by Tony Daniel
Ah-ha.
“So, I couldn’t get out.”
“Pardon, Corporal? Did you ask me a question?”
“No, Dragon. No, I did not.” He shunted back to actuality. “Rastin!”
“Corporal?”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
“What?”
“You heard me. Get in the escape pod and take it down. I’m staying behind to flip the fucking switch.”
“But Corporal—”
“That’s an order, Private.”
“Who the fuck are you to give me an order, you—”
“Rastin, shut up! There’s nothing you can do to help me. It’s the only way. Now get in the fucking pod!”
Rastin gave Kwame a long, mournful look. He had never noticed before how much Rastin’s face resembled a hound dog’s.
“All right, Neiderer,” he said. “I’ll go.”
“Then go!” Kwame growled.
“Jesus Christ, all right.” Rastin grabbed a handhold and swung himself toward the door to the pod bay. “Good luck, Kwame,” he called out, and then he was gone.
Back to the virtuality.
“Dragon!”
“Yes, Corporal.”
“Go home.”
“Are we evacuating?”
“You are.”
“I don’t understand, Corporal.”
“I’m staying.”
Another millisecond of being startled. “Oh. I understand. Corporal.”
“Download and away with you, Dragon.”
“Yes, Corporal.” Dragon’s presence withdrew. But she left an image inscribed in the “air” in front of Kwame. He had to look twice before he could believe his eyes. It was two lips bowed into a kiss.
“Well, fuck me,” he said, then called back up the pilot’s sensorium.
A bright flash indicated that the escape pod was away. He watched it trail off on its parabola of salvation. I don’t get one of those, Kwame thought. He looked back at the tether. The midpoint was drawing near. Just you and me. Me and evil.
Fuck evil.
He waited. The light stayed green above the toggle. He waited longer. Something like an idea. No, not even that. A crazy notion.
The light shone red.
Kwame flipped the toggle and ran for the escape pods, He was through the door in an instant. The hopper was shaking violently, and he used his pellicle grist to cling to the bulkheads. By the time he got to the ejection sling, he was crawling on his hands and knees just to keep moving.
Jesus God, he hoped he could get it to reset itself.
He interacted with its simple algorithm. The sling reset. Kwame squirmed into it. His body was not at all shaped like an escape pod, but the seat of the sling was curved, just like the bowl of a catapult might be. He got into it, feeling like a pea in a great big spoon.
“Good-bye, cruel world,” he said. “Or something like that.”
He ordered the sling to release. The bay door opened. The sling actuated.
If he had been in an escape pod, he would have been lying flat against a cushioned wall that would, with its grist, exactly match the contours of his body and adjust for all acceleration strains. It would be a rough jostling, but nothing more than uncomfortable.
This was more like getting slapped in the back of the head with an iron bar.
Kwame was flung into space at nearly a twenty-gee acceleration. It was almost enough to kill even the space-adapted. Almost, but not quite.
His mind browned over for a moment. Kwame blinked. Consciousness returned.
And there he was, flying through empty space. The only direction that mattered at the moment was away. Away from the damned—the truly damned—hopper. Away. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t. All he could do was hope.
Minutes passed. Triton was above him. Above, he thought, how can that be? Then he realized he was lying on his back with respect to it. What the hell. He mentally adjusted his point of view.
The shock wave from the nuclear explosion hit him while he was doing this, and, after that, all was confusion. Then the white confusion turned to brown confusion, the brown to black. The black to nothingness.
When he woke up, he was farther away from Triton. Much, much farther. He could see the whole fucking thing. It had been a long time since he had been in a vacuum, and he’d never been in free fall and a vacuum simultaneously. That was why it took him a moment to remember that he had small attitude sprays built into his elbows and knees. He called up the operations manual and reacquainted himself with how to use them. With a little adjustment, he had himself facing the moon.
Fuck me, Kwame thought. I’m in fucking orbit.
He was. Falling around Triton like a human satellite. For a long time, he just looked. Looked on the green-yellow moon. The cantaloupe-rind equatorial area. The volcanic craters of the south pole. The zone where they interfaced. He tried to see the twinkling lights of New Miranda, but then remembered that he was on the opposite side of the world from it.
“I sure am,” Kwame said, andheard himself speak. That was how he remembered that he had a built-in radio. Of course he did. How the fuck else was he gonna talk in space?
I have the grist, he thought. I can get on the knit. He tried it. Dead. The lines were dead. Oh yeah, they were jamming the incoming merci. He must be inside the range of their jamming device. Or whatever. It didn’t work.
But I have a radio.
He’d need to be over the civilized side of the moon. How fast was his orbit? He had no gauge, except the change in the moon’s position below him.
“How the hell long can I live out here?” he said. He called up the specs. Five e-days.
So. Maybe. There was a chance in hell.
And there were satellites. Hell, there was a geosynchronous minefield above New Miranda. Could he bounce a message off of them? He had no idea where they were. But he sure as hell could guess their general vicinity.
What the fuck. It was worth a try.
He turned his radio-enhanced voice up to full amplitude.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey, I’m up here. It’s Neiderer. I’m up here in the sky!”
He kept it up, kept calling. Calling till he was sick of it and full of the knowledge that it would do no good, that he would die out here. He’d almost resigned himself to that cold fact when he heard the answer, faint but clear.
His algorithms triangulated on it; he cocked his ear.
“Hey, I’m up here!”
The answering call was louder now and, oh shit, Kwame recognized the voice.
The Old Crow himself.
“Neiderer!”
“Yes, Colonel?”
“What the goddamn hell are you doing up in space?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You’re slacking off, aren’t you, Corporal?”
“I can’t say, sir,” he replied. “But it sure is good to hear you.”
“We can’t have it, Corporal. Can’t have you hanging around out there when there’s fighting to be done.”
“Get me down from here,” Kwame said, “and I’ll kick their asses, sir.”
There was a moment of quiet. But Kwame checked. The carrier wave was still coming in strong and true.
“We’re coming to get you, son, just as soon as it can be arranged.”
“That’s good to hear, sir.”
“Hang tight.”
“Don’t have much choice, Colonel.”
“And, Corporal?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You did it. The rip tether’s cut and fallen. Rastin and Dragon are back safe.”
For a moment, he couldn’t remember what it was the Old Crow was talking about. And then he did. The evil was gone. Fallen to ruin. Gone. For now.
“Corporal, you there?”
“Can I ask a favor, sir?”
Sherman guffawed. He hadn’t known the old bird could laugh. Or maybe that was just static. “I believe a favor might be in order, son.”
Kwame look
ed at the cantaloupe moon. He looked at his hand held against it. His palm just covered the northern hemisphere.
“When I get down from here, Colonel, could you ask somebody to explain to me what the hell I just did?”
Sixteen
The Borrasca
A Memoir
by Lebedev, Wing Commander, Left Front
Unlike a Met ship, a cloudship is a person. The vessel is not an extension of the captain’s will, but is, instead, his or her will embodied. Along with intelligence comes adaptability. A single cloudship can become any number of other “types” of ship, and can do so quickly, especially when the ship has practice and training. A cloudship is big—sometimes hundreds of times larger than a Met vessel, and can split into pieces that are the equivalents of the specialized Met craft. Its structure is generalized. The captain’s intelligence is spread throughout the ship so that there are no critical places for a weapon to strike that might take out the entire structure. The largest of us are the size of small moons, and far more dispersed, so that to kill us, an enormous amount of destruction is required. Disabling us is a slightly easier task, but we possess recuperative powers equal to those of a Met bolsa and—provided enough material is handy—can be back in operation sometimes within minutes, depending upon the extent of the damage.
This said, there are drawbacks. We possess no equivalent to the DIED ship’s isotropic coating, and are sitting ducks for certain classes of weaponry. We are all grist and generalized matter, and most of our weaponry is manufactured and operates on a nanometer level. Thus, while you cannot “take out” a cloudship’s cannon, we are vulnerable to grist-based attacks and are susceptible to “killing zones” of military grist, as was shown so effectively in the early stages of the war.
The “quantum jamming” also used early in the conflict proved quite able to destroy us from within on occasion. If a jamming device could be gotten close enough, ships could be induced to tear themselves to pieces in the equivalent of an epileptic seizure. Defenses against these attacks were developed, but not before much loss of life resulted.
Our greatest ability, apart from intelligence, and our most powerful weapon, is our ability to produce antimatter at any point on our surface and concentrate it for firepower or propulsion. The positronic cannon of the DIED ships were sometimes called Auger guns because of their use of a variation on the Auger effect by which suitably excited atoms emit, instead of electromagnetic radiation or an electron, an antielectron, or positron. This is then concentrated in the same manner as a laser concentrates photons. This is necessarily done on a macro level, by large-scale equipment. Cloudships use an entirely different process.
The process is begun by using what is called the Casimir effect. This effect is a result of the fundamental quantum nature of reality, and it works as follows: If two mirrors are placed a short distance apart, and facing one another, they will move, to a small degree,toward one another. This distance is imperceptible to the naked eye, of course, but it does, indeed occur.
The most familiar concept usually used for demonstrating the principle of uncertainty is that of momentum and position. If you know one, the other becomes unknowable to an extent equal (precisely) to the amount that you know its partner. Another product of uncertainty is the energy and time pairing. Taking this into account mathematically results in the prediction that space—empty space—is actually teeming with a sea of virtual particles, all produced in pair-antipair combinations that are continually being generated and annihilating one another.
This is known as quantum fluctuation.
The time involved is usually extremely short, but there are arguments that the entire universe is the result of a specific kind of quantum fluctuation that has lasted a good deal longer. No matter, that, at the moment. My point here is that quantum fluctuation does occur, and our mirrors can be affected by it. This was demonstrated as early as the 1990s on Earth.
Empty space can be polarized, and you can “make” a particle out of nothing.
A good way to picture the process is this: Think of space as a string on a musical instrument. Now pluck that string. Normal space is a very long string, and its “vibration” corresponds to the lowest energy state there can be. Now if you “fret” the string—say, with our two mirrors—you necessarily exclude certain vibrations. The only vibrations that will occur between the mirrors are those whose wavelengths fit exactly into the distance separating the mirrors. This is precisely how a fretted guitar string produces different notes, and how, in a sense, it “contains” all notes.
Now you will remember that all elementary particles are not actually particles, but are wave-particle entities that have properties associated with both phenomena. With our mirrors we might “play” an electron upon the nothingness, or, more easily, a photon. But when we “play” one virtual particle, the others are all necessarily excluded. In effect, there are “more” possible particles on the outside of our mirrors than there are between them. There is less pressure, therefore, pressing them out than pressing them in. The mirrors move together. Remember that this hasnothing to do with gases or liquids being between or outside the mirror surfaces. We are speaking of empty space.
This is the Casimir effect.
The movement of the mirrors is precisely related to the wavelength of the type of particle you are trying to produce. It is, in fact, the energy equivalent of that particle, as was found in experiments done in the twenty-first century on the moon. You must “put in” energy in the form of setting up the mirrors, so that the law of the conservation of energy is obeyed, but the energy that comes out is precise and focused. If you “fret” the vacuum correctly, the energy produced can be extracted in the form of a stream of antiparticles, which can then be lased into a beam, or used to produce an annihilation reaction with matter. This is the operation that is at the heart of a cloudship.
All of this is done on a nanometer level by the grist. The mirrors we use are conducting plates of material that is a single molecule thick. Our lasers are of a similar dimension. We can enact this process anywhere on the ship where there is grist. To a cloudship, it feels very much like moving a finger or blinking an eye. If you are watching from space, it appears as if a bolt of raw energy has erupted from the ship’s surface (provided, of course, that that energy interacts with something along its path, and so become visible). When we energize a large portion of our surface in this manner it is, let me assure you, a sight to behold.
Unless we are aiming at you.
These, then, are the basic makeup and capabilities of the ships that were opposing one another in the war. At the beginning of the hostilities, Tacitus and I had long been in residence in the Oorts. We had set up a school, as a matter of fact, a kind of outer-space equivalent to Bradbury University, where we were educating the young cloudships after they had reached university level. We had obtained good results, and I was content, at that stage in my life, to continue this activity for many decades to come. It was a challenge to which I was suited by temperament, and there I was in my paradise—a long, long way from the sun.
Then Tacitus, who always kept one ear cocked toward the inner system, got wind of troubles that were rising to storm levels back sunward. He took this information to the Council of Ships, where he got a cool response. As I said, we were rather a snobbish lot at the time, and much given to internal politicking and long—long—argumentation on every conceivable point of self-governance. Tacitus brought up the fact that most of our wealth and energy—and as a result, our autonomy—was based upon a stable and free solar system, but his logic fell upon deaf ears. I would have been enraged by such treatment—after all, this was Tacitus, the great-grandfather of all cloudships. But Tacitus took it with his usual aplomb and decided to take matters into his own hands for the time being.
Leaving me in charge of the Ships’ School, he journeyed to Triton, where he arrived just in time to tilt the balance of the initial conflict in favor of the outer-system forces. He returned forthw
ith with firsthand intelligence, and then went about setting off a real debate in the Council. But this was a momentous time indeed, and one to which I must devote another chapter.
Seventeen
Amés was present when Captain Meré Philately suddenly rushed into Admiral San Filieu’s cabin to report that something strange was happening on theJihad , something unaccounted for and horrible.
“What?” said San Filieu, but it was Amés speaking through her.
“Some sort of grist has got into the troop hold from outside. It’s run through theJihad before I could stop it. We have to leave, ma’am!”
“Are you insane?” said San Filieu. “What about the troop transfer?”
“There isn’t going to be a transfer,” said Philately. Her voice cracked for the first time. San Filieu could see that the captain was deathly afraid. She was trembling. “Admiral, it’s a jungle. The whole moon’s infected. I don’t understand it exactly—some kind of bioengineering grist, run wild. We don’t have this one in the data banks at all. It isn’t based on any standard military grist models, and we don’t have a counteragent. It’s remaking every living thing that it touches.”
“Are you telling me that theJihad is lost?”
“It is full of vines. The soldiers have been suffocated. Or transformed. I can’t say. There wasn’t time to pull most of them out of suspension. My senior staff alone has escaped.”
“Bruc!” yelled San Filieu.
Instantly the captain of theMontserrat was with her in the virtuality. “Yes, Admiral?”
“Take us out of here, now!”
“But Admiral—”
“Do it!”
Captain Bruc looked at Philately, who was still flustered and continually glanced over her shoulder. He turned back to San Filieu. “Aye, aye, Admiral,” he said, and went to do his duty.
Within moments, theMontserrat was taking off from Nereid and streaking into space as fast as her antimatter engines would react with matter. Though the merci was jammed locally, Amés had his own methods of finding out what was going on. He momentarily abandoned San Filieu and had a look at the moon’s surface. The entire human population was infected with this grist strain, whatever it was. All of Nereid’s citizens were blooming. He watched as they contorted in death throes—in their homes, at their workplace. Men, women, and children—vine runners bursting from their mouths and eyes. Fingers turning to leafy tendrils. All of the Met soldiers taken along with the populace. It was a ghastly, but compelling sight. Any exterior-adapted person who caught the grist plague immediately froze and shattered, turned to ordinary plant material on a world that was almost as cold as interplanetary space.