Tyger Burning

by T. C. McCarthy

  “Let’s do it,” Maung said. “Good luck, Nam.”

  “Don’t worry. We won’t let them get in. Just promise me.”

  “What?” asked Maung.

  Nam pushed back toward his station, where he and Than controlled the drifters and made sure everyone was in position; they’d take care of communications. But Nam would also be able to electronically “tap” Maung’s consciousness in the event that they needed help from him, sending messages from his control station.

  “That you’ll kill them all.”

  Maung nodded. Then he closed his eyes and dove in.

  He hummed across the cables connecting Karin’s sunny and dark sides as data slipped past, packets that to him resembled tiny fireflies vibrating at a frequency that made it difficult for his mind to process and represent as specks of light. He pulsed one with a query. To his surprise, it returned its own query, and Maung disassembled the fragment to find multiple layers of security, all of them stamped with Allied official transmission verification codes. Someone on Earth or from Fleet was trying to hail Karin with a constant stream of data—somehow breaking through any jamming curtain the Chinese threw up. Maung wished he could move faster than the speed of light, urged on by a sense that something was wrong.

  In less than a second he arrived in the coms system, where he analyzed the communications architecture then coded madly to tie everything into his wetware at the same time he threw up defenses. A part of Maung’s wetware spun up when it appreciated what was happening, and it reminded him of the danger; Maung paused when a mountain of statistics erupted before him to outline the chances, the odds that his defenses would be breached by more than a trillion different attacks. It couldn’t force him to stop. But the safety program had never spun up before, and now that it cautioned him against tying into so many disparate systems with different functions and hardware, Maung worried it was right. He paused to run his own set of scenarios and probabilities. When the results showed that a failure to execute his plan would result in almost zero chance of survival, he quieted the safety program and kept going.

  He finished and tried to brush away the excitement—the power. Maung was Karin. He controlled the antiship missile batteries scattered on all sides of the rock. Karin’s tactical semi-aware linked with his, taking much of the load off his wetware, and several blisters of communications domes fed such an enormous and steady stream of electrons through his brain that he had to ignore much of it, casting a net that only picked up messages related to the Chinese and Allied Fleets. It wasn’t long before one popped up. Maung churned through and nearly withdrew from Sunny Side when he absorbed what it said, and in the control room his hands clenched into fists; he scanned it a second time to ensure his wetware hadn’t made a mistake.

  TO NANG VONGCHANH, EYES ONLY

  FROM JCS J2 LIAISON

  NO TRANSMISSIONS RECEIVED FROM YOU SINCE LAST CHECK. REPORT ON OP TYGER BURN IMMEDIATELY

  END TRANSMISSION

  It took a moment for Maung to cycle the data and another for him to actually believe it, and he fought reality until his semi-aware forced the concept to sink in: Nang was an agent of the Allied Fleet. She had been assigned to work on him—to follow him and keep track of what Maung did. And she probably knew who and what he was, the whole time.

  Maung ignored the pain. Even in this mode, where his wetware limited most sensory perceptions to what he experienced in the cables, he realized it would hurt badly when the full effect of it hit him on Dark Side, after he unplugged. Maung was about to pulse Nam with a message about Nang when another arrived. This time it was different; it didn’t filter through the coms system, but instead pounded Maung’s brain with a direct beam that must have been close.

  Hello, Brother.

  At the same instant, the Chinese destroyers attacked; Maung almost froze at a ping from the Karin tactical-defense semi-aware feed, which alerted him that it was tracking over three hundred incoming missiles.

  Maung sent a data pulse to Nam, warning him of the incoming fire. Once it was delivered, he linked with the Karin semi-aware and scanned for destroyers, his frustration making him want to scream once he discovered that all of them were outside missile range. Maung’s semi-aware decided on a tactic: use his batteries to act as point defense for the station and destroy the incoming Chinese missiles. But Karin was a prison—no longer a military post and couldn’t defend against missile waves forever; his semi-aware made it clear that the destroyers could stay out of range and continue attacks like this, softening up their targets, waiting until the Karin missile batteries were empty. Maung fired. There was no point in waiting since the analysis was the same no matter how many different scenarios he tried: The Chinese wouldn’t risk landing until they’d taken out Karin’s defenses.

  One by one the incoming missiles blinked out. To Maung the process took forever, the seconds feeling like hours as he tracked the progress of each target and each of his defensive missiles on radar, his wetware simultaneously plotting trajectories to determine the Chinese targeting strategy. To his surprise, most of the incoming missiles were aimed at a single location: Karin’s communications domes.

  Maung’s alarms tripped and before he reacted his wetware alerted him to hundreds of infiltrations; it was him. The enemy super-aware probed at each of the vulnerabilities that his safeties had warned against and now Maung had to dedicate every resource—including Karin’s tactical semi-aware—to fending off the attacks. It must be bad, he thought. Maung’s wetware now generated enough heat that his head burned and the real-world pain distracted him, forcing his thoughts toward hot Yangon days and the smell of thanaka. And then, at the moment he began beating back the attacks, the Chinese pulsed him with new energy. Maung screamed. The Chinese Dream Warrior’s ship must have slipped in on the dark side of Karin, close to the control room where it beamed an attack directly, through the rock, and his defenses crumbled. Maung retreated from Sunny Side, unable to keep up with both the missile defense and this new threat.

  The safeties activated again and Maung’s system warned that the risks were too great but he quickly shut the message down, telling his semi-aware there was no choice; in a few seconds, the Chinese Dream Warrior would own him. He created a kind of capsule, a cage of code that he hoped would hold for at least a few seconds—long enough for the Chinese to find it and long enough for him to shut down all receivers in the station. When it was ready, he injected the creeper, filled the packet with his captured weapon and then shut it tightly, scouring his own systems for any sign of infection. He was clean. Finally, he pulsed the creeper packet, firing it outside his defenses where the Chinese snatched it up.

  Maung moved quickly. He coded the Karin semi-aware to begin an entire systems shutdown, anything with even a remote possibility of acting as an electromagnetic receiver, and then retreated back to the control room where he sat up and gasped for air. His head pounded. Only a few seconds passed before he calculated that his attacker still hadn’t broken into the cage, so the attack continued on his defenses, the only part of this system he couldn’t shut off as long as a beamed threat existed.

  “Nam!” he said.

  “You’re alive! We thought they were killing you, with the way you were screaming, Pa.”

  Maung couldn’t move. His arms and leg muscles locked with spasms and the pain made him grit his teeth so that he had to speak through them. “I need to get somewhere that’s EM-shielded. I think the Sommen attack area. You have to carry me there.”

  “But, Pa,” Than said, “what about the Chinese?”

  “Now!” Maung shouted. “I’m under attack and I can’t shut my systems down.”

  By the time Nam and Than got their helmets on, and then Maung’s, his head threatened to split apart.

  The deeper they went, the more relief came, little by little. Maung had no idea how the Dream Warrior continued to reach him with coms waves, and guessed that Chinese forces had planted repeaters everywhere but he couldn’t risk using the energy to d
etect them in case it broke his concentration. He told Nam. Maung could barely form words and worried his voice was so hoarse that Nam couldn’t understand, but then the old man screamed over the net for the Sunny Side guards to start scanning—to destroy any active transmitters.

  “Are you OK, Pa?” Than asked.

  Maung couldn’t respond. The Chinese had been planning this for weeks, he figured, and just at the moment he repelled one attack method three more popped up, pre-scripted and written, an automatic invasion where each subsequent wave was more intense and in depth than the last; not only did the Chinese not lose their tiny gains, they consolidated them to creep forward through his defenses.

  Suddenly it stopped. Maung inhaled and relaxed his jaw, not sure if it was a trick—part of the strategy, to get him to stand down. After a few seconds he relaxed further. Then he examined the packets that stayed in his system, the last signs of his attacker that bounced around in his wetware, waiting to be destroyed.

  “We found three transmitters; they’re gone now, Pa,” Nam said.

  Maung’s voice was barely audible. “Thanks, Nam.”

  “What happened?”

  “They almost got me. The Chinese launched hundreds of missiles at Karin’s external coms blisters and then hit me with a direct attack on my wetware; they pulsed me with a broad spectrum EM attack and I nearly broke.”

  “That’s not good,” Than said. “What now, Pa? Now that you’re not linked in, are we dead?”

  Maung tried to laugh, but then coughed; it took a moment to get his voice back. “No. I trapped a fragment of the creeper when we were down at the Sommen attack site that first time. I managed to put it in a cage and feed it to the Chinese Dream Warrior. Based on the last packets I got from him, it’s in the process of eating his mind and I doubt he’ll bother us again—at least for a while. If I could handle it, he can handle it too. But with any luck, it will jump from him to the Chinese Fleet.”

  “You let that into your mind?” Nam asked.

  “Yeah. And I found out one more thing; the Chinese encountered it too, when they took all the bodies from the Sommen attack site. The creeper was why they were so nervous about us and so unsure; since we attacked them with the rifle and prevented them from getting any Sommen tech, they assumed that we had figured everything out—even how to use the creeper as a weapon.”

  “Which you did,” Than said.

  “Barely.” Maung checked his chronometer. Less than a minute had passed since the attack stopped but the destroyers were still out there, and if they hadn’t been affected by the creeper then there could be another wave of incoming missiles. Maung’s cramps had vanished. But now he couldn’t move because of the exhaustion and he sagged in Than’s arms.

  “Get me back to the control room; I think we have incoming missiles.”

  When they were halfway there, the first missiles hit. To Maung it felt as though the access-way pipes broke free and slammed into his back, cracking against his helmet and causing a cloud of sparks to shower around his head when the heads-up system failed. It happened again a few seconds later. Than dragged them forward as best he could but when the attack continued for what seemed like hours, Maung worried they wouldn’t make it. Finally Nang’s voice crackled over his headset to announce that the wave was over, and that Karin’s missile batteries were gone.

  Maung wanted to scream at her for betraying him. Instead he forced himself to focus. “Get me to the control room, Than.”

  “I’m going as fast as I can.”

  “It’s not fast enough,” said Maung. “They’re getting desperate.”

  Nang waited for them in the control room. She launched herself at Maung and wrapped him in her arms, but when he didn’t respond she moved away.

  “What’s wrong?” Nang asked.

  Maung slid past her; the pain in his joints made him wince, but a rage increased with every millisecond as his wetware analyzed the data, dug into every conversation he’d ever had with Nang, and it soon overshadowed the muscle pain; Maung had to stop himself from telling her everything. Part of the anger he directed at himself: How could I have been so blind?

  “Later,” he said. Maung tucked into his chair and pulled at the cable. “Right now I have to see if there’s something I can do about those destroyers.”

  Nam grabbed his arm. “Maung, you were almost destroyed. That Chinese Dream Warrior is still out there.”

  “I know. But without the repeaters, he’ll be less powerful.”

  Maung slammed the connector in. Within a second he linked back to Sunny Side and churned through status reports and radar data, trying to organize everything in a way that made sense. All of the Karin defensive missile batteries were gone. Secondary magazine explosions had caused so much damage that the entire structure—including tunnels and prisoner cells—had depressurized, and the number of dead shocked Maung; every Sunny Side prisoner had died in the attack. He set the observation aside and waited for the radar data to sweep through, expecting another wave of missiles to hit at any moment.

  But there was nothing. Only one radar still worked and Maung ran a diagnostic to make sure before using it to sweep a wide arc where the destroyers should be; all four were there. A wave of missiles launched from two of them but instead of heading for Karin, they blinked in a pattern that traced toward their neighboring ships, and Maung had to imagine the particle beams that cut through space and ripped armor panels open, venting the craft and ejecting its occupants into a cold vacuum. His wetware had the answer before he asked for it: Communications between the two firing ships suggests that the creeper has jumped the link between the enemy Dream Warrior and two Chinese ships, which the creeper now controls. The other two ships are panicking. The Chinese super-aware is dead.

  Eventually the firing stopped. Maung had no way to know if the creeper accomplished its mission to take over all the Chinese systems, but to be safe he shut down Karin’s communications so the thing couldn’t jump back to them. On radar, the ships continued on their path. All four, two of which looked like they’d broken into pieces, headed toward Karin and within an hour, the two intact ships would impact the asteroid. Without warning, more targets appeared. Before Maung disconnected, the tactical semi-aware identified them as drop ships.

  Maung jerked the cable from his head. “The creeper killed at least two destroyers. Less Chinese will be able to attack us. That’s the good news.”

  There was a small group of Myanmar guards in the control room, and they cheered, first hugging each other and then Maung, their happiness crackling over the radio since even Dark Side was starting to depressurize as a result of the Chinese missile impacts. His head still hurt from the last one.

  “What’s the bad news?” Nam asked.

  “Two Chinese ships are on a collision course with Karin. Their combined mass and velocities will do far more damage than their missiles could, and several drop ships have disengaged with one of their ships. They likely contain Chinese troops trying to escape the destroyers, and whether or not they’re infected with the creeper is unknown. They’ll land here after the destroyers hit—to attempt consolidation and take-over.”

  “We have to get off Karin,” Nang said.

  Maung’s anger at her spilled into his voice. “How? Do you know of any ships that are docked at Karin or if any survived the missile attacks? There is no way to get off here, Nang.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong, Maung,” she said. Maung heard her voice crack with sadness. “I don’t know what I did for you to be mad at me, but I told you a long time ago that there’s a ship. A small one. The warden keeps a survey ship in a deep crater so that it’s almost impossible to detect unless you’re right on top of it. The ship has stealth tech.”

  “How many can a survey ship hold?” Than asked.

  Nang paused before answering. “Only ten.”

  “This kind of decision,” Maung said, “must be easy for you. We escape, leaving all my jungle idiot friends to die.”

  Na
ng looked at him, her mouth wide open.

  They were free-falling in the prisoners’ elevator shaft when the destroyers impacted. All of the guards followed Maung—Dark and Sunny Side—in a long line of environment-suited figures, streaming down in darkness toward Karin’s core, and he looked back at the same moment the walls jumped to one side. The rock slapped Maung. He blacked out for a second and the taste of blood filled his mouth from having bitten his tongue. But his suit was intact. Maung didn’t recognize that his hearing had gone until the sounds of screaming crackled over his helmet speakers. He looked back again, flicking on infrared. A massive chunk of asteroid had dislodged to block most of the shaft above him, but someone’s arm reached through a narrow crack. It groped for something at the same time vapor jetted from a massive gash in the sleeve and someone screamed that they’d been trapped. Maung guessed at least half of the Korean guards were now stuck behind him.

  There’s nothing you can do, his semi-aware said.

  Maung turned off his receiver, not wanting to listen to their screams.

  The remaining half of their small band crawled upward. Maung said a prayer of thanks for Than, Nam, and even Nang, and then prayed for those who had gone. He brought up the rear and paused to look back at the same moment his imagination pictured a group of dead guards trying to follow as their suits vented, eventually falling back to disappear in weak gravity. Karin had swallowed their souls, gulping them down its throat. Karin didn’t want anyone to escape.

  “We have to hurry, Maung,” Nang said.

  “So you can hand us over to the Allies?” he asked. “So you can finish your spying mission, Tyger Burn?” Maung decided hiding it was a waste of time; a feeling of betrayal had grown strong enough that it eclipsed any other feelings he had for her. He continued the crawl upward, inching toward the Sunny Side shaft exit.