Tyger Burning

by T. C. McCarthy

  The Chinese had left something behind. Maung focused all his attention on a remaining Chinese artifact, a nonintelligent thing, an amputated limb set on autopilot and coded to mutate when contact was lost, and Maung used the ship to watch it shed parts of itself to his attacks while it simultaneously scavenged for other bits of code; it used these to mutate into a dormant bomb, an egg or seed that hid until its parents came back to save it.

  Maung ripped it apart and then swept the ship’s systems and smiled at how clean everything was, and he imagined the confusion onboard the Chinese vessels because only a moment ago they had been winning.

  Maung no longer heard their voices but registered the words as data when Jennifer said, Something’s wrong with the ship; notify the captain that I no longer have access to navigation. All ship’s systems are offline and we don’t have control. She was more confused by his answer, though, that there was nothing to worry about.

  “Everything is fine, Jennifer,” Maung said, his voice now that of the ship’s computer. “The Chinese do not have control.”

  It’s time, Maung thought. The enemy’s attack had nearly overwhelmed him and part of him shook with fear; this was his first time fighting the Chinese, his parents and creators; what he was about to do could kill people and that bothered him too because he’d hoped to never kill again, but this was different. This time it was defensive, to protect. He set traps in command and control. It took a few more seconds to re-rig the communications system encryption to better defend against Chinese attacks but he left one channel less secure than the rest. Maung was sure they’d detect and concentrate on it. He had already sensed the Chinese confidence during their first attack and almost sympathized because they wouldn’t anticipate a counterattack by a super-aware; once he was inside their ships again, he’d be ready with a more complete plan—one to end it for good.

  The Singapore Sun’s crew had one advantage. They were not integrated with their ship, weren’t hardwired or radio linked to each other and to a central processing matrix used to formulate collective decisions that could be read and used to predict their moves and intentions. In cases like this, where the Chinese were blind to the fact they fought a super-aware, their hive-mind structure was a weakness and he knew exactly how to exploit it.

  Nang cried. Maung’s attention wavered and before he restarted the ship’s communications he monitored the video feed from her compartment where she was alone in her couch and he heard the sobbing. He’d forgotten about her. The feed was grainy but Nang’s hair was in a ponytail and looked so black that it shined blue, and the human part of Maung wanted to talk to her but unless he could extract them from this, that wouldn’t happen.

  Maung shut off the feed and refocused. He flicked the communications’ power nodes simultaneously, activating all the receivers and transmitters and noted the incoming Chinese frequencies so he could interfere, blasting space with meaningless beamed transmissions at exactly the right frequencies and modulation. The Chinese compensated by hopping. Maung pretended to let it work and then waited, sensing that they’d once more entered the command and control network, but were more cautious this time, probing instead of using a frontal assault. The Chinese suspected, he thought. They appreciated that the American ship was more than it seemed and now a part of their hive got nervous, jumpy with each dead end they encountered and with each second spent decrypting his codes.

  When they arrived at his trap, Maung prepared himself. He prayed to his ancestors and asked them for the speed of a spider, begged for the swiftness and ruthlessness that came from being a silent predator and he brushed off any shame in what he was about to do. This was easier than the Sommen; Maung needn’t have worried. Despite the fact that his attackers were part machine, they had fundamentally human thought patterns, not like it had been with the Sommen. Plus, this time Maung was on a battlefield of his own making and witnessed his encryption failures as one by one the Chinese unwrapped a channel that led to the real ship’s command and control—the node leading to Maung. He “sat” behind the code wall having already arrayed the ship’s computer systems to launch their own frontal assaults against the Chinese at just the right moment. Finally the last barrier fell. Maung almost heard the joy in the Chinese because at the same instant his defenses failed, he jumped inside their beam, using one isolated ship’s transmitter to send a part of his consciousness back to the Chinese vessel—just like he had done with the Sommen.

  To know your enemy, you must become your enemy, Maung reminded himself.

  He understood them now. There were two Chinese ships and he had their schematics, which depicted an almost random collection of cubes and rectangular modules that had been pieced together to form electronic and kinetic attack platforms—two destroyers. Each ship had a crew of forty-five half-human things, so connected to the ship that they were a part of it. The one he was inside was the lead vessel, the Lanzhou 101. Now the Chinese panicked. Maung’s automated counterattack onboard the Singapore Sun had them struggling with security programs that isolated or tore apart their first elements, and their initial joy of victory shifted to surprise and fear. He read the exchange of code between the Lanzhou and her sister, the Dandong 98; both ignited their main engines to close the distance and get within kinetic attack range because they already concluded something horrific: They might lose.

  Maung slipped behind a deeper set of security screens. Someone sensed his presence, one of their most talented, and where there was a clear path a millisecond before, now there was a wall. A checkpoint. Maung could hit it with a decryption effort but then they would detect him and he cursed his bad luck, wondering what he had done to give his presence away. He backed up to the less secure outer shell and took another look at his options.

  They have control of our navigational systems, Jennifer said, breaking Maung’s concentration. We’re now braking and will be within their weapons range in ten seconds. The Chinese never asked to board, thought Maung. This shocked him because of the treaty, because they immediately attacked without wasting time on friendly overtures, as if they had already calculated it would take force to get what they wanted. Maung refocused. He’d already wasted seconds thinking and now a stream of communications that hadn’t been there before pulsed brightly so he probed it with a query. The security response was almost immediate. Maung smiled and dove into it, assaulting with decryption algorithms and leaping upstream to its origin so that within milliseconds he had control of the Lanzhou’s forward missile magazines. The Chinese panic went into high gear. Someone tried to cut communications but a portion of the ship’s targeting system was already locked onto the Singapore Sun and Maung kept it there, using a small dish to maintain his link. They probed him again. Maung guessed from its pattern that this was the same one that threw up a code wall earlier but now he was ready, and when the next probe hit, he absorbed the data and returned nonsense in order to buy time. All he needed was time. A few more milliseconds to finish aiming and locking the Lanzhou’s missiles at its sister ship.

  Maung fired. He tried not to think about what the crew of the Dandong experienced just before the Lanzhou’s missiles struck her, a hundred of them piercing amidships and splitting the organo-synthetic core into pieces. They all died alone—disconnected. He reeled at the horror among the crew of the Lanzhou, overcome by the shock of having just killed their sister, and then there were a few milliseconds of anger from the one trying to stop him, just before Maung self-destructed the Chinese ship’s remaining missiles. This was an act of mercy, he figured; Maung had never forgotten what it was like to live with the guilt of killing and now he’d put the Chinese abominations out of their misery.

  Before the Lanzhou died it ejected a capsule. The tiny dot rocketed toward Europa and Maung couldn’t see what it contained because he never had control of the entire ship, but he feared it may have held data about him—that the smart one escaped to warn its masters that one of their creations was back: a Dream Warrior turned traitor.

  Maung r
eturned to the Sun. He opened his eyes and realized that his mouth was parched and he could barely speak, as if his throat had been coated with sand. The battle had lasted only one hundred and thirteen seconds. But Maung had bled and sweat enough that when he croaked “I need help” into the mic he wasn’t kidding, and almost couldn’t punch up the captain’s coms code. The captain and the doctor ripped Maung’s helmet off.

  “You did it. We’re on course again for a window to Karin, and the crew don’t know what the hell just happened.”

  Maung said, “I got lucky; their weapons systems weren’t secured as well as they should have been; they weren’t expecting one of their own. Is Nang OK?”

  “Of course she is,” the doctor said. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  The captain handed him a water bottle, and after Maung took a long drink he coughed and then said, “Someone onboard their ship recognized what I am, Captain—evaluated my signature. He got away. We need to leave as quickly as possible before they try again. Now that they know I’m here, what we found on Ganymede won’t be their primary interest.”

  “Why?” the doctor asked. “Why would they risk starting another war just to get you?”

  But Maung passed out; he couldn’t have given an answer anyway, not one that didn’t boil down to You wouldn’t understand.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In ten minutes they would accelerate. The captain held a hasty burial ceremony for crew members killed in the meteoroid strike before ejecting them out an airlock, and even though he wasn’t friends with them, Maung knew the ship was emptier now in a bad way—a vast empty tube of steel and ceramic ruled by spirits. He helped Nang cinch up her restraints and spotted red marks on her cheeks.

  “Why were you crying?” he asked. “We escaped the Chinese. In ten minutes we accelerate beyond Jupiter and their reach. The dead are with their ancestors.”

  Nang smiled and looked down, then at the wall. “I’m not crying about them or Beijing. It’s about you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. I’m not who you think I am and when we get to Karin, you and I will be on different sides of a fight. Again.”

  Maung shrugged. “It can’t be that bad. I’m sure working as a prison guard is not easy, but a fight?”

  “You’re so silly.” Nang laughed, wiping a new tear from her eye. “Always the Burmese villager. This is not the kind of heat that thanaka will relieve, and ancestors have nothing to do with anything, Maung. I hate Karin. I don’t want to go back and wouldn’t if I didn’t have to.”

  “I will not fight you, Nang.” A pressure grew in Maung’s chest and he wanted to brush the hair from her face, but he couldn’t bring himself to move.

  Nang shook her head. “You don’t get it. But you will.”

  Maung grunted under the two gees of acceleration; his breathing was ragged. The captain clicked into his cubicle and Maung vaguely heard him say that there was a sudden power drain that they couldn’t explain, and he asked Maung to check it out, which made him sigh with relief. Maung activated his semi-aware and merged; almost immediately it stimulated portions of his autonomic system and numbed others with weak current, and although the acceleration continued, his body now compensated in ways it couldn’t before, relieving at least some of the pain. Once that finished he relaxed, and his eyelids drooped as he readied to merge with the ship.

  Maung reached out. In milliseconds he was within the ship’s systems and before he closed his eyes, the semi-aware superimposed its interpretation of signals onto Maung’s normal vision so that he smiled and became dizzy from the mixture of separate worlds. He homed in on the power logger. The thing resembled a fire hose spitting streams of data into storage bins but some streams only flickered while two were strong, their lines like brilliant white beams in a sea of black. Maung probed one and traced it to the engine systems; he sent a query list to the ship’s computer, which responded that engine function was normal.

  But something wasn’t right. He linked with the second stream, just long enough to read its metadata, just long enough to see that the ships communications systems were sucking in power, and that for some reason the backup transmitter was active. Maung chuckled at the fact that his semi-aware urged him onward, sending waves of encouragement; he followed its lead and rocketed through the data, feeling a different kind of acceleration, one that didn’t really exist because it was an illusion born from interpretations fed to the organic portions of his brain. Within a fraction of a second he was there. Maung caught a glimpse of the backup coms system, which resembled a web of light connecting the transmitter and receiver to data streams that, in turn, connected to the millions of ship’s systems. His semi-aware couldn’t focus at first. Then Maung saw a pearl—a huge pulsating sphere of data that something constructed within the transmitter’s storage unit—and he reached out to form a link.

  Before touching it, the transmitter fired. The pearl vanished and Maung mentally blinked, seeing nothing but an empty space where the thing’s bright light used to reside. He checked the transmitter’s most recent settings, then backed out of the ship’s systems to find himself shaking under the acceleration.

  “Captain,” he called out. “Did you just send a message to Earth?”

  “Negative. I haven’t sent anything in over three hours. Nobody did.”

  Maung couldn’t shake a feeling of unease. “Someone did—with the backup transmitter. And because of the size of the data pack and the fact that they wanted to form it in a short time and burst transmit, the system sucked power at detectable levels. But there was no sign that it was the Chinese, and transmitter settings suggested the burst went to the US.”

  “Any ideas?” the captain asked.

  “A guess only,” said Maung. But he ran the data through his semi-aware now for the third time, grateful for the fact he was more than an idiot, at least for a few minutes. “It looks like someone or something on Earth is keeping tabs on us.”

  “Let them,” the captain said. “A short acceleration, then we begin deceleration for our approach to Karin. Not much farther, Maung, and you’ll be at your new home.”

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER NINE

  Days later, when they finally docked at Karin and the airlock opened, a smell washed into the ship and Maung dry heaved. It was the smell of death. He was never on the battlefield and so had never experienced that aspect of killing, but Maung heard it described by others and assumed it couldn’t be anything else. The odor of human decay corrupted the air itself, converted it into a fume that wound its way down through his windpipe and into his stomach. Maung dry heaved again. He expected the prison to be filthy but never imagined this kind of smell and when he looked beyond the airlock door, he raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  Instead of filth, the prison walls were pristine. A glossy black tunnel stretched away and through the asteroid’s rock until, about fifty meters away, a solid wall of bluish glass blocked it.

  “Good luck,” the captain said, “We’re dropping you off here and then locking down until the hydrogen transfer is complete. I never like to stay long at this place. The smell gets in your clothes, even in your pores; it takes days to get rid of.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Nang said.

  “Keep your head down, Maung.” The captain slapped his shoulder. “Choose your friends carefully and you might make it through.”

  But Maung thought otherwise; the odor was a portent. He pictured the smell soaking into his jumpsuit and penetrating his pores so that before long, he wouldn’t be able to smell death at all; death would be a part of him. And then his ancestors wouldn’t be able to find him, not as long as he was trapped in clouds of decay because even spirits avoided burial grounds.

  “Do you think they’ll sell electronic cigarettes here?” he asked.

  “Shut up, Maung,” Nang said.

  Nang led him toward the glass and then stopped. The wall, Maung understood, wasn’t just a wall but a huge chamber that blocked the tube, and inside a man
in a vacuum suit sat at a desk and stared through his helmet faceplate. Nang said, “We’re the new guards,” and he flicked a few switches. The entire thing, cube and all, rose and disappeared into the ceiling, stopping overhead with a loud clunk and Nang waved him forward. There was barely gravity, Maung noted. They pulled themselves along using pockets carved into the rock, handholds that were only visible as blacker patches against the already dark rock. Strings of tiny lights—set into stone—lit the way.

  “We head into receiving, just up this corridor, and fill out forms. Then they give us our suits and gear and assign us to our different stations.”

  “Different stations?” Maung asked.

  Nang looked away and nodded. “I told you; I might not see you that much, Maung. The main guard force is located here near the docking station and with the main prison population—low and medium security.”

  “Where will I be?”

  “On Karin’s dark side. All I know is that it’s a massive metals reclamation and recycling operation manned by high-security male prisoners. It’s an old outpost or something; I’m not really sure. None of the guards assigned there talked to us during my last assignment.”

  Maung’s legs and arms trembled as they moved forward, and behind him he heard the cubicle assembly lower from the ceiling and lock into the floor, sealing them off from the Singapore Sun. He shivered. “Why will I be assigned there? How can you be so sure?”

  “Because.” Nang stopped him before they reached a solid metal door. “Maung, listen to me. Anyone from a Chinese sympathizer nation gets the hardest duty—the most dangerous. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived in America. The guards probably already know you’re coming and have prepared your assignment. But the danger on Karin isn’t just the guards who hate the Burmese; there’s also Karin itself. Be careful. Pay attention to everything and learn.”