Maung didn’t know what to feel—or believe. Lies and deception had always been the Old Man’s currency and his system struggled with the question of who the man really was. What was truth and what was a lie? The memory of his wife and her terror at dying made him furious and sad at the same time, and his hands formed into fists so that the edges of the straps started cutting into them. His anger focused on the Chinese now, the possibility they betrayed his family. If the Old Man was telling the truth, Maung now had another reason to hate them and getting revenge—if he survived this—would need his concentration.
The Old Man kept going. “We’ve been after you not to kill you, but to learn. When your wife got cut down in the jungle, that was a Chinese hunter unit made-up to look American; we were hunting you too, but not to kill you. And you gave us a hell of a chase. We lost you in the jungle and missed it when your family dove into the Charleston slums; it took forever to get a bead on you again. We probably never would have reacquired your trail had it not been for that Sommen warrior at the spaceport.”
“You guys keep secrets,” said Maung. He still fumed, but focused on the thought that maybe his anger partially resulted from not being able to process data quickly. “Too many secrets.”
“Ask me anything. Tell me what you want to know, Maung.”
“Right. Like you’ll tell the truth. You’re a hundred percent American.”
The Old Man smiled and switched to Burmese instead of English. “You won’t know unless you try, Pa.”
Maung thought. He concentrated and Nang smiled at him, nodding, and his doubts faded when he guessed there was no reason for caution anymore. No matter what happened, he was here, tied up, and soon they’d probe him for information so he may as well try and get some for himself. And there was one thing that had been eating him ever since that day at the Charleston Spaceport.
“Why did the Sommen leave our solar system? What is their connection to all this and why did they leave a warrior in Charleston? Why leave all those bodies on Ganymede? Why attack Karin the way they did and then fail to occupy it? Why not just nuke it? Why—”
The Old Man held up his hand. “One at a time, Maung.” He glanced at Admiral Villa, who to Maung looked older than the Old Man; the admiral had no hair and his skin had shriveled with age, but there was no smile on his face and the man peered at him with a kind of hardness. He nodded, giving silent permission.
“OK,” the Old Man said. “But you’re not going to like this, Maung; none of us do.” He turned to Nang. “You can go outside and wait. If you hear what I’m about to say, you’ll lose any right to pick your job postings, your career, everything. We can’t take any chances.”
Nang responded without hesitation. “Screw that. I’m not leaving; I want the same thing Maung does. After all this, I have to know.”
“Nang,” the admiral grunted. His voice sounded gravelly and sturdy, one used to giving orders, and even Maung went rigid with attention. “Think about this. I could use you—you’re country needs you. We are at war. If you hear this, you’ll be confined to a useless ancillary assignment to make sure you’re not captured . . .”
“Sir, I realize that. I’m asking you with all respect: let me choose?”
At first the admiral said nothing. Then he stepped forward and hugged Nang, who hugged him back. “You were always so stubborn, even when I first met you during your training. The best. Like a daughter to me and my wife.” He let go and stepped back, nodding at the Old Man. “Go ahead. She’s earned it.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Nang whispered.
The Old Man paused to light a pipe. Thick white smoke rose into the air and Maung smiled at the smell of cherry, an odor that was close enough to thanaka that it reminded him of his son and home—and that he wanted a cigarette more than ever.
“The Sommen left because they want to give us time to build up our defenses and military capabilities. They lifted the system-wide quarantine so we can finally gather resources. Right now, Fleet has thousands of deep-space mining operations in play; there are literally a chain of asteroids lined up for exploitation. And we only have a hundred years to get ready.”
“Get ready for what?” Maung asked.
“War. In a hundred years the Sommen are coming back. Do you guys remember all those people who left with the Sommen—how you could once walk up to any Sommen ship on Earth and volunteer for their merchant supply service?”
Maung and Nang both nodded.
“Those people were pressed into some kind of slave supply corps; they moved weapons and ammunition from rear areas to the front of whatever war the Sommen had going on at the time, but then one of them returned a while ago—after serving for decades.”
“I remember the rumors,” said Nang. “Some Ukrainian guy.”
The Old Man nodded. “Lev Sandakchiev. But the Sommen dropped him off in Charleston—not Kiev. From what we can tell, Lev was the first human to complete his supply assignment and the Sommen gave him a choice: stay with them and live a cushy life as a member of a kind of merchant class, or go home to Earth. But they didn’t tell him it was a test. When Lev chose to go home, apparently it was a huge deal to the Sommen. Few of the alien races they enslave ever choose that path.” The Old Man paused to relight his pipe.
“So what?” Nang asked.
“The test is part of their religion,” he continued. “Before he came back, the Sommen gave Lev a database containing all the information and data you could want—weapons tech, tactics, strategy, and even their religion and history. We have a team working on the religion part, which turns out to be the most important section of all. The test they gave Lev was part of their search for worthy races; when Lev chose to come home, it was more than a declaration of war. It was a compliment to the Sommen, a sign that their prayers were heard and answered—that we, humans, were their equals in courage. So they’ll give us a chance to wage a fair fight. A hundred years is supposed to be enough time to prepare.”
“Why the hell didn’t Lev just stay with them?” Maung asked. Nang was crying and he strained again to free himself. “I mean, now we’re going to be annihilated.”
“If Lev had stayed, then the Sommen would have destroyed us and taken our resources for themselves, leaving the solar system an empty shell. Those bodies you found on Ganymede? They’re the rest of the humans who volunteered for Sommen service, like Lev. Our experts tell us that by beheading them and leaving them like that, for us to find in the territory of our enemy, the Chinese, it was both an offering to their god and a symbol of high respect. No Chinese had volunteered for service—either that or none were accepted. The Sommen hate the Chinese; we think it has to do with how they’ve gone so far in merging man and machine.”
Maung had trouble remembering everything. Nang stopped crying but her expression was one of horror and Maung wanted more than anything to hold her, and it made him glad that she’d come to listen because already the details slowly drained from his memory. He glared at the Old Man.
“Turn my systems on and unstrap me. I can’t process all this, it’s too much.”
“We can’t, Maung.” He shook his head. “Not yet.”
Nang put a hand on Maung’s leg. “What was going on at Karin?” she asked. “On Dark Side. What was that facility and why did the Sommen attack it the way they did—instead of just nuking it or something and moving on?”
The Old Man turned to face at the admiral again, and raised his eyebrows.
“Go ahead,” the admiral said. Maung was still surprised at the volume and depth of the man’s voice. Then the admiral looked at Maung. “You need to pay attention to this, son. This is the part where we make it clear—why we need criminals like you.”
The words sickened Maung. He imagined lying on an operating gurney for the rest of his life, wired to semi-awares and bots, probed and prodded in test after test to help the Americans.
“We think,” the Old Man said, “Karin is what attracted the Sommen to Earth in the first place. It wa
s a communications station—the first of its kind. We had research programs, started ages and ages ago in an organization that no longer exists, DARPA, for propulsion and communication systems suitable for supporting deep-space missions. Getting communication with anyone beyond the moon was, and still is, a pain in the ass. Then the old DARPA program, now an Allied program, had a break through.”
“Dream Warriors,” said Nang.
“That’s not what we called them, but yeah. Cybernetic systems. It’s how we defeated you guys, but we assigned most of our cybernetic units to Karin. The entire station was one big wormhole engine, a massive power plant connected to hundreds of lasers and particle-beam accelerators. I’m not a physicist. But as I understand it, Allied communications researchers became convinced that they could create a tiny wormhole and—more importantly—keep it open long enough to stream a beam of particles that represented zeros and ones. So we did it; we streamed particles.”
“Holy . . .” Nang whispered. “How?”
“The amount of energy we consumed to fire lasers and particle beams could’ve powered Charleston for years, and that was just to open a tiny hole. Then we figured out how to keep it open for picoseconds—just long enough. That’s when we stumbled. We had worked out the physics to target specific areas but when we tried it we got nothing; the receiver ships we sent into deep space never got the signal, the particles never showed up.”
Maung closed his eyes in frustration. “I can’t follow.”
“You will later—if we reactivate you—for now just listen, Maung. At first we couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Then a bright young physicist named Zhelnikov sent a memo that created a debate that went on for almost a year: He argued that we’d only built half the wormhole; we’d punched into an alternate universe, but hadn’t finished the connection in space-time to ours. So instead of sending particles to our receiver ships, we’d been sending them to God knows where. That’s when Zhelnikov ran some experiments, and a few years later he figured out the power configuration needed to complete the bridge.”
“We succeeded,” the admiral broke in. “That colossal prick, Zhelnikov, figured out how to ‘aim’ the holes we created so that a multiship receiver array could pick up the particle beams. Tests between Karin and deep space were all successful. We had developed our first deep-space communications platform and the units like Maung, Dream Warriors, were critical in controlling it. We called it Signum, which is Latin for signal.”
The Old Man pulled on his pipe and stared at the floor before speaking. “A year later the Sommen attacked, hitting Karin first. Then they landed a major force at Sommen Lake in Sweden, which is how those pricks got their name in the first place.”
“You’re no different than the Chinese,” Maung said. “Or the Myanmarese. You invented me—people like me.”
“That’s a load of crap!” the admiral barked.
“Wait—why?” Nang asked. “Why would Karin have attracted the Sommen?”
The Old Man nodded. “The Sommen have something in their religion against using machines to augment the body, and interstellar communications conducted the way we did it was especially offensive. Unforgivable. But even worse—to them—was when we accidentally punched into the alternate universe; they picked it up somehow and there’s something in these places that even they fear.”
“It explains why the Sommen went after me when I activated in Charleston,” said Maung.
“Now we get to you,” the Old Man said. His face looked grim. Maung trembled at the thought of what might come next but he couldn’t shut his ears and there was no way for him to escape.
“No Allied personnel will ever trust you Maung; we stole Chinese records and know exactly what you did. We know how many people you killed and how many children you scavenged for DNA and organs. Some in our command structure wanted us to execute you as soon as you were captured. But we need you. After the Sommen took Karin, they systematically tracked down every site involved with Signum and killed troops associated with it. We saved a couple of our cybernetic units to use in the war against you, but even they’re dead now and aren’t of any use to what Zhelnikov needs: a living specimen. All our records were on Karin, in systems the Sommen fried. We’ve been working for years to figure out how to insert into that section of Karin and exfiltrate any remaining data because we feared if the Sommen detected us, they’d strike. You almost screwed things up for everyone when you broke into the Signum area and activated your system.”
“I still don’t get it; why would working on that kind of program bring a Sommen attack?” Nang asked.
“Because,” said the admiral, stepping forward, “their truce terms are clear: We are not permitted to fuse man and machine, and the Chinese have already gotten a warning—that the Sommen are about to wipe them out. If we do any cybernetics, they’ll strike us. So with Maung in that section of Karin, an active Dream Warrior, it could’ve been interpreted by the Sommen that we’re working on Signum again. But we have another idea that follows the damn Sommen rules and Zhelnikov thinks he’s the smartest man in the universe—that he’s figured out how the Sommen handle interstellar communications. He damn well may have solved the puzzle.”
The Old Man nodded. “And that’s all we can say. We need your super-aware capability.”
“What does that even mean?” Maung asked. “That you need me? You’ll kill and autopsy me?”
The Old Man laughed. “God, no, Maung. Have you been listening at all?”
“Maung,” said Nang, leaning over to look at him. “The Allies didn’t kill your wife and friends, Maung. We’re not going to kill you now.”
Maung cried. It shocked him into hyperawareness. The tears came from nowhere, and streamed off the sides of his temples, their water warm but quickly cooling in the air-conditioned space so they felt like tiny specks of ice, sliding down and dripping onto the gurney. Maung saw his son. He was connected over space and time, entering the boy’s thoughts and tracing the overwhelming confusion that he faced, alone with only his grandmother. An overwhelming realization that he’d failed his family flooded over Maung, threatening to suffocate him.
As if reading his mind, the Old Man whispered. “We took care of your family, Maung. We have agents on either side of them in the projects. Not the most glamorous assignment. But it’s keeping your boy safe. And we shipped your friends, Nam and Than back to Earth; they'll have real jobs waiting for them.”
“You want me to become a lab rat,” said Maung.
The admiral put his hand on Maung’s shoulder. “Not exactly. Mars was a weapons development center and proving ground. These creatures, the ones who’ve given you all this trouble, are just one project—a genetically engineered force that we can insert and use to infest Sommen systems. They can survive via photosynthesis, or ingestion of millions of different nutrient sources, and can breathe ten different kinds of atmospheres.”
“We have a hundred complexes like this all over Mars,” the Old Man added. “There’s one for communications R and D. You’d be assigned there, Maung, with Nang if she wants it.”
“Forever,” he said.
“Unfortunately . . . yes. We can’t risk this getting out. Almost nobody on Earth has any idea that in a hundred years we could be annihilated. Plus you’re still a Burmese soldier, Maung, and worse, a war criminal—you’ll never shake that. It’s a label you’ll carry to your grave.”
Nang asked, “What about seeing his son?”
The admiral looked down. “We can’t let you go, Maung—not to see your son, not for anything. Even if you refuse to help us, you’re stuck here. But if you agree to these terms we guarantee that your son will get the finest life Fleet can give him. We’ll move him and your mother to DC, give them both citizenship and a nice home in an upscale neighborhood, and he’ll get the best schooling there is. Period. As an American. He may never stand in a jobs line.”
“That’s not fair,” Nang said. “You can’t keep him from his child.” She glared at the Old M
an, who looked down at the floor.
“This is about our survival, Nang. Your concerns and Maung’s are nothing. I’d kill you both right now if it would give us a better chance, and I wouldn’t lose any sleep.”
“Nang,” said Maung, “they’re right. It’s OK.”
She shook her head; her face went red but Maung couldn’t tell if it was from anger, sadness, or both. “They’re not right, Maung. To take your son from you . . .”
“I’ve always wanted him to have a chance. You don’t get it, you never did. You’re American. I’ll never forget that I’m Myanmarese and neither will my son, but look at our world, Nang. Where else is there anything bright and shiny? Not in Laos, Cambodia or even the Philippines. Everyone wants American. America has existed only for three or four centuries but it’s the only place where all things become possible—where you aren’t doomed from birth. You can’t understand that because you grew up in it. I don’t trust Americans and I may never. But my son does. And Nam and Than are safe now.”
Maung looked at the admiral. “I’m in. Do what you want.”
“Maung!” said Nang.
The admiral waved for two guards; they moved in, taking Nang by the shoulders and leading her toward the door.
“Fleet took a pounding a few days ago when they hit Europa and had to regroup here. They’re preparing for a Chinese counterattack and we’re putting you on the flagship. We have to keep the Mars proving ground safe at all costs.”
Nang shouted across the room. “I’m going too!”
“Nang!” the Old Man said. “You’re staying here. We can’t risk having both of you out there, two people who can spill all of our secrets if captured.” He paused to empty his pipe in a trash can, shouting before the guards escorted her out the door.
“And you’re pregnant; sending you to space is against regulations.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A team of scientists rolled him through Mars’ tunnels, firing questions—“How old are you”; “Where were you born”; “Do you have any allergies”; “What do you remember about the Chinese installation procedures”—and Maung did his best to answer. But he spoke without thinking. The fact that Nang was pregnant and that it must be his kid overwhelmed his mind to the point where he wanted to strangle all of them. Maybe the young monk was right; maybe he would have a son and a daughter. He strained to find the Old Man, but the straps kept him from sitting up.
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