by Wil McCarthy
He'd come from a city called Albuquerque, one of the unlucky sites in the Waister scouting raid. His family, his roots, his heritage, had been vaporized by a handful of sand which passed through the center of town at point-five-cee, half the speed of light. Kinetic energy became heat, and in a flash, two million people were economically removed from the war effort.
He pictured Shiele Tomas, melting, the sidewalk melting beneath her. Look of surprise on her vanishing face.
Sand had figured heavily in the fighting, as it turned out. Of the thirty six sites the Waisters destroyed, the cities and stations and asteroid warrens, thirty had been hit by sand. And it was sand, blasted relativistically across the path of the scoutships, that had turned the tide, however briefly, in favor of the humans. Three ships destroyed outright, one crippled, unable to maneuver, sailing past the sun into the frigid depths of interstellar space. The other two had been forced to slow down, and humans had descended upon them like locusts.
One of the ships had died in the fighting, going up like a supernova, taking tens of thousands of human lives with it. The other... The other was before Ken Jonson right now, bitterly fighting for its life. Doomed, surely, its motors reduced to slag so that it was pinned forever between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. But Sol had lost a third of its fleet already, hundreds and hundreds of ships, and it seemed they might lose the rest before the Waister defenses gave out.
The ship must be captured intact, the X.O. had told them. We need prisoners, artifacts, intelligence. The survival of the human race depends on this. The obvious corollary, that any number of lives could be sacrificed in the process, had gone unspoken.
The sparkling new years' lights swept closer to Ken for a moment, as the Waister beams probed his region of space. Terror swept him, like cold water sluicing through the marrow of his bones, but the beams moved away again, the winking of death becoming more distant. The burden of doom had been shifted to others, for a while. The terror faded a little.
He felt exposed, incredibly exposed. If he could choose to be standing nude right now in the middle of an Antarctican blizzard, he would gladly do so. He was like a spider on a wide, white wall, climbing desperately but knowing that a shoe or a rolled-up mat would strike him long before he reached safety, crushing him to anonymous pulp. No, it was worse than that; he didn't even have a wall to cling to, only the pale and heartless stars that hung lifetimes beyond his reach.
Oh, God, he said to himself. Oh God. Oh God. He repeated it over and over in his mind, like a mantra, until the words lost their meaning and became simply patterns. Oh God oh God oh God...
The sky lit up as a navy gunboat flashed and died somewhere nearby. No time for fear, no time for the men and women aboard to gasp or scream or grip their consoles with whitened knuckles. They simply existed in one moment, and then in the next moment, did not. Much better, it seemed, much more humane than the lonely strobelight deaths of the marines.
The scooter bucked beneath him once, like an angry horse trying to throw its rider, and then fell silent, the soothing autocycle hum of its motor cutting off suddenly and completely. Part of the plan, Ken assured himself. Nothing wrong, NOTHING WRONG, the scooter was supposed to do that when he was halfway to the target.
Halfway. God. Could it really be true? It seemed like days since the “people cannon” had expelled him from its dark and claustrophobic womb, but still the Waister ship looked tiny, distant. He looked around it, his eyes hunting for human figures, but that was ludicrous, of course. His nearest comrades, kilometers away, were dull pinpoints of light. On the hull of the ship they would be like bacteria.
Ken felt a vibration in the scooter, faint and quickly gone, and then the Waister ship seemed to accelerate, to drive itself sideways until it slipped past the edge of his helmet visor. The stars wheeled about him. The ship wasn't moving, it was he, Ken, who was turning his back on it. The sparkle of disintegration beams was falling behind him now, out of sight. Oh God, Oh God... The skin between his shoulder blades began to tingle and crawl.
KCHUMMMmmm... The hum of motors returned as the scooter, now falling tail-first toward the enemy, began its deceleration. Oh God, Oh God. Hadn't he been moving slowly enough already? Now, each second that passed would make a bigger, slower, more inviting target of him. And he couldn't even see where he was going! He and the other troops could actually be shot in the back while advancing. Surely he'd known that, intellectually at least, but now the irony seemed bitingly fresh.
“Lucky day,” he murmured, and was startled by the sound of his own voice, echoing dully inside the helmet. A voice, even his own, was an anachronism here, a bit of irrelevant sensory data. Radio silence was being maintained, a gag stuffed into the mouths of a million murder victims.
The sky behind him was filled with moving dots. Was his own transport, the Nob Witan, still among them? Ten months he'd been aboard her, longer than at any other post. He remembered, with nightmare clarity, the look on the Second Mate's face as he stood hat in hand at the barracks door and announced that the asteroids Eros and Nysa, and the Terran city of Albuquerque, had just been added to the rolls of destruction. His voice was as flat and weary as a stale tub of beer. Had that really been only ten days ago?
Ken had never known the man's name, never wanted to. Marine proverb had taught him that names were for tombstones.
One of the spaceship/dots flickered momentarily, not with the yellow of Waister death but rather the blue-white signature of primitive, mass-production fusion motors. The glare burned into his eyes, leaving a red-green smudge that throbbed and pulsed near the center of his vision. He blinked as the afterimage began to fade, restoring it almost to its original intensity. It was slightly right of center, actually, and it retreated as he attempted to look directly at it, turning and swiveling right along with his eyeballs. He blinked again, and then again, toying with the image, and was about to smile... But he was in space, of course, riding backward into the arms of an unknown and unyielding enemy. He shivered within the rigid spacesuit, and the afterimage dried up the way raindrops did on the sandy soil of his home.
In its place, Ken saw the ship that had fired its motors, swollen beyond pinprick size now, looking about as large as his smallest fingernail viewed at arm's length. The ship was round, but not in the pregnant way of a spin-gee Marine transport. Rather, he found he was looking almost end-on at the needle of a gunboat. As he watched, the ship seemed to grow and turn. It was going to pass almost directly “above” him, though at a range of ten kilometers or more.
It looked like a toy. He was far away from it, of course, but Ken suspected that a closer look would only reinforce the impression. Most of the navy's ships seemed to have been stamped out by a giant cookie-press somewhere, so that Ken half-expected to see foil stickers on them saying PRODUCTO DE CALLISTO or some such. And the weapons! A typical gunboat was a hundred meters long or more, and barely ten meters across, a thin metal shell wrapped around the gas-core spindle of a gigawatt laser. Most of them had small turret lasers as well, and there had been rumors of projectile weapons, actual cannons, on some of the newer models.
Of course, Ken himself carried a shotgun in one leg-holster, and a “utility knife” in the other. Ostensibly, the knife was for cutting through obstructions and performing expedient repairs. Its pommel was heavy and flat, like the head of a hammer, and its rear edge bore odd protuberances for cutting wire and turning screws. But the blade itself was long and curved, tapering to a wicked point barely twenty atoms thick. Not really a tool, but a magic sword for the dismemberment of the Waister crew.
He glanced at his outstretched forearms, encased in the rigid polymer tubes of the hardsuit. Even his hands, now gripping the scooter's wide handle-bar, were gauntleted. He felt ridiculous, a medieval knight whose steed shone brightly, whose armor was the dull gray of fused ballistic fiber. But there were wireguns mounted on his forearms, and there was nothing funny about them. If King Arthur had been similarly equipped, he might have taken out
Mordred's entire army in the first ten minutes of fighting.
The wire spools aren't so big, a grim voice told him inside his head. And it was true; the cylindrical lump at the base of the gun-tube was hardly larger than a shotglass. How long would it last? For that matter, how reliable was the equipment itself? Maybe Arthur should keep Excalibur handy after all.
Humanity could do better than this, he was sure. They'd harnessed the antimatter dragon over a thousand years before. From time to time, they'd built starships, set mammoth ansible stations in the dark spaces between the stars. Where was all that capacity now, when it was so desperately required?
The navy ship flew over him and passed out of view. How long would it be permitted to continue its existence? Would it fire its gun once again, or maybe twice? The tingling between his shoulder blades resumed, like pine needles raining down on his back.
Oh God, Oh God...
He wondered how the light-show was going. Ten men down every second? Probably more. He remembered the twinkling, fairy-dust sparkle of disintegrating people. FlaFlaFlash! FlaFlaFlash! Yes, almost certainly more. If it were... He tried to think. If fifty Marines died every second, no, call it a hundred... it would take ten thousand seconds for the entire force to be destroyed. Three hours? Two and a half. Something like that.
But that couldn't be right. Nobody would plan a battle of such grisly attrition. Maybe it was only ten deaths a second, after all.
The scooter lit up with reflected light, bright yellow-white, as something behind him was converted to plasma. Something large, and relatively close by. The light grew brighter, and brighter still, and then vanished suddenly. Farewell, he thought, picturing the toy gunboat in his mind. The crew would have been huddled at their stations, strapped and braced against the lurching acceleration of the fusion motors, the laser core-tube sweating heat upon them even through its thick diamond sheath. They would be busy people, their heads filled with little besides numbers and vectors, though two or three of them, the ones at sensor stations, had probably been aware of Ken's proximity as their vessel soared past him. There would be chatter on the ship's intercom, twenty or thirty voices trading information back and forth in a kind of tightly-controlled turmoil. And then, without warning...
Farewell. He sent the thought toward them like a prayer. Fare well. In truth, Ken hoped they would fare not at all. What could an afterlife be but more of the same?
He wanted to be somewhere else. Crotch-deep in boiling acid, maybe. Anything but this, anything at all. Why did the Waisters toy with them so? Why send in a scouting raid ahead of the armada, why pick single targets and destroy them one by one? Really, it was just too much. Why couldn't the human race just flicker and die, all at once, like one big happy gunboat crew?
“Oh God,” he said, aloud, relishing now the lonely echo of his voice. “Oh, dear God. You bastard. Get me out of this. Get all of us out of this.”
He quieted his breathing for a few moments, but the supreme being, creator of human and Waister alike, declined to comment.
Ken Jonson felt tears welling up in his eyes, rolling slowly back into his hair in the scooter's light acceleration. He had never felt so isolated, so incredibly alone. Why couldn't he have died in Albuquerque, surrounded by family and friends? Why!
The stars shone coldly upon him for a long, long time.
Chapter Three
“'Morning, chum,” said the young lieutenant, waving a coffee cup at Ken. This was Josev Ranes, the Navy guy. The talkative one. “Come on, then, grab a seat. Enjoy.”
Ken looked around skeptically. The cafeteria was grim, almost industrial in its mood. Identically-uniformed people marched to their tables, sat, shoveled food into their mouths, and marched away again to dump their trays in the cycling chute.
“Chowtime is special,” Ranes espoused. “A break from her Queenship, you know? A little time to rub elbows with the rest of humanity.”
“Hmm.” Ken grunted.
“Well,” said Ranes with a wink and a smile, “Most of the rest of it. I s'pose there're still some folks that haven't been assigned here, but as I've never met 'em, there's no point me worrying about it, eh? You want your biscuit?”
“Yes,” Ken told him. “I do. Uh... Lieutenant? What do you think about... this assignment?”
“What do I think about it? Gosh, nobody's asked me that before. Let's see. I've been here three weeks, and so far we haven't really done anything except those clodgy 'team-building exercises.' I s'pose it'll be more interesting when things get rolling. Why? Something troubling you?”
Ken swallowed a mouthful of food, cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah, sort of. We're supposed to think like Waisters, right?”
“That's right. Nothing to it, I say. I figure they're people, not like us but still people. They've got some reason for all the things they've been doing. Steady, chum, I didn't say I liked them or anything. I mean, King Schubel was a person, but I wouldn't exactly introduce him to my sister. The thing is, whether you like it or not, the Waisters are intelligent, conscious entities. They've got strengths, weaknesses, lusts, blind spots...”
Ken applied himself to the task of eating.
“It may be a bit excessive,” Ranes continued, “imitating their family groups and such. I can see where you'd be rattled. You'll do fine, though. At least you have me for company.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Oh, quit that. Sludge! There should be somebody around here who really talks to me. I swear, Yeng and Hanlin are about as much fun as an autopsy, and Talbott, well... I think maybe she's been an officer too long. I get more inspiring conversation from the dog.”
“Oh, yeah. I wanted to ask somebody about that. Martian Retriever? What is that, I never heard of it.”
Ranes pointed a fork at Ken. “You should have. Great animals. They breed them for intelligence, although the talking is all just neural interface stuff. This thing like a Broca web picks up on what the dog is thinking and translates to the nearest Standard equivalent. The voice module is in the collar. Thing translates Standard back into dog neural patterns, too. You wouldn't expect most human thoughts to mean much to a dog, but that mutt really seems to know what's going on most of the time. She worked maintenance in the Chryse tunnels until they assigned her here. Sniffing out gas leaks or some such.”
“Huh. Wow. I never heard of such a thing.”
“Well,” said Ranes, “Now you have. It's a good match, really. She acts a lot like a Waister, from what Talbott says.”
“No,” Ken said, sipping from his coffee.
“No? What do you mean, 'no'?”
“I mean Talbott is wrong. Waister dogs don't act like that.” He set down his cup; his hand had begun to shake. “They don't run around, or wag their tails, or sniff things. Their movements are slow and deliberate, almost like some kind of reptile. The only... God. I shot a couple of workers, and their dog just... fell over and cried like a baby.”
Josev Ranes clicked his tongue softly. For once, it seemed, he had nothing to say.
“I wired it,” Ken explained. “Totally reduced it to pulp. I just wanted the screaming to stop, you know? But I still hear it, sometimes, late at night...”
“Go easy,” Ranes said, reaching out to grip Ken's hand firmly. “Don't get lost in it, chum. Plenty of time for that when the war is over, but right now we're too damn busy.”
Ken refocused his eyes, pulled his hand away and nodded. “Yes, sir. I'm sorry.”
“Don't be sorry,” Ranes insisted, leaning forward a little. “And don't call me sir. Okay? I mean it. Marshe may be a fat, squishy slug, but she's right about that one thing. Call me Drone, or chum, or even Josev. For the time being, you and I share equal status.”
“Don't turn around,” Ken said, nodding his head diagonally. “The fat squishy slug is right over there.”
Josev hunched his shoulders. “Oh, damn. Has she seen us? Is she coming over here to sit?”
“Uh, she's coming right toward us, but she's not carryin
g a tray. Keep your voice down, don't say anything.” He raised his voice a bit. “That's fine with me, Josev. Hello, Captain.”
Talbott placed both hands on the table and leaned across at Ken. “That's Queen to you, mister.” She looked over her shoulder at Josev, who smiled a little uncomfortably. “You telling him how it is, Josev? That's good. You two ought to be close. Gentlemen, I hate to spoil your breakfast, but we need to gather in the assimilation chamber at oh-seven-hundred.”
“Oh sludge, Marshe,” Josev protested, glancing at his wristwatch. “That's five minutes! I've barely touched my food.”
The captain returned his smile. “You might try talking a little less. If it were up to me we'd have the briefing at oh-eight-hundred, but Colonel Jhee has a very busy schedule. Be glad he didn't fetch us out of bed.” She turned back to Ken. “Some fresh uniforms have been left on your bunk. Hang them up when you get the chance.”
“Thank you,” Ken replied, remembering this time not to call her ma'am.
The captain straightened. “Well, I'll see you in five minutes then. Oh by the way, Josev, if the subject of my many faults happens to come up in conversation, you might also mention my HTH rating.”
She thumped him on the shoulder and walked away.
“Bitch,” Josev observed when she was gone.
“What's an HTH rating?” Ken asked, placing his cup and utensils back on his tray.
“Navy parlance for hand-to-hand combat. She says she scored two-eighty out of three hundred on the certification test. Maybe she did.” Josev sighed. “C'mon, let's get going.” His tone indicated resignation, but he stood quickly, stepped clear of the bench, and walked off toward the cycling chute.
~~~
Marshe Talbott glared at the Drones as they came in. “You're late,” she said, letting some of the irritation leach through into her voice. She'd always despised tardiness, always grated at the way it muddled her plans, took the crisp edge off her lists and schedules.
