortment of scroll clips and elastic bands from Tara’s desk. They’d talked, when they first moved into this house not long after Mâra was born, of turning one of the ground-floor rooms into a workshop for Ish, but he was home so rarely and for such short periods that with one thing and another it had never happened. She kept gardening supplies there now.

  The projector in the courtyard was showing some temple news feed, an elaborately animated diagram of the nomads’ weapon—a ‘kinetic penetrator,’ the researcher called it, a phrase that Tara thought should describe something found in a sex shop or perhaps a lumberyard—striking the city’s outer shell, piercing iron and ice and rock before erupting in a molten plume from the steps directly beneath the Lady’s feet.

  Tara turned it off.

  Ish looked up. “You’re back,” he said.

  “You stole my line,” said Tara. She sat on the bench next to Ish and looked down at the icon in his lap. “What’s that?”

  “An old man gave it to me,” Ish said. “There.” He wrapped a final elastic band around the icon and set it down next to the glue pot. “That should hold it.”

  He’d found the broken corner of the icon on the floor not far from the old man’s couch. On Ish’s orders they’d abandoned the pointless mapping expedition and taken the man to an aid station, bullied the doctors until someone took responsibility.

  There, in the aid tent, the man pressed the icon into Ish’s hands, both pieces, releasing them with shaking fingers.

  “Lady bless you,” he croaked.

  The artillerist, at Ish’s elbow, gave a bitter chuckle, but didn’t say anything. Ish was glad of that. The man might be right, there might be no command, there might be no soldiery, Ish might not be an under-officer any more, just a man giving orders. But Ish was, would continue to be, a soldier of the Lady, a soldier of the city of Isin, and if he had no lawful orders that only put the burden on him to order himself.

  He was glad the artillerist hadn’t spoken, because if the man had at that moment said again the Lady’s dead, Ish was reasonably sure he would have shot him.

  He’d unzipped the flap on the left breast pocket of his jumpsuit and tucked both pieces of the icon inside. Then he’d zipped the pocket closed again, and for the first time in five days, he’d gone home.

  Tara said: “Now that you’re back, I wish you’d talk to Mâra. She’s been having nightmares. About the Corn Parade. She’s afraid the nomads might blow up her school.”

  “They might,” Ish said.

  “You’re not helping.” Tara sat up straight. She took his chin in her hand and turned his head to face her. “When did you last sleep?”

  Ish pulled away from her. “I took pills.”

  Tara sighed. “When did you last take a pill?”

  “Yesterday,” Ish said. “No. Day before.”

  “Come to bed,” said Tara. She stood up. Ish didn’t move. He glanced down at the icon.

  An ugly expression passed briefly over Tara’s face, but Ish didn’t see it.

  “Come to bed,” she said again. She took Ish’s arm, and this time he allowed himself to be led up the stairs.

  At some point in the night they made love. It wasn’t very good for either of them; it hadn’t been for a long while, but this night was worse. Afterwards Tara slept.

  She woke to find Ish already dressed. He was putting things into his soldiery duffle.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Lagash.”

  “What?”

  Tara sat up. Ish didn’t look at her.

  “Lord Ninurta’s fitting out an expedition,” Ish said.

  “An expedition,” said Tara flatly.

  “To find the nomads who killed the Lady.”

  “And do what?” asked Tara.

  Ish didn’t answer. From his dresser he picked up his identification seal, the cylinder with the Lady’s heraldic dog and Ish’s name and Temple registry number, and fastened it around his neck.

  Tara turned away.

  “I don’t think I ever knew you,” she said, “But I always knew I couldn’t compete with a goddess. When I married you, I said to my friends: ‘At least he won’t be running around after other women.’ ” She laughed without humor. “And now she’s dead—and you’re still running after her.”

  She looked up. Ish was gone.

  Outside it was hot and windless under a lowering sky. Nothing was moving. A fine gray dust was settling over the sector: the Lady’s ashes, Ish had heard people call it. His jump boots left prints in it as he carried his duffle to the train station.

  An express took Ish to the base of the nearest spoke, and from there his soldiery ID and a series of elevators carried him to the southern polar dock. As the equatorial blue and white of the city’s habitable zone gave way to the polished black
metal of the southern hemisphere, Ish looked down at the apparently untroubled clouds and seas ringing the city’s equator and it struck him how normal this all was, how like any return to duty after leave.

  It would have been easy and perhaps comforting to pretend it was just that, comforting to pretend that the Corn Parade had ended like every other, with the Lady’s blessing on the crops, the return of the images to the shrines, drinking and dancing and music from the dimming of the Lady’s House at dusk to its brightening at dawn.

  Ish didn’t want that sort of comfort.

  34821.6.29 5:23:5:12.102

  Abstract of report prepared by priest-astronomers of Ur under the direction of Shamash of Sippar, at the request of Ninurta of Lagash.

  Isotopic analysis of recovered penetrator fragments indicates the nomad weapon to have been constructed within and presumably fired from the Apsu near debris belt. Astronomical records are surveyed for suspicious occlusions, both of nearby stars in the Babylon globular cluster and of more distant stars in the Old Galaxy, and cross-referenced against traffic records to eliminate registered nomad vessels. Fifteen anomalous occlusions, eleven associated with mapped point mass Sinkalamaïdi-541, are identified over a period of one hundred thirty-two years. An orbit for the Corn Parade criminals is proposed.

  4. Dog soldier

  There was a thump as Ish’s platform was loaded onto the track. Then Sharur’s catapult engaged and two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty times the force of Isin’s equatorial rotation pushed Ish into his thrust bag; and then Ish was flying free.

  In his ear, the voice of the ship said:

  —First company, dispersion complete.

  On the control console, affixed there, sealed into a block of clear resin: Gula’s icon. Ish wondered if this was what she wanted.

  And Ninurta added, for Ish’s ears alone:

  —Good hunting, dog soldier.

  At Lagash they’d wanted Ish to join the soldiery of Lagash; had offered him the chance to compete for a place with the Lion-Eagles, Ninurta’s elites. Ish had refused, taking the compassion of these warlike men of a warlike city for contempt. Isin was sparsely populated for a city of Babylon, with barely fifty billion spread among its parks and fields and orchards, but its soldiery was small even for that. When the hard men in Ashur and the actuaries in Babylon-Borsippa counted up the cities’ defenders, they might forget Lady Gula’s soldiers, and be forgiven for forgetting. What Ninurta’s men meant as generosity to a grieving worshipper of their lord’s consort Ish took for mockery of a parade soldier from a rustic backwater. It needed the intervention of the god himself to make a compromise; this after Ish had lost his temper, broken the recruiter’s tablet over his knee and knocked over his writing-table.