Tyger Burning

by T. C. McCarthy

  “The Americans,” he said, trying to get the words out before he forgot again. “They were researching their own Dream Warrior program.”

  Nam had been about to leave because the replacements were now opening the outer airlock door; instead he slammed his fist against the emergency locks, engaging them with a hiss and setting off the alarm.

  “What?”

  “They were researching their own program, Nam. The evidence is still there. An entire army of Sommen hit this place because of them and I know that because the same thing happened to me when I activated in Charleston; the Sommen there was attacking Americans but as soon as his defensive systems identified me, he turned and charged. They had multiple APCs and soldiers with coil guns and grenade launchers, and instead of focusing on them, it swerved and charged me. Someone without weapons. That’s the same thing Than and I saw today. The Sommen went into a frenzy.”

  Nam shouted into his throat mic at the replacements who were now pounding on the inner door, and he told them to wait before looking back up at Maung. “You are sure of this?”

  “I’ve never been more sure,” said Maung. “You didn’t know this? It’s right there—out in the open.”

  “Of course I didn’t know it!” Maung flinched at the anger he heard in Nam’s voice, but the man was looking at the floor, thinking. “You don’t know it either. Forget about it. Give me time to think and we’ll talk on our next shift. Do you remember how the Sommen would let anyone just walk up to their bases and ships—to join their merchant ranks?”

  “Yeah,” Maung said.

  “I’m starting to wonder if things would’ve been better if I’d had the guts to do that.”

  Nam opened the inner airlock door and apologized to the replacement guards, who stared at Maung but said nothing. When the door closed behind them he gripped Maung’s wrist before he could get his helmet on, then whispered. “I mean it. Don’t talk to Than about this at all, and I’ll go straight to his quarters to make sure he keeps his mouth shut.”

  “Why?” Maung asked. “Why should we be so secret?”

  “Because we may be able to use this to our advantage. But now thanks to that idiot, Than—who had no idea what those dead humans represented—we have no time to think; if I had known, I never would have reported this to Sunny Side. You should have spoken up as soon as you got back, Maung. Make a mistake like that again and Old Man Charleston will have you killed.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Maung stared at the guards’ “barracks”—a narrow vertical slot, ten meters wide and carved into the rock so it extended a hundred meters away from him and fifty meters above. Each side of it contained dormitory cubicles. Maung slipped into the slot, and climbed. His space was near the top and he squeezed into a three-meter cube, the open side of which was covered by wire mesh and a thin curtain to form a private cage. Maung closed the cage door. He drew the curtain, shut off the single light over his bed, and then tried to sleep while fending off nightmares of the Sommen. It was nice to hear Burmese voices, he thought. While drifting off, Maung listened to the other guards talk and gamble, and for the first time since the war he forgot he wasn’t in Myanmar.

  Maung woke when someone pressed his shoulder. Without thinking he clutched at the air and made contact with a forearm so he wrapped his fingers around it and twisted before a voice hissed into his ear.

  “Stop, Maung; it’s Than!”

  Maung let go and yawned, grabbing a handhold to prevent himself from floating upward and bumping his head. “What time is it?”

  “Come.” Than tugged on Maung’s suit. “Time is meaningless here, except in terms of when your next duty shift is. And we’re on duty in eight hours.”

  Maung floated after him and saw the bluish-white LEDs outside his cube, gleaming in reflection off Than’s helmet, which hung from a strap over his shoulder. Wherever they were going, he thought, it was vacuum or Than wouldn’t have bothered carrying it. They made it all the way out of the barracks before Maung realized his mistake.

  “I forgot my suit helmet,” he said.

  Than kept going. “It doesn’t matter. We got you an entire new suit, a proper one this time. Nam is waiting for us so we have to hurry; try and keep up.”

  “Where are we headed?” asked Maung.

  “Just a second.” Than popped a panel off the wall outside the barracks and checked to ensure nobody watched; he then dove into a tiny access shaft. The panel floated downward to land at Maung’s feet.

  “Get in and shut it behind us. Once we meet Nam, we’re heading back to that place we found yesterday—with all the dead Sommen—because Nam wants to grab as much stuff as he can before the Fleet makes it off limits. We may be too late already.”

  Maung squeezed in behind Than; once he sealed the access panel, darkness swallowed them both.

  “We want you to access the dead,” Nam said.

  At first Maung thought he’d heard it wrong because of interference from the humming conduits that touched his new suit and helmet so he shrugged. “Access what?”

  “The dead,” Nam repeated. “You have to try and plug in—access whatever’s been frozen for all these years in the computer portion of their brains.”

  “I don’t know if that will work,” Maung said. The thought itself induced a sense of dread. “From what we saw when we were down there, it looks like the Sommen specifically went after the wiring on these guys. None of them had heads.”

  They were deep within the station now. Nam said that he had a map display on his heads-up so they wouldn’t get lost, and Maung picked up the sounds of the station, vibrating through the gauntlets and into the air inside. The structure moaned. He imagined that the towering buildings above were like banyan trees, their limbs and massive trunks shifting in the winds of a monsoon and he and the others crawled through the roots, protected. He squeezed through a tight hole. Nam had forced open a metal, sphincter-like valve that looked razor sharp and Maung took care to make certain the edges didn’t slice his suit. He looked back; Maung hoped nobody was following, but couldn’t shake the feeling that the place was haunted and since he was last he shone his headlamp behind them into the darkness—relieved to see nothing.

  “Not much farther,” said Nam. “We’re almost there.”

  “Why is this so important to you?” Maung asked.

  Nam chuckled. “It’s not—not to me. It is to the Old Man and you know the rules: We do anything he says.”

  “No questions?” Maung said. “Don’t you ever wonder why he cares about things—like this?”

  “No questions.” Nam grunted and the sounds of clanking metal came over Maung’s helmet speakers. “We’re here. I’ll clip off and drop the line down, but we’re coming in from above and it’s a long drop so be careful.”

  The second time was no easier. Maung wrapped his arms around his chest and surveyed the pile of headless bodies, watching while Than and Nam dug, breaking through the thin layer of ice that held the corpses together and looking for one that might still be whole. He refused to get close and neither Than nor Nam insisted. Maung said a silent prayer for protection from evil, for protection from the souls that had lived here for so long, frozen in place only to face a form of grave robbery. After an hour he sat on the floor. He hadn’t been on Karin that long and suspected that low gravity and stress were getting to him, and he fought the urge to pound his own helmet with a futile rage.

  “We should let them rest,” he said.

  Nam straightened and turned. “Not out here, Maung. These are American devils who got what they deserve and there’s no room here for superstition. We’re millions of miles from Mandalay.”

  Maung smiled at the slang, reminded of home. The phrase, miles and miles from Mandalay, was used to describe things that were too far to reach and it felt good to talk in Burmese.

  “They are dead, though, Nam,” he said. “Their dead, our dead, spirits are the same all over. We should leave them be. And don’t call them American devils; you neve
r faced them in war and don’t know what they’re like. They’re not devils.”

  “I think Maung’s right,” Than said. “Even if we find one that looks intact, the chances of this working after they’ve been frozen for so long—”

  “What do you know about semi-awares?” Nam interrupted. “What do you know about anything? You’re half as smart as Maung is without his semi-aware and that’s pretty dumb. So keep working and don’t say another word, either of you.”

  But Maung was glad to see that he’d had an effect. Instead of treating the American dead as if they were wood, tossing them here and there in the light gravity, Nam and Than worked together and lifted the bodies carefully, stacking them neatly wherever there was room. After fifteen more minutes Nam held his hand up. He reached down and motioned for Than to help.

  “I think we found one,” he said.

  Than grabbed the feet. “It’s a girl.”

  They placed the body in front of Maung, who scraped the ice from its faceplate to reveal the pale face of what to him looked like a young woman, maybe in her twenties, and she stared up into the blackness with an expression of surprise, her lips coated with frost. The preservation was perfect. Her skin was soft and white, matte with a layer of ice crystals that formed long ago on her cheeks, but the layer was barely there. Even covered by ice she was beautiful.

  “It reminded me of the old kids’ story from the twentieth century,” said Nam. “The one they’ve made like a trillion versions of.” He thought for a second. “Sleeping Beauty.”

  “This is wrong,” Than said.

  Nam smacked the side of his helmet. “Shut up or I’ll send you back alone; let’s see if you can find the way back again, this time without a map.”

  “He’s right, though,” said Maung. His stomach was uneasy, nervous with the anticipation of what was about to happen. Nam wrenched off his back pack and opened it, yanking out bundles of different cable loops so that Maung imagined the man was gutting a wild animal. “If I connect, it will be for a moment and will be with the last thoughts of a dead woman. What about this seems right to you? This is bad luck, Nam—something a kala would do.”

  Nam sorted the cables and laid them across the floor. “You said that you have the ability to link directly with computers and from what Old Man Charleston said, you may be able to power one of their semi-awares with yours. So pick a cable and do it.”

  “What if the sunny-side detail shows up in the middle of my link? Who’s going to deal with any nanos that lock in, like they did the last time we activated unshielded tech down here?”

  “We’ll worry about that if and when it happens,” said Nam. “You’re to power her up and gather as much data as you can, as quickly as you can, and then we go back the way we came; there wasn’t time to work out the proper shielding. Also, as far as we can tell, this area is clear of nano-mines.” He cracked the seal on the dead woman’s helmet and carefully pulled it off; the helmet split down the middle, clamshell, and a bundle of small golden rods slid out from the back of her head. “How can you stand this, Maung. How could anyone stand having metal inserted into their skulls?”

  Maung ignored the question. “I don’t see how this will work, Nam. How can I get the cable into my helmet? Do you expect me to do this in vacuum?”

  “I’ll show you, but first find a cable that works on the woman; all of these will work on you, I guarantee it. And we don’t need to operate or tell the surgeon.”

  Maung leaned over and turned the woman onto her face, where he could look more closely at the back of her head. Then he scanned the cables. Once he found one that looked like a good fit, he pointed and Nam nodded, lifting the cable before shuffling behind Maung; he fumbled with Maung’s hoses before snapping the cable into place. A whirring sound filled his helmet. Maung panicked for a second, thinking that microbots had gotten inside his suit; a slight pressure pushed against the back of his head where his port was, then a sharp pain when something cut through his skin, and finally a click when his port locked. There was no connection to anything yet so his semi-aware remained inactive.

  “Where did you find this helmet?” he asked. “These cables?”

  “The Old Man,” said Nam. “He already thought something like this might be needed. This suit and gear got here at the same time you did and microbots are integrated into the helmet port, on the inside; they tunnel through your skin to form the linkage.”

  The faster this was done the faster he could be out of her mind, Maung thought, and he reached behind the woman’s head to lift it gently, holding the connector steady. He prepared the other end of the cable before activating his system.

  In less than a second he understood what to do. He estimated the proper amount of juice to send down the connector, assuming the woman was designed in a manner similar to himself, and set up shields and traps to prevent her semi-aware from going on the offensive and taking him over. She may be dead, but now that he was fully aware, Maung realized there was a chance her system stored some power and could try to force through his defenses; there was no telling what the Americans were up to. Just before sliding the connector into the woman’s port he thought that cold air had entered his suit, but then his system reminded him that the cold came from suit sensors, linked directly to his brain, and the thought of it made him smile; he’d never touched absolute zero before—or however close to it they were on Karin. It was a cold beyond cold, an extreme that his semi-aware monitored almost at the individual fiber level, making sure the strands could still flex despite the environment and that they didn’t snap to create micro leaks. He was aware at a level that made his existence blend seamlessly into that of Karin. But at the same time Maung imagined he was like a ghost and that his soul expanded beyond the flesh of his body and into a thin layer that bled outside the asteroid to contact space itself.

  He slid the connector into her neck port and waited. At first there was nothing. Then time itself seemed to melt, sending Maung into a universe of slow motion as data streamed first in one direction and then in both when the woman’s basic systems booted. Maung had to close his eyes. The stream of visual information confused him because Nam and Than looked as though they were frozen compared to the speed at which Maung absorbed the data, a kind of golden light that made him warm, just at the thought of being alive again. If only he made it to the main communications center, Maung could reach out to American commanders and let them know of the Sommen. The Sommen were unstoppable. All of his comrades were dead already and it was up to him to . . .

  He shut off incoming traffic and opened his eyes. “That is way messed up, man.”

  “What’s wrong?” Nam asked. “You just started a second ago.”

  “She’s trying to take me. I set defenses and it’s like they aren’t even there, like her semi-aware can detect traps and break through the firewalls instantaneously. If I didn’t know any better I’d say it could predict my every move. And she’s sending me her thoughts; the last ones she ever had. It’s like I’m her.”

  Than jumped to his feet and Maung guessed he was looking at something on his heads-up. The man’s voice sounded panicked.

  “Nanos. They’re still far off and the structure is giving me a lot of interference, but they’re headed this way, moving slowly. We have time.”

  “Get back in there,” Nam said.

  “What if it takes me over?” asked Maung. “I’ve never experienced anything like this, like the semi-aware has a real personality, and all of her is contained within it.”

  “You have five minutes. Then I’m pulling the plug and we’re heading out.”

  “What happens if we pull the plug while he’s still hooked up?” Than asked. Both he and Nam looked at Maung.

  “Don’t. I get a really bad headache and it takes me a week to walk again.”

  “Five minutes,” Nam repeated.

  But five minutes, Maung recognized, may as well have been five hours. Communication down the cable was blocked and the woman’s semi-aware
bombarded the optical fibers with its will, a kind of energy stream, strong enough to disturb his systems and at first he was too frustrated to even open the connection again until his semi-aware finished analyzing the pattern, identifying it as something that diminished. A moment later the signal weakened to almost nothing. He’d given some juice to the woman’s semi-aware but not enough so it could run for any great length of time and now her energy cycled down.

  The memory of his wife popped into his thoughts without warning. Maung hesitated before flicking open the line because as soon as he saw her, sadness made him fight the urge to cry and it took almost thirty seconds to regain control of his emotions. When it passed, he opened the line to the dead American.

  Almost at once the woman’s system flooded in. The signal attenuation had been a ruse and Maung drowned among wave after wave of multiple frequencies, too much for him to handle so that he almost gave up until he had an idea. His semi-aware pulsed a code, one that hadn’t been used in years but then again it had been a long time since the war ended and Maung noted that the last time he used it the code had been old. But it had worked. The main Chinese target had been a massive parallel setup of American semi-awares in Thailand, one of their main centers for strategic planning, and Maung was still shocked to find even more powerful capabilities in such a small package—an American human. In less than a second her attack stopped. He couldn’t believe the code worked, but one moment his brain and semi-aware were flooded with electrons and now it was empty, a kind of computational wasteland. Maung probed deeper into the woman’s semi-aware, wary of the possibility that other traps waited.

  The outer structure was gone. Maung had to send out more feelers than normal to trace a path and he wondered what could have caused such destruction, not spending the computational power to figure it out now, but saving the data for later. When he reached the core he found the last bits of activity. A decompression bomb—the thing that nearly overwhelmed his systems—looked like a spinning drum, its outward section spinning so fast around a horizontal axis that it hurt Maung to just scan it; the rest of the area had been converted into a capacitor, designed to supply a burst of energy to power the bomb as soon as a target appeared. Maung examined what remained. All of the woman’s memory was gone and if this were a city it was one that had been blown out, the spires of skyscrapers the only thing left, with shattered windows occasionally letting a piece go with a distant crash. But there was something else; one of his feelers sent back a ping, like a fishing bob that just disappeared under the water and then popped back into sight, and he was about to send a query down its length when his alarms tripped. He backed out. Like so many times before, Maung sank back into his training and relaxed his mind, getting out of the way of his reflexes and letting them do what they’d been taught, at speeds so fast that his body temperature instantly slid upward.