by Tony Daniel
And when it hit, that is exactly what it did. It cut into New Miranda like a dull knife—slicing, surely, but also tearing,ripping, as if it weren’t content with merely doing its job. There was a savagery to it. The ground rumbled with its power, and the thin air conveyed the promise of its intent. Houses simply turned to microscopic dust before it. The dusty wind, blowing at hundreds of kilometers an hour, acted like a spinning saw blade, widening the devastation to a kilometer or more.
People also turned to dust, and their bodies, ground to bits and accelerated insanely, were used to cut down their neighbors. Neighborhoods simply disappeared. There were nine hundred thousand people in New Miranda. Within the space of fifteen minutes, one hundred thousand were killed.
Just like that, Kwame thought. Well, the lucky ones got it instantly. Plenty of others were maimed beyond saving, even if the entire grist structure of the city were not compromised and their pellicles could work at full efficiency. Just like that, more than one in ten of the civilians Kwame knew—his friends—gone. Another twenty thousand wounded, hundreds seriously.
And then it was gone. But within an hour the Old Crow had put together the response team, and Kwame was assigned to it and he found out the worst part of all.
The evil would be back. It was as inevitable as physics.
When he had first been stationed on Triton, Kwame might not have cared so much. The dead would have been an abstract number, and not faces. Faces he was charged to protect. One thing about the Old Crow—he never let you forget what your job really came down to. Kwame was secretly kind of proud of what he was doing these days, for the first time in his life. But he would be damned if he’d let anybody know about that. The Army liked to use soldiers with big heads for target practice. He was just another shit-kicking grunt, in the final analysis. It was kind of a paradox, actually. Or a dilemma. Or both.
Two years ago, Kwame wouldn’t have known the difference, or given a shit. The last thing he’d expected when he’d joined the army was to be thrown into a fucking logic course, but as soon as he got out of basic and was assigned to Triton, the Old Crow had sent him to goddamn school. And not to learn how to be a mechanic or a communications tech or anything like that. Those came later. First came fucking Logic 101, Third Sky and Light style.
For two awful months, Kwame had had syllogisms and existential operators floating around in his brain, or swarming his dreams like a nest of bees. Then, somehow, it had all clicked. Made sense. Then and only then did he start learning the nitty-gritty of remote sensing.
And, what do you know, the logic helped. He had been quick with machines and the grist before, good with his hands, but never much of a concept man.
Concepts, hell, Kwame thought. I spent my first twenty years knocking around in a falling-down house when all I had to do was turn the doorknob and walk out.
Some of it was the fault of his background, that was for sure. Kwame had been born about as far out as you could be, unless you were a cloudship. His mother had traveled to a mining habitat in the Oorts not knowing she was pregnant, and not knowing that her grist was losing its potency and clogging her veins like so much fine sand. It was something any competent medic would have detected and fixed in a moment, but Object 71449-00450 did not have a competent medic, convert or aspect, in residence. It had, instead, fifteen families banded together to pull what zinc they could out of the sludge of a comet-wanna-be, to sell what they might to cloudships who couldn’t be bothered to manufacture their own, and to fight among themselves when it came time to divide up the meager profits. Goya Neiderer was, herself, from Pluto, and Kwame supposed that was where he had been conceived, though she didn’t live to tell him. Childbirth was too much for her overloaded circulatory system, and she died, so Kwame had been told, raving about some pretty yellow flowers she had seen in a greenhouse on Charon during her transfer over for the flight out to the Object.
Kwame was taken in by his aunt, but her husband soon convinced the collective that he was a burden who had to be shared and shared alike, so Kwame spent his childhood shifted from family to family on the Object. He went to school on the merci, and so got a taste of the civilization that was a hundred million miles away from him. His grist, which he had inherited from his mother, was not adequate to permit a full virtual interface, however, and mostly what he retained from his first ten years were vague images and disjointed words from teachers who classified him time and again as “slow,” so that he tumbled through school like a child falling down a set of stairs.
He was a difficult boy, and, after he began eating like an incipient teenager, the families of the Object collected enough money to ship him back to Pluto, having obtained a place for him in an orphanage there that had a school attached to it. This was all done, they claimed, for Kwame’s good, but no one had come to see him when he berthed on a passing freighter, and Kwame doubted that he had ever been anything but a mouth to feed during his life on the Object.
But the Object had been a veritable paradise in comparison with the orphanage on Pluto. While the Object families had provided a sort of stability, if not a sense of belonging to Kwame, he rarely was with the same adult overseer at the orphanage for more than a year. It was used by the local teaching college as a place for students to get their first classroom experience, and those on the administrative track managed the facility. There were some kindly teachers, but everyone, of necessity, moved on, and for the most part, Kwame passed the years there suffering their benign indifference. There had been, however, one constant, and that was the Rules. The Rules was a free convert who was, to tell the truth, fallen from sentient status—although no one had thought to run the algorithm through a requalification exam in decades. Since there was no physical means for the Rules to control the children under her charges, each child was given a “lockdown” code that was written into his or her grist.
You might be innocently playing, and, the next thing you knew, your muscles would seize up and you would collapse in place for as long as your infraction allowed the penalty to last. You were not unconscious—just frozen.
Any fully sentient algorithm would have had the sense to “unlock” the children after a certain amount of time, and only apply the maximum punishment for more difficult cases or more terrible infractions. But the Rules would have none of that. Kwame had spent days of his youth in a paralyzed state, unable to move and unable to fall into unconsciousness. Owing to the Rules, he still retained a claustrophobia that was, at times, overpowering, even though, for the most part, he kept it under control.
There would be no temptation in God’s blue heaven that would convince him to take a trip into the confines of the Met. No. The outer system was the place for him, and always would be.
At sixteen, he had “graduated” from the orphanage school and gone to work in a transshipping warehouse on Charon. Since he had had to do a great deal of exterior work, his employer had paid for him to be completely space-adapted. Being entirely space-adapted was a mark of distinction in the far outer system, though it was by no means uncommon, and Kwame had been proud of it. His job, though menial and manual, was also the first activity that he’d ever felt useful and needed in, and Kwame conceived a deep regard for his company.
As a reward for his loyalty, he was laid off after four years with three months’ pay, thanks to his excellent service record.
By that time, Kwame had a girlfriend and a cubicle to call his own. He fell into a funk, and began to drink and to use enthalpy and had, within a month, blown his entire wad and driven his girl away. He woke up one morning—at 10:00 everyone on Charon got a midmorning chronometer standardization in his or her grist that announced itself with a brief siren call—lying in a service corridor, his face suspended over a drainage grill that gave off a bilious odor that Kwame suspected was his own vomit from the night before. His head had an ache that no grist bloodstream sweepers could alleviate, and, worse, he felt the muscles that he had developed while working for the transshipper, and which had
attracted his girlfriend in the first place, beginning to atrophy. He was, in general, a sorry excuse for a human being if there ever was one.
He thought back to the times he had been happy—not a lot of memory space required for that—and considered what it was that had pleased him most about those times. He decided that what he most liked, what he needed, was to belong to something—something, anything, like a family. He had thought of his employer that way, but had been mistaken. What he needed was someplace or someone where they couldn’t arbitrarily kick you out or let you go unless you deserved it.
I guess I was kind of a logical guy even back then, Kwame thought, even though I didn’t know it.
By the time the noon siren went off, Kwame had joined the Federal Army.
So now his “family” was throwing him up against something so horrible, he wouldn’t have been able to imagine it—no, that’s not true, Kwame thought. I’ve always had a good imagination. That’s how I made it through being a kid. But definitely I could not have imagined how it would feel tosee that fucker, to experience it, until two days ago, when I did just that.
The hopper shook violently and Kwame, in a full virtual environment of readouts, and in rapid communications with sensors through his convert portion, prepared to meet the evil head-on.
“We’re in range for the mags,” he called out to the lieutenant.
They were about to try something that had only been theoretically discussed before as a way to destroy a rip cable. Of course, rip tethers themselves had only been imaginary engines of war before the Met had deployed theirs on Triton. One thing was for certain:They worked. Now to see if the solution was anywhere near as effective.
The idea was to place a ring of electromagnets around the half-kilometer girth of the tether. It was not only swinging like a pendulum, it was also spinning on its axis. This was deliberate—a defense to keep someone from merely matching speeds and latching on. If you did that enough times with enough weight attached, you could change its center of gravity and make it fall from the sky. But the makers had been too clever to make stopping it that easy. Nevertheless, the extreme spin created a powerful magnetic field. If they could encircle it with their own magnets, they would vary those magnets’ polarization and strength and ride the tether’s magnetic field right up. Up to the top, if they chose. But Kwame’s task force was aiming for a bit lower than that. Severing it halfway up would cause the upper half to reach escape velocity and fly out of orbit. The lower half would be caught by Triton’s gravity, no longer balanced so that it was “falling around” the moon, and would crash to the ground. Theoretically.
And they had to do it here and now, on the opposite side of the moon, because the other side had most of the human settlement. Even a disabled, falling rip cable might kill hundreds, or thousands, depending on where it hit.
“Extend the clasp,” Lieutenant Flashpoint said to Rastin, the mag operator. “Bring us in as gently as you can,” she told Sergeant Peal, the pilot.
“We’ve matched speeds,” Peal said. “But, Lieutenant, I can’t go in there, look at the atmospheric turbulence.”
“Take us in, Peal.”
“But Lieutenant . . .”
“That’s an order, Sergeant.”
“All right . . . I . . . I’ll do my best,” said Peal.
Kwame had always liked the sarge. He had been Kwame’s first mentor, and it had been Peal who made sure the logic lessons got pounded into Kwame’s skull. He’d thought that the sarge was pretty fair, especially after that hard case he’d had for basic back on Umbriel. What a shithole of a moon that place had been. Made Charon look like Earth or something.
Peal very slowly took the hopper in on attitude rockets, losing far too much altitude along the way, in Kwame’s opinion—not that that mattered one goddamn bit, of course. If they weren’t careful, though, they might have to back off, set down, and take another bounce.
As if she were echoing Kwame’s thoughts, Flashpoint called out to the sergeant, “Quicken it up, Peal!”
But, if anything, Peal brought them in more slowly.
“I can’t get alignment!” he gasped. “I can’t get alignment!
Kwame couldn’t believe it. He looked back at his sensors to see if there was any change, anything he could do to help. No. They had to fucking go in and give it a shot. Peal had seen what this tether could do. He’d been heading Kwame’s grist-burning detail when the tether hit the first time. In fact, he remembered Peal’s face while he was looking at the thing. Dead set in anger. If Peal could have thrown himself in attack at the tether right then, Kwame was sure the sergeant would have.
But that was then, and this was two days and a lot of thought later. Still, you had to do your job. That was the deal. And without a deal, you were puking your guts out into a drain or back in the orphanage, lying with your face to the floor for two days.
“Sergeant Peal,” shouted the lieutenant. “Peal!”
“Have to back off! Out of alignment! I tell you there’s no alignment!”
“Peal, you’re relieved,” said Flashpoint. “Neiderer, take the rudder.”
Kwame grabbed a handhold and swung himself over to Peal’s position. He grabbed the hold next to Peal and let his pellicle grist latch him fast there.
“Excuse me, Sergeant,” he said. Peal did not move, did not glance up. He was locked into virtuality, and when Kwame tried to join him in the piloting sensorium, Peal forced him out with a fierce blast of will. Kwame almost let go of his hold, but managed to hang on.
“Peal, let go of that rudder!” Flashpoint commanded. “Let go, Peal!”
“We’re too close!” said Peal, speaking to no one but himself now. “Too close, and there’s no alignment.”
For half a second, Kwame tried to imagine what the logical next step would be. But fuck that shit, Peal was taking them right into the tether, as if he were being drawn there by some occult force. Kwame grabbed the hold above the pilot’s station with his other hand, launched himself off the floor, and kicked Peal full in the head and shoulders with both his feet. The blow sent Peal flying across the hopper cabin. Kwame quickly inserted himself into virtuality and reentered the pilot sensorium. Peal was gone, knocked out of simulated reality by virtue of being unconscious. Kwame took control of the hopper’s rudder and looked to see where they were.
“Shit, oh shit, oh shit,” he said. Peal had brought them too, too close. They were falling fast, and there was no way they could clear the tether’s path of destruction in order to find good ground on which to make another bounce. It was now or never. Probably never, Kwame thought. But, fuck, why not at least give it a try?
He quickly brought the hopper into alignment. The magnetic clasp was to deploy about it like a five-hundred-meter-long bicycle chain might be slapped around a giant lamppost. Only this lamppost was rotating and preceding simultaneously. The hopper tried to roll to the right, but Kwame applied rudder and attitude rockets simultaneously—a technique called “slipping” that he learned when he went through transport checkout, his fourth skill level under Sherman’s system. The hopper lost altitude like it was caught in quicksand, but the alignment remained dead-on.
“I’ve got it, Lieutenant!” he called out.
“Deploy those mags, Rastin!”
Even with the harsh shaking, Kwame felt the clasp when it moved out. Then he saw it in his piloting sensorium. It was a good ten meters away. He edged them in closer, closer . . .
“Put down that wrench!”
It was the lieutenant’s voice. Kwame fought the urge to go back to actuality and see what the hell she was talking about. A little bit closer . . . there!
“Drop it, Peal. Goddammit, Peal, I said—”
“Close the clasp!” Kwame heard himself yelling aloud. “Do it, Rastin!” Rastin closed. The clasp folded out and around the magnetic field of the tether, deploying at blinding speed, driven by the very spin of the rip tether itself. One second. Two. Three. The leading end arrived. Working in the vir
tuality, Rastin caught and latched it.
They were locked on to the tether.
“Back us out! Back us out, you little fuck!”
Kwame felt strong hands on his shoulders. Yanking him back, pulling him out of the virtual back to actuality . . . and Peal was standing over him, brandishing a wrench.
Without thinking, Kwame rolled to the side and avoided getting his brains splattered, as Peal brought the wrench down where his head had been. The force of the blow overbalanced the sergeant, and he fell in a heap next to Kwame. Kwame went for the wrench. Had Peal’s hand. Was prying away fingers.
Then something in his gut, and a blunt palm smeared into his eyes. The pain was too much, and Kwame let go—only to have Peal deal him a savage blow to his arm with the wrench.
Flare of pain like the horrid muscle spasms Kwame used to feel when the Rules finally released him from hours of paralysis. In most men, the blow would have been enough to shatter the bone.
But Kwame Neiderer was space-adapted. He could take a meteor strike and escape without permanent injury.
He struck out with his other hand and hit Peal in the face with his palm. He felt the sarge’s nose break from the blow. Peal was not space-adapted. Peal roared and grabbed his face. Kwame grabbed the wrench.
The hopper lurched, and Kwame lost his balance, fell to his knees.
“We’re losing it!” shrieked Rastin.
Peal rose to his feet above Kwame, livid with anger, and streaming blood from his ruined nose. Kwame drew back, and, with both hands, brought the wrench up in an arc just as Peal descended on him.
Metal connected with skull bone.
There was a horrible, horrible crack. Peal fell hard beside Kwame, and there was no fucking need to do any checking. The sarge was dead. Kwame didn’t think about it. Not now. Later. If there is a later.
Thirteen
Danis was working in the Diaphany, clerking during the day and learning finance at night. She was home in her personal space after a long day. A shipment had come in with mismatched coding at work, and they’d done overtime tracking down what was, in the end, the error of an aspect who had mislabeled five crates of specialized grist being shipped to Jupiter. Finally, she had shunted home and taken up her accounting exercises for the day. The qualifying exam was in three days, and she was determined to pass on the first try. Suddenly, in midst of studying value stocks and the theory of buying a holding long term, the wall of her virtual apartment had dissolved and she’d found herself standing in her nightgown among three teenagers.