The City Who Fought

by S. M. Stirling

  Everybody laughed. Simeon looked them over and stifled a wave of bitter longing. A military commander of any stature led his troops from the front, not from an impervious titanium column. Don’t worry, if they fail you’ll be the only one left to say what happened, thanks to that same titanium column. If you can live with your conscience, that is.

  “I’ll keep my eye on the coils and give you enough warning to peel off,” Simeon promised.

  Almost simultaneously, helmets covered the faces of this small band of heroes.

  “This is taking more time than it’s worth,” Channa said in disgust, giving the control panel a final thump with her fist. The door valved open.

  “Damn! And I thought that was a station legend,” she said. “Does it work for you, Simeon?”

  “Having a servo whack me with a wrench to make me work properly?” he asked. “No, not often. The bridge ought to be right down there. And hurry.”

  “How are we handling the demolition?” she asked him, stepping through the half-open door and trotting down the darkened way, her helmet light fanning ahead. Mercifully, no bodies floated about this section.

  “I’ve got a team rigging explosives all around the ship to blow it to,” he paused, his own nerves making him play the clown, “smithereens. Real, genuine, non-station piercing smithereens. It would be disgraceful, utterly disgraceful, to get holed by flying debris after surviving this morning, don’t you think? Ah, the tug volunteers are in place, ready to grapple. Ah! They’ve broken her out of orbital inertia.”

  Movement was not obvious this far in the bowels of the dying ship. “Who’s in charge of the team?” Channa asked.

  “Gus.”

  “Patsy said he was a good pilot,” Channa commented. “Soon as I finish here, I’ll join her. Is she still standing by at the hatch?”

  “She is, to pick you up and bring you straight back to the station with any information you discover.”

  “I can scan the info back to you, Sim-mate, but first I have to find it, you know.” She stumbled over some jumble piled in the corridor and recovered herself.

  “You and Patsy get straight back here. I can’t have my brawn risking her neck when . . .”

  “Simeon,” she said reasonably, “brawns are supposed to risk their necks for their brains. And if you, the station, are at risk, I am required to reduce that risk any way possible. This time I can do it by helping tug the risk away from here. Have I made myself clear on this point?”

  “I don’t like it,” Simeon said in a disgruntled mumble. “Foolish risk.”

  “Thank you for your input, but Simeon . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t you ever try to forbid me to do the job I’m here to do. You got that?”

  “Right in the forehead, sweetheart.”

  “Not quite where I was aiming, but it’ll do,” Channa said.

  “If you get through to the bridge of that ship, can I ask you for a download?” Simeon said plaintively.

  “Why else am I penetrating this about-to-blow-up wreck?” Channa said. “Patsy, you read me?”

  “Welcome to the pahty, Channa,” came Patsy’s cheerful voice.

  “You don’t mind my crashing?”

  Patsy laughed. “Watch yoah choice of words, girl.”

  “I just noticed something,” Channa said, slowing her pace.

  “What?”

  “Paper. What’s all this paper doing around?” There were sheets of it drifting down the corridor and sticking with static attraction to the rubbery walls.

  “This lumbering hulk must be filled with gear so ancient it’s exotic,” Simeon said.

  “Paper storage?” she said dubiously.

  “Maybe they regressed.”

  “Could it originally have been piloted by a shellperson?” Channa asked, suddenly jumping to some conclusions that ought to have been more obvious to both herself and Simeon. If she got the edge on him on this one . . .

  “Highly unlikely,” Simeon said patronizingly. “B & B ships weren’t that common then. All of these little back-of-beyond colonies were literally a shot in the dark, too risky to expend us on. C’mon, forward is to your right, one more passage to reach that control room.”

  “Aye, sir,” she said. She worked her way forward, past leaking pipes and the occasionally sparking control boxes, ruptured by the overloads of the catastrophic deceleration.

  “Paper,” Channa said in wonder, wishing she could touch the valuable substance with her bare hands.

  “And books! At least I think that’s what I saw when you glanced into that corner. No, further right. Yes! Books!”

  “No time for browsing now,” Channa said firmly.

  “Right,” he said. “Antiquarian reflex, sorry.”

  “Ah, I am now at the control room,” she said.

  It was large and circular; most of the consoles were under shrink-shrouds of plastic that looked rigid with age. Raw, hasty jury-rigs had restored a few panels to functionality. She had to duck under festoons of cable which were draped to and fro with no noticeable pattern. In the dimming light, she saw jury-rigged control boxes taped to consoles. The whole bridge seemed to have been reconstructed with mad abandon.

  “Ghu! They flew this thing?” Simeon exclaimed. They must have been crazy, he thought and cocked a weather-ear to the sound from the engine. “The log,” Simeon reminded her. “Though I’m inclined to doubt that this outfit has anything that fancy. Strip the data bank, too. We want any information we can get.”

  “You tell me how to retrieve information from this archaic mess and you’ve got it,” she answered, peering from workstation to workstation, trying to figure which one might access the main banks.

  “I’ve got to go a long way back in my own files to find something comparable,” he said. “There’re only three centuries of buggering-up to decode but . . . ah, try the second console to your right. About the only one they hadn’t been trying to use.”

  She drew the information feedline out of her glove and pressed it over the inductor surface. The screen beside it clicked to life and began flowing with a spaghetti-complex web of symbols.

  “Oh, my oh my,” Simeon muttered.

  “Problems, Sim?”

  “Nothing ol‘ Simeon can’t handle,” he said. “But the code is old. I don’t have anything that esoteric on file. Nothing I can’t eventually decipher.”

  “Don’t let your modesty run away with you,” she muttered, looking down at her wrist chrono. Plenty of time, she thought. I hope.

  “I’m just cracking the interface and downloading it to decode at leisure,” Simeon replied. “Don’t get your tits in a tizzy.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Old slang,” he replied blandly.

  “Another antiquarian reflex, no doubt,” she said archly.

  “Touché. Okay, got it,” he said, “Get out of there.”

  “Gawd-damn this thing!” Patsy said in frustration.

  The tug was presenting its broad rear surface to the ancient colony ship. Channa scanned carefully on visual and deep-magnetic, looking for a place to engage their grapple.

  “Time is a factor here, Ms. Hap.” Gus’s voice was a little testy. Aligning an extra tug in the pattern had taken more time than anticipated.

  “I just got up here, Mr. Gusky. I’m looking for a flat spot among these struts. I can see why you gave it a pass. It’s a mess. Wait, I think I see something now, it’s . . .” She looked again and increased the magnification. “Bloody hell!” she cried.

  “Crap!” Simeon’s voice overrode hers. It took the others a few moments longer.

  “I don’t believe it,” Channa whispered.

  “What?” Patsy demanded. “What do you see?”

  “It’s a shell. There’s a shellperson out there, strapped to the hull.”

  “Are you sure?” Gus’ voice cut in. “Look, everyone else is in place, we have to get this thing away from the station—”

  Simeon ordered in a roar t
hat nearly fractured eardrums. “BELAY THAT, GUSKY!” A moment of stunned silence followed. “Check it out, Channa. Now!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Channa said even as she strobed a landing spot where Patsy could set the tug down. “Yes, Mr. Gusky, it’s a shellperson all right. Granted, it doesn’t look like anything you’re likely to have seen, but brawns learn to recognize ‘em all.”

  She hoped Simeon never had occasion to bellow like that again, with the decibels going off the gauge. Understandable, of course, or at least to her. If brains had a collective nightmare, it was being cut off from their equipment and left helpless. Attached to their leads and machinery, a shellperson was the next thing to immortal, a high-tech demigod in this world. Cut off from it, they were cripples. Spam-in-a-can, as the obscene joke had it. Neither Simeon nor she were capable of abandoning a shellperson, even if its occupant should prove dead.

  “Gus, why don’t you set the haul in motion,” Channa said, knowing her priorities had just shifted. “Patsy and I will get this shellperson off.”

  She anchored the grapple just above the shell and as quickly as possible, reeled the tug to it. She studied the shell in the monitor as she drew closer. “It’s inward facing, they did that right at least.”

  “Fardling right?” Simeon cursed. “Did it right? There is nothing right about this. What kind of shit-for-brains did this? That shellperson was lodged on the exterior of the hull! Anything could have happened to him or her! Bastards, bastards, bastards. Get him out of there!”

  Channa heard the cold passion in Simeon’s voice and recognized another aspect of him, one his often diffident manner and sometimes boyish enthusiasms had masked. Shellpeople were as individual as normals. Why had she thought him shallow, even trivial? Because of his fascination with ancient wars and weaponry?

  “I’m on my way, Simeon,” she said. “Gusky, step on it. We’ll get out of your way. This won’t take long.”

  “It had better not,” the ex-Navy man said, his voice still carrying a trace of resentment. “Wilco. Out.”

  The surge of acceleration was faint but definite as the bulky vessel began to move. Channa locked a safety line to her suit before she swung down to the pitted, corroded surface of the hull and began to thread her way through the crazed jungle of beam-fused girders that covered it like fungus. The light had the absolute white-and-shadow of space, but the froth where vaporized metal had recondensed looked out of place.

  I’m too used to things being new and functional, she told herself at a level below the machine-efficient movements of hands and feet. Fear coiled at a deeper level still, shouting that she was risking two living humans for a shellperson who could have died long ago. Brawn training overrode that trickle of fear almost before she noticed. A shellperson could not be left, not while a brawn could remove him.

  “Is the brain alraht?” Patsy asked.

  “Can’t tell yet,” Channa told her. Off to her left a white light flashed and the metal toned beneath her feet.

  “What was that?” she half-squawked.

  “Iron ore,” Gus said. “She’s moving into the dispersal cone of that load of balled ore. There’s a lot of that crap out here. Hurry.”

  I’m hurrying, I’m hurrying, Channa thought. The shell was a shape like a metal egg split down the middle, with a tangle of feed lines and telemetry jacked into opened access panels. Three more winks of light as ore struck at hundreds of kps further down the derelict’s hull, then a whole cluster. Debris flipped away into space with leisurely grace.

  “Channa . . .” Simeon began. The rage was out of his voice, replaced by fear for her. Somehow that warmed Channa despite the cold clamp she’d put on her feelings.

  “Can’t be helped,” she said and planted her own grapple at the top of the shell, just beside the lugs.

  “It’s a different design from mine,” Simeon told her. “I’m doing a search now to see where you can put a heavy magnet without interrupting anything vital.”

  “Fine,” she said distractedly. “Looks like they just took a dozen loops of wire cable and tack-welded it to hold the shell down. Talk about improvisation!”

  Simeon watched her hands as she used a small laser to cut through one of the cables lashing the capsule to the hull. It broke free and the shell fell away from the hull slightly, fine wires floating like roots in a glass of water. God, it looks so naked, he thought helplessly.

  Channa’s gaze had passed over the code name incised on the shell so he could read it. PMG-266-S, a low number brain of very advanced years. Guiyon. The name floated up out of deep storage where all the names of his kind rested. A managerial sort. Working for the Colonial Department as it was, back then. Paid off his contract and dropped out of touch, presumed rogue. A hermit.

  “He’s a two-hundred series,” he told her. “Now put the grapple dead center, upper side.”

  Channa used a remote control device to lower one of the smaller grapples from the tug, gingerly placing it as directed. Then she returned to cutting cables. She was working on the next to last one when a pebble-sized piece of ore struck the back of her helmet, hard enough to knock her sideways and to burn straight through her air regulator from left to right. Simeon saw specks of plastic spin off in the wake of the tiny meteor. The exterior view from the tug’s pickups showed metal glowing white-hot.

  “Channa!” Simeon called. The med-readouts flashed unconsciousness. He overrode the suit and ordered it to inject stimulants, a horse-dose, anything to buy her time.

  “Oww.” Channa jerked and then shook herself, hauling back on the safety line until her feet touched the surface of the ship. A red light flashed on the inside of her faceplate and the message:

  “System failure—air regulation. Ten minutes emergency supply only” appeared. It was replaced by 10:00. Then 09:59, and the seconds scrolled down inexorably.

  “Channa, you okay? Should Ah git down there?

  “No!” Channa rasped. “Keep ready for lift.”

  Simeon called. “Channa, get inside.”

  “I’m almost finished,” she said gruffly.

  “Now,” he said.

  She ignored him. He watched the cable part, and her hands reached for the last one. From another view he watched the ancient colony ship being dragged away at an ever increasing acceleration.

  “Channa! Get your ass in that tug now!”

  “Shut—up!” she snapped.

  The final cable parted and the shell swung free. For the first time, Simeon saw that the feeder line was damaged. No, he thought.

  08:38.

  Channa began to disconnect the shell’s input leads. It was difficult work in the unwieldy suit gloves, but her long-fingered hands moved with careful delicacy. She closed the valve on the broken feeder line.

  “Might not be too bad,” she muttered. “There’ll be an interior backup. Probably ruptured when they stopped.”

  Then she keyed the remote to reel them both back to the tug at a careful pace, holding on to the exterior lugs and using her feet to fend them off random projections. The shell went ter-unnnggg against the light-load grapnels up near the apex of the stubby wedge; the mechanical claws closed on the hard alloy with immovable pressure.

  06:58.

  She turned and pivoted around a handhold and dove feetfirst into the control seat.

  “Get yo‘ suit plugged in!” Patsy snapped, beating Simeon by nanoseconds.

  “Can’t. This is a standard EVA suit, the input valve’s upstream of the break. Get moving, we have to help haul this thing!”

  “Negative,” Simeon said. “Make tracks back to the station, Patsy.”

  “Negative on that.” Channa said. “If we don’t get this hulk far enough away, there won’t be a station to go back to.”

  Patsy bit her lip and touched the controls. The tug sprang straight up, the derelict shrinking from sky-spanning vastness to child’s model size in seconds as the great soft hand of acceleration shoved at them.

  “Then you plant that grapnel field,
” she said urgently. “We can help the boost with our own rise. But when that’s done, we’re goin‘ home, girl.”

  Channa began the adjustments. The tug was designed for straightforward long slow pulls, not this redline-everything race against disaster. She must balance the uneven pull that might shred the tug’s structure and compensate for the hulk’s weakness by intuition as much as anything. Who knew what structural members had given way within? It would do very little good to rip a large segment of it loose. . . . The giant ship began to grow slightly smaller.

  She glanced at the readout. “I hate these clock things,” she said fiercely. “They must have been created by a sadist. I’m going to know when I run out of air.”

  “Stop talking,” Simeon ordered, “you’re wasting oxygen. When that clock has flipped over another thirty seconds, you return to station!”

  Gus’ command rang through the conversation. “Synchronize release, slave controls to mine as Patsy cuts loose.”

  Channa keyed it in. “Five seconds. Mark.”

  Patsy cursed with scatological inventiveness as the little craft surged. Then it flipped end-for-end and the space behind them paled as the drive worked to shed velocity. They would have to kill their delta-V away from the station before they could return.

  “Priority,” she barked over the open circuit. “Everyone git outta my way, ‘cause I ain’t stoppin’!”

  Deceleration turned to acceleration again. Channa wheezed a protest as her ribs clamped down on her lungs.

  04:11.

  Simeon’s monologue took on a frantic note. He forced his mind not to calculate times, with an effort that almost banished fear.

  Keep her informed, he thought: “ . . . madness to have attempted that sort of linkage. The nutrients might have given out on the trip. It depends on when the feeder line was damaged. I might be responsible for that. It could have happened when I hit them with the satellites. What do you think? No, don’t answer, save your air. I know we won’t be able to tell anyway until we examine him.

  “What kind of people are these?” he asked for perhaps the twentieth time. “Could they be pirates who stole the brain? Then why didn’t they bring it inside? The access-way? Sure, that must be it, they couldn’t get it through the hatch. Still, a shellperson is a valuable resource. You’d think they try to protect him more if they had to leave him outside. It could be some kind of punitive measure by an insane religious sect. Nah, Central would never assign a brain to a group like that, it wouldn’t make sense.” He began to curse again. “Hey, Channa, stop rolling your eyes like that. You’re making me dizzy.” The circling increased in tempo. “Okay, okay, I’ll change the subject. Sheesh, take away a woman’s ability to talk . . .” Channa closed her eyes. “I was joking, Channa.” Her eyes remained closed. “You’re getting close to the station. You’re going to need to see where you’re going. Remember what it’s like out there.” No change. “Okay, I apologize. It was a stupid, ignorant remark and I regret it. I didn’t even mean it. Bad joke, okay?”