Tyger Burning

by T. C. McCarthy

  “I hope nothing happens to you,” he said. “While you’re working.”

  Maung glared back at the man. “This won’t be Phobos or Karin or even Mars. This is Europa—the key to Jupiter and all the hydrogen we’d ever need, without having to pay the Chinese. It’s like nothing you’ve ever faced. It probably has underground labyrinths stocked with additional ships, Dream Warriors, and all the ammunition they’ll ever need; you know this. I reviewed the data fed to me by your own semi-awares.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Maung closed his eyes, suddenly tired. “That once this starts, you’ll probably be dead along with the rest of us. But we have no choice. Because if we don’t attack the Chinese, they’ll attack us and either way, we die.”

  Maung’s guards shook him awake and he almost couldn’t open his eyes; the prior day’s battle exhausted him more than he realized and Maung had spent most of the past eleven hours searching his wetware for strategies he hadn’t yet tried, modeling them with the number of ships left in his fleet plus the Chinese vessel. None worked. In most cases the Fleet lasted less than an hour against deep, layered Chinese defenses, and only in one did it survive: in the case where the Allies ran away. Maung was about to contact the admiral himself when he got an idea.

  He sat up straight and gestured for one of the guards to hand him the cable; it floated near the corner.

  “You’re linking up already?” he asked. “There’s time to eat if you want, Maung.”

  Maung shook his head, grabbing at the cable when the guard extended it toward him. “No there’s not. I have to link with the Langley now to see if something else might work. An idea I had. Do you read old science fiction?”

  The guard nodded. “I love science fiction.”

  “Have you ever read a really old book called The Forever War?” When the guard nodded, he continued. “Then you’re going to love this.”

  “So there’s hope?”

  “There’s always hope,” said Maung, smiling. “Just not certainty. Everything is a matter of chance and probability, except for when it’s not.”

  Maung heard the guards laugh. But the sound disappeared as soon as he slipped the cable into his helmet, linking himself with the Langley and shifting his consciousness into the speed of light, bounding through the ship’s conduits until he fused with the command semi-awares. As soon as he fed them his idea, they stopped processing. Maung could tell they were intrigued and that they’d judged this was important enough so they put on hold all the other functions they’d been ordered to perform in preparation for the attack; new options automatically had high priority. One by one they came to their own judgments—each of them the same. Maung’s calculations were correct. If his plan worked it should deal a serious enough blow that the Allied Fleet could win its fight against the Chinese vessels, and avoid the need for ground invasion. Maybe.

  Maung ordered the semi-awares to look at additional possibilities for using the Allied Fleet, including vessels that should be sacrificed in order to maximize the probability of victory. One of the semi-awares detected that Maung was fading out and asked him, Where are you going?

  Maung paused. It’s time I got the Chinese ship moving. It’s never too early to start. He pulled out of the command center and rerouted his efforts to the Langley’s communications system, linking up with the Nan Yang. All of its super-awares were gone. Destroying the ship’s autonomous capabilities had been a priority for the Marines so that when Maung navigated its conduits he imagined he traversed empty fibers and nodes, with dark tunnels appearing on both sides whenever he passed through the remains of an important junction. But its guidance system was alive. The captain’s techs had finished installing a simple network only twenty-four hours ago, which Maung found active, waiting for him; it was also linked to a temporary network that could allow Maung to activate the ship’s remaining weaponry.

  It’s not a semi-aware, he thought. But then it doesn’t need to be a semi-aware. In fact, what the Nan Yang is about to become doesn’t require intelligence or awareness whatsoever. Only the laws of physics.

  When he returned to the command center, the other semi-awares flooded him with options and strategies now that they’d decided on a course of action. Maung stacked them for review. He waited for a moment before presenting them with their next challenge—to ignore orders—and the response was what he expected.

  The admiral and Command were clear about timetables, one pointed out. We cannot deviate from those orders.

  Maung knew this was true, and struggled to find a way around a set of specific orders: He couldn’t override Allied Command. Maung almost laughed at the fact that figuring out a way around Allied regulations might be more difficult than finding a strategy to defeat the enemy and he churned on the problem for seconds that stretched into minutes before giving up in frustration. Maybe, Maung thought, he should contact the admiral. But to do that would’ve revealed his plan over radio or microwave, the same as handing his strategy to Chinese intercepts and spies.

  Give me access to the original messages from Command, Maung said.

  They are sealed with a new set of codes. It will take a moment to access.

  That’s OK, Maung assured. Just give me the new codes and I’ll handle it. I’ll need decryption capabilities when we move out anyway. I’ll send you my favorites of the options you gave me and then all of you need to continue refining our strategy because we don’t have much time. The Nan Yang is moving out now.

  When Allied Command found out what Maung planned, he’d be in trouble. Already the captain pinged him; he was furious that the Nan Yang was underway without the rest of the Fleet, not to mention that it was heading in the wrong direction, away from Europa. Maung anticipated they’d soon attempt to override his access to Fleet systems, and so it was not enough to just forge a new set of orders and insert them into the constantly shifting stack of incoming transmissions for decoding and reading. He had to make sure the new orders fit with everything else that was incoming—to give him as much time as possible. It only took a moment to craft them. But Maung spent almost half an hour reviewing every message the ship had received in the last day, making sure that his new creation wouldn’t attract too much attention; if it did, someone might contact Command, destroying the entire effort.

  Maung ignored his small inner voice, which asked, What if your plan fails?

  At this rate, one of the semi-awares sent, we shall arrive at Europa one day before the Nan Yang.

  Maung had seen this already, but the fact that others watched the same calculations and helped with decisions made him feel better. We can’t move any slower without increasing our exposure and making them suspicious that there’s more to our approach than meets the eye. He asked, Can we survive one day against them? Maung had his own numbers but wanted confirmation.

  The odds are against it.

  Maung disconnected from the system. He stayed still so the guards didn’t notice he’d returned, and so he could have private time to pray and meditate, sending thoughts to his ancestors and asking for their protection. One day. They only had to last twenty-four hours Earth time, but in battle that length of time may as well be twenty-four years since there were so many enemy ships arrayed against them. Even if they won, Maung had estimated, most of the Allies would die.

  And it would be his fault.

  The captain shook him awake. “You’re going to slaughter my entire fleet.”

  “It’s not your fleet,” Maung said. He rubbed his eyes and checked the time, cursing himself for falling asleep.

  “The hell it’s not, you little shit.”

  The captain reached for his fléchette pistol. Maung heard rustling behind him and before the pistol cleared its holster, both his guards screamed past and impacted against the captain simultaneously, one knocking his head against the compartment hatch with a loud crack. The captain went limp. Blood flowed from a huge cut on the man’s head and one guard hit the coms panel, yelling for a medic, while th
e second one snatched a spare undersuit from storage, pressing the fabric against the captain’s head in an effort to stop the bleeding.

  “Thanks,” Maung said.

  “The guy was an asshat,” one of them said.

  The one trying to stop the bleeding asked, “What was this about, Maung? Why is he so pissed?”

  “I’m changing the attack timetables. Command gave me the freedom to decide on a strategy but not on the timing for our attack. I sent the Nan Yang on a separate course from ours, and we’re moving toward Europa at about quarter speed.” When he finished, Maung marveled at how insane it must sound to someone without knowledge of the full plan.

  “That’s crazy,” the guard said.

  Maung nodded. “Of course it is. The Chinese will never expect crazy; they’ll expect exactly the same tactics and strategy that their semi-awares and Dream Warriors would develop, the ones that make the most sense. So our only hope is in insanity.”

  The other guard looked shocked. “Had I known that, I might have let this guy shoot you.”

  Maung smiled. The chronograph blinked one minute closer to the start of hostilities and his smile disappeared with the realization that it was almost time. In less than an hour they’d be within range of the remaining Chinese Dream Warriors, and soon after that, long-range missile batteries would fire from Europa. He clamped his helmet on and strapped back into his couch before the medics arrived.

  Maung spoke to the guards through his helmet speakers. “Suit up and strap in. Everything is about to start.”

  Maung’s view of the battle was a kaleidoscope pattern of motion, some painted in passive ultraviolet and infrared, but most of it in radar from a sensor ship that he and the semi-awares sacrificed for the task. The ship had no defenses. Maung tweaked its function so the vessel’s radar scanned the space ahead at high power, painting anything that had sharp corners, anything made of a hard material. But it also marked the ship itself as a clear target. The rest of the fleet used only passive sensors and Maung sent the sensor ship ahead, burning as fast as it could, so that it provided them with an advance view of the Chinese defenses.

  It didn’t take long. Maung’s alarms tripped at the approach of several Chinese attackers when they overwhelmed the sensor ship’s electronic countermeasures; to prevent them from using the ship against him, he touched off one of its own weapons, aiming a missile battery at the sensor ship’s fuel-storage area. The explosion blossomed on infrared. Maung wondered if the Allied ship had been there during the previous attack, and part of him hoped that its crew hadn’t felt anything when they died in the blast. He and the semi-awares ignored any calculus that assigned value to human life. They only counted victory or defeat. And hundreds of Allied personnel just winked out of existence, a necessary tactical sacrifice.

  We are processing the radar data now, unit Maung.

  Maung thought the name “unit” was funny. He learned more about the Allied semi-awares every day, and now they couldn’t conceive of him as an entity separate from the ship, only that he came and went, as if someone had switched off his power to take him off the network until needed. They had a vague sense of humanity. But to them Maung was different. Maung communed with the command semi-awares and therefore demonstrated a higher order of thought than human crews and unit Maung was a compliment.

  What does it show? he asked.

  One of the semi-awares sent him the data file, which opened in his consciousness, spreading throughout his mind in a field of three dimensions, most of it empty. But he saw tiny dots. The specks formed bright white patterns that Maung had to concentrate on and zoom into, so that they expanded into the outlines of Chinese vessels, some of them huge—even bigger than the Langley—while others looked the size of a fighter drone. The semi-awares assembled hundreds of images in sequence. Soon Maung played the radar returns in a kind of movie, showing the larger vessels lumbering movement with respect to each other as the tiny fighters zipped around, practicing maneuvers.

  What are the large vessels? Maung asked.

  Chinese carriers. We count three. There could be others out of sensor range, however.

  Maung struggled to digest the information. Until then, they hadn’t seen any sign of enemy carriers, and three of such vessels could change the game. Not only did his Fleet only have two, but the enemy carriers were much larger. To Maung, it looked like a cloud of gnats surrounded the vessels, wheeling and turning in tight patterns that indicated high-gees—gees only a semi-aware or a fully-altered human could withstand.

  Should we notify the captain? one of them asked.

  No, Maung sent. The captain was injured and needs his rest. We’ll continue with the plan. No changes. Three carriers reduces our odds of success but I see no other way forward.

  Maung missed the transition—the point at which the Fleet moved from silent anticipation to shouts of horror and missile fire—because he was so entranced by his own efforts to keep systems free from Chinese control. The Allied ships avoided full engagement. Maung and the Langley’s semi-awares dedicated some ships to probing attacks to break up the Chinese defensive formations, to draw the enemy out of Europa’s gravity well and lead them into drone traps but none took the bait.

  At the same time, the main body of the Allied Fleet maneuvered again and again to keep as much distance between its ships and the Chinese carriers, as well as the moon’s gravity well. Gravity could ruin Maung’s plans. The closer his ships got, the slower they moved and the more fuel they expended and since they were already close to Jupiter now, the rate at which they consumed fuel alarmed Maung; they had to slow down or they wouldn’t last until the Nan Yang arrived.

  A flashing alarm yanked him from his thoughts.

  How many? he asked.

  Three full squadrons. They took a circuitous route that avoided our main sensors and must be at the limits of their fuel tanks.

  Will they get within missile range?

  It took a moment for the semi-awares to do their equivalent of huddling before responding, Yes. We estimate they will have launch capability in thirty minutes. Our scans indicate that these are nuclear tipped, unit Maung. Plasma defenses won’t matter. This is because—

  Because they can detonate them outside the range of our plasma cannons, Maung finished. And the detonation will radiate the hell out of the ships’ interiors.

  Affirmative. We estimate thirty percent casualties in the first few hours, with up to ninety percent at the end of seventy-two from acute radiation poisoning.

  Maung thought for a minute and got excited. They don’t know I’m controlling the Fleet, do they?

  Why would they know that? one semi-aware asked; it seemed confused. Our enemy likely surmises that you’re handling cyber engagements—since you are—but this is likely the extent of their understanding. Is something wrong?

  Maung didn’t answer. He was on the move again, reaching out to the communications center where he broadcast an uncoded emergency message to the Fleet with instructions for each ship to take immediate action. It played out on radar. Miniscule dots appeared alongside the larger dots that represented ships of the Fleet, and the small ones drifted away in a cloud that he hoped wouldn’t get drawn into the gravity of nearby moons—or into Jupiter itself. Then the large vessels slowly turned. Maung watched with satisfaction as the entire fleet slowed and pivoted, a maneuver that chewed up twenty of their thirty minutes, and now he mentally urged them to accelerate again, to move toward the enemy drones as quickly as they could. Maung decided against calculating how much fuel the maneuver consumed because he didn’t want to know; instead he reconnected with the command center.

  You provided a shield for them, one of the semi-awares said.

  The lifeboats can keep Allied humans alive for at least twenty hours, Maung sent. But yeah. We’ll make sure every missile detonates on us, and this should put them out of range for the worst of the gamma radiation since most will have to pass through us anyway.

  What about you?

>   Maung chuckled but was confused. What about me?

  Although your synthetic parts are adequately shielded, aren’t you partly organic? Won’t this harm that part of you? I can’t pretend to understand this design decision, unit Maung. It seems like—

  Take over for me, Maung interrupted. I have to disconnect and do something urgent. Continue with the plan and sound an alarm if you need me to handle a cyber security emergency. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.

  Maung unplugged. He ripped his helmet off to find the compartment empty, which was what he expected since he told everyone to abandon ship. But he’d hoped the guards—at least one of them—had stayed. He hated being on the ship alone. Automated voices filled the empty spaces to announce different threats and observations, important words that populated an empty ship with the voices of ghosts and phantoms. Maung said a prayer. Then he unstrapped and kicked away from the couch, heading out the door and into the main ship’s corridor, grateful at least to finally be able to move freely.

  “Six minutes to detonation,” the ship announced.

  Maung moved faster. He screamed through passages near the rear of the Langley, where his body flew in vast spaces designed to accommodate heavy equipment and machinery, and headed to a computer terminal, tapping at it so frantically that he had to pause and grab onto the wall to keep from spinning away. He found it. Maung memorized the map to the reactor maintenance section and then flew off the wall, not caring that at this speed he could break an arm.

  When he reached the maintenance area, less than a minute remained. Maung found what he was looking for and said a silent prayer of thanks to his ancestors—that there was no gravity in space. He lifted several large slabs of lead shielding and leaned them against each other at the same time he squirted adhesive, then placed several more slabs so that a tiny lead box encased him on all six sides. Maung couldn’t worry about the tiny gaps that remained; time had run out. Already a semi-aware counted down from ten and Maung shut his eyes, praying out loud after he clamped his helmet on.