He shouted at the walls. He knew there were ears in them, but they didn't speak.
No one would tell him the date. He hadn’t seen a human face. He drank and ate from canisters. Shat in the same.
At last a stirring of crypts sounded beyond his tight walls. Something had happened.
When the hatch to Zack's cell opened at long last, Zack felt the change in the air like the arrival of a storm.
People outside his cell were moving fast.
Two Marines let him out of his bright white chamber and marched him upstairs into some kind of situation room. There was no one else in it.
Several monitors on the walls showed different views of the Citadel. Small fighter craft wearing missiles thick as porcupine quills speared through the Intersection in echelons. Those missiles had to be carrying viral warheads.
They had engaged the enemy on the other side.
Then Zack spotted something on one of the monitors. A familiar shape tumbled amid the broken space stations, past victims of the Rutog, which floated derelict in the Sirius system. Zack thought the twisted vessel was a piece of one of those stations, but it wasn’t. It was a Dagger ship. His. John Henry.
John Henry's carcass, torn nearly in two, turned over and over amid the rest of the space rubble.
John Henry had come after him. He’d got through the Intersection in real time. That meant he must not have been carrying a tracer. Why? Why had he come through without a tracer? It was suicide.
The Citadel guns had nailed him. John Henry was dead.
Heat was built behind Zack's eyes. He kept a stone face. I am not gonna cry for a machine.
A visitor joined Zack in the situation room, a man near retirement age, dressed in a brand new, fresh-out-of-the-bag Space Corps uniform. It still had the folds in it. The man wore no medals. He wore colonel's pips but this wasn't a Space Corps officer. It was a crypto.
Zack said, "Give me something to call you other than what I want to call you."
“I am Colonel Fuches. You may call me ‘sir’. Sit.”
"Fuches?" Zack whispered.
The crypto was just as Dad described him—a rat-faced turd built like a sock puppet. Wears his hair in a butt part.
Zack's sight narrowed to a tunnel. His Dad's voice came to him.
An officer in Spacer uniform came to me in intensive care. His name was Fuches. He made our squad go away as if we never existed…
Zack launched himself at the man. Broke his face. Zack was pummeling him when Marines came in and pulled him off.
Fuches picked up a tooth from the deck and pulled himself up. He sputtered blandly through the blood running from his nose. "This rat has supplied sufficient authentication of his humanity and his identity. No charges.” Then to Zack, “You will, however, muzzle yourself, spaceman."
“Charge me with something or let me out of here,” Zack demanded.
“May I note for you, spaceman, that you came through the anomaly without a tracer.”
Zack was confused. “Is that meant to signify something I’m not getting?”
“Your last recorded location is on the far side of the Intersection. For the record, you have not come back from Rutog space. For all anyone knows, you are not here. But your ship is.
Looks to me like you must've deserted.”
Zack felt light headed.
It was sinking in like knife stabs what Fuches was telling him.
Fuches could bury him and kill his name and there would be no trace.
"You're going to kill me."
“Do I need to?” Fuches asked.
It choked Zack to address him, “Sir? What do you want?”
“Want? No. This is what you will do, spaceman. Of a certain Dagger Team whose existence is classified you shall never, never speak. You shall never hint.”
“Isn't there a thirty year rule on sealed files?”
“This falls into an exception. There are things that should never be allowed out. You will say nothing of Team Seven. For you even to put those two words together will be an act of treason and you will be summarily executed. For you to speak the names? Summary execution. For you to nod in response to leading questions? Summary execution. Do you understand?"
“Yes, Colonel Fuches.”
“You will not speak of your father in any way referencing Daggers. Ever.”
Zack submitted. He swore on his honor and his country.
And he was given another Dagger ship. Zack named him Sugar Ray, for a boxer, and joined up with his team at the Intersection, where they sprayed Rutog invaders with the Stodolsky metananovirus the moment the aliens stuck a cilium through the Intersection.
Sometimes it took weeks for the Rutogs to dig through their own dead to make another sally through the chokepoint. Factories across near space churned out thousands of tankerloads of the virus. All available space vessels ferried the stuff to the Sirius star system.
The war wasn't over. But it was decided. It was only for the Rutogs to finish dying.
During a short leave Zack met up with Paul Rittenhouse on the Washington Mall. The cherry trees were in bloom. Zack and Rittenhouse walked along the reflecting pool. Talk was strained.
“Some things you're not allowed to say, Cade?” Rittenhouse said. White petals fluttered down around them.
Zack kept his voice vapid. "Don't know what you're talking about, Lieutenant.”
"I myself am constrained from speaking certain things,” Rittenhouse said. “That constraint required me to omit stating in my debriefing certain items that Gort and Ix Chel are carrying."
Zack struggled to read in between those lines. What were Gort and Ix Chel carrying? Gort and Ix Chel were still in transit. Gort and Ix Chel wouldn’t be coming home through the Intersection for another four and a half years. “What are they carrying?” Zack finally asked.
"Well, Zack, they’re carrying tracers."
Zack gasped. Not just their own tracers, Gort and Ix Chel carried the tracers of Dagger Team Seven.
Goodwin, Williams, Bagnold, Thompson, Li, and Cade.
Zack sank back into dull resignation. "Those tracers will just be confiscated on entry."
"Don't be a Rutog, Zack. The instant any tracer passes through the Intersection they are scanned and logged by all the sentry systems in the Citadel."
"The cryptos will have settings to send up flags and sanitize them."
"Pilot Cade, are you being intentionally dumb? Do you or do you not understand the term international?"
Zack felt his face go slack.
The Citadel comprised installations of nearly all the nations of Earth plus all the planetary nations of the known part of the Milky Way. All of those stations monitored everything that came through the Intersection.
The US cryptos had no control over all those foreign eyes and ears.
Rittenhouse said, "You know I might should’ve said something to Fuches, but dang it all, I have orders not to speak some things."
"Must obey orders," Zack said faintly.
"Must," said Rittenhouse. “These trees sure are pretty.”
The truth was coming out. Zack could count down the days to its exact arrival. The wait should have seemed like an eternity, but after all those years of doubt, a few more years was nothing.
It was really no time at all.
About the Author
R.M. Meluch is the author of the Tour of the Merrimack series. She has been writing military science fiction since 1979. She holds a Masters in Ancient History from University of Pennsylvania. She is a fan of all things Alexander the Great and the Battle of Britain. She’s never written a book in which she didn’t blow something up, but she’s not a veteran. At the sound of automatic weapons fire, find her crouched behind the refrigeradora, clutching a machete.
The “Jim” to whom all her previous works have been dedicated died in 2011. Meluch has moved back to the U.S. from Mexico, and now lives in Pound Ridge, New York, with her husband, Stevan Apter, and too many canines. Rmmeluch.com<
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Coffee Black Sea
An “Action Figures” Story
by Aaron Allston
1: Making Babies
It’s never a good idea to cross right in front of a set of live guns with a finger on their trigger, particularly when any one of those weapons could tear you and your aircraft to composite-material confetti. Each cartridge from those guns, at 100mm in length, if stood on its base, would come up to my waist.
So, never a good idea.
I did it anyway. My three-meter-long aircraft, four ducted fans hauling a personnel and weapons pod beneath them, a vehicle suited to military conquest of Toyland, rose less than a meter in front of the enemy helicopter’s gun emplacement.
I wasn’t looking at the guns. I couldn’t bear to. I had my gaze trained above them. I stared at the faces of the helicopter’s pilot and gunner through the clear plass bubble of their cockpit. Two men, wearing the camouflage-pattern uniform of Chiron’s military forces, their eyes for the moment on the console monitors in front of them—
Then my ducted fan assemblies rose high enough over the consoles for the men to notice. My personnel pod was still in front of their guns.
The gunner’s attention flickered to me. Though he couldn’t see me inside my matte-black pod, he seemed to look straight into my eyes.
His grip tightened on the trigger of his gunnery yoke—
***
But that’s how it was on the day Stage Three of the operation went down. Which doesn’t put the whole event into context. Doesn’t explain our air force, the dismal state of my love life, or our frantic effort to get one spacecraft, one little spacecraft, off the surface of the world of Chiron.
That had all started three months before, at the Nest, the day Lina’s first baby rolled off the assembly line.
The birth began with a hum. The air around the output conveyor, a long, narrow, horizontal sheet of silvery metal, became suffused with a musical hum. All of us standing beside the conveyor’s thigh-high side rail could feel the magnetism in the air. Literal magnetism—ferrous gear on us and a very few ferrous components within our bodies responded, trying gently to push us away from the conveyor. We stood our ground.
Then, at the far end of the conveyor, the exit panel from the Stork’s interior, twice the height of any of us, slid up, revealing the dark depths of the gigantic compact nanotech fabrication unit.
Out glided the baby, floating on the conveyor’s maglev effect a centimeter above the metal surface.
Of course, the Stork was meant to be set up in a human-controlled factory, not in a series of repurposed caves deep in the wilderness of the colony world of Chiron. If it had been used for its original purpose, an adult Dollganger would have floated out, not a baby. And there would have been a human worker standing beside the conveyor to inspect the new ’ganger, then send him or her gliding onward. This conveyor would have been attached to another and that one to yet another, forming a long, long path, where other human workers at stations would have tested, dressed, equipped, de-powered, and packaged the ’ganger.
But instead it was fellow Dollgangers waiting, standing on a platform the precise height of the conveyor, and it was Lina’s baby gliding out to meet us.
He was a pink, pudgy thing, his shape human but proportions wrong, with torso and head slightly too large, arms and legs too small, just like a human baby’s. Yet there had never been such a thing as a ’ganger baby before a few weeks prior to this night, and I still wasn’t used to them. The baby stared around him in wide-eyed wonder as he floated toward us.
Gliding as he did down the center of the conveyor, he was beyond my reach, beyond the reach of any of us. I stood 225 millimeters tall, about 9 inches for those of you on planets preferring Imperial measurement, and that was about average for a male ’ganger. Lina, the baby’s mother, all long dark hair and delicate beauty, stunning in a green-and-yellow floral print dress, was about 200mm. Wolfe, the father, with his black eyes and silvery hair, in a formal-cut black jumpsuit, stood tall at 250mm.
So we three, and the other dozen members of the witnessing party, weren’t tall enough to reach the baby. But there was another platform directly opposite ours, and that’s where the baby-catcher stood.
BeeBee was her name. A fit-looking ’ganger woman, she had unsettling red-pupilled eyes concealed at the moment behind wraparound sun shades. She’d worn her hair in a short black bob for years, but now she had let it return to its original streaked-blond color and grown it out enough to wear it pulled back in a long ponytail. She wore a leaf-pattern camouflage jumpsuit like mine, standard casual dress for the inhabitants of the Nest who performed regular work on the surface. In her hands she held a slender pole taller than she was, topped with a large fuzzy ball of pink cloth material like an oversized cotton ball. As the baby glided within its reach, BeeBee extended the pole, bringing the fuzzy ball into gentle contact with the baby, who regarded the blobby thing with just a touch of concern on his face. BeeBee delicately pushed the little guy so he would come within arm’s reach of Lina.
Lina bent and picked him up with infinite care. She wrapped him in jade-green swaddling cloth. She straightened, beaming, and swayed a little. Wolfe embraced both of them, steadying her. The others in the crowd applauded. And that’s how the baby was born.
I took a look around. We were the only ones in the Stork Chamber. Since the Stork had been built to human scale, the chamber had been, too, with a ceiling four meters high—about twelve stories tall in ’ganger scale. The chamber’s unpainted slab walls and ceiling echoed with the applause of the others. For such a cheerful event, this was a drab place, all concrete surfaces and metal fixtures welded together from human scrap, painted in durable colors of gray or black or dark green. The Stork itself—long and big as a human’s enclosed cargo trailer, made up of boxy components in gray or black, with human-sized stations with built-in swivel seats and monitoring screens at intervals—was not exactly a thing of beauty.
But the doorways out of the place were Dollganger-sized, none big enough to admit a human. The wall in the direction the conveyor pointed had been poured after the fabricator was installed. It was heavily reinforced, and all accesses to this part of the Nest were Dollganger-sized and guarded, but at some level I always expected to see a hole blown in that wall from outside, humans swarming in, their weapons firing, murdering all of us.
But there were no humans coming today. They still didn’t know where we were.
When all the clapping, back-slapping, and congratulating was done for the moment, though the making-faces-at-baby continued, it came time for me to play my role. Hesitantly, Lina handed her child to me, her expression making it clear that she feared that the slightest slip might injure him.
I knew better. I’d helped put together the design specs for ’ganger babies. I could drop the tyke on his head all day long and not do him any harm. But I held him as delicately as Lina had. The little guy stared up at me with bright blue eyes and then, after a couple of failed attempts, seized the tip of my nose. Dollganger babies could do that at three minutes of age.
I looked down at him but spoke so everyone gathered around could hear. “You don’t understand my words now, but you’ll remember them all your life, and they may mean something different to you at every stage. I’m here to give you a name. As time goes on, you’ll change that name, substituting components as old ones lose their luster. What we are changes the same way, transforming over time. We are continuity, not an unchanging now.” I took a deep breath and became aware of how quiet the others had fallen. I let some of the breath ease out. “By your parents’ leave and at their request I, Chiang BinDoc Bowen Bow, name you Verdure BinWolfe Khthon Thonny. Welcome to life, Thonny.” Then I gave him a welcoming kiss on the forehead and handed him back to his mother.
I’d never kissed a baby before. I realized that the Stork had given Thonny an odd smell, sort of like perpetually new, fresh synthetic skin. There had been only four babies born in the Nest so far,
and Thonny was the first I’d held.
And the first I’d given a name to. Day by day, we were still making up customs. Even the components and order of our full formal names varied from recently-formed family to family, though the pattern I’d used, one I’d developed and proposed, was rapidly becoming the standard among our kind. I suspected Lina and Wolfe would be making up their child-rearing rules as they went along.
The onlookers, friends of Wolfe and Lina in their emotional age range, surrounded the parents and child and sort of swept them away to the platform’s mesh-sided, open-topped elevator. There would be a celebration several levels up in the Nest, but I wouldn’t be joining it. My presence tended to put a damper on the moods of other Dollgangers. My part in today’s event, the participation of a community celebrity, was done. And I thought that Lina’s friends probably would have preferred for someone else to perform the naming, but Lina had chosen to give it to me as a consolation prize—consolation for the fact that the role I really wanted to play belonged to Wolfe.
I leaned back against the conveyor rim and watched the elevator descend.
Moments later, the Stork’s output door slid closed and the hum from the conveyor ceased. I could tell from the way the magnetic push ceased against my back that the maglev effect had shut down.
Then I heard the footstep from the other side of the conveyor.
I glanced over my shoulder. BeeBee still stood there, setting her baby-catching pole down behind the far rail.
“I’d forgotten you were there.” I straightened up and turned to face her. “Did you wait behind to get a chance to kill me in private?”
She smiled in half good cheer and half malice. She stepped over the rail and walked across the conveyor, stepping over the near rail to stand beside me. “I told you I’d given up on that. Back when you were declared a Hero of the Revolution. Back when they proclaimed you Jack One.”
I was sure she threw in that last remark to gig me. I disliked my nickname. The first part came from the old human folk tale of Jack the Giant Killer. The second came from the grim fact that I’d been the first ’ganger ever to take a human life in hand-to-hand combat. I didn’t punish myself for that act of survival, that act of war, but I also didn’t care to celebrate it with a nickname. Trouble was, I seemed to be the only ’ganger with that particular scruple.
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