Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

He had done it out loud, she said, while suppressing the clock functions of his net, claiming that it helped him concentrate on the essential moment. They’d timed him once; over ten minutes, he’d deviated by less than a second.

  “You don’t remember?”

  Her gaze was steady, and Baker felt a touch of embarrassment and looked away. She clearly remembered more about him than he did; it was like suddenly finding yourself naked. He said, “It sounds stupid to me. What’s the point of trying to do something better than a brainless machine?”

  She said, “It’s funny. You were listed missing in action, one of the few casualties on our side. But here you are, and you don’t seem much like the man I used to know.”

  He told her the story. He’d told it so many times now that it was polished smooth and bright. He’d told it so many times that he believed that he remembered what had happened, even though it was a reconstruction. He’d been so badly injured that he had no memory of the accident which had nearly killed him, and only patchy memories of the times before.

  Like all combat pilots in the Quiet War, he had been a teenager, picked for his quick reflexes, multi-tasking skills and coolness under pressure. He’d been zipped into a singleship, its lifesystem an integral pressure suit that fed and cleaned him and maintained his muscle tone with patterned electrical stimuli while he flew the ship and its accompanying flock of deadly little remote control drones. Each singleship took a different orbit, swooping through Saturn’s rings in complex multiple encounter orbits, attacking flyby targets with the drones when the timelag in the feedback was less than a second, never using the same tactic twice. Like all the combat pilots, Baker had been essentially a telepresence operator infiltrated into the enemy’s territory, spending most of his time in Russian sleep with the singleship’s systems powered down, waking an hour before the brief high-velocity encounters between drones and target, making a hundred decisions in the crucial few seconds and then vanishing into the rings again. It had been just one front of the Quiet War between the Outer System colonists and the Three Powers Alliance of Earth, less important than the damage done by spies, the economic blitz, and the propaganda campaign.

  Saturn’s rings were a good place to hide, but they were dangerous, the biggest concentration of rubble and dust in the Solar System, shepherded by tiny moons and tidal resonances into orbits 100,000 kilometres wide and only fifteen deep. Baker’s singleship passed and repassed through the rings more than a hundred times, and then a single pinhead-sized bit of rock killed him. It smashed through the thick mantle of airfoam that coated the singleship’s hull and punched a neat hole in the hull, breaking up into more than a dozen particles that had all penetrated the six layers of Baker’s lifesystem and the gel which cased his sleeping body. Some shattered the artificial-reality visor of his facemask and left charred tracks through his skull and brain; others smashed through the singleship’s computer; one ruptured a fuel line.

  He’d died without knowing it, but the singleship’s computer had saved him. Nanotech in the lifesystem gel sealed ruptured blood vessels; the lifesystem drained his blood and replaced it with an artificial plasma rich in glycoproteins, lowered his body temperature to two degrees. Although the singleship’s automatic systems were only partially functional, they powered up its motor, ready to expend its fuel in a last burn to accelerate it into a long-period orbit where it might be retrieved. But most of the fuel had already leaked away and the burn terminated after only a few seconds, leaving the singleship tumbling in a chaotic orbit.

  The Quiet War ended a few days later; in the aftermath, there was only a cursory search for the missing singleship. Fifteen years passed before it was spotted by a long-range survey. A collective retrieved it a year later, looking for scrap value and finding Baker. They revived him and used foetal cells to regrow the damaged parts of his brain, upgraded the neural net through which he had interfaced with the singleship and the drones. He had worked for the collective for two years, paying off the debt, and then they had let him marry into their extended family.

  At the end of the story, Jackson said, “Well, I guess that outdoes Goodluck Crowe. So now you’re working for them?”

  “I’m a partner.”

  “Yeah, right. Funny, isn’t it? We helped win the Quiet War, our own governments encouraged us to settle here, and then we were shafted. What do you pilot?”

  “A scow. I do freight runs.”

  “That’s just what I mean,” Jackson said. “Most of the freight in this system is rail-gunned. You used to be a hot-shot pilot and now you’re working the edge, picking up part-cargoes, trading margins on luxury items. I bet they’d use a chip instead of you if they could.”

  “I choose my own routes. I do business on the Bourse.”

  “Puttering around, making half a cent a kilo on the marginal price difference of vitamins between Daphoene and Rhea. Hardly the same as combat, is it?”

  “I don’t remember too much from before my accident,” Baker said amiably. “Are you still a pilot?”

  “Well, I guess I’m sort of freelance.”

  Baker felt a twinge of alarm. His sidekick said, If she asks for credit, you will not give it. I think that she was in the prison farms—the tattoos suggest that. I told you that this was a bad idea.

  Something must have shown on his face, because Jackson said, “I have credit. Plenty of it—I’m staying in the Hilton. But, see, it’s all room credit.”

  Baker didn’t understand.

  Be careful, his sidekick said. Here it comes.

  “See,” Jackson said, her bright blue eyes fixed on his, “I thought I’d walk about for a while. Stretch muscles. Then I wanted a beer, and the fucking machine sucked all the credit from my chip and wouldn’t give anything up. Tell me about your ship.”

  “Hamilton Towmaster, prewar but reconditioned. Daeyo motors, 80,000 kilos thrust. She’s a good old flamebucket. She’ll probably outlast me.”

  “You get where you’re going?”

  “Pretty much anywhere in the system.”

  Although mostly it was runs back and forth between Titan and Phoebe. The collective was one of the contractors on the Titan project. Titan was lousy with organic, but it was presently one vast storm and would be for another century, until the terraforming began to stabilize, so fixed carbon and other biomass for the construction crews had to be imported from Phoebe’s vacuum farms, and that was what Baker mostly hauled.

  Jackson sucked on the last of her beer; the thin plastic of the bulb made a crinkling sound as it contracted. She said, “It’s a pretty sorry state. Here we are, both of us on the winning side of the war, and the tweaks have got us fucked.”

  Baker looked around, but luckily none of the incredibly tall, stick-thin people ambling about the promenade with the slow shuffle required by sticky shoes seemed to have heard her. Calling an Outer System colonist a tweak was like calling one of Baker’s ancestors a nigger. The original colonists had undergone extensive engineering to adapt them to microgravity; incomers like Baker made do with widgets in their blood and bones to maintain calcium balance and the like, and in most places in the Outer System medical liability laws ensured that they weren’t allowed to have children.

  Jackson said, “Ordinary people like us have to stick together. That way we can show the tweaks what real humans can do. The way I see it, the war is still going on.”

  Baker said, “What is it you do now?”

  Jackson crumpled the empty bulb and dropped it over the rail; it fell away slowly towards one of the nets. She said, “Come see where I live these days.”

  ###

  The hotel was two levels down, a terrace landscaped as rolling parkland, with lawns and colorful flowerbeds, and clumps of trees grown into puffy clouds of leaves the way they did in microgravity. Little carts ambled here and there between the cabins. Baker had been to Phoebe 50 or 60 times but he had never before been here. This was where vips from Earth stayed, along with novo abastado industrialists and miners who rende
zvoused here to make deals because the Redeemers were scrupulous about commercial confidentiality.

  Jackson had to sign Baker in. Blinking on the flash of the retinal print camera, he sat next to her on a cart which took them deep into the level. A sky projection hid the rocky ceiling high above; in the middle air, a couple of people were trolling about on gossamer wings. The guests could hunt here, too, Jackson said, although the meat remained the property of the Redeemers.

  “You buy a license to go out and shoot one of the little cows or mammoths they have here, and then you pay all over again if you want a steak.”

  Baker said, “You ever done it?”

  “I’ve other fish to fry,” she said.

  He was very aware of her warmth, next to him on the bench seal of the cart, hips and shoulders touching. He was also aware of his sidekick’s unhappiness; it hadn’t stopped complaining since he’d accepted Jackson’s invitation. She’s an old friend, Baker told it, and it said, Yes, but everyone is your friend and that’s why I give you advice you’d do best to listen to.

  But Jackson was an old friend, a very special friend. A war comrade, maybe even a lover. Although Baker didn’t remember anything specific, sitting next to her he definitely felt that they had once had something special, and she certainly seemed to think so. For all the edge she tried to put into her voice and body language, her trust was quite wonderfully naïve.

  The cart rolled over neatly trimmed green grass at a leisurely walking pace and circled around a big stand of bamboos and yellow-flowered mimosa, and there was one of the cabins, a dome turfed over with grass, little round windows like rabbit holes glinting here and there. A door dilated as the cart approached, and then they were inside a big room with carpet all over the walls and pits for places to sit or sleep. When Baker remarked on the size of the place, Jackson said that it didn’t matter how big a cell it was, it was still a cell.

  “I thought this was cool at first,” she said, “but I’d just upgraded is all. I’m still stuck here, but I think now I know a way out.”

  The sidekick had started to complain again. Baker winced and, something he hardly ever did, switched it to stand-by mode. The silence was a relief; he gave Jackson a goofy smile which obviously puzzled her.

  She said, “You’ll see who I work for, then you’ll get an idea of what I mean.”

  They put on sticky shoes and shuffled down a long curved ramp into a lower level, coming out in a room that was all white tiles and bright light, with a circular pool of polystyrene balls rippling back and forth, something big and pink half-buried in them. Some kind of animal Baker thought, and then it spoke and he realized that it was a man, the fattest man he’d ever seen, masked with artificial-reality goggles and twiddling his hands this way and that.

  “Time to wake up,” Jackson said loudly. “I’m back, Berry, and I’ve brought a friend.”

  The fat man cut the air with a hand; his goggles unfilmed. “Where have you been?” he said, his voice childish and petulant.

  “I was out on an errand,” Jackson said, her voice echoing off the tiles, “but I’m back now. Do you need anything?”

  “Didn’t know where you were,” the man said.

  “Well, here I am now. You been lying there all this time? You’ll lose the use of your legs.”

  “Help me to the surface if you want,” the man said, “but not right now. I’m deep in the Ten Thousand Flower Rift. I think I might get through to the Beasts’ chateau this time.”

  He rose and fell with the big, slow waves that rolled from one side of the pool of polystyrene balls to the other and back again. There was a little machine floating in the air close by his head, holding a bulb of thick white liquid, and he lifted his face now and sucked at a straw noisily.

  Jackson said quietly to Baker, “So now you see who I work for.”

  “He’s got to be the fattest man I’ve ever seen. Massing, golly, it must be 200 kilos at least.”

  “One hundred sixty. He tends to spread out a bit lying down.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Mostly he just lies right there and runs these antique 200-year-old sagas and drinks, or lies around on grass and runs his sagas and drinks. That’s margarita mix he’s working on there, he gets through a couple of liters of that a day. And he uses other stuff, too. He does his drugs, lying buck naked there or out on the grass under the sunlamps. They have some UV in their spectrum, so I have to rub cream on him to stop him burning. He can get about if he has to, but it hurts him even in microgravity, so he mostly stays on his back. There’re air jets under the balls, helping him stay afloat.”

  “I mean, who is he? How can he afford all this?”

  “Berry Malachite Hong-Owen; his mother is Sri Hong-Owen. That doesn’t mean anything to you? She invented one of the two important vacuum organism photosynthetic systems, made her rich as all hell. Berry is her son by her first and only marriage, a reject with a trust fund, doesn’t have to do anything but let the money roll in.” Jackson raised her voice and said, “You all right there, Berry? I got a bit of business with my friend here. You shout if you want anything.”

  Back up in the dome, Baker and Jackson sipped bulbs of a smoky brandy. Jackson lit a marijuana cigarette—Berry could afford the tax, she said.

  Baker said, “How did you get the job? It looks like fun.”

  Jackson didn’t answer for a moment, holding a volume of smoke before blowing it out and saying in a small, tight voice, “Fun? The one other thing Berry likes to do is fuck. He can manage it in microgravity, just about, although it takes some care.” She fixed Baker with her bright blue eyes, daring him to say something. When he didn’t, she took another drag and said through the smoke, “That’s part of what I was doing before I met him—the fucking Redeemers sell you a prostitute’s license and you pay tax on every bit of business. I may be old, but some of the tweaks do like the exotic. The rest of the time I was part of the gardening crew, moving bushes and trees here and there, replanting flower beds. I didn’t have much choice—I lost my ticket off through a piece of foolishness. I got to hear of Berry and did some research, and made myself indispensable to him. He likes older women—I think he misses his mother. But the fucker’s crafty. His trust fund pays for room and service, but he doesn’t have anything much in the way of transferable credit. Doesn’t need it, he says, because he never leaves the hotel.”

  “Doesn’t he pay you?”

  “He did at first, but then I was living here and I told him to save his credit. It wasn’t that much anyway, not enough to parlay up for any kind of good ticket and I don’t fancy leaving here as a corpsicle in steerage.”

  Baker began to see where this was going, and felt a twinge of pleasurable excitement. He had been right to think that there might be something in this, and it could well fall within the very wide parameters which allowed him to operate without consulting the collective. He said cautiously, “The thing is, the ship isn’t exactly mine.”

  “I’m not looking for a lift,” Jackson said leaning forward through her cloud of smoke. “I’m looking for a partner in a deal so sweet it could rot your teeth just thinking about it. Let me tell you about Berry.”

  Berry’s mother, Sri Hong-Owen, was a gene wizard with a shadowy, mysterious history. The system of artificial photosynthesis she had invented had made her as rich and famous as her rival, Avernus, but she had also done a lot of covert work before and after the Quiet War. Before the war, she was rumoured to have set up an illegal experiment in accelerated evolution of vacuum organisms somewhere in the Kuiper Belt for the Democratic Union of China; during the war, she had helped design the biowar organisms which had taken Europa, and she was said to have been involved in a covert program of human engineering. And after the war, she had announced that she was retiring (which no one believed), and had taken advantage of the resettlement scheme to take up residence at the edge of the ring system of Saturn.

  “Potato One and Two,” Jackson said. “Remember?”

&n
bsp; “Sure, but they’re just a couple of rocks, something to do with the military, I think. Anyway, no one lives there.”

  “That’s what they want everyone to think,” Jackson said.

  Potato One and Two were the nicknames of a pair of co-orbital satellites, tiny chunks of rock which had probably been shattered off a larger body by some ancient impact. Their orbits were within 50 kilometres of each other, beyond the edge of the F Ring. Sri Hong-Owen lived in absolute seclusion on the larger moon, Janus; she had registered the smaller, Epimetheus, as an experimental area. Berry had left—or had been thrown out—ten years ago; the other son by her failed marriage, Alder Topaz Hong-Owen, was working somewhere on Earth, perhaps as liaison with whichever government or corporado was sponsoring his mother’s current work. She had good and influential connections in the Three Powers Occupation Force; Jackson said that it was likely she was working on some covert military engineering program. The two moons were off-limits, protected by fierce automatic defense systems, but Berry had the right to return there.

  Jackson told Baker, “Berry misses her badly. He talks about her a lot, but there’s something which stops him returning. I think he was kinked, given some sort of conditioning. He has the codes which will get us through her defense system, and I know what they are—it didn’t take anything more than withholding his margarita ration for a couple of days. We can say that he paid us to bring him back, ask for money to take him away again. It’s like kidnapping, but in reverse.”

  “Suppose she doesn’t pay up?”

  Baker didn’t need the prompting of his sidekick to know that Jackson wasn’t telling him the whole story, not that it really mattered if his own scheme worked out, but he found that he liked the illicit thrill of becoming involved in her shady plot. Perhaps this was the way he had felt in the brief moments of combat, all those years ago before the accident had changed his life forever.

  Jackson shrugged. “She doesn’t pay, then we say we’ll kill him, or we’ll think of doing some damage to her experiments. But really, why wouldn’t she pay? Who’d want Berry around all the time?”